debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

30.7.05

Maathai Goes Mainstream

Kenya's Maathai Upbeat On G8, Unhappy At Evictions

Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai condemned the brutality used against thousands of peasants in Kenya's forest eviction programme but defended the policy as vital to save the east African nation's environment.

... The government says the clearances are the first in a long-term project to reclaim Kenya's once-mighty forests, which have dwindled to a mere 1.7 percent of national territory and collect water vital to agriculture and wildlife.

-- via Gristmill

I don't know the details of this particular scheme, but what I know of the history of conservation in Africa makes me suspicious. It's unclear what, precisely, the evictees were doing in the forest -- though I don't doubt that for many observers, "being there" was enough of a sin. Colonial and postcolonial governments have seen the environment through a lens of wilderness worship. It's troubling that someone who once argued that "If you want to save the environment, you should protect the people first, because human beings are part of biological diversity" would now limit herself to asking for a kinder, gentler exclusion of humans. Kenya has a long history of shuffling populations around to solve political and environmental problems (which were often caused by the previous shuffling). Too often in the Third World, when the environment is at stake, it's the poorest and most marginalized people who are asked to make sacrifices.

Stentor Danielson, 11:58, ,

29.7.05

Once More On Jared Diamond

I'm winding down what I have left to say about Jared Diamond given that it's been so long since I read GG&S. But I'd like to bring up one more point, which was mentioned early in the debate, lost in the shouting over whether Diamond is a crypto-racist or anthropologists are jealous, then hinted at in Tim Burke's critique (which largely agrees with mine in questioning Diamond's practice of reaching back too far for causes and ignoring the role of historical contingencies). The point is this: insofar as Diamond is successful, he only explains why Eurasia could conquer the rest of the world, not why it did. Why were the resource-mobilization advantages of one civilization directed toward developing military might and using it against their neighbors? (The impacts of disease are less intent-dependent -- smallpox wiped out tribes the Europeans had never heard of, much less planned to conquer.) Why are "Pizarro conquers the Incas" and "Atahualpa conquers Spain" the only options once trans-Atlantic contact becomes technologically feasible?

Implicit in Diamond's work is a sort of Hobbesian/Darwinian model. Even if all people aren't selfish militaristic bastards, they have to act that way lest the selfish militaristic bastards wipe them out. That sort of thinking only works if (as Hobbes argued) all parties are roughly equal in power. If you realize that you could squash your enemies with your pinky, you have no Hobbesian incentive to develop better armies, or even to use the armies you have against anyone. To reconcile this explanation for conflict with the clear resource superiority that makes the victor inevitable, you have to assume that none of the civilizations involved realized how unequal the fight was.

Both the "selfish bastards" and Hobbesian theories are useful starting points. But by leaving them implicit, Diamond's theory winds up with an underdeveloped hole. There's quite a lot to say about how different societies make decisions about how to develop and use their potential might -- how they define their goals, gather information about possible courses of action, and select among them. The need becomes obvious when you look at something like this article, in which Diamond explains how, because of Japan's greater biological productivity as compared to Korea, Korean dry-rice agriculturalists initially weren't able to conquer the affluent hunter-gatherers of Japan, but the invasion was only a matter of time once the Koreans got hold of iron and wet rice agriculture. Yet Diamond seems to expect that modern Koreans and Japanese can choose to end their (at times violent) feud.

Of course, some people go much too far in the other direction. A Marxist mailing list picked up my original GG&S post, and among the replies was a strange argument (I can't name the author or link to it because the archives apparently only go back 100 posts and I neglected to blog it while it was fresh.) The Marxist in question pointed out the decision-theory hole in Diamond's argument, then asserted that the lust for conquest is a uniquely European cultural feature, dating back to the glorification of war in the Odyssey and the Aeneid. The people vanquished by the Incas, Mongols, or Malians would be surprised to hear that.

