Culture and Environment

• Fordism

o Assembly line - Henry Ford gets the credit o Replaced a few skilled craftspeople with large number of unskilled people

• Why do Bushmen hunt (cultural ecology and Marxism)?

o Because they can. Farming is harder work and possibly worse for you; foraging is efficient in terms of energy and time

• Why do Bushmen hunt (political ecology)?

o Because they have been excluded from more lucrative franchises by other groups.

• Optimal Foraging Theory

hunters often go after non-optimal animals (smaller would be better) o Animals that would be good payback per risk and energy are not sought after as much as large animals that have a lower risk-return payoff o Costly signaling

• Paddy ecology - fertilizer

o N is a key agricultural productivity o N is abundant but mostly in a nonreactive form that crops cannot use o It needs to be "fixed" (more later) o Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria o Grows abundantly in rice paddies

o Patchy swidden clearings

• Manage fallows • Leave stumps • Pollinators - easier for them to get there if it's a small patchy area • Swidden recovery

• Kloppenburg: It starts with the seed - but how can you make seeds a commodity that has to be purchased? After all, the nature of seeds is to make more crops just like them

• 1. Biological means - control the seeds ability to germinate and breed true o Much controversy over GMO terminator seeds (this technology was never actually deployed) o Hybrids much more important • 2. Social/legal means - contracts

o Agricultural industrialization - US has lead the process? Why?

• 1. Induced innovation (lots of space because we killed Indians, needed machines) • 2. Land Grant Universities and Agricultural Experiement Stations - US got into early and more in depth. Founded during Civil War • 3. WWII - nitrogen and pesticides were big takeaways • 4. Domestic politics (Pollan - Nixon - go big or get out) • 5. Also "National Integration" as opposed to colonialism

o Discovery theories

• Many assumed that early people were extremely stupid. Wanted to know how they could figure out how plants grew from seeds • Ex. Predicted that they buried people with seeds and they grew and people assumed the ghosts were providing the plants

Factoid 12

In 2002, when the first GMO was approved for India (Bt cotton), the buffer stock of wheat and rice was 41.2 million tons over the desired level.

• Why do they hunt and gather? Evolutionist Answer

• Evolutionists would say it is a stage; they are less evolved.

Agriculture affects the greenhouseandthe greenhouse affects agriculture

-CO2 level affects yields photosynthesis and transpiration, mainly positive effects on crop growth and water use may also affect nutrients in crops -Climate and weather affect yields... temperature water soil weeds, insects, disease -People who farm displacement

Actually an interesting time for Mexican agriculture

-Cardenas, pres. 1934-40 -promotes ejidos (semi-communal farming villages, much more adaptive than Mao/Nyerere/DERG farming communes) -Landlessness and rural out migration plummeted

Green Revolution: Nuts & Bolts

-Development and deployment of crops for developing countries -Breed traits into wheat and rice OPVs (not hybrids) -Wheat bred in Mexico, 1940s-60s -Rice bred in Philippines, 1960s -Later, various fertilizer intensive crops for developing countries (ex, sorghum, millet, barley) sometimes referred to as Green Rev

Agriculture's great legend: Norman Bourlag

-Ehrlich and friends said that India would never feed itself -Norman Bourlag says the problem is that wheat was too top heavy and falls over, taking up too much space. He creates dwarf wheat. -Bourlag's creation seen as revolution that saved a billion lives -- miracle wheat and rice

Agricultural science has been making foods less nutritious anyway

-MICRONUTRIENTS DECLINE as crops are bred for raised production -PROTEIN TOO...Scientists developed technology to make bread with lower-protein wheat, which allowed them to increase wheat yields. -Davis's team studied changes in 13 key nutrients in 43 garden crops (basically vegetables) over the last 50 years. The results: breeding for rapid growth led to significant decline in 6 nutrients ranging from 5-38%.

Humanitarian technological antidote to Malthusian Famine

-Narrative that depicts: -Validity of Malthusian overpop (a billion would have starved) -Ag development motives as humanitarian -Technology as a fetish -Technology as the only solution

Post-War US Plans: Mexico and Asia

-Rockefeller Fnd's Mexican Agric Program, 1941 -US wanted solution for "the problem of food production in the Orient" where crops and conditions similar to Mexico -In post-war, Cold War: Green Revolution (as it was later called) to avert Red revolution -Want to modify Mexicans' habits, create "industrial revolution of agriculture" -Agricultural personnel taken off land and into factories to make farm machinery, like America -Political-economic interest and ideology by foundations and US govn -Cullather esp good examination of thinking & motives

Breed traits into wheat and rice OPV's (not hybrids)

-Semi-dwarf stalks -High fertilizer response (so more water & pesticides) -Not "high yielding varieties" but "high response varieties" -Photoperiod insensitive so adapted to multi-cropping -But more industrialization than Boserupian intensification

• Great Leap Forward disrupts key elements in intensive sustainable farming

-social org of production -scale of ag -risk management -control of schedule -agricultural ecology

1995-97: GM's Two Home Runs

1. HT (herbicide tolerance)mostly Roundup-Ready(glyphosate tolerant) 2.IR (insect resistance) Bt These 2 traits account for over 98% of all GM acres planted worldwide

India's Iconic Food Woes

1870s "El Niño" deaths while record exports 1896-1941 documented decline in nutrition 1943 Bengal famine (Amartya Sen: problem was hoarding, not actual shortage) 1946 drought: 1.5 mill tons imported from US as emergency measure 1951: up to 5 mill tons imported from US in special shipments 1954: PL-480 (later "Food for Peace");

Prehistory of Genetic Engineering

1953: Watson & Crick, "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" 1958: geneticist Edward Tatum's Nobel acceptance speech predicts "biological engineering"

Factoid 2

Roughly 2 million starved or fled Ireland during the Potato Famine. Ireland not only exported large amounts of beef, pork and grain during this period, but exports actually increased; for example, in 1846 alone, 500,000 pigs were shipped to England.

Factoid 6

Although overall inputs are impossible to measure precisely, a study of extensive rice farmers in the Philippines and intensive rice farmers in China found that the Chinese farmers were putting in over 4x the amount of work into their rice, but were harvesting around 4x as much. Their efficiency ratios were around the same (discussed in the Netting 1993 chapter)

o 3. SSC is Exogenous and maladaptive

: caused by expansion of "civilized societies" (political ecology; Ferguson and others)

o 1. SSC is indigenous and maladaptive

: needs to be stopped by civilized societies; Hobbesian "warre"; recent includes Pinker's Blank Slate • Human life by nature is "nasty, brutish and short" - inherently prone to conflict • Struggle of human nature against civilization • Ironically, colonial powers often took belief in indigenous warfare as a good excuse to wage war against those people

Factoid 11

A study from a few years ago showed over 18,000 deaths from MRSA in the US, compared to around 16,000 deaths from AIDS.

Larger Farms, Agriculture is Out of Mind

As they were developing their biotech division, Monsanto saw 3 stakeholders to please: regulators, investors, and farmers. They assumed the public would not engage this detail of how their food was produced, given the large and distant farms in the U.S.

Factoid 5

At a Rio Negro site in the Columbian-Venezuelan Amazon, soil charcoal (apparently from swidden cultivation) was dated to 4000 BC

• Terracing

Most important terrace crop o Economy of (small) scale - need small plots in large system o Amenable to terrace cultivation so suited to hilly landscapes o The overall system is large but individual fields are small

Why hunt - cultural ecology

Based on work of Richard Lee in Northern Botswana. Studied Ju/'oansi group. Presented at Man the Hunter Conference in Chicago in 1966 o Population density <.5/mi o Live mainly off wild resources like mongongo nut, melons (but also reported on Bushmen at cattle stations, had relationships with farmers) o Settlement: bands, numbering in dozens but variable; frequent moves (foragers in Binford sense) o Workload around 2 hours/day (although hard to measure precisely) o Health good; avg. adult intake equivalent of 2.5 lbs. rice and 14 oz. meat, water from melons o Lived in bands o Mobile o No accumulation o Non-hierarchical o No ownership o Non-contracepting o Low fertility o Long inter-birth intervals of 4 years o Lactational amenorrhea o Lee: "persistent and well adapted way of life"

Agriculture effect on the greenhouse

EPA figure often cited but this almost certainly underestimates the impact of industrial agriculture. "(IPCC) indirect EF for rivers (EF5r) is underestimated up to ninefold in southern Minnesota, which translates to a total tier 1 agricultural underestimation of N2O emissions by 40%. We show that accounting for zero-order streams as potential N2O hotspots can more than double the agricultural budget." Turner et al 2015, PNAS (see Philpott summary) N2O has approx 300x the heat-trapping power of CO2 Mostly the overproduced corn that Pollan describes 11% of Anthropogenic GHG comes from agriculture

Wheat bred in Mexico, 1940s-60s

First impact in Mexico Main impact in India (especially as icon) Today, CIMMYT (international wheat and grain improvement center)

Rice bred in Philippines, 1960s

First impact in Philippines, then much of south Asia Today, IRRI (international rice research)

Climate change effect on farmers

GW will increasingly disrupt people's ability to grow crops. Extreme weather events cause disclocations flooding of fields destruction of crops Extreme weather events affect developed and developing nations alike

Mad Cow Disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, BSE)

IDENTIFIED IN U.K., 1986 DOES IT CAUSE THE HUMAN DISEASE "CJ"(variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease)? 1996 British govn & medical establishment reverse themselves, announce BSE does cause vCJ Cattle destroyed, beef market devastated BSE spreads across Europe, Japan Cow-eat-cow ended (cows fed meat and bone meal), warnings of epidemic not borne out BSE cases continue at very low rate "In the same month that Daddy Gummer was cramming that burger into her tender mouth, he was secretly discussing whether the entire British herd should be culled." Guardian Unlimited, Oct 22, 1998. See Jasanoff 2005. Later in 1996: GM soy announced in British foods. Unlabeled as an ingredient but British govn assures public it is safe...

Factoid 8

In 1934, often cited as the key year for hybrid maize introduction, 36 million acres were taken out of production by federally-sponsored acreage reduction

Factoid 3

In India, over 8 million people starved in the late 1870s famine. The deaths have been blamed on El Niño droughts, but India also exported a record 358,000 tons of wheat to UK in 1877-78.

Factoid 4

In the early 1960s Lee documented Ju/'oansi as spending an average of 2 hours daily in subsistence pursuits

Indigenous breeding?

Increasingly disrupted by commercial seeds May be too slow But anyway industrial agriculture makes its money selling inputs...

o But before condemning India for overpopulation consider

Loss of agricultural lands -partition, loses much of Punjab breadbasket Export (non-food) production • Colony of England - outer directed agriculture • Even after independence, substantial amount of production is for export (1/5 of land is for non-food crops) • These facts were obscured by people in the West • Rockefeller Foundation calls for research into food production in India • Ford Foundation - same Effects of the PL-480 program

Consider economic animal changes...salmon

Salmon mostly raised in offshore "farms" Fed ground up fish which concentrate toxins And increase toxins in nearby wild fish And produce much lower levels of healthy Omega-3 fatty acids And higher levels of Omega-6 fatty acids And develop pale flesh that is colored by feeding fish synthetic pigment (canthaxanthin) Color picked by SalmoFan

Indian farmers adapt to delayed monsoon

Main responses: Changed irrigation Switch to more drought-tolerant crops Delayed planting

Lesson of the last 22 years of GM crops

Mainly industrial crops, non-replantable seeds

Safety

Major reductions in insecticide use Increases in herbicide use; next generation of 2,4-D crops Difficulty in isolating health and ecosystem impacts

Ownership of the genome

Many see gene patenting as problematic Also directly affects scientists ability to study effects

FACE (Free Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment) Experiments

Measuring the effect of elevated CO2 using FACE is a better way of estimating how plant growth will change in the future as the CO2 concentration rises in the atmosphere. FACE also allows the effect of elevated CO2 on plants that cannot be grown in small spaces (trees for example) to be measured. Hope is that science will develop ways to reverse declining nutrients

Breakdown of ag effects on greenhouse

N fertilizer, Livestock emissions, burning, rice

Factoid 9

Over the last 15 years, government subsidies to corn production have averaged $6 billion/year (not counting ethanol subsidies and mandates that drive up the price of corn, and not counting policies allowing the externalization of costs)

Theoretical projections - points of agreement

POINTS OF AGREEMENT on CROP PRODUCTION: severity on impacts increase with degree of warming worst impacts in tropical areas currently with greatest hunger (but hunger does not equate with unproductive crops)

Global Warming and Agriculture - will GW lead to decreased global food production?

Possibly. Predictions tend to agree on higher production in temperate areas and lower in tropical areas (where most poorer developing countries are, esp. subSaharan Africa). These are plausible, but projections make unrealistic simplifying assumptions. We know that farmers will adjust practices and that new agricultural technologies are developed all the time, although we don't know how successful they will be. (More on technology in a minute)

Will agricultural technology companies meet the challenges of GW?

Probably not, but they will capitalize on it for public relations.

Early Genetic Engineering

Restriction enzymes isolated; cut DNA DNA ligases identified; join DNA strands Individual genes isolated for 1st time

Seeds and other technologies are developed all the time

Seed varieties developed by the thousands by international, national, and local breeding centers; universities; governments; seed companies; even farmers themselves. But indigenous breeding is fairly slow and it is increasingly impacted by commercial seed.

Mexican Agricultural Program

Semi-dwarf ("Norin-10") wheat developed in Japan (early 20th C crosses of Japanese fertilizer-intensive grains with US varieties) (why were they growing fertilizer-responsive wheat, anyway?) - taken from Japan after WW2- doesn't lodge Borlaug's shuttle breeding - Expedited rapid breeding - Selected for strains adapted to diverse environments

Technological solutions? Climate-change-ready rice?

Technologies like submergence-tolerant rice should be helpful with some levels of flooding, but not extreme weather events. Those will require political and economic solutions more than technological ones.

Malthus vs politics of hunger & poverty

Surge of neomalthusian claims connected to GMO debates Case of technology fetishizing; it's not the science per se but who controls it, what rights they have over it, what their incentives are

Farmers in dev. countries adjust farm practices all the time

Sustainable intensive farming in Nigeria Intercropping with crop mixes adjusted to ecology and economic changes Low reliance on external inputs

Unrealistic Assumptions (especially about developing countries) in retrospective study

The authors admit that their results are packed full of assumptions. They could be overestimating climate's effects, because the model doesn't account for the fact that farmers might switch to different crop varieties or change their planting dates as conditions change. Conversely, the results could be an underestimate, given that the model doesn't look specifically at extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and heatwaves. "It's the best we can do with the data available," says Lobell.

Capitalism and climate change

The contemporary form of capitalism is inherently incompatible with reversing the course of global warming. The contemporary form of industrial agriculture may be too.

Factoid 10

The feeding efficiency of beef (feed:meat) has fluctuated between 9-14 in the last century

Paul Ehrlich's inspiration

Was biologist and butterfly researcher Went to India and saw that poor villages that were starving were also in midst of population boom in 1970s • 1967, Ehrlich went to India, it was very crowded and dirty, said he "felt" overpopulation

Will GW lead to isolated food crises?

