14.2.04

Healthy Rangelands Initiative

Colorado Luis has been following the use and abuse of our western rangelands. While I haven't had time yet to digest the whole issue, I thought I'd point out the latest story he links to:

Ranchers Applaud Grazing Proposal The Bush administration plans to make it easier to graze livestock on 160 million acres of Western lands, cheering ranchers who want less interference from the government and environmentalists. ... "We regard ranchers as stewards of public lands," said Tom Gorey, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management. "The proposed rules are going to give us a better ability to work cooperatively" with livestock owners. ... The new rules would make BLM staffers monitor range damage before changing lease terms, reduce public participation in many decisions, and eliminate the public's ability to challenge agency findings on endangered-species issues. Ranchers would be given partial ownership of improvements, such as fences and water tanks, that they make to rangeland.

The philosophy behind this rule change reminds me a lot of the Healthy Forests Initiative. In both cases, extractive industry is propped up by subsidies drawn from federally-controlled lands*. But rather than espousing outright privatization, the change is made under the rubric of supporting communities (dependent on ranching or logging), streamlining a process bogged down with red tape (due to environmentalist meddling), and serving conservation ends (preventing environmentally destructive fires or slowing urban sprawl). In both cases public input is limited and business is enlisted as the agent of land preservation. Luis is right that this move helps to shore up Bush's support among ranchers, who were angry over what we might call the Healthy Mining and Fossil Fuel Drilling Initiative. But it also clearly follows from a definite philosophy about how government and business should support each other -- i.e., that government should claim to be seeking the help of business while giving business a big boost.

*Note to self: Check to see whether these changes apply to Native American trust lands.
Stentor Danielson, 12:52,

Who Does The Hijab Hurt?

As you can see from the comic a couple posts down, I'm pretty set against France's decision to ban the wearing of the hijab in schools. The comments to a recent Crooked Timber post provoked me into taking a more in-depth look to see how well justified my conclusion was. The overriding question is: who does wearing the hijab hurt, and does the ban alleviate this problem?

Muslim Girls: I've addressed this question briefly before. I understand, and share, the concerns that the hijab custom is often (but hardly always) used as an instrument of oppression against Muslim women as well as being an expression of the idea that women are inferior. I can see that for some girls the law may provide an excuse to avoid the custom, as in the example of dueling laws referenced on Crooked Timber. However, it will do little for the situations in which the hijab is most firmly entrenched (the very ones that most need to be reached). Conservative families may decide that if their daughter can't cover her head, she can't go to school. The girls themselves, making the reasonable assumption that right or wrong they have internalized the hijab requirement, would feel emotional distress at being forced to go without it (hardly something adolescents need more of). The outcome would be to reinforce the idea that strict observance of Islam is incompatible with French culture. If the core worry is about the persistence of oppressive customs and Muslims' failure to assimilate, that's not a choice you want to force French Muslims to make. Since religious identity is incredibly strong while they often haven't yet picked up a firm attachment to France, they will choose Islam. This will exacerbate the cultural split and make it harder for West-friendly Muslims to cross the divide. The only way to make the decision consistently fall in favor of assimilation would be a Stolen Generations-style scheme that I trust is completely out of the question.

French Non-Muslims: This is the weakest argument for the ban. French officials claim that wearing the hijab is a form of proselytizing. Their commitment to secularism or Christianity or whatever must be remarkably weak if the acknowledgement by others of their Islamic faith is tantamount to proselytizing. The argument reminds me in a way of the "keep it in the closet" school of thought about homosexuality, in which people say they aren't opposed to homosexuality, but they don't want it "forced" on them by such behaviors as publicly acknowledging the existence of a same-sex relationship. Stefan in the Crooked Timber comments says the French "are very tolerant of other religions as long as they don’t flaunt it."

Perhaps in some schools with an overwhelmingly conservative Muslim student body there might be strong peer pressure on non- or liberal-Muslim girls to conform by wearing a hijab. But dealing with that by banning the hijab falls into the same trap as all attempts to correct peer pressure by banning the activity that kids are pressured into -- it fails to get at the underlying disease of insider/outsider distinctions in children's socializing patterns, which will then simply manifest itself in a different way.

The French State: Ginger in the Crooked Timber comments lays out the argument that France has a right to enforce public observance of French cultural values, and that contrary values -- particularly those that promote an identity other than the individual and French citizenship -- can be considered a threat that the state can defend against (emphasis in the original):

[France] is making it absolutely clear that those views of women as something to be covered up, and of religion as something that sets people apart in contradiction to basic principles of gender equality and laicite is no longer going to be tolerated in a state school setting. ... What matters first of all to the state is that collectively, whatever individual reason behind embracing/submitting to them, the physical and behavioural display of those views disrupt the basic foundations and workings of state education as the French have envisioned it.