Stentor Danielson, 14:16, ,

28.7.05

More On Guns, Germs, And Steel

Apropos Brad DeLong's comments to my previous post, I should clarify the intent of my criticisms of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Geography's "GG&S problem" as I defined it there is a problem of the lay public's understanding of Diamond's argument. Thus we have to respond, not (only) to the book as Diamond intended it, but to the book as it's understood by the general readership. In particular, DeLong points out that the aspect of Diamond's argument that I spend the most time criticizing -- his attempt to explain why, of all the parts of Eurasia, it was western Europe which ultimately took the lead -- is a relatively minor part of a book mostly devoted to explaining (with mixed success) the rise of Eurasia by 1500. But I think most readers of GG&S take it as an explanation for the rise of Europe, and thus it's important to respond to that framing. One element of that response may be the sort of internal critique that DeLong's comment suggests -- pointing out that even Jared Diamond doesn't have a lot of confidence in GG&S's ability to explain the last 500 years.

Stentor Danielson, 11:25, ,

27.7.05

Geography's Guns, Germs, And Steel Problem

Ozma at Savage Minds argues that anthropology has a "Guns, Germs, and Steel problem" -- that while Jared Diamond's book has popularized a set of answers to questions anthropologists have been wrestling with for ages, anthropologists lack a pithy response that can raise the discipline's profile and outline Diamond's successes and errors. I'd argue that geography has even more of a GG&S problem, as Diamond's explanations are all explicitly geographical, in both senses of the word -- that is, they are based on spatial relations among places and on human-environment interactions. It's been a few years since I read GG&S, so my recall of the details of the argument may be sketchy. But as one of the few geographer-bloggers, I thought I'd take a stab at it.

First, what Diamond got right: he is correct to point out that the environment influences the course of history, and that racial superiority is not a valid explanation. He's also right that technological superiority was a necessary condition for the emergence of a dominant civilization. And I have no quarrel with his explanation of the role of disease in the conquest of America and the Pacific.

Second, knocking Diamond down to size: he, and many of his supporters, exaggerate the originality of his thesis. Most of the supporting arguments he uses are drawn from decades of work by archaeologists and human ecologists (and the ones that are more original, like the "continental axes" thesis, are the weakest). Diamond's contribution was not a de novo theory, but a synthesis that brought together a set of existing arguments and declared them to be a reasonably complete explanation. It should also be noted that (contra Diamond's explicit claim), his theory is not the sole alternative to racism.

Now, to the meat of my disagreement. As I see it, the main problem with Diamond's thesis is that he reaches too far back in history to find the roots of Euro-American dominance. He traces the current power imbalance back to the arrangement of continents and biota that prevailed at the dawn of "civilization" some 10,000 years ago. Diamond makes much of Pizarro's easy victory over the Incas, treating it as the proof in the pudding of the superiority that Europe had achieved. But even as Europe was laying the smackdown on the Americas, it was desperately trying to catch up to the much more advanced civilizations of India, China, and the Middle East. It wasn't until the the 19th century, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, that we can say with confidence that (western) Europe was the world's dominant power (see Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient). This suggests that a historically contingent explanation is likely to be better than one positing a long-standing inevitability.

Diamond begins with pointing out that Eurasia alone among the continents has a long east-west axis. Domesticated plants and animals move much more easily within a climate/ecological zone than across them. This allowed greater exchange of crops and animals between Eurasian peoples, and hence greater exchange of technologies and disease. Jim Blaut rebuts the axis thesis, pointing out that north-south commerce was much better developed than Diamond lets on. More importantly, the great Eurasian axis is a myth -- while Europe and China may have comparable climates, they are separated by thousands of miles of desert, mountains, and jungle. I would add here that Diamond too easily conflates the Middle East -- where he locates the origins of European dominance -- with Europe itself. The climate of Europe, and in particular the countries of northwestern Europe which were to dominate the world, is far different from that of Mesopotamia and the Levant, despite the two being supposedly on the same climatic axis. (Indeed, the difference is comparable to the difference between Mexico and New England -- yet Diamond makes much of the difficulty of spreading maize northward in order to explain why the US did not develop a powerful indigenous civilization.)

