The Anti-Economics of Environmental and Food Justice

MODERATOR'S NOTE: This is the first time I respond to a comment or question posted on EJ Food Blog. I am new at this, so I want to apologize in advance if I happen to violate any sort of etiquette. I truly appreciate any one that takes time to read this blog and I want to express my respect to that effort by responding as often as possible to questions or comments posted by visitors.

Toward a political economy of justice?

Seattle, WA. Is there an economic theory for environmental and food justice? This question is one that I have been contemplating for some time and I want to sincerely thank David Thomson for submitting a similar question in response to my blog on "War, Food and Hunger" (22 May 08). The question follows:

What economic policies should the U.S. use to revive our once great place in society?

This is an important question for activists and organizers in the environmental and food justice movements. I will rephrase the question a bit as follows:

What social, environmental, and political policies should the U.S. follow, in collaboration with other nations and civil society at-large, to promote a transition to a just, sustainable, and resilient economy?

Rephrasing the question: the need for anti-economics

Before I discuss "economics" and respond to the question, I want to explain why I rephrased the question. There are several notable reasons.

First, it is way past time to stop believing in the false ideology of American Exceptionalism: This is the idea that the USA, at some point in its mythic past or even its glorious [sic] present, was/is the paragon of exceptional and virtuous democracy. Despite current left-wing nostalgia (e.g., the recent The Nation thematic issue), not even the New Deal comes close to being a model of democracy we should want to emulate. After all, the New Deal - among many other sins - denied farm workers the right to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining. Apparently, food democracy and farm worker well-being were not part of FDR's agenda to save capitalism from itself.

With no apologies to Tocqueville, I believe history shows we have never really earned a right to represent a "once great place" or serve as a model to be emulated by societies interested in democracy.

The U.S. was founded as a nation-state bent on class, race, and gender privilege and oppression. The original rights and powers enshrined in the Constitution derived from and pertained to white male, property-owning privilege and depended on the perpetuation of chattel slavery and misogyny.

This ingrained the structure of our polity with deep racial, gender, and class divisions that are still played out in our nation's electoral politics - witness Hillary Clinton's use of a variant of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" among presumably uneducated and poor working-class whites in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

We cannot use our history, of less than virtuous behavior, to restore some great place as a paragon of justice. We must first earn that place in the practice of collective justice, justice for all. We cannot lay claim on paragon status just by spouting misguided rhetoric about how our Founding Fathers enshrined individualist (Lockean) notions of justice.

An American paragon of justice waits to happen. I'll do Michelle Obama one to the left and declare that I am still waiting for that defining moment that makes me proud to be American.

We cannot fulfill the virtues of this paragon because at its roots, the U.S. has been the offspring of a violent, usurpation-prone, settler colony that practiced genocide against Native Americans, imported African slaves, denied women the right to vote or to own property (indeed women were property), and treated the environment no better than as a means to an end, a resource to be exploited and converted into merchantable goods for the sake of individual gain.

So, I have to drop the part of the question that involves restoring or reviving some mythical virtuous past.

Second, I substituted a term in Thomson's question: I switched the term "economic" with "social, environmental, and political" policy. From my vantage, deconstructing the American Empire begins with a critique of the erroneous belief in the possibility of a capitalist science of economics.

Capitalism, in all its forms including the "soviet," destroys the natural conditions of existence so it cannot provide a rational basis for magical policy solutions to social, environmental, and political problems. The economics is the problem!

Social and environmental problems are effects and consequences of the capitalist nature of the global economy, the so-called "second contradiction of capitalism." The political problems are a function of the structure of power/knowledge imposed by the hegemonic global neoliberal regime.

With more nuance: The problem is a dominant behavioral economics that reduces all life to the science of cost/benefit analysis and presumes that this allows us all to pursue maximum satisfaction (freedom?) through the search for perfect knowledge of prices.

This is an "objective science" of economics that seeks to maximize the benefits that accrue to individual rational actors whose only rationality can be this self-serving interest and fulfillment of egoistic desire. This is a fairly horrid model for the nature of the human being and we must begin by acknowledging and declaring our rejection of this as a fundamental ontological principle.

Are humans more than just greedy money grubbers? Is self-interest the only form of enlightened interest in modern economic terms? Did Hayek deserve the Nobel Prize for thinking through these ontological assumptions about the constitution of power and freedom in the form of the inviolate rational individual actor seeking maximum knowledge of prices to plan a better world for optimum self-conservation and self-satisfaction?

What about all those cultures and civilizations without words for "individual," "commodity," or "price"? Are we to ignore these alterNative rationalities? Are we to presume western superiority because we have concepts for "individual" or "property" or "commodity"? Are we superior because we have a rational cost/benefit science of prices? A lot of good that does the displaced Native, the homeless family, or the wartime refugee. Why are these three concepts - individual, property, commodity - so intertwined in our legal philosophy and practical law? In our domestic and foreign policies? Why are they enshrined like Commandments? [Note that the Arizona legislature is contemplating an act that would ban the teaching of any ideas or theories that are critical of "Western Civilization" or "Capitalism."]

