Anthropology Reading Reviews Questions

Itc!7 ,d

'i.

5, t'

,I I

tl n I{i

,hrtlr\l

I n"I ut

ftr

ft. A

,;, (*Jr" 4 .Jchn von fr tl x,rg" 1,.17 - Quw't :tton - L,J"ttft / C7'

],J, llr te^ . nJ 0r f rc./ {t

4 The Domain Environ m ent

of the

Thomas R. McGuire

Environnrental anthropology is a tag for a conrplex set of issues surround- ing the relation of humans to their environment. In particular, environnren- tal anthropologists are concerned with how to comprehend, analyze, and ameliorate environmental degradation and destruction (Escobar l99tl; Silli- toe l{)9ll). A long-standing concern is the management of renewable and nonrenewable resources and the conrnrunities of users that depend on such resources (King and Durrenberger 2000; Ostrom 1990). Anthropologists analyze and empower local knowledge about the natural rvorld and use that knowledge to loster ecologically and socially sustainable communities (Descola and Pdlsson 1996; Orlove and Brush 1996). Another focus has been on the rights of rninorities and the poor to a healthy environment- environmental justice in the rvake of environmental racism (Bowen et al. 1995; Mohai and Bryant l9!)tt). Climate change, climate vulnerability (Glantz 2001; Magistro and Roncoli 2001), socially constructed "acts of God," and genuine natural hazards (Oliver-Smith 199(i; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman l9!)l); Steinberg 2000) are also on the research agendas of envi- ronmental anthropologists and their interdisciplinary colleagues. Environ- mentalism in its many variants, radical and mainstream, North and South, is a complex topic of interest, both as a social movement and as a voice against the ecological consequences of economic development (Brosius 1991); Bryant l99tl; Hvalkof and Escobar l99tl; Kempton, Boster, and Hartley 191)5; Milton 1993).

Although these are contemporary and pressing concerns, anthropologists have had a long-standing interest in ecology, that is, the total relations of

88 Applied Anthropologlr

animals, including humans, to their environment. Reminiscing in The people of Puerlo./?rco (Stew'ard et al. 19.5(i), Eric wolf recounted how he and a num- ber of his fellorv studenrs were attracted to the discipline of anthropology and toJulian Steward's projcct o[.'cultural ecology":

For sonre of us, r'ho were going to school after World War II on public funds, anthropology offered a prospect of studying a "real" world of "real people." One had some hope then that knowledge could be linked to acrion and that better knowledge would yield better action. Julian Steward, who had then begun to teach at columbia University, seemed to us to offer the kind of matter-of-fact materialism which, we hoped, would allow us to study real people and to build that better knowledge. (Wolf 2001, 39)

Eric wolf, through much of his career, would deri'e m're inspiration from a Marxian political economy than Steward's cultural ec'logy. Nevertheless, those promises of the Puerto fuco project would still motivate subsequent generations of anthropologists and other social scientists to engage in the study of human relationships to the natural environment.

Social m<-rvements of the lg(i0s and lr)70s invigorated an interest in the environment and offered some blueprints for taking action. The civil rights movement would ev.lve from the civil disobedience of the early lg(i0s to urban riots at the end of the decade. The antiwar movemer)t could then nrodel its marches on rhe Pentagon after those on Selma. Earth Day of 1970 was a nationwide teach-in, and rvhen the antienvironment policies of Ronald Reagan andJames watt superseded those ofJimmy carter, ecorer- rorist groups such as Earth First! could draw on some o[ the tactics of the antiwar movement to keep environmental issues on the political agenda. Diverse as these movements were, they shared a culture of activism that stimulated people to take steps to address s.ciety's ills. Finalry, the Rio Sum- mit of 1992 issued a concise and global declaration: Human beings are enti- tled to a producrive and healthy life i' harmony with nature (Tsing 2001, 3).

I begin this excursion into the domain of environmcntal anthropology with a look at theoretical building blocks. Two of tlrese were already intro- duced: cultural ecology and politicar economy. A third, p.ritical ecology, is hotly contested no*' some scholars and practitioners are for it (watts n.d.), some against it (Vayda and walters lggg). I examine this endeavor to recon- cile cultural ecology and political economy. I then evaluate one subfield, maritime anthropology, not as a proxy for the entire domain of environ- mental anthropology, but as an arena in which a number of key concepts in human-environment relations have been addressed. These include the nature of property rights, the role of science and scientists in resource man-

The Dontain ol the Environment 89

agement, the possibilities and limits of local control of resources, and the nature of nature itself. Maritime anthropology is also an arena in which anthro- pologisu and other social scientists have entered into the policy process.

Many of the advances in maritime anthropology have come through tra- ditional ethnographic studies of coastal fishing communities. Environmental anthropologists have also engaged actively in the process of "scaling up," of developing methodologies for examining issues that affect large regions and global environmental concerns. Some of the tools required for scaling up have come from outside the discipline-remote sensing, geographic infor- mation systems (GIS), and powerful ecosystem simulation packages. Some are largely homegrown, such as the efforts to enlist local resource users and managers in mapping biodiversity over regional landscapes.