With absolute certainty. But isolated food crises will require political and economic solutions.

Factoid 7

Yanomamo conflicts correlated with rubber booms and arrival of steel tools.

Handicap principle (part of costly signaling)

behaviors that handicap an individual may be selected for because of the information they transmit • Informs potential mates that the individuals can afford the cost • Peacocks tail • Deer antlers • Informs predators that the individual is very fit and not worth chasing • Antelope stotting • The observers evolve to recognize the honest signals by their costs

• Leslie White

energy capture is the drive of evolution of culture. More evolved cultures capture energy more efficiently

In the news: processed meats linked to higher cancer risk according to WHO

• Why is this attracting so much attention? Studies have been around since before 90s • There is a whole industry of churning out studies about foods that cause or prevent cancer • Story about nutritionism - Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, provides rules about what you should eat. But he discusses the "nutrition industrial complex" - industry for studies claiming that certain foods are good or bad for health. Almost always, studies are highly inconclusive. Press jumps on them because they are popular stories. Food companies love it because it gives them a good way to market their products.

o What is the advantage of the mar muos?

• Why leave your farm to help someone else? • Benefits: • Extra labor • Simultaneous labor • Yam heap making almost all done by festive labor parties • Tilling is labor intensive, need to reduce spring bottleneck • Weeds at key times • Buttress sorghum stalks • Mobilizing lots of labor • Extract more labor with music, festive atmosphere, group effort • Convert earlier inputs into millet cultivation into access to labor when most needed • Simultaneous labor demands • Millet storage requires several different tasks to be done simultaneously • Catholic missionized groups still drink beer, can still do mar muos • Protestant-missionized group stops drinking beer - festive labor system fell apart for them

o Gender and hunting

• Women play limited roles in hunting and never hunt instead of men • Fundamental SDL (men hunt, women tend children?) • But offspring don't tend to benefit - meat is usually distributed widely not only to hunter's kids • Little difference in survival risk for the children of better hunters • Lots of free-riding

The Population Bomb

• Wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, very popular, ended up on Johnny Carson show regularly and scared people, predicted there would be food shortages and billions of people would die, said Green Revolution was clownish and could not produce enough food by 2000

Road projects

• Roads bring ecological consequences along the corridor

o AL Kroeber: possibilism, "Natural and Cultural Areas"

• Said the environment wasn't a major explanatory factor but there are some links • Can't ignore that there are certain plant and animal resources that are linked to particular cultural groups (of American Indians) • Say different environments set up what is possible - doesn't determine but establishes what the parameters are

• Some resolution of a bitter debate

• San and Bushmen are not all the same group • Stop essentializing the Bushmen • Southern San live near and have economic integration with Bantu farmers for 200 years o Kwaneng San live on margins of Tswana society • Some northern San have history of much less external economic interaction o Dobe bordered by 100+ km waterless belt; difficult access in Iron Age; reached by black (Bantu) settlement only in 1920s

State interventions: Seeing Like a State (James Scott)

• Second case of socialist state intervention • Case study in pathologies of state control o Inherent tension between interests of state and sustainable ag? • James C Scott, Seeing Like a State

o Settlement pattern

• Sedentarization esp. important; classical colonial intervention • Highly disruptive to pastoralists, agro-pastoralists and shifting cultivators • But disruption is often seen as a good thing • Ex. American Indians "moved up the cultural evolutionary ladder" by getting land and cow • Also administrative ordering of farmer villages • Kofyar - agriculture on frontier was so successful because they had control over their own settlement pattern. Closely linked to fact that farming is social activity. Settled near people who were similar in micro-ethnicity. Divide land into neighborhoods, use these divisions for organizing mar muos

o Malthusian theory in reverse: pop can't keep up with ag

• See slide for explanation • Acreage reductions are preventive checks - try to keep food production lower • But we still end up with too much food (only eat 5% of it)

o But what are key features of crop domestication?

• Seed size increase • Ripe seeds stay on plant (tough rachis, usually a stem like a corn cob) • More predicatable and synchronous germination • Reduced physical and chemical defenses (ex thorns, spines) • Low dormancy: separates weeds from many annual crop plants • Change in taste, color, etc. • Rapid growth • Getting rid of seeds (bananas) • Larger and more palatable roots (carrot)

o Settlement schemes

• Settlers given free or cheap land, encouraged to clear it using slash and burn - not patchy, clear large areas • Arrangement of fields different from old-fashioned slash and burn cultivators • Brazil's policies reward forest clearance - can get ownership through clearly land

o Key features of animal domestication

• Smaller (less dangerous) • More docile and social (like cows) • Mutations for secondary products (milk, wool, etc.)

o "Ethnic" conflict

• Some say conflict has to do with access to resources, not ethnicity • Vandana Shiva says access to water is extremely contested. Violent outbreaks in the Punjab • Fight with neighboring states over access to water • Westerners say its just Sikhs not getting along with other ethnic groups • What could they have bred for instead of fertilizer-intensity • Breed for crops that do well in drought • Better nutrition • Disease, pest resistance • More efficient fertilizer utilization • Intercrop synergy (like millet-sorghum) • Green Revolution nearly eradicated drought-resistance crops, like pearl millet

• Likely mechanisms of EDC

• Still a lot of research needs to be done • 3 likely mechanisms; • Changes nature of fat cells o Stimulate more fat cells, reduces number but makes much larger (like BPA) • Epigenetics o Changes not in genes themselves but in how they express, ex. Genes may be silences, may be heritable o Happens during course of life but can be passed onto kids • Hypothalamus o Affects metabolism

o Farmers?

• Success of collaborative breeding programs leads to grain glut - same time hybrids are being introduced (30s and 40s) • In 20s, big push to replace draft animals with machines. These animals were big corn eaters, less demand for it. • Farmers blamed science and government for glut • Farmers don't actually need seeds that are more productive, but farmers don't want to be left behind by neighbors • Grain is not identity preserved - farmers don't have choice but to adopt • Farmers protected by government subsidies and substitutionism in the market • Set asides (aka acreage reduction) - government pays farmers not to grow crops - avoid surplus problem. Started in 1933 • Substitutionism - farm products turned into industrial products

• But not driven by invention per se; rather by institutions allowing invention to become profitable

• Sugar colonies invent whole new way to farm, but only spreads because slaves make it profitable -- plantation is in some ways like a factory, but the only way it could be profitable was with free labor • Breeders invent hybrid corn, but it only takes off because public institutions shoulder burden of research. Hybrid corn not inherently better, just gives more variability. • Chemists find new fertile compounds, but fertilizer industry grows because of government subsidy • Green revolution crops spread only because of government subsidy of inputs

o Scott's theory of legibility

• The state arranges people and their productive activities in ways that simplify the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, prevention of rebellion • Cross cuts different types of state • 'Administrative ordering of nature and society' -impose order to fulfill functions

o Problems with Pigs:

• Theories change; with political ecology, becomes poster child for ahistorical, hyper-functional, hyper-local • Theoretical problems: mid-1970s on, interest in external influences, power relations as compared to functionality, historicity as compared to timelessness • Empirical problems with Pigs (not really a study of warfare; little data on land regulation) • Today, the famous "Pigs" study is now more important as a foil for political ecology than as empirical research • Contrast: 1980 Rosaldo study of Ilongot Headhunters; looks at how norms play out in history, change throughout history (1883-1974)

o Betty Meggers

(1954) - can classify environments by how advanced the cultures are that can develop

Many of the areas likely to be hardest hit by global warming are poorer areas in tropics

(Bangla Desh often tops the list; India, sub-Saharan Africa, Pacific Island nations, Haiti)

o 2. SSC is indigenous but adaptive

(cultural ecology; early Vayda, Rappaport, Harris) • Popular in 1960s, heyday of cultural ecology • Warfare as safety valve institution - promotes social cohesion by providing occasion to unite and pursue common purpose

• Julie Guthman

- book on industrial agriculture in California • Pollan cited her but she didn't like it, wrote "Why Reading Michael Pollan Makes Me Want to Eat Cheetos" • Guthman talks a lot about obesogens • Guthman talks about US moral panic about obesity epidemic

Political Economy of Green Revolution in Mexico, 1950s-60s

- govn investment shifted away from ejidos towards infrastructure (irrigation, roads, electricity) - land rush by private investors to capitalize on govn investments -increased irrigation means less flood-fertilizing, so boosts in inorganic fertilizer use -credit for farm expansion & irrigation demand for fertilizer-intensive wheats guaranteed wheat prices - special exchange rates to promote mechanization - farm concentration: "the great wheat boom that made Mexico into a wheat-exporting country forced the smaller individual cultivators out of business and concentrated capital-intensive agriculture into the hands of less than 200 'millionaire' entrepeneurs" (Pease p. 37)

Julian Simon

-Economist, 1932-98 o Simon says Ehrlich exaggerated his numbers, threat of global famine was not realistic o With pesticides, fertilizers, and miracle seeds, there was a huge increase in food production - Green Revolution o Trends opposite of his predictions - natural resources, food and energy have become cheaper with time o Although India implemented more family planning, it is nearly impossible to convince Americans to reduce their consumption and shrink the economy

Development & deployment of crops for developing countries

-Technology development by foundations (mainly Rock.) working in close concert with US -During & after, built CGIAR centers -Internationalizing agricultural industrialization, starting with fertilizer-intensive breeding as in postwar U.S. agriculture

Will GW lead to less nutritious food?

Almost certainly. But agricultural technology developers have been developing less nutritious foods for a long time.

• Amartya Sen

famine doesn't come from food shortage but to entitlement issues. If society decides that not everyone is entitled to food then not everyone gets fed. Won Nobel Prize in economics for this work.

Retrospective studies

Corn: down 3.8% from where it would have been with constant climate Wheat: down a bit Rice and soybean: up Developed countries fare worse in this study.

Irresistible Public Relations Opportunities

Corporations say GM and other tech can save humanity from the effects of climate change

Points of disagreement on theoretical projections

Depending on the circulation model, developed countries are either going to have lots more food or somewhat less. Different models predict decreased production in developing countries but... models assume current agricultural practices and technologies which is bad because they are always changing

Will the isolated food crises cause famines?

Famines are rarely caused by underproduction, but by people not being able to grow crops at all or not get access to the food

Factoid 1

From 1800-2000 world population rose just over sixfold (from around 1 to 6 billion) while agricultural production rose at around tenfold.

Isn't this just science doing its best to raise production to feed America?

I don't think so. Some of the biggest drops were during the 1930s when there were wheat surpluses and also grinding poverty

Problems with Mexican green rev narrative

Narrative: create "industrial revolution of agriculture" worked Mexico self-sufficient in food by 1950s, providing model for Asia Cullather : "But this version left quite a bit out" In US, industrial agriculture had contributed to depression-era farm crisis paradox of plenty In Mexico, displacing small and communal farming with commercial agribusiness, "liberating" millions of farmers into urban slums or across the border "wetback problem" bursts onto front pages in early 50s also narrowing the genetic base "These correctives have strikingly little effect on how the Mexican parable is retold in congressional hearings or news accounts" Borlaug furious at those questioning the narrative)

o Neoliberal context

blame individual choices for eating bad food instead of policies allowing bad and cheap food -- takes attention away from bad policies • Connects to cultural values that become entrenched with neoliberalism- individual achievement and competition, success equated with thinness

o Neolithic revolution

circa 10,000 years ago -shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture

o Franz Boas

moved against environmental determinism • Professionalized anthropology • Fieldwork: just read colonial reports • Found cultural variation even in same environment • Examined history of the places he visited - different things happen throughout history within an environment • The "ethnographic present" - people study a place where they don't know the written history and the say in ahistorical way "____ people are like ______" Strips them of history and assumes that they have always been living as they are at that moment. But all cultures change throughout time. • Anti-environmental, anti-evolutionism • Historical particularism • General/environmental vs. particular/history is still a struggle in anthropology

• 3 Big ideas

o 1. SSC is indigenous and maladaptive: needs to be stopped by civilized societies; Hobbesian "warre"; recent includes Pinker's Blank Slate o 2. SSC is indigenous but adaptive (cultural ecology; early Vayda, Rappaport, Harris) o 3. SSC is Exogenous and maladaptive

• Modern Institutionalization in US farming

o 1905 - Office of Farm Management founded o "Quantitative spirit" 1910-30; try to quantify, measure, make things scientific o Ag made scientific and Taylorist - made rational and legible to the state o Ag education on campuses - tell people traditional ways are bad, teach Taylorist farming - whole system relied on Taylorism o Ag engineering arises - want to be the one who has a skill that the farmer really needs. Became enthusiastic about machinery. Increasingly promoted internal combustion engines over animal-pulled tractors o "No one will object to calling the farm a factory; it is a factory. The sun and seeds are the raw materials." - Taylor

• US Food and Agriculture

o 1920s - tractors o 1930s - hybrids o 1940s - surplus fertilizer from bomb factories • Breed intensive maize • Increased watering • Increased pesticide o Dumping in 50s o Corn based diet o Ethanol o Obesity problem

• Yet...

o 1920s: studies show equivocal economic benefits of tractors o 1930s: tractors were saving work but placing enormous strains on farm budgets o Debt and mechanization work together • Banks evaluate credit-worthiness on tractor ownership o Iowa State College's Dean of Agriculture suggested that the Depression was in part due to mechanization (1927) - he got in lots of trouble by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers o Self-reinforcing spiral - if you adopt tractor you need to scale up to make it work economically.