Third, I don't think the U.S. can go it alone any more than I believe we can trust elected officials, corporate CEOs, and their obedient troops of experts to resolve social, environmental, and political problems. They would surely promote more of the same, a top-down managerialist approach to planning a brave new world of global neoliberalism.

I don't think the U.S. can be allowed to continue using the metric of a selfish "national security interest" (read: keeping a safe business climate abroad for American multinational corporations) as the benchmark for defining our "place" in the world. No nation-state, including China or India, should be allowed this sort of status. Indeed, I envision the need for the abolition of the nation-state altogether but I am also averse to a "one-world government."

States and corporations are not to be entrusted with matters of planning a transition to a more just, sustainable, and resilient economy. Civil society, which is to say all the forms of human association that are beyond the reach or command of the market or the state, must be the soil we root this process in. A localized participatory democracy is in my estimation the only form of organization that even gives us a shot at creating a more just, sustainable, and resilient society. Our anti-economics must be grounded in the localized struggles for autonomy, for the place-based homeland commons.

By now, the reader is likely thinking that the good professor is surely, then, some type of radical anarchist! I will beg to differ, but to do so must first shift to responding to the elemental question I have posed.

Toward the anti-economics of the commonwealth

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

- John Maynard Keynes

Just, sustainable, and resilient future communities may have to be based on what I am going to call the anti-economics of the commonwealth. I propose this concept of "anti-economics" to suggest that all economic theory is defunct.

Marx argued this point precisely in the Grundrisse, the relatively unread notes he wrote and left unpublished prior to the drafting of the uncompleted three volumes of Capital. He viewed the bourgeois political economists and Utopian socialists of his day equally as charlatans, snake-oil salesmen [sic], offering magical solutions through the "sleight-of-hand" pseudo-science of prices, money, and rent as applied to the "politics of labor time."

The primary point Marx was making in the Grundrisse, and that guides much of my current thinking about these matters, is that capitalism is not so much an "economic system" or "mode of production." Instead, Marx, because he disdains economic or technological explanations, insists that capitalism is above all else a "social relation of power" that was created to rob the majority, the multitude that produces the "social wealth" through our common labor and livelihoods.

Capital uses economic theory to rationalize the forced appropriation (abstraction) of the creative force of living labor which it reduces to the status of the commodity form of waged-labor, which is to say the living human body is reinvented as "free" or substitutable units of labor time; i.e., the capitalist can hire and fire at will; can out-source endlessly as the corporation globe-trots its way to free trade nirvanas. The anti-community, anti-social, and even pathological attributes of this peculiar form of social power are more than self-evident.

If we can for a moment accept this premise, that the economic relationship imposed by capitalism is principally a problem of social power, then we might, borrowing from a critically revised Foucault, be able to engage in some critical reflections that are suggestive of the types and forms of "policy-making" we can engage to take steps toward a more just and ecologically resilient world and effectively oppose the logic of neoliberal governmental rationalities.

The future theory of the anti-economics of the commonwealth will likely emerge when we find the appropriate expressions derived from bioregional and place-based experiences. I cannot, like say Jeff Sachs, predict or project what policies should be adapted. Instead, I focus on the need for a new process of problem-solving altogether. One that shifts the terrain of action to the local place-based communities and their networks with similar reiterative struggles, hopes, and self-reliance resources.

This ultimately gets us into the relatively unexplored area of autonomy theory. Autonomy theory is deliberately positioned against the classic liberal tradition of the discourse of equality. So too by the way is Hayek, the founder of neoliberal economics, for whom all freedom is solely in the economic calculus of the informed, qua knowledgeable individual. This means that for Hayek even the Civil Rights Movement and its limited legislative victories was a by-product of totalitarian government (see the Hayek quotes at the start of this blog entry) since this limited the discriminatory actions individuals should be able to undertake as part of their own perfection of "dances with prices" in the "immoral economy" of "free markets." Of course, from our vantage, all this presupposes acceptance of a uniquely Eurocentric concept of the individual self, i.e., an ideology of radical disconnection that presupposes only the self-serving body can conserve its being in the world. This seems a bizarre premise for "modern" economic policy, no?

Autonomy and liberal theory approach the problematic of social power (freedom) in radically distinct ways: Liberals charm about the struggle for equality of individual rights, which corresponds to the "normativized" practice of private property rights as the metric of individual freedom, the latter being the twist Hayek provides to the classical liberal ideology of individual rights. Only the market is the true measure of the value of a freely-acquisitive body. For that they gave him a Nobel Prize!

Autonomy theory rejects this form of "devolution of power" to localities or so-called individualities (the selfish automaton, selfish gene, ad nauseum) as a dangerously flawed and exploitative theory of human being. This is top-down decentralization (the old Trojan Horse of neoliberal trickery). Autonomy springs from bottom-up decentralism (the practice of grassroots mobilization and networking).