Diamond goes on to argue that Eurasia -- and in particular the Middle East -- had a much superior endowment of domesticable plants and animals. I don't have the expertise to evaluate this claim in detail, and in the case of animals -- most critically the horse -- I suspect he's onto something. But I'll just note in passing that while the Americas were home to only two major staple crops, peoples across the Old World quickly exchanged their native grains for maize and potatoes following Columbus's voyage.

But let's accept for the sake of argument Diamond's thesis. Eurasia was doubly blessed -- it was both the largest continent and the one with the best single endowment of domesticables. Now why, of all the countries in Eurasia, did western Europe come out on top? Neither the continental axis nor the biotic endowment seem helpful, as western Europe was neither a heartland of domestication like China nor a crossroads of exchange like Central Asia. Here Diamond introduces another element of geography: capes and bays. Europe, he argues, is dissected into numerous peninsulas which prevent political unification, while China's contiguous landmass made it easy for a single emperor to dominate. Thus Chinese advance could be easily stifled by the centralized bureaucracy, while international competition drove Europe's innovation. If there's anything to this claim of Oriental Despotism as the proximate cause, it's hard to see peninsulas as the underlying driver. The sea need not be a barrier to political unity -- see, for example, the Roman Empire or the Swedish circum-Baltic empire. On the other hand, the late unification of Germany and the continued independence of the Low Countries indicates that an unbroken plain is no proof against disunity. And moving east, while China is indeed a single large landmass (albeit broken up by mountains and deserts), if we look a little north and a little south, we find regions of peninsulas and islands comparable to Europe in Japan-Korea and Southeast Asia-Indonesia. These regions were equally semi-peripheral to the late mideval world system and politically fragmented, yet neither of them went on to dominate the world.

Any geographical explanation of Europe's eventual victory must be more subtle. Direct causality by a major landscape feature runs into the obstacle that China and India were the world's leaders until very recently. Whatever caused Europe's rise must have delayed effects, or become relevant only with the emergence of industrialization.

As Janet Abu-Lughod points out (in Before European Hegemony), western Europe's very isolation from the centers of disease was a factor in its rise. When the Black Death and its associated economic depression hit in the 14th century, western Europe was sheltered from the worst ravages by its lack of integration with the world economy. Yet it was just connected enough that it could parlay this advantage into a leg-up in the next round of global economic growth and integration.

Furthermore, Europe's semi-peripherality motivated it to look west, first for a route to China that would cut out the Islamic middle-men, and then for an even more peripheral land that Europe could exploit for goods and raw materials with which to buy its way into the Chinese-Indian economy, positioning itself to sieze the advantage in the shakeup that accompanied the beginning of the industrial revolution.

I should note that an explanation of this crisis-response form introduces another factor into history: chance. Europe's rise was perhaps not quite such an inevitability as either Diamond or the racists he criticizes think it was. C.S. Holling's model of the adaptive cycle is informative here. Holling argues that all systems (and he has produced detailed mathematical and empirical evidence for this in the case of ecological systems) go through cycles of buildup, crisis, and reconfiguration. The progress of buildup is deterministic and predictable. But during the "backloop" of recovery from crisis, the system is much more open and unpredictable. Varying endowments of the "capital" released by the crisis, and influences from systems at higher and lower scales, certainly influence how the system is reconstructed. But there remains a role for chance and for small events to push the system into quite different directions. The rise of Europe thus can be seen not as a historical inevitability, but as partially the result of happening to sieze the advantage during the world system's backloops.

As you can see by the length of this post, I haven't produced the pithy response to GG&S necessary to solve geography's "GG&S problem." In part, it's because I lack an alternative sweeping explanation for world history. But I think pointing out the relative recency of Europe's rise, and hence questioning its historical inevitability and future persistence, is a start.