Paul Ehrlich's ideas

o 1970s - population growing because of public health innovation o Ehrlich says planet had exceeded carrying capacity o Ehrlich proposed having population controls (voluntary and if not successful, then by force) o Impact = population x affluence x technology (IPAT equation) -went on Johnny Carson and became very influential

• Environmental Obesogens

o 2002 article: synthetic organic/inorganic chemicals ingested, inhaled, absorbed • Weird, almost conspiracy, person who found it was selling something, alternative journal o Early interest in organochlorine pesticides (ex. DDT) o Functional category "obesogens" came to be - environmental, not dietary • Sugar is not an obesogens because it affects thru the caloric route o Widespread consensus today on validity of obesogens • Still debate on mechanisms and effects

• Ehrlich's proposed re-bet included (changes 1994-2004):

o 3 years 2002-2004 will be on average warmer than 1992-1994 o There will be less agricultural soil per person o There will be fewer plant and animal species o More people will die of AIDS o Sperm cell counts of human males will continue to decline and reproductive disorders will continue to increase o The gap in wealth between the richest 10% of humanity and the poorest 10% will be greater o Problem: while these things happened, they are not linked to overpopulation but rather to greenhouse gas emissions and other factors

• Conditions favoring sustainable development from below

o Ability to develop/adapt own social institutions o Inputs reliable (mainly labor); sustainable by almost all definitions; no external technology o Highly productive; helping feed Nigerian cities

• Political economy of taking away properties from plants

o Advantages to controlling reproduction of corn o Green revolution rice and wheat dependent on fertilizer and pesticide o Dependence created to sell more products to farmers • Modern domestic turkeys psychically incapable of reproducing

Malthus at Oakwood chapel

o After a year, father gets him a job in a country parish at Oakwood chapel where he is a pastor • Culture shock despite short distance • People were tiny and malnourished - seemed "like a different race from the lads who played cricket at Cambridge" • When he was pastor, Oakwood was experiencing a mini population boom which made a large impression on Malthus who constantly did more baptisms than burials. • People were poor because of political economy of aid with Poor Law on a parish basis. Poverty not due to overpopulation • Malthus left after a few years, had distain for parishoners who he thought were over-reproducing and had sense of entitlement

• Discrete but connected industrializations

o Agriculture doesn't lend itself to being turned into a factory in one complete overhaul - series of appropriations o Hybrid corn seed commodification o Machinery o GMO seeds o Pesticides o Fertilizer • The first wave of major ag industrialization • Biggest energetic input into ag • Makes modern ag monumentally inefficient

• Agriculture and industry

o Agriculture resists capitalist penetration, systematic overhaul of organization of production, decomposition. Why? • Takes up a lot of space • Physical environment closely involved in production (harder to override than in factory production) • Ecological systems have and need variability • Unpredictable risk (weather, diseases, etc.) • Agriculture is seasonal • Requires skilled labor (not all of it, but most of it) • Reproduces itself (seed, offspring)**** most important to resisting capitalism

Malthus context

o Alive during industrial revolution in England o Inherited wealth from Daniel Malthus, father. o Cambridge math major, wanted career in church but advised against it due to speech impediment. Wrote father of 'utmost of my wishes was a retired living in the country" o Graduated 1788, ordained same year o Returned to parent's home in Albury, Surrey where he spent year socializing and reading father's library o Read Enlightenment texts from 18th century like Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Jefferson. • Focus on reason and science instead of faith and superstition • Social progress and optimism

• Economy of (small) scale - skill replaces scale

o As you move to smaller plots you need more knowledge and skill o Social concomitants • Generally applies to intensive cultivation but especially true of paddy rice • Reliance on household labor; locally adapted, highly skilled, invested in the farm • Able to control own labor schedule • Household controls land (long-term investment in paddies, hydraulics, etc.)

• In whose interest was hybrid production?

o Breeders as scientists (more exciting, more avenues for publication) • Shull invented hybrid vigor; saw it as a scientific rather than commercial tool. o Capital - seed companies had been very small before, this had huge potential to take control of key means of production. Must buy hybrid seeds because you can replant the offspring of hybrids but they lack hybrid vigor • Breeding marketable hybrids is field research intensive - so seed companies prevail in claims that governments, through land grant colleges, should do background research. Give seeds to companies once they reach saleable form.

• India - politics of food imports

o British colony since 1700s o Becomes independent and must start remaking itself o 1950s goal: heavy industry, not agriculture o 1950s: food and cotton price spikes -- so India is interested in PL-480 wheat. Gave Indian regulators a tool for managing prices and public opinion just at the moment when they needed it o Effect: kept Indian grain prices very low, domestic prices stagnated, grain producers stopped producing because it was so unprofitable o Deepened dependence on imports, reduced India's ability to produce food

Why didn't the the Marxist model fit agriculture?

o But in farming, land and ecological endowments are crucial (unlike factories) o Another problem: Need for continual intimate interaction with environment o Farming is seasonal o Economic organization and class o Misunderstood social organization of farm production

Neoevolutionism

o Came back to social theory in 1900s • Leslie White (1900-1975) • Returned attention to social evolution (no one follows this anymore) • Carrying on work of Tylor and Morgan but improving their paradigm • Specified what the axis was on which cultures were being compared. Measurable and scientific. Axis of energy capture and efficiency of capture. • Amount of energy expended per capita per unit of time and efficiency are hallmarks of evolution • Laws of cultural development

• Case Study #3: Yanomamo (in Amazon)

o Chagnon's monographs describe 1964-72, Orinoco-Mavaca area in southern Venezuela (also in Brazil) o Yanomami (Subgroup is Yanomamo) are slash and burn farmers, cassava, peanuts and maize, do some hunting and wild food gathering o Large buffer areas between villages for hunting o Villages between 20-100 people - big variation o Fairly mobile, villages sometimes break into sub-groups o Low pop density; reports range from under 4/sq km to .5/sq mi o Lots of violence and sexual violence o Practice female infanticide - scarcity of women o 64 women per 100 men o Level of conflict astonishing - Chagnon reports war leading cause of male death: up to 40% and famous militarism and belligerence (Chagnon's studying in the Yanomamo dramatizes) o Why did it resonate with people? Maybe because he was a lurid story teller

Nyere and China

o China started investing in Tanzania o Nyerere went to China in 60s to learn about 'successes' of GLF o Nyerere wanted to promote proper villages o Concerned about Kulaks - wanted state sponsored cooperatives

• Guthman talks about US moral panic about obesity epidemic

o Cites "The Fat of the Land" about how everyone is aware of obesity but it is a bigger problem, undermines fabric of society o Guthman says this generates moral panic - we believe fat people are behaving badly o Obesity has risen since 1980 o But it isn't a moral or medical problem, it is also a political issue o Hypervisible problem (fat people) - averts attention from underlying problems (bad food policies are hard to see) o Ethnic/class effects o Questionable attribution of healthcare costs to obesity (including Pollan)

• Industrial revolution

o Commodification and complete reorganization of production in factories o Capital penetrates the form of production; changes how goods are produced, how much is produced, who controls the technology of production, how producers are rewarded, how benefits are distributed o Skilled weaver, owns loom, controls the cloth → society decomposes into deskilled, replaceable workers with no control over what is produced and capitalists who own the factories

o Lenin's famine 1921-22: Stalin replaces Lenin and gets worse

o Continued attempts at class warfare, killing kulaks o 1929: peasants collectivized, land, animals, declared state property, organized into agricultural brigades o Peasants try to flee, passport system instituted, many killed o Politically, Stalin wanted to punish Ukrainians o Economically, wanted to industrialize, push economy of scale o Foreign exchange from grain exports while people starved • 1929 famine • 1932-33 famine (Law of the Spikelets - all crops are state property so farmers can't eat food that they grow) • These not admitted until Kruschev's 1956 book

• Killing the crop-livestock synergy

o Cow that used to be valuable for traction, beef, milk and manure is no longer valuable for manure o Manure no longer in use in modern fields o Sets up conditions for factory farms

• Effect of food production on population

o Cultivation per se would not have impact in all cases • Ex. Maize agriculture had little demographic impact until long after the introduction; only with better ceramics, more sedentism, better landscapes o But it often affected pop growth through various mechanisms: (food, childcare)

• Risk management

o Deadly serious business - managing food over multi-year time spans, don't just try to maximize yields, many other considerations, like what stores well. People had nothing to fall back on after Mao

• How does Malthus fit in?

o Definitely indigenous (driven by biology) but can be cast as both o Maladaptive but unavoidable with respect to the overpopulated poor o Adaptive within larger system overseen by God • God made it this way so that people would struggle to improve • Not a new concept: seen in Homeric epics, Zeus sent war to relieve overpopulation

o But how does human domestication of economic species differs from these non-human forms of food production?

o Depends on what stories you want to tell; can put in context of • Religion (dominion, Malthusian struggle for improvement) • Social politics (domesticates for elites) • Political ecology of agriculture (only humans overproduce) o Domestication is a key aspect of food production but not the same thing o Hunter-gatherers produce food by irrigating wild grasses o Some key domesticates are not food • Like drinking gourds, dogs (elaborate dog burial evidence) o Domestication before sedentary villages in some parts of Mesoamerica vice-versa in Middle East

Nyere's impact

o Disastrous impact of food production - had to increase imports significantly by 1973 o Drought going on in West Africa - discussion that drought was the fault of the Africans themselves (cutting down trees was said to cause drought) - Westerners blamed the West Africans o Idea spread to East Africa, where they looked at the West Africans as importing too much food

• Tractors

o Emergence of ag engineers co-equal to botanists and chemists at LGUs post ww1 o Tractor adoption pushed farmers becoming aligned with extension agents o Note the conjoined interests of agricultural colleges, insustry and the USDA o SO the industrial model Pollan criticizes was there soon after WW1 o 1918 - first PTO (power take off) makes the machines more useful o Adoption booms in 1920s o >2 million tractors by end of ww2, 40% of farms o As the pace of mechanization quickened and the number of farms shrank after ww2, the ration between tractors and farms became inverted

• Political economy of Ethiopia 1974-1991

o Emperor Haile Selassie I (royal family for thousands of years) o 74-76: Run by educated people, except two military generals started infighting, killed educated leaders. o Elected Mengistu Haile Mariam from 1974-1991 - horrible dictator. Killed 2 million people o 10 year agenda: Rural areas and the strategy of socialist agriculture

• Environmental Determinism

o Environment determines culture o Not restricted to past, but more common in past as expanding European/ Euro-American culture encountered cultural and environmental variation o It is a logical path to take, but models often don't work well o 3 questions: aspect of environment (what), mechanism(how), data (proof)

• Costs of more energy capture

o Environmental - air, water, soil o Economic - subsidies cost government/tax payers a lot of money. We pay farmers to not grow certain crops o Problem with outlets for surplus (from HFCS to dumping on 3W countries)

More on Ethiopia

o Ethiopia - wanted to promote rational land use patterns, conserve resources, provide access to modern amenities, strengthen security o USSR was the main ally at the time, but it was dissolving so they could not send aid. o Passport system. Difficult to move of leave country o Not a revolution, just a takeover. o 1987 - end of program. Let individual do own farming, allow private industries. But Megistu was still the president. He eventually fled the country and took refuge in Zimbabwe. o 1991- Revolution, took over the government. Supported by local people and the US. Not is democratic, capitalistic country. Still human rights violations.

• Mechanization in the US

o Example par excellence of industrial integration o It appears that our agricultural sector has dwindled but lots of urban factory workers are actually contributing to the ag industry o Goldschmidt study of two towns in CA in 1947 - studied how industrialization affects fabric of society o Particularly important part of development of American ag o Classic example of tech now seen as an obvious benefit to farmers, but it wasn't o Spread instead due to set of vested interests o Also ideology

• Externalizing costs

o Externalities encountered in the ag sector commonly: o Put differently: externalized costs of ag are generally o Industrial nitrogen use

• Multi-story forest

o Extraordinary biodiversity o Crappy thin soil but can have 500 tons living matter and 50K species in 1 ha o Plant life competes for nutrients wherever possible o Dense canopy o Nutrients in leaf litter o Roots grow sideways to get nutrients off of forest floot o Tall trees with shallow roots o Trees grow out very wide o Huge insect diversity o Plant make secondary metabolites - not helping it grow and reproduce but useful in fending off insects or attracting insects o Useful human stuff can be made from secondary metabolites o Caffeine induces pollination loyalty to plants o Shifting cultivation needed in rainforest because it allows light, fertility and pest control - critical in this environment o Early archeological evidence for swidden agriculture in amazon (Rio-Negro area) dated to 4000 BC

• Induced innovation - agricultural R&D adapt to factor prices

o Factors- things you are using in ag or could use o Ex. Japan is crowded island. Grow lots of wheat. Since they are land short, they have developed fertilizer-intensive wheats o Ex. US has lots of land but not as much labor. Develop labor-saving machines o Look at what is expensive and what's cheap - develop tech to capitalize on that o Boserup model is also example of this

• Is there a such thing as "too much food"?

o Farms disappear, go broke, rural areas depopulate o Further encourages capital-intensive farming o Many of our uses for surplus grains are problematic] o Industrial ag systems externalize costs

• Political ecology

o Focus on power, political economy - blind spot of cultural ecology o How and why are costs and benefits of environmental interactions shared unequally o Especially by moving the lens back to see larger contexts • Larger spatial scale, broader view of society • Longer time scale, more historical o Critique of apolitical cultural ecology o "hatchet" because of apolitical explanations not only miss larger dynamics but help to naturalize unequal costs and benefits of environmental> Political ecology chops away at the blind spot of cultural ecology. o "seed" refers to better understanding of indigenous strategies and knowledge. Political ecology tries to help people through understanding power differentials -Emerges in 1980s, in geography and anthro

• Behavioral ecology

o Focuses on adaptive fitness of behaviors in evolutionary context o Cultural ecology tends to ask how cultural institutions serve to protect and feed people o Behavioral ecology asks how specific individual and group behaviors affect passing on of genes o Models often don't separate humans and nonhuman creatures

• Russia: Bolsheviks take over in teens

o Forced Marxist theory to fit agrarian countryside o Mao copies this disastrous program a few years later, as do others o Marx/Engels 1848 Manifesto: Advocated combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the populace o But in farming, land and ecological endowments are crucial (unlike factories) o Another problem: Need for continual intimate interaction with environment

• Marx's hypothetical Precapitalist Society

o Use value, not exchange value; o Control forces of production so benefit form their own work rather than selling it as a commodity; o Classless without one group profiting for underpayment to another o Some people say Richard Lee's Ju/oansi are an example of this - bushmen represent an ideal original human adaptation

• Poultry

o Foster-Magdoff and Pollan say CAFOs started after WW2 o Actually started before o CAFOs started with chickens o Before 1930s, chickens were byproduct of egg production - eggs were seasonal in the spring and birds slaughtered after spring hatch o Fed gov in depression sponsors Big Science - ex 1933 Nat Poultry Improvement Plan research on disease control, breeding, husbandry in confinement systems o Create industry for "broilers" o WW2: chicken not rationed like beef, War Food Admin on Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia) o Postwar public investments in research on confinement strategies o 1940 took 250 man-hours to raise 1000 birds, 48 man-hours by 1955 o Distinctly American system of prod arises in the south - fully integrated operations start in the early 50s, common by end of 50s, 90% of operations except foundational breeding (usually done at gov expense) • Try to make chickens whose breast muscles are as large as possible o By mid 60s, feed producers like Ralston-Purina become leaders

• Taylorism

o Fredrick Taylor studied industrial production - how to make people more productive o Also asked social questions about who is most fit to work certain jobs o Idea of early modernism - can scientifically improve production process, make it more efficient

• Technology fetish in India

o From mid 60s to mid 70s: • Gov invested heavily in infrastructure (dams, wells, canals) • Subsidized fertilizer (guaranteed profit; companies proliferate) • Pesticides, credit given to farmers • Guaranteed wheat and rice prices • Food Corp of India, started 65, buys wheat and rice • Some think that this was more important than the seeds themselves (yields rose 51% but area planted with wheat rose 47%)

• Golden Rice: GMO

o GMO crops on markets since 1990s o Golden rice is one of the hottest battles in GMOs today o Golden rice - poor people type of rice, rice had beta carotene which turns into vitamin A (common nutritional deficiency) o No one is growing yet, but moving ahead in Philippines