In opposition to liberal and neoliberal ontologies, autonomy posits that place-based, watershed-based, and local systems of social organization are expressions of face-to-face reciprocity networks that are themselves reiterative structures of mutual reliance interests (rather than strategic choices by individual rational actors following selfish interests). These practices are the local knowledge base for "normative" or customary laws that facilitate communication in any given linguistically-constituted community. Instead of an ideology of disconnection we have a reiterative network of participation; an engaged network of multiply-positioned and shifting subjectivities.

How people organize and live their own freedoms, based on local control of the natural conditions of social production and reproduction, can teach us much about the orientation we might adopt to assess the concept of sovereignty, i.e., the scope of the form of governmental and social organization, appropriate to environmental and food justice ethics.

This must include the anti-economic logic of the production of livelihoods which should never be misconstrued as limited to calculated economic behavior. I cannot outline all these aspects today, but I would like to provide an outline of the elements that might make up such a framework for thinking about the anti-economics of the commonwealth; these may therefore consist of "policies" that embrace the following principles:

1. workplace democracy (no managers; workers manage themselves and their enterprise)
   
2. community ownership of producer cooperatives
3. resurgence of the commons (re-commonization of enclosed spaces)
   
4. networks of autonomous confederated municipalities
5. place-based civic culture and forms of governance
6. mutual reliance interests
7. bioregional scales (participatory municipalities must respect the limits of watershed boundaries)
8. food sovereignty built on place-based agroecosystems and heritage cuisines
   
9. emphasis on prosumption (producing to consume; auto-abastamiento); this must include renewable energy systems
   
10. mutual aid, cooperative, and community labor
11. anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-heterosexist norms
12. the social forms of wealth - interrelation and conviviality (as against commodification of wealth)
    

The list is surely longer, but this certainly suggests a few new directions for thinking about the paths we might pursue toward a just, sustainable, and resilient society. I will admit and declare that I am - if anything can be represented by a label - a bioregionalist rather than an anarchist at heart. Some will declare that what I propose is already in Bookchin-styled social ecology, an interpretation I will challenge in a later blog.

In most accounts of the history of American environmental thought, bioregionalism as a social movement is said to date to the 1970s and the rise of back-to-the-land environmental activism based on a deep ecology vision of a return to some lost original unity with place and nature. This has too often resulted in an immoral economy of localities like Taos, New Mexico, where the back-to-the-earth aficionados displaced the native cultures by converting acequia farm lands to high-end second home amenity properties for ski enthusiasts, nature lovers, crystal therapists, would-be shamans and cultural tourists. It did so while safely reducing Pueblo and Mexican peoples to objects of museum collections, public spectacles, and culture vultures.

I believe bioregional practice is already evident in the multitude of local, place-based indigenous cultures that are the original "watershed commonwealths," to tarry John W. Powell's famous adage. In the so-called American Southwest, the bioregionalist impulse is precisely already configured in the memory and practice of the place-based commonwealth in Native American and Chicana/o homelands of the Rio Arriba.

In future blogs, we will explore these concepts further and begin to add substance to this blueprint for an "anti-economics of the commonwealth," always rooted, ontologically, in a bioregionalist vision that resonates with concepts of autonomia.

War, Food and Hunger

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MILITARISM IS THE STRUGGLE AGAINST HUNGER

Seattle, WA. I have been reading a new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (available from Beacon Press). The book was written by author and food justice activist, Claire Hope Cummings, a long-time contributor to Pacifica Radio's "Against the Grain" radio series.

One of the more fascinating aspects of this book is the links it reveals between the current war in Iraq and the destruction of local food systems across the globe.

Precious antiquities are not the only part of Iraq's heritage that has been destroyed or pilfered in the wake of the U.S. invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. Cummings begins the book by emphasizing how the war and occupation have led to the destruction of Iraq's seed bank.

Iraq as a Wounded Vavilov Center

Iraq is one of the critical sources of Middle Eastern biodiversity and is of course considered the heart of the Mesopotamian "Vavilov Center." Named after the Russian scientist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, this refers to a center that is one of the original geographic locales for human domestication of wild relatives of our existing food and medicine crops.

The fertile lands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created ideal conditions for the domestication and cultivation of wheat, one of the landrace cultivars Iraqi farmers developed more than 10,000 years ago. The Mesopotamians developed the rich land race diversity of wheat, a grain that has spread across the world. Seed-saving and local experimentation with wild relatives endemic to the bioregion were the key to this process. It could be said that the Iraqis gave the world the gift of bread.

Often overlooked in the outcry against the ecological atrocity of the Iraq War is the destruction of the habitat for countless native plants and animals and the displacement of the people that have nurtured and protected these species. Cummings forces us to acknowledge and recognize this ecological apocalypse.

Indeed, the entire structure and organization of agriculture in Iraq has been devastated. The country is now largely dependent on U.N. food aid and transnational corporations. Iraq's food self-sufficiency has been decimated by the war and the policies of occupation and "nation-building" that still drive the quotidian violence are continuing to affect the ability for people to end the conditions that perpetuate the violence of hunger and malnutrition.

