Seeds are central to agrobiodiversity, and farmers have historically bred a rich array of crop seeds to sustain rural and urban communities. Over the past 150 years, however, trajectories in macroeconomic development, science and research, and agricultural policy have dovetailed with environmental changes to diminish seed diversity and the living agricultures it supports. While genetic erosion has emerged as a global challenge, access to that diversity has also come into stark relief: Industry consolidation, the development of transgenic crops, and intellectual property rights are now seen as constraints on free exchange of seeds and the ability of farmers and breeders to adapt and breed resilient crop cultivars. How can seed diversity – and access to it – be expanded once more?

To address this question, my dissertation develops a ‘political ecology of seeds.’ Building on the foundational account of seed primitive accumulation by Kloppenburg (1988), I examine several dimensions left underexplored in this and other accounts: new, countervailing forces of repossession working against primitive accumulation; the knowledge politics of seed production and of seed science; and the co-production of institutions, policies, discourse, and knowledge together. Using a constructivist theoretical framework, my project explores how knowledge politics and coproduction are instrumental in carving out new – and retracing old – territories for seed enclosures in the contemporary era. By examining how often-invisible discourses and practices underpin seed dispossession, we are better equipped to organize alternatives – not only to reject colonial and capitalist habits of thought/practice, but to revitalize communal, ethical, and economic strategies of repossession. My thesis includes three core papers, alongside introduction, theory, and conclusion chapters.

In the first paper, I critically interrogate meanings of ‘diversity’ via rivaling discourses of seed ‘loss’ and ‘persistence’ visible in the scientific, international policy, and farmer movement literatures over 40-plus years. On one hand, numerous studies and stories indicate that crop genetic diversity is rapidly eroding worldwide. On the other hand, much data suggests that far from disappearing, seed diversity persists – resisting homogenizing trends within industrial capitalism. Yet in lieu of binary analyses, a more accurate accounting, I argue, can come from investigating the epistemic practices and politics of agrobiodiversity: what is known – recognized, measured, valued – as being lost or maintained. Evaluating historical data on farmer naming systems along with newer methods of genomic and biochemical analysis, I develop a multi-dimensional framework for understanding seed diversity.

My second paper considers crop wild relatives (CWR) as a fast-emerging site for new seed primitive accumulation. Faced with imminent climate change, scientists and agribusinesses are vying to develop crops that can survive drought, floods, and shifting pest regimes. CWR offer breeders the allure of ‘climate-hardy traits,’ infusing genomes of modern crops with ‘lost’ genetic variety. Paradoxically, wild relatives themselves are endangered, propelling CWR into the limelight as an international conservation and food-security priority. I examine accumulation processes along two fronts: conservation policies, where in situ approaches, typically regarded as empowering alternatives to ex situ, instead may support appropriation; and breeding and biotechnology research, which produces new use values for CWR while profoundly shaping upstream conservation priorities.

My third and final paper explores the US-based Open Source Seed Initiative as one example of repossession. OSSI has created an alternative to intellectual property rights with a ‘protected commons’ for seed. Commons scholarship has contributed much on theories of institutional governance. But, I argue, attending to the practice of ‘commoning’ helps illuminate a more complex triad: communities who manage shared resources according to negotiated social protocols. Employing the metaphor of ‘beating the bounds’ – a feudal practice of contesting enclosures – I ask how OSSI defends the commons in intersecting arenas. First is legal, as OSSI negotiates a move from contract law toward moral economy law. Next is epistemic, as a ‘freelance’ breeder network revitalizes informal farmer-breeder knowledge, proving less structurally constrained than formal university breeders to lead commoning efforts. Third is seed sovereignty, as OSSI engages with global South movements whose diverse cosmovisions and seed cultures pose new challenges for constructing transnational commons.

