Farmers and ranchers work on the front lines of global climate change. This dissertation examines how rural farmers and agricultural advisors navigate the material and discursive risks of climate change despite many farmers’ continued skepticism of climate change science. This research demonstrates the ways that farmers’ decisions shape rural livelihoods, the relative effectiveness of conservation practices and policies, and the politics of everyday life in Siskiyou County, an economically marginalized and politically conservative region of northern California. Many farmers and ranchers understand land and water management practices as constitutive of politics rather than as responses to environmental changes due to climate, yet they necessarily adapt to droughts and wildfires. The micropolitics of adaptation to climate change, including how differentiated groups of farmers understand and publicly discuss the bases of their land use decisions and farming practices, are fundamentally reorganizing agrarian relations and landscapes. This research illuminates new possibilities for natural resource governance and climate policy that move beyond the notion that agricultural producers must be convinced of climate science before developing strategies to adapt to climate impacts.
Employing qualitative, ethnographic methods, this extended case study draws on more than 130 in-depth interviews with farmers, agricultural advisors, and county officials, as well as livelihood analyses of six multigenerational farm families. Additional analysis included regional historical and policy documents to situate localized climate adaptation practices and challenges within broader US rural contexts. This scholarship deploys concepts on risk perception and gendered social differentiation to analyze the new ruralities that these agricultural communities have constituted in response to climate change.
The dissertation analyzes how perceptions of different kinds of climate-related risks and the material realities of climate change structure adaptive practices and discourse. To the sociological scholarship on farming decisions in contexts of enhanced risk and environmental uncertainty, this research introduces the concept of social risk perception, focused on the potential social costs and consequences of deviating from culturally normative climate discourses and farming practices. Farmers manage perceived risks of exclusion from formal and informal farming groups, including loss of access to networks of reciprocity and public institutional services, and agricultural advisors often embrace regionally specific politics and practices that reinforce climate change misinformation in order to build trust with farmers. Social risk perception of climate change encompasses physical and perceived risks; together these endanger the material worlds farmers upon which farmers rely.
This research also analyzes household livelihoods to reveal some of the ways that gender relations condition everyday practices and the micropolitics of land and water management. Gender differentiation brings explicit household analysis into the contemporary political economies of small-scale family farming in northern California. Despite attempts at exclusion from social and institutional networks by relatives, county officials, and agricultural advisors, women farmers often lead adaptation efforts. This research finds that women within multigenerational farm families may be less burdened by prevailing community norms and practices, and therefore perceive fewer social risks of adapting in novel ways that diversify farming practices and livelihood strategies.
This examination finds that, irrespective of farmers’ beliefs about its causes, climate change is a material reality, and its manifestations are reorganizing rural relations into “new ruralities.” Land and water use practices and policies become political terrains within which to contest visions of rurality and access. As the contours of farming change—including who is farming, which crops and livestock farmers grow, and the land and water use practices farmers employ—county-level officials attempt to define what is considered agriculture and who counts as a farmer. Maintaining narrow definitions facilitates the continued accumulation of benefits to a relatively exclusive group of established farmers, while preventing those who deviate from accessing resources. Adaptation thus offers opportunities for powerful local actors to benefit. Contestation over shifting rural relations catalyzes both unlikely alliances and incipient resistance efforts, yet uncritical calls for local control may retrench patterns of inequity.