This represents a threat to the millions of Iraqi people, especially children, who have faced increasing hunger and malnutrition ever since the aftermath of the first Gulf War waged by Bush I and the policies involving an "economic boycott" of Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. Under Clinton, hunger and malnutrition increased despite the corrupt "Oil for Food" program.

This pattern represents a threat to all humanity as the violence against people and their plants continues to escalate across the world. The destruction by militarism of local food systems is more than just a symptom of a world gone mad in times of war and profiteering. It is a continuation of a process that Karl Marx had the good wisdom to call "the bloody primitive accumulation." We might recall that when the U.S. military waged war against the Dine Nation (Navajo), Kit Carson burned the peach orchards at Canyon de Chelly. Indeed, the purposeful destruction of food supplies and of local systems of food production has long been standard military strategy.

Cummings' book is a brilliant indictment of the neoliberal empire forged by the USA in the bloody aftermath of the collapse of the old Soviet regime that accelerated after 9/11.

Order 81: Planting the seeds of democracy?

In 2005, F. William Engdahl wrote an essay in Current Concerns with the intriguing title, Iraq and Washington's 'seeds of democracy.' This was a play on the words of George W. Bush, who declared that "the reason we are in Iraq is to plant the seeds of democracy..." Less obvious to most people is the irony in this statement given Paul Bremer's "Order 81."

Engdahl gives us a different take on "seeds" and "democracy" by focusing on Bremer's Order 81. I offer an extended quote from Engdahl's essay on this moment of neoliberal charm and logic:

The CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] explicitly defined the legal importance of the 100 Orders to leave no doubt that they were, indeed, orders. An Order was defined as, ‘binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.’ In other words, Iraqis were told, ‘do it or die.’ The law of occupation was supreme.

Buried deep among the Bremer laws was Order 81, ‘Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law’.

At the heart of Order 81 was the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) provision. Order 81, states: ‘Farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties or any variety mentioned in items 1 and 2 of paragraph (C) of Article 14 of this Chapter.’

In plain English, this gives holders of patents on certain plant varieties, i.e. large foreign multinationals, absolute rights for 20 years over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture. The protected plant varieties are Genetically Modified or Gene Manipulated (GM) plants, and an Iraqi farmer who chose to plant such seeds must sign an agreement with the seed company holding the patent that he would pay a ‘technology fee’ and an annual license fee for planting the patented seeds.

Any Iraqi farmer seeking to take a portion of those patented seeds to replant in following harvest years would be subject to heavy fines from the seed supplier. Iraqi farmers would become vassals, not of Saddam Hussein, but of multinational GM seed giants.

Engdahl goes on to describe how the "Iraqis had held samples of such precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank." The Iraqi seed bank "was located in Abu Ghraib, the city made infamous as a US military torture prison site in 2004. Following the US occupation and various bombing campaigns, the historic and invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished, a possible further casualty of the Iraq war." An NPR report of 23 May 2007 stated that some Iraqi scientists had earlier (1996) moved a portion of the collection to Syria.

A bit of an explanation is perhaps in order. Paul Bremer was Bush's pencil pusher and policy-crafter on the ground in Iraq. His Pentagon advisers, Engdahl tells us, "had very different plans for Iraq’s food future." One wonders if any of this collection was already under the control of ex situ seed banks that could be readily accessed by corporations to modify and patent transgenic varieties.

This has been a very familiar story ever since the 1950s and when the Green Revolution was promoted by the USA to impose an American model of agricultural modernization on the rest of the world as a technological solution to famine and hunger. The anti-hunger line is a well-known neoliberal ruse meant to veil a strategy to maintain and extend control of food systems by transnational corporations.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Bremer, developed Order 81 in order to hand control of Iraq's food systems over to a handful of transnational corporations. According to reports cited by Engdahl, "the specific details of Order 81 on plants were written for the US Government by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops."

The people of the United States need to know the details of Order 81 and the destruction or theft of the collection of native landrace seeds kept at the Abu Ghraib seed bank. The reconstruction of Iraq requires rebuilding the local food systems and restoring the environmental conditions that have nurtured and sustained a vital center of agricultural innovation and experimentation for thousands of years. This requires that the wake of any immediate US military withdrawal include policies for the return and revival of displaced farming communities. If the US military knows the fate of the Abu Ghraib seeds, then it must see to it that the truth comes out and the seed collections returned to the rightful heirs.

The people of the USA need to recognize that our aggressive militarism inevitably involves acts of "structural violence," actions that create conditions that deny non-combatant civilian populations access to food, water, sanitation, shelter, medical care, and other basic necessities of human life. This is also fertile ground for justified anger and resentment toward our policies.

This violence is connected to our nation's leaders who seem to have a political desire to maintain the dominant position of the USA as the world's largest economic power. To me, these are the desperate actions of a teetering empire that refuses to face the challenge of a transition to a post-Peak Oil world. Instead of lashing about at the world, we might consider pursuing a peace-making foreign policy that plants the seeds of democracy by simply allowing the people to plant their own seeds.