• WW2 and government sponsored research

o Gave us new insecticides - intensive research on insecticides to protect troops overseas • DDT insecticidal properties discovered during war • Organophosphates developed during war - linked to poison research o Herbicides: within a week after Pearl Harbor, plant hormone researchers start working on developed chemicals to destroy crops • 24-D o Number of pesticide-resistant species takes off in 40s, 50s, 60s o PNAS study - more than 50% of water samples globally exceed local levels of pesticide contamination • Producing more o Maybe we should think twice about producing more, especially since we already produce so much more than we could ever eat • Key lessons about industrialization o See bb

• Formal breeding

o Government • Collect lots of plant varieties from countries in global south • Found land grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations (1860s onward) • Promote useful arts - agricultural and mechanical arts • Reward structure at land grants and ag experiment stations favored participatory plant breeding with farmers • Work with OPVs o Capital • Played a small role until 1920s

• "Ship to mouth" India due to overpopulation

o History of Malthusianism: 19th C British explanations of poverty and hunger (Trevelyan) o People have long used India to construct ideas of overpopulation - like Ehrlich • He thought the Green Revolution hadn't happened yet but it was happening

• New markets for old crops: heirloom rice

o Hundreds/thousands of land rice (local types of rice) o Many land rice farmers got displaced but some in highlands are still growing them • Different varieties with distinct colors, flavors, etc. o Heirloom rice from Philippines now imported to US to foodies o Problem: Lots of foodies and heirloom interested people now into locavore foods

• Meaning of hunting in American society today

o Hunting associated with rural culture, more conservative ideology o NRA has large role in American politics o But changing culture - liberal urban people interested in alternative food systems now interested in hunting like Michael Pollan

• Policy implications of malthusian thinking

o If they are laws of nature, we shouldn't bother to fix them o Only palliative possible; can't keep positive checks from befalling "lowest orders" (The Dismal Theorem) o In fact, feeding the hungry will only increase starvation in the future ("Utterly Dismal Theorem") o Even mitigating poverty was a bad idea as it would only make them lazy and impoverish the nation

• Fallacy - all nonhuman organisms just eat what nature provides

o Insects farm fungi o Amoeba farm bacteria o Coral reefs produce own food o Ants produce food through chambers, fungus seeding, make and use pesticides and antibiotics o Food production via genetic "engineering" • Crown gall disease invades wound in a plant's surface. Agrobacterium inserts genes into chromosomes of the tree, forcing it to create a tumor that makes lunch (nopaline) for the bacterium

• Rice - most important single food production system in world, especially for poor

o Interesting agro-ecology, different from fallow shortening o Interesting landscape and hydraulic engineering (ex. From japan) o Example par excellence of intensive cultivation (according to Netting) o But also example of limits of intensification theory o Dramatic contrast to disastrous state meddling (GLF) o Key crop in • Green Revolution • GMO • Alternative food/farm movement • For all 3, the Philippines is a key place

• Problem with proof

o Ireland's food exports rose throughout the famine (500,000 hogs exported to England in 1846) o Indian exported a record amount of wheat from India to the UK o Food production per capita has been growing since the 1800s (agricultural production rose 10 fold while population rose 6 fold from 1800-2000). Even greater food per capita growth in developing countries o FAO predicts this trend will continue

• Proof is in the pudding

o Irish potato famine (1843-50) o Taken to be proof of Malthus's theory o 1 in 8 starved and 1 in 8 emigrated o Charles Tevelyan, director of relief, was a student of Malthus, saw winnowing of Irish population was for the best, ordained by God o Famine in India in 1870s o Colonial governor said it was for the best o Relief would enhance evils of overpopulation

• Maximizing food production?

o Malthus: typical view of productivity as inelastic • Ag growth = more land under the plow or men behind the plow o We still tend to assume farmers are maximizing production o Saying we have to produce twice as much food by 2050 is taken to mean that we must come up with new tech since we are already producing as much as possible • This is wrong!!! o Intensification =/= industrialization

• Nigeria: Jos Plateau and Benue Lowlands - setting of Kofyar settlements

o Jos Plateau- southern edge is ragged and difficult to traverse o Kofyar originally went up into hills to avoid conflict and slave raids below o Hilltop villages have population density of 100/km^2 o Land is rocky and difficult to cultivate o In hillfoot villages, population density is 500/km^2 o Annual cultivation of land in high pop density area o Lived in dispersed settlement pattern - continuous farmsteads o Sorghum and pearl millet were main crops o Cowpeas, groundnuts, maize, Bambara nuts, and others were secondary crops

• Cultural ecology

o Julian Steward strongly identified with cultural ecology o Steward was a student of Kroeber (who wanted to bring environment into understanding of culture because we can see broad linkages between certain types of environments and cultures) o Steward developed these ideas much farther

• Water control with dykes: polders, 18th century China

o Keeps water out with a wall - the polder o Reclaimed land inside wall is also called a polder or a poldered field o Tanks in ancient India: dam a stream to make a pond, have outlets to bring water out of pond to irrigate rice o 10,000s of tanks in Central India • Used for fishing • Mud used for fertilizer for other crops when water is low • Mainly to irrigate rice o Some of the technology has been updated such as metal head gates

• Materialism

o Key ideas from Marx • Marx was an activist but our interest is in analysis not revolution • Detailed, historically grounded analysis of capitalism and how economies change—very helpful to understanding culture and environment. Felt that analysis supported series of actions that should be taken to fix the world - his prescriptions haven't been successful, sometimes basis for disaster as in China • Basic idea for understanding political ecology • And for understanding how capitalism has been able to configure environmental interactions so as to be indispensable (Capitalism has a history of configuring things so that its goods are indispensable)

• Smallholders

o Key to how these systems profit goes back to the "self-exploitation" of the smallholder - small farmers work very hard and don't complain about it o Corp can capture this by getting them in debt and giving them the risk o Takes hold in poor areas in southeastern US o Wouldn't choose to be a chicken CAFO farmer if you had better options

• State engineering

o Lake Hachirogata in Japan - very large lake, used for fishing, lots of small scale fishers o In 1950s they decided to make a polder with the lake as a water source. Got advice from Dutch engineers. o Now the polder is filled with rice fields o Pharonic project: have lots of rice but less seafood • Need more seafood than rice even before they built it o Started bringing in settlers in 1960s, government was already worried about rice surpluses o Told settlers to curtail rice production - mandatory o About using rice to enact a vision of modernity

• Tropical rainforest biome

o Large area of general biological uniformity o Not clean how amazon got to be the way it is o Human activity increased biodiversity and promoted the growth of certain species o People have partly created the nature that they live in

• Ed Wilmsen and revisionists

o Larger scale of analysis, attention to power differentials o Not persistent, well-adapted way of life o Marginalized underclass scraping by in poor environment o Foraging as a result of colonialism o Exemplified key aspects of political ecology • Historicizing ecological adaptation • Larger scale of adaptation • Recognize effects of differential power • Look at different interests but not classes in an industrial society like Marx, rather different ethnic groups o Said they were acting like people who were very poor

• Ecology of fallows

o Let it return to grasses, plants, etc. o Fertility goes back up o Pests go down o Grow more fodder so you can slash and burn later o Often integrated with hunting (usually hunt, gather and do swidden) • Patchy, so ecological diversity • Garden hunting: semi-domestication • Settlement shifts linked to hunting • Reconnaissance during hunting

• Agro-ecology - it makes sense

o Light • In a forest, trees will block the light o Fertility • Some soils not naturally fertile o Pests • Insects and plants • Domesticates often have problems with insects, especially because they are grouped together o Fire helps with all three! Gets rid of tree, ash and charcoal make soil fertile, hot burn kills weeds and insects o The more you farm, the most problems you have with pests and fertility so fire is more and more necessary the more you farm

• Households quickly change on frontier

o Limited by labor more than land - need larger households o Average household size increased to over 9 o How did households get bigger? • Fertility rose (women had more babies). High fertility very common on frontiers • Polygyny rates skyrocket • Nuclear family households replaced by multi-family households; young marrieds urged to stay at home • Values changed accordingly • On average, double in size within 10 years

• Compared to Owens Valley Paiutes

o Lived in well-watered area o More concentrated and predictable resources o Larger bands, more sedentary, modify environment (hunter-gatherer irrigation, irrigated wild stands of grass) o Communal land tenure, property rights

• Went to Benue lowlands in 1940s from homeland

o Lots of land, could farm extensively there o Robert Netting worked there in 1960s o As they moved into very lightly populated areas they switched to swidden cultivation o Also drawn to chance to participate in the market - Nigerian cities were growing so they started growing cash crops o Ex. Started growing yams - soil very good for yams

• Agricultural ecology

o Lysenko's theories meshed perfectly with Mao's obsessions with class struggle. He readily believed that plants from the same class would never compete against each other for light of food o Ecology is extremely complicated, require local knowledge o Mao told people exactly how to plant their crops, not based on local knowledge or science, based on weird Marxist theories o But - plants can sense each other

• The 1803 Rethink

o Malthus travelled through Scandinavia o Found that there are social institutions that affect population growth (not beholden to sexual desires) o Wrote 2nd edition where he introduced the "preventive check" of "moral restraint" o Said moral restraint lacking in lower classes o Turns previous model on its head because of moral restraint and institutions

• Hunter-gatherers

o Many spectacles through which we can look at hunter-gatherers o The Comparative Approach (Article by Marlowe 2005) o In the past, hunter-gatherers were actually highly diverse • Proportion of food from hunting vs. gathering varies greatly with latitude. Farther from equator, less food from gathering • Be wary of "typical hunter-gatherers" • Some were densely settled, especially on coasts where they were surrounded by aquatic resources • Some very socially complex o Most of what we know comes from a small and biased sample • Farmers displaced h-gs from most of the good spots, like coasts • Relegated to marginal areas by farmers; but also have symbioses with farmers. • All have interactions with farmers, not isolated societies

• Social organization of production

o Mao thought collectivizing production would make greater yields

• New patterns of agricultural clearance

o Martina McGloughlin says we will starve without clearing the land or the rainforest or supporting GMOs - GMOs protect the amazon o BUT most of land cleared for cropping is for soybeans (primarily GMOs). So, GMOs don't protect the Amazon o Soybeans primarily grown to feed pigs in factory farms. Not for human consumption

• Rostow - "Marx was a City Boy"

o Marx didn't know about countryside, said "idiocy of rural life," thought farmers were stupid, no real knowledge of agrarian society. o Also, revolution was easier to do in city than countryside because of population density. o Also saw famers as conservative and reactionary. o Limited view of social organization in countryside. "Like a bunch of potatoes that make up a sack of potatoes" - no organization o Irony: Although he had an idea of how social relations articulated with production in industrial society, he didn't for rural society. o Said family should be abolished o Problematic ideas used for terrible policies o Lenin would advocate the elimination of agriculture o Mao's Great Leap Forward. Copied by Nyere in Tanzania and Mengistu in Ethiopia

• Deforestation from population growth?

o Modern era of it begins in 1970s o Rainforest pop at that time was 70-90% lower than 1492 o Brazil's pop is growing and deforestation is continuing - is there causation?

EDCs

o Most important are EDC's • Endocrine disrupting chemicals • "If there were even a contest for the most easily duped biological systems, I would nominate our endocrine system" (Steingraber, "Living Downstream") • Not a new type of chemical, but the era of widespread EDCs is new • Disrupt hormonal system • Not all agricultural

• Political economy of fertilizer science

o Nitrogen is most common element in atmosphere - cannot be used by plants in it's most common form (nonreactive form) o Plants need nitrogen - but nitrogen must be fixed (break apart triple bond) to be used o Early 1800s, soil fertility depletion in Europe and US - knew some crops made soil more or less fertile but didn't understand what the mechanism was

• What causes obesity?

o Obesity (measured by BMI which is problematic) strong rise c. 1980 • Mean is up 28 pounds but even bigger change in positive skew • Even those at bottom end of BMI curve and gaining weight - what is happening is happening to everyone, "suggesting an environmental trigger"

• Green Rev in India

o Obvious food security issues o National pride also a problem o 63-64: MS Swaminathan begins trial plantings o 65-66: drought o 67: Sonoran wheats planted widely - dramatic rise in wheat production o 69: food imports stopped almost completely

• Hybrid summary

o Often presented as agricultural breakthrough benefiting humankind o Key step in commodification of seeds through biological means o Key step in capital taking advantage of government subsidy o Able to harvest fruits of public research

• Rice Varieties

o Orya sativa (Asian) • Asian, 2 subspecies (japonica and indica) • Both have glutinous (sticky) and non-glutinous (non-sticky) varieties • Sticky rice often in sweet dishes in Asia • Common points of confusion • Both are gluten-free (glutinous is misleading) • Sushi is made with non-glutinous japonica rice, but it is slightly sticky o Oryza glaberrima (African) • Domesticated independently • Still grown in places in West Africa but not a good industrial rice • Secure, more dependable but not huge yields • On our green roof

Why hunt - Sociology of Science

o Other research had showed light workloads, adequate diet o But Lee had detailed ethnography and measurements, but also highly agreeable account of egalitarian society, off the grid, published in 60s o Published during hippie times o Popularized the notion that traditional, indigenous peoples are in some kind of idyllic harmony with nature

• Plowing, Ming Dynasty (1400s)

o Oxen used for plowing - economically sensible and sustainable o Oxen better adapted to small fields and small economies o Can use tractors for non-terraced or low-terraced fields

• Politics or population?

o PL480 became basis for food policy o Gov't set up a network of fair-price shops to sell discounted flour o Price controls on other goods largely failed so cheap wheat = main instrument for holding down inflation o Deflationary effect financed steel plant o Imports had advantage over procurement because imported grain was all in the hands of the authorities o Creates psychology of abundance o Did Indians need PL480 b/c they didn't produce enough food or the opposite? (The opposite) o Despite all the problems, food prod in India was outpacing population

• Salmon

o Start farming in 1980s-90s o Dramatic rise in salmon consumption in US and EU o Farms usually out in ocean o Salmon anemia, sea lice, other health problems o Farmed salmon much less healthy than wild o Farmed salmon is grey but dyed orange o Farmed salmon causes obesity

• Ponded fields: water as another semi-natural process

o Waters the plants o Worlds best weed preventative o Helps with insects, rodents o Medium for nutrients, soup bowl ecology o Raise secondary economic species

• Case study #1: Maring Pigs (Pigs for the Ancestors)

o Papua New Guinea - hilly area, cultural diversity - lends itself to cross-cultural studies o Roy Rappaport (Vayda student) fieldwork among Tsembaga (subgroup of Maring-speakers) in early 1960s o Swidden cultivators, sweet potatoes, pigs (very large and valuable) o Tsembaga are small people, pigs often as large as grown men o Pigs are always eaten in specific and ritually controlled contexts o Rappaport wanted to study farming energetics and strategies but work appears in mid/late 60s heyday of cultural ecology o Write Pigs for the Ancestors - widely read, attacked, discusses o Case study in ritual regulation of environment relations • Regulates consumption of valuable pork • May regulate population densities (no data) • Causes but controls conflicts o Conflict on frontier triggers war (non-lethal, more chest-thumping and threatening) o Fighters eat pork w/o drink, limiting fight o Winners plant rumbim to thank ancestors, reward allies with pork, then pork taboo o Rumbim taken up after ancestors are satisfied (which turns out to happen when pigs overpopulate); pork feast o War system limits violence o Linked homeostatically with pig population o Adaptive value of ritual

