Mobilizing the Ecological Society
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We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.
—Al Gore, 2007
There is an old fable that Mike enjoyed telling to his children when they were young, “Androcles and the
Lion.” It is indeed old, 2,000 years at least. Some say it dates from the time of Caligula, who ruled the
Roman Empire from 37 to 41 CE, and that it was written by Apion, a scholar from that day, and that it
may be based on a real incident. Others say that it originally comes from Aesop, the Greek storyteller
from the sixth century BCE. The earliest extant version of it is in the Noctes Atticae, or Attic Nights, of
Aulus Gellius—20 volumes of random stuff that Gellius, a minor Roman official, scribbled down to pass
the time while on a posting to Athens, which is in Attica.1 Gellius himself, at least, says he got it from
Apion, not Aesop, and that Apion claimed to have been an eyewitness to the story. In any event, it is
plenty old.
There’s a good reason why people have continued to tell this story for so long. It is not just a story for
the young; rather, it has an important message about community and environment and how to bring the
two together into that biggest community of all. Here’s how it goes—or at least here’s how Mike used to
tell it.2
How do we mobilize ourselves to build an ecological society, a community of care big enough to include
humans, lions, and all other creatures—a community that recognizes, celebrates, and maintains our
mutual dependences and independences? When those moments of passion arise, when the moment of
truth comes between butchering Androcles and the lion or respecting their unique story, how do we
encourage the crowd’s roar toward life and not death? How do we organize ourselves to work together
for what we believe is right for the planet and its diverse inhabitants, even in the face of bad odds?
The story of Androcles and the lion points out three foundations of ecological mobilization that
environmental sociology also points out. We’ll call them the three cons of conceptions, connections, and
contestations.
The prefix con- is wonderfully multiple in its meanings. It can refer to “knowledge,” as in the words
connoisseur, consideration (which means knowing the stars), con (as in the phrase “con job”), and
cunning (which transforms con- into cun-). Con- can also mean “together” and appears in this usage in a
host of words, such as consult, confide, convene, conversation, converge, conclave, concert, consent,
and (transforming con- into com-) community and commonality. Plus, con- can mean “against,” as in the
pros and cons of something, and in its full form as contra- in the words contradiction, control, contrast,
and controversy.
An effective environmental movement needs to be “pro” all of these basic meanings of con-. To mobilize
the ecological society, we need ecological knowledge—conceptions. We need the solidarity of
community ties—connections. And we need political strategy—contestations.8
Androcles had the ecological conceptions to begin with. Plus, because of his own experiences as a slave,
he could relate to what the lion was going through; the two then built a strong solidarity of mutual
connections that carried them through the years. Finally, based on that solidarity, the lion contested the
government’s animal handlers, and Androcles made a compelling appeal, winning a remarkable political
victory that brought freedom for human and lion alike. Whether the story is fact or fiction—and it has
certainly had its share of reshaping over the years by various storytellers, including Mike—it is true in a
deeper sense. As we shall see.
There once was a slave named Androcles who belonged to the Roman governor of Africa. The governor
was a cruel master and used to beat Androcles mercilessly. One day, Androcles saw his chance to
escape, and he ran away into the wilderness. After running for hours, he spied a cave where he thought
he could rest, hide, and spend the night.
But as Androcles approached the cave, he heard a terrible roaring echoing from inside it, and a huge lion
came out into the cave’s mouth. Androcles was frightened, of course, but he noticed that the lion was
favoring one of his feet. Androcles looked more closely and could see something sticking out of the paw
of the hurt foot. It was an old nail. Forgetting his own safety, for he probably could have outrun the lame
lion, Androcles cautiously approached the brute. He took the hurt paw into his hands and pulled out the
nail, and then did his best to clean up the infected sore. It just seemed like the right thing to do. After all,
Androcles knew what it was like to suffer.
The lion was ecstatic and gratefully licked Androcles’s face. The two, man and lion, became fast friends.
They lived together in the cave and learned to hunt together, using the lion’s teeth and claws and
Androcles’s hands and wit. They became inseparable, despite their differences, and in many ways
precisely because of those differences.
But they were a little careless one day. Some of the Emperor Caligula’s soldiers were out hunting for a
lion for a show in the Circus Maximus back in Rome and caught the beast in a net. One of the soldiers
recognized Androcles as the governor’s escaped slave, so they captured him, too. When the soldiers
brought Androcles back to the governor, he flew into a rage about the poor slave. In those days before
television, people enjoyed going to the circus to watch lions eat defenseless captives, and other
gruesome sports. The governor condemned Androcles to the Circus Maximus to be used for this
unhappy purpose.
On the day of the event, great excitement filled the air as the crowd swarmed into the arena. Even the
Emperor Caligula was there. After all, it was good for an emperor’s popularity to be seen putting on a
satisfyingly bloody circus show, and Caligula was in political trouble because of his lavish spending on an
expansion of his palace.3 Besides, Caligula was a rather bloodthirsty fellow himself.
Tension mounted as the preliminary acts—foot races, weight lifting, gladiator fights, a chariot race—
were held. Finally, Androcles was thrown into the ring, naked and unarmed. The lion, who had been
starved for days, was also released into the ring.
Snarling and roaring, the lion approached Androcles and prepared for a lethal pounce onto the modest
frame of this gentle soul. But as he drew near to Androcles, the lion recognized who it was. The mighty
cat lay down in front of Androcles, looked up at him, and began to mew softly.4
A few people in the stands began to jeer. They wanted blood. So some of Circus Maximus’s animal
handlers came out with long pikes to poke and anger the lion into action. But the lion rose up, shook his
great mane, and roared fiercely at the handlers until they retreated. Then, the lion lay down once again
at Androcles’s feet, purring and swishing his tail.5
The circus crowd fell absolutely silent. Caligula, too, was astonished. He asked to have Androcles
brought near to his viewing platform so he could question him. Androcles explained the strange history
of his friendship with the lion, shouting up to the emperor high above on his portable throne. Caligula
thought for a moment and then commanded that the story be written out on a tablet and passed
through the crowd so all would know. After all, there were no loudspeakers in those days.
Once the tablet had made its way through the multitudes, with those who could read explaining the
matter to those who could not, Caligula rose up. Everyone immediately fell silent again to hear. Caligula
shouted out, “Should we release Androcles and the lion?” The crowd roared its approval. Caligula held
up his hand to silence them again, and then proclaimed, “The vote is clear. Let them both go free!” The
crowd’s roar after that could be heard clear across Rome.
For the next few months, Androcles and the lion walked through the city together, the lion on a light
leash so as not to frighten anyone. People would give Androcles money and sprinkle the lion with
flowers. And everyone who met them exclaimed, “This is the lion, a man’s friend; this is the man, a lion’s
doctor.”6
But eventually, Androcles and the lion grew tired of the fuss, even though they now had plenty of
money to live on. They returned to the wilderness and lived out the rest of their days together, the
closest of companions.
And so we learn that no act of kindness is ever wasted.7
Mobilizing Ecological Conceptions
One of the oldest answers to the question of how to mobilize an ecological society is education. The
environmental movement has put a huge amount of effort into environmental education. There are
literally thousands of local environmental education centers and school programs across the world.
There are dozens (it could even be into the hundreds) of professional associations of environmental
educators at the regional, national, and international levels—for example, the North American
Association for Environmental Education, founded in 1971; the Australian Association for Environmental
Education, founded in 1980; the Maine Environmental Education Association, founded in 1982; and the
Japan Society of Environmental Education, founded in 1990. Many countries publish environmental
education journals, including Australia, Canada, Hungary, South Africa, the United States, and more, and
there are several international journals. Since 2003, there has been an annual World Environmental
Education Congress. There can hardly be an environmental organization, either governmental or
nongovernmental, that does not put significant effort into education and public outreach. And think of
all the TV programs and popular magazines that have carried environmental stories, from the Discovery
Channel to National Geographic. In these many ways, the environmental movement has been working
to put into practice the widely cited definition of environmental education from UNESCO’s (United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 1978 “Tbilisi Declaration,” to wit,
Environmental education is a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness
about the environment and associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address
the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and
take responsible action.9
Sounds great. It is great. Much good has come of it. Nonetheless, after decades of environmental
education, we still have massive environmental problems and significant issues with every goal
mentioned in the Tbilisi Declaration’s definition of environmental education.
The trouble is, knowing something doesn’t mean you can do much about it. If people find their lives
organized so that it is hard for them to put their ecological knowledge into practice, then they are
unlikely to do so. Why? For exactly that reason: because it is hard—especially when one tries to act as
an individual. The pattern of our economy, technology, built environment, and ideologies presents
tremendous obstacles to getting something changed when we try to act on our own.
When people hear that they are doing something wrong that they feel they can’t do much about, they
will likely try to dodge the implied sense of guilt by resisting knowledge. They may well accuse the
bearer of environmental knowledge of playing a game of shame and blame to gain a position of moral
superiority over the ecologically guilty. So they turn the page. They click the remote. They surf to
another site.
Does this mean that environmental education doesn’t accomplish anything? Hardly. We wouldn’t be
writing this book if we believed that. But it does mean we should be wary of a behaviorist approach to
environmental problems—the idea that if we change an individual’s attitudes, his or her behaviors will
soon follow. Now, there is much that individuals have done that makes a real, marked difference, and
we’ll talk about that more in the final chapter of the book. But we need to look at knowledge
situationally, understanding the social contexts by which, and in which, people find themselves
motivated to take action. Counseling individual action can overwhelm and disappoint people. The
“knowledge and awareness” the Tbilisi Declaration advocates is not something one can insert into
someone’s brain as she or he comes down an assembly line, a missing part that we slot into a skull as it
goes by. These are social matters, not ones of individual mechanics.