Wild-Crafting a Sense of Place

Appearance of Wild Asparagus Marks Spring Time & Reminds Us of the Healing Power of the Earth

SAN LUIS, CO. Residents of farming communities have a different sense of time and space compared to modern city-dwellers. Digital clocks are irrelevant when you live and work according to the rhythms of the sun and planets.

There are many indicators of seasonal time when you live and work in the countryside. But each place has its own unique locally-adapted markers. For example, in our Culebra River watershed, spring is marked by the appearance of wild asparagus, which grows alongside our acequias and fence lines.

Yesterday, my friend Joe Gallegos and I went to gather the wild green spears and immediately found a bounty along the eastern fence line of the Gallegos Ranch by the old apple, apricot, and plum orchard. As we gathered our breakfast (asparagus for an omelet made from Suzanne Quintana's eggs and goat cheese), I recalled an old favorite book by Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus.

I love Gibbon's book but take exception to the idea that one would even "stalk" a wild plant. The word "stalking" to me seems to covey an idea more like hunting, and implies an act of violence against another living being. (I am not against subsistence hunting, but that is another story).

What we were doing seemed different. It was more like accepting the blessings of the earth, and thanking the Creation for providing us this nutritious wild vegetable. After snapping the spears all the way down from the bottom of the stalk, I said a little prayer: "Gracias, Creacion, por la vida que nos das. Me compromito a protejer la vida." (Thank you, Creation, for the life you give us. I commit to protecting life.)

Many of these wild edible and medicinal plants actually respond with vigorous new growth if you gently harvest only part of the plant. Don't get greedy and uproot or tear the plant from the earth; that would kill the plant. Instead, take just a little bit from the tops, and treat this source with respect. Asparagus like lambs quarters likes to be picked. The wild-crafting seems to stimulate the plant into new growth.

The tender practice of wild-crafting has been embraced and taught by Native Americans for thousands of years. More than twenty years ago, a Ute-Xicano elder taught me some of the ethics that guide the wild-crafter. Frank was teaching me how to identify edible and medicinal plants in the San Luis Valley. We were focused one day on the proper harvesting of wild sage for smudge sticks. He showed me that the harvest of blue sage should only use the stems with fresh green growth. He said that a prayer was necessary to assist the plant with healing. Creation does not appreciate expropriation. However, nature yields gifts for those who are ready to obey "original instructions," the most important being the obligation to care for the earth. Healing ourselves may require that we heal our relationship with the earth.

The Preamble to the Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted in October 1991, has a relevant ethical lesson to offer the wild-crafter. The preamble in part reads:

We, the People of Color, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves...

Wild plants are part of the sacredness of the earth and symbolize the regenerative and healing qualities of the land; its yearning to link up and interact with other life forms. The act of harvesting wild plants, done respectfully, connects us to the planet and teaches respect for living processes. The plants are not just food, they are our teachers: They teach us interdependence and if we listen carefully, tenderness.

Soon, another local seasonal marker will appear on our highest mountain peak: El Pajarito, the Bird, is a snowfield shaped like a bird or some say an eagle; to me it looks like a quetzal, although oddly out of place from its native habitat in the humid tropics of Guatemala.

El Pajarito appears at a certain time on the western face of Culebra Peak. The timing of its appearance depends on the depth of the winter snow pack and the pace of the spring-time warming of the face of the earth. If the Pajarito shows up in late April or early May, we know that we will have less water for irrigating our crops. If the Pajarito shows up in late May or early June, then we know that this will be an easy irrigation season with plenty of water for every one. This is how we read our landscape to develop a local sense of place.

The earth, our home, is generous and resilient. The wild asparagus is a marker not just of a seasonal shift but of our continued interdependency. The wild-crafter knows that the abundance of asparagus is dependent on how we as harvesters act.

This is true for all human activities. We can choose to be abusive and greedy and in the process destroy the life-giving source, or we can choose to follow the original instructions and act with tenderness, love, and concern for the well being of all living organisms. That is the lesson I draw from the wild-crafting of the emerald spears.

San Isidro Labrador, Patron Saint of the Farmer

MAY 15 IS OBSERVED THROUGHOUT THE RIO ARRIBA

SAN LUIS,CO. It is May 15, and I am back at the farm in Colorado to mend and rebuild fences before we start planting our maiz de concha and bolita beans. Later this afternoon, Father Pat Valdez of the Sangre de Cristo Parish will lead our annual procession followed by mass and dinner to mark the Feast Day of San Isidro Labrador, the Patron Saint of the Farmer, a 12th century well-digger in Madrid.

The good Father will use Holy Water to bless the acequias and the farm fields that will soon bear the harvest of organic heirloom corn, bean, beet, squash, haba, pea, cilantro, and the other delightful crops that sustain our local food system in the Rio Culebra watershed.

Spring in the southern Rocky Mountains this year is still locked in a bit of winter's chill. We all agree that it looks like the sun and warmth this year are running 2 to 3 weeks late. Instead of complaining, we adapt our schedules to nature's slow beckoning of the seasonal transition.

We'll plant a bit later this year than originally planned and that is OK for there is plenty of other work to be done. I am reminded of San Isidro's life, an ascetic one, to be sure, but also a life inspired and filled with the passion that comes from being connected to something larger than your own being. Getting water from the source to the farm fields, that was his mission in life.