I conclude by using spatial ‘centricity’ to conceptualize power relations in seed systems. CWR exemplifies ‘ex-situ centric’ flows of seed knowledge, power, and value away from local communities to centralized, often distant sites of recognizing and classifying diversity. Expertise is conferred primarily upon those scientists and industrialists who can produce commodity goods. By contrast, OSSI mobilizes breeder and farmer knowledge in a countervailing, ‘in-situ centric’ direction: towards local spaces, towards legitimizing farmer-breeders as knowledge makers. This movement, I conclude, is not merely an opposite force: it triangulates across three bases of ‘emancipatory’ action at the heart of agroecology, food sovereignty and commoning. Uniting politics of recognition (race, gender, identity), politics of redistribution (class and inequality), and politics of representation (democracy and citizenship), the question of seed diversity and access, I suggest, is ultimately a political one. It calls for recognizing diverse knowledge-makers, redistributing genetic resources as commons, de-centralizing seed reproduction to suit heterogenous agroecologies, and addressing base inequalities in power that drive dispossession.

Making systems of production sustainable will require deep technological and societal change. This dissertation explores several facets of the relationships between scientific knowledge, society, and “green design”—a set of approaches for eliminating harmful chemical substances from material technologies. This is an interdisciplinary investigation based in science and technology studies (STS), drawing from scholarship in the sociology of knowledge and resource management, information studies, and design studies.

An overarching challenge in green design is effectively cultivating and mobilizing scientific knowledge to enable technical change. This dissertation asks what systems could produce, test, verify, and organize scientific knowledge in ways that better meet the needs of a growing community of green design practitioners, advocates, and decision-makers. Scientific communities are increasingly turning to systems of shared and collectively governed knowledge resources—or knowledge commons. Using in-depth case studies I explore emerging knowledge commons in the domain of chemicals and environmental health. I investigate how a commons can be formed and sustained in this complex and politically contested arena; and whether (or how) such a commons can function as a stable site for producing “socially robust knowledge”—knowledge that has been tested and accepted as valid by a wide range of stakeholders.

At the same time, the politics of green design are structured by dominant systems of knowledge and technological development, in which civil society is largely oblivious to the risks of material design choices and unable to actively participate in shaping alternatives. With a case study of the building sector, I examine how mobilizing science to inform green design necessarily involves making political and value-laden choices, even though these are rarely debated as such. Extending my analysis to the case of nanotechnology, I argue that green design should become more participatory—providing pathways for society to consciously shape material technologies for sustainability.

An aging domestic farmer population and depreciating rural sector provokes “good food” activists and policy makers alike to ask, “Who will farm?” One proposal is the aspirational narrative of beginning farmers, where a new generation eschews urban ambitions for a rural life based around environmental stewardship and food systems transformation. This ideal replicates a classic American imaginary: the self-made yeoman farmer as the foundation of society. In doing so, the beginning farmer movement demonstrates a critical blind spot: How will these new farmers get onto the land? Learning from farmers seeking to fulfill this new agrarian dream in California, this dissertation shows how the problem of land access threatens to dead-end the aspirations of the beginning farmer movement.

First, I examine how sociocultural and relational constraints impede land access for former immigrant farmworkers aspiring to independent farming in California’s Central Coast region. Here, I argue that landlord–tenant farmer dynamics dominate and thus complicate beginning farmer narratives. Then, I analyze the flagship federal support program for beginning farmers, the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program (BFRDP). Analysis of the BFRDP’s funding history and discourse reveals a “knowledge deficit” based program focused on the technical rather than the structural aspects of beginning farming. This is contrasted with qualitative analysis of beginning farmer experiences in California’s Central Coast region. The discrepancies between the farmer experiences and the national structure of the BFRDP program ultimately reveal a policy mismatch between the needs of beginning farmers and the programs intended to support them. Finally, searching for methods to re-envision the standard beginning farmer narratives, I explore how web-mapping tools may attend to the entrenched problems of land access. Land access problems are found to be inherently spatial, opening the possibility of mapping interventions. I describe the development of the Farmland Monitoring Project (FMP), a web-mapping framework that interrogates multiple elements of the land access barrier. The reflection-in-practice of the FMP helps explore the juncture between critical GIS and beginning farmer land access dilemmas.