Stentor Danielson, 12:07, ,

26.7.05

Forms of Ecofeminism

This is not meant to be a definitive or expert post, but rather an organization of what I've gleaned from various readings to help myself make sense of it.

In its broad sense, "ecofeminism" can refer to the idea that women have some sort of special connection to nature. This typically means that women have better knowledge of nature, and are more competent at sustainable human-nature interactions. As I see it, there are four basic theories about what this special connection entails and how it comes about.

The Essentialist position is often referred to as "ecofeminism" in a narrower sense. Essentialists argue that women are basically hardwired for understanding nature. This position typically entails a sweeping vision of the uniqueness of female thought and practice, holding that women are holistic, non-dominating, and cyclical thinkers and actors. Thus Essentialists rely on a particular view of what nature is -- specifically that it's best reflected in women's way of thinking rather than the opposite mindset held by men. The exact cause of the gender difference in ways of thinking is unclear, though it's often linked to motherhood and menstruation, "natural" processes that women's bodies alone participate in. This view has been widely criticized for taking patriarchal assumptions about women's naturalness and irrationality, and putting a positive stamp on them. The essentialist view is criticized, and used as a strawman, out of proportion to the number of people who actually hold it.

The Psychoanalytic position is in some ways a subset of the Essentialist view. Psychoanalytic ecofeminists agree with the Essentialist view of the differences between male and female thought, and propose a particular mechanism to account for them. Rather than hardwiring, it's child development that gives women their special connection to nature. In the course of their development, boys are forced to break away from their mothers, defining themselves as different sorts of beings and joining the world of men, who can never embrace them in quite the all-encompassing way that a mother embraces her children. This experience of separation sets the foundation for a lifetime of thinking in terms of oppositions and conflict, which puts men at a disadvantage in connecting with nature.

The Shared Domination position emphasizes a more socially constructed female connection to nature, opening the possibility that ecofeminism is a historical phase resulting from patriarchy, rather than a gender universal. The Shared Domination argument says that both women and nature are oppressed by the current social system, and that this shared experience allows women to relate more closely to, if not nature itself, the domination of nature that environmentalists seek to address. The Shared Domination position has been important in drawing attention to the links between environmental destruction and patriarchy -- such as the way women's supposed greater naturalness has been used to justify their oppression. Yet there remains reason for skepticism about whether the link really results in women understanding nature better. After all, their shared experience of domination didn't make white feminists (at least initially) receptive to the concerns of racial minorities. Further, while empathy between oppressed people seems like a straightforward process, it's unclear to what extent such empathy is even possible, or produces useful knowledge, when the other dominated entity is something as different -- for example, in the sense of lacking consciousness -- from a human as nature.

The final variant of ecofeminism -- and the one I find most convincing -- is the Social Position view. This view starts with the premise that practical day-to-day involvement with something will result in gaining knowledge about it and placing importance on it. Societies around the world give different sets of tasks to men and women, thus cultivating different knowledge spheres. In many cases women are given tasks that involve more direct work with nature -- for example, in many areas of the third world women are left to tend the farm while men seek out urban industrial jobs. Social Position ecofeminism also points out that it's not merely a matter of having greater or lesser connection to nature, but of different types of connection. So men in a society might have a great deal of knowledge of, and concern for, cash crops, while women understand how things affect the medicinal plants that they gather and can advocate for that aspect of nature to be taken into consideration.

Stentor Danielson, 14:33, ,

Gristmill Notices Cultural Theory

Today's exciting discovery is that Dave Roberts at Gristmill has linked to my Wikipedia article on the Cultural Theory of Risk*. Roberts takes the political upshot of Cultural Theory to be a matter of framing. Just showing the other side our facts isn't enough, because the facts are often not fully conclusive while worldviews are deeply entrenched and good at filtering out information that doesn't fit. (Note, though, that Cultural Theory does include a Kuhnian theory of surprises, in which overwhelming contrary evidence can shift someone into a different bias -- unfortunately most modern environmental issues lack the prospect of that kind of smack-you-in-the face falsification until it's too late.) Roberts argues that to make progress, we need to make environmentalist concerns resonate with Individualist and Hierarchist worldviews**.

