This essay responds to a mandate created in conversation between the Culture and Natural Resources Program of the Ford Foundation and the UC Berkeley Environmental Politics group: to review scholarly literatures about the interaction of culture and natural resource management for the benefit of Ford Foundation program officers who might be interested in building programs in this area. Because it made sense to offer the paper as a contribution to the UC Berkeley Environmental Politics seminar series, I have also used it as an entry in what I hope will be a more extended dialogue among UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz environmental scholars on the subject of how to use the concept of “culture” in our research and teaching. A little more detail on these imagined audiences may prove a helpful orientation for readers of this essay.

This dissertation is a study of the landscape ecologies made by the phosphate fertilizer industry in Florida. Chemical fertilizers are one of the big stories of our times, rivaling fossil fuels in terms of Earth-altering effects. I use the Florida phosphate industry and the human-altered phosphorus cycle as a lens to understand the emergence of what earth scientists call the Anthropocene. Unlike most Anthropocene scholars, I argue that we are not “in” the Anthropocene so much as we are living through the Holocene/Anthropocene transition. Studying the Holocene/Anthropocene transition, I assert, requires arts of noticing patchy multispecies landscapes with both Holocene and Anthropocene parts. It also requires anthropological elucidation of industrial capitalism. Understanding how industrialization drives the Holocene/Anthropocene transition is at the core of a new discipline I call critical landscape ecology.

At the heart of my critical landscape ecology of Florida is a structural critique of the human-altered phosphorus cycle and the industrial food system it fertilizes. In the Anthropocene, phosphorus forms a broken biogeochemical cycle, feeding the capitalist world-system in a one-way flow from mine to farm to fork and to water body. By learning to convert phosphate rock into an overabundance of cheap food, humans have created the biogeochemical foundations for economic, human population, and (sub)urban growth.

Located within Central Florida is one of the world’s largest and oldest phosphate-rock-producing regions, known as Bone Valley. Central Florida is also an agricultural region with lakes, rivers, and estuaries that have been polluted by phosphate fertilizers. Lastly, it is a region transformed by suburban sprawl and the politics of growth. I examine how phosphate mining, the eutrophication of agricultural watersheds, and suburban development have fractured the regional Holocene and generated an Anthropocene. As Holocene natures are destroyed and polluted, Floridians invest in restoration and conservation. I document how environmental managers attempt to stave off the ecological entropy unleashed by phosphorus industrialization. Attending to the natural history of this mosaic Holocene/Anthropocene region reveals a strange and surprising mix of invasive weeds, native remnants, restored habitats, and the ghosts of extirpated species.

Edge Effects: Salt Making Worlds of Timor is an ethnographic study of shifting livelihoods and land use patterns in Kupang Bay. Under pressures from the Indonesian state to produce commercial grade salt, and in the context of declining ocean fish populations, salt farming has come to predominate livelihood aspirations of coastal residents, even as they recognize that it creates ecologies that contribute to the denigration of lifeways in the region. This dissertation argues that people in Oetua respond to conditions of scarcity and coercive state governance in three interrelated ways. First, by constructing dichotomies that draw comparisons between “then” and “now.” Through dichotomies, they weave a story about the present and its challenges. Second, is the practice of using the state’s tools in subversive and unexpected ways. Through tactical engagement with juridical forms and government actors, people undermine the state and advance their own agendas, but not without a great deal of work organizing across difference, and not without consequences. Third, is that by making use of liminal spaces, residents in Kupang Bay are able to hold on to alternative socialities and maintain meaningful attachments to place and one another, despite encroachments and displacements by economic nationalist projects.

This dissertation approaches Latin American integration through the Pan American Highway. While integration, the process by which communities are imagined and social collectivities take shape, has often been understood as a regional economic and political process, this dissertation uses ethnographic insights to understand how people's lived experiences on the Pan American Highway inform integration at national, regional, and hemispheric scales. Based on fieldwork in eastern Panama, the only location where the highway has yet to be completed, as well as archival research in Panama and the United States, this study traces mobility practices along the highway: the migrations, displacements, travels, and everyday commutes it facilitates, and also the planning, construction and maintenance activities that make the highway possible. Engaging postcolonial studies, science and technology studies and the anthropology of mobility, this dissertation charts how the highway creates connections between people and landscapes, enables the movement of tangible and intangible things, and produces encounters across difference that nonetheless create common, if unequal, ground. Understanding integration through the Pan American Highway offers a way to make sense of the multiple and competing dreams and desires that, through movements and encounters, create uneven forms of togetherness.