Environmental anthropologists are "scaling down" as well, addressing issues framed by neighborhoods. Backyard anthropology, an array of projects in which anthropologists address the environmental concerns of communities throughout the United States, offers another template for an applied environmental anthropology. Under a cooperative agreement between the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and the U.S. Envi- ronmental Protection Agency (EPA), practicing anthropologists have brought their skills and methods to bear on public issues. Few local prob- lems were solved during these relatively brief apprenticeships, but as one of the architects of the program observed, "I think the projects did demonstrate the potential for tangible results and the fact that paying attention to social processes is at least necessary, if not sufficient, for community-based, envi- ronmental problem solving" (Young 2001, 4tl).

These three templates-one where theoretical concerns central to anthro- pology are brought to bear on issues of public policy, the second where information-processing technologies have opened new lines of research and intervention, the third where the issues themselves are largely defined by local communities-do not exhaust the possibilities for an applied environ- mental anthropology. I conclude this selective survey of the domain with some brief observations on the opportunities for the engagement of anthro- pologists in environmental affairs.

Theory and Practice in Environmental Anthropology

Julian Steward's cultural ecology, which he applied to the complex society of Puerto Rico, was born on a simpler landscape, the Great Basin of Nevada" Utah, and California. Steward documented that the institutions of the region's aborig- inal inhabitants were "most extensively patterned by subsistence activides,"

90 Applied AnthropologSr

hunting and gathering. His cultural ecology, as a research method, posed a straightforward question: *whether the adjustments of human societies to their environments require particular modes of behavior or whether they per- mit latitude for a certain range of possible behavior patterns" (Steward 1955, 3ti). The analytic strategy was three-pronged, requiring examination first of the natural landscape, then of the cultural or behavioral devices employed to

exploit that environment, and finally of the institutional adaptations resulting from those behaviors (Steward 1938, 2).

This strategy would yield, for Steward, a "culture core," the "constellation o[ features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and eco- nomic arrangements'(1955, 10). This core thus encompasses the social, polit- ical, and religious institutions involved in making a living from the environnrent. Secondary or peripheral leatures ofa culture, acquired by diffu sion or random variation, give distinctive shapes to cultures with similar cores.

Eric Wolf, in his reassessment of cultural ecology as elaborated in Thc People of Puerto rRico (2001), drew strategically on a commentary on Stervard's Great Basin work by Robert Murphy (1970). Murphy, a student (though not a dis- ciple) of Steward's at Columbia in the late l9.t0s, observed that Steward's project was less about the grand relation between environment and culture and more about the (implicitly' more mundane) process of 'work,' the employment of tools and technologies to transform nature. Wolf put Mur- phy's observations in a Marxian frame. What Steward was concerned with was the "labor process," the ways people use tools to transform nature (Wolf 2001,40). Steward neglected Lo analyze,in People and in his earlier work in the Great Basin, what Marxists call the *social relations of production." These are concerned with the allocation of resources and the means to exploit them, questions that turn on dil'ferences in wealth and power ('t.l).

In retrospect, then, Wolf was differentiating trvo strains of inquiry that would occupy anthropologists and other social sciences for several genera- tions: political economy and cultural ecology. Thel' are connected through a common concern for the material bases of hunran existence. Cultural ecol- ogy, in its several reconfigurations, would remain focused on the interac- tions of people and their local environments- I'olitical economy would seek to tie those people to the world system of capitalism. The emergent political ecology, in turn, attempts to bring these levels of anall'sis, the local and the global, together. lt seeks to understand how political and ecological forces interact to cause social and environmental change.

Cultural Ecology Steward codified his approach to culture and the environment in his ?"ie-

ory of Culture Change (1955). In the 30 years that followed, Steward's students

The Domain of the Environment 9l

and their students actively worked to reconfigure cultural ecology. The first

modification was to focus on populations as the unit of analysis, rather than

Steward's culture core. This enabled anthropology to appropriate some powerful concepts and models from biology, primarily ecosystems, energy

flows, and adaptation. Inspired heavily by Eugene Odum's Fundamentab of

Ecotog (1953), ecosystem ecology (some labeled this transformation as

"human ecology," "systems ecology," or "neofunctionalism" [cf' Biersack

1999; Kottak 19991) built on the definition o[ ecosystem, the "structural and

functional interrelationships among living organisms and the physical envi-

ronment within which they exist" (Moran 1990,3). Emilio Moran, a leading

practitioner, suggested that the ecosystem approach attracted anthroPolo-

gists because it promoted holistic studies of human populations in their physical environment and because it could foster the development of a set

of common principles in biology and anthropology. Moreover, with the growing concerns in the 1960s for the environment and the fate of non- industrial societies, ecosystem ecology could turn the tools of science to the

advocacy of habitat and species preservation (l l).

