Environmental Justice and Climate Change | Part 1 of 4

Natural Resource
Management. Bunky
Echo-Hawk (2006).

Credit: Palgrave
Journals    

Part 1 | Toward an Arid-Sensible Way of Life

INDIGENOUS RIGHT LIVELIHOODS and CLIMATE
CHANGE ADAPTATION

Note on the
Series: I am posting a four-part
analysis and discussion of environmental justice and climate change beginning
with today’s essay on the cultural implications of climate change. Today’s post
focuses on the importance of protecting arid-sensible ways of life as a source
of understanding of adaptation to climate change. I highlight the cases of the
rainwater harvesting and community irrigation canal systems of India and the
U.S. Southwest.

The goal of the series is to illuminate the
connections between indigenous land- and water-based cultures and the
broadening climate justice movements. I am especially concerned in this series with
exploring issues that connect food sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and climate
change. This includes a detailed and critical deconstruction of the idea of GMO
crops as the next panacea for solving climate change. The series ends by
exploring how the environmental, food, and climate justice movements are
converging and how this trend might be amplified as a major aspect of these
struggles.

Devon G. Peña, The Acequia Institute | Seattle, WA | October 22, 2014

I first learned about the rain harvesting and canal irrigation
systems of India from Vandana Shiva when she visited Colorado College in 1994
to deliver the Daniel Patrick O’Connor Memorial Lecture in Social
Justice. After her lecture, we
shared a road trip to visit the acequias
(community irrigation associations) and common lands (ejidos) of the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado.

Vandana was struck by the similarities between the “watershed
commonwealth” of the Río Arriba acequias in Colorado and India’s own community
irrigation institutions that she later wrote about in her book, Water Wars. Like the acequias, the Indian rain harvest and irrigation systems – for
e.g., the naula, zabo and kuhl – comprise
part of a rich variety of arid-sensible ways of life found across much of the arid
and semi-arid regions of the world.[i]

Kuhl irrigation canal in Kangra. Like acequias in Colorado,

these canals bring water from melted snow to the

plains from the mountains. Photo credit: Nirupamad

These American Southwest and Indian irrigation systems
are widely celebrated as exemplary contributions to the world’s cultural heritage
as ecologically regenerative technologies and as resilient and equitable water
use and management institutions based on right-livelihoods. These qualities
suggest these grassroots institutions of local ecological democracy are models
for climate change adaptation and an ethnoscience-based challenge to neoliberal
corporate privatization of the water common.

The arid-sensible way of life

What does it mean for a culture to follow right
livelihoods? This political and economic formation can be said to occur wherever
a local community follows livelihood traditions adapted to place-based
conditions over multiple generations involving productive activities that on
balance regenerate the vitality of Earth’s ecosystems. However, because of the
effects of centuries of colonialism and decades of neoliberal globalization,
the ability to follow right livelihoods is becoming a much more rare occurrence
and a major front in the environmental and food justice movements. The future
of the planet depends on these values becoming part of a new more broadly integrated
global norm.

There are many cultures that share a long history of resilient
adaptation to the limits and advantages of aridity. These cultures are often overlooked
as reservoirs of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK). The institutions
and technologies developed in places where water has always been scarce provide
well-tested examples of successful adaptation of agriculture and food systems to
conditions of environmental stress.[ii]

These systems certainly provide lessons for the
Two-thirds World about how to adapt to the agricultural and food system impacts
of global climate change because they are resilient, sustainable, equitable,
autonomous (self-managing), and supportive of local food self-sufficiency.

I have learned the virtue of working with the limits and opportunities posed by aridity at
our farm school in south-central Colorado. Our acequia-riparian long-lot farm
is located in a high alpine valley at roughly 8000 feet or 2438 meters above
sea level. This is essentially a high altitude cold desert environment with a 90-120
day growing season framed by late frosts that can arrive well into July and
early damaging frosts in early October or even late September.