The Cultivation of Knowledge
Think about what goes on in anyone’s day. It is awash with information. For it is not just the
environmental movement that is trying to grab people’s attention. Every social movement, industry, and
government agency is out there trying, as the Tbilisi Declaration describes, to increase “knowledge and
awareness”; develop “skills and expertise”; and foster “attitudes, motivations, and commitments” that
result in what each of those organizations regards as “informed decisions” and, we must hope,
“responsible action.” The Internet. The newspaper. Television. Radio. Mail campaigns. Viral marketing.
Flyers passed out on the street. Advertisements on buses, billboards, and T-shirts. Everyone is trying it
all. And no one can pay attention to it all. There is simply too much. So which sources will someone key
into, and which will he or she ignore?
Plus, all the various sources out there often do not agree. (Indeed, if they did agree, they probably
wouldn’t feel a need to put out a message of their own.) Which is confusing and confounding (two more
con- words), as none of us is an expert in everything, even within our own fields of endeavor. We (Mike
and Loka, that is) think we know quite a bit about environmentalism and environmental issues after
many years of studying these matters. But there is a lot we don’t know. How do you conceptualize
something without certainty? For example, Mike and Loka had a good look through the Fifth Assessment
Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a document that states
climate change is “unequivocal”; that the changes in rising sea levels, concentrations of greenhouse gas,
and diminished ice and snow are “unprecedented”; and that it is “extremely likely” that human factors
have been the “dominant cause.”10 Mike has a geology degree and another in forestry, and Loka has a
degree in geography. So between the two of us, we have some technical background in some of the
relevant sciences. But most observers agree that these are interdisciplinary matters. And if something is
recognized as being an interdisciplinary concern, that is another way of saying that no one person
understands the whole thing. Moreover, who has read every one of the citations in the 1,552-page,
four-volume Fifth Assessment Report? Not that reading them is enough to be sure of their veracity.
Maybe the experiments and measurements and models were done wrong. Maybe the sources aren’t all
reliable—which was indeed the case with a few of them in the Fourth Assessment Report, as the
“Climategate” controversy showed.11 Scientists make mistakes. Everyone does. Scientists sometimes
misunderstand what they see. We all do. But who has the time or the resources or the expertise to do
all those experiments for her- or himself to see if others got it wrong?
Which means each of us has to trust someone else who knows more about some aspect of something
than we can determine on our own—and not just about technical matters of environmental science.
Throughout the day, we ask others about things that have worked for them or that they have heard
worked for others. Do we need to sample every poisonous mushroom for ourselves to believe that they
are poisonous? That would kill us. Do we need to read every book, newspaper, and website for
ourselves to decide which ones are worthwhile? We’ll never live so long. So we each rely on others—
others we trust—to help guide us successfully through the day.
But what if our friends are wrong? What if that supposedly poisonous mushroom was, in fact, safe and
delicious? What if some bit of the knowledge in all those books, newspapers, and websites that our
friends indicated, either explicitly or implicitly, that we shouldn’t bother with was, in fact, exactly what
we needed both to better ourselves and to better the world? We may never know.
The point is that education is not just about communicating facts. It never has been. It is also
fundamentally about trust and the people by whom we gain a sense of what knowledge to pay attention
to and what knowledge we can safely not pay attention to. Because of the centrality of trust, then,
knowledge is not just knowledge. Knowledge is a social relation. And education is a social relation, too.
Think of it as a matter of the cultivation of knowledge.12 By that we mean what we take to be
knowledge is a matter of our self-identity and a matter of the social relations of trust that shape and
come from self-identity. It’s an interactive matter. It’s ongoing. And it’s cultivated within culture and the
resulting sense of lines of difference and lines of similarity we forge with and between others and
ourselves.
What we know is who we are. (Mike and Loka are environmental sociologists.) Who we are is what we
know. (We therefore know a lot about environmental sociology.) Who we are and what we know are
whom we know and whom we trust. (We gained our identities and much of our knowledge from other
sociologists, environmentalists, and environmental sociologists, who give us professional recognition
and whose work and experience we use as a base for our own. And we learned much from the
individuals we’ve mentioned throughout the book. Those we’ve read. Those we lived with. Those we’ve
interviewed. Those who have shared a piece of their knowledge with a stranger to open dialogue into
unexpected places. All based on trust.)
Some deep commitments are at work here. A person’s identity is who his or her friends and associates
are and who his or her friends and associates are not. Given that your knowledge is linked to your
identity and that both your knowledge and your identity are linked to others, a lot is at stake in the
cultivation of knowledge. Yourself. Your friends. Your associates. Your confidence. Your confidences.
These are matters that are close to the bone of how we consider our location in the world. These are
matters that are hard to change.
To cultivate knowledge is also to cultivate a sense of the ignorable. We don’t mean ignorance. Nor do
we mean stupidity about reality. Rather, we mean that which we can safely disregard—which is central
to what we consider important. We gain knowledge by paying attention. But to pay attention to one
thing is to not pay attention to something else—indeed, it is to not pay attention to far more than we
pay attention to. To be where we are, in tune and attentive to the place and the people, is to be not
everywhere else and not with all those other people. To decide what counts for knowledge—useful
knowledge that is appropriate to our lives, as we understand them—we must have some way to screen
out far more that we will never know. We can try to read The New York Times every day (Mike does).
But can we also read The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Irish
Times, The Times (of London), Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and Al Jazeera? Every day? Cover to cover? And
how about Sierra Magazine, the Ecologist, E/The Environmental Magazine, High Country News, and
Environment Times? When we are already reading the National Review, The Spectator, and The
Economist?
So how do we know that what we focus on is what we should focus on if we haven’t looked at those
things we are not looking at and will never look at? We don’t. But from the cues of culture, the cultures
with which we identify and find trust in, we decide, almost without deciding, what is safe for someone
like us to ignore.
Cultivating Knowledge in the Fields of Iowa
How, then, does anyone ever change and begin to tune in to other cultivations of knowledge, other
conceptions of self and reality such as, say, ecological ones?
Mike found himself asking this question some years ago when he lived in Iowa and encountered a
marvelously successful organization: Practical Farmers of Iowa, or PFI for short. PFI is Iowa’s largest
sustainable agriculture organization, with over 2,000 members, roughly half of whom are farmers. That
may not seem like a lot when one considers that Iowa, a major farm state, has about 90,000 farms. But
in 1985, the year the group began, there were hardly any sustainable farmers in Iowa, which has as
industrialized an agricultural landscape as one can find anywhere on the planet. Some 60 percent of the
state is covered by just two species of plants: corn and soybeans. Each spring, Iowa’s grain farmers gear
up the machinery and chemistry to keep yanking this biomass out of the ground and into the mouths of
hogs and cattle and, increasingly, into the mouths of ethanol and biodiesel factories. We’re talking
factory farming in the extreme (see Figure 11.1). This is what most Iowa farmers do. But they don’t have
to farm this way. In the years since 1985, PFI farmers and many other farmers have shown that
sustainable agriculture works. It produces strong yields and solid incomes, while supporting families,
communities, and ecologies. So why don’t more farmers change, and, conversely, if so few do, why do
any at all?
Figure 11.1 Industrial agriculture in Iowa. An articulated tractor discs and applies chemical fertilizer to a
field, 2000.
Figure 60
Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson.
The standard answer is that the structure of agriculture—markets, laws, subsidies, technologies—
prevents them from changing to sustainable methods. After all, the government pours vast subsidies
into corn and soybean production, which mightily maintain the existing pattern of markets, laws, and
technologies, while giving a direct boost to farmers’ bottom line. But that doesn’t explain why some
farmers change, especially as PFI farmers mostly come from the same situations as their conventionally
farming neighbors. PFI farmers drive tractors. They wear “feed caps”—baseball-style caps that read
“DeKalb” or “Cenex” or “Cargill” or “Pioneer” or the name of some other company that sells supplies to
farmers. They were mostly raised in the communities where they now live, and often on the same
farms. They are not a bunch of old hippies gone to seed.
However, conventional farmers in Iowa have plenty of incentive to change. The structure of agriculture
is not kind to most of them. That’s why farm numbers have continued to plummet in Iowa long after the
fabled farm crisis of the 1980s and, in fact, were plummeting well before the farm crisis, too. As farm
numbers continue to fall, so do the number of local businesses that service the farm economy. The loss
of those businesses boards up main streets, churches, schools, and even houses across rural Iowa. The
result is an odd paradox: lush fields worked by expensive, modern equipment spreading out to the
horizon and away from abandoned Victorian homes with sagging porches and glassless windows and
small-town main streets lined by plywood instead of plate glass (see Figure 11.2). So the structure of
agriculture is rough on farmers’ communities. The stress of the work is often equally rough on their
families. The danger of the work is hard on their own health. And the monocultures in the fields—
pumped up and propped up by can’t-miss chemistry and “Big Iron,” as farmers say—literally send the
land down the creek. The structure of agriculture is hard on the environment, too.
Figure 11.2 The smoke and dust rises as a 1907 Victorian farmhouse in Pocahontas County, Iowa, is
razed to the ground. Industrialization of agriculture has increased farm sizes so much that many
farmhouses are abandoned and fall into ruin, and rural communities with them.
Figure 61
Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson.
