GUEST BLOG: Estevan Arellano on 'Convide'

Moderator's Note: We are posting a short "op-ed" piece by our esteemed colleague and fellow acequia farmer, Estevan Arellano of Embudo, New Mexico. This piece reminds us that the concept of convide is essentially a Native declaration of a commitment to conviviality and is much older than the Slow Food Movement. Estevan is an award-winning author and most recently the editor and translator of Gabriel Alonso de Herrera's famous 1513 text,  Ancient Agriculture: Roots and Application of Sustainable Agriculture. For a preview of this fabulous book, please visit Ancient Agriculture. We apologize for the lack of accent marks in the Spanish words in this blog entry; a problem with the editing format currently prevents use of the accent marks.

Convide

Nowadays there is so much confusion about what is "sustainable," "organic," or "natural" food that, as Indo-Hispanos, we sometimes forget our own ancestral models that have worked historically and make more sense to us as a people. One such concept that has fallen by the wayside in too many places, as we ironically embrace and debate such abstract concepts as "food security" and "food democracy," is the philosophy of convide, or the sharing of food among neighbors.

Indo-Hispano (Chicana/o) communities have been sharing water and food since time immemorial. The sharing of the water comes from the concept of equidad, or equality, as stated in the Qur'an and is the ethical practice known as repartimiento.

Therefore, repartimiento and convide are two basic values that have made our communities sustainable over the past four hundred years here in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

Convide - from the concept con vite - that is, "with" and "alive" - is an idea that has allowed our communities to survive and thrive when it comes to eating healthy food. Even the Slow Food Movement, the brainchild of Italian journalist Carlo Petrini, has embraced the concept of convivium.

Here in the Rio Arriba, when the women made something special, be it biscochitos, tamales, a special caldo or guiso, the whole community would aprobar or "taste the food." In this manner, for centuries no one went hungry. The same would happen when an animal was butchered and everyone shared un pedacito, a "piece of meat." The day of the matanza was a day of fiesta. This was the ultimate form of con vite and prefigures by centuries the same ideas that are now the basis of the Slow Food conviviums.

For the matanza, everyone had a specialty: The chichorranera/o was the one who made the chile colorado de matanza (when it was pork); the tortillera was the maker of the tortillas, etc.

Then there was the hueso del caldo (soup bone) that people shared to make caldo when times were really bad. The hueso would flavor the spring water that was infused with wild edible herbs (quelites) and boiled soft tubers.

The New Mexico Acequia Association has recently launched a food project that involves an assessment of the state of traditional local foods in four watersheds including the Embudo, which includes the communities on the rios Picuris, Santa Barbara, El Valle, and Ojo Sarco, all the way down to where the rio Embudo empties into the Grande or Bravo del Norte.

The three most important concepts that you will hear from the elders for strategies of survival are repartimiento, convide, and working en co-operacion (mutual aid and cooperative labor). The best example of this third concept is the acequia, a truly worker-owned and democratically self-governed cooperative.

By sharing resources, be it water or food, and cooperating in labor, the people here were able to sustain themselves with high altitude grass-fed cattle, lamb, and goat. For us, this meant that the livestock summered up in the upland grass meadows of Tres Ritos.

Our local food includes heirloom chile, both green and red; corn, which people used to prepare a wide range of traditional foods from tamales to posole. Local "Spanish" wheat was used to make flour which was then made into the favored Lenten pastry or panocha. This was made from sprouted wheat seeds, which were dried and then ground on metates into a whole-grain flour.

The traditional foods included fabas, lentejas, and all types of meat: Beef, lamb, goat, pig, and chicken were all raised by the families and their neighbors. The traditional foods, when subsistence hunting was more common, included wild quail, turkey, pigeons, deer, elk, and at one time even buffalo. The diverse cuisine of the Rio Arriba included different recipes for the use of fish including freshwater eels. The manito culture developed a nutritious and healthy regional cuisine based on the possibilities of the environment.

This was only the beginning of what was produced "natural y con la ayuda de Dios," naturally and with the blessing of God. To this saying, the people often added another phrase: "para nos, para vos, y para los animalitos de Dios" (for us, for you, and for God's animals). Con la fe (with faith) in the land, water, and all creation, we survived by adopting and following these ethics of repartiendo, conviviendo, and cooperando.

Conviviendo, helping one another as members of a community, instead of simply "sustaining" one self to save and then invest somewhere else, is what has blessed us with "una vida buena y sana y alegre." We are resilient because we have followed the simple philosophy of sharing water, food, and work, and this has also made our lives more "festive."