I am responsible for the conservation and cultivation
of our Institute’s three sisters (corn, bean, squash/pumpkin) seed library
known as the Rio Arriba Seed Cooperative Library (RASCL) and spend a good
amount of time currently caring for one particular “Center of Origin” maize
variety in our heirloom collection. This is a place-adapted 70-74 day (to
maturity) white flint corn locally known as maíz
de concho. The variety we cultivate is a gift from the Corpus A. Gallegos
family.

This Upper Rio Grande bioregional “floury” flint line
was developed over a period of many generations beginning as early as the 1690s
and is traditionally intended for use as roasting corn for winter stores – a
practice adopted by Rio Grande Pueblos from their Anasazi ancestors. Concho is adapted
to extreme local conditions including a diurnal temperature range that can push
the thermometer from a 38°F/3.3°C overnight reading to highs in the range of
88-90°F/31-32°C a few hours later at mid-day.

Solar radiation at this elevation can make burnt toast
of your average Midwestern GMO or hybrid corn varieties and the June-July monsoon
rains nearly always include damaging hail and late frost in the fields. Our concho
seems resistant to UV radiation, frost, and wind damage: It literally dances
over the course of the day by twirling the leaf angles with the passage of the
sun to minimize direct exposure and resultant UV damage. It is not a tall stalk
and matures within 2 ½ months at a height of 4 to 5 feet  (1.2-1.5 meters). The best yields will have 2
twelve-inch long cobs per stalk.[iii]

Our chicos del horno from native maiz
de concho.

Drying under sun after being roasted
in the adobe oven.

Photo by Devon G. Peña

The existence of this type of land race maize in the
heart of the Southwestern USA symbolizes the inherent adaptability of the world’s
arid and semi-arid land-based cultures – including many of those still found in
Mexico, India, and our own San Luis Valley (SLV) in Colorado. These place-based
local cultures have developed sophisticated ecological and cultural knowledge
systems that tend to be associated with well-established institutions for
direct community governance of water and land as assets-in-place and common
property.  These are the producers,
heirs, and stewards of much of the world’s agro-biodiversity.

Studies dating back to the 1950s, starting roughly
with the work of Harold Conklin, confirm a close fit between conservation, sustainability, and the
stability of viable local cultures that host agroecosystems well adapted to
place. The protection of arid and semi-arid farming systems is especially
important if the goal is conserving the biological diversity of food crops and
their wild relatives in their centers of
origin (see Altieri et al 1987;
Nabhan 2011).

The arid-sensible farm involves technological and
ecological aspects centered on water use and management institutions that have
a vital social-cultural dimension: Kuhls and acequias are both renowned for the
application of principles of shared
scarcity, mutual aid, and cooperative labor (compare Baker 2005 and
Arnold 2005 with
Hicks and Peña 2003, 2010).
These values figure prominently in the formation of community irrigation
associations that our colleague José Rivera (1998) calls
“water democracies”.  

Such cultural systems provide the community-based
resources for the type of long-term social and economic stability that
communities need to sustain sound ecological management principles and
practices, especially if climate change brings about the need for the sharing
of water scarcity. Strip this sociocultural and normative ‘infrastructure’ away
as part of an enclosure and privatization movement and the result will most
likely include activities that lead to environmental degradation and increase
the poverty of deprivation.

Colorado farmer Joe Gallegos flood irrigates fields

with acequias. Photo by Devon G. Peña

Indeed, the environmental history of India and the
American Southwest are both filled with episodes in which colonizers destroyed
watershed after watershed by industrializing the exploitation of forest,
mountain, basin, and range. This was accompanied by forced removal of natives and
the blocking of the exercise of stewardship obligations and use rights to the
sources of right livelihood, the common lands and waters (see, for e.g., Guha 2000, Martinez-Alier
2002, and
Peña 2005).