• Industrialization of fertilizer

o Pollan: industrial revolution in food chain dates to close of WW2, leading to food production drawing energy from fossil fuels instead of sun o But it actually has a much deeper history

• Intensification on the frontier

o Pop density up to 100/km^2; market stimulus o High labor in complex, carefully balanced agricultural calendar o Millet, sorghum, peanuts, sesame, yams all grown in same field (intercropping) o Yam heaps - prepare next years fields while this years crops are still in it o Used same simple hoe technology (intensified by labor, not technology) o Added work in dense, complex cropping calendar, work-year lengthened o Fertilizing, weeding start up again o Household, reciprocal and festive labor have different characteristics and are used strategically

• Malthus's premises in retrospect

o Population is always restrained by bio-social mechanisms (preventive checks) • If reproduction were unchecked women would have >40 children each, highest recorded is 8.9 by Hutterites • Examples of mechanisms • Birth spacing (ex. By lactational amenorrhea) • Contraception and abortion • Delayed reproduction (brideprice, dowries) • Celibacy institutions • Education, esp. of women (Condorcet was right)

• Aquaculture

o Production of seafood thru factory farm o Surge in 1990s o Shrimp is one of major items o There are more sustainable ways of mass-producing shrimp • Extensive farms - doesn't produce as much per acre of water • Multi-species extensive aquatic production o Shrimp farms very unstable • Works extremely well when its working • Starts in 1980 in Taiwan, Thailand, China, Indonesia • Spreads to L America • But they are susceptible to many diseases • When viral and bacterial diseases hit, the industry collapses • China dominates, Vietnam booming now but future is ? o Big market for "wild caught" shrimp - usually a lie

• Managing regrowth

o Protect certain trees o Don't pull up stumps - allows trees to re-sprout o Chitemene - slash larger areas than they burn because they have small tree and need a big burn o Almost always use dibble stick to poke holes into ground for seeds

• Hunting as costly signaling - how it is institutionalized in real life

o Quantitative study shows • Men who are better at hunting have higher fertility o Ethnography shows • Hunting success linked to sexual access o Jury is still out - it fits a lot of the data but not all of it

• Philippine highlands settled by intensive wet rice farmers?

o Recent archaeology • Can't find evidence of terraces more than a few centuries old • But this negates the story told to tourists about ancient terrace farmers • Spaniards in Cordillera in 1600s didn't mention anything about terraces in their accounts • Can build terraces quickly - could be done in a few centuries o Historical linguistics • Austronesian terms for paddy, terraces, pond-type rice, even work groups • Shared roots across Cordillera

• Funk Seeds; Trio Idea

o Redesign corn to capitalize on flood of cheap fertilizer o 1. Bred hybrid corn that responded well to lots of fertilizer o 2. Heavy fertilizing - encouraged farmers o 3. Close planting - pack tons of corn into one field o Example of induced innovation

• Control of schedule

o Remember the Kofyar - take labor from one place to another, no control

• Scale of agriculture

o Rice only works on a small scale - can't make it huge or it doesn't work

• Key works in cultural ecology

o Roy Rappaport (Pigs for the Ancestors 1968) - Papua NG, pigs, warfare and religion. Religious ideals help mediate relations with environment o Bennett (WUSTL) work on northern Plains in North America o Lee 1968 work on Ju'/oansi o Netting (Hill Farmers of Nigeria 1968) on intensive agriculture o Economist Boserup 1965 (Conditions of Agricultural Growth) similar to cultural ecology but major change in theory of technology; also Netting 1993 (Smallholders)

• Was Malthus backward?

o Set-aside - government pays to have people not grow crops o Like a preventative check - trying to prevent excess corn from being produced in the first place

• Co-culture (rice and aquaculture)

o Sometimes in paddy and sometimes close in integrated production system o Sometimes have fish in water of rice paddy o Monoculture (green rev rice) vs. coculture and carp co-culture • Co-culture requires less fertilizer and pesticides • Rice attracts insects which feed fish and shade water to keep it cooler; carp bump into plants and knock insects off o Co-culture in Philippines - snails and various fish • But actually this is the invasive Golden Apple snail, an introduced disaster- eats eggs of other kinds of snails and crowds them out, not as edible, destroyed key part of co-culture o Can grow water chestnuts, fish, other aquatic plants in neighboring bonds o Rice, mulberry trees on banks, silkworms, fish all part of co-culture, work together in system

• Water control with dykes: Bunded fields

o Sophisticated hydraulic engineering with simple technology o Bunds are low walls used to hold water o Simple tools like hoes and shovels are sometimes used o Hydraulic engineering • Bamboo aqueduct • Square pallet chain pump moves water uphill

• Ecological aspects of administrative ordering

o Standardized units of measure (and impacts of scale) o Cropping strategies (esp. monocropping) o Settlement pattern

• Pig CAFOS

o Started in 1970s - hog CAFO model • Cattle start out on cow-calf farms, start in pasture with mom, stay in pasture for a while • Pigs adapted to chicken model of total industrial control • Fully enclosed metal barns • Feed silos • Exhaust fans • Manure lagoons o Breeding facilities • Gestation crates • Farrowing crates • Grow out facilities o Midwest has many hog CAFOs o North Carolina is 2nd biggest producer - black belt - CAFOs in poor black communities, poor health outcomes, shoulder the environmental, health effects of swine waste externalities o Manure lagoons not very well contained

Essay on the Principle of Population

o Started writing "Essay on the Principle of Population" which was passed out free on the streets (18th century equivalent of blogging) anonymously • Malthus was a clear, engaging writer by the standards of his day • Pamphlet based on discussions he had been having with his father, the Enlightenment fan • Reacting negatively to "perfectibility of society" when he sees dirty, poor, overproducing peasants • Takes down William Godwin, leading enlightenment writer in England at the time and Condorcet, enlightenment thinker and demographer in France.

• Case Study #2: Better example of religious regulation of environmental relations

o Steve Lansing's research on Balinese water temples is a better example of ritual regulation of environmental relations o Water temples all have priests who take care of spiritual and agricultural matters - schedule of when farmers had fields in cultivation vs. fallow (before late 1960s) o Green Revolution rice (bred to be input-intensive) enters Indonesia in early 1970s; brings high external inputs including information flows, and official disapproval of non-maximizing indigenous practices o Green revolution rice usually replaced land races of rice o Green revolution joined with ideas about how to farm - trying to get farmers to become more modern in thinking - turn to agricultural experts rather than traditional authorities o Farmers adopted new seeds and stopped talking to priests - Lansing actually predicted this! o Priests had synchronized fallow - scientists thought this was a waste • But doing no fallow made it so there was no habitat for a particular pest - population of this insect crashes • Eliminating fallow meant that they had to use lots of pesticides and still could not get rid of them completely

• Steward and Marx

o Structural similarities to Marx, theoretical o Differences • Unit of analysis generally whole society (Steward) vs. divisions (Marx) • Functionalist - how does a cultural adaptation allow people to adapt to environment (Steward) vs. questions of how something functions to benefit one group to the detriment of the other group (Marx) • For many years seen as model for non-capitalist societies vs. Marx for capitalist societies (environment less relevant)

• Fallows are managed

o Succession is manipulated • End cultivation cycle with fallow-enhancing crops • Plant trees as fodder o Fertilized o Fallows are planted too • So rotational cropping blurs with fallowing • Fallow plants are valuable resources o Hundreds of plants that are valuable • Patchy swiddens can return to forest

• 2 forms of production of rice

o Swidden aka upland or dry o Intensive aka paddy or wet (standing water) • Landscape engineering to bring water in or keep it out • Land preparation • Paddy ecology • Co-culture (growing rice with something else in same prod system)

• The 2 demographic transitions

o The Neolithic Demographic Transition (birth rates rise, followed by mortality rate) is the mirror image of the contemporary demographic transition • Pre-agricultural • Low fertility, low mortality • Pre-modern agricultural • High fertility, high mortality • Since lots of kids die, institutions encourage high birth rates • Modern agricultural • Low fertility, low mortality • If you can bring down mortality, you'll go through a high fertility phase as institutions are still in place, then institutions will catch up and people start having fewer kids

• Pesticides build their own markets

o The more you spray, the worse bugs get o Insecticide treadmills - usually there is a predator for every pest. But when you spray insecticide, sometimes you have more impact on the predator than the pest. May be making the problem worse. Also bugs become resistant to the spray.

Nyere's actions

o There were some cooperatives in the early days that were pretty adaptive - formed to try to help production in rural area of Tanzania - didn't tell people how to produce or override indigenous ways, just trying to help rural people pool resources o Before long, Nyerere banned the early, adaptive cooperative. o Forced people into settled villages of at least 250 households. Enforced crop schedules and labor - similar to Little Leap Forward o By 1973, resettlement into villages became compulsory - thought that forcing it would make the ineffective program more effective o Mobilized army - burned old villages so people couldn't leave new ones

• Summary of Yanomamo study

o Tight correlation of major changes in availability of steel and outbreak of war o Unequal social relations created by western trade o Not about revenge killings, about rubber boom areas, other economic explanations o Debate about human nature - but this isn't a window in the basic nature of humanity, it is about what happens in particular conditions

• Show landscape

o Transplanting usually done by hand in most of rice-growing world o In Japan, almost nothing is done by hand o Rice transplanting machine costs $25,000 o Role is to show what agricultural modernity looks like, especially to African visitors • But it doesn't make sense for anyone to actually use this machine

Paul Ehrlich's disagreements on international level

o US suburban people were the biggest over-consumers - but this is politically unpopular on right and left o June 1972 UN Conference on Environment o 3rd world people disagreed - said super-consumption in 1st world was the problem, not high population growth in the 3rd world o India's program for population reduction led to enforced sterilization, which was a human rights disaster. Changed to a choice-based program which Ehrlich thought was not far enough o Women rarely had enough power in family and society to achieve smaller families

• Colonial high modernist ag in Tanzania

o Until 1960s, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa colonized by European powers. When they became ex-colonies, did not have organization or infrastructure to be modern nations o Emerge into world divided by Cold War - most nations aligned with one side or other. A few avoided and went their own way o Tanzania had visionary head of state, Nyerere. He wanted Tanzania to not be aligned. Option? Cozy up with China, which was Marxist state that was not aligned with Soviets.

• What would have happened w/o the green revolution?

o We don't know o Between 63 and 83 • India: Wheat up 89% and rice up 140% • China; similar increases o Green revolution led to significant increase in wheat yields but lowered rice yields

• Malthusian disaster: GLF

o When there is famine, people always say its because of overpopulation, point the Malthusian finger o MS Swaminathan, key figure in Green Revolution, says all of the famines in Asia were just because of overpopulation

• Inventing a world in which capital is entrenched between culture and environment

o Why does ag. become industrialized? o Whose interests drive it? o Who benefits? o How does it affect how we think about our environment and ourselves? o Industrialized ag - key inputs come from off the farm (not labor like in Boserupian intensive ag)

• Preindustrial agriculture

o crop is the seed - created for use value o Seed improved by population improvement - retain genetic diversity but increase frequency of desirable traits by mass (phenotype) selection o Domesticated crops and land races

• Obligate cultigen

plant that has been so domesticated it cannot reproduce on its own

European Rejection of GM Foods examples

recent environmental / public health / agricultural disasters 1986 Rhine disaster timing of BSE (aka Sandoz spill) -The plant was producing agricultural pesticides (as was the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal 2 yrs before) -Spilled agri-chemicals into the air and Rhine river

1954: PL-480 (later "Food for Peace");

regular food shipments, "ship to mouth" note regarding the "saving a billion lives": this program is still running In FY 2012, Food for Peace provided approx 1.4 million metric tons of food aid as part of programs valued at approx $1.6 billionin 44 countries (link)

European Rejection of GM Foods

soya: unavoidable in processed foods; wanted labels less trust in government institutions than US closer industry-government relations in US (Jasanoff) dependence on contributions revolving door  geography and agricultural distancing?

Problem with Unilineal evolution

what is line of evolution? (In biological evolution, organisms don't become 'more evolved' or better, they just change). What causes cultures to change? Many examples of cultures not fitting this scale, or even going backwards (like hunter-gatherers who used to be pastoralists)

• Applying materialism to environment/agriculture

• 1. Expropriating wealth; getting someone/something else to pick up the tab/not pay full value o Capitalism runs on surplus extracted from labor. More value in what workers produce than what you have to pay o Capitalism runs on expropriating nature's capital and underinvesting in restoration or repair of impacted ecological systems, capitalist firms squeeze surplus from the landscape o Metabolic rift from capitalist agriculture (distance, commoditized) farming. Cities suck wealth from countryside and lead to its impoverishment. Robbing the soil. Increasing fertility of soil for short time destroys soil for future. • 2. Commodification; create commodities as indispensible elements in agriculture o Key feature of industrial agriculture is that it is input intensive. Exists for benefit of input industries more so than for people who are doing the production. Create a system where you seem to need to buy things like chemical fertilizer, machinery, etc. This isn't how farms have to work. Capital pulls away natural grounds of production.

o 10 year agenda: Rural areas and the strategy of socialist agriculture

• 1. Nationalized land and established peasant associations (PAs)- went down to one hectare per family • 2. Development of producer and service cooperatives • 3. State farm expansion - took over good land for cash crops like coffee and tobacco - peasants stuck, don't have inputs they need like seeds, equipment (used to get it from landowning elites) • 4. Resettlement and villagization initiatives (mid 1980s). Just told people they had 3 months to move. No options. Took people who were culturally and linguistically unrelated and moved them to different places. Moved specialist farmers from highlands to lowlands with malaria. Conscripted university students from cities to cut down trees in jungle. Many died. • 5. Food production and marketing policy - started ration system but had to register kids, people were trying to hide sons from the military. Black market system. Peasants hid grain.