Obamaecology and Environmental Justice

PART ONE: ENERGY

Moderator's Note: After some 14 months in office, the Obama Administration has clarified many of its positions and goals in areas related to agriculture, environment, and energy policy. This provides us with a sufficient basis for a broad sense of the underlying environmental ethics that appear to be guiding this "Presidency of Change." As citizens we are obligated to critically evaluate the implications posed for environmental justice by the emerging policy preferences and rationale exhibited by the Administration.

I have decided to initiate a five-part blog series focused on this Administration's policy-making goals and strategies in fields that directly affect the prospects for environmental and food justice: Energy, Environment, Agriculture, and Trade - or what I like to call the EEAT policies. Part One of the "Obamaecology" series focuses on policy-making in Energy-related fields; the second on Environment;  the third on Agriculture; the fourth on Trade; and a fifth part will summarize my own policy views and offer a call for change in this Administration's direction. This critical review is needed because the Administration's emerging positions and ethics in these significant public policy-making fields will greatly shape the struggle over the fate of the planet and the prospects for protecting biocultural diversity and promoting Earth Democracy.

Seattle, WA.    Climate change, and not just energy security, is at the top of the Obama Administration's priority list for action on energy policy; and well that it should be. There are five principal strategies proposed by the Administration to what it presents as the most pragmatic (qua politically least destructive) response to the "climate crisis." Politics trumps science; as usual. These five strategies are: 

1. Pursuit of a 'cap-and-trade' system to reduce carbon emissions
2. Development of 'clean' coal technologies
3. Resuscitation of nuclear power
4. Shift toward renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, etc.)
5. Adoption of stricter conservation measures including use of 'smart grid' technologies

Re: 1) Cap-and-Trade. The President has long favored the adoption of a "cap-and-trade" system to reign-in our nation's "carbon footprint." He argues that this policy must be allowed to work its way successfully through Congress, presumably, I might add, to be molded by the very same energy giants that have created disturbances in the complex climate system in the first place.

My basic objection to this policy is that the focus on "carbon" footprinting is too narrow and what is needed is a broader systemic strategy that emphasizes reduction of the entire range of our "cultural ecological footprint" including violence against "environmental space" (indigenous territories, biodiversity reserves, etc.). After all, many of these environmental spaces are significant carbon sinks.

My understanding is that the policy of allowing the market to impose a "price" on pollution will simply commodify the "externalities" that are consequences of the capitalist process of producing, selling, or speculating on the price of other commodities. It will not work simply because it will fail to cut emissions on time to the level most climate scientists agree is necessary to avoid catastrophic changes. For a scientific view of this problem, please see The Guardian interview with James Hansen.

Change in this context simply cannot be incrementalist, as if the Obama strategy for energy can safely mimic his approach to health care reform (he even got Kucinich to buy into that argument). What is proposed here is nothing more than an old tangled ideology that rewards and privileges sustainable profit-making over the resilience of human and ecological values. Obama's policy on cap-and-trade is a re-centralizing, top-down technocratic and managerialist model and has nothing to do with community-based planning and citizen participation. But then again, he never said it would.

My point is to note how the overall strategy of the Administration remains captive to a neoliberal ideology that insists on the "free market" remaining the fundamental operating condition and starting point of any "sustainable" policy for our nation's energy needs.

Obama's neoliberal inclinations violate the Principles of Environmental Justice in a grotesque way by privileging private corporations and the collaborationist State as sole actors in a framework of environmental governance, call it "neoliberal ecological modernization," that sacrifices participatory ethics at the behest of the corporatist preemption of the rule of law and democracy.

What makes this a neoliberal policy other than its reliance on magical mystery market mechanisms? Overlooked in most expert commentary and punditry is the fact that cap-and-trade is based on the privatization of our atmospheric commons, since the issue of the control of carbon emissions is also intrinsically an air pollution issue. No one owns the "air," and yet the cap-and-trade system would basically treat damage to air quality from carbon emissions as a tradeable "development damage permit." I am certain someone on Wall Street already thought of inventing themselves a bit more "cognitive capital" through credit default swaps for cap-and-trade futures.

Re: 2) 'Clean' Coal. Obama has long been a devoted follower of the 'clean coal' technology crowd. The problem with this technology is that it doesn't exist and never will. The idea of 'clean coal' is largely a fabrication of the massive coal power industries and the municipal utilities that rely on coal to operate their energy grids.

You may eventually be able to economically promote widespread adoption of the latest 'scrubbing' technologies and on-site carbon sinks to reduce emissions at the point of energy production, but you will not be able to discount the damage to the environment as a consequence of mountaintop removal policies the Administration continues to support. These are two ends of the same cultural ecological footprint, and you cannot ignore either pole or counterpole. 

