9.4.05

Fafbloggin' the AAGs?

Jusat a day after I heard Paul Robbins present a paper titled "We Are The Elk," Fafnir posts that he is an elk. Coincidence?
Stentor Danielson, 00:26, ,

8.4.05

AAGs, Day Two

This post is delayed because Blogger wasn't working for me last night. On with the show:

1. Carolyn Finney gave another great talk today about her research on African-Americans and the great outdoors, particularly National Parks. Her interviewees told her that the media was a major culprit in African-Americans' disproportionately low involvement with what we traditionally think of as "nature" and related environmentalism (as opposed to the environmental justice movement, where they're well represented in fighting environmental health risks). Finney pointed out that you rarely see black faces in photos of people in nature -- and when you do, they're working, not doing recreational activities. She also read a shocking letter to the editor that lambasted the National Parks' efforts to increase the diversity of its visitors, because the parks are supposed to be where white people can go to be safe from nonwhite criminals. (Addendum: This morning I went to a session in which I heard a similar thing from Nik Luka, who was doing a study of vacation cottages in Ontario. He said that later in his interviews, as interviewees got more comfortable with him, they began to talk about how they like to go stay at their cottage because the area was so white, and they didn't have to deal with "dirty Pakistanis s***ing on the beach.")

The discussant for this session was Ruth Gilmore, who offered an interesting definition of racism: "the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death." On the one hand, this definition is useful insofar as it underlines the seriousness of racism. With the decline of the most blatantly overt forms of racism (e.g. lynchings), it's easy to underestimate the harm done by racism. For example, there's currently a five or so year gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites, which is almost certainly a result of racism given the lack of a biological basis for racial distinctions. Things that kill people are a Big Deal in our society in a way that other harms aren't.

On the other hand, it seems too narrow to confine the range of harms of concern to those that lead to premature death. Certainly a great many of the negative consequences of racism do (even if only in a small and remote way) raise the risk of death, and pointing out this connection can raise the percieved urgency of addressing the harms. But to make the badness of racism derivative solely of its contribution to premature death undervalues the harms that don't kill you. It seems to evoke the "technical" perspective on risk analysis, in which "risk" is defined as "probability of death." Risk researchers have worked long and hard to show that this definition fails to capture what members of the public value, and to create richer conceptualizations of the harm done by hazards. Insofar as racism is a cause of vulnerability to hazards, defining the harm as premature death is overly narrow.

2. The best paper of the conference so far was one by Peter Klepeis (my old mentor from Colgate) and Paul Laris about logging and the creation of a national park in Tierra del Fuego. In a nutshell, a logging company was planning to do some logging in the Chilean part of Tierra del Fuego. They developed a plan for doing it sustainably that was described by experts as cutting-edge. But national and international environmental groups were fixated on a wilderness ideology that would not accept any compromise. So they battled it out in court until the company ran out of money. The land was then acquired by Goldman-Sachs, which donated it as a National Park. Klepeis and Laris argue that the "wilderness reserve" model of nature preservation has been shown around the world to have limited usefulness, and particularly so in an area like Tierra del Fuego where 1) the land is not pristine wilderness, and 2) huge sectors of the forest are already reserves, so creating more is likely to suffer greatly diminishing returns. They argued that this "victory" by environmentalists is likely to sour timber companies on putting forth the effort to log sustainably.

What I found particularly interesting, given the topic of my paper (more on it Saturday, after I present it), was one of their criticisms of the logging company's strategy. They argued that the company failed to win over environmentalists in part because of their reliance on technical scientific expertise to argue for their proposal, and the environmentalists' understandable lack of trust that the company would follow through on its proposal. They argued that it would be unrealistic to expect the company and the environmentalists to be able to overcome these barriers and work directly with each other. However, they say an important role for the government (which had taken a backseat in this controversy) to step in as a mediator. The government would be able to facilitate communication between the two groups, and would have the power to demand accountability.
Stentor Danielson, 16:51, ,

7.4.05

AAGs, Day one

Technically the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting began on Tuesday, but since I got to Denver at 11:30 pm I wasn't able to go to any of those sessions. Here I'll make some notes on a few of the interesting talks I heard today.