Given that their farms, communities, and land, and sometimes their families and health, are all eroding
away, there is plenty of reason for conventional farmers to change to sustainable practices. They rarely
do change, though, because what they are really farming out in their fields is something far more
important to them than their crops. They are farming their selves. They are farming their sense of
themselves as men and women, knowledgeable about and competent in what they do, maintaining a
respectable place for themselves in the fabric of their communities, in which they have lived most of
their lives, and sometimes all their lives. They do this farming with a stock of knowledge, built up over
many years, often hard won, that serves as a continual investment in their identities, the more they
draw on and add to this knowledge. It’s a lot to give up.
Now, conventional farmers could be going to the series of field days that PFI puts on at members’ farms
across the state, demonstrating sustainable practices. Sometimes they do. They could be accessing the
information on sustainable practices offered by Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture and
agricultural extension staff. Again, sometimes they do. They could be attending the winter meetings that
the state’s organic and sustainable farmers put on that discuss the strong markets for sustainably raised
farm products and that bring farmers together with eaters interested in helping promote agricultural
change. At times, indeed, they do go. And when conventional farmers tune in to these events, they are
often surprised to find out that PFI farmers have most of the same passions for farming life that they
do—that there is a network of friends here that one can trust to help navigate through the poisonous
mushrooms and the flood of potential knowledge each day brings. That discovery brings them back,
again and again.
One of the main leaders of PFI, a man we’ll call Earl, explained this discovery to Mike one hot summer
afternoon at a field day at a PFI member’s farm.13 About 25 people were huddled under the shade of an
old oak, and a few, including Mike, in the shadow of a huge John Deere tractor. Most of the crowd were
PFI members. But there were several new faces, too. The farmer (not Earl) was explaining the
importance of not putting too much fertilizer on a corn crop.
“If your corn is looking dark green right through to the end of the year, you’re throwing your money
away,” he told the crowd—meaning that if your corn is dark green that long you’ve spent more on
fertilizer than you’ll get back in yield, however good the crop may look. Plus, you’ve just polluted the
groundwater because you’ve probably used more fertilizer than the crop can absorb. In farming, as in
other endeavors, wasting money often means wasting the environment.
Mike knew Earl, whose own farm was just up the road, from earlier PFI events. Earl must have been
finding it hard to concentrate in the heat, too, and he wandered back from the group by the oak to
where Mike was standing. “All this fertility stuff must be a bit boring for you,” he said to Mike, in a kind
of classroom whisper between naughty pupils. Earl knew by then that Mike was a sociologist and that he
didn’t have a farm background.
“Well,” Mike replied, a bit uncertainly, not knowing where this was going, “there’s a lot of it I can’t
follow.”
“Besides,” said Earl, “it’s all social. That’s where the real change has to come from. All this, this is just
technical.”14
But how do these social relations of knowledge get going? The nine years of research Mike conducted
on PFI with his colleagues Sue Jarnagin, Greg Peter, and Donna Bauer led to this conclusion: Change
most commonly starts with a phenomenological rupture in people’s existing cultivation of knowledge, a
wrenching experience that causes them suddenly to doubt the bases of trust upon which they had long
committed themselves to this cultivation. That rupture is not something PFI creates. The strains of
industrial agriculture are what rip the fabric of trust, often through a financial crisis or a health crisis,
according to the farmers that Mike and his colleagues interviewed who had switched from conventional
farming to sustainable practices.
Dick and Sharon Thompson (their real names) were perhaps the best-known PFI farmers, and by the
time Dick died in 2013, they had won several major environmental awards for their work (see Figure
11.3). They were among the first to switch to sustainable practices, back in the 1960s, in fact, and went
on to help found PFI in 1985. Here’s how Dick once described the rupture, and his spiritual experience of
it, in response to a crisis in the health of his livestock and his own overworked body:
In January of 1968, while chopping stalks in field number six, going north, I was—I’d had it. All the
work. The pigs were sick. My cattle were sick. I hollered “help.” That’s about the only way I know how to
explain this. But some things started to happen. And a lot of things that happened seem to happen early
in the morning. That thoughts come into my mind that I know that are not mine. So I want to share this.
The creator wants to put a receiver, a still small voice, way down deep inside each one of us, for
communication. It’s our choice. It’s not forced on us. If you want it, you can have it.15
Figure 11.3 Dick and Sharon Thompson, winners of many environmental awards, at their farm in Boone,
Iowa, 1999.
Figure 62
Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson.
Other farmers also described the unsettling period of rejecting a valued knowledge cultivation as a
spiritual crisis. For example, one experienced it as a calling from God, speaking down from the sky one
day when he was up on a ladder, painting his barn, and closer to the heavens.16 Another called it a
“planned event” orchestrated by a higher being.17
Dale, another PFI member, explained the disorientation of the rupture well. He had been one of those
market-oriented farmers, spending every free moment in front of a computer, watching the movement
of prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. He made some good choices about when to sell and on futures
contracts he signed, but also some bad choices. He had dug himself into a big hole with a string of bad
guesses, but then thought he had the situation pegged. He had accumulated a good stock of grain to
sell, even though it hadn’t rained in Iowa for a while. Because of the lack of rain, prices were good, and
getting better day by day. Monday, he thought, I’ll sell. But that was 2 days too long.
“You know, I had the boat loaded. But it rained over the weekend, so that was the end of that deal.”
Dale laughed, wistfully. “The boat sunk in the harbor!”18
The financial crisis that ensued nearly drove him out of farming, like so many others before. And he
began to doubt everything that he thought he knew about how to be a successful farmer. “I kind of lost
confidence in myself, because some of the things I was doing before failed me. Naturally after your ideas
and things had failed, well, then, soon you get kind of gun-shy. It’s taken me probably a couple years to
gain my confidence back, so to speak.”19
How did he get it back? He happened on a notice for a PFI field day. He’d seen such notices before. He
knew a couple of other farmers in his area were members. But this time he decided he would go. He
wound up joining. Two years later, he had his confidence again. He had trust again, in himself and in
others. He had a cultivation of knowledge back.
Today he is farming differently, too. No longer a fence-row-to-fence-row grain farmer, he has a
diversified operation based on integrating grass, livestock, and some grain crops through a 5- to 7-year
rotation that breaks up pest cycles and fertilizes the ground without chemicals and with very little
erosion. He is getting a lot more money per acre, too, because he is spending less and getting better
prices by not emphasizing low-value commodities like grain. So he is no longer in the game of forever
plotting to get his neighbor’s land to make a low-margin, high-volume income. In so doing, he is making
space for more farmers and a stronger local community. And he also likes himself better.
“But you know, going back, all these chains of events that have happened in my life, I’d have to say that
I’ve been a better person because of it. And I have no remorse for the money I’ve lost or whatever.
Because, the thing is, to me, it made me a better person.”20
New knowledge, new self. New self, new knowledge. New self, new knowledge, new friends. New self,
new knowledge, new friends, new farm—a farm that sustains the land and its people.
Cultivating Dialogic Consciousness
Central to knowledge cultivation is not only the existence of social relations of knowledge, but also the
character of those relations. As we’ll come to, PFI emphasizes a horizontal, dialogic process of engaging
others and linking knowledge and identity. There are top-down, monologic ways, too. These monologic
ways are by no means uncommon or unsuccessful, at least in the short term. Think of the “you” ads
discussed in Chapter 2. Think of promotional campaigns fronted by a good-looking and famous person
that many people would like to consider as a personal friend. Think of the religious leader who pitches a
particular value by connecting it to traditions. Think of the manipulation of nationalist sympathies by
unscrupulous politicians. These are all common practices.
The theory of frame analysis describes top-down methods of knowledge cultivation well. Monologic
ways of cultivation depend on framing issues so that people will respond to them as the framer desires.
This is the skill of the “good communicator”—the orator who takes the symbols of the day and uses
them to her or his advantage, or reframes them to the same effect. The key process is what David Snow
and Robert Benford call frame alignment, by which an individual’s frames become congruent or
complementary with what we have been terming a knowledge cultivation.21 Snow and Benford identify
four basic tactics for aligning individual frames: frame bridging, which links frames; frame amplification,
which invigorates the values behind a frame; frame extension, which widens a frame’s boundaries; and
frame transformation, which reconfigures a frame’s meaning. Frames identify problems and attribute
blame in particular ways that can be flexible or rigid. As we discussed in the ideology of environmental
concern, those frames can mean the difference between inclusion and exclusion. Some frames are more
narrow, and others, such as environmental justice, are master frames that cross many boundaries. And
based on the credibility of the frame, such as who the articulators and claimsmakers are, a movement
can sink or swim.22 Throughout, the effort is to link knowledge to social relations, often subtly (and, to
those on the outside, often not so subtly) reshaping them.
Probably any social movement, or indeed any social encounter, engages in at least a bit of framing. After
all, rhetoric is inescapable. We are always representing, always engaging in social construction. There
are many ways to describe any situation. As Chapter 9 discusses, you can never describe absolutely
everything about anything. We all have to choose our words, and we do so with our audience in mind. It
has long been this way. Two millennia ago, Aristotle wrote out a whole book on the matter. In his Art of
Rhetoric, he distinguished among three forms of persuasion, noting that we generally use all three at
once:
Ethos, convincing by getting the audience to feel that the speaker is ethical and trustworthy;
Pathos, convincing by getting the audience to emotionally experience the speaker’s point of view; and
Logos, convincing by getting the audience’s agreement on the logic of the argument (yes, even social
constructionists agree this is important).23
Frame analysis restates (and reframes) this ancient insight. Many environmental sociologists have
applied frame analysis to understanding the success of the environmental movement and the success of
countermovements to environmentalism. Barbara Grey has used it to understand conflicts over
Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota.24 Dorceta Taylor has used it to understand the success of the
environmental justice movement.25 Andrew Rhys Jones has used it to understand how the media
portray global warming.26 Brian Walton and Connor Bailey have used it to understand the success of
the wilderness preservation movement in Alabama, after years of little headway.27 Almost any Google
search or Twitter feed will also exemplify framing at work, building online collective identities through
rhetoric and hyperlinks, and galvanizing followers.28 It’s all over the Web.