Reductionist thinking focused on scrubbing at the point of power generation will not produce a magical solution to the fact of ecological destruction from mining activities that take the coal out of the ground to begin with. This is exactly why Appalachia is a 'national sacrifice zone,' and the capacity of the bioregion to contribute as a carbon sink is also increasingly compromised by such a strategy, to say nothing of the immense misery and displacement suffered by the inhabitants of the areas that are affected by mountaintop removal.

Re: 3) Reviving the Nuclear Power Zombie.  Ask the people of Atlanta about the prospect of a shift in Georgia to "nuclear energy," and many will tell you point blank, "Are you crazy!"  One colleague in Georgia even told me the other day, "What? Bring back that Zombie?" The walking dead, or zombie, is of course an ancient figure articulated as part of the often hidden side of eschatology.  What could be better than a revival of the Nuclear Power Zombie to usher in the good old end days?

Seriously: There is a great deal of confusion and division within the environmentalist community on the question of a revival of nuclear power. Some environmentalists have started to embrace Obama's plan to spend hundreds of billions, not just in R&D but huge taxpayer-subsidized 'loan guarantees' to support an industry that cannot make it on its own in current market conditions.

Let's be straight-faced honest about this: If Obama is such a fan of free market fundamentalism, then why the state intervention to secure a space in the energy market for a form of energy generation that the public at best views in a deeply ambivalent manner? Most people are opposed to nuclear power because of the unresolved issues related to nuclear waste disposal but even larger numbers are opposed to the high risks involved in financing these incredibly complex power plants.

Here in the state of Washington, citizens are still reeling from the failed boondoggle known as the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) that sought to go nuclear in the late 1950s. After nearly three decades of planning and construction, in January 1982, the WPPSS suspended construction on two nuclear power plants when the total cost was projected to exceed $24 billion; in 2010 dollars that would be roughly $63.1 billion based on the conversion table available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.

As has been widely reported, the unfinished plants never generated electric power or revenue for the system and it was forced to default on $2.25 billion in municipal bonds. The municipal utilities (e.g., Seattle Light), and the ratepayers were ultimately responsible for this debt which came to about $12,000 per ratepaying household. We are still paying for plants that never produced a watt of energy. Of course, today we have even fancier investment instruments like credit default swaps (CDSs) and so someone could make a bundle on the next financing meltdown.

The amount for loan guarantees that Obama has proposed, just for the nuclear power plant project in Georgia, is in excess of $8 billion, and the total projected for the first phase of nation-wide loan guarantees is more than $54 billion; see recent article in Political Affairs Magazine. One of the environmentalists interviewed by Political Affairs on the proposed subsidies for the Atlanta-based Southern Company, notes that "The I-Pod/Facebook generation deserves some modern technology: a smart new grid tying together community-based wind and solar plants to give us relief from the poisonous heavy industrial energy from 19th century thinking."

I will return to this very smart suggestion in a moment, but it seems clear that the nuclear option fails to embrace the environmental justice principle that we must adopt ecologically sustainable and decentralized forms of energy production that are scaled to local community needs. EJ principles require that we re-localize energy systems and detoxify the process of energy production through a shift to smaller-scale renewable technologies. 

There are of course lingering questions about operational safety at nuclear energy production facilities. The critical issue is conceptually simple but technically vexing: How do we safely handle waste by-products that have dangerous half-life ranges measured in hundreds of thousands of years? There is currently no ethically sound answer to this question that will satisfy long-term environmental, social, and security concerns.

There is a lot of confusion around this issue and we need to make one point clear: There are two separate nuclear waste streams in our nation: That which is generated by the national defense (weapons) sector and that which comes from private and private/public partnerships in commercial nuclear power generation.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico is the federal government's current 'state of the art' strategy for the storage, monitoring, and retrieval of defense-related nuclear waste streams. The proposed facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the unresolved and still unapproved site for handling the waste stream from the commercial nuclear power industry and other commercial and scientific end-users (including radioactive medical wastes).

In the meantime, the waste stream is kept and contained at the production sites where they represent a real threat to health, human safety, and national security. Indeed, dangerous radioactive medical waste has already illegally made its way into solid waste landfills (garbage dumps).

One key to understanding the issue of nuclear waste is salt. You need large underground salt formations to safely store nuclear wastes for any meaningful amount of time. The WIPP is located in such a formation, but the Yucca site is hard rock, and it will leak; period. Even proponents of nuclear power acknowledge that the Yucca site is not safe.