1. Jay Hasbrouck gave a good paper that I unfortunately missed the beginning of because the Adam's Mark Hotel -- like all conference hotels I've been to -- was apparently designed by a team of monkeys with expensive crack habits. He talked about how eco-anarchist groups, particularly ELF, make use of (often outdated) anthropological theories to construct their anti-civilization ideologies. What I found interesting was that they use not only the "noble savage" myth (in order to substantiate their claim that non-civilized society is better), but also the "barbaric savage" myth. Nonviolence, they argue, is unnatural, and it's anthropocentric to demand it as an ethical precept. This justifies their "eco-terrorist" actions.

2. Paul Robbins spoke (in his characteristically dynamic way) about the ethics of political ecology, with particular reference to game ranching in Montana. I found his empirical work interesting, as he described the rise of game ranching (an unprecedented privatization of wildlife) due to cattle ranching being outcompeted by factory farming, while the demand for recreation rises with the expansion of the urban-wildland interface. The game ranching project quickly collapsed, though, because game ranches proved to be fertile breeding grounds for Chronic Wasting Disease (an elk version of mad cow disease). But he lost me when he tried to draw out the larger philosophical implications. He's one of those people who is clearly thinking on a higher plane than I'm capable of (or else he's a far better BSer than your average academic).

3. Vine Deloria Jr. gave one of the talks at the big plenary session at the end of the day. I had read a couple of his books (Red Earth, White Lies and God is Red) and not found them particularly compelling, though they did have a bit of the same sort of voyeuristic fascination for me as Eirich von Danniken's work. I understand where he's coming from in terms of his anger at what western culture has done to Native Americans. But he has a tendency to demonstrate a lack of understanding of many of the elements of western culture that he criticizes. A good example of this came in an offhand comment about evolution in his AAG talk. His main theme was tribes' claims that gods or other spiritual beings told the tribe to settle in a certain area, and granted them a special connection with, knowledge of, and adaptation to that patch of land. Deloria clearly believes that these origin myths are (in some way) true. As support for this, he said that secular theories can't adequately explain how tribes come to be so well adapted to their homelands, because evolution asserts that life has no meaning -- yet how can such a level of adaptation be achieved without a sense of purpose?

Applied to the adaptation of non-human organisms, Deloria's argument would be a simple case of the argument from incredulity -- I can't imagine how this adaptation came about, therefore it can't have occurred through a non-teleological natural process. Applied to cultural adaptation, it's a blatant misstatement of the theory of evolution. Evolution is not nihilistic, denying the possibility of purpose in life. It simply denies that any purpose guides the process of natural selection. But cultural adaptation is clearly not driven primarily by natural selection -- it's the result, though not necessarily in a planned way, of humans who believe in various purposes for their lives. Evolution does not even contradict the (anti-existential) idea that there is one correct meaning or purpose for life. It merely holds that this purpose can only have an effect on the world by being believed in and acted on by humans. It's a bit audacious of Deloria to make this argument at a geography conference, since geographers have been in the forefront of proposing secular theories of how communities adapt to their environments.
Stentor Danielson, 01:48, ,

6.4.05

Another Non-AAG Post

Sebastian Holsclaw draws attention to this Jane Galt post presenting the classically conservative case against gay marriage:

By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning. To which, again, the other side replies "That's ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!" Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. "That's ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!" This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can't justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he's only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity. Similarly, you--highly educated, firmly socialised, upper middle class you--may not be the marginal marriage candidate; it may be some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa. That doesn't mean that the institution of marriage won't be weakened in America just the same.

