Christopher Boyer – A Land Between Waters
4 November, 2021 -
examPrep
- 3 – “Generations of historians have studied environmental revolution associated with colonialism, but they have largely ignored the more recent and ambiguous political ecology of modernity. Yet the relationship between people and the landscape has undergone fundamental transformations in the past two centuries as new technologies have revolutionized resource extraction, organic fuels have ceded to fossil fuels, and Mexico has become an urban nation. This does not add up to a one-way history of relentlessly increasing exploitation of natural resources and a secular trend of environmental decline, however. On the contrary, a close examination of Mexico’s modern environmental history leads to a substantially more complicated periodization.”
- 3-4 – “It is hardly surprising that most mechanization, technological development, and investment in hydrological projects — and eventually the deployment of Green Revolution technologies such as pesticides and fertilizers — have occurred during times of relative social peace and economic advancement.”
- 4 – “The result has normally been to increase state capacities to promote and regulate the use of nature and to elaborate initiatives intended to promote modernization and continued growth.”
- 10-11 – “The Cardenas administration of 1934-1940 sped the pace of redistribution and labored to provide peasant communities the tools to use their land more efficiently by making rural credit available, organizing producer’s cooperatives, and using institutions such as the Banco Ejidal as makeshift agricultural extension agencies. Emily Wakild and I have described these development-minded Cardenista policies as ‘social landscaping,’ that is, a holistic political project intended to manage rural society and nature together to rationalize the countryside.”
- 11 – “Cardenismo combined elements of centralization and decentralization insofar as it sought to increase rural productivity and manage resource use in the context of a strengthening state, yet it decentralized many elements of rural political life by granting land from haciendas and agribusinesses to rural communities. . . . Indeed, the Cardenista experiment in social landscaping might have offered an alternative to the cycles of centralization and decentralization if not for the realignment of political priorities that took place in the wake of World War II.”
- And so contradicts your cyclical centralizing/decentralizing intensive/extensive paradigm?
- “Political leaders [during the Mexican Miracle, mid-1940s to 1982 debt crisis] used power over tariff policies and control of labor and campesino unions to embark on a program of import-substitution industrialization and agricultural modernization based on the use of pesticides and fertilizers.”
- 13 – “Conceptualizing the environmental history of modern Mexico as a cycle of centralizing and decentralizing phases of resources use does not merely reveal the fundamental interconnectedness of political economy and the environment; it suggests that a systematic study of environmental history can contribute to contemporary debates about environmental policy.”
- “The political ecology of centralization has historically been associated with state policies that both promote and regulate resource use; by the same token, decentralized modes have historically arisen during period of diminished state power, allowing communities and commercial interests alike greater latitude either to preserve or to despoil the resources under their control.”
- I.e. centralization has higher floor and lower ceiling of environmental sustainability, while decentralization has lower floor and higher ceiling thereof.
- 14 – historiography of environmental histories of Mexico — it’s a short one — includes Melville