Yet, the Obama Administration is moving to revive the zombie of nuclear power generation despite the many serious unsettled environmental, safety, public health, national security, and financial viability issues posed by the growing commercial waste stream. I will also note that environmental justice principles challenge us to address the problem of weapons-related nuclear waste streams through total global disarmament; this is not a negotiable position from which humanity can waiver; we must disarm all nuclear states, an issue I will have to address later in this blog series.

There are two principles relevant here: 6) Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production, and 7) Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation. Both of these principles are violated by Obama's plans to revive nuclear power.

Re: 4) Renewable energy. This is one of the few areas where the Obama Administration's plans hold some promise from the vantage point of environmental justice. The development of solar and wind power is rapidly increasing through federally-subsidized market-driven investments in these alternative energy systems.

There have also been some recent technological innovations that can reduce the cost of solar panels and installation of associated system upgrades. The Obama Administration is planning to increase R&D spending on research into more efficient and affordable battery storage technologies, the single remaining obstacle to widespread adoption of small-scale solar power energy grid systems.

However, the Obama Administration seems focused more on promoting large-scale alternative energy technologies: We are already seeing the proliferation of large wind and solar "energy farms" as a result of investments by private energy corporations, states, and municipalities. These large-scale projects are certainly commendable as one route to reducing our nation's carbon footprint, but once again issues related to the broader cultural ecological footprint and issues of local energy sovereignty would remain largely unaddressed.

Our renewable energy 'frontiers' are quickly being colonized by corporate forces and this could mean that low-income, people of color, and under-served rural communities will still be contending with the consequences of the privatization of energy needs and thus will remain vulnerable to the inevitable rounds of rate increases that subsidize the energy barons' huge multi-million dollar bonuses. It is estimated by one of my confidential sources that fully 25 percent of the average ratepayer's energy consumption costs go toward the administration and management of the energy companies and a not very 'smart' grid. Increasingly, we are not paying for power, we are paying for executive privileges, perks, and bonuses and grid inefficiencies.

The Obama plan for renewable energy sources does not, as currently formulated, begin to address the rampant social inequities propagated by the privatization of our energy commons. Again, no one "owns" the sun, yet the Administration would continue to support corporatization of solar power instead of a massive grassroots campaign that helps households and small businesses not just 'weatherize' their buildings but adopt clean alternative energy sources that are locally run and democratically operated.

Indeed, the only way to address this injustice is to pressure the Administration to develop policies that encourage local community-based solar and wind energy cooperatives. This means shifting away from the current emphasis on market-steered corporate energy farms to a more appropriate human scale - a system that is based on smart energy grids built and managed by local communities and including universal application of solar and wind technologies at the household level wherever this is feasible.

Re: 5. Conservation and 'smart grids.'    This brings me to the fifth and final priority the Administration has defined for its energy policy: Conservation and technological innovation. I admit that the fact that this Administration even has an emerging 'national' policy on energy is a change. No other President, including Jimmy Carter, has pursued such a comprehensive set of policies. While this is 'systems' thinking, and as such merits commendation for holistic inclinations, let us not fool ourselves into thinking this is some sort of revolutionary change from a privatized toward some form of a 'socialized' energy commons. This is not energy socialism.

The conservation strategies emphasized by the Administration currently focus for the most part on assisting and rewarding the 'end-users' of energy: Households and businesses, manufacturing factories, government offices, and public utilities that adopt conservation measures and technologies and upgrade their energy grid with the latest information management technologies will be rewarded with tax breaks, federal subsidies and grants, and other financial incentives.

The most common end-users, individual households, can be expected to benefit from these innovations and these policies have the potential to support an upwelling of grassroots participation in energy efficiency and conservation activism.

I don't see a downside with this policy except that it overlooks the other end of the cultural ecological footprint. If the smart energy grids include solar and wind power sources, and these are largely owned and operated by giant energy corporations, and these capitalist entities have a diverse portfolio of energy sources including coal, nuclear, natural gas, and other renewable resources (including hydroelectric, biofuel, and tidal), then we will still be supporting portfolios that are not sustainable and come with overlooked costs in the form of continued violence to environmental spaces.

Environmental justice principles insist that a sustainable energy path must also be one that embraces social justice. Unless we can transform the nation's energy portfolios to rid these of coal, nuclear, natural gas, and other old industrial poisons, we will not eliminate the patterns that bring us mountaintop removal, under-regulated hazardous waste sites, continued carbon emissions, and the structural violence of poverty induced in part by the inability of people to continue paying for energy costs that subsidize the rich and powerful CEOs of the energy corporations.