At least a bit of monologue is part of every social situation and every social movement. But do we want
an environmental movement that stresses monologue as its main technique of knowledge cultivation?
Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian philosopher of pedagogy, would have said no. If we want a humane,
liberatory education that is truly based on trust, and not the appearance of trust, the main approach
should be what Freire called conscientization—the building not of head-nodding agreement, but of
critical consciousness in dialogue with the world.29 Head nodding leads to nodding off. Critical
consciousness leads to a wide-awake creativity. Thus, dialogic education, and a dialogic knowledge
cultivation, does not emphasize persuasion. Rather, it develops people’s critical capacities and
welcomes their differences and disagreements as ways we grow and grow together.
PFI wonderfully cultivates this critical and sustaining collaboration through which friends and colleagues
stimulate each other to new knowledge for everyone, as Mike came to appreciate. PFI farmers, Mike
discovered, love to argue with each other—not with negative, alienating disagreement, but through
fostering mutual checks and balances with the experiences and insights of others, developing the ties of
cultivation as they develop knowledge.
Central to PFI’s critical approach are the group’s participatory research trials, conducted on-farm and
often with the help of university researchers, in which farmers become scientists and scientists become
farmers. Many of the techniques of sustainable agriculture are new or have been little studied by the
professional research community. Plus, being a better scientist is a great way to be a better farmer. And
as Chapter 4 discussed, to do science is to be open about one’s reasoning and to be open to the
reasoning of others. On-farm, participatory research trials exemplify both of these opennesses by using
methods that are accessible and explainable and by presenting the results to other farmer-scientists and
scientist-farmers for their critical feedback.
One tool of mutual critique that PFI uses is randomized, replicated plots, where you lay out an
experiment on your farm in a way that allows you to take account of the variability of the soil and
microclimate, so you know your result is due to your treatment and not due to an unrecognized
environmental difference. Knowing what caused your result also means you can explain your result to
someone else. Plus, you write down what you do. That, too, makes it a lot easier to explain your
experiment (see Figure 11.4).30 Glen, a PFI farmer who recently switched his farm over to organics,
explained how PFI’s dialogic approach helped him make the change:
Figure 11.4 Cultivating knowledge in a machine shed. PFI farmers discuss the results of the group’s
research trials, along with a university researcher, Iowa State University professor Kathleen Delate.
Figure 63
Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson.
“I probably wouldn’t have taken that step . . . if I hadn’t had the knowledge to be able to document what
I was doing, and some people there to hold my hand,” Glen described. “Just sitting down with people
and arguing about how do we structure our costs and things.”
Mike was really struck by his use of the word arguing, something that Midwesterners are generally
known for trying to avoid.
“It has been very valuable. In my organic operation now, I have weed control issues using the flame
weeding and rotary hoeing and things.” Flame weeding is when farmers pass a gas flame along the rows
of a crop when the weeds first start to come up, not to burn them but to superheat their sap so it bursts
plant capillaries and wilts the weed; you have to do it when the crop is strong enough to take the heat,
but before the weeds are. Rotary hoeing is another way to control weeds without chemicals. You use an
array of barbed disks to crumble the surface of the ground, breaking up the contact of weeds with the
soil; again, you have to do it when the weeds are small. Organic farmers in PFI, and elsewhere, have
been trying to figure out when to use one versus the other.
“Actually, that was my PFI trial this year,” Glen explained. PFI farmers get together in the winter to
coordinate their research trials for the group and then debate the results everyone gets on their
individual farms. “I had a statistically significant difference in weeds and yield. So I was pretty pleased
with the trial.”
“Using the flamer versus the rotary hoe?” Mike asked.
Glen nodded. “In my mind, the flamer is the last tool in the toolbox for early season weed control. . . . I
choose to use the flamer last because I think it is the most severe to the crop. There are people that
argue that point with me, and that’s next year’s trial.”31
So the dialogue of critical consciousness continues, ever developing the conceptions and knowledge
cultivation that make PFI strong. Which is exactly what the word consciousness means: con- for
“together” and sci, another root meaning “to know,” yielding “knowing together.” Indeed, it’s the only
way we ever really know.
Mobilizing Ecological Connections
How do we get that togetherness together? According to Garrett Hardin, at least, it won’t be easy.
The Tragedy of the Commons
In his famous 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin described the problem in stark terms.
Imagine you are a shepherd grazing your sheep on your village’s common pastureland, back in the hills
above the village. As a member of the village, you have the right to graze your sheep there, just as every
other village member does. You’ve got only 10 sheep, though, and after a while you think, “Well, I’d be a
bit better off if I added a few more to my flock.” Meanwhile, your fellow villagers are thinking the same
thing about their own flocks. Pretty soon, as everyone adds a few more animals, there are a lot more
sheep in the common pastureland.
The pastureland is only so big, though. Eventually, overgrazing occurs. The grass cover gets thin, and the
land starts to erode. Everybody’s sheep start to die. You wind up with fewer sheep than you began with,
and the eroded common land is no longer capable of supporting as many sheep as it originally could:
economic and environmental disaster.
Here’s how Hardin, rather melodramatically, described the situation:
The inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. . . . The rational herdsman
concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And
another; and another . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing
a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his
herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each
pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.32
Hardin intended this parable as a master allegory for all environmental problems. Three examples he
mentioned in the article are traffic, pollution, and overfishing. Think of streets as a kind of commons,
something we all collectively own—which, in fact, they usually are. As members of the community, we
are free to drive on our city’s streets as much as we want. But what if everybody decides to get about
this way? The result is traffic jams, smog, and the loss of alternatives as mass transit shuts down.
Or think of the lake where your summer cabin sits as a kind of commons. It’s expensive to put in a good
septic system, and it wouldn’t hurt you much to flush into a shallow leaching field close to the water’s
edge, where, as it happens, it would be the cheapest and easiest place to put the field. The lake is pretty
big, and it can handle a little bit of pollution. Besides, it would be hard for anyone to determine that
you’re the one with the shallow leaching field close to the shoreline. Lots of cabins ring the lake. But
what if everybody on the lake did what you’re doing?
The oceans are a commons, too. A fisher might as well cast as big a net as possible. What one fisher
does won’t have that much effect on overall fish stocks. Anyway, the other fishers are probably going to
do the same, right? And soon the fish are gone.
Hardin’s analysis is far from perfect, as we’ll come to in a moment. But it is hard to ignore the fact that
traffic jams, for example, are on the rise. In the car-dependent United States, traffic congestion cost
Americans a collective 5.52 billion hours and 1.88 billion gallons of fuel in 2011. That’s close to an hour a
week per commuter in the United States. Total cost? $121.2 billion. And it’s getting much worse, year by
year. By comparison, traffic congestion wasted a collective 1.12 billion hours in 1982.33 As for pollution,
another of Hardin’s examples, many recreational lakes have been badly polluted by their users, and total
annual air pollution deaths worldwide are huge: 1.64 million per year, as Chapter 10 discussed. As for
fishing, stocks are in terrible shape in many parts of the oceans and have simply collapsed in the Grand
Banks, leaving hundreds of fishing communities from Newfoundland to New England economically
devastated.
These are all examples of a more general class of circumstances, what social scientists call the problem
of collective action: In a world of self-interested actors, how can we get people to cooperate for their
own benefit? Individual actors pursuing their rational self-interest often lead us to irrational collective
outcomes that, in fact, undermine the interests of those who enact them. The result is a striking paradox
of social life: We often do not act in our own interests when we act in our own interests. Or, to put it
another way, when we all do what we want, it often leads to outcomes nobody wants.
Why It Really Isn’t as Bad as All That
Hardin’s account of the “tragedy of the commons” remains one of the most discussed theories in
environmental sociology, even nearly 50 years after it was written. The phrase “tragedy of the
commons” is familiar to many in the general populace. Academics regularly employ it in analyses. In a
quick search of the databases at our university library, we found over 4,000 peer-reviewed publications
that discuss or reference the phrase.34 Over 200 academic articles were just from the year 2013, the
most recent full year at the time we checked.35 In as specialized a realm as academia, this is a huge
amount. Several of these articles extend the allegory of the commons far beyond environmental
concerns, applying it to analyses of topics like corporate political donations, software piracy, financial
markets, and bitcoins.
Much of the reason for the continuing attention, though, is to point out how spectacularly
oversimplified and overstated Hardin’s allegory is and how it diverts attention from some fundamental
social processes at work in environmental problems.36
To begin with, Hardin seemed to blame common ownership of resources for the tragedy. But, in fact, we
can find countless examples of highly successful use of commons for resource management. Grazing
lands all across Africa, Asia, and South America; traditional systems of fisheries management in India
and Brazil; even the private homes of modern families, which are a kind of commons in miniature and
remain a highly popular form of social arrangement—these are just a few of the many examples of
generally successful commons management.37 Indeed, common ownership is the primary way that
people have managed their affairs for centuries. And it has, at least until recent years, largely worked.38
Rather than the tragedy of the commons, Hardin’s allegory is better characterized as the tragedy of
individualism. For what breaks down Hardin’s commons is not collective ownership itself, but rather the
inability (and perhaps unwillingness) of the herders to take a view wider than their own narrowly
conceived self-interests.