Science, Capital and US Agriculture

• 1. Seeds and breeding • 2. Fertilizer (and the relationship between crops and animals) • 3. Machines (and technology adoption) • 4. Factory farms (and externalizing costs)

o Famous calls for fertilizer chemistry

• 1898: British Chemist William Crookes famous speech "The Wheat Problem" • Wheat harvests depends on saltpeter from Chile • But land reserves in Europe in particular are depleted and Chile's saltpeter reserves are running out fast • N is therefore urgently needed as a plant nutrient • Must be top priority for chemists - must learn how to fix nitrogen (there was a little bit being done but it was very inefficient) • Naturally nitrogen is only fixed by lightning or the bacteria on roots of legumes or cyanobacteria (pond scum) - but it doesn't fix as much as we need, will run out of natural supply

o US Postwar N Fertilizer Production

• 1940: US has built multiple fertilizer plants, but industry is pretty small • 1941: get involved with WW2 • 1940-1950 - go from 100K to 1.5 million tons of fixed nitrogen produced to make bombs • After war - bomb factories converted to fertilizer plants • Process becomes much more efficient by 1950s - learn how to make it out of natural gas instead of coal

Fertilizer Politics

• 2 big ideas: Technology fetishism and induced innovation

Ecology of "Primitive" (small scale) Conflict

• 3 big ideas about conflict • 3 famous cases • Related consideration of religion • "primitive" is linguistic gap, not a good word for it • Conflict overlaps with cultural ecology of religion and political ecology • Goals o Situate ssc in larger themes of course o Introduce 3 major dogmas about ssc o Consider classic cases of conflict o Conflict intersects issue of religion

Agricultural intensification

• Africa is known for shifting cultivation • Shifting cultivation requires pretty low population density, which sub-Saharan Africa has (under populated place) • Striking examples of intensive cultivation • Example of highly productive, apparently sustainable farming on a crowded landscape in 18th century West Africa o Why were they doing it that way?

o Economic organization and class

• Agrarian version of forces of production owning bourgeoisie = anyone hiring labor or large landholding • Kulak ("fist" - for holding onto wealth): rich peasants • Must incite class warfare in the countryside against the Kulaks

• Humans: Domestication and Food Production - multiple definitions

• Altered genetically to meet human needs/desires • Biological changes in plants and how it changes the relationship between people and plants • Species unable to reproduce without human intervention (obligate cultigen) are a subset

o But, agriculture is the world's biggest form of production so...

• Capitalism has trouble taking control over the means of production (ex the seeds) and making non-owners do the work (although it has some success with farm laborers) • So it develops new commodities which become required farm inputs - the farmer has to buy • Marx nailed this point: make farmer buy products in order to work. Machinery, chemical fertilizer, etc. "Pulling away of natural ground" is the tendency of capitalism

• Mao's China o Surprise! World's largest Marxist revolution comes from countryside

• Doubles down on Marx-Lenin-Stalin's understanding of agrarian society • Mao emulated by Africans

• Dialectical materialism

• Analyze capitalism • Focus on cities, factories, industry but key ideas for environment/food • Dialectical - interplay between opposing forces. Society composed on different groups with different interests. Groups make each other. • Materialist - ideas and ideals are not main drivers of human events, material factors like production, tech and ownership do drive events • Hegel was also a dialectical philosopher but to him, ideals were competing, not material factors • Synthetic - politics and economy and social factors and ideology fit together - hard to separate • Not environmental determinist • Semi-causal relationships; not deterministic • Forces of production→ relations of production → legal/ideological (base, structure, superstructure) • Forces of production deal with technology and other aspect of nature that can be used to produce things. How these are controlled leads to relations of production (people).

o Dropping water tables

• And the elections issue - panders to the populous - lots of farmers to pander to. Politicians who install electricity and make it cheap for farmers get elected. Gets easier to suck up more water because it makes politicians look good

o Externalities encountered in the ag sector commonly:

• Are neglected • Occur with time lag • Damage groups whose interests are not represented • Result from actions by parties that cannot be identified

o Specific theory of agriculture's origin

• Arose in different places, different times, different crops, different processes • Silly to look for one general answer • In New World - domestication of corn before settled villages. Mostly plant domestication, not as much animals • Old World - settlements long before domestication. Plants and animals simultaneously

o Ecology of intensification

• As you shorter fallows, you have to do less fallowing (less fire and clearing). But it doesn't do as much for returning fertility and killing pests. • As you lose the ability to let fire and fallow work for you, you have to do more work

• Thomas Robert Mathus (1766-1834) o Enduring set of ideas:

• Basic scientific model what is the relationship between pop growth and food production? • Major social implications: how do population and social institutions affect each other? • Policy implications: what effects do food-related state policies have? • Political economy of ideas: where does the strength of theories come from?

o Rice vs. wheat

• Becker describes well although mostly for wheat. • Rice production decreases much more severely than wheat during GLF (Rice: 86.8 M tons to 53.6 M tons, down 38%, or 1957 was 62% higher than 1961)

o Mid-19th Century Fertilizer "boom "

• Big change but relatively small amount of fertilizer being used compared to later booms • But major changes in institutional relationships • New spatial scales • Foundation of American society - transfer materials to farm to consumers - nothing comes back

o Does mechanization allow farmer to produce more or force them to produce more?

• Bigger farms means fewer farms • Fewer farms means smaller rural population • Surging corn production • Yields go up (how much produced per acre) in 1950s • Prices drop starting in 50s

o 1840s: von Liebig Law of the Minimum, Agricultural Chemistry

• Book had huge impact because of concern about soil fertility • Took down vitalism approach: vitalism people thought there was some sort of essence in the soil • Liebig says there is no essence, just elements that plant needs. Find what plant needs and supply element to have it grow more - pushes reductionist NPK mentality • But still debate over vitalism: 1842 Dana's Muck Manual (vitalistic) best seller in US • Humus-based; you can only investigate so far, due to an elusive vital principle • In fact, today still poor understanding of soil fertility; phytomicrobiome new field • Less commodifiable • Liebig's ideas are much more appealing to capitalists • Personal interests of commerce favor reductionism/commodification: • Off-farm commercial interests visible form the dawning of formal ag research • Von Liebig went into the fertilizer business once he identified fertility enhancers • Lawes also tried to sell fertilizers

• Lewis Binford, demographic (general): "Post Pleistocene Adaptations"

• Braidwood was senior prof at U Chicago • Hired Binford; personalities clash • 1968: Binford wrote paper that pushed pendulum back toward demographic theories (just wanted to make Braidwood look bad) • Theory o Rising sea levels; reduced coastal optimal zones (not the Kalahari) o Overflow coastal populations encounter less predictable foods but domesticable grains o Others make into a local model by applying to the Middle East; overflow populations bring grains out of natural habitats, adopt cultivation

Also "National Integration" as opposed to colonialism

• Britain: classic example of outer-directed agro-colonialism o Colonial empire depends on ag imports o England as "workshop of the world" - turned inputs into higher-value products ,where the profits were o Ex. India used to have most advanced textile industry. British broke their looms, forced them to grow and ship cotton to England instead of making textiles themselves • US was never colonial power: follows inner-directed integration of manufacturing into agriculture o Industrial agriculture runs on purchased external inputs, often developed with state backing, and development of industries to absorb overproduction (ex. Meat industry)

o Morphological and physiological changes

• But also consider coevolution • People so dependent on crop plants that we are domesticated as well

o Political subsidy for pig CAFOs

• CAFO exposes • New Missouri crime = agricultural production facility interference - watered down version SB 631 signed into law • Criminalize exposes on CAFOs • Ag Gag laws introduced in 20 states • WUSTL environmental law clinic case against premium standard • Truman State students trained to monitor odor from CAFOs, big meat producers met with legislators to cancel the program • MRSA -when laws are in place that allow producers to create enormous public health problems, must be seen as failed regulation • MRSA kills more people in US than AIDS every year • Pig CAFOs are major (but not only) contributor to it

o Misunderstood social organization of farm production

• Call for abolition of the family • Didn't understand importance of family/households in agrarian production • Conflict with cultural ecological perspective: Netting, Smallholders, Householders - smallholder agriculture is run by households (economically functioning unit, typically co-residing and co-producing but not always). Need for highly skilled and coordinated labor

o Questionable attribution of healthcare costs to obesity (including Pollan)

• Causality problems • Evidence for health effects of obesity disputed (except for morbidly obese) • Ex. Diabetes causes and is caused by fatness - works both ways (thin people can get diabetes and become fat, not always that fatness causes obesity) • Problems with stats and measurement • Unclear how much of costs of diabetes, hypertension, etc. attributable to obesity

o Great Leap Forward (1958-61)

• China opens to west in 1979; mid-80s pubs report missing millions • Irony of Ehrlich predicting tens of millions starving due to pop outracing food, just after tens of millions had starved but was it overpopulation?

o Mao starts in mid 50s, Little Leap Forward

• Closes grain markets to establish state monopoly • Peasants give quotas • Peasants into mutual aid teams of 20-40 households, under direction of party secretary • 400 million put into 752,000 collectives • Social life torn apart: music, religion, small-scale enterprises and craft. Tombs of ancestors plowed over • 1956: Stalin-like passports issued, can't travel

• How does dogma 3 play out? Dogma 3: Maladaptive and exogenous: Contact Theory (political ecology, Ferguson)

• Colonial states, spread of "civilization" - Tribal Zone: creates tribes and spread conflict and violence. Can see 3 kinds: o 1. Resistance o 2. Native-Native under European direction o 3. Internecine war - fight with each other over conditions that have been introduced by outsiders • Waves of contact in Amazon, latest waves start in 40s; missions (Salesians introduce shotguns), posts, 1958 malaria control station • Causes depopulation (not pop rise like Harris thought); but more importantly, it concentrates population and produces large villages, w/ attendant social disruptions • Central reasons: introduces steel tools: 10x more efficient than stone axes (slash and burn isn't as efficient as Boserup without steel, Boserup didn't study stone tools); steel tools greatly prized but still in short supply in 60s • So Yanomamo trek and move villages to get better access to suppliers • These and other items in posts revolutionize economic relations • Villages near posts are greatly privileged; political imperitive to stay close to source of western manufacturers • Can raid but prefer long-term access; get new goods, then when worn down can trade for hammocks, curare arrows, food, etc. • Ferguson analyzes geography, etc.

o Recap of cultural (Unilineal evolution)

• Comparative method • Unilineal theory with many environmental diagnostics but no theory of adaptation • Lacked mechanism of change, and so couldn't explain why more primitive cultures 'evolved' • What was the nature of the axis of more/less evolved

Condorcet and Godwin

• Condorcet: said population can outrace food production but it was a solvable problem. Believed in conservation programs and female education to lower fertility. • Godwin: attributed social ills to societal institutions, anarchist, utopian, by applying reason we can fix society, writing prolifically and influentially in 1790s. Advocated that we could overcome sexual passion and need to sleep and that we would eliminate crime, war and government. Equality by perfecting social institutions. - ironic that he is writing this during Industrial Revolution which increases disparity between rich and poor • Godwin wrote Malthus a nice letter after reading his treatise and didn't argue even though their ideas were completely different • Godwin's career went down after that while Malthus's career went up. Godwin eventually wrote a bad response which Malthus never bothered responding too.

o Main tool: backcrossing

• Cross plants to get desirable trait, breed it back with parent, end up with plant that has desirable trait and is most similar to good parent

• Postwar period: DES (synthetic estrogen) - widely given to pregnant women in 1950s, DDT

• DES had horrible effects, especially on female babies born to women whose moms took DES, especially to reproductive cancers • DDT - ag chemical sprayed heavily, horrible health effects

o Put differently: externalized costs of ag are generally

• Diffuse • Delayed (like DDT) • Indirect (not obvious who/what is responsible for all the costs - hard to punish/sue)

• Since the farm resists conversion to a unified production process, separate portions have been industrialized separately:

• Discrete elements of the production process have been taken over by industry - broadcast sowing taken by seed drill, horse by tractor, manure by chemical fertilizer • Appropriationism - discontinuous but persistent undermining of discrete elements of ag production and their transformation into industrial activities • Different stories for each step • Government always plays a role; capital always harvests value from the public

o Technology fetishism - key to ag in capitalism

• Discrete episodes of Appropriationism • Developments in science and tech always play a key role in episodes • Tend to think of developments as an improvement -- not always the case • But not driven by invention per se; rather by institutions allowing invention to become profitable

o Soup bowl ecology

• Distinctive feature of paddy rice • Years of continuous cultivation develops good water proof hardpan covered in mud (podsolization) • May hold fertility indefinitely (at least at a certain level of multi-cropping) • Can intensify further by fertilizing, and long history of organic fertilizer • Characteristic of green revolution: push more crops/year, requiring enhanced external fertilizer (made of fossil fuels)

o How does conflict play out with Yanomamo? • Dogmas 1 and 2 play out here

• Dogma 1: aligns with Chagnon's views - indigenous and maladaptive: natural urges in absence of civilizing culture: fighting over women and admit it. Yanomamo claim to be fighting over women, Chagnon cites Hobbes o Problem: most cultures don't behave this way so how is it human nature? • Dogma 2: Adaptive war: Protein Theory (Marvin Harris) o Data shows only large villages have game depletion o Not balanced diet, short on protein - access to hunting grounds is exceedingly important. Buffer zones need to be large, not that many animals o The way you keep buffer zones large is to have lots of conflict - need to institutionalize conflict - military mindset - women less valuable so female infanticide o Functional terms to explain behaviors o Not widely believed

o Time frame

• Domestication time frame not clear, yet it was not overnight • Some predict large jumps happened over short period of time (decades or centuries)

• Non-demographic theories o Unintentional processes

• Don't need demographic pressure to get crops pushed toward point of domestication.