By arguing that large-scale modern projects such as the highway may be traced through their linkages to other projects operating at other scales (such as nation-building projects) in order to understand their power and lively heterogeneity, and by arguing that connections and movements across the Americas must always be situated within a material landscape (that is, by arguing that social processes in Latin America cannot be understood as culture exclusive of nature), this dissertation contributes to understandings of modernity and coloniality in America, and of how these configurations--best illustrated by the idea of a smooth, straight road to progress--may change, just as the movements, surfaces, and landscapes of the Pan American Highway are also in constant and lively transformation.

For over a century the enclave state of Lesotho has acted as a labor reserve for South Africa’s mining industries. With the decline of the migrant labor economy in the 1990s, many people in Lesotho lost their primary source of income: wage remittances from family members working over the border. During that same period, the Lesotho government hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A Treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), a multi-billion dollar effort to dam and divert water from the mountains of Lesotho to the arid industrial areas south of Johannesburg. However, the rise of the LHWP has raised concerns that degradation stemming from land mismanagement in the upstream catchment could imperil the water economy, prompting erosion control programs and land use reforms. This dissertation examines the logics and consequences of such programs, the water production infrastructure of which they form a part, and the broader ecology of life in an economic “periphery.” Based upon 15 months of ethnographic field research, I show how efforts to produce water commodities rely on colonial soil conservation techniques that represent modes of governance more than ecological measures per se. Following the colonial legacy of figuring Lesotho as a politically walled-off but economically dependent territory, the goal of governance then and now is to maintain a relationship between nonsustainable multispecies livelihoods, on the one hand, and political quietude, on the other. Elites in Lesotho construct water commodification as a national priority, thereby arguing that erosion control is necessary. Erosion control is presented as a technical matter when in fact it is a political one, as nonsustainability is not a failure of local management but rather an architectural feature of a regional political economy: land degradation stems from Lesotho’s historical experience as a “periphery” to the South African “core.” Settler colonialism by white Afrikaners; population growth and class struggle within Basotho society; and colonial promotion of wool and mohair production together put intense pressure on the mountain rangelands where LHWP dams are now sited. Today’s nonsustainable livelihoods are maintained through the innovative livestock production strategies of rural Basotho, and through a tenuous politics of distribution established by elites, whereby payments for water are channeled toward concentration and corruption but trickle down to rural livelihoods through development and environmental management programs. In making this argument, I present ethnographic and historical accounts of the symbolic production of water as a national natural resource; the development of soil conservation work parties called fato-fato; the establishment of rangeland management associations; peasant and state understandings of land degradation; and the development of a wool, mohair, and mutton export economy that promotes rural livelihoods but also rangeland degradation. My findings contribute to interdisciplinary literature on state-making, environmental conservation, and natural resource politics by describing the symbolic and material infrastructures required for water production, and by showing how history and political economy insinuate ecological processes.

Comparisons are powerful tools for making sense of worlds. But comparisons do not merely identify inherent or pre-existing similarities and differences; instead, they participate in making the very worlds they aim to describe. This dissertation probes how comparative practices shape the formation of multispecies landscapes. I show that the specificities of how people make comparisons and what kinds of comparisons they make are a powerful but often overlooked part of the production of human-nonhuman arrangements, as well as knowledges about them. By focusing on salmon in Hokkaido, Japan, I demonstrate that neither the island's watershed ecologies nor its fish population structures can be understood without attention to practices of comparison-making. Since the mid-19th century, natural resources management in northern Japan has been profoundly shaped by how people both within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes and fish to those in other parts of the world. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japanese officials sought to "develop" Hokkaido's lands and waters and make them legibly "modern" to Euro-American audiences. They did so by importing "Western" crops and livestock, promoting large-scale commercial agriculture, and constructing salmon hatcheries. Since that time, the ways that Japanese fishermen, scientists, government officials, and indigenous peoples have compared Hokkaido's salmon and salmon-bearing watersheds to others around the globe have dramatically affected the region's approaches to fisheries management, as well as its salmon. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and fisheries science research in Hokkaido, the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and Chile, my dissertation demonstrates how particular practices of comparison have created cross-border movements - such as transplants of salmon eggs, exchanges of currency, transfers of scientific technology, and exports of processed fish products - that have shaped the course of Hokkaido's development, the genes of its fish, and the identities of its people. Comparison, I show, is not just a "meta" act of analysis, but also an everyday practice that alters both human and nonhuman bodies and relations. When a Japanese consumer compares kinds of salmon at a supermarket and decides to purchase the fish labeled "wild," or when a Chilean biologist compares the temperature of a Patagonian river to one in Hokkaido, determining that it might be possible to transplant fish from one side of the Pacific to the other, such decisions fundamentally reconfigure human and salmon lives. By tracing such far-reaching comparisons, this dissertation attempts to open up the practices and geographies through which we know landscapes.