The exemplar of the ecosystems approach was Plgs for lhe Anccslors (Rappaport lgtitl). Roy Rappaport measured energy flows through a New

Guinea ecosystem, including its human comPonent, the Tsembaga, based on

the prevailing assumption that energy was the only measurable common

denominator that structured ecosystems and that could serve to deline their

funcrion (Moran 1990, l7). He concluded that one TSembaga ritual, which

culminates in the kaiko, the slaughter and distribution of pigs to allies in war-

fare, performed the function of adapting local population sizes-of humans

and pigs-to the environment's carrying capacity, that is, the level of human

activity that can be sustained through time without degrading the environ-

ment. Rappaport's analysis encompassed the nutritional requirements of

pigs and people, the availability of land for cultivation, the energy expended

in productive activities, and the relations of war and peace among neighbors

(Rappaport l96tl). Anthropologists refined a systems ecology through the 1970s (cf. orlove

l9tt0), but fundamental rethinking in the mother sciences of biology and

ecology generated a significant revisionist trend in the ecological anthropol-

ogy of the 1980s. A "new ecology" developed in the 1970s and lI)tl0s, and it

challenged the basic understanding of ecosystems, that they contained mechanisms for self-regulation-for adjusting populations to the carrying

capacity of the environment (Botkin 1990). Disapprovingly, Rappaport characterized this movement as follows: "whereas the older ecology was

concerned with revealing nature's order and regularity, the newer ecology is

conccrned not <-rnly to discover disorder, disturbance and randomness but to

92 Applied Anthropologlr

replace conceptions olorder with them" (1990,44). In the face of these chal- lenges, Rappaport argued that it would be politically and socially absurd to abandon the ecosystem concept altogether. At the very least, it is "good to think" in ecosystemic terms when addressing contemporary environmental problem such as ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, deforestation, and acid rain-many of them systemically linked. Others, however, took up the challenges of studying nonequilibriating ecosystems and nonsystemic envi- ronments. Some of these forays would feature individual decision makers rather than populations and social groups.

John Bennett brought people to the fore in Northcrn Phircmen (l9ti9). His central concern was adaptation, the "process of coping with resources in order to realize goals-and by so coping, creating new goals or problems to solve" (l9ti9, l4). Bonnie McCay took up Bennett's charge by calling for a "people ecology" in 197U, partly to critique the extant systems ecology. In that frame, "What the analyst postulates as structure and function, or self- regulation and system goal, may be the outcome of the diverse strategies of multiple actors in complex interaction" (McCay 1978, 403).

As something of an aside, McCay acknowledged that "social relations of production" ought to be incorporated into the analysis because these may affect the ability of individuals and communities to control aspects of their relations to their resources. This is what readers of Marx have sought to do (Orlove l9tl(),250; cf. Ortner 1984; Roseberry l98tt). l

Political Economy and Political Ecology Marxist-inspired dependency theory was underdeveloped at the time of

Julian Steward's Puerto Rico project, and Eric Wolf acknowledged that the work failed to adequately conceptualize local communities within states, and states within larger systems. Andre Gunder Frank published Capitalism and Underdeuelopment in Latin America in 1967, gving academic legitimacy to the long history of Marxist critiques of imperialism. The toolkit of dependency theory evolved rapidly in the radicalized social and academic environment of the late 1960s and 1970s, and Wolf drew upon this to restate the Puerto fuco problem: Both Puerto Rico and the United States were enmeshed in the world system, dominated by capitalist relations of production. In this system, Wolf observed, "capital flows towards these segments, withdraws from them, or avoids them altogether, depending on the ability of capital to obtain above-average profits" (2001, 4(;-7). Through his prolific career, Wolf would endeavor to understand real people within the world system. But such people were not simply engaged in the *work process' of applying technology to nature; rather, they were people caught up in struggles to obtain and retain access to resources, to resist or manipulate the "penetra-

The Dontqin ol the Environment

tion of capital" into the countryside, to fight peasant wars when the opportu- nities arose-real people enmeshed in relations of power.

ln 1972, Eric Wolf sketched a political ecology that had roots in political economic approaches. He called for putting local rules of inheritance in a wider political and historical frame. The papers in the symposium he was introducing on the anthropology of the Alps, however, were still largely in

the tradition of cultural ecology. Several documented the significance of environmental variations "on the distribution of men, animals, and plants over the landscape, and on the specification and scheduling of work sites

and work tasks" (Wolf 1972,201). Geographers would take the lead in fashioning a political ecology out of political economy. The driving force was a growing awareness in the 1980s of widespread land and resource deg- radation throughout the Third World, such as soil erosion, water pollution, and deforestation. Causes were to be found in the social relations of produc-

tion and the macro-level politics of states and larger systems. The defining text for political ecology was Land, Degradalion and Society