In summary, I argue that the antiquated yeoman myth limits the transformative potential of beginning farmer aspirations. I offer suggestions for how to escape such a narrow narrative construction. In principle, without structural attention to land redistribution and access, the ideal of the new farmer will remain a niche phenomenon.

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Systems: Closing the Ethical Loophole of Social Sustainability

by

Nikolaos Sakellariou

Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Alastair T. Iles, Chair

This dissertation investigates the historical and normative bases of what contemporary engineers consider to be the embodiment of sustainability: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It explores the interplay among technology ethics, energy systems, and how engineering cultures foster sustainability by adopting normative assumptions and problem-solving practices—particularly LCA—as part of their professional identities. Specifically, I provide a broad conceptual analysis of “sustainability engineering” in the US (1989-present) to unpack its history, epistemology and politics. I first show that the 1990’s produced two distinct engineering ideologies of sustainability—one emphasizing engineering creativity and innovation, and the other emphasizing normative ethics and socio-cultural change. I find that the dialectic between sustainability and engineering has been defined largely by an ideology of technological change. I argue that engineering ideologies of sustainability not only affect how professionals imagine LCA as a medium of technological and environmental transformation, but also how they conceptualize sustainability as a vehicle to renegotiate engineering knowledge and identity in addressing some of the most pressing existential dilemmas facing their discipline.

Next, I investigate the politics of engineering identity formation in relation to social, political, regulatory and community pressure to reshape the ethics and boundaries of LCA. I show that starting around 2000, a small group of engineers and, vitally, companies and consulting firms with an eye to addressing technology’s “social impacts” have laid a basis for developing an interesting sustainability tool called Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA). SLCA, I argue, is an ideological hybrid where there are many spots of dissent and disagreement but also some surprising fundamental alignments between those who see engineering as technics and those who believe that engineering needs to be socially contextualized. SLCA attests to a messy, ongoing tussle between different viewpoints, where the dominant engineering ideology and culture begins to morph into a more open-ended approach.

Finally, I focus on two case studies of sustainable energy system building—solar and wind project development in California’s West Antelope Valley (WAV)—to understand in more detail the politics and ethics of LCA in energy systems. I describe how LCA became embedded in narratives and decision-making concerning renewable energy in the US—in their design, as well as in their regulatory, economic and environmental planning. California’s inaugural utility scale solar and wind projects were trumpeted as conforming to principles derived from LCA. At one level, I show, the siting of solar PV projects in the WAV was predicated on a mechanism linking legitimacy and life cycle thinking. At another level, along with projects’ contentious permitting and pre-construction phases, the interrelated questions of legitimacy and sustainability emerged from the LCA shadows and became central issues in rural renewable energy project development. I explore the tensions between technical expert and lay expert knowledges that swirl around the deployment of LCAs in solar project development and I argue that LCAs enabled disembodied and context-less decision-making. Seen through my ethnography in the WAV, I present material on the internecine politics of renewable energy project development that took place locally and at the Los Angeles County level—a local-regional scale perspective that is often not seen in the literature. I describe how the fractured relationships between stakeholders and the disparity between rural and urban mechanisms of governance facilitated the diminishing fairness and participatory democracy in renewable energy project dispute resolution.