Conservation measures that reduce our carbon footprint but then fail to address these ethical concerns are doomed to failure. The new, less carbon-based, energy grids of the future will continue to subject the great majority of people to exploitation as dependent rate-payers, no matter how efficient their double-paned windows and insulation.

The broader view of environmental justice ethics includes the concept that our footprints on the planet are not just the result of our carbon emissions. They run the gamut across various hideous forms of structural violence against environmental, social, and cultural spaces and the resulting displacement and immiseration of human communities and other lifeforms.

Until our energy policies are based on an understanding of the 'social' side of sustainability, there will be no resilient energy future with equal access to all, including those who dwell on top of the sources of traditional industrial poisons like coal and uranium. May their habitat and homelands be protected by the quest for a more holistic model of renewable energy alternatives that values protecting a sense of place as much as it does the btu-potential of rock, gas, sun, and water.

Anatomy of the Disappeared, Part 3

The Myth of Maladaptation 

Weber further mischaracterizes Hispano agriculture as "maladaptive" in a modern market economy.  The natural, economic and cultural resources available to farmers and ranchers in the region are said to be "necessary but insufficient."  Weber's stereotype of a "maladaptive" rural culture of poverty can be read as a restatement of Steinel's views cast in the "value-neutral" vernacular of 1990s social science research. 

Hispano farmers, Weber argues, are hindered by a lack of access to land, water and credit. This threatens the long-term survival of family-based agriculture.  Weber overlooks the role of discrimination by the USDA and other credit, loan guarantee, or subsidy sources that have notoriously denied famers of color access to these markets. For Weber, smallholder intensive agriculture is not a viable alternative for future economic development in the Upper Río Grande bioregion and this has nothing to do with racial discrimination by the very institutions purporting to support farmers.

The construction of maladaptation is problematic in several ways.  It assumes that all Hispano farmers and ranchers have limited access to land, water and credit.  Other researchers, including my colleague sociologist Ruben Martinez, suggest that there are some significant generational and regional differences.  For example, younger Hispano and Anglo farmers have tended to use credit more often, for more reasons, and more effectively than older farmers.

Ruben Martinez and others have studied Hispano land loss and acquisition and found that there is an oft misunderstood complexity in patterns that go beyond the myth of mass displacement and out-migration.  Our own research in the San Luis Valley (1994-2008) found that Hispanos, and particularly college-educated men in their thirties, are actively acquiring land to expand acreage for irrigated row crops and pasture.  Current research suggests that many Hispanos are returning to work the land, sometimes after living in cities for two or three decades.

Throughout the Upper Río Grande there are dozens of agricultural cooperatives actively reviving local production.  Some of these efforts focus on helping younger farmers get started; others are designed to help part-time, limited-resource producers make the transition to full-time farming; and yet others are encouraging women to become more actively involved in the ownership and management of agricultural micro-enterprises.

There are clearly a variety of strategies Hispanos have used, and are using, to adapt to economic and technological changes in agriculture.  In a growing number of cases, Hispano farmers and ranchers are making a successful transition to commercial agriculture while blending "modern" mechanized technologies with traditional techniques.

The Myth of the Disappeared

There is a fourth myth which derives from the preceding three.  This is the myth of the "disappearing" rural folk culture.  A renowned cultural geographer recently expressed this myth in the following straightforward terms:

Unmistakably, given the trends of American agriculture and rural life, one can foresee the continuing erosion of the old way of life identifiable with the Spanish-American [sic] folk culture....After centuries of not having been confronted with the need for change, this way of life will disappear rather quickly, largely with the passing of the older generations and the alienation of their landholdings to non-Spanish Americans.  The farming of the small acreages will eventually cease altogether as they offer no hope to the younger generations. (Alvar Ward Carlson (1990) The Spanish-American Homeland: Four Centuries in New Mexico's Rio Arriba.  Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press; p. 213.)

One aspect of this myth states that Hispanos lived for centuries without having to confront the need for change.  Hispano culture has a static and unchanging quality.  Another aspect declares: Because Hispanos are not accustomed to change, when confronted by it they will disappear.  If Hispano culture is inherently conservative and resistant to change then surely the current frenetic pace of social, economic and technological change is bound to destroy the last remnants of what is viewed as a 19th Century relic.

As we will see, Hispano farmers have always adapted to change and one example we will discuss later is the changing roles of women in the household division of labor.