(l9ti7) by geographers Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield. Understandings of environmental change must address the political, economic, and histori- cal context of the "land manager." Anthropologists Peter Little and Michael Horowitz published a collection the same year on Lands al Risk in lhe Third World: Local-Leael Perspecliaes (1987). In that volume, Marianne Schmink and Charles Wood laid out a succinct agenda examining the environmental destruction in lowland Amazonia. As summarized in a subsequent volume, The Social Causes of Enaironmental Deslruction in Latin America (Painter and Durham 1995), the elements to be researched included the following: the nature of production, whether precapitalist or capitalist, in a specific region; the class structure of the region and the patterns of conflict over access to resources; the nature of market relations and means through which sur- pluses are accumulated; the policies of the state that work to the benefit of certain classes over others; the role of international agencies and corpora- tions in local resource use; and, finally, "the ideology that orients resource use-for example, the position that rapid economic Srowth is the best way to address social and environmental problems-and what grouPs benefit from that ideology" (Painter and Durham 1995, 8). This agenda for political ecology stimulated a large body of work by anthropologists and geographers

through the 1990s (e.g., Bebbington and Batterbury 2001; Peluso 1992; Schroeder 1993; Zimmerer l99l).

Susan Stonich's (1995) research along the Pacific coast of Honduras fol- lowed this formula. After decades of economic stagnation and mounting for-

eign debt, the Honduran government embarked on an aggressive program to expand shrimp aquaculture along the country's coastlines. Concessions of

93

94 Applied Anthropolopgr

land were granted to Honduran investors, including government officials, urban elites, and military leaders. Incentives were offered to transnational corporations. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) loaned substantial funds for the establishment of large-scale shrimp farms. Under these stimuli, total production of cultivated shrimp grew l,6l I per- cent lrom l97tt to l9lltl; in a rhree-year period from lg86 to lgtig, shrimp ponds expanded from l,{rl0 to 5,500 hectares. In Sronich's analysis, this export-driven expansion had severe social and environmental conse- quences. Small landowners have been removed from land needed for shrimp ponds; wetlands, once utilized by local residents for fishing, shellfish harvesting, and firewood, have been converted to private ownership; few new jobs have been generared by the aquaculture operatious for displaced residents; the resource base of coastal fishers deteriorated as the construc- tion ol'shrimp farnrs destroyed habitat, blocked estuaries, and rechanneled rivers. Skrnich concluded that ignoring the environmental and social effects of development for exporr *may c;ruse ecosystems to exceed their limits and precipitate a permanent human and ecological crisis in the region" (lgg.i, g0).

This is vintage political ecology. Two critiques emerged, however. The first contended that political ecology contained too much politics and too lit- tle ecology. The second contended that it did not contain enough politics. Andrew Vayda and several of his colleagues and students are against politi- cal ecology to the extent that it gives prioriry-a priori-to politics. lvlichael Watts, Arturo Escobar, and others are lor a *politicized" political ecology that attends to the struggles of peasants and other land managers to protest against thc nexus of power they find themselves in-to employ environmen- tal discourse to invigorate social nrovements (cf. Escobar lggg; Hvalkof and Escobar l99tl).

Vayda is a veteran of the skirmishes within cultural ecology, urging as early as ll)(jtt that populations, not Steward's cuhure core, be the object of analysis (Vayda and Rappaport l9(;tt), then rejecting the equilibrium assumptions of a systems ecology (Vayda and McCay lt)75), then promoting an actor-oriented approach to the study of environmental events and changes. Vayda's salvo against political ecology, published with co-combatant Bradley walters, rvas aimed at the insistence of "self-styled p<llitical ecolo- gists" that political influences-especially political inlluences from the out- side, from the so-called wider political system-are always important, arguably more inrportant than anything else, and should accordingly be given priority in research (Vayda and Walters lggg, l(;8).

In place of such "politics without ecology," they proposed an *event ecol- ogy," in which research begins with an environmental event or change and then proceeds *to work backward in time and outward in space so as to

Tht Domain of the Environment 95

enable us to construct chains of causes and effects leading to those events or changes" (Vayda and Walters 1999, 169). In an earlier discussion of this method of progressive contextualization, Vayda highlighted its potential util- ity to policymakers, concerned with broad questions such as deforestation and how to arrest it. Researchers can thus break such broad questions down into rnore specific activities such as timber harvesting. These then become the objects for progressive contextualization. As Vayda contended, progres- sive contextualization *leads to concrete findings about who is doing what, wh1' they are doing it, and with what effects, and the very concreteness of the findings means that the policy implications are quite concrete too and readily communicable to policy makers" (Vayda 1983, 276).

Politicized political ecologists are less concerned with applying knowl- edge to problems (especially when those problems are defined, top-down, by policymakers) than they are with the liberation of dominated peoples. Liberation ecology, as defined by geographers fuchard Peet and Michael Watts (Peet and Watts 1996), starts with the proposition voiced by a Mexican activist: *You must be either very dumb or very rich if you fail to notice that 'development' stinks" (quoted in Peet and Watts 1993, 238). It incorporates a postmodern conception of "truths" as "statements within socially produced discourses, rather than 'facts' about reality" (228). Liberation ecology employs discourse analysis and examines local knowledge to comprehend sustainability and pr<lmote alternative development strategies. It seeks to "unc<lver the discourses of resistance" to development and to "put them into wider circulation" (Peet and Watts 1993,247; cf. Escobar 1998).