This dissertation examines the history of ethanol policymaking and the growth of a global ethanol production network, a cornerstone of the emerging low-carbon, bio-based economy. In this way, the study also provides insights into the nature of economic and environmental governance of this bio-based economy, analyzing the effects at multiple jurisdictional levels. I conducted research in Brazil and the United States, the two countries responsible for the vast majority of global ethanol production. The dissertation draws on data collected using qualitative methods including document analysis, interviews conducted in English and Portuguese, and multi-sited ethnographic investigation at nodes along ethanol commodity chains. The dissertation is divided into two parts, in which I first analyze the social, cultural and political forces that have influenced national ethanol production and consumption strategies, practices, and policies, before turning to the contemporary transnational governance arrangements determining the low-carbon value of ethanol and other biofuels on global markets. Together, Parts I and II emphasize the role of ideas and expertise in the transformation of ethanol and other biofuels, from agricultural support crops to the first globally traded commodities to be sold with low-carbon sustainability credentials.

Broadly, the four chapters in Part I examine the ways in which governments have transformed the economic geography of ethanol production networks anchored in Brazilian sugarcane and American corn. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 examine how nationally specific political cultures of economic governance have influenced ethanol policymaking. In Chapter 2, I present a new framework for understanding the relationship between ethanol policymaking and political cultures of economic governance as a way to shed new light on the cultural and structural conditions of state support for low-carbon development. Chapters 3 and 4 address the US case exclusively. In Chapter 3, I provide a genealogical analysis of the evolution of political culture since the formation of the nation-state, tracing how key ideas and practices regarding economic governance have emerged and receded leading up through the 1970s. In Chapter 4, I weave the history of US ethanol policymaking into this genealogical analysis, using the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to show how political culture has helped to constitute the vision, strategies and policies used to build the US ethanol statecraft. Chapter 5 applies the same analysis in Chapter 4 to the case of Brazil. The overarching argument developed is that the US and Brazil have differently governed ethanol expansion in accordance with their unique political cultures of state intervention. In addition, these cases suggest that ethanol statecraft also helps to constitute a nation’s political cultures of economic governance.

In Part II, I examine one particular form of economic governance: the emerging global regime complex for biofuels governance. I shift the usual focus of policy analysis from the national level to the transnational level. I conduct a fine-grained analysis of the governance arrangements shaping the global biofuels production network. I advance the argument that a global regime complex for biofuels has emerged and indicates that the politics of expertise provide a new mode of regime complex orchestration. Chapter 6 situates global environmental governance for biofuels as part of a broader historical trend away from multilateral regimes to regime complexes. This began in the forestry sector, which I unpack to use as a critical exemplar. Chapter 7 explores how the low-carbon justification for industrial policies that have increased ethanol production and consumption around the world requires nation-states to arbitrate the meaning of “low-carbon” value through the politics of expertise. This chapter looks closely at the scientific controversy that emerged around models developed to calculate the lifecycles of greenhouse gas emissions produced by different biofuel commodity chains. Chapter 8 provides a theory of regime complex orchestration based on the biofuels regime complex. This theorization emphasizes the ways in which the regime complex structure empowers transnational networks of experts to orchestrate coordination between regimes. The experimentalist architecture of the regime complex for biofuels empowers experts to steer outcomes through think deliberation. In effect, this group of non-state actors has pulled various regimes for biofuels towards broad agreement about the value of including indirect land use change variables in GHG calculator models. Taken together, these findings offer several theoretical and practical insights into the kinds of democratic institutional capacities that are required for a just transition to a low-carbon future.

Recent headlines have called food waste “the world’s dumbest problem,” often pointing out that consumers are responsible for the majority of it in the United States. Edible food is discarded while there is continuing food insecurity and hunger. Discarding food is also associated with environmental, economic, and social costs. However, the characterization of this problem as dumb or simple fails to acknowledge that its causes are complex and inextricably linked to the structure of our food system, our relationships with food, and the demands of everyday life. My dissertation centers around why people discard edible food in households in the United States by focusing on various aspects of how they plan, shop, prepare, store, cook, eat, and discard food.

