Eve Buckley’s Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil studies the drought-prone sertao region of Brazil and interactions between its inhabitants the sertanejos and technocrat and bureaucrat government representatives as the negotiate their responsibilities to one another and the environment. These disparate groups with sometimes allied, sometimes conflicting, motives struggle to conceive of droughts variously as socio-economic, technological, and/or ecological-climatic problems. Ultimately, Buckley focuses on experts and their knowledge, and though she questions the ability of scientific expertise to solve social problems, she never challenges that expertise by realigning her scholarly focus on local sertanejo expertise, instead, solely examining “science and technology as vexed instruments of social reform in an impoverished Latin American region.”

 

• 1 – Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil examines science and technology as vexed instruments of social reform in an impoverished Latin American region.
• Central to this study is climate unpredictability and the risks it presents in landscapes of entrenched poverty.
  • Landscapes of entrenched poverty — some kind of connection between the ecological condition of the landscape and the socio-economic conditions of the people resident there
•  Ultimately, this book asks to what extent scientific expertise can solve pressing social problems—particularly, glaring inequities in wealth and security. It highlights the constraints on technocrats as agents of social change.
• 13 – They believed that the specialized knowledge of their particular fields would generate similar outcomes even when applied in contexts subject to very different political dynamics. This was the essential promise of science: its universal applicability.
  • 1 – A case study in the locality of scientific knowledge?
• 14 – The history of drought control efforts in northeastern Brazil suggests a general critique of technologically based development engaged in by many governments and nongovernmental organizations during the twentieth century. Despite the recurrent optimistic belief of technocratic personnel that their skills could solve the entrenched problems of historically poor regions without engendering massive social upheaval, there was often no way to bypass political confrontation and still remedy the long-standing marginalization of impoverished regions and people. Technocrats operate in a political landscape that shapes the potential impact and effectiveness of their recommendations.
  • The development critique
  • “Political landscapes”
• 29-30 – and the careful introduction and management of improved technology would alter both the landscape and its inhabitants.
  • Co-control
• 31 – Da Cunha himself adhered to this theory, describing the sertão’s barrenness as the result of Indian and Portuguese settlers’ routine use of fire to create pasture, combined with a ferocious wind and rain cycle. Such criticism implied that more rational cultivation and pastoral practices in the sertão would end the region’s climatic woes and improve the backland economy.
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• 86 – What gave meaning to the Escola Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro (as well as to the Escola de Minas and to some extent the Politécnica in São Paulo) was mostly their role in the creation of a new breed of elite intellectuals who could challenge the established wisdom of priests and lawyers in the name of modern science. The notion that society could be planned and ruled by engineers, which was well within the French tradition, would have a large impact in Brazil.”
  • 1 – who gets to “know” brazil and, consequently, its landscape
• 90 – A nuanced version of this theory, articulated by cleric and scholar Florentino Barbosa, argued that the northeast’s interior plain was a fragile climate requiring careful adaptation by its inhabitants. Yet settlers since colonial times had not adapted to the limitations of their semiarid landscape, so human and natural forces operated in tandem to adversely affect the environment: deforestation increased wind erosion of the sertão’s shallow soils, and abandonment of farms during droughts exposed the vulnerable land to intense sun and, later, heavy rains
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• 96 – A prominent cearense landowner himself, and an advocate of technological improvements to farming and ranching, Brasil Sobrinho portrayed IOCS’s infrastructural investments as a means of ensuring social peace by enriching all residents of the drought zone through improved technology.
  • Co-control
• 110 – Like other positivist drought agency técnicos, Santos wished to imbue his workers with a more progressive mind-set, one less resigned to letting nature’s caprice determine their fate.
  • Co-control
• 140 – Struggles for Authority over IFOCS: Agronomists versus Engineers
  • 1 – who gets to know what to do about a drought — what about the sertanejo’s knowledge of nature, droughts, and drought remediation? I know this is a story about polytecnicos but damn
• 149-50 – Trinidade recommended that irrigated farming operate in two different modes, for normal and drought years. During droughts, irrigated fields would be used to grow corn, beans, and other crops basic to human sustenance. The residual material from those crops would sustain cattle as well. During normal years, when staple crops were abundant, resource-intensive irrigation could be more profitably used to grow arboreal cotton. Reliable soil moisture guaranteed a higher quality crop than could otherwise be grown in the sertão.
  • 2 – irrigation network and drought conditions co-produce a planting regime
• 156 – Duque’s Solo e Água no Polígono das Sêcas (Soil and water in the drought polygon) recommends cultivating commercially valuable xerophilous plants (species that flourish in hot, dry climates) throughout the sertão, thus turning the region’s climate from a liability into an asset. The plant species that he recommends include oiticica for its nut oil; manicoba for rubber; mangabeira for latex; licurizeiro palm for its wax and oil; murici, batiputa, and umbuzeiro for their fruit; faveleiro for its tasty seeds; carua for fiber; and manipeba for its starchy roots, storable for several years as food security against drought.
  • 2 – instead of trying to convert the semi-arid sertao into a quasi-pluvial agricultural landscape through hydrological engineering projects, convert its semi-aridity “from a liability into an asset” by growing appropriate plants in it — co-control
• 218-19 – a promising democratization of drought aid in 1987 led by Ceará’s agricultural extension service, in which agronomists backed by the state bureaucracy organized community councils to determine which projects would be most helpful to those in greatest need of aid.
  • 1 – finally a mention of sertanejos getting to decide for themselves
• 219 – In another evaluation of changes to development ideology following democratization, Robert Silva notes the emphasis on “living with” the drought rather than “combatting” it. He sees this rhetorical shift as indicative of a more ecologically minded view of interactions between humans and nature, different from the modernist assumption that landscapes should be reengineered to meet human needs.
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1. Knowledge politics and labor: how did different groups and individuals know nature through their labor (a la Richard White)? How did different actors develop knowledge and skills and what kinds of contests emerged among them over how to intervene in non-human nature? Who gets to decide what landscapes and waterscapes are produced? What were the consequences of these contests for nature itself?

 

2. Human-non-human-nature relationship: how do people produce nature? what role does non-human nature play in these stories? Is it an actor, acted upon, co-production?

 

3. Relationship between time and space.

 

4. Declensionism: early environmental histories were often declensionist narratives, often about deforestation. How have these environmental historians of Latin America attempted to move beyond declensionism since the 1990s?

—- David Fletcher, Flood Control Freakology