Practitioners working in the developing arena of political ecology dis- agree on a number of issues, and a unified frame is perhaps as unlikely as it is unnecessary (cf. Paulson, Gezon, and Watts 2003). Nonetheless, to be a viable approach to the analysis of human-environment interactions, it can- not afford to ignore either its politics or is ecology. It should attend to the processes of *work" thatJulian Steward was concerned with, the application of tools and technologies to the transformation of the environment. At the same time, it should attend to the larger political economy within which real people, doing real things, are often constrained in the choices they make and in the resources available to them. In short, political ecology needs to attend to both of its theoretical roots.

Concepts and Applications: The Case of Maritime Anthropology

Maritime anthropology is a domain within a domain. Anthropologists and kindred social scientists who study fishing communities and intervene

96 Applied Anthropologsr

in fisheries policy have faced, and sometimes fashioned, many of the issues at the forefront of a larger environmental anthropology. These include the nature of property rights. Fish, like pastures, forests, and the atmosphere, are prone to the tragedy of the commons, and fisheries anthropologists have worked long and hard to find, document, and recommend solutions to the problem of a resource that has no owners. Maritime social scientists have also been concerned with issues of sustainability, as have those throughout the domain of environmental anthropology. On this score, the record for the world's fisheries is not good. Thus, maritime anthropologists and their col- leagues have studied fisheries science, often with the conviction, and fre- quently the conclusion, that such science hiu failed the world's fisheries. They have studied and advocated traditional ecological knowledge as a comple- ment to big science. They have made significant contributions to the new ecology of chaos and have drawn clear policy implications from this research. Most significantly, perhaps, they have placed notions of co- management-the call for local communities to share in the management of their own resources-firmly on the agendas of state and international resource management. A handful of anthropologists have taken their seats in those agencies. They have, to one extent or another, fostered whatJohn van Willigen distilled as the "new synthesis" for applied anthropology, building on local knowledge, participation, empowerment, critical con- sciousness, and sustainability (van Willigen 20U,,t4). Here I assess some of these forays into an applied maritime anthropology.

Questioning Common Property Garrett Hardin's elegant argument in "The tagedy of the Commons'

(1968) sparked several decades ofrebuttal work by anthropologists, potitical scientists, geographers, legal scholars, and others. Much of the anthropologi- cal response drew upon fisheries cases. In fact, economist H. Scott Gordon had earlier formulated Hardin's tragedy around the fishery. Gordon con- cluded that there is substantial truth to the notion that everybody's property is nobody's property: "The fish in the sea are valueless to the fisherman, because there is no assurance that they will be there for him tomorrow if they are left behind today" (lg5-1, 121).

Hardin's tragedy :rlso played out on the village commons, where a rational herder would graze more and more head, garnering all the proceeds from the additional animals but bearing only a fraction of the costs of overgraz- ing. Inevitably the pasture would be destroyed: "the freedom o[ the com- mons brings ruin to all" (Hardin l9(i8, 12.14). His two solutions to the common property dilemma would prove unpalatable to many social scientists: plivatization or government regulation.

The Domain ol the Environment 97

There was a concerted effort to more precisely define the problem and the nature of property rights regimes. Strictly, the regime Hardin was model- ing was one of open access, the absence of well-defined property rights where access to resources was unregulated and open to all. A private property regime entailed the right of an owner to exclude access to resources and, typically, transfer or sell these resources to others. State property regimes vested resource rights exclusively in governing bodies, empowering such entities to make decisions on access and levels of exploitation. Distinguished from these regimes is communal property, under which resources ale held by identifiable communities of interdependent users. These users regulate use by members of the community and prevent outsiders from exploiting those resources. As David Feeny and his colleagues have defined communal property, rights to resources within the community are olten rights of equal access and use, not of exclusive property. These rights may be legally recog- nized. ln other cases they may be de facto, "depending on the benign neglect of the s[ate" (Feeny et al. 1990, 2).

Many researchers were inclined to accept Hardin's model of the human being as a rational, self-interested actor, but they argued that after several years of declining yields or deteriorating environmental conditions, these actors would come together to make and enforce rules for resource use (cf. Ostrom 1990). Anthropologist James Acheson painstakingly docu- mented one such case on the lobster fiefs of Maine, first publishing his results in 1975 (cf. Acheson l98t|). Lobster fishers working out of individual harbors formed *lobster gangs" and defined and defended territories, in effect turning an open-access property reginre into a communal one. In ter- ritories that are strongly guarded-perimeter-defended territories-harbor gangs also agreed to self-regulate their fishing effort. Acheson was able to document the biological and econornic benefits of this system. In perimeter- defended territories, there were fewer boats and fewer fishermen per square mile and lower levels of fishing effort. Local conservation measures, such as closed seasons and limits on the number of traps, controlled fishing efforts. As Acheson noted, these measures did not affect the total lobster catch, but they reduced lobster mortality and increased the proportional catch of larger, more valuable lobsters. Finally, "[glreater stock density in the perimeter-defended areas suggests that reduced effort has halted the process of overexploitation" (Acheson l9tl7, 57-5tJ).