I'm troubled by this idea that the state may not only take sides on cultural questions (that much is often inevitable), but also actively work to force compliance with the national culture. Freedom of expression deserves a broad range and generous benefit of the doubt, compromised only by an imminent threat of lawlessness.
Stentor Danielson, 12:40,

A New National Park In Maine?

New U.S. Park? Maine Bid Draws High-Profile Debate Should a national park that's bigger than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined be established in the eastern United States? The idea has some high-profile supporters?but is it the best option for the future of Maine's storied North Woods? Many don't think so, particularly local residents who have enjoyed hunting and other traditional uses of the forest for generations. ... "It's the more traditional forest land owners that have been putting land up for sale," [Nature Conservancy Maine Chapter spokesman Tom] Abello said. "The new owners are generally timber investors, mutual funds, endowments?the types of investors who have a shorter horizon for management and ownership. Land will be coming on the market more frequently than in the past." The "land churn" caused by such short term investment ownership could promote fragmentation and development, conservationists fear.

My political ecology instincts are making me suspicious of this proposal. While they bring in a new industry -- tourism -- parks tend to be disruptive of local livelihoods. In Africa, the creation of nature reserves has been a major engine of disposession of the native people, barring them from traditional uses of the land and setting it aside for the entertainment of foreigners. Elephants trample crops with impunity because regulations prohibit dealing with them, since they're what tourists come to see (and shoot).

How much this is applicable to the Maine situation is open to question. While we frequently underestimate the importance of access to wildlands for the rural poor (one of my fellow grad students is doing her dissertation on non-timber forest products), it's also true that New Englanders by and large aren't practicing local-environment-based subsistence strategies. The value of the forest is from its use in logging (which, like most extractive industry, is a notoriously poor basis for a local economy) and recreation such as snowmobiling and hunting.

This feeds my general wariness about the tendency -- too common among political ecologists -- to say "the local people are always right." This article gives an excellent representation of the feeling that the park promoters are interlopers with no real attachment to or knowledge of the land they want to "save."

There's also a property question. In the article I linked to in the last paragraph, park promoter Roxanne Quimby defends her purchase of land for conservation on the basis of the "free market." She's responding to the locals' feeling that, regardless of who owns the deed, the woods around them are in some sense their woods. Private property is not absolute. Even if you can't walk on it or take stuff from it, the land around you can be appreciated aesthetically and used to shape your sense of place. Quimby, on the other hand, feels that the north woods should be partly the property of all Americans, that we would all lose out if certain decisions were made by the legal owners of the land, that our cultural connection to it -- for example, through the writings of Thoreau -- extend the woods' value beyond the people who happen to live near it. She explicitly states that she wants to "donate this land to the people of America." North woods residents see what has happened with Acadia National Park, which has been overrun with tourists because it's formally the property of the whole country, and don't want to give up their quasi-ownership.

I'm more sympathetic to the alternate proposal being pushed by the Maine government. I've expressed skepticism before about the efficacy of the land trust and conservation easement model of conservation, but it does have the advantage of not creating a sharp boundary between used and preserved land, allowing the two to integrate.
Stentor Danielson, 01:26,

13.2.04

Scarlet Goodness

Here we go with my latest material from The Scarlet. First, my stand-alone comic:



Then, my commentary: "BSE .. It's What's For Dinner," and its comic.

And finally, my commentary from last week: "Getting Out As Fast As We Got In."
Stentor Danielson, 00:09,

11.2.04

Indigenous Crops

Environment Experts Tout Indigenous Crops Developing countries should promote the cultivation of more indigenous crops to help combat hunger and malnutrition facing hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa, a U.N. conference on biodiversity was told Tuesday. ... Many private organizations are working with mostly rural communities to develop better crop management techniques that officials hope will help reduce poverty and teach farmers more environmentally friendly techniques, the report said. Nutrition-packed crops that farmers have been encouraged to grow include millet in India, the indigenous Bayarni rice in Nepal, pulses and legumes in Kenya, and sorghum — a type of cereal grass — in Ethiopia.