Herders, in fact, are unlikely to conceive of their interests so narrowly, at least in traditional commons.
For one thing, Hardin assumes that no one will notice the overgrazing until it is too late. But herders out
there in the pasture every day with their sheep are likely very quickly to note the deteriorating condition
of the grass. For another thing, Hardin assumes that the herders do not communicate with one another.
More likely, as soon as the herders notice the beginnings of overgrazing, they will walk over to each
other’s houses in the village and have a few words about the situation. They will likely convene a
gathering of some sort to try to work out an arrangement that restores the grass, while following local
norms about the number of sheep each herder is fairly entitled to graze.
More significant, however, is the reliance of Hardin’s allegory on a rational choice view of human
motivation. People are, simply put, more complex—and thankfully so. We are moved by more than our
own narrowly conceived self-interests, as Chapters 2 and 10 described. Equally important are the
sentiments—the norms, the feelings of affection (and lack of affection) for others—we have in social
life. These sentiments are a crucial aspect not only of our humanity but, as we shall see, of our interests
as well.
The Dialogue of Solidarities
Let’s return to the story of “Androcles and the Lion” and the home truths it recounts, despite being a
fable. It is not the usual sort of evidence that sociologists draw upon, but hear us out.
To begin with, why did the lion spare Androcles in the ring, as he came up to him, all snarl and roar? At
that moment, the lion could have had no idea that refusing to eat his former partner would result in
freedom. Indeed, the Circus Maximus animal handlers might have decided to kill this apparently
hopeless lion for failing to put on a good show. (The Circus Maximus was like that.)
And why did Androcles initially pull the nail from the lion’s paw? At that moment, Androcles could have
had no idea that pulling the nail would result in his gaining a friend and hunting partner. (Hunting
partnerships between humans and lions are, after all, rather unusual.) And neither could he have known
that they would eventually be able to return to the forest to live out their days together.
The reason was, according to Apion, that the lion and Androcles were moved by more than narrow
calculations of their own pure self-interests. They were moved as well by their sentiments: Androcles for
a lion in pain, and the lion for a friend and former companion; Androcles for reasons of commitment to
certain norms of behavior, and the lion for reasons of friendship, of affective commitment. These
sentimental commitments, in turn, led to the promotion of their interests although they could not have
known that at the time. This is a crucial point of criticism of the rational actor model described in the
tragedy of the commons. What it means is that sentiments may promote interests but do not reduce to
them.
At the same time, interests promote sentiments. A large part of the reason Androcles and the lion liked
each other is that, beginning with Androcles’s act of pulling the nail and extending through the lion’s
refusal to eat Androcles, they had learned to rely on each other to promote each other’s needs. Because
they helped each other out, they liked each other and shared a sense of commitment to common norms
of social behavior. And because they liked each other and shared a commitment to common norms,
they helped each other out. The story is thus another example of a dialogue, this time what we like to
call the dialogue of solidarities.
We use the plural because this dialogue is based on the interaction between two mutually supporting
bases for social commitment: a solidarity of interests and a solidarity of sentiments. The interests of
both Androcles and the lion were served through their relationship. But as well, they sensed the
existence of sentimental ties—affection and common norms—between them. And the one constantly
shaped and maintained the other.
All this emphasis on sentiment may sound a little idealistic, the kind of rare altruism we sometimes hear
about in stories or, as in this case, in an ancient fable. But sentiment is actually quite common—and
quite necessary—in social relationships, at least those that endure across time and space.
Consider, for example, a domestic union of some kind, two recent college graduates perhaps. They each
have interests, such as careers. They make their job choices with the other partner’s interests in mind.
They manage their home in ways that allow each to succeed at work. And thus they maintain a solidarity
of interests.
These domestic partners may not each be getting the same interest satisfied through their domestic
union, however. Indeed, likely not, for everyone is different, as we know, which means everyone’s
interests are at least a bit different. Maybe one is a graduate student following her or his intellectual
passion, while the partner supports it in part because he or she foresees in the long term more
household income. Or maybe one is a musician and the other a schoolteacher, leading to quite different
rhythms of time demands and resource needs. As long as they can work out a way to coordinate these
different interests, that’s fine. The important thing is not that their interests are the same, but that they
are complementary.39
However, there are always time delays involved in complementary and cooperative action. How does
one partner know that the other will come through when it is the other partner’s turn to make a career
sacrifice? There are also always issues of space in complementary and cooperative action. The two
domestic partners cannot keep each other under constant surveillance. How does each know that the
other can be relied upon to coordinate shopping, to maintain monogamy (if the union is based on that
understanding), to cover for each other when situations require it?
The answer is, again, trust. This trust can exist because each believes the relationship to be based upon
more than the narrow calculation of self-interests. Because each has affection for the other or because
each has a sense of common commitment to common norms of interaction—or both—each can trust
that the other will come through across the isolating reaches of time and space. Without this sense of
trust that a solidarity of sentiments gives, no solidarity of interests can last long.
The process works the other way, too. The persistence of a solidarity of interests is one of the principal
ways that each partner comes to sense real affection and common normative commitment on the part
of the other. If one partner violates that trust by not looking out for the other’s interests, chances are,
frankly, that pretty soon they won’t like each other anymore, nor will they have faith that they share
some crucial norms. Trust is the essential glue of both a solidarity of interests and a solidarity of
sentiments.
So, to return finally to the tragedy of the commons, one of the main reasons why herders on a commons
usually manage to keep from overgrazing the pastures is that they trust each other. These are their
neighbors, after all, and likely their kinfolk, too. These are the people they relax with, dance with,
worship with, and marry. Of course, villages sometimes fall into considerable internal conflict, and when
they do, those sentimental ties may go. If so, the grass on the pastures will likely go, too.40
The dialogue of solidarities is a kind of ecologic dialogue, a constant and mutually constituting
interaction between the realm of the material (a solidarity of interests) and the realm of the ideal (a
solidarity of sentiments). From this dialogue emerge solidarities of solidarities, if you will, within
families, organizations, businesses, neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, counties, provinces, states,
nations, species, ecosystems, and all other kinds of commons. From this dialogue emerges community.
Not only is there dialogue in the philosophical sense at work. A dialogue of solidarities depends upon
dialogue in the everyday sense of the term: dialogue as communication. And communication means the
mobilization of the social relations of knowledge. Right in the center of a dialogue of solidarities is the
cultivation of knowledge, all mutually building and depending upon trust and upon each other. For from
the cultivation of knowledge, we gain identification with norms and commitments—with sentiments.
From the cultivation of knowledge, we also gain identification with where our interests lie. Neither
interests nor sentiments are given in this life. Rather, they are created, and re-created, throughout our
lives in interaction with each other and the world.
If the paradox of collective action is that people often do not act in their own interests when they act in
their own interests, the solution is clear: Also act on your sentiments. But consider those sentiments and
those interests broadly and openly. That is, consider them dialogically.
A Tale of Two Villages
At least this is the everyday wisdom our colleague Peggy Petrzelka found among the Imazighen people
of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, widely known as the Berber.41 (Imazighen is the name they prefer.)
Along the Imdrhas River Valley lie two villages, some 13 kilometers apart: Tilmi and M’semrir (see Figure
11.5). It’s not great cropland, and the Imazighen in the area have traditionally relied on grazing sheep
and goats for income and sustenance. It’s not great grazing land either, however. The land is steep, and
the climate is dry. So local villages use what they call the agdal system of collective management of the
grazing lands, which have traditionally been held almost entirely in common.
Under agdal, grazing schedules and any disputes are worked out through a local representative council
of herders, known as the jemaa. The head of the jemaa is called the Amghrar, and he (it is traditionally a
he) is elected by the local villagers. If signs of overgrazing start showing up or if there’s been a
particularly dry spell, the jemaa will close certain areas of the commons to allow regeneration. The
nuadar, two men from each village, are selected annually to keep watch on the commons to make sure
that the guidelines of the jemaa are being followed. If someone violates the guidelines, he or she may
be forced to pay an izma, a penalty. When fence repair, harvesting, or other work needs to be done, the
villagers organize touiza—communal work teams. It’s a system that has worked for centuries.
It has worked. Peggy, who speaks Arabic, got a chance to live for most of a year in the area. She soon
noted what many in the area now frequently complain about: that in M’semrir, the agdal system is
breaking down. The grass looks bad. Stocking rates are double what they should be. Violators are getting
away without paying izmas. Much of the land has been privatized. Some people seem to be getting quite
a bit richer, and satellite TV dishes have sprouted from a number of rooftops. Touiza is disappearing.
People are scared of the Amghrar. The jemaa are increasingly an in-group who distribute grazing rights
to each other and their friends. People are angry with each other.
But in Tilmi, the grass still looks good. Stocking rates are just what they should be. Very little of the
traditional commons land has been privatized. The jemaa distribute grazing rights in ways that everyone
Peggy spoke with found generally equitable. Touiza is still going strong. There are very few satellite
dishes. When they disagree with him, Tilmi residents tell the Amghrar to his face. That’s because they
like him and are confident that he likes them, even when there are disagreements. Which there aren’t
very often, because people in Tilmi still like each other.