The aim of this dissertation is to augment the current dearth of information about causal mechanisms and determinants of consumer-level food waste and to interrogate how definitions of edibility influence household-level research. The central finding is that the behaviors associated with the production of wasted food in households are complex and diverse including a wide range of structural, social, cultural, technological, symbolic, and material factors. Understanding these factors and how they interact are key to identifying interventions that will effectively reduce the amount of wasted food.

Chapter one explores the concept of edibility as a sociocultural construct rather than a fixed feature of a food item. Increasingly, food waste measurement, research, and policy seek to differentiate between edible food and associated inedible parts, acknowledging different underlying causes for discard and different preferred solutions for managing the materials. Given the varying views of edibility within and across cultures, there is no single definition that is widely accepted. Specifically, this paper evaluates how different definitions of “edibility” influence outcomes of food waste measurement at the household level. Using kitchen diary data from households in Denver and New York City, four definitions of edibility were applied to food waste generation data. Based on the varying definitions, we found that the percentage of total food waste considered edible ranged from 52% to 71%. We also found that the top ten lists of most wasted edible food items changed based on the definition. The findings suggest that the definition of edibility does matter in terms of defining the extent of the problem, identifying hot spots for intervention, and tracking progress over time. We contend that edibility should be consistently and transparently defined, but also that how we define edibility should be considered in the context of policy and intervention goals.

In chapter two, we explore behaviors hypothesized to be linked to lower levels of edible food being discarded in households, such as meal planning and freezing foods. Using a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) dataset from over 400 households in Denver and New York City, this chapter employs exploratory factor analysis and regression models to explore whether these behaviors are correlated with edible food waste generation. Weight-based food waste generation data from kitchen diaries were coupled with surveys that assessed frequency of participation in behaviors. After analyzing patterns of participation in twenty food waste-related behaviors, we identified three clusters representing “suites” of behavior: maximizing the consumption of already obtained food, meal and shopping planning, and minimizing overages from purchasing and cooking. The maximization factor was the only suite of behaviors found to have a statistically significant correlation with the generation of edible food waste, with greater participation in these behaviors associated with lower levels of wasted food. Although planning behaviors were not correlated, we contend that this does not mean that these behaviors are not important. Rather, we identify the potential intervening factors that could explain the lack of correlation. This chapter highlights the concept that participation in certain behaviors may have variable outcomes over time within and between households. Understanding these nuances with regard to how these behaviors are enacted within the priorities and contexts of everyday life is important to ensuring that suggested interventions are effective in reducing wasted food.

Finally, chapter three qualitatively explores how food becomes waste by focusing on the broader relationships households have with food. Open-ended interviews with 52 households in Oregon, Washington, and California were used to identify five key benefits associated with food that were linked to its non-consumption: pleasure/enjoyment, comfort, self-identity, convenience, and “good” food. I found that these benefits were sometimes realized through the consumption of food items that directly or indirectly resulted in the non-consumption of other food items (e.g. eating out instead of eating a planned meal to treat oneself during times of high stress); and were sometimes realized even if the food providing the benefit went unconsumed (e.g. stockpiling food items to feel more secure about access to food). Using theories of practice for the underlying theoretical foundation, I found that households participate in value negotiations, weighing costs and benefits, to maximize utility or satisfaction from food. These value negotiations include the intertwined household costs of money and time and lead to either the consumption or discard of food. Overall, this chapter illustrates why focusing solely on financial benefits of reducing wasted food may not be an effective lever for changing behavior.

