Karl S. Zimmerer

Soil erosion and labor shortages in the Andes with special reference to Bolivia, 1953ndash;1991: Implications for “conservation-with-development”

Abstract Many claims in support of soil conservation policies have been flawed by excessively deterministic reasoning and unwarranted spatial overaggregation. A case study remedying these flaws demonstrates that soil erosion in the Bolivian Andes worsened during recent decades (1953-91) due to changes in production as peasants shifted labor from conservation techniques to nonfarm employment. These findings reflect in three policy issues concerning sustainable resource management oriented toward development (“conservation-with-development”) are discussed: (a)environmental consequences and economic causes of increased nonfarm employment by part-time peasant farmers; (b) environment-related aspects of technology innovation and technique modifications in labor-scarce peasant production; and (c) the environmental perceptions of peasant farmers in participatory development planning.

Geographical approaches to crop conservation: The partitioning of genetic diversity in andean potatoes

The geographical concepts of spatial scale and the human-geographic region offer significant contributions to the conservation of crop genetic resources. They are used in the present study to examine the partitioning of genetic diversity along two axes: geographical location and landrace population.Locations in the study consist of three micro-regions within the highland Paucartambo region of southern Peru. Six widely distributed landraces of the potato species Solatium stenotomum Juz. et Buk. and S. tuberosum subsp. andigena (Juz. et Buk.) Hawkes are evaluated. Electrophoretic analysis of isozyme loci demonstrates that the majority of allelic variation is contained within the geographical and landrace populations. Geographically, greater than 99% of total variation is found within single micro-regions. Taxonomically, approximately 75% of variation occurs within individual landraces. The weak geographical partitioning of allelic variation is due in part to formerly high rates of seed-tuber exchange. The weak-moderate taxonomic partitioning of variation is attributed to common parentage and shared introgression. Unique genotypes are microgeographically concentrated.Findings recommend that conservation strategies focus on intensive sampling or preservation in micro-regional areas due to the concentration of unique genotypes. Evaluation of the spatial patterning of diversity and recognition of the taxonomic specificity of results (not necessarily applicable even to related potato landraces) rely on biogeographical and human-geographic concepts.

Geographies of Seed Networks for Food Plants (Potato, Ulluco) and Approaches to Agrobiodiversity Conservation in the Andean Countries

This study is focused on the geographic structure of seed networks in the conservation-targeted Andean potato and ulluco crops. Results demonstrate that farmers of eastern Cuzco are dependent on multiscale networks of seed procurement that are spatially and socially differentiated at the levels of individual farmers and households, intracommunity farm units, the rural community, and groups of multiple communities. Scale-related differences exist in the seed provisioning roles of men and women farmers. Seed flows are shown to support access to diverse food plants and to shape the makeup of seed types as social-agroecological products. Negative impacts could be incurred through current approaches for in situ agrobiodiversity conservation since their models of farm zonation do not account for the multiscale geographies of seed flow in diverse Andean potatoes and ulluco.

Cultural ecology: placing households in human-environment studies - the cases of tropical forest transitions and agrobiodiversity change:

Cultural ecology is today at a place of rapidly expanding interconnections with the growing number of human-environment approaches in geography and other fields. Productive interconnections are evidenced, for example, in the extensive debate and discussion within geography that surround the varied relations (e.g., theory, methods, roles of science and representation, scale and subject matter) of cultural ecology to political ecology, since the latter is regarded as a chief cognate approach. Sufficient similarities evident in that dialogue led to the renaming of the specialty group within the Association of American Geographers as Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE). This broadly based cultural ecology is currently counted as one of the most active and popular of the specialty groups within the organization, and it is the largest of the groups that are focused on human-environment interaction. Reaching this position has occurred though a process of incremental growth over the course of the period since 1960 in a range of distinct subfields, such as cultural-historical ecology, human ecology, systems ecology and adaptive-dynamics ecology. Cultural ecology thus conveys the sense of an umbrella approach, which continues to serve as the integrator for a considerable variety of subfields. While broad in scope, the approach of cultural ecology is also sharing new interconnections with the expanding suite of other human-environment approaches. For example, the ‘human dimensions of global change’ appears to share a defining emphasis on the interaction of global environmental processes with local actors and institutions that is common to much of cultural ecology. The interconnections of cultural ecology with political ecology and with ‘human dimensions’ is typically dialogic, often to a high degree, in that most studies associated with one field are actively informed by and engaged with the others. This dialogic tendency in cultural ecology is found also in relation to various other distinctly framed approaches toward human-environment interaction (in geography as well as anthropology, sociology and environmental studies). Several intersecting points

Overlapping Patchworks of Mountain Agriculture in Peru and Bolivia: Toward a Regional-Global Landscape Model

Overlapping patchworks of farm spatial units are characteristic of the mountain landscapes of Andean regions of Peru and Bolivia. Patchiness and overlap (200-600 m) are shaped by the broad tolerances of major crops, high variability/low predictability of habitat factors, multifaceted cropping rationales of cultivators including their linkages to extraregional influences, and, to varying extents, the sociospatial coordination of crop choice among farmers. Indian peasant farmers manage overlapping patchworks using a concept of farm spaces as loosely bounded. They apply a naming system to farm spatial units based primarily on topographic features in order to serve their cultural, social, and political purposes. Key processes suggest a regionalglobal model of overlapping patchworks. The model elucidates the roles of landscape flexibility and uncertainty in conservation-with-development. Implications are shown by farm units of diverse food plants and prospects for in situ conservation. Findings caution against universality of the zone model of mountain agriculture.

Cultural ecology (and political ecology) in the ‘environmental borderlands’: exploring the expanded connectivities within geography

© 2007 SAGE Publications