Keywords for Environmental Studies

Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, David N. Pellow

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780814724446
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik Geschichte & Theorie

Understandings of “nature” have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From “ecotourism” to “ecoterrorism,” from “genome” to “species,” this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities— in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

1

Agrarian Ecology

Gary Paul Nabhan

One might wonder whether any twenty-first-century preoccupation with agrarian values, agrarian ecology, and agrarian ideals comes as too little, too late. Less than 2 percent of the North American public lives in rural areas outside towns, cities, and suburbs, and less than half of the world’s population now lives outside cities. But the New Agrarianism, which is emerging globally, is not restricted to the rural domain, nor is it necessarily a romantic desire to reenact social behaviors and mores associated with rural populaces in bygone eras. Instead, a New Agrarianism is emerging within urban as well as rural communities, and may indeed be the set of values and operating principles that can obliterate the rural-urban divide that, in many ways, characterized and crippled North American and European cultures during the second half of the twentieth century. But what exactly does “agrarian” mean? Why are the concepts associated with it being used once more as rallying cries, decades after most global citizens have become disenfranchised from the land? Finally, why has “agrarian ecology” become a useful focus for anthropologists, biologists, demographers, geographers, historians, and land-tenure lawyers, and why is it being applied to solving problems in at least a dozen countries on four continents?

If we return to its etymological roots, agri- can be traced as far back as the proto-Indo-European noun “h₂é´gros,” meaning field or pasturage, which has cognates not only in Old English but in ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit as well. As used over the centuries in Europe and England, this term refers to a constellation of activities, values, and premises regarding human relationships to cultivated soil or to the land in general. As a prefix in Latin, and then Old, Middle, and modern English, ager- and agri- relates to soil, fields, farms, land, terrain, landscape, territory, and country. In the related term “agriculture,” based on the Latin ager + colere, we see the relationship between humans and the land circumscribed by the activities and values of cultivating, tilling, stewarding, tending, and safeguarding. Agrarian ecology, as articulated by agricultural anthropologist Robert McC. Netting in 1974, is the study of both the social and the legal frameworks that guide tenure to and the human uses of cultural “working” landscapes and the interactions between human communities and their agricultural and ecological resources in the landscapes.

Agrarianism, of late, has come to embody a nuanced set of social, political, and ecological values that see rural activities, behaviors, and ethics as functioning on a higher order than urban- or suburban-derived comparables. However, for well over a century, the phrase “agrarian reform” has had broader recognition in Latin America, Europe, and Asia as a movement to keep peasant societies from becoming increasingly landless and in greater servitude to capitalistic institutions by enacting the redistribution of land and other wealth. Agrarian ecologists have paid particular attention to how peasant societies resist such extractive institutions and organize themselves to protect, sustain, and efficiently use the natural resource base and traditional knowledge upon which their members’ livelihoods depend.

In a very real sense, agrarian values place heightened importance on the daily human commitment to and daily involvement in rural lifeways as God-given responsibilities. Accordingly, Thomas Jefferson is often designated the best early articulator of American agrarian values, while Henry Wise Wood, Louis Bromfield, Ralph Borsodi, Robert Swann, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Helen Nearing, and Will Allen are granted status as the most elegant contemporary North American defenders of agrarian values in the face of agricultural industrialization and ex-urban growth. However, agrarian values are not exclusively Euro-American or even Christian, for Marxist materialists around the world have come to embrace some of the same principles and strategies for valuing the work done by peasant farmers. As eloquent as Jefferson and Berry in the United States and European voices such as Jean Giono and John Berger may be, Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukouoka and Australian permaculturist Bill Mollison exemplify the power and reach of agrarian values outside of the Euro-American geographic and cultural context.