Folk Management, Co-Management Acheson's important work, in which both the economy of fishing and

the ecology of lobsters were well documented, invigorated the field of maritime anthropology. A number of researchers set out to find similar

t

98 Applied Anthropologlr

"folk management" schemes in the world's fisheries, leading however to overzealous and poorly documented claims to ecological sustainability. Prefacing a collection of these studies, Christopher Dyer and James McGoodwin defined this arena as follows:

Folk management in the fisheries is management by and for fishing people themselves. It naturally arises as an inevitable outcome of resource utilization by fishing peoples. Formally defined, it is any localized behavior originating outside state control that facilitates the sustainable utilization of renewable natural resources. (1994, l)

The inevitability of f<llk management systems and their durability would be questioned (cf. King and Durrenberger 2000, 9). Indeed, few of the case studies assembled by Dyer and McGoodwin support their faith in folk man- agement. Caroline Pomeroy's analysis of Mexico's Lake Chapala fisheries disclosed failed efforts to maintain exclusive resource boundaries, little sup- port by government agencies for local organizational initiatives, and a result- ant tragedy of the commons (Pomeroy l99a). McGoodwin's own study of Mexico's coastal shrimpers revealed that efforts at local management are "hardly worth the effort, given the pervasive pessimism about ever seeing the more valuable marine resources return to their former abundance" (McGoodwin 1994, 50). William Ward and Priscilla Weeks evaluated offers by the Texas Coastal Fisheries Division (CFD) to suspend state regulation of oyster harvesting. The industry itself rejected the offer, believing it to be a covert attempt to destroy the industry. Ward and Weeks suggested, then, that the industry's view of human nature coincided with that of the CFD biolo- gists: "if humans are given a public resource to use with no restrictions, they will 'keep taking until the last one is gone'" (1994, l0U).

Evelyn Pinkerton (1994) concluded the Dyer and McGoodwin collection with a careful specification of the conditions required for effective folk man- agement and a warning that neither the state nor the market will go away. Folk management systems may be expected to arise, she suggests, when a community has experienced a long period of stable population size, afford- ing it an opportunity to experiment, learn, and adapt to local resources. Such adaptations would occur through trial and error where the resource base is forgiving-where mistakes could be made that were not fatal to that resource. Based on the case studies presented, she suggested that such condi- tions are rare.

As an alternative to folk management, Pinkerton and others call for schemes of co-management. Resource regulatory agencies incorporate legit- imate local management practices into regulatory regimes, provide legal backing for local activities, and foster local participation in management

The Domain of the Environment 99

decisions. Responsibilities for initiating regulations are shared by local users

and their managers. Svein Jentoft situated co-management between the

property regimes of communal and state, as "a meeting point between over-

all government concerns for efficient resource utilization and protection, and local concerns for equal opportunities, self-determination, and self-

control" (l9t|9, 144). Jentoft thus acknowledged that the tragedy of the commons may occur in unregulated fisheries but suggested that the partici-

pation of local fisheries organizations in the framing of regulations will enhance the legitimacy of such regulations and increase the possibility that

local fishers will comply with those regulations (Jentoft t98S). Although there was a general consensus in the fisheries social sciences

that co-management was a desirable goal, there was a rather categorical

rejection in these same circtes of what was becoming the dominant tool in

state-sponsored fisheries management in the l9U0s and 1990s: individual transferable quotas. Quotas are a form of output control, efforts to limit

catches to a sustainable level over the long term. They are also a form of

private property because individual fishermen or boats are accorded the right to obtain a specific quantity of fish out of the total allowable catch (TAC) as estimated by fisheries scientists for a given season. In early schemes, individual quotas could be transferred, bought, and sold on the

free market, and anthropologists quickly raised objections on equity grounds. There were concerns about the fairness of initial allocations, and

then concerns about the acquisition and consolidation of quotas in the hands

of large operators (National Research Council 1999; Pdlsson 1998)' A deeper critique of quotas and TAC, and the fisheries science upon which these are based, would surface in the 1990s. This critique drew upon the "new ecology" of chaos and complexity, producing calls for management

policies rhat foster flexibility and resiliency (Berkes and Folke l99tt). Before examining the new direction, I turn to a spectacular failure in fish- eries management.

The Collapse of the Cod The collapse of northern cod stocks, and the indefinite moratorium

imposed in 1992, affected 35,000 fishers and fish plant workers in New- foundland and Labrador. This has rightly been labeled "the classic case of

the failure of conventional science-based fisheries management" (Finlayson

and Mccay t99ti, 3l l). It is also, I have argued, a test case for linking the ana-

lytical traditions of political economy and cultural ecology (McGuire 1997).