The intensity of the maritime traffic across the Eastern Mediterranean signals that the movements of ships are tied to and routed with the convulsions of unstable Mediterranean economies and regimes. Along their route between Turkey and Greece, formerly detached rural coastal towns turn into industrial boom towns. In my research, I explore the economic, political, and environmental development of coastal towns in the Gulf of Izmit in Northwestern Turkey, which reached its peak and turned remote towns into international shipping hubs at the beginning of the 2000s. Heterogeneous and unequal encounters between the landscape/seascape and the boom-and-bust economy of coastal towns led to new arrangements of coastal environments of a hardened shelf. Further the sediment in the Gulf’s basins restored years of industrial runoff and kept a record of coastal development. From algae in ballast water to anti-fouling paint sloughing off the hulls, ships carry much more than their manifests describe. Ships bring places with them, creating new inter-place dynamics in their materiality. I track the events that escalated the transformation of out-of-the-way small towns into shipping hubs in the Gulf of Izmit. Specifically, my project uses ethnographic work among maritime industry workers, municipal archives, regulatory agencies, marine biologists, and residents of these towns. By digging into the material landscape of insular concrete infrastructures, logistics hubs, and coastal waterscape, my project illuminates the processes that shift the geo-bio-morphology of the narrow, enclosed sea. I argue that shipping makes coasts in its historical and material contingencies, and that the sea is not a smooth surface for the speed of logistics but is full with entanglements.

At a time when human environmental disturbance is challenging livability on the planet—for humans and nonhumans alike—it is important to find better methods for engaging with the liveliness of landscapes, the relations with which they hang together, and the various ways they are interrupted. This dissertation explores the practices of tracking and gathering as methods for studying such issues facing Kalahari Desert landscapes in Botswana. These ecologically important landscapes are increasingly encroached upon and fragmented by the growing cattle economy and the proliferation of extractive industries into the desert. These trends have led to dramatic declines in wildlife populations and growing desertification of the already arid region. The Kalahari is home to small communities of people, many of whom are former hunter-gatherers whose rights to land and access to wildlife are increasingly inhibited. The government has banned hunting, largely in response to conservationists’ concerns about wildlife. In addition, gathering is increasingly regulated, and cattle colonize areas that are significant for wildlife and San communities. In this context, rather than treating tracking and gathering as objects of study, I take these practices seriously as methods for noticing and theorizing more-than-human landscapes, their transformations, and contingent histories to address challenges facing people and their environments in the Kalahari and beyond.

By focusing on the relational forms of noticing landscapes with San trackers and gatherers, I describe landscapes as always in motion, emergent more-than-human places where assemblages gather, histories are made, and politics enacted. This is in direct contrast to theoretical moves that treat landscapes as background on which histories and politics occur. My dissertation enacts tracking and gathering as a methodology. Beginning with an extension of the concept of tracks and following their movements out to their relations with other landscape actors in each chapter, I emphasize that landscapes are not merely contexts for politics and histories. Rather, landscapes do histories and politics, in spite of efforts to hold these landscapes still as underutilized expanses of resources.

The dissertation itself unfolds, moving out through the landscape by tracking these emergent relations. I argue that tracking is a relational practice of becoming-familiar-with these multiple entanglements of emergent landscapes. The practice of gathering involves much of the same kinds of attention to landscape movements and their coordinations as with tracking. Here, I employ gathering in its double meaning: the practice of collecting and of coming together. The tracks of gathered truffles then lead to the worlds of grass and termites that, in turn, allow for a reflection on Kalahari rangeland ecology and the political economy of the cattle industry. Finally, the dissertation zooms out to the desert’s geomorphology, tracking the movements of geological processes as they gather with the movements of humans and nonhumans to form lively landscape features over the longue duree. Tracking and gathering are methods that allow for an elaboration of these more-than-human landscapes-in-motion, together with their social, political, and economic histories and speculative futures.