For this reasons as well, then, these community irrigation
institutions, and their gravity-driven and renewable energy technologies, have
never seemed more relevant than in today’s context of climate change when many
vulnerable nations, regions, and peoples will have to learn to become more adept
at living an arid-sensible life and this process of adaptation is and will
continue to be associated with political conflict and the structural violence
that is already being unleashed by efforts at neoliberal privatization of land
and water rights along with the pivotal struggle over the control of seed in
the management of plant and crop genetic resources.

In 1994, when Vandana first visited us in Colorado,
the intercept of rainwater for domestic use was disallowed under the
constraining precepts of Colorado’s doctrine of prior appropriation. Since 2009, Colorado has seen some permitted
exceptions on this front but there are also some new and very complicated
conflicts centered on continued injustice associated with the deprivation of
senior surface rights delegated to acequia farmers under a juridical order that
really has come to serve the interests of more junior groundwater rights tied
to the development of large-scale potato and GMO canola and alfalfa
monocultures operated by corporate agribusinesses in the SLV.

It would seem the political, if not the legal,
standing of prior appropriation rights in Colorado in reality does not always apply
if Mexican or Native American communities, usually for purposes of subsistence
and small-scale production, control the actual water. This is called progress and
it certainly promotes more technological modernization and concentration of
corporate capital. Of course, this unfolds along with the displacement of smaller
and more traditional farmers who, if considered at all, are depicted in the
juridical narrative as maladaptive and resistant to change.

The GMO-Climate Change Nexus

In the twenty years since Vandana’s first visit to
Colorado the circumstances have changed dramatically for all of us. Those of us
who depend on surface and rainwater as the direct basis of seed freedom and
food autonomy are especially vulnerable, but not so much from the effects of
climate change since we are indigenous leaders in adaptation. Instead, our
vulnerabilities stem from national and global ecological politics associated
with the manner in which climate change is itself being “gamed” by the corporate
drivers of neoliberal capitalism. These forces include active interventions by
the purveyors of agricultural biotechnology who champion the colonialist
project of full privatization of seed, land, and water.

This new challenge, which was barely recognizable two
decades ago, involves the endless onslaught of propaganda (PR) about GMOs with
highly controversial, largely unsubstantiated, and exaggerated claims by
corporations promoting the view that the world’s countries must invest in genetically
engineered crops because this new technology is the only thing that will save humanity
from the devastating effects of climate change including the widening crisis of
hunger and famine.

Can we accomplish climate change adaptation goals via
agroecology and permaculture practices or must we rely on the promises of an
unproven and clearly more risky technology, GMOs, as is currently being
proposed by the USA government and transnational biotech capitalists?  Who gets to define the goals? Are these goals
to be measured in a purely quantitative sense?

The history of such claims – which have been routinely
made by Monsanto and the other Gene Giants since the 1990s – is pure hubris.
Each and every one of the biotech panaceas has resulted in decisive failures – and
not just if the metric is ecological integrity and biological viability in
ecosystem context. Keep in mind that in the agroecology framework a seed is considered
sustainable only if it is capable of surviving without external artificial inputs (e.g., chemical fertilizer, insecticides,
herbicides, fungicides, etc.). The sustainable farmer’s seed requires inputs
but in the form of a set of tested cultural practices that draw from
generations of local direct observation and, yes, manipulation of biological
entities and processes (e.g., selection, companion planting, reliance of
polyculture, etc.). This is cultural adaptation.

The earliest versions of the “biotechnology as savior”
argument involved claims that transgenic crops would eliminate the need for
pesticides and herbicides. Biotech crops were championed as the key to a second
truly “Green” revolution in agriculture. But the “Gene Revolution” has turned
out to be a second “Green Revolution” only in the worst way possible by emulating
the mischief and violence unleashed by Borlaug’s army of technicians with a
consistent record of attacks on local farming systems across the entire planet.

I first directly heard the biotech savior argument at
the 1995 White House Conference on Sustainable Agriculture, which was convened
in Kansas City on behalf of Vice-President Al Gore who personally invited a
group of scientists, scholars, CEOs, farmers, and others to discuss the roles
of technology, environmental and agricultural policy, and the law to advance
sustainable agriculture in the USA.