Historians and sociologists have been predicting the demise of rural Hispano culture since at least the 1930s.  Longstanding concerns with this presumably imminent extinction have led to many attempts to "preserve" Hispano culture.  Suzanne Forrest, in a brilliant study of the so-called Hispanic New Deal in New Mexico, notes how these efforts were:

 ....[d]esigned ostensibly to preserve Hispanic village life while "modernizing" the villagers and teaching them Anglo, middle-class economic behavior and cultural values...[T]he Hispanic New Deal was...part of both the 1930s intellectual fascination with "primitivism," and with our southern neighbor's socialistic experiment in education and land reform. (Suzanne Forrest (1987) The Preservation of the Village.  Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press; p. 16.)

As Forrest demonstrates, the progressive intellectuals who were involved in the pioneering Tewa Basin Study and the Interdepartmental Río Grande Board fell tragically short of effecting substantive land reform, even if they succeeded in amassing an impressive archive based on field research in numerous Hispano villages.

Contemporary researchers seem not to fully appreciate the significance of the Tewa Basin Study as a point of departure for understanding the political and ecological character of the most enduring problems facing Hispano agriculture.  The Tewa Basin researchers recognized that the key problems in the struggle for a revitalized rural economy centered on the unresolved land claims of Hispanos and the historical process of environmental degradation.  Land reform, the just resolution of Hispano claims, was the critical public policy issue that had to be resolved. 

This concern seems to have disappeared from much of the Southwestern agricultural literature.  Instead, the land reform question has become the focus of more recent scholarly work in the area of Spanish-Mexican land grant studies.  The study of Hispano agriculture cannot be separated from the study of Spanish-Mexican land grants any more than we can separate the watershed from acequias.  Afterall, the commons of the land grants are the watersheds of the village farms and ranches.  The land grants are not just a somewhat amorphous physical boundary system.  They also encompass ecosystems which bind the headwaters of the high mountain peaks with the irrigation networks in the riparian bottom lands.

Perhaps the failure to address land reform policies stems from the tendency of ag researchers to conflate cultural change with culture destruction?  It seems to us that the history of relations between Spanish-Mexicans and Anglos has always involved profound structural and ideological conflicts.  Change did not begin yesterday and Hispanos never occupied the land of mañana or poco tiempo.  Hispanos did not remain "outside" change over centuries, then or now.  Perhaps Hispanos more often are viewed as "swept along" rather than being in complete command of the direction of change throgh their own capacity for agency? 

The enchanted, timeless and yet disappearing "Hispanic" rural folk culture of the Southwest seems more the contrivance of a fanciful EuroAmerican imagination than an expression of authentic bioregional traditions and experiences. But myths often have at least some basis in reality.  What then might be real sources of this myth? 

Certainly, Upper Río Grande communities have faced numerous environmental, economic, political and social catastrophes: the loss (enclosure) and degradation of the commons and other lands; the breakup of riparian long-lots and the decline of the family as the basic economic unit of village life; a legacy of discrimination which produced persistent poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment; displacement by federal reclamation projects (e.g., Elephant Butte and Navajo Reservoir); and out-migration of youth to the cities to mention a few of the more critical problems.

All these problems have more than one ending.  For example, while migration of youth was a clear and persistent trend between the 1940s and 1960s, Hispano populations in many rural areas of the bioregion have stabilized.  In some cases, rural populations are growing in part through return migration from the cities.

The abandonment or loss of many farms and the existence of a large number of Hispano "ghost towns" is another source of the myth.  Will the Hispano family farm community disappear?  Are the smallholders of the Upper Río Grande following the path of the Midwestern farmers into financial bankruptcy and cultural oblivion?

The number of Hispano "commercial" farm owner-operators in the U.S. actually increased from 16,000 in 1982 to 17,000 in 1987 (and these are gross underreportings). There are still an estimated 50,000 parciantes (acequia water rights users) in New Mexico, consisting for the most part of small landholders who irrigate subsistence garden plots or maintain small pastures. It would appear that the persistence of Hispano land-based communities continues to defy the most astute predictions of disappearance.

We do not deny that Hispanos have suffered a tremendous loss of land, water and other resources.  Nor do we deny that very real threats are posed to rural Hispano communities by the forces of capitalist maldevelopment.  The enclosure of the land grant commons is not the only threat either.  Water rights have also been lost or destroyed by development and adjudication politics.  Rural industrialization (mining and timbering) pose a constant threat to the land and water rights of Hispano communities.  And the recent growth of high country tourism (skiing, backcountry hiking, hunting, fishing, etc.) poses additional threats from real estate and related infrastructure development. Given 150 years of assimilationist policies, a great loss in traditional values is also evident. 