Because twentieth-century agrarian proponents such as Canadian Henry Wise Wood, Japanese Masanobu Fukuoka, and American Wendell Berry have often been diagnosed by urban critics as being afflicted with a nostalgia-emitting dysfunction that has symptoms of being “anti-urban,” “luddite,” or “retro,” some proponents such as Eric Freyfogle and David Walbert call their philosophies “Neo-Agrarian.” On his populist website, newagrarian.com, Walbert offers a brilliant articulation of how the New Agrarianism can be distinguished from other forms of agrarianism that may be flawed by romanticism or nostalgia. He argues that New Agrarianism is defined by four elements. First, while it draws heavily on past agrarian practices and thinking, it is not bound by them because New Agrarianism is focused on building the future. Second, New Agrarianism is concerned with creating a new kind of rural community for the twenty-first century—one that is tied neither to traditional models of rural America nor to the dominant large-scale industrial agricultural approach. Third, New Agrarianism views sustainable community as the ultimate goal, and sustainable agriculture is just one critical part of that vision. Thus, New Agrarian values can be expressed in all sectors of the economy and across all aspects of a sustainable culture and life. Fourth and finally, New Agrarianism recognizes that society is mostly urban and sees this as an opportunity to seed New Agrarian values within and across nations and urban areas, since the core of this philosophy is the desire for sustainable connections among nature, place, and community.

And yet, David Walbert, David Orr, Will Allen, and others concur that an agrarian believes in, if not the primacy, then at least the uniqueness of agriculture among human endeavors. Activists David Hanson and Edwin Marty, coauthors of Breaking through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, believe that agrarian values and practices should and can be expressed in urban, suburban, and ex-urban settings as well as in rural landscapes. Youth groups such as FarmFolk/CityFolk, the National Young Farmer’s Coalition, and Greenhorns are moving such an agenda forward as a social movement that now crosses international boundaries. In their view, a foodscape is no longer (and has actually never been) a place beyond the city’s limits, and the quest for just, equitable, and sustainable food systems and environmentally healthy foodsheds must engage both rural and urban dwellers of all races, classes, and languages with equal strength. The fact that over twenty-five hundred acres of Metro Detroit’s sixty-five hundred acres of formerly built-upon and abandoned urban lots are once again producing food is testament to the survival of agrarian values in an urban setting.

Finally, it is worth noting that agrarian and neo-agrarian advocates link themselves to an unbroken chain of prophetic voices that have critiqued excessively urban, inward-looking, and narcissistic values of those who have become indifferent to the plight of farmers, fishers, ranchers, and foragers, and to the land itself. In theologian Ellen Davis’s finely researched book, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, it becomes historically clear that agrarian voices have risen up as prophets, dissidents, and agents of change whenever urban hierarchical or industrial societies have become too excessive in their consumption, waste, and hegemony over others. Davis deftly links the messages and methods of the Old Testament prophets with modern-day agrarian voices from many countries.

On the academic or scholarly level, it is surprising that biologically trained ecologists are among the least engaged in the documentation and application of agrarian ecology (sensu Netting) compared to geographers, anthropologists, agro-ecologists, and rural sociologists. There are, of course, exceptions among broad-based natural scientists such as Mexican Victor Toledo, Chilean Miguel Altieri, and Indian Vandana Shiva, who have trained hundreds of students to apply a broader perspective to ecological issues in food-producing landscapes. Anyone who still believes that agrarianism is something of the past should spend a day with “greenhorns,” some of whom are now associated with Via Campesina, Slow Food International, or various young farmers’ coalitions and permaculture guilds. Be assured that you will be both tired and fulfilled at the end of one long but fruitful day with them.

2

Animal

Stacy Alaimo

One English word, one Western concept—“animal”—somehow encompasses a vast array of creatures—sponges, spiders, capybara, camels, eels, eagles, ticks, tigers, octopi, orangutans, dinosaurs, and slugs—but it rarely contains humans. Western philosophy and everyday conceptual frameworks define the human against the animal, forcing the multitude of beings other than Homo sapiens into one category. Jacques Derrida notes the absurdity and violence of this ostensibly neutral term:

Whenever “one” says “The Animal,” each time a philosopher, or anyone else, says “The Animal” in the singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be human (man as rational animal, man as political animal, speaking animal, zōon logon echon, man who says “I” and takes himself to be the subject of a statement that he proffers on the subject of the said animal, etc.), well, each time the subject of that statement, this “one,” this “I” does that he utters an asininity [bêtise]. (Derrida 2008, 31)

Uttering the term “animal,” in the singular, he argues, is a disavowal that demonstrates one’s “complicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species” (Derrida 2008, 31).