At most of the meeting, I sat to the right of a white
male executive from a corporation that was then known as Calgene, a
biotechnology start-up in California that was eventually acquired by Monsanto.
The company is best remembered for its failed Flavr-Savr
tomato, a transgenic event in which flounder genes were spliced into a tomato
genome to extend shelf life and preserve fresh [sic] flavor.  Consumers were eventually repulsed by the idea
of eating fish genes in vegetable chimera. The retail product failed but
Monsanto watched and eventually picked up their proprietary rDNA technology,
which I imagine they have put to profitable use.

Climate change is already impacting
agriculture through drought.

Photo credit: ICID

Ever since that 1995 Kansas City meeting, each
President since Bill Clinton has used Executive branch agencies to promote
biotechnology as an integral part of a neoliberal globalization agenda for sustainable
agriculture.  Every administration, including
Obama’s, has uncritically embraced the false mantra that a new green paradise awaits
us in the form of a chemical-free agriculture made possible through technology
produced by a handful of global corporations who tout themselves as dedicated
to the use of the “life sciences” to improve farming and food production.

In Stolen
Harvest, Vandana Shiva dates the emergence of this strategy back to 1987 during
corporate preparations for the first Earth Summit when the Dag Hammarskjöld
Foundation “organized a meeting on biotechnology called “Laws of Life”:

This watershed event identified the
emerging issues of genetic engineering and patenting. The meeting made it clear
that the giant chemical companies were repositioning themselves as “life
sciences” companies, whose goal was to control agriculture through patents,
genetic engineering, and mergers…(Shiva 2000:2)

Independent third-party scientific research on risk
and the environmental, social, and economic impacts of agricultural
biotechnology demonstrates how the exact opposite has occurred. Instead of reducing
the use of agro-industrial chemicals, GMOs have increased the overall
consumption of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers.
Scientists, farmers, and activists have known this for a long time; see for
e.g., Benbrook (2009).  The weeds and insects targeted by these
transgenic technologies have become resistant; just as the critics predicted
they would.

Charles Benbrook (2012) of Washington State University estimates that the
adoption of herbicide-resistant crop technology led to a 239 million kilogram
(527 million pound) increase in herbicide use in the United States between 1996
and 2011. Overall, pesticide use increased by an estimated 183 million kgs (404
million pounds) or about 7 percent but the Bt crops reduced insecticide
applications by 56 million kilograms (123 million pounds). However, Benbrook’s
study did not yet have access to data on the more recent problems associated
with rootworm resistance to Bt maize.  There will be a pattern of future increases in
herbicide and other chemical applications for the so-called environmentally
friendly Bt crops. This will reverse the decade of reductions achieved when the
Bt transgenic crops were first deployed, primarily in corn and soybean fields.

As expected, the biotech companies are addressing the
rise of the super-weeds and super-bugs by seeking approval from the EPA for the
application of an entire older class of economic poisons like IFT, 2,4-D, dicamba,
and others that are in the pipeline. Let’s not forget, these chemical companies
are not based on the life sciences. They do appropriate advances in molecular
biology, genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics in order to develop plants that
can survive the application of their flagship chemicals. That is their
principal business. They are chemical companies first and foremost. Let us stop
pretending that integrating genetic engineers into what is essentially a
chemical factory hardly changes the corporate charter and mission.

In the case of 2,4-D, scientists have a moral
responsibility to inform the public that this chemical was originally developed
as an important component in the preparation of Agent Orange, the incredibly
toxic and carcinogenic defoliant widely used during the Vietnam War. We need to
encourage discussion of what this means for public health and workplace health
and safety as well as environmental protection of clean air, water, soil, and
food.

