Mikael Wolfe – Watering the Revolution

1-2 – “Mexican federal engineers, also known as tecnicos, were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, to implement it, they actively mediated knowledge between state and society, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.”
2 – conflict between development and enviro sustainability, as in plague of sheep
6-7 – is there an argument to be made, and is wolfe making it implicitly, that the envirotech approach is always applicable to environmental historians and historians of technology because of the inter-referential nature of the definitions of “environment” and “technology”?
10-11 – “soft authoritarian” mexican state
12 – debate between hubristic view of nature vs. nature as fragile and finite
247 – synthesis of spatial marginality and temporal non-coevalness as the result of conquest, or the failure to embrace its hegemony

paul kelley vieth