This season it will be no different for us in the Culebra watershed: The work will be done with our neighbors. Labor is scarce, so we have to depend on one another to keep something larger than ourselves alive. The work involved is the usual: Preparing the acequias for the irrigation season; planting the crops and new orchard trees and brambles; repairing and constructing fences; getting equipment serviced and prepped for work; and exchanging seed with friends.

Soon, our time will be occupied with irrigating and changing water. Cultivation will require long hours in the fields. Eventually, the aspen will start turning to fall colors and harvest time will be upon us. This shift brings the after-harvest work of adobe oven-roasting of our white concha corn to make chicos. October means preparing seed for winter storage and drying out elk meat.

The result of this tequio, this collective work, is perhaps a bit unusual: It is this place - the Culebra acequia farm lands that have been nurtured over the generations by families that know how to follow "original instructions." This place is a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. It remains one of those rare places in the United States where neighbors don't wait for crisis to lend a helping hand.

It is the sort of place I imagine San Isidro would have found familiar and inhabited happily. He would have been a great parciante and a good vecino. In a way, he does inhabit this place: His spirit of charity lives today in our mutual aid and other cooperative traditions.

The people of the Culebra acequia farm communities appreciate the Creation for what it is: A responsibility to connect as co-inhabitants of a miraculous planet whose purpose is the continuing cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Theory: Power/knowledge and justice

TEZOZOMOC AND DEVON GET ALL THEORETICAL ON US

Part 1 - Power/knowledge and justice

This blog entry presents Part 1 of what we envision as an on-going conversation between Tezozomoc, one of the founders of the South Central Farmers Feeding Families, and Devon G. Peña, host and moderator of the EJ Food Blog. In this first part, we debate and explore the rather obtuse theoretical perspectives in the study of power/knowledge in relation to how we conceive of justice. Our context is an on-going critical analysis of social movements for ecological and food democracy. Our hope is that the circle encompassing this conversation is an ever-enlarging one.

DEVON: Since this blog is concerned with promoting critical discussion of the environmental and food justice movements, I thought it important to begin our conversation by critically examining and deconstructing the concept of “justice.” This requires that we also examine the concept of “power/knowledge.” Where do we start, Tezo? What are the principal problems with the concept of justice as you see it? How is it related to issues of power/knowledge to borrow Foucault’s inextricably wound dyad?

TEZOZOMOC: I would like to re-think the whole idea of us striving for justice (“just-is,” “just-us”) and rights...Justice is a singularity in time and it is eroded by difference and time (this is entropy). We can never truly achieve the perfect union with justice but merely see it passing us by as a signpost on the path to some yet unforeseen and perhaps unrealizable utopia. Human rights are problematic because they are articulated within and for the nation-state, especially the Western nation-state, which seeks to exploit “desire” for its own purpose of dominating and regulating all life from the inside out.

DEVON: Agreed, but the concept of Universal Human Rights is not the same as place-based concepts of justice that center on group interactions rather than on “individuals” with discrete vested rights. Is there such a thing? In one alterNative version, as Gustavo Esteva and Mahdu Prakash argue in Grassroots postmodernism (1999): The Trojan Horse of Universal Human Rights delivers a top-down, one size fits all, western-centered concept of “individual” rights to be adjudicated under the positive law of the impartial courts [sic]. Of course, this is a ruse, a neoliberal trick. More importantly, it is at odds with the multitude’s diversity in the demand for “group” or “collective” based notions of justice as in the sovereign practice of right livelihoods in place, for e.g., by indigenous peoples. I think here also of Agamben’s notion of the “sovereign ban,” but we (meaning the multitude of social movements) are engaging in a “strategic inversion” of neoliberal logics and capitalist desire. This is a distinction, or better, a reversal of poles, that Foucault and other mostly European or Euro-American philosophers have been incapable of knowing or expressing, given their positionality, and despite the lavish praise of Negri and Hardt, in the book, Multitude, for among others the autonomy struggles as we have in the form of the glorious Zapatistas.

TEZO: Okay... point taken...How then do you resolve and constitute collective alterNative jurisprudence? Since we know that the individual is an invention of the nation-state, how do we fill and negotiate the trinity of Jurisprudence (natural law, analytic law, and normative law)? This trinity must coalesce within a semiotic regime of signs (sign/value, sign/signifier) regardless of whether it is alterNative or not.