Figure 11.5 The dialogue of solidarities in two Imazighen (Berber) villages in Morocco. In Tilmi, the
village up the Imdrhas River Valley and off the main road, solidarity is stronger, and the pasturelands are
in better shape. In M’semrir, capitalist individualism and self-interest have undermined the dialogue of
solidarities, and the pasturelands are suffering.
Figure 64
Source: Petrzelka, Peggy, & Bell, Michael M. 2000. “Rationality and Solidarity: The Social Organization
of Common Property Resources in the Imdrhas Valley of Morocco.” Human Organization 59(3): 343–
352. Reprinted by permission of the Society for Applied Anthropology.
In fact, the people in Tilmi like each other so much that they dance together. A lot. It may sound
romantic, but most evenings when the weather is fine and the work is done, a group of villagers get
together to sing and dance in the village center. When there are family celebrations—a wedding, a
circumcision—virtually the entire village attends, and the dancing can go on for days, until 2 or 3 in the
morning. And they sing when they practice touiza, helping each other harvest their personal garden
plots, or as they repair the road or clear snow. All this astounded Peggy. Yes, it may sound romantic,
because it is romantic. But it is also what they really do.
In M’semrir, however, people don’t dance much anymore. There may be a bit at family celebrations, but
the whole village is no longer invited. Just close family and friends. In Tilmi, weddings are usually held
together during the same season of the year, and the brides walk through the village together amid the
throwing of dates, almonds, and figs from the roofs of the grooms’ houses to the crowds below. But in
M’semrir, weddings are individual and scattered throughout the year, and the rich and festive foods are
thrown only to the guests.
Peggy went for a walk one day with Amina, a woman from M’semrir, up into the hills above the village.
They paused for a rest on a high rock overlooking M’semrir and the Imdrhas Valley below. They got to
talking about changing traditions in M’semrir.
“We used to gather everyone and have one big party—now everyone has their own tradition,” Amina
remarked.
She pointed out what used to be the communal property, now divided into small private plots.
“Nizha,” she said, using the Arabic name locals informally conferred on Peggy, “the words of today are
not like the words of yesterday, and that which we did early is not that which we do today.”
Why, then, this difference between the two villages? The Moroccan government has been working hard
to “develop” the local economy, trying to increase the nation’s productivity and also people’s personal
incomes. So they’ve developed regional market centers and have begun promoting tourism. They have
also promoted privatizing much of the communal land, figuring that production would go up. But in the
rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains, it’s harder to bring “development” to the more remote villages.
M’semrir is lower down the Imdrhas Valley, more accessible to the Jeeps of government officials and the
delivery vans of the central Moroccan economy. Tilmi may be only 13 kilometers from M’semrir, but
those 13 kilometers are up a twisty, rutted, dirt road, and the officials, tourists, and other bearers of
“development” just don’t make it up there so often.
People in Tilmi have heard of privatization, though. They aren’t that isolated. After all, they often go to
M’semrir for its bigger, more vibrant marketplace. And they’ve toyed with some of the practices that the
people of M’semrir have taken to. But thus far, they’ve only toyed with them. Thus far, they are still
singing and dancing together. Thus far, they still have a dialogue of solidarities. Thus far, the grass is still
green.
How Big Is Your Solidarity?
But can we create a dialogue of solidarities with aspects of our world that do not speak? Can we create
community with nonhumans?
Apion said yes. Androcles and the lion managed it, even though the lion did not know how to speak Latin
and Androcles, as far as we know, did not mew and growl. Philosopher Bruno Latour says yes, too. One
of the most basic points of actor network theory is that networks of actors (what Latour prefers to call
actants, as Chapter 9 describes) extend well beyond the human, forming a broader coalition that he
sometimes calls a “collective.” Now, this collective, this solidarity, is not necessarily symmetrical. Yes, we
can imagine that lions have interests and sentiments and can form relations of trust, as anyone intimate
with nonhuman mammals and other vertebrates can attest. They have ways of communicating their
interests, sentiments, and trust. But butterflies and clams, rocks and soil, grass and trees? Here the
interests and sentiments and trust will lie in our part of the collective, not theirs.
Environmental sociologist Ray Murphy has suggested that, as we do not communicate with the
nonarticulate actants in our collectives, an easier terminology is to think of these interactions as dancers
who prompt each other. “The concept of ‘prompt’ captures the influence of nature’s dynamics on
conceptions, discourse, and practices, without claiming the latter are determined by those dynamics,”
Murphy writes. He goes on to say,
Human agents dance with the moves of nature’s actants to form hybrid constructions, with both
influencing the other and both having some autonomy. The dance can be adroitly or ineptly performed.
An approach that analyzes movements between human agents and nature’s actants, like partners in a
dance influenced by the other’s creative movements, can bridge the nature/culture divide in sociology
and transcend the limitations of a one-sided approach that focuses solely on nature’s determinisms or
human social constructions. The metaphor of dance captures the autonomous movements of nature’s
dynamics without implying intentionality by the non-human partner, only movement.42
In other words, an actant does not have to be able to speak to be part of an environmental movement.
What an actant needs is enough connections to be invited to the dance.
Mobilizing Ecological Contestations
So, you’ve got the conceptions your group needs, having developed a cultivation of knowledge, one that
we hope emphasizes dialogue and conscientization, not monologue and PR. And you’ve got connections
going, bringing interests and sentiments into solidarity and dialogue through trust and through your
cultivation of knowledge, and we hope also bringing nonhuman actants into the collective. Great. Your
grassroots environmental movement is well on the way.
But what if government or corporations or the broader society doesn’t agree with what your movement
is trying to do? What if others’ interests and sentiments lead them in other directions? What if they’d
really prefer it if you and your connected community of environmental conceptions just went away?
Indeed, if your group felt motivated to get something going and make a change, chances are not
everyone would welcome what you wanted to do. Otherwise, it probably would be being done already.
So let’s explore the environmental sociology of contestation: how environmental social movements
successfully confront resistance and, in the end, often broaden their solidarities.
Double Politics and the Political Opportunity Structure
Saul Alinsky was a tough old bird, but an inspiring one. Starting with the people of the “Back of the
Yards” neighborhood of Chicago in the 1930s, Alinsky more or less invented the notion of grassroots
community organizing. Back of the Yards is next to where Chicago’s stockyards used to be—the district
that Upton Sinclair made infamous in The Jungle. In the 1930s, Back of the Yards had appalling health
conditions, poor housing, and the disorganized social life one often encounters among the
disenfranchised and downtrodden. What Alinsky catalyzed, with notable success, was perhaps the first
environmental justice movement, although no one called it that back then. Through the Back of the
Yards Neighborhood Council, set up with Alinsky’s help, local people organized a cleanup of the
stockyards, built homes, developed local businesses, and were instrumental in the founding of the
National School Lunch Program. The Council is still going strong. Alinsky’s passions are also in the
thousands of grassroots groups that have taken inspiration from what the Back of the Yards
neighborhood has accomplished. Here is perhaps Alinsky’s most famous quotation, from his Rules for
Radicals:
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent
abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.43
In other words, to think a grassroots movement can avoid friction is fiction. If there is something worth
doing that hasn’t been done, it is probably because some powerful interests out there stand in the way.
And if there is something worth doing that hasn’t been done, it probably won’t be easy. Indeed, most
anything worth doing isn’t easy, or, again, it would already be done. So be ready to embrace conflict. Be
ready for the sit-in, the march, the confrontation, the rough treatment. That was Alinsky’s message and
method (see Figure 11.6).
Other organizers, though, worry that this conflict-based approach can be off-putting to potential allies
and that it works more by fighting fire with fire instead of with water. It resists the material expression
of power as embodied in laws, regulations, police, locks, and fences with the material power of people
out there on the street, blocking traffic and ready to fill the paddy wagons and holding cells. But maybe
a better strategy is to look to changing the minds of those who make the laws, write the rules, instruct
the police, smith the locks, and build the fences. Rather than a conflict model of contestation, organizers
in the tradition of Michael Eichler argue for a consensus-based approach. “Instead of taking power from
those who have it,” Eichler has written, “consensus organizers build relationships in which power is
shared for mutual benefit.”44 Rather than a materialist approach, Eichler works on the side of ideas.
Figure 11.6 Town sign for Defiance, Iowa.
Figure 65
Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson.
So who is right? Which way is in fact the most successful?
It’s yet another dialogue. Community sociologist Randy Stoecker suggests there is both a “vinegar” and a
“honey” side to successful organizing—that both conflict and consensus have their place, and that most
organizing involves a good bit of both.45 We like to call it the double politics of contestation.46
Stoecker suggests that a grassroots movement begins this double politics by first analyzing the political
opportunity structure that it will have to contend with to gain its goals. Political opportunity theory
originally comes from Peter Eisinger, who defined political opportunity as “the degree to which groups
are likely to be able to gain access to power and to manipulate the political system”47—which sounds
very instrumental, with its bald use of the term manipulate. But that’s exactly the point. We’re talking
about strategy here. Many environmental sociologists have used this form of analysis to understand why
some environmental movements, like the anti–nuclear power movement, have been so spectacularly
successful, while others, like the anti–climate change movement in the United States, have gained so
little traction.48 Plus, many authors have elaborated and refined political opportunity theory over the
years.49 Stoecker usefully synthesizes these insights and adds a few twists of his own, pointing to four
factors a grassroots group should think out in planning a successful strategy and in deciding whether to
use more honey or more vinegar:
The openness of decision makers to hearing grassroots concerns
The implementation power decision makers have to do something about those concerns
The structure of alliances that shape how decision makers will feel compelled to act
The stability of all of the above
So there you are, having a meeting one evening with your grassroots environmental group, sitting in a
local church basement on some old folding chairs, drinking watery coffee and munching brownies while
someone stands at the flip chart. Here’s what the group’s first line of questions should be, advises
Stoecker: Who are the relevant decision makers we have to contend with, and are they likely to be open
to what we have to say? Not likely to be very open? A definite minus. Here’s your second line of
questions: But do those decision makers actually have the resources to implement what we’d like them
to do—plenty of budget, staff, and legislative leeway? Yes? Well, that’s a plus for sure. The third line of
questions is this: How about the interest groups that shape these decision makers’ sense of the
politically possible and politically necessary? Are they for us or against us? A bit mixed? Could be worse.