Unfortunately, this story is very short and I couldn't find a longer discussion of this point on the Convention's website. The story leaves it sounding like the advantage of the indigenous crops is mainly that they're more nutritious. In reality, there are a number of advantages local crop packages have over one-size-fits-all universal staples. They tend to have greater biodiversity than common crops that have been hybridized or genetically modified, which provides a buffer against pests and weather variability. They tend to be better adjusted to local conditions. And they're often part of intercropping strategies which allow multiple crops to be grown together, supporting each other (via casting shade, foiling pests, changing the nutrient mix in the soil, etc.). Such strategies give a competitive advantage to smallholder farmers, because they are more responsive to human labor than to mechanization and chemical inputs.

However, it's important to keep in mind that third world farmers (not to mention the nearly disappeared first world smallholders) did not switch to standardized alien crops because they were stupid. A constellation of structural forces, such as colonial land tenure arrangements, changing consumer tastes, and subsidies to industrialized agriculture, have altered the prospects of the world's poor. Attempting a technological reform without a social reform is bound to fail.
Stentor Danielson, 17:31,

My Interest Is AWOL

Much like politicians' pro forma denunciations of "special interests," there's an unspoken rule that political commentators are required to denounce the media's obsession with scandals and "gotcha" politics, yet dive into the latest scandal with gusto, particularly if it helps their side. I guess that makes me a bad commentator, because despite my desire to see Bush slinking back to Crawford in January, I don't think the "Bush AWOL" scandal is terribly important. Despite the embarrassing awfulness of my first ever political commentary, I stand by its central premise -- that we should judge politicians by what they will accomplish on the job. Perhaps for someone without much of a political record it might be relevant how they spent their days during the Vietnam War. We have to construct a hypothesis about their probable execution of their office. But in the case of a sitting president, we don't need that kind of hypothesis. We have three years' worth of actual direct data about how George W. Bush does his presidenting. Would it change the security situation in Baghdad if we proved that the now-president blew off his National Guard duty thirty years ago? Would the Iraqi and American deaths suddenly become more justified if Bush vindicated himself and showed that he had been on the base the whole time? The AWOL scandal, and the whole "chickenhawk" meme, is a sort of ad hominem, suggesting that the validity of the case for war depends on the character of the person making it.
Stentor Danielson, 17:06,

10.2.04

Ed O'Donnell Is Out Of The Race

I'm disappointed by the lack of oddball minor candidates (aside from Lyndon LaRouche) on the ballot in post-New Hampshire primaries. I guess I'll have to get my entertainment from following the fortunes of candidates who are not technically running anymore. For example, the Joe-mentum is strong in Tenesse, as with 98% of precincts reporting Lieberman has racked up 3,176 votes (beating actual candidate Dennis Kucinich) from people who are apparently so devoted to him that they haven't watched the news in two weeks.
Stentor Danielson, 21:10,

9.2.04

Bush Endorses Civil Unions (A Quasi-Popperian Interpretation)

Congressman Says Bush Is Open to States' Bolstering Gay Rights Paraphrasing the president's remarks, [Representative Jim] DeMint said: "He said he was not going to condemn anyone, that the need to have various types of agreement does not mean we need to redefine marriage. `If people want to have contracts on hospital visitation and benefits, that's O.K.' " Responding to questions on Sunday about the Time article, Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said: "States, through their contract law, have the ability to address some of the issues that advocates of gay marriage are raising, such as hospital visitation rights and insurance benefits and the ability to pass on one's estates to another. What the president has said is that he strongly believes in the sanctity of marriage, so that's what he is saying." -- via Sadly, No!

So Bush thinks it's fine if same sex couples get any and all of the benefits of marriage, but he wants to preserve the "sanctity of marriage" for heterosexuals. What would be left to make marriage sacred? The word "marriage"? Is the president engaging in a bit of name magic?

Yes. The word "marriage" confers a legitimacy on a relationship that a mere legal contract doesn't. Contracts allow the government (and citizens) to dodge the criticism of official discrimination against same-sex couples without having to admit that those unions are legitimate.

The other thing that contracts don't offer is standardization. Marriage is a strong institution because it comes as a standard package deal of legal rights, which links into a cultural role. Married couples have an understood and supported place within our social framework. Couples who create individual contracts don't -- they're carving out special spots for themselves around the edges. At least this tells us that Bush doesn't strongly share the cultural conservative worry that marriage is too individualized, since he endorses the epitome of individualism -- the contract -- and even suggests that this option is open to opposite-sex couples.