State, Ideology, and Anthropology: Lessons form the Great Leap Forward

• Dramatic case of state intervention into agriculture • What is "sustainability"; an anthropological view (seen through the prism of spectacular agricultural failure) • Practical question: just how do you manage to starve 30-40 million people who had been feeding themselves? What can we learn about environmental policy by looking at one of the worst social/agricultural policies ever?

o Ester Boserup's book: The conditions of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure

• Dynamic model for all primitive agriculture • Not a theory of demography • Saying "if pop grows then this is what happens" not "this is how pop works"

o Unilineal evolution

• Early 19th century theory - savagery, barbarism, civilization was one line through which all cultures evolve, based largely on criteria of environment and food ways (Lewis Henry Morgan) • Comparative method: look at contemporary accounts of cultures and using those to piece together what had happened in the past (like saying Kung are what Europeans were like several stages ago) • Certain groups of people stalled in evolution • Single line of evolution, key is way that foods are produced

• Manipulates natural processes of fire and fallow o Important because :

• Ecology: usually highly efficient (output: input) - so people often do it when they can; and often keep doing it even when they also farm intensively • Politics: less dependent on external sources for the resources to make food (not bags of fertilizer or pesticides)\ • Culture and morality: intensive farmers consistently designate their farming as more "advance" culturally and morally superior, often citing greater transformation of nature as a virtue

• Example: Western Shoshone

• Effective environment in Great Basin - very dry, sparse, ephemeral and scattered resources, few dense concentrations of plants of animals, • Technology bow-club-net • Adaptations: o Mobility o Impermanent camps o Family groups except winter encampments - gathering pine nuts- and group hunts (others saw this as evolutionary but to Steward it was an adaptation to the environment) o On group hunts, political authority would emerge for extent of hunt (rabbit boss) o These adaptations shaped other aspects of culture: • Political authority, land tenure adjust to "core" practices • No king, big man, etc. because they spent time in small groups travelling • Didn't recognize land tenure (made sense because they moved around so much)

o Historical school of thought for environmental determinism

• Enlightenment • Ex. Montesquieu: fertile soil promotes monarchies • 19th Century determinism • Ex. Anthropogeographie in France and Germany, late 19th early 20th century. Tried to take data from colonies and make sense of it in terms of which environments lead to which types of cultures

o The Africa Problem

• Enormous variation in organizational types in Africa within similar environments • Herbst tries to say some kinds of resources occur in concentrated areas that don't require strong state institutions to exploit. Other resources need strong administration to control the land. • Problem: state power varies through time even when resources don't change (Like Great Zimbabwe, which rose and fell) • Must look at things more dynamically

o Recent history of bushmen

• Environmental problems, mainly depleting water tables • They became increasingly dependent • Kicked them out of the central Kalahari for mining and tourism • Lawsuits to regain land (mixed record) • Selling hunting rights in some cases

o Population and state control

• Erhlich: state limited control of population (using sterilants) • US history of eugenics • Many states are adopting pro-natalist policies • Some have anti-natalist policies although these are not as important as you may thinks • China has had one of the most important and dramatic drops in fertility in modern times • Doesn't his show that the only solution to population growth is draconian intervention like the famous "one child policy"? • But dramatic decline in birthrate started decades before one child policy was instituted

o Ethanol vs. fossil fuel

• Ethanol burns 30-90% cleaner than fossil fuel • But lots of emissions from the land use change to produce the ethanol - not at all clean what the total environmental impact is • More than half of fossil-fuel based fertilizer washes off into streams when growing the corn • Because of the changed land use, there are more pests which require more pesticide use

• Getting farmers to boost production through technology is key to capitalism

• Even better if you can get state to subsidize technology development • Also get state to set rules allowing profitability (ex patenting genes) • De-couple farming from food needs and rig the system for unlimited production, so the farmer will have to buy any new input if it increases production...even if there is already plenty of food • Pollan is good on this point -- corn becomes a basic industrial good

o Social iniquity

• Favored farmers who were the biggest and wealthiest already • Even Rockefeller recognized this

• New inputs with less reliance on fire and fallow

• Fertility: making compost, rearing animals for manure, • Tillage: plowing, hoeing • Weeding • Insects/animal controls • Land modification: terracing, removing rocks • Irrigation • Overall effects • More hours of work • Efficiency drops (output: input). Decreasing marginal returns. Must work proportionately harder. Driver of Bosrupian model • Output per area/time (production concentration) rises o Swiddens can be quite productive, but not for long

o Forms of added labor necessary to Kofyar:

• Fertilizing - every household has herd of goats and sheep. Kept in corrals during growing season and must be brought food. All of manure accumulates and is used as fertilizer • Tilling - use large hoes to do "waffle-ridging" - makes the field so that there is no runoff or erosion • Transplanting - start by planting seeds in nursery, transplant seedlings • Weeding • Land modification - terracing hill slopes

Fertilizer Politics continued:

• Flood of cheap nitrogen after WW2 - example of induced innovation - seed breeders innovated to create corn that would suck up fertilizer and make more corn • Huge surge of surplus corn • Transformative rupture in way we farm - no more synergy of crops and livestock; Changed basic nature

o Steward's work

• Focus on organization of work, with related cultural practices explained as adaptive strategies • Look at which social arrangements are most directly linked to adaptation (to local environment and technology available) and interacting with environment • Those institutions form the "cultural core," which shapes higher aspects of culture such as property rights and ideology • Hold the environment and technology constant (independent variables) • Go into a place, see what environment and technology are like and make observations about culture

o Ethnic/class effects

• Foodways always culturally sensitive, both disapproved and emulated • Food was featured in caviling mission of colonials • Modern food missionaries - initiatives to improve diets of poorer, minority people (like teaching afterschool programs where kids eat kale)

o Early 20th century industrial N fixation: 1909

• Franz Haber starts working on improved N-fixation, 1903 • Extant methods had low production • But you can also make bombs out of same ingredient in fertilizer • Fertilizer factories turned into bomb factories - some people say this extended the war considerably because Germany was so far ahead in ammunition • Haber also was the father of chemical fertilizers • Haber fled Germany because he was a Jew - his family died in concentration camps by the gases that he invented (Zyklon B) • Science (Haber won a Nobel Prize for his work), capital (BASF - chemical company that sponsored the research profited) and state (rise of Military Industrial Complex) all benefit from work

o Problems with energy balance dogma (calories in = calories out)

• Given as a scientific fact but increasingly found to be oversimplified and overrated • Poor evidence that people are eating significantly more since 1980s • We ate lots of processed foods well before 1980 • Surprisingly little difference in consumption by income • Rise in obese newborns (according to some studies) • So energy balance model doesn't fit the data well despite its popularity

o Effects of inorganic fertilizers

• Green rev wheat optimized for inorganic fertilizer • Before, mostly came from cow manure • Impact on soil and water in India because of inorganic fertilizer use

• Challenge achievement model

• H/g work loads light even in marginal areas • Domesticable plants everywhere • H/g knowledge of plants and cultivation • Diseases from animals like chickenpox • Health considerations include acute vs. chronic nutritional stress, caries, fungal diseases, anemia • Agriculture allows people to avoid seasonality problems - Harris Lines disappear BUT agricultural populations have more chronic malnutrition - smaller and takes longer to reach adult stature

General theory of agriculture's origin

• Happened in generally the same time in many places throughout the world

o But farming makes people sick

• Harris lines - allows you to get away from episodic food shortage but replaces it with chronic malnutrition • Increases pathogens (ex. Fungal diseases from soil) • Agricultural demographic transition • Mortality rose in concert with fertility because of pathogens

o Unintentional domestication

• Harvest - non-shattering rachis • Rubbish heap - protect from normal selective pressures. • More nutrients and water around human settlements • Seeds brought back to human camps will be in a situation with unusual protection from natural pressures

• How organization of work shapes social institutions

• Household o Particularly important in intensive farming • Reciprocal labor group ('wuk") o 5-20 neighborhood participants o No compensation - only labor is exchanged o Work together on a regular basis • Festive labor party ("mar muos") o 30-150 participants o Compensation by beer

Efficiency according to White

• How much energy goes in to get a certain amount of energy out? • Ex. One American farmer can feed x eaters

o Why do bushmen hunt? (behavioral ecology)

• Hunting is costly signaling for sexual selection (it's about sex and gender roles)

• Disastrous in last century when combined with

• Ideals of High Modernism (belief in the ideas of mastery of nature, desirability of rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws) • Authoritarian state willing to use coercive power to bring about high modernist designs • Prostrate civil society

• But here is the rest of the story...

• If bread fails, what are the British to do? Wheat is fit and proper food of the good races (rather than rice, corn, etc.) • Not about feeding the world, about making sure there is wheat for the British • Crooke's was also in the fertilizer business so he had an interest in this • German whose invention almost destroyed British wheat eaters....

• Square chicken model of Boserupian Intensification

• If pop density goes up, you already had to cut more land before you could get to tree fallow • You'll have to settle for land that hasn't been fallowed for the longest ideal amount of time • Now you have to go to bush fallow instead of tree fallow • If pop keeps going up you might have to go to grass fallowed land • Eventually all land is being cultivated and there isn't space to move plots of do fallows • If pop goes up farther, you can't fallow and have to subdivide, you'll have to start multi-cropping multiple crops per year in same amount of land • Multi-cropping (more than one crop in same piece of land per year) - like wet season crop and dry season crop • Inter-cropping - growing more than one crop in field together at the same time (millet, sorghum, peanuts, etc.). Brilliant use of this in Africa

Food surplus in India in 2000

• In 2000, professor went to India, experts were alarmed by food surplus o Government bought up wheat and rice in enormous amounts in buffer stocks since 1995 o Feed the poor at reduced price, ensure food security, subsidize farmers, moderate price fluctuations o Frequently amount they have in above norm levels which they cannot accommodate o By 2000, over 41 million tons beyond what system could handle, and it was rotting o Suggesting dumping it in the sea

Kofyar - historical case study of Bosrupian change

• Kofyar culture and agriculture • Flesh out nature of intensive cultivation • Show how intensive farming runs on labor, which shapes social institutions • Case study in sustainability

• Marx's general theory - trajectories of change

• In capitalism - one group controls forces of production, other group works for them to produce commodities. • Commodity - something produced for its exchange value, not its use value • Labor is also a commodity • Slightly evolutionary view - theorized pre-capitalist, capitalist and post-capitalist society • Primitive accumulation (accumulation by dispossession) - historical process of divorcing producers from means of production. Ex. Taking land from small farmers so that they must go to work for someone else • Goods for use value → exchange value • Commodities • Can create surplus value by underpaying labor • Those profits become capital when reinvested in creating more surplus value

• But is it Boserupian?

• In some ways (high input, high output) as she predicts • But it is relatively efficient! • Why? o Upland (swidden extensive) and paddy (intensive) rice production have approximately the same efficiency in terms of input to output o World's biggest food system is an exception to Boserupian model o So should farmers begin with wet rice farming rather than swidden? • Philippine highlands settled by wet rice farmers? Big debate

o 1834: Malthus dies o 1834: fertilizer experiments in England (Lawes)

• Inherited farm • Wealthy - set it up as a research station • Wanted to find what made soil more or less fertile

• GW Carver

• Initially supports chemical fertilizers, thought they were good for poor, black farmers • By 1902, he changed his mind - promotes organic cultivation, natural humus instead of commercial fertilizer • Tuskegee could save money by building up soil, eating local foods, wild greens, hunting • Said chemical fertilized produce wasn't as nutritious • Became advocate for peanuts for small farmers • But tide moving against him • Universities prioritized corporate interests and efficiency

o Food production increases by processes other than more land under the plow and more men behind the plow

• Intensification (internal change in production) • Industrialization (external energy)

o Between 1950-1980

• Intensive nitrogen use • Per acre seeding rates double • Ammonia and N fertilizer consumption take off after WW2

o Louis Binford 1980 (Nanumuit vs. Kung)

• Interested in hunter-gatherers • More interested in general, theoretical explanations • What makes H-Gs be as they are? • Ethno-archeology. 2 groups: one in Alaska and one in Kalahari. • Represent two fundamentally different ways that H_G economies are organized. Organization determined by environment • Uses terms foragers and collectors (2 ways they are organized) • Foragers move consumers to resources. Resources readily available; don't vary a lot in time and space. Kalahari isn't very seasonable, resources available most of the time. Lower spatial-temporal incongruities • Collectors move resources to consumers. Higher spatial-temporal incongruities. Lots of variation in resources based on space and time. With group in Alaska, there • Data doesn't really support his work

o Industrial nitrogen use

• It is dangerous - very explosive. Hard to make and ship safely • Explosion of fertilizer plant in Texas, killed 3, injured 176, destroyed several buildings • 1947 - Monsanto loaded fertilizer onto ship and ship blew up. Worst industrial accident in US History, killed 500+ people • Leak carcinogenic materials into rivers and streams • Makes people sick - blue baby syndrome from nitrates in drinking water, algae blooms make toxins that make people and fish sick. Can be deadly to infants. • Toledo's water supply was undrinkable because of runoff into Lake Erie • Delayed sickness - produce carcinogens, get cancer later; many other long-term impacts are not understood. Hard to isolate because it makes us sick in combination with other things • Dead zones- algae bloom in increased nutritional areas, suck up all oxygen and fish all die. Long term dead zone in Gulf of Mexico • The Pesticide Era - monocultures were already common but less ecologically problematic before WW2

• JP Rushton

• JP Rushton wrote Race, Evolution and Behavior (1995) • Caucasoid, mongoloid and negroids. • Colder climes are more cognitively demanding and produce greater intelligence, seen in larger brains. Selcted for greater social complexity because pressure on men to cooperate on group hunting. Reduced intra-male sexual competition and aggression. • Warmer climes had food available throughout the year so little need for cooperation • Inter-male aggression is adaptive for reproductive success • Lower testosterone in cold, more in hot. Uses questionable data to show negroids have more than other groups, as seen in penis length. • Rushton's people have more intelligence and more self-control • Problem: cooperation doesn't lead to social complexity, sex mechanisms silly, hunting varies with culture not temperature, data problems, brain size correlates with body size, not IQ. • But notion that environment produces certain organizational forms of production isn't completely off

o Dynamic theories: Jared Diamond

• Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, Steel, 1997 • How certain environmental variables set up certain cultures to do certain things (like European colonialism) • Environmental factors: superior domesticates (animal and plant species easier to domesticate), larger landmass for Eurasia which led to different diseases so people had greater immunity to greater variety of diseases (epidemiological advantage)

• Robert Braidwood, Nondemographic/achievement

• Jarmo site in Iraq • Said it wasn't about environmental factors but about human achievement • 8000 BC, people knew habitat so well that they began to domesticate plants and animals • Cultural diffusion spread this knowledge to rest of the world • Cultural, ideational model • Cultures would adopt agriculture as soon as they could

o Value added - beer and bread (nondemo theory)

• Katz: its not a matter of producing more food, but that with domesticates you can produce different kinds of food that people want • Production of alcohol perhaps the biggest single impetus of domestication of many crops • Maize domesticated for stalk sugar that people could use to make alcohol, not for grain • Fermented beverages frequently put in religious context and ritual - especially in Mesoamerica • Drunkenness as a sacred state • Also put into important economic context • Kofyar: beer is serious business to farm work system

• Complicated long term effects

• Kids exposed to PCBs and DDE in utero tend to be more obese • Mice may be obese 2 generations after exposure • Populations exposed to pesticides had more hypothyroidism • This is hard science to do - incentives for scientists are not set up to do hugely long term study • Wonderful externalized cost!

• Labor in households

• Labor demands = small but continuous, highly skilled • Production limited more by land than labor (can't have households that are too large or there will be nothing for them to do) • 5.1 mean household size • Low rate of polygyny (1.2 wives average) • Mostly nuclear; young marrieds move out as soon as possible • Swidden farmers in next valley had much larger households

• Biggest impact: Punjab: In 1960s

• Larger farms, more heavily capitalized • Semi dwarf wheats spread to 90% of wheat area • Fertilizer consumption goes up • More area under irrigation - rapid installation of tube wells • Changing wheat was just an excuse for policy and econ changes

o Fertilizer industry grows and affects ag policy

• Late 19th century US south - public sector research to facilitate and promote fertilizer • Public sector tells poor farmers that they need to buy fertilizer • Relationship between fertilizer industry and land grants • Institutions adjust to make it more profitable

• New economic and political relationships

• Laws passed to promote fertilizer trade and make it more profitable • Millard Fillmore discusses importance of Peruvian guano in the State of the Union address • Passed Guano Islands Act in Congress - claimed ownership of these islands and protect with Navy

• The Pesticide Era - monocultures were already common but less ecologically problematic before WW2

• Long history but most problematic after WW2 • Higher plant populations, more luxuriant growth provide ideal conditions for weeds and insects - promotes use of pesticides to get rid of them

o Cropping strategies (esp. monocropping)

• Loses synergies of intercropping • Destabilizes agroecology. Rachel Carson argues for this in the 60s

• Practical aspects

• Main input is human labor - rises in production concentration possible with little or simple changes in tech • Social organization is important, Netting on households (see Square Chicken) • Not evolutionary or even progressive; can go back to shifting if pop drops (Boserup cites cases of this to support the theory; upcoming Kofyar case) • Implications for development o Intensive agriculture is not inherently preferable o Farming is not generally intensified through teaching • Can be sustainable by almost all definitions of the term

o US Maize production and preventive checks

• Maize yield started increasing a little before WW2, probably because of hybrids. When fertilizer-intensive hybrids were introduced, it went up even more • Maize harvest also increased with the increase in yields • When yields were first starting to increase with hybrids (1930s) government new surplus was a problem. - starts paying farmers not to grow • But this program fails to keep it down very much, other than the immediate year of the program

Swidden and Deforestation in the Amazonian

• Major deforestation in tropical rainforests in general but esp. in Amazon • Swidden works esp. well expect when it isn't • Ecology of Amazon • Indigenous long-term adaptations and impact of Amazon TRF • Causes of modern deforestation • Tendency to say population growth is the driver of deforestation in Amazon

o Why is Malthus still so popular?