“Animal” is an overwrought, overloaded term indeed. The category has been invoked to elevate humans above all other living creatures as well as to denigrate certain groups of people as not-quite-human via racist, sexist, classist, Social Darwinist, and colonialist ideologies that place them “closer” to animals in hierarchies of being. Human exceptionalism, emerging from monotheisms, Enlightenment humanism, capitalist anthropocentrism, and other forces insulates (some) humans from kinship with degraded, brutish beasts. But repressed critters return to bite. Monster movies such as The Island of Dr. Moreau feature human/animal hybrids that rouse the viewers’ recognition of the animality of the human only to conclude by assuring us that we are certainly not animals after all (Alaimo 2001). Evolution says otherwise. Charles Darwin, who could be considered the first “posthumanist” philosopher, remarked upon the rather obvious correspondences between humans and other animals:

It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. All the bones in his skeleton can be compared with corresponding bones in a monkey, bat, or seal. So it is with his muscles, nerves, blood-vessels and internal viscera. The brain, the most important of all the organs, follows the same law. (Descent of Man, 1936, 395–96)

The word “notorious” unveils the paradox that the fact that “man” is constructed like other mammals is somehow both accepted and unacceptable, both obvious and objectionable. Darwin attempts to make human kinship with other animals more appealing by telling many a charming and humorous tale demonstrating how the animals that humans would denigrate as such actually possess various “human” characteristics, of curiosity, reason, language, affection, tool use, and even religious experiences.

Marc Bekoff’s recent work continues this tradition, documenting how various animals think, feel, play, and even behave “morally” (2007; Bekoff and Pierce 2009). These capabilities, Bekoff and many others insist, demonstrate that living beings other than humans deserve ethical consideration. Joy Williams’s wry term “animal people” (which is also the title of her scathing essay), denotes humans who advocate on behalf of nonhuman life, but it also suggests that these people are themselves, unflinchingly, “animals” (Williams 2002). Boundary creatures, such as primates, cyborgs, the oncomouse, and dogs populate Donna Haraway’s corpus, troubling commonsensical conceptual divisions and definitions that would distance humans from other life forms. One of her most compelling arguments, however, is that what humans are as a species is partly due to canines. In The Companion Species Manifesto she argues that humans and dogs do not exist as separate entities but, instead, have co-constituted each other through their significant relations across evolutionary time. “Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships—co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all. Historical specificity and contingent mutability rule all the way down, into nature and culture, into naturecultures” (Haraway 2003, 12). The conceptual abyss between “human” and “animal” that Derrida encounters becomes, in Haraway’s work, a fleshy realm of interconnected histories, significant relations within specific “naturecultures.”

Whereas Haraway’s boundary creatures radically muddle the human/animal divide, strategic boundaries have been drawn at other sites. The Great Ape Project, for example, defends “the rights of the non-human great primates—chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom” (Great Ape Project). While the appeal for the great apes stresses their kinship with humans, the “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins” asserts the “equal treatment of all persons,” basing personhood on “scientific research [that] gives us deeper insights into the complexities of cetacean minds, societies and cultures.” The list of ten rights includes the right to life, freedom from captivity or servitude, the “right to protection of their natural environment,” and “the right not to be subject to the disruption of their cultures” (Helsinki Group 2010). Both the Great Ape Project and the “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans” release particular species from the “asininity” of “the animal,” insisting that certain animals demand separate ethical and legal consideration. Yet, even for those of us who passionately believe in granting the great apes and the cetaceans all the rights outlined in these declarations, these movements do, of course, beg the question of what other living beings should be granted rights and whether the rights framework is adequate or appropriate for addressing the many assaults on the lives and well-being of a multitude of living creatures. Cary Wolfe, commenting on the “Spanish Parliament’s approved resolution to grant basic rights to great apes,” argues that

even as it constitutes a monumental step forward for our relations with non-human animals within the political purview of liberal democracy and its legal framework, it might well be seen, within the biopolitical context opened up by Esposito and others, as essentially a kind of tokenism in which non-humans “racially” similar enough to us to achieve recognition are protected, while all around us a Holocaust against our other fellow creatures rages on and indeed accelerates. (Wolfe 2010, 8, 23)