This is where Bush's frequent assertion that he believes that marriage is between a man and a woman comes into play. That statement is not just a dogmatic expression of how he thinks things ought to be. It's a reflection of a definitional issue within his worldview. What he's saying is that he's confused by the idea of two men or two women being married. Imagine you move to a new town, and your neighbors show you a baby and say "this is the mayor." You'd be confused -- how can a baby be a mayor? How should I act toward someone who supposedly is a mayor, yet can't do the things a mayor would do? Similarly, working from a gendered definition of marriage, Bush doesn't know what it means for two people of the same sex to be married. And if he can't deal with that anomalous data point by excluding it -- by concluding that a same-sex couple is not, after all, married -- it seems like the whole idea of marriage becomes incoherent. That's why the slippery slope to man-on-dog argument comes so easily. Same-sex marriage breaks the traditional definition of marriage, so once one is forced to allow for that exception, it seems like marriage might as well mean anything or nothing. This particular order, or chaos.

So perhaps it's the most traditional places that would suffer the most from the introduction of same-sex marriage. For people with liberal definitions of marriage like myself, it changes nothing to add same-sex couples to my set of observations -- indeed, the data fit my definition of marriage better if there isn't this gaping hole where same-sex couples should be. But for people like Bush, there may be a transition phase from when the old definition of marriage is falsified and when a new idea of marriage forms that can take account of the new observations.
Stentor Danielson, 19:26,

No Cigar

I forgot to grab an electronic copy of the final version of my commentary from last week before I left the Scarlet office, so I haven't been able to post that yet. And for some reason my computer won't let me download pictures as .gifs, so it's taken until now to get my comics. But we now have the latest:



You can also see the comic that went along with my as-yet-not-online commentary.
Stentor Danielson, 14:05,

The Real Sodomites

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the best known supposedly anti-gay passages in the Bible. It has given us the word sodomy, which while technically just meaning "weird sex," almost invariably conjures the image of homosexuality (specifically that between two men). There have been countless articles debunking the idea that the Sodomites' real crime was homosexuality -- indeed, no less an authority than the Bible itself says that their sin was that "She and her daughters [i.e. the people of Sodom and Gomorrah] were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me."

But I think we can go further. Not only do homosexuals not commit the sin of Sodomy, but homophobes do. The Reverends Phelps and Falwell are the real Sodomites. The core of what the Sodomites did is often described as "inhospitality." They weren't keen on having outsiders in their city, and so they came to rape -- and possibly kill -- the angels who were staying with Lot. They did this not because they were horny, but because they were "arrogant" and "haughty." They thought that they were better than those dirty foreigners, and they wanted to put them in their place. To be raped is the ultimate disgrace for a man in a patriarchal culture. Similarly, homophobia is a practice that affirms to the homophobe that he is better than homosexuals, that they are outsiders to "normal" society. Homophobic words and acts are designed to put them in their place.

When the angels first arrive in Sodom, their initial plan is to spend the night in the square. Lot meets them at the city gate and begs them to come stay at his house. In part, this is just an example of his hospitality, since it's better to sleep in a house than outside. But it must also reflect Lot's knowledge of what would happen to the angels if they found themselves outside when the Sodomite mob got wind of their arrival. The city square is a sort of common area, open to anyone to use. Had nobody in Sodom been feeling particularly hospitable, the angels should have been able to take advantage of the square for the night. But of course, they wouldn't have gotten away with it. The Sodomites were unwilling to share their institutions, like the commons, with "outsiders" or people who were different. Similarly, homophobia is based on an unwillingness to share the institutions of public life -- ranging from marriage to the ability to talk about one's love life in public to being a member of the church -- with people who don't fit one's idea of what the core membership of society is like.
Stentor Danielson, 11:30,

8.2.04

VP

It's probably a foregone conclusion, but I'd like to urge John Kerry not to choose John Edwards as his running mate. Sure, Edwards has charisma, an attractive message, boyish good looks, and enough twang for both of them (since apparently people from south of the Mason-Dixon line are physically incapable of casting a vote for someone from the northeast). But think about what else Edwards has: the same first name as Kerry. I'm not prepared to sit through months (maybe even years) of columnists and bloggers making cutesy disparaging references about "the two Johns" or "John-John."

Alternately, one of them could change his name. "Philip Kerry" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Stentor Danielson, 22:54,

Culture Change On Rapa Nui

Easter Island Culture Seeks To Survive ... Often called the loneliest place on earth, Easter Island [Rapa Nui] is now caught up in the swirling changes of globalization and is on the front line of a broader effort to preserve the world's endangered languages. Every year, more languages pass into extinction. In the Chilean archipelago north of the Strait of Magellan, the last dozen or so speakers of the Kawesqar Indian language are aged. Inevitably, Kawesqar will join Kunza and Selknam on the list of Chile's dead languages. ... Chileans are currently as free to come to Easter Island as Americans are to move to Hawaii. "The constitution of Chile is killing my culture and my identity," said Petero Edmunds, the mayor of Hanga Roa and the island's only popularly elected official. "We are a millenarian culture that existed long before Chile did. And the only way to protect that culture is by regulating migration."