And the fourth line of questions, which concerns the stability of the answers to the other three, is this
one: Do the alliances have some internal divisiveness? Nice. Does that divisiveness leave the decision
makers a bit uncertain as to what to do? Double nice, at least for us. And the implementation power of
the decision makers seems pretty secure? If we can get things turned our way, that will be great. Sounds
like a mixed strategy of judicious applications of honey and vinegar both is the way to go. Double politics
to the rescue.
Most times, suggests Stoecker, the appropriate strategy will be like the above: some kind of mix of
conflict making and consensus building. The specifics will vary, of course, and it will be important to pay
close attention to those. Maybe you’ll be able to identify a decision maker from the start who is with
you. Maybe the trouble will be that the decision maker doesn’t have the budget and staff to do much
about your concerns and has to deal with alliances that don’t agree with you, with mixed stabilities for
these. The honey and the vinegar will have to be doled out differently, then, but you’ll still want to use
both.
Sometimes, though, the honey and vinegar scorecard will come up pretty much all vinegar. Decision
makers aren’t welcoming. Their implementation power is weak. The alliances are against you. And the
situation seems quite stable. So do you get out your battered copy of Rules for Radicals and take to the
streets, perhaps in some situations risking tear gas, rubber bullets, and worse? That is not an easy
decision for any group, on both practical and ethical grounds. Is it practically worthwhile to attempt the
conflict approach in such an unreceptive context? Is it ethical to put group members at such risk? Best
check how strong your dialogue of solidarities is to begin with and consider how wide and significant the
gaps are between your own group’s interests and sentiments and those of the context you are trying to
change.
But here’s some better news. As Stoecker points out, contestation unfolds historically. The conflictmaking approach of today, if reasonably successful, often lays the foundation for the consensus-building
approach of tomorrow. Double politics is about gaining a face in the dialogue of decision making.
Dialogue is not a “frictionless vacuum,” a space free of power. One gains face to speak, and to be
responded to, through power. Dialogue requires face, and face requires power. Conflict can thus in time
lead to consensus.50
Conflict can also destroy face, however. It’s a tricky matter, so don’t try it alone. Conflict is dangerous, of
course. But also, the old approach of “good cop/bad cop” is one of the most successful strategies of
double politics. The people doing the conflict making don’t have to be the same people doing the
consensus building. In fact, they usually are not.
The Double Politics of Practical Farmers of Iowa
The history of PFI is a good example of double politics.
The 1980s was a difficult time in the rural United States. The “farm crisis” came about after a period of
massive industrialization in U.S. agriculture, funded by constantly rising farmland values in the 1970s
and rising implement costs related to Big Iron. The Soviet Union was buying lots of grain, keeping prices
high. The new machinery, chemicals, and hybrid crop varieties were yielding strong production. Banks
were telling farmers to borrow and buy, borrow and buy, and borrow and buy. Farms got bigger.
Tractors got bigger. The costs of both skyrocketed, but there was plenty of money around, and nobody
seemed worried. Then, President Carter tried to punish the Soviet Union for its December 27, 1979,
invasion of Afghanistan by ordering a grain embargo. U.S. grain prices immediately plummeted.
Farmland values dramatically dropped soon afterward. Plus, inflation pushed interest rates to shocking
levels. In January 1981, the U.S. prime rate hit 20 percent. Money got tight, and so did the banks. No
more easy farm loans. The spending spree was over, and there was little way to pay for the binge.
It was awful for rural life. Suicide rates tripled in rural states like Kansas and Nebraska. A farmer in Iowa
shot his banker, and a farmer and son in Minnesota shot two of theirs. A Farmers Home Administration
official in South Dakota, depressed from foreclosing farms, shot his family, his dog, and finally himself.51
New farm advocacy groups—the American Agriculture Movement, the National Family Farm Coalition,
and PrairieFire Rural Action, to name a few—organized protests. In March 1986, hundreds of farmers
blockaded a Farmers Home Administration building in Chillicothe, Missouri, with their tractors, and
stayed until the end of the summer.52 Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up at that one, wearing bib
overalls.53 Farmers also organized local protests to disrupt farm auctions and foreclosures, including
one in March 1985 in Plattsburg, Missouri, that brought 1,500 protesters and turned ugly, with injuries
and arrests.54 Rural people don’t usually do this kind of thing.
As far as the officials at the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, were
concerned, there were plenty of bad cops around. Farmers were angry with the university, too, for
having led them down a rosy path of happy industrialism. Farm advocates were writing blistering
critiques of university research priorities.55 Even some academics were among the bad cops, publishing
their own critiques.56 So when a new farm group, Practical Farmers of Iowa, formed in 1985 in the next
county over, the university was suspicious and standoffish. The university’s face was under considerable
challenge, with its structure of alliances increasingly in tatters, and the university mainly responded by
distancing itself from the threat.
But in 1987, it all changed when the associate dean of extension at Iowa State at the time, Professor
Jerry DeWitt, showed up in a three-piece suit to a PFI field day at Dick and Sharon Thompson’s farm.57 It
began earlier that year when the Plant Pathology Department at Iowa State courageously invited Dick
Thompson, the first president of PFI, to give a talk at a seminar series it was hosting on the farm crisis.
DeWitt described the moment to Mike in his cluttered campus office, soda can in hand:
It was the most formal I have ever seen Dick Thompson. I do remember that Dick Thompson was
extremely nervous. And that was probably equal to the anxiety in the room of what was this guy going
to say and what was he going to do. So it was sort of a moment of like two dogs looking at each other
and not quite knowing what the other was gonna do, or who was gonna move first. It was sort of a
stalemate. He was nervous, we were nervous. It was a quietly electric moment in Iowa State’s history.
But Dick didn’t yell. He didn’t run down the university. He didn’t blockade the auditorium door with his
tractor. He gave a measured talk in which he asked the university to do some research to help farmers
interested in something other than the Big Iron, Big Chemical way. He also asked the university to have a
look at the scientific research trials that PFI farmers had already started doing on their farms, set up with
the help of a visionary Iowa State graduate student in agronomy, Rick Exner. In other words, Dick talked
like the good cop of science.
The university didn’t trust how PFI was doing science, though. PFI farmers were doing randomized,
replicated plots, but they were doing them on a large scale that they could farm. When you are trying to
control for unrecognized environmental effects in an experiment, a big dilemma in agronomic research
is controlling the problem of field variability, as agronomists call it. Fields vary in slope, soil quality, and
other environmental factors, often in significant ways over, say, 100 feet. One field, or even one side of
a field, might give very different results from another. So agronomists typically do their research in small
plots on the order of a few tens of feet square, or even smaller, and use the fact that there will still be
many plants in even a small plot to do statistical comparisons. But you can’t profitably farm little plots
like that. Dick Thompson had started out doing research more on the half-field scale of things, so he
could still farm it. The trouble was, the results of his trials might just have been measuring
environmental differences across one of his fields, and not differences in his farming methods.
Dick had recognized that this was a problem. And he had gotten friendly with Rick Exner, the graduate
student who later helped PFI set up its research trials. As a graduate student, Rick was not so tightly a
part of the structure of alliances that kept the university moving along in its inertial way. He was one of
those nodal people—someone who was positioned at the intersection of social networks—so valuable
to any social movement.58 Rick was someone Dick could approach without anyone losing face. They
discussed the problem of field variability, and Rick presented it to Chuck Francis, an agronomist at the
University of Nebraska, safely distant from Iowa State but still part of the network of university
scientists. (In fact, Chuck has gone on to become a very well-known agronomist and advocate of
sustainable practices. But this was early on in the acceptability of sustainable agriculture in colleges of
agriculture.) Chuck suggested that PFI try what agronomists call paired comparisons. Rick brought that
back to Dick, and Dick came up with the idea of doing the pairs in field-length strips, one pass of the
tractor each, so the field could still be farmed. A farmer could do one practice up the field, get off the
tractor and make whatever changes to the equipment the experiment required, and do the comparison
back down the field on the next pass, randomizing which strips got which treatment. By doing the trials
one tractor pass wide, meaning just a few rows per strip, field variability could be assumed to vary
equally for each strip. Then any difference in the comparison would not be a result of differences across
the field.
It had never been done at the university, though. A few weeks after Dick’s talk at the university, Rick
talked Jerry DeWitt and another professor at Iowa State into sitting down with him and Dick. They met
at a McDonald’s, the most nonthreatening location Rick could think of—off campus and anonymous.
“That was a very tense meeting,” Jerry recounted to Mike:
We went in there not knowing if we were going to argue or not. They said, “We’ve got something we
think you ought to recognize.” And I represented, in a sense of body, [the view] that probably was
saying, “Well, what you’re doing is not valid.” Across that little table there was a lot of tension.