But these losses do not present an all-encompassing or even irreversible experience.  Cultures change and evolve, sometimes against the proclivities of their members.  But change is not necessarily the death of a culture, particularly if people manage to conserve at least some of their land, water, language and customs.  In the absence of explicit genocidal policies, cultural change is seldom a zero-sum game. Indeed, resilience, the ability for local place-based cultures to renew their epistemological and ontological groundings, is a continuing source of cultural survival and metamorphosis.

The four myths also obscure the continuing role of the land as a type of "symbolic cultural capital."  Hispanos still view ownership of land as part of the family patrimony.  One does not sell a member of the family. This belief is associated with the existence and reproduction of a deeply-rooted political ideology, a native sense of place that begets "militant residency" on the land.

It is difficult to assess the changing nature of Hispano agriculture without accounting for non-market dimensions of economic and political life in land-based communities.  Hispanos have an emotional and physical attachment to the land; they have an historical memory of place.  Rural Hispanos in the Upper Río Grande have weaved a multigenerational land-based identity through storied residence (legends, folktales, aphorisms, and place names).  This sense of place can be a very powerful antidote to rootless modernity because it supports an ethos of militant resistance to outside pressures.

Given a militant ethos of "living-on-the-land" against the odds, it is not surprising that rural Hispanos have resisted disappearing for more than 150 years.  There are many reasons to believe that rural Hispano culture will continue to evolve and change, but there are very few reasons to expect that it will "disappear."  Hispanos are not likely to empty out of the countryside, rushing off into the cities like so many acculturated lemmings leaping off the precipice into the seas of cultural extinction.

NOTE: This excerpt is from the original and unedited version of a chapter first written in 1994 (and this explains the dates of the sources). The only changes in this entry include additions to place this in the context of the blog series. A revised, fully referenced, and more detailed ethnographic version of this chapter will appear in the forthcoming book, The Last Commons: Endangered Landscapes and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place (Arizona, 2011).

Water and Environmental Justice

SHORELINE, WA.  If you Google the phrase "water as commodity," the search algorithm will produce an interesting set of results. First, you'll see a variety of links to websites for stock brokers, investment banks, financial and commercial credit groups, or other investment service companies and organizations. All of these share something in common: They all promise "riches greater than gold" if you invest in water-related securities, derivatives, mutual funds, and other capital instruments.

This worldview, neoliberal to the core, is based on the principle that people with enormous financial assets have a right to make individual investment decisions that allow them to seek profit from the privatization of water, i.e., from its "pricing" as a commodity that can be sold and subject to speculation and is thus warranted for inclusion as part of a "good balanced and diversified portfolio."

Second, you will start noticing further down the pages a growing number of links to a broad range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies, water councils, watershed organizations, and indigenous organizations that share another highly contrasting view: Water is not a commodity and should be considered a human and ecosystem right (as is the case in Ecuador for example). Indeed, many cultures consider water sacred and the idea of treating it like a commodity is incompatible with extant social mores and cultural norms.

As the challenges of climate change assert themselves more prominently, the world will likely experience increasingly violent conflicts because nations and regions will struggle to maintain or gain access to drinkable water as well as sources for irrigation, industry, and other uses deemed essential to human survival and flourishing.

Many scientists warn that the growing human demand for water, coupled with unpredictable effects from climate change, is the most serious threat to biological diversity and the resilience of Earth's ecosystems. But the denial of access to water has also served as a tool of conquest, colonialism, and now neoliberal market exploitation.

Water Market Nirvanas for the Willfully Blind

Let us start with the views of the promoters of water as the "hot" and "it" commodity for future diversified and balanced investment portfolios. There is a site by the name of investopedia.com that specializes in investment counseling services and also has a fairly entertaining blog section. One of the blogs recently posted is entitled "Water: The Ultimate Commodity." 

The author begins with the following assertion: 

Rapid industrialization and increasing agricultural use have contributed to worldwide water shortages...Pollution also highlights the need for clean water. In the U.S., the dead zone off the Gulf Coast highlights the impact of fertilizer runoff, and methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), an additive in unleaded gasoline, can be found in well water from California to Maryland...Of course, fouled water supplies further limit the amount of fresh water available for human use...Like any other scarcity, the water shortage creates investment opportunities. Here are some of the more popular indexes designed to track various water-related investment opportunities.

The commodification of water clearly comes with a price, and I am not referring to the speculative exchange value placed on water as a scarce commodity or as a bet on the risk that the market value of water will rise or fall.