It's sad to see a culture on the brink of extinction (particularly Kawesqar, although that's because I personally know more about that culture). But I'm uneasy with the idea that restricting immigration is a good solution. Part of it is the way the logic resembles the arguments against letting Latin American immigrants into the US, for fear they'll dilute our Anglo-Saxon culture (as well as similar arguments against Asian immigration to Australia and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe). One could make a case for drawing a distinction based on the issue of power. Immigrants to the US are relatively powerless. There's an objective sense in which fears of white America being swamped by Latinos are simply incorrect given any reasonable threshold of cultural survival (i.e., unless you demand complete purity). We're in a position to be enriched by immigrants without being swept away. That's not the case for Rapa Nui.

I'm not convinced that immigration restrictions would solve the problem. The idea is to reduce the cost of maintaining a culture. People are lazy in their use of mental and social resources, and tend to value culture not for its inherent worth (if it even has that), but for its utility -- its usefulness in helping them interact with others and make sense of their own situation. There's a baseline level of cultural competence that's universally cost-effective. When contact with non-Rapa Nui culture was not an option, Rapa Nui culture could be maintained on the basis of that baseline utility that any culture would have. In this sense it didn't matter that the culture was specifically Rapa Nui, just that it was a culture that was compatible with the culture of the other people and the environment that one needed to interact with.

Contact with Chileans broadened the compass of people it was possible to interact with. It raised the question of whether there was anything especially worthwhile about Rapa Nui. Either Spanish or Rapa Nui can satisfy the baseline utility of having a culture. Trade, TV, and immigration lower the costs of acquiring a new culture, while offering the benefits that come from an extended compass of social interaction. The more people pick up Spanish so as to be able to take advantage of the interaction with Chile and its products, the more the baseline utility of Rapa Nui is eroded -- if you and your neighbor both learned Spanish so you can speak to Chileans, what do you need Rapa Nui for? It's less taxing on your mental resources to just remember one language, and to speak to everyone in Spanish. And because cultures must be maintained through social interaction, there's a snowball effect from the accumulation of individual choices -- my decision to learn Spanish alters the cost-benefit structure of my friends decision contexts because Spanish now offers them slightly more. Easter Island doesn't have a large enough population vis-a-vis Chile (and certainly not vis-a-vis Latin America) to keep the balance from tilting decisively toward homogenization (in the way that the major European languages kept in balance). Economic modernization also affects the function of culture in connecting people to their environment. The specialized environmental knowledge embodied in a culture becomes less immediately useful as people partake of mass production.

One solution is for people to judge that there's something inherently worthwhile in Rapa Nui, something that Spanish can't provide. This may be a functional utility, as in the argument for maintaining a connection with one's roots -- you can't go back in time and get the ancient Easter Islanders to speak Spanish. (Of course, this assumes that it's worthwhile to be connected to one's roots, and that one's real roots are genetic and/or geographic, rather than cultural -- else why not adopt Spanish roots along with the Spanish language?) Indeed, the functional utility may lie in the very fact that it is a minority culture, and thus confers specialness on its practitioners and distances them from a majority culture that has been the source of injustices. It may also be an inherent utility, as in the argument that there's a unique worldview captured in Rapa Nui that can only be palely reflected through translation into Spanish.

The "multicultural" solution is to try to emphasize those additional values, arguing that they are great enough to make it worth maintaining a second culture. But the anti-immigration proposal represents an "isolationist" solution, a deliberate narrowing of a group's compass of social interaction so that the culture in question can be used to fulfil the baseline utility. If you shut the Chileans out (not necessarily completely, but to a degree that would go beyond immigration controls to reducing communications like TV as well as trade), then you no longer have "Spanish lets me speak to outsiders" as a reason that tips the balance in deciding whether to speak to your neighbor in Spanish or Rapa Nui. At the extreme end of this is the Amish solution, in which the socioeconomic structure and socialization of the group essentially "rig" a person to encounter prohibitively high costs if they attempt to extend their compass of interaction to outsiders and forces a choice between outsiders and insiders, rather than allowing people to straddle the border. It puts up a barrier on the slippery slope to culture change, at the cost of restricting people's opportunities for choice.
Stentor Danielson, 19:32,