DEVON: Good question. I am also seeing the necessity of clarifying why we use the term “alterNative,” so we have to come back to that later. I disagree that there is only a trinity of Jurisprudence. Clearly, you and I both reject what I call “positive law,” but for me this refers precisely to the trinity you just mentioned. However, in legal pluralism, that branch of anthropology of law that studies the law as its plays out on the ground, so to speak, posits that there is another form of law, beyond “lawyerly law” with its pretensions at unbiased universal normativity, and I am inclined to call this place-based or “customary” law and that comes closest in meaning to the notion of “normative law” in your trinity. Yet, for me in the western positive sense, normativity (technologies of the self that correspond with a given governmentality of the body) is tied to the imposition of a normative law in ways that are substantively different from the mutual reliance interests evident in most forms of place-based cooperative labor or in the self-governance of water use and irrigation practices like we see in the acequia systems. While laws, in the local cultural sense, are a semiotic regime, and presumably all laws connect back to a system of meaning, the localized practices of customary law actually lay beyond the scope of formal or positive law and in many cases these two get into pretty fierce conflicts over jurisdiction and prominence. The conflict between sharia and secular civil law is one example. A big part of this difference is in the mode of “bodily realization” – either as, in positive law, the internalization of neoliberal economic norms by the hyper-individualist rational actor disconnected from all others except as a sign herself, a mere commodity, with rights attached to her “self;” or, in contrast to this, the constitution of an essentially “social being,” always interconnected to others, and emerging through the constant re-iteration of mutual reliance norms that prefigure an epistemology of place-based law. Of course, sometimes this plays out in male dominated ways wherever patriarchy asserts its control of reproductive practices and capital (women’s bodies) through customary norms. We also have to guard against romanticizing the local and place-based. There are too many brutal circumstances where persons in a given locality may act with presumed impunity against fellow human beings. For example, recently in Oaxaca there were reports of men in one village assaulting women, including alleged instances involving genital torture with chile peppers, in an effort to prevent women from voting in elections for the local communitary assembly. These are our political struggles rather than some signifier of a depraved local civic culture.

TEZO: If justice is always promised it exists in the immanence of the Spinozan self-power, and so what you are saying seems very Spinozan to me. Spinoza would lead us to believe that as long as we have life we have power and no one truly ever gives up that power because to do so would be to give up life itself. Many of these communities are made up of bodies dislocated from territories and place-based knowledge and find themselves in an “anonymous strategy” of domination. Justice finds its grounding in the refusal of the proscribed discourse. Foucault presents the interlocked relationships of power, truth/knowledge and jurisprudence in many of his works. From Warfield, “Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.” This is the precise location where many of these communities have chosen to interject an alterNative discourse and a constitution of power through discourse and immanent resistance vulnerable only to time and difference (entropy). The struggle of the South Central Farmers is an example of the persistence of what we can call an “anonymous strategy” of networked resistance and constitution of local place-based power.

DEVON: This is an interesting point and it seems to bring this discussion a bit closer to some of the more concrete matters at hand like food, hunger, food sovereignty, and the nature of the autonomy of the community. I am intrigued by your idea that “Justice finds its grounding in the refusal of the proscribed discourse.” I’ll return to that in a moment. You and I have talked about the concept of “community” as well. For me it means a social network that is itself constituted from interconnected bodies, beings-in-place, to not get too Heidergarian about it. On Warfield’s quote, well of course, power and knowledge come together to produce discourse, what Foucault called the “games of truth.” That still seems to me to be a one-sided affair, even if, as Foucault argues: Knowledge is power and where there is power there is resistance. It is one-sided because it assumes that all discourse is a conversation with the hegemon, but not all of our poetry or song or soil beliefs are a conversation with domination. Most of the really useful stuff, say the knowledge of polyculture milpas, is actually transmitted via place-based and inter-generational practices that get us outside the master’s home. This has to do with our mutually recognized sense of interconnectedness as members of a linguistically constituted community. While P/K are “joined together” in discourse, not all of our ontology (our being) can be reduced to this negative dialectic since we are often able to rupture, through the great refusal or by simply living in place against the odds, our reduction to substitutable units of abstract labor-time. When grandmother saves seeds and hands them down across the generations that for me is the epitome of the practice of community and place-making and is more than just de-commodification of food; it goes all the way through to an alterNative semiotics where signification against the hegemon is not even an afterthought. The desire to connect and share the alberjon or chipilin is its own reason for being, its own desire. It does not need to become the enantiomorph of the dominator.

TEZO: Enantiomorphs are “mirroring others,” right? What you are saying is, “Smash the mirror!” We don’t have to reflect unto the master’s mirror. The problem of justice for us then is not that we want equality, equal rights, or any of that self-serving individualistic nonsense, although this is the dominant way servile “Others” articulate “human rights” demands. That is not a refusal; it is obedience, a cry for integration and subordination within the existing architecture of power/knowledge. Like you, I am interested in self-organizing processes (autopoesis) and this means in part that there is no need for our social movements to use the mirror to demand equal treatment. There is no demand per se, only the struggle and praxis to assert our autonomy. We are living our autonomy. At South Central this is exactly what happened. We did not ask permission to organize a general assembly, elect section representatives, and identify the goals and mission of the organization. We did not raise our hands and say, “Please mister can we have some more?” The farmers simply and spontaneously self-organized and the form of organization also did not ask permission to imitate the dominant form of urban agriculture involving a typical loosely associated group of individual plot-holders in community gardening spaces. We took a space that had been violated and enclosed; we made it a “commons.” We transformed it our way based on pre-existing patterns of social organization that people had brought with them from their dislocations. We brought the seeds of land race heirlooms and sacred trees but we also brought our tequio, gueleguetza, and cargo.