I think there's something to this kind of conservatism. But I also think it's important to recognize the flipside argument. Conservatism tends to implicitly conceptualize society as a static entity, changing only when we deliberately reform it. But in fact society is constantly changing (at a comparatively rapid pace in the modern world, but even hunter-gatherer societies changed over time -- they're not mere stone-age relics). These changes can lead an institution that has a long and functional history to become dangerously outdated unless it is reformed. Holding onto an old institution when the conditions of its functioning are lost is just as problematic as changing an institution when the conditions are still suited to the old setup.

The other way conservatism tends to dodge this problem is by positing that the conditions that make an institution functional are basic facts of human nature (and that human nature is a relatively proximate cause of that functionality). We see shades of this in Galt's post, where she implicitly presents the gender-affirming nature of marriage as something biologically rooted. (This also explains the conservative desire to carry out a seemingly un-conservative radical democratization by force in Iraq -- we've found that democracy works in America, and assume that it works because of a universal human desire for and understanding of freedom.)

In the case of gay marriage, we may be at a point where each of these two philosophies has a different domain of applicability. In more conservative communities, the need for gender affirmation is strong, and therefore opening marriage up to couples who not only don't, but can't, fulfil traditional gender roles may well weaken the institution's appeal to heterosexual couples. (I believe that even in the most conservative areas the benefits of allowing same-sex marriage outweigh the damage to opposite-sex marriages, but the point is to understand the source of concern from the point of view of conservative heterosexuals.) On the other hand, in liberal areas, man-and-woman-only marriage has become dangerously outmoded. It's not just that we're secure enough in our marriage decisions to not need the gender affirmation of traditional marriage (as Galt argues), it's that our gender culture -- a culture asserting the uselessness of rigid gender categories -- is out of sync with marriage as it exists outside of Massachusetts. We may be marginal in a different way, turned off to traditional marriage by its insistence on gender roles just as much as the Tuscaloosa dropout is turned off by reformed marriage's lack of gender roles.

Neither side is willing to accept a "live and let live" strategy on this issue. In part, it's because the boundaries can't be sealed off -- even if you can't marry a person of the same sex in Tuscaloosa, knowing that it's possible in Massachusetts sends a message about the nature of marriage, and vice-versa. It's also because both sides have strong commitments to the cultural conditions that underly their vision of marriage, and they hope and fear -- with some justification -- that by changing the institutiuons, they can shift the culture. This is coupled with a conviction that their culture-institution combination is ultimately superior (liberals because more people are given access to marriage, conservatives because even liberals have a fundamental need for gender affirmation).
Stentor Danielson, 09:34, ,

Writing About Others

So there is internet at the hotel where I'm staying. I'm still not sure how much I'll get to blog this week. In the meantime, I wanted to make a note of this quote, from an article on Hinduism linked by Ampersand:

For Sharma, author of Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford, 2000), the debate has shades of gray. “Both the insider and the outsider see the truth,” he writes in an e-mail interview, “but genuine understanding may be said to arise at the point of their intersection. At this intersection one realizes that the Shivalinga [the icon of the god Shiva] is considered a phallic symbol by outsiders but rarely by Hindus themselves, or that the Eucharist looks like a cannibalistic ritual to outsiders but not to Christians.” He continues, “If insiders and outsiders remain insulated they develop illusions of intellectual sovereignty. Each is required to call the other’s bluff.”

I don't know much about Hinduism, but the comment on communion-as-cannibalism is right on. Having learned Christianity as an "insider," I find it strange, and dissonant with my own experience, to hear people describe communion as cannibalism. It's got a sort of superficial resemblance, in that the bread and wine are said to represent the body and blood of a man, but it completely lacks the other connotations that are associated with real cannibalism in our culture. (It's interesting to note that it's exactly those other connotations that motivate many people to make the cannibalism-communion connection -- by drawing that comparison, they aim to make Christians out to be strange and barbaric.)
Stentor Danielson, 08:55, ,

5.4.05

Off to the AAGs

I'm headed to Denver for the 101st Association of American Geographers annual meeting. Depending on the quality of internet access there, I may blog about the conference here. Otherwise, I'll see you on Monday.
Stentor Danielson, 15:14, ,