• Malthus 1798, revised in early 1800s. Time when social and economic impacts of Industrial Revolution were the strongest. o Why still so popular? Argument that poor people being sick/hungry/miserable are just natural. Shouldn't try to stop it because it will just produce more miserable people • Popular with factor owners • Social politics shape which scientific theories gain traction

o Manure lagoons not very well contained

• Many disastrous examples • Moving into era of increasingly intense storms • 1999: Hurricane Floyd washed 120 million gallons of hog poo into NC rivers. Hog operations fined only thousands of dollars • Guthman: failed regulation of waste as a subsidy

o 1975 - Passed ujamaa villlages act - mandated where people lived, how large their houses and fields were

• Many plans didn't make sense agriculturally, but were great to monitor and administer • Promised modern conveniences to people in new villages - but couldn't deliver. Ex. No animals because they are supposed to get fertilizer, but when they don't deliver fertilizer, crops don't grow o Ujamaa program never formally cancelled, just fell apart and stopped enforcing due to lack of funds o In 80s, people tried to go back to what they were doing before, but new people had moved there. Courts swamped with land dispute cases, couldn't handle all of them. Order in countryside disrupted. o Nyerere was educated, thoughtful, intelligent leader. Ideas can continue to have traction even with remarkable record of failure.

• Marx and Malthus

• Marx hated Malthus • Said Malthus plagiarized ideas, stupid and not original • Malthus only became popular because timing and politics made it so o Expanding class on industrialists in early 1800s o Suits certain interests - like ruling classes o New industrialists, enriched by labor of poor, promoted his ideas

• V Gordon Childe - Oasis (Propinquity) Theory

• Materialist, environmental, largely demographic • Fertile Crescent, Middle East • Agriculture gets going at end of the Pleistocene • Would have been environmental desiccation, drying out • Leads population to cluster in small areas • Because they are clustered, it sets the stage for domestication and agriculture • Local population/food plays a role; need for more food in restricted areas • Semi-demographic theory

o Perceptions of wild ecological wealth - Pharonic Projects

• Metaphor of pyramids - large, involve lots of labor and don't serve much of a function • History of these big, ambitious and failed amazon projects • Ex. Henry Ford's project from 1930s was to build modern industrial society in the Amazon. Eventually gave up on this project • Jari Project in 1960s - mill, agriculture, timbering etc. Main factory built in japan, put on barge. Failed • Attitude behind these projects continued - idea that we must utilize this wild, untapped nature

• Childcare mechanism

• More sedentary → more care available • Analysis of 130 mortuary populations spanning beginnings of cultivation shows rise in 24% in estimated children per woman

• Food mechanism of effecting population

• More stored food for hungry time o May keep people alive longer o Allows more regular ovulation o Cultivated food easier to give children as a weaning food → babies breastfeed for shorter time and birth spacing goes down

• First the biology

• Most crops outcross; only a few are selfers (designed to pollinate itself) • Selfing of outbreeders causes inbreeding depression • Big coup of Mendelian breeders: crossing inbred parents may produce offspring showing heterosis (hybrid vigor) - seeds called hybrids

o Beyond swidden: large fields, monoculture

• Most of plots cleared for monocultures • Don't leave stumps • When you clear large ecological area, the temperature is much warmer than in forest - affects what kinds of seeds sprout, which pollinators are there, etc. • Harder for forest to regenerate • Cattle as coup de grace of ensuring forest can't come back - cattle compress the soil so seeds can't grow

o Pest explosions

• Much of the groundwater in contaminated with pesticides • All of soda in India have soda in them - Pepsi and CocaCola - same levels as domestic brands

• Mar Muos

• Muos - millet beer, ties the system together • Ecological advantages to millet-sorghum intercropping • Drought-resistant • Early crop for food security • Can eat or brew (and on frontier, also sell) • Beer instrumental in farm labor • Advantages for certain farm tasks • Drummer gives event a festive air • Agriculture as a performance

o Intensive sustainable agriculture -Economically sustainable

• No state subsidy; no dependence on outside inputs • Most energy in system comes from labor • Lots of it (Boserup's point) • Skilled (Netting's point: skill replaces scale) • Coordinated • Practical? Are they able to mobilize the labor, and if so, how? • Theoretical? Big part of the answer: cultural institutions adapt to labor demands of production • Classic case of cultural ecology as related to farmers

o Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

• Original precapitalist affluence • Capitalist society invented poverty • Material wants satisfied in hunter-gatherer society • Material wants never satisfied in capitalist society

• New spatial scales

• People wanted to go to areas with nitrogen-rich deposits - digging up battlefields, grinding up mummies • Islands off western coast of South America had good nitrogen source - bird guano • Institutions had to change to move fixed nitrogen over the world - shipping industries developed, pirates interested in this as well so governments provided military support for guano shipping

o How environmental determinism got a bad name:

• Personality theories: Eskimo personality is placid and schizophrenics tend to get catatonic schizophrenia rather than paranoid; European bravery-industriousness • JP Rushton wrote Race, Evolution and Behavior (1995)

o Intentional domestication

• Planting • Larger size • Lower dormancy • Faster growth

• Redesign corn as an industrial plant

• Plants can't absorb all the fertilizer that is now on the market • Corn plant redesigned to be able to handle it • Induced innovation - agricultural R&D adapt to factor prices • Ideas floated on breeders that wouldn't have made sense before • Funk Seeds; Trio Idea

o Guthman contests Pollan on commodity crop subsidies as a cause

• Pollan says cheapest calories are carbs and sugars and healthy food is more calories/dollar • Guthman says processed foods/carbs are cheaper by the calorie because they are more amenable to industrialization, not just because of subsidy • Produce is always more labor intensive, would always be more expensive because it is less industrializable - says Pollan misses the point o Research on built/economic/marketing environment (food deserts) also suggestive but not conclusive

o How do you manage to starve 30+ million food producers?

• Previous famine much smaller and linked to external disruptions • Great Leap Forward disrupts key elements in intensive sustainable farming

Wilmsen account of foragers and pastoralists

• Probably pushed out of niches with wide open areas by indigenous early pastoralists • Mid 19th century, pushed out of other areas when Euro colonists start raising sheep • By late 19th century, many !Kung had acquired sheep and cattle but lost in rinderpest epidemic trouble getting back into pastoralism • Now often work as herd boys for Herero or Khoe • Mafista herding - bushmen hired to look after the herds. They aren't paid but get to eat animal when it dies. • Selling labor as a commodity - don't own means of production • Problematizes Sahlins' notion that they are affluent in their own way • History of selling labor • 19th century worked in ivory trade as servants, guides, hunter, messengers, bearers, etc. • Work for SWAPO as trackers and soldiers.

o Unfair comparisons

• Problem of the counterfactual, especially in food production • Natural control groups very rare • Controlled controls invalid • Two key problems • Effects on non-treatment forms of production • What would have happened w/o treatment? o Intercrops - can't do with industrial crops o Rotations o Any meaningful comparisons must include drops in non-wheat crops

• Political ecology as hatchet

• Problematizes overly functional explanations • Kalahari as ground zero for dehistoricizing • Lee and others using the Bushmen to represent the timeless natural humans should know better

o Hybrids, seed commodification, and birth of the seed industry

• Rediscovery of Mendel begins to have impact on public sector breeding; focus on mechanisms of heredity • 1st decade of 20th century, struggle between Mendelian and traditional breeders. • 1909- discovery of heterosis (hybrid vigor) by Shull • Kloppenburg: new relationships between government, science and capital

o Emperor Haile Selassie I (royal family for thousands of years)

• Regent of Ethiopia 1913-1930 • Emperor of Ethiopia 1930-1974 • During last ruling period there was horrible drought in Ethiopia, thousands died • People's movement to overthrown Ethiopia

o Standardized units of measure (and impacts of scale)

• Replace non-standard units based on local functions (ex the "two cow farm," the boundary negotiated neighboring farmers - with standardized units - sections and quarters) • Scale is an important part of sustainability (ex Great Leap Forward) • Also a crucial factor in alternative farms in the US

• Intensive sustainable agriculture - environmentally sustainable

• Replenish fertility • Prevent erosion • No chemical buildup • No depletion of aquifers

o The feasting theory - linked to alcohol

• Theory: domestication arises out of feasting • Major driver of domestication was having special value foods that could be used in feasts • Responding to contemporary concerns about Yuppies. Hippies looked at Yuppies with distain - too materialistic and obsessed with conspicuous consumption; renouncing values of 60s. • Driving force of domestication was conspicuous consumption in form of feasts • Enormous archeological evidence of feasts, especially in Mesoamerica (like serving vessels, special animal bones, exotic plant remains, figurines, whistles, drums, Chaco Canyon) • Alcohol is a key component of feasting (whether religious or social)

Highlight of book

• Tough-talking realism: "things as they are" vs. overly optimistic Enlightenment thinkers • Sound science vs. unproven theory • Don't worry be happy: because of the natural laws involved, there was nothing that could be done about it

• Politics of food imports in the 1950s

• US - surge in grain production after WW2 o CAFO, rise in beef, set-asides, etc. Can't check it • PL-480: systematic way to absorb surplus by having gov't buy it and use for geopolitical aims o Try to put it where there are food shortages and keep communists from taking over o "Grain-dumping" - not just humanitarian - hurts local economies and farmers

Main postulates

• Unchecked population can (and by implication, tends to) grow geometrically, driven by human passions o Theoretical and empirical (case study, US colony) o Recognizes preventive checks but odd discussion and poor understanding; sees them as functional mainly among the upper classes • Food production can only grow arithmetically. How? o He didn't really explain because it was presumption that land was already used as productively as possible. Can only expand by finding more land or by having more farmers working o Common view: Ricardo and others viewed farm output as inelastic o Becomes dogma, repeated as a truism through the ages • Ergo: agriculture is inherently incapable of keeping pace with population growth • Ergo: population is regulated by food supply • It is impossible, by the fixed laws of nature, that there will always be food shortage for poor people • Positive checks occur: early deaths o Misery and vice do most of population-food balancing. Famine was only the last resource of nature to control population

• Intensification theory

• Upends Malthus: reverses what determines what • Boserup says population determines agricultural methods • Based on elasticity of land productivity • Entirely materialistic, not driven by ideas (cf. Ehrlich's idea that more people = more innovators who can come up with more ways to farm) o A necessity is the mother of invention model (a kind of induced innovation) o Indigenous technical knowledge (ITK) is not perfect, but it rarely is the limiting factor in production o As important as ITK was in swidden, becomes much more complex in intensive

o Pollan thinks that corn overproduction is a major problem

• Using of 5% of corn for eating • Biggest use is for ethanol - used for tractors • Weird moment that the corn exists to benefit the tractor • Also make HFCS out of it - contributes to obesity

o CAFO - Beef

• Very inefficient way to raise animals • But when there is a glut of corn, it becomes efficient • It is a process that is able to absorb large amounts of corn and turn it into something valuable • Cows are least efficient animal to raise on corn - got more and more inefficient in the 50s because they were bred to absorb more and more corn • Long gestation and lactation • High metabolism • Less of body is edible (62% of cow is edible as compared to 74% of pig and 90% of chicken) • Protein conversion for cows is the lowest than any other meat • Beef consumption driven by surplus of fodder - huge increase in beef consumption starting in 50s and going up to 70s (debate on what happened after that) • This was when CAFOs started being very common • Beef consumption tracks perfectly to maize yield, maize harvest and N fertilizer consumption • Innovations can be disastrous - not always good for the world • Feeding grain to ruminants is biological nonsense - it's a misuse of resources driven by commercial gain

o Barry Commoner

• WUSTL prof of biology, • Founder of modern environmental movement but disagreed with Ehrlich on causes of environmental problems and poverty, • Said could solve pollution without trying to reduce population (like throwing people overboard to save a sinking ship)

o Another problem: Need for continual intimate interaction with environment

• Western Modernism also failed to recognize this. In US after WWII, there was a zeal to conquer nature with science - widespread indirect downstream costs

Swidden Agriculture

• When people start farming, they almost always start with swidden agriculture • Still practiced in developing countries • Gets bad press for being destructive • Terms o Swidden - fire based o Slash and burn (common method)- usually involves cutting down bushes, trees, etc., let they dry, and then burn them o Shifting cultivation - ephemeral plots, shift from plot to plot o Fallow farming (rest plots) o Extensive farming (large areas of land) o Local terms: milpa, chitemene o Extensive ←-----→ Intensive • Continuum in agriculture

Problem with Leslie White's theory

• White thought it was important of measure energy harnessing. Often measurements don't fit his patterns. Example, in US we almost doubled energy production between 1950-80. Did we become twice as evolved during this period? • Is more energy capture inherently more advanced/better? • US overproduced far beyond food/fiber needs (by most ways of reckoning overproduction) o US system actually good at externalizing costs of agriculture (not really that efficient). Why don't we see the costs? • Physically distant (ex. Fertilizer runoff effects felt thousands of miles downstream) • Temporally distant/delayed (ex. Breast cancer elevated among women who were exposed to DDT 50 years previously) • Indirect, diffuse (can't be linked to one farmer or company) o Public health costs of industrial agriculture • MRSA - antibiotic resistant bacterial disease • Antibiotics overused in meat industry • Kills more people than AIDS in US

o Case study: Ecology and Politics of Kalahari Bushmen

• Why do they hunt? Answer depends on paradigm, know multiple answers • Kalahari bushmen have become representative of h-gs everywhere. Particularly the Ju'/oansi] • Bushmen/Khoisan culture? It's complicated. • Often described as a group with click languages, common economy. But this isn't always true. • Khoisan language phyum o Khoe language family, mainly herders o !Kung (Bushmen) language; "!Kung San", traditionally characterized as foragers • Bantu (major family within Niger-Kord phylym) - herders (Hereo, Tswana)