No one less conservative a source than Forbes
Magazine (June 2, 2013) recently
posted a report prepared by Beth Hoffman about a USDA-funded study confirming
that the growth of the herbicide market ran alongside the growth in acreage
dedicated to no-till herbicide-resistant GMO crops. The study confirmed that
there really is no question but that the sales of herbicides increased
sevenfold between 1998 and 2002. GMO advocates claim this simply means more
growers are adopting GMO crops but the fact remains that per acre use of
chemical inputs has increased steadily since the 1950s as more agricultural
land is transformed into concentrated corporate monoculture operations.

Despite this massive increase in the use of
herbicides, and especially glyphosate, the failure of transgenic technologies
across corn, soybean, rapeseed (canola), and cotton crop “events” is
definitive. This also amply illustrates the harsh reality imposed by the grand
scale of resistant pests affecting tens of millions of acres in the USA, all of
which are now populated with Bt-resistant super-bugs (Cullen et al 2013) or
herbicide-resistant super-weeds (Waltz 2010).

In summary: The corporate-dominated GMO path to
industrial capitalist agriculture means that Earth ecosystems will continue to
be ravaged by chemical- and technology-intensive monocultures that reduce
biodiversity, alter ecosystems, have massive carbon footprints, and destroy
local cultures and their ethnoscientific knowledge bases that include strategies
for resilient place-based adaptation to climate change.

The environmental and food justice movements demand
that we account not just for ecological values but for vital cultural and social
equity values as well. Establishing a priority for these principles will
strengthen the prospects for environmental security for all and not just the
privileged wealthy few. Climate justice
is an issue already being discussed in UNDRIP and IPCC forums but the policy
discourse in the USA remains largely tone deaf despite the recent actions in
the Climate Justice and #FloodWallStreet movement meetings and protests.

Defining the political will for climate change policy
in the USA requires more than protests, direct action, and alternative peoples’
forums – all of which are good and necessary. But the climate justice movement
can also make clearer that alternative agriculture and food systems that are
adapted to climate change already exist. These must not just be defended and
preserved they must become the new global norm.

As this unfolds, we must also be mindful of the fact
that climate change also involves the relocation of plant, animal, and human
communities in a forced planetary-scaled migration. As Susan Crate (2009:147)
notes:

We need not be over confident in [local
cultures’] ability to adapt. Although it seems completely plausible that highly
adaptive cultures will find ways to feed themselves even if their main animals
and plants cannot survive the projected climatic shifts…we need to grapple with
the cultural implications of the loss of animals and plants that are central to
daily subsistence practices, cycles of annual events…sacred cosmologies [and
institutions for self-governance of the common]. [Brackets added]

Crate (p. 148) continues by observing how in “some
cases the communities themselves will move [and] in other cases, it is the environment
that is moving”. In my estimation, this is clearly a novel anthropogenic feature
of the adaptability challenges facing even people with established
arid-sensible cultures.

PART 2 will provide a more detailed critique of GMO
crops as climate change saviors and set the stage fore presentation of the agroecological alternatives. Stay tuned.

Endnotes

---

[i] One authoritative source on right livelihoods in
India lists 45 different indigenous rain harvest technologies that are still in
use across the subcontinent, from the coastal plans of southern India in Goa
and Kerala to the Himalayan foothills of northern India in Himachal Pradesh.  See: Centre
for Science and the Environment. Also,
see Rainwater Harvesting.

[ii] There are thousands of studies of TEK,
sustainability, resilience, and social equality among the world’s indigenous
place- and right-livelihood-based cultures, including many cases from arid and
semi-arid environments. For a start with this vast literature, consult the
classics by Berkes 1999;
Berkes and Folke 2000;
Nazarea 1999. Some
more recent studies include Pilgrim and Pretty 2010;
Walker and Salt 2012;
Johnson and Hunn 2012;
Terer et al 2013;

[iii] Unpublished research by Colorado College maize geneticist
Dr. Ralph Bertrand, completed in 1996, confirms this basic description of the
morphology and physiology of the Gallegos family’s maíz de concho. The study will appear in a forthcoming book, Voces de la Agua/Water Voices, which I
am currently preparing and is based on research conducted under grants from the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Ford Foundation.