Left there, Roberts' use of Cultural Theory seems prone to slip into the sort of marketing approach too often seen in the framing debate -- that we need different terminology to sell our ideas to other people. But Cultural Theory -- in particular the work of Michael Thompson -- offers a more complex political approach. Thompson argues strongly that a society dominated by one bias is doomed to failure. Rather, each bias has its strengths and weaknesses, which can be mixed and balanced over space, time, and issue to produce a more resilient society. Here he draws closer to Alan Fiske's conception of a reportoire of basic models of social interaction, rather than the Douglas and Wildavsky theory of all-encompassing ways of life.

What this means for environmentalists, then, is that reaching out to other sectors of society is not just about speaking their language so that we can form an overlapping consensus on Egalitarian-desired policies. We need to listen to the values of Hierarchists and Individualists and recognize what they have that's of merit. The fact that our current society has too much Hierarchism and Individualism and not enough Egalitarianism can't become an excuse for an Egalitarianism uber alles strategy, even a culturally sophisticated framing-based one.

*I also recently wrote an article on risk perception, which puts Cultural Theory in a broader context.

**As I pointed out in Wikipedia, Cultural Theory's empirical confirmation has been weak. Douglas and Wildavsky's claim that environmentalists are Egalitarian was one of the first components to be challenged, with some people pointing out that most of the major environmental organizations, like the Sierra Club or NRDC, have a very Hierarchist organization (and most anti-environmentalist argument is based on the idea that environmentalists are big-government Hierarchists). Yet of all the claims of Cultural Theory, the claim of a correlation between general Egalitarian attitudes and concern with environmental issues has held up most strongly in empirical tests. This perhaps casts some doubt on Cultural Theory's close link between social structure and worldview, if the Sierra Club bureaucracy can be filled with Egalitarians.

Stentor Danielson, 14:32, ,

24.7.05

Interesting Roberts Clarification

Via the Commons Blog, I found this SCOTUS Blog post, which goes into more detail on Roberts' toad dissent. If SCOTUS Blog is right, environmentalists have less to worry about than they thought. It looks like the court upheld the Endangered Species Act protection on the grounds that the housing development that was going to kill the toads was interstate commerce -- a somewhat less stretched definition of "interstate commerce." Roberts said that whether the killer is interstate commerce is beside the point. What needs to be decided -- and he claimed to be open to the possibility -- is whether the species itself has an impact on interstate commerce. In other words, Roberts is asking that the case be argued on the very grounds that environmentalists want to use, the stretching of "interstate commerce" to cover things that have several-degrees-removed impacts on interstate commerce.

Stentor Danielson, 21:56, ,

Causality And Blame

I've noticed an interesting flip-flop in some right-wing discussions of terrorism after the murder of a man by British police in the Underground.

The normal right-wing position on terrorism is that the proximate cause of a terrorist act bears full responsibility, while underlying causes bear none. Things that disposed or motivated al-Qaida toward terrorism -- such as US mideast policy -- are innocent, because the terrorists themselves could have chosen not to kill anyone despite the provocation.

Yet one of the right-wing responses to the Underground murder takes the opposite view. The proximate cause -- the police -- is innocent, and we should blame the underlying cause -- terrorists -- that provoked the police to shoot. The arguments are thus ostensibly about apportioning the blame between proximate and ultimate causes, but the inconsistency of the rhetoric in different situations suggests that the real principle underlying the opinions is that blame should always fall on the Other and never on "one of us." (The charge that left-wingers make the opposite mistake by always blaming one of us and never the Other is a straw man -- I have yet to meet anyone of any political leaning who would claim that the terrorists are innocent.)

