Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part V

Invaders, exotics, and ecological restoration, or: resisting soil governmentality

We expect that much of this land will be restored to Native perennial polyculture meadows. There are numerous “invasive” species in Colorado and our watershed is no exception, but we are lucky to be located so far down the Acequia Madre that we are not yet overwhelmed by noxious plants from the Asian steppes and other places that are becoming the “scourge” of farmers and ranchers in the state of Colorado.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not about to launch into an all-out diatribe against so-called exotic or invasive species. That would constitute an epistemological contradiction for someone who considers himself to be “eco-centric.”

I pretty much reject the concept of “weed” but share the concern of some restoration ecologists for keeping the balance in favor of native and “naturalized exotic” plant associations. I am a proponent of many “naturalized exotics” like the potato or Fava beans (habas) for example.

However, Leafy Spurge, Canada Thistle, and Russian Knapweed are examples of noxious plants spreading in the San Luis Valley agricultural districts. These troublesome species are unwanted because cattle and other livestock can eat them, get sick, and die. My concern is that these species displace native plants and thus affect habitat for many living organisms.

The trouble with these noxious invaders is that they are “invaders” prone to dominating the landscape, a sort of exotic weed monoculture. I understand this happens more readily in, or is in any case associated with, soils that have suffered considerable disturbance from human activities.

These noxious plants are the biological baggage and ecological legacy of European empires (see Crosby 1988). Restoration of Native sovereignty may require ecological restoration to exorcize these biological analogs of conquest, colonialism, and the degradation of land and body alike.

An additional trouble is that these noxious invaders are usually treated under the framework of a military-styled “warfare against weeds” paradigm. Last year, the USDA, through the local office of the NRCS (the Soil Conservation Service now the Natural Resources Conservation Service), announced that it was “launching an all out war against these noxious invasive weeds” (Anonymous weed technician from NRCS in a conversation with the author, March 2007).

The “war” involves rapid deployment of herbicide treatments, of course. The USDA teams sprayed herbicide on a test plot of Leafy Spurge growing along the edge and a few other isolated patches in the local high school athletic fields.

We, as local acequia farmers, objected and instead opted to use goats and sheep on the patches of Leafy Spurge laying within the polygon perimeters of our long-lot farms. The Leafy Spurge in the USDA test plot is coming back, like a fiercely defiant fairy-circle gathering around the sprayed patches that are dead but obviously not gone.

The goat and sheep treatments had their desired effect and the Leafy Spurge is in retreat on the acequia farms’ test plots. Some of the technicians are finally starting to come around but a few of them remain committed to the modern chemical treatment protocol.

This story about weeds is partly interesting because it is suggestive of changes occurring in the relationship between the state (in the form of the NRCS) and the local Chicana/o farmers. There is clearly a process of ‘devolution’ of planning authority to the local soil conservation board; this was barely imaginable two decades ago when local board members, scientists, and technicians were mostly white men from outside our community.

Today, the local NRCS office includes one local Chicano and a progressive white woman. The office seems much more open to the local farmers who are now experiencing a level of attention they have long yearned for.

Underlying these interactions between acequia farmers and NRCS staff is a contested process of ‘governmental devolution’ on soil matters in the southern half of the Costilla County Soil Conservation District. One vision, the top-down one, allows the local NRCS office a bit more autonomy, within strict budgetary limits and subject to individualized contracts, to reach out to ‘under-served’ and ‘under-represented’ farmers like the acequia farmers of the Culebra watershed.

Many of the local acequia farmers are approached to enter into agreements with NRCS or the FSA (Farm Security Administration). You can do this for example by applying for an EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) grant. This grant has been used to improve acequia components like compuertas and other water diversion, soil erosion, and sediment control structures.

It took several federal lawsuits (including Garcia v. Venneman, 224 F.R.D. 8 (D.D.C. 2004) to get the USDA to begin addressing decades of discrimination against Latina/o farmers. The EQIP outreach is an example of new programs designed to address these patterns of racism and neglect and are led by progressive Chicana/os and white men and women in our local NRCS offices.

However, the restoration ecology work before us cannot be entirely supported by programs like EQIP. We face the challenge of converting that meadow from sprinkler to flood irrigation. The repair work to restore compacted soil under the concentric grooves of the old sprinkler system and to realign the network of lindero and sangría acequias likely can be addressed with the technical and financial assistance of the NRCS and FSA.

There is, however, another set of problems beyond the apparent current scope of these programs. We need to rely on permaculture features to slow down the movement of water through this badly damaged meadow. We need to anchor and buffer the more erosive slopes with a system of ancones (terraces), alamosas (Cottonwood tree lines), and bordos (raised berms) of Native vegetation like sand cherry, chokecherry, gooseberry, and osha to protect the patches of ancestral riverbed gravels that were exposed by decades of excessive plowing, inappropriate and poor irrigation practices, and overgrazing (Mike McGowan in personal note to the author; June 2006).

There are always dangerous ambiguities presented by how the USDA, locally, works to implement programs from the top-down not the least of which is the tendency to impose technical design criteria that may not be entirely appropriate to acequia methods and that may even undermine or weaken our commitment to collective community-based approaches to problem-solving.

These are efforts to inculcate a new individualist and “modernist subjectivity” on the parciantes by inducing us to accept individualized contracts and the possibility of shifting to drip irrigation or other techniques at variance with acequia flood irrigated practices. These seemingly neutral designs can reduce our ability to act on the basis of shared norms of mutual reliance.

It is hardly recognized that mutual reliance interests constitute an alternative to the dominant “individual rational actor model” of economic behavior that undergirds the various programs administered by the NRCS under the last, current, and presumably future Farm Bills.

As acequia farmers we continuously negotiate our way in a manner by which we tend to juxtapose ourselves against the imposed process of neoliberal governmentality of soil. Against this “conduct of conduct,” the community seeks collective, informal, and self-provisioning responses to soil conservation needs.

In 1995-97, Robert Curry and I managed to log a small set of “soil augur” surveys in which we found evidence at the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches and a few other sites to corroborate the local claim that acequia farms are “soil banks.” Not all acequia farmers are that successful but the technology of gravity-driven flood irrigation, when combined with intensive permaculture practices, carries with it the possibility of regenerative effects from a peculiar anthropogenic disturbance regime.

I am using the language of conservation biology to convey the idea, familiar now to most of you, that at our best farmers can act like beavers and contribute to biodiversity when they follow original instructions as inhabitants of a place.

This is Part 5 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.