The declaration of the rights of “higher animals” reveals the fault line between animal-oriented philosophies and movements and environmental philosophies and movements. Most notably, biocentrism reverses the established hierarchy of living creatures, asserting that life on Earth could continue without humans, great apes, or cetaceans, but not without bacteria, which are crucial for ecosystems. Animal rights, animal welfare, and animal ethics tend to depart from environmentalism’s focus on large-scale, interdependent systems, such as ecosystems and habitats, for example, as well as the threats to those systems—pollution, habitat loss, climate change, overfishing, extinction—as they focus on particular animals. But climate change alone, which threatens to push a million species into extinction by 2050, illustrates why attention to large-scale, interconnected systems is crucial for the continued existence of nonhuman creatures. Conversely, environmental activists, organizations, and scholars rarely consider cruelty to factory-farmed animals, animals used for experiments, or animals exploited for the entertainment of humans. Appeals to wilderness, wildness, conservation, aesthetics, and biodiversity are cordoned off in another discursive universe, far from sterile laboratory cages or filthy feed lots.

While environmentalists examine interconnected systems, “animal people” shift the focus from “objective” views of the big picture to “subjective” standpoints of other living creatures. Scientists, writers, philosophers, and artists have taken on the formidable task of attempting to understand particular animals’ worlds and perspectives, from Jacob von Uexküll’s Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934 [2010]) to Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), artist Sam Easterson’s videos from animal perspectives (2001), Les Murray’s poems in Translations from the Natural World (1992), and the most provocative and perhaps problematic portrayal of elephant culture, kinship, mythology, and even religion: Barbara Gowdy’s novel The White Bone (2000). Notwithstanding the irresolvable epistemological difficulties with attempting to understand the lives, cultures, and ways of being of other creatures, the scientific, philosophical, literary, and artistic endeavors can spark ethical and political engagements. Despite Joy Williams’s justified lament, “We learn more about them, and that does not save them,” animal people still somehow hope that such findings will translate into less animal suffering (Williams 2002, 122). Whereas Williams bemoans the fact that the production of knowledge about animals does not diminish cruel and exploitative practices, as the exclusively human, monolithic “we” amasses information about animals that rarely translates into movements for animals, Bruno Latour proposes a political “collective” that would include the “voices of nonhumans” (2004a, 69) as represented by scientists, with their instruments and their “capacity to record and listen to the swarming of different imperceptible propositions that demand to be taken into account” (2004a, 138). Although Latour does not grant them an official role in his collective, philosophers, transdisciplinary animal studies scholars, writers, filmmakers, and artists seek to shift beliefs, attitudes, and practices toward nonhuman species. Attention to nonhuman creatures within academic disciplines is resulting in new areas, such as “multispecies ethnography” (see Debra Bird Rose’s essay in this collection). Whether or not such investigations will benefit diverse living creatures remains to be seen.

Insisting upon the perceptual, cognitive, semiotic, phenomenological, and cultural differences of different species is invaluable for understanding the vast world of living creatures as more than Cartesian machines. But new materialist approaches, which turn their attention to corporeality, substances, and physical agencies, suggest that animals need to be considered within material systems—not only within ecosystems and habitats but also within food systems, big pharma, chemical industries, and other areas of global capitalism. Nicole Shukin’s brilliant book Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times urges us to regard animal bodies, as “capital becomes animal, and animals become capital” in a “semiotic and material closed loop, such that the meaning and matter of the one feeds seamlessly back into the meaning and matter of another” (Shukin 2009, 16). Her conceptio...