Land frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon continue to be dominated by the expansion of cattle ranching and large-scale deforestation events. Theory on smallholder agriculture argues that the agroecological intensification of land use – which would counteract land extensive speculation – depends on population pressure and land scarcity. This region has a low population density, however, which would mean that agroecologically intensified systems of land use cannot be explained by local adaptation alone. Instead, social organizational factors spanning multiple political and ecological scales can induce land system changes. Further, phenomenological anthropology supports the hypothesis of human ecological survival and sustainability in cultural learning processes. As such, how can alternative land use and livelihoods emerge and effectively counteract pressures of speculative deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon? If so, how – based on what economic, cultural and ecological factors? What implications would emerge in terms of human labor’s relation with global environmental change, for tropical forest conservation and restoration, and in continuity with Indigenous forest agriculture?

This research used participatory observation, remote sensing analysis, oral histories, botanical history, ethnobotanical and socio-economic surveys to assess socio-ecological relations and land system changes across a variety of land holdings along the Transamazon highway. The municipality of Medicilândia, Pará – a major producer of cacao seeds for commodity markets –was singled out for its unusual history of failed state sugarcane plantations, which were subsequently re-consolidated into smallholding cacao agroforestry. Remote sensing analysis was conducted to identify land use/cover historical trajectories on individual holdings and across landscapes as a whole. The research found that a new class of ‘true’ smallholders are emerging in the region, who cultivate significant agrobiodiversity in more concentrated patterns of agroecological management. As a native Amazonian tree, cacao’s history is both social and ecological, and endemic fungal ecologies both threaten production while encouraging this crop to be managed at small scales. Further, cacao production is not limited to high fertility ‘terra roxa’ soils (Nitossolo Vermelho), which the state originally deemed the only soil suitable for development. Medium fertility Argissolos (Ultisols in the USDA terminology) are also viable for production and extend over hundreds of thousands if not millions of hectares. The findings – historical, socio-economic and ecological – suggest that the role of smallholding cacao and other agroforestry systems in more equitable rural development, connected with tropical forest conservation and restoration, could be significant.

What happens when the love story that changes the world is not between humans? Based in the Pampas of Argentina, where cattle are an outsized symbol of prestige as well as an everyday meal, Belonging in the Pampas traces the love men have for cattle, and what they do when the world cattle create is threatened. It begins in 1996, when a representative from Monsanto visits David Murray’s farm on the edge of the western pampas with a bag of genetically modified soybeans. The soybeans, according to the representative, could be sprayed with glyphosate – a potent and lethal herbicide that causes quick death in plants – and survive. David was skeptical, but he planted the seeds. They did so well that the next year he planted more. And he was not alone.

Within two decades farmers and multinational companies had planted over twenty million hectares of Pampas farmland with genetically modified soybeans, ushering in an astonishing and rapid landscape change. But David and other ranchers, aware of the possibility of immense profits in comparison to cattle, were faced with a dilemma. What would they do with their herd? Many ranchers culled their cattle herds to make room for soybeans in the plains, while others like David decided to lease ranches in the western forests, moving their cattle to the semi-arid savannas that were too dry to grow soy.

Tracing the arc of environmental change brought by European settler species to Argentina, the dissertation tacks back and forth between the current moment and poignant historical flashpoints that changed the social and ecological worlds of the Pampas. Soy, the dissertation shows, expands and develops a historical ecological conquest through its displacements as well as through its destinations. Rather than being a crop that feeds the hungry world, it is a crop that creates astonishing opportunities for concentrating more animals into smaller spaces. And so, even as the men sought to come to grips with the world they themselves were bringing into being, so too were they able to accumulate more cattle in feedlots, and to hang on to the part of themselves that had fallen in love, first with cattle. It was with cattle, and especially on the frontier in the forests, that they could be reminded of who they were. They sought out the forests as a refuge for masculinity and freedom, even as women in the plains retreated to the cities, estancias fell into disrepair, workers were made more marginal than ever, and in the forests a movement for Indigenous recognition was born.

Expansive in its scope, Belonging in the Pampas traces a century of environmental change, with special focus on the past two decades, and in so doing makes a case that this epoch we have entered due to human modification of the earth’s environment cannot be thought without affect. And, the dissertation argues, it is the love between species, the love men have for cattle because of who cattle make them, that brings into being the Anthropocene.