Food systems in the United States are in need of transformation. The current globalized, mechanized, chemical-based, fossil fuel-powered food system causes negative impacts on ecology, human health, social justice, and local economies. This dissertation explores places where alternatives to the dominant food system are being advanced, and investigates how such alternatives could be scaled up, better supported, or reinforced through food systems education. The crisis of global climate change intersects with the challenge of sustainably (and nutritiously) feeding a growing global population, leading to synergistic opportunities to engage in integrated food systems and climate education. As branches of environmental literacy, which is increasingly promoted in new state standards for K-12 education, food and climate literacy offer opportunities to educate young people while building a climate resilient, equitable local food system. How to build food, climate, and environmental literacy effectively remains a question requiring further action-research. The following chapters address this question through case studies of relocalized food system transitions in Lopez Island, WA and the East Bay region of California’s San Francisco Bay Area. Lessons from these two case studies inform a food and climate change curriculum, a work in progress presented in Chapter 4 alongside an overarching analysis of effective, experiential climate change education pedagogy. Ultimately, efforts to reform our food system with the realities of climate change in mind will require young people partnering with allies in older generations to create and scale alternative production, distribution, and consumption practices. Education has a critical role to play in enabling food system transitions and climate solutions, implemented at a community scale but integrated in a global network of climate-friendly food system transformation.

Early hopes for the dramatic and significant expansion of Urban Agriculture (UA) in the East Bay Area to help mitigate the metropolitan metabolic rift were not borne out. Using Critical Race Theory, Industrial Ecology, and Urban Political Ecology, I explore this phenomenon by examining the operations of four nonprofit UA organizations: Spiral Gardens, City Slicker Farms, Urban Adamah, and Urban Tilth. I conclude that a simultaneous valorization and stigmatization of farm work (Field Hand Labor) and the absence of engineered municipal material support infrastructure for agroecological urbanism (the Cybershire Imaginary) curtail food sovereignty, and yet these organizations nonetheless perpetuate politics and moral economies that suggest Chayanovian differentiation and repeasantization based partly in a legacy of Black Agrarianism (the Urban Agrarian Question).

Managing within social-ecological systems at the landscape scale, such as in the national forests of the Sierra Nevada of California, is challenging to natural resource managers (e.g. the U.S. Forest Service) due to the uncertainties in natural processes and the complexities in social dynamics. Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) has been recently adopted as a viable strategy to diminish uncertainties in natural processes through iterative policy experimentations and adaptations, as well as to overcome conflicting values and goals among diverse environmental stakeholders through fostering and facilitating collaborations. While many CAM studies have focused on evaluating the management impact on natural systems and processes, few have examined the social engagements and dynamics of management itself. To address this knowledge gap, I examined the various social engagements in CAM, particularly the flow of information products, dialogues in public meetings, and social connections among participants, based on my research case study--the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP).

SNAMP began in 2005 in response to the USDA National Forest Service's 2004 Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment calls for managing the forest using the best information available to protect forests and homes. The participants in the project can be sorted into three primary categories of environmental stakeholders: federal and state environmental agencies, the public and environmental advocacy groups, and university scientists. The project studies the impact of forest fuel reduction treatment on forest health, fire mitigation and prevention, wildlife, and water quality and quantity at two study sites: Last Chance in the northern region of the Sierra forests at Sugar Pine in the southern region. The primary strategies and methods for fostering partnership and facilitating collaboration among the diverse participants are producing science information and making it transparent and publicly accessible, as well as facilitating discussions about such research and management results in public meetings.

To evaluate the effectiveness of CAM in the case of SNAMP, I used a mixed-methods research approach (i.e. citation analysis, web analytics, content analysis, self-organizing maps, social network analysis), by leveraging available information technologies and tools, to characterize and analyze the flow of digital information products, the outcomes of facilitated discussions in SNAMP public meetings, and the resilience of the social networks in SNAMP. Some of the interesting findings include: 1) Scientific knowledge products, in the form of peer-reviewed journal publications, contributed to knowledge transfer between scientists and environmental managers; 2) facilitated discussions helped environmental stakeholders to stay engaged on the important administrative and research topics through time; 3) the social networks experienced turbulence but remained resilient due to the existence of a committed and consistent core group of environmental stakeholders that represent diverse backgrounds and interests. As the picture of how information, conversation, and social connections contributed to the success of CAM emerged, my dissertation provides recommendations to natural resource managers on how to improve in these areas for future implementations of CAM.