DEVON: Precisely, and this offers us an opportunity to make a statement about “alterNativity.” The Native part of this is self-evident. We are referring to indigenous knowledge systems, an epistemology that is place-based, that arises from the ontology of being in place. But dislocations alter this place-based being, rupturing generations of attachment to homeland commons. So the Native is “altered.” But it does not end there, that is the anti-thesis; the synthesis, or rupture, is in the ability and strategy of the altered Native to alter the circumstances of the dislocation, our “alterity” means that we have had to change our perspective to that of the Other, the cosmopolitan city-dwelling Other. But this also means we alter these new spaces to re-inhabit place; to re-locate our being in place. But in the process, we also have re-invented our Native-ness. That is what I see happened at South Central and is continuing at Button Willow where you have re-established the farm and continue with your tianguis and Food for the Hood project.

GUEST BLOG: PAULA GARCIA ON FOOD FUTURES

Harmony and sustainability: An essay on green futures

Paula Garcia | For The New Mexican (Posted by permission of the author)

Originally published on 4/25/2008.

For many who were raised in Northern New Mexico, the springtime was shaped by the urgency of the growing season. Acequias had to be cleaned, soil had to be tilled, and seeds had to be planted by a certain saint's day. These ancient cultural practices still permeate the communities of the region during the months of April and May, making it a natural time to reflect on our relationship with our tierra madre. Since the 1970s, spring has also been a time to celebrate Earth Day, an expression of the mainstream environmental movement.

I believe there are substantive differences in the way that traditional communities and environmental groups relate to the landscape. For many with generational connections here, a relationship to the Earth is expressed as a profound connection to place. The names of ancestors, their lives and features of the land are articulated through oral histories. The powerful presence of beautiful mountains, the streams they nurture and the valleys we inhabit and cultivate inspire connection to place for newcomers as well. However, the generational element in traditional communities is distinct.

Another difference is a feeling of dispossession and displacement that stems from historical experience. Farming and ranching livelihoods were seriously disrupted with fragmentation of the landscape following the U.S. conquest. Rural villages have endured generations of outmigration as people have sought better jobs outside their historic communities. This historical context is crucial to understanding, for example, why well-intentioned efforts to protect "wilderness" rub against the historic rights and uses of the traditional land-based people of the region or why gentrification of historic communities sometimes fosters resentment.

Any discussion about the "environment" in Northern New Mexico has to begin with reaching a common understanding of our history and the way in which traditional communities relate to the land and water. If we could truly reach common ground on the historical understanding, there is great potential for how we might strategize for the future.

Assuming we could meet such a threshold, I have some thoughts about where we might start. I believe some of our most pressing concerns are that Northern New Mexico, along with the rest of the state, suffers from one of the highest rates of food insecurity and highest disparities between the rich and the poor in the nation. Despite the cultural and ecological richness of the region, these numbers raise a red flag as indicators of social and economic justice and ecological sustainability.

First, we should restore our ability to grow and process more of our food locally, a concept often referred to as food sovereignty. Although we import most of the food we eat, historically we once were more self-sufficient, and we have the potential to do so again. For example, in a recent study by the New Mexico Acequia Association with the support of the Kellogg Foundation, we estimated that, in a five-county area of Northern New Mexico, local ranchers are raising enough livestock to feed their respective communities but lack the infrastructure to process the food and distribute it to our tables.

In making a shift toward processing local beef, we could support the income of thousands of ranchers, improve the quality of the food we eat and reduce the number of miles our food travels. We could do the same for all of our crops with an emphasis on native foods that are spiritually and culturally significant to our communities.

To reach this amazing potential, we need to take immediate steps toward protecting the historic grazing rights, water rights, native seeds and farmland that are the basis for our agricultural productive capacity. It would also require serious investment in our farms and ranches as well as the infrastructure needed to process our food. Widespread support will be needed to make these structural changes to our local food systems. We need to reach economies of scale that will achieve the dual objectives of supporting our farmers and ranchers while also making the food produced affordable for all of our families.

In addition to rebuilding our local food systems, New Mexico could lead the way toward a new energy economy. The public funding that is allocated to the national laboratories would be better invested transitioning to renewable energy such as wind, solar and biomass, and developing alternatives to fossil fuels, the rising costs of which will impose disproportionate hardship on poor families. Under certain conditions, these new technologies could create many new "green collar" jobs and keep more of our energy dollar in the region. Such a model for community development could help address economic inequities such as the wide disparity between the median incomes of Los Alamos and Rio Arriba counties and eliminate the possibility of radioactive contamination, which already has precedent in Northern New Mexico.

I envision a future for Northern New Mexico where we create just livelihoods for workers, farmers and ranchers that also provide for the basic needs of families for healthy food and clean, affordable energy. In working toward that future, we would contribute to a global movement to reduce our dependence on transnational corporations for our food and energy. As a person dedicated to working the land and to grassroots organizing, I remain hopeful about our potential.

Paula Garcia is executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association.