A better approach to apportioning blame would draw on expected utility theory. We should recognize that blame is not a zero-sum game. Blame is proportional to the magnitude of the harm, and to the amount that a person's actions raised the probability of the harm occurring relative to the best choice available to them. Thus the proximate causes of both the terrorist bombing and the police shooting bear the maximum blame for those outcomes, since they had the option of ensuring that the harm would not occur (by not pulling the detonator/trigger), but chose the option that guaranteed it would occur. The underlying causes, on the other hand, bear blame in proportion to the amount they raised the probability of the harm. In the case of the shooting, this is a fairly large share, as my impression is that pre-al-Qaida British police were fairly gentle, while ratcheting up security -- with the risks of false shootings that it brings -- was a reasonable thing to expect in the wake of a terrorist attack. Of course, even a large fraction of the blame for a single innocent death is dwarfed by the blame the terrorists bear for being the proximate causes of thousands of deaths. And insofar as blame is not a zero-sum game, blaming the terrorists does nothing to exonerate the police. (Note that another right-wing response to the shooting is consistent with this approach -- the claim that it was reasonable for the police to think the man was a terrorist and would detonate a bomb if they didn't kill him. Here I simply disagree with the assessment of the facts.)

Stentor Danielson, 18:13, ,

The Weakness Of Environmentalist Use Of The Commerce Clause

While most of the criticism of John Roberts has focused on his views on abortion, the environmental blogosphere has been tossing around the question of his views of the Commerce Clause. Most federal environmental legislation is justified on the grounds that it constitutes regulation of interstate commerce. Many conservatives have challenged the constitutionality of these laws based on a narrower reading of the commerce clause.

The main evidence that Roberts is among those conservatives comes from a dissent he wrote arguing that the EPA has no right to extend Endangered Species protection to a toad whose range does not cross state lines. Whether this means Roberts would support sweeping reinterpretations of the commerce clause is unclear, but certainly he would be likely to narrow the margins of the environmental regulations that the federal government is entitled to put in place.

This would be a straightforward case of opposing an anti-environment judge -- except that Roberts' reasoning is hard to argue with on procedural grounds. Protecting a Californian toad is only very tenuously related to the idea of interstate commerce. If the toad can be covered by the commerce clause, then pretty much anything can, and so the idea of ennumerated powers goes out the window. Some environmental law -- such as the regulation of transboundary pollution -- fits easily within a reasonable reading of the words "interstate commerce," and the clause's vision of the federal government as mediator among the states.

I support the basic body of environmental law in place in this country. And I think that any modern government ought to have the power to make such laws. I think most Americans would agree that environmental laws are a legitimate function of the federal government. If we were writing a new constitution from scratch, I think we would most likely be able to get a clause in it explicitly granting Congress the power to pass environmental laws.

The problem, though, is that the constitution that we actually have is rather more conservative than the body of laws that rest on it. For most of the past half-century we have been lucky enough to have a judiciary liberal enough to recognize the moral right to environmental regulation, and to treat the constitution as a tool for achieving justice rather than as a constraint on pursuing justice. The courts cut us enough slack in interpreting the constitution that no amendment was necessary to formally expand the government's powers. But by taking that quick and easy route, we made ourselves dependent on a body of precedent advancing a sometimes very strained view of the commerce clause. That basis is vulnerable to a shift to a judiciary with a substantive preference for less environmental law and a willingness to take a narrower view of what the commerce clause entails in order to achieve that.

This is a persistent problem for those who go too far in blurring the line between what the constitution should say and what it does say. The words of any document will always lack the sharp precision implied by facile theories that you should just "look at what it says" -- and all the more so for a document as old and as general as the constitution. But at the same time, words do have central as well as more peripheral senses. Insisting that a right is already in the constitution can be effective in the short run. But the more the derivation relies on peripheral meanings, the more vulnerable it is to changing interpretations. The farther out you are from the central meaning of a clause, the more likely that a change in the size or shape of the boundaries someone will draw on its meaning will overturn your interpretation.

Stentor Danielson, 11:13, ,