Prior to 1977, the waters off Canada had been fished by voracious factory

freezer trawlers from a dozen European nations as well as by Canada's own

fleet. In the early 1970s, the International Commission for the Northwest

F

roo Applierl Anthropology

Atlantic Fisheries (lcNAl') introduced quoras, which were weakly enforced by member states over their orvn fleets. Quotas were set at "maximum sus- tainable yield," which proved to be unsustainable. Average catches had plummeted from IJOO,(XX) rnetric rons in the 1960s to 2I.I,(XX) tons by l!)77, when canada unilaterally declared a 200-mile exclusive fisheries jurisdic- tion and commenced a rebuilding process. Quotas were set by scientists from the Department of Iisheries and Oceans (Df'O) at more modest fishing mortality targets, prclviding, it was thought, "a buffer against stock assess- ment errors and e.ftrrcement deficiencies" (Lcar and Parsons lgl)li, {iti). By the end of the l l)ti0s, it became increasingly clear that even these targets were excessive, and the science underlying them came under intense scrutiny.

DFO scientists based their annual targets on t!!,o sources of data: research surveys performed by the department and the catch per unir effort (CpUE) reported by the country's offshore fishing fleet. Through the 1980s, these data sets diverged significantly; the surveys showed thar stocks had grown very little since l97ti, whereas the CPUE data shou'ed stocks at about three times what they were in the late lg70s. Df o scienrisrs resolved this discrep- ancy by essentially averaging the two data sets.

Warnings within and outside the scientific community that quotas were too high and that assessments \r,ere wrong went largely unheeded until l1)t19, when quotas for the lgl)0 offshore fishery were substantially reduced. Even then, the two integrated fishing and processing firms resisted any reductions in t<-rtal allowable catches. one decp-sea trawler skipper wrote to St.John's newspaper: "I've been fishing northern cod f.r eight years, and I tell you there are more fish there now than there were eight years ago" (quot"d in Finlayson and McCay 191)lt,32{i).

christopher Finlayson and Bonnie Mccay offered a parriar hypothesis fcrr the failure of fish science, one that draws on the relations of porver-the political economy of the industry and its managers. Scientists know the truth but are not listened to by fisheries policymakers, rvho have a vested interest in portraying the stocks under their care as healthy. They further suggest that the heavy debts of oflshore fishery companies and the high number of jobs at stake in their processing plants "may have played a role in closing eyes and ears until it was roo late" (lggtt, 32ti).

one set of truths that rvas emerging, and that uent largely unheard until the cod stock collapsed, came from inshore fishermen. Larry Felt and Bar- bara Neis, sociologists at the Mem<lrial University in st. -fohn's, had been gathering local knowledge from these fishermen, through interviews and archival research, and the material pointed quite clearll, to signs of a declin- ing stock, such as the decrease in the nurnbers

'f la'ger, breeding fish(cf. Felt and Neis ll)lxi). l'ishermen themselves were (nral)adapting to this

The Dontain of the Environment I O I

stock decline by increasing their fishing effort and adopting more efficient technology. David Hearn from Petty Harbour increased the number of cod traps he operated: "Even though we were increasing our gear the fish were getting smaller. Fish wasn't half the size the last few years as they had been years before that. We had to catch twice as much fish for the same amount of weight" (quoted in Neis 1992, l(;3).

Other researchers linked humans, technology, and the environment in a cultural ecology of faulty science and resource collapse (e.g., Steele, Andersen, and Green 1992). My own postmortem is an argument against a political ecology that slights ecology. ln retrospect, three processes were at work in the collapse. First, in the euphoric though cautious optimism after Canada declared its 20(lmile exclusive zone, Canadian deep-water trawlers were upgradcd with new technologies for finding and harvesting fish, even though the actual number of vessels was fixed. Second, skippers were encouraged to fish in areas that had theretofore been the province ofthe for- eigm distant water fleets, and they quite rapidly learned how to fish those grounds. Third, the ecology of the cod came into play. There was an appar- ent increase in cod stock concentrations as these stocks declined in the l9tl0s, increasing their "catchability." Together, these processes worked to distort the interpretation o[ catch per unit effort. High trawler catch rates coincided rvith declining stocks because fishers were discovering where to find the last northern cod (McGuire 1997).

Chaos Faced with such failures in conventional resource management, a number

of anthropologists incorporated the metaphor of chaos into their thinking about marine systems and how they should be managed (Acheson and Wilson l!)96; Smith 1990; Wilson et al. l99l). The thrust of one such effort, the Uni- versity of lvlaine Chaos Project, was to generate a multispecies ecosystem model for the Gulf of Maine fish stocks that more accurately represented ecosystem behavior than the dominant modes of stock assessment utilized by fisheries scientists. Those "numeric" modes were predicated on a stock- recruitnrent assumption-that the size o[ the stock available to be exploited in one year is a function of the size of the breeding stock that survived the fishery in the previous year. Models using this assumption form the basis for most management regimes, calculating the total allowable catch and restraining fishing efforts to the appropriate level. However, the evidence of numerous crises in the world's fisheries that are managed this way suggests that it was not working.