Instead, it seems to me that this approach to water requires that we pay a price in the internalization of a profound insensivitity to humans or the planet and their suffering. There is not a hint of concern for pollution, dead zones, and shortages. Indeed, from this view pollution is good! Shortages are great! Unmet thirst is a God-sent blessing for the moneychangers. Less drinkable water presumably means more profit for the quick-minded investor.

Another similar website, for something called seekingalpha.com, starts its pitch by using and co-opting one of the oldest and most cherished of all traditional aphorisms among aquaphiliacs (yes, I just invented that term): "Water is life." El agua es la vida, as we say in the Rio Arriba. This commodities blogger goes on:

We all need water to live. As useful as oil, copper and corn may be, we could get by without them for a while. But water? Water is a necessity. And for some, this makes it the ultimate commodity. People invest in commodities for a lot of reasons: for diversification; as a way to play growth in the developing world; because they think demand growth will outstrip supply. By those metrics, water may be the ultimate commodity investment. Demand for water is steady and never-ending, meaning water investments should not be correlated with broader economic developments. Meanwhile, history shows that as economies develop, citizens will demand more and more water to support richer lifestyles, making water an interesting play on countries like China and India. And finally, the world is in a silent water crisis, with rising demand set against limited supply; a classic commodities squeeze.

This is classic "blindspeak," by which I mean blind to ethical and humane implications. Anyone looking for an ethical justification for capitalist rationality, abandon all hope, and look elsewhere, as you certainly will not find that here.

The idea that water is the "ultimate commodity" and that it should not be "correlated with broader economic developments," is so obviously scurrilous and banal that it almost seems pedantic to point it out. Yet, here is a view of the world that seems "normal" because it is so "pervasive," especially to members of hyperconsuming "advanced" [sic] capitalist societies.

I pause a moment here to absorb this: When we term a society like ours as "advanced," we are not referring to environmental ethics are we? Anyone willing to make water a "thing with a price" that "makes for an interesting play" in rapidly industrializing countries like China and India is obviously not someone that will care about the fact that 1 in every 3 persons in the so-called "developing world" already lacks secure access to adequate drinking water. Or, they will care, that is, if there is a profit to be made, then they are willing to make it, even if the ratio of people without adequate water increases with the privatization and over-appropriation of water for other wasteful development projects.

Water as a Human Right

In startling contrast to the view of water as a commodity that is on display on these commercial websites and investor blogs, is the view of water as a human right shared by the massive majorities of the so-called "two-thirds" world. On websites from every corner of the world, from NGOs and indigenous organizations to UN agencies and university-based water research centers, we find shared consensus that water should not be treated as a commodity but as a sacred ecological commons.

Most famous among the many two-thirds world organizations struggling for "water justice" or "water democracy" is the grassroots organization of peasants and indigenous peoples that led the Cochabamba struggle. In 2000, thousands of Bolivian protesters engaged in a state of massive civil disobedience in an action designed to reverse a government policy that privatized the water supply system in this indigenous Andean region.

The struggle led to a important victory against neoliberal ideology and the formulation of the "Cochabamba Declaration," which states in part:

For the right to life, for the respect of nature and the uses and traditions of our ancestors and our peoples, for all time the following shall be declared as inviolable rights with regard to the uses of water given us by the earth:

1. Water belongs to the earth and all species and is sacred to life, therefore, the world's water must be conserved, reclaimed and protected for all future generations and its natural patterns respected.
2. Water is a fundamental human right and a public trust to be guarded by all levels of government, therefore, it should not be commodified, privatized or traded for commercial purposes. These rights must be enshrined at all levels of government. In particular, an international treaty must ensure these principles are noncontrovertable.
3. Water is best protected by local communities and citizens who must be respected as equal partners with governments in the protection and regulation of water. Peoples of the earth are the only vehicle to promote earth democracy and save water.

What could be further from the dominant ideology of unregulated privatization and commodification of the source of life itself? There are some self-evident truths in this declaration and perhaps the most significant of these is the idea that "local communities must be respected as equal partners...in the protection and regulation of water."

This call for place-based ecological democracy is a social force that even global capitalist speculators cannot control or manipulate. Investors may not be able to make a profit from the privatization of water but they will try, I am sure, to speculate on the risk of investing in water caused by this deep and widening movement for water justice. I am certain Goldman Sachs and its ilk were busy issuing a new set of "credit default swaps" on existing water privatization contracts over the past decade. Some of these likely were part of the "toxic assets" that brought AIG down.

Water is life. Sin agua no hay vida. Indigenous people understand this and continue to act with respect to the Earth and its ecosystems. So-called advanced industrial capitalist societies need to learn this and become more humble before the complexity and interconnectedness of the Earth and its peoples.