The University of Maine's modeling exercise began by setting a few con- stant parameters, representing spawning potential, growth rates, habitat, and

t02 Applied AnthropologSr

migratiorr, that in the real world remain relatively stable over time. Stable parameters lend a degree of order to chaotic systems; fish populations will vary in unpredictable ways, but they will remain within a normal range of historical limits (Acheson and Wilson 199(i, 584; cf. Acheson, Wilson, and Steneck 1998). Acheson and Wilson offered a simple recommendation to fisheries regulators: Manage fisheries by managing the parameters, not the numbers. The goals of management should be to maintain critical life pro- cesses such as spawning; to outlaw fishing during certain parts of the life cycle; and to maintain areas such as breeding grounds, migration routes, and nurseries that are essential for the growth of the species. This can be done by rules governing fishing locations, fishing areas, and fishing tech- niques, an approach to management, they observed, "that is taken in so many tribal and peasant societies" (Acheson and Wilson 1996, 58.1-85).

Parametric management has not displaced numeric management in the world's fisheries, but its implications are consonant with the growing interest in ecosystem management, refugia, and marine protected areas (cf. Gadgil, Hemam, and Reddy 1998; Pitcher, Hart, and Pauly lgg8). Parametric man- agement, however, draws its inspiration from folk management, and both are beset by the problems of evidence. Acheson and Wilson acknowledged this:

[T]here is very little statistical data that local-level folk management rules are effective in conserving the resource. The evidence is largely anecdotal. . . . [Aluthors have noted that resources have not crashed and have assumed that the sustained yields are due to folk manage- ment rules. (1996,586)

Nevertheless, Acheson and Wilson marshaled the ethnographic materials from dozens of tribal and peasant fishing societies (none of which were man- aged through quotas) to support the case for parametric management of industrial fisheries. Much of this evidence was collected by American mari- time anthropologists working within a tradition of cultural ecology. And, as previously noted, much of this research was undertaken to contest Hardin's model of the tragedy of the commons and the self-interested and short- sighted actor who, if unfettered, would bring about the tragedy.

Canadian anthropologists and sociologists turned to political economy rather than cultural ecology to analyze the industrialized fisheries of the Maritimes and Newfoundland. observing a landscape of failing fish stocks and socioeconomic crisis in Nova Scotia in the l9U0s, Anthony Davis looked to government fisheries policies. Those policies fostered the profes- sionalization of small-boat fishers through training in accounting, small business operations, and taxation and fiscal planning. Davis argued that these policies, aimed at the goal of turning fishing into a small business

The Domain ol the Environment t03

enterprise rather than a way of making a living, in fact spawned a class of very Hardinesque "rapacious fishers": *government management policies, which were predicated on the premise that fishers were irresponsible self- seekers and, thus, prone to over exploit ocean resources, have created the very conditions necessary to fulfill their prophecy" (1991,20). Davis and others are doubtful that the localized practices and norms governing fishing for a living can survive the ingestion of competitive, utilitarian rationality peculiar to industrial capitalism.

Maritime Anthropology in the Policy Process In the final analysis, maritime social scientists have not prevented fisher-

ies disasters. But Bonnie McCay, long a participant in fisheries policy forums, is guardedly optimistic about the contributions anthropologists and others are making to resource management thinking and practice. They have added their voice to the growing numbers of fisheries scientists who question the logic of managing by numbers (Ludwig, Hilborn, and Walters 1993). They have championed the idea that ecosystems, not single species, should be the units of management (Pauly and Maclean 2003; Pitcher, Hart,

and Pauly l99tt). They have promoted the notion that fishers themselves should have a say in how they are managed, and co-management is now on the agenda for resource managers worldwide (Haroldsdottir 2000). They are less enamored now with some of the unrealistic claims made in the name of folk management, which should add credibility to anthropological intervbn- tions in policy. Most recently, McCay is making the case for participatory research, in which scientists and fishers collaborate to define community needs and find workable and acceptable solutions (Finlayson and McCay l99tt; McCay 2000; McCay 2001). This mode of intervention is the touch- stone of the backyard anthropology promoted by the collaborative effort of the EPA and the SfAA; participatory research also plays a sig.nificant role in the endeavors to scale up to study human-environment relations beyond the

local community.

Scaling Up: Mapping and Countermapping The driving ftrrces for scaling up are multiple. Land degradation, soil loss,

deforestation, and desertification have been concerns of social and environ-

mental scientists ars well as of those whose livelihoods depend on the resources of these landscapes. The loss of biological diversity and the recog-

nition that this diversity can best be maintained by preserving the integrity of terrestrial and marine areas have been acknowledged by local resource users, environmental activists, and land managers. Assaults on indigenous