But Jerry took away with him their little diagram of randomized, replicated, field-length paired
comparisons. A few days later, he brought it to yet another university professor, Reggie Voss.
“What do you think?” Jerry recalled asking him.
Reggie looked it over and said, “Yep, that’ll work. That’s valid.” Poof! When I heard Reggie Voss say,
“Yes, that’s valid, that’ll work, that’s fine,” it was like, now wait a minute. For how many years have we
been discounting what they’re doing as not workable? And they have been thinking, we will never
recognize their work. It took one meeting, an hour meeting, a piece of paper, and a why-don’t-you-lookat-it. It took me 10 minutes to give it to somebody and Dr. Voss to simply look at it, and poof! All of that
tension was over with.
Jerry had heard there was a field day that day at Dick and Sharon’s farm, just a few miles from the
university. He was so excited that he got into his university car and drove out there, in the three-piece
suit of a dean, to shake Dick’s hand. It was quite a scene when he arrived. A big crowd of farmers in
jeans and feed caps. Dick standing 10 feet above them in the bucket of a front-end loader so he could be
heard. Jerry in his suit. Rick Exner remembered the moment this way:
“So Dick got out of the bucket, talked to Jerry for about a minute, came back. He was quite pleased.
DeWitt had gotten back in his car and left, and Dick said, ‘Sounds like we’re going to work together.’”
Rick chuckled, happily thinking it over in his mind.
“So this was at Jerry’s initiative?” Mike asked him.
“Jerry really gets the credit for this, yes.”
Over the next year or so, Jerry used his implementation power as associate dean to broker an unusual
collaboration between a university and a farmer’s group. He found an office for PFI on campus and
found some money to steer toward the group so they could hire a staff person for the office. PFI and the
university would have equal say in hiring that person, and that person would be considered a university
employee, with the university’s health care and retirement benefits. And who became that employee?
Rick Exner. Over the years, PFI has grown to the 13 staff it had as of 2015. By now, dozens of university
faculty and students have conducted hundreds of research trials with PFI farmers, using the field-length
paired comparisons and other techniques and always bringing farmers and researchers together as
partners through participatory research. And by now, PFI has helped thousands of farmers implement
sustainable practices through the group’s cultivation of knowledge and dialogic sense of solidarity.
As for Jerry DeWitt, he later went on to direct the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa
State—a different kind of administrator at a different kind of college of agriculture—until he retired in
2010.
“PFI has meant a lot to me personally,” Jerry explained at the end of the interview, conducted before he
retired.
I would not be who I am today—I would not be where I am today or doing what I’m doing today—if it
weren’t for PFI. It’s been that important. Sometimes you look back and you can see events that were
real turning points in your life that you might not have realized were at the time. Well, PFI has been that
for me.
In other words, Jerry assigns the credit for this successful double politics just the other way around, to
PFI and not to himself—a sure sign of a solidarity that is both wide and truly in dialogue.
The Pros of the Three Cons
As the success of PFI shows, cons can be pros—at least when we are talking about bringing together the
three cons of conceptions, connections, and contestations. But the main thing is togetherness itself. In
fact, if the reader will forgive us, the three words that we chose to represent the three cons do not
derive from each etymological form of con-. Rather, they all derive from the “together” form.
Conception means to put together. Connection means to tie together. And contestation means to bear
witness together. Grassroots environmental movements succeed through this togetherness of these
togethernesses.
The trick is how to get a togetherness of togetherness, well, together. Environmental grassroots
movements are not always as successful as a group like PFI has been, of course. If they were,
environmental sociologists would not devote so much research to understanding how such
achievements come about, and environmental activists would not be so interested in hearing the
findings.
Environmental sociology has no precise recipes to offer, however. The origins of movement success are
often best understood after the fact, so dependent are they upon the happenstance of, say, a
phenomenological rupture or having a willing and visionary nodal person at hand. These are matters of
what we like to call dialogic providence—not luck, exactly, but situational opportunities that provide
scope for agency and change.59 The reason why this providence is not just luck is that we can help
create situations that invite these opportunities, even if we cannot predict what they will look like, when
they will appear, or how they will turn out. The skill of a grassroots movement is in creating the
situations as much as it is in acting upon the opportunities they may occasion. Like inviting people to a
meeting at, of all places, a McDonald’s restaurant.
No, there can be no recipe for success, just conditions that welcome success. Otherwise, there would be
no success—only ineluctable outcomes in which agency is merely the working out of some socioenvironmental mechanism, and is thus not agency at all.60 And ineluctable outcomes are exactly what
grassroots environmental groups are mobilizing to prevent.
Governing the Ecological Society
Image 15
The Earth is one but the world is not.
—Bruntland Commission, 1987
Participation. Even for something as important as national elections, it’s hard to get people to turn out
to vote. Usually, little more than half of the voting-age population manages it—about 50 to 60 percent
in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, although sometimes hitting the low 60s. In the U.S. 2014
midterm elections, 36.4 percent of voters turned out to cast a ballot. Those were the lowest numbers
since World War II.1 The situation is a good bit better in many European countries, with turnouts
between 70 and 80 percent typical in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. But the trend is down
in Europe, as it is in Japan and many other countries. A few countries do achieve quite high rates,
especially Australia where the rate is almost always in the 80s.2 But voting is compulsory in Australia,
and you pay a $20 fine if you don’t vote, unless you provide a “valid and sufficient” reason for not
voting.
If people don’t participate, willingly, how can you democratically govern or effectively resolve some of
the world’s most pressing problems?
Like water pollution. If people don’t feel that they have a voice in coming up with solutions, they are
unlikely to want to implement them. The government could try to force solutions on everyone. But
water use is such an everyday matter, it would take a Big Brother police state to make the laws stick.
And even that might not work—in addition to not being a good way to run a society. So how can we
make it possible for people to be part of the solutions, when participation is such a challenge?
Loka and her colleague Noelle Harden reasoned that for people to want to participate in the democratic
design of solutions for water pollution, they first need to know that such a problem exists.3 So a few
years ago, they set out to cultivate knowledge in the community of Agraria, where the local lake
suffered from high levels of phosphorus. They hosted public meetings. They ran newspaper and radio
advertisements, posted fliers across town, and visited civic groups to spread the word that the nearby
lake was on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list for phosphorus “impairment,” the technical
term EPA uses to mean that phosphorus levels are too high.4
Why worry? Most phosphorus “overloading” comes from agricultural runoff.5 When you have an
“overload,” the consequences can be dire—like the infamous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area
about the size of Connecticut where toxic algae blooms feed on too much phosphorus and nitrogen
rushing in from the Mississippi River and suck away the oxygen in the water, killing fish and marine
plants.6 Sometimes when such blooms occur, the water becomes unsafe for humans or other mammals
to drink, as regularly happens in Lake Erie.7 Aptly titled “A Dog’s Worst Friend,” the blooms can be
especially dangerous for canines that unknowingly drink from and swim in afflicted water bodies, later
dying from the toxic cyanobacteria.8
Loka and Noelle’s outreach in Agraria immediately attracted attention, but not the kind they
anticipated. Soon after distributing fliers across town, Loka received a phone call from Eugene, the local
public works director, accusing the poster of inappropriately describing the local water body as
“polluted.” In addition to serving as a local recreation site, the lake was a public water source. Eugene
requested that Noelle and Loka come to a special meeting with town council members and an aide to
the mayor to discuss the project. Loka and Noelle agreed, and while waiting for the meeting to start,
they made small talk with Charles, a city council member.
“So you’re from the People’s Republic of Madison?” Charles abruptly asked with a smirk. Madison, the
city where Loka lives (and Mike too), is widely regarded in the Midwest as a bastion of liberalism.
Loka and Noelle laughed in return (albeit a bit dryly), and Loka said, “Yes. I guess sometimes we get that
kind of reputation.” After the mayor’s aide arrived, the meeting began with Loka describing the
collaborative nature of the project.
“This process uses farmer and public meetings to allow those key groups to decide what ways are best
to clean up the... ” Loka began.
“It sounds like you’re reinventing the wheel,” Charles said, cutting in. “It sounds like what you’re doing is
pretty much a clone of what we’ve done,” he said, referencing an agency-run study of the lake. “The
lake’s not even polluted.”
“The lake currently is impaired with phosphorus,” Noelle replied, matter-of-factly.
“Phosphorus is an unregulated substance as far as the EPA is concerned,” Eugene responded. “That is
what applies to our water supply,” meaning that legally it wasn’t polluted, in his view. “I think [the flier]
could have been worded much better than ‘reducing pollution.’”
Even after Noelle specifically reminded Eugene that the water body was listed on the EPA’s 303(d) list
for phosphorus pollution, he continued to press his point.
“When we’re talking about a public water supply, and people start using the word pollution, it creates a
public perception that is, uh, not exactly conducive to our consumer confidence,” Eugene said.
“We don’t want people storming city hall,” Charles added.
As the conversation shook out, it became clear that the officials’ issue with Loka and Noelle’s project
was not whether or not the lake had a phosphorus problem. It turned out that they agreed it did, albeit
grudgingly. Rather, their issue was the public becoming familiar with the pollution, because it would
make government officials look like they hadn’t done their job. Eugene objected so strongly, he
requested that Loka and Noelle discontinue research in the area.
Loka and Noelle continued their work anyhow, and with some encouraging results. By the end of their
public engagement process, many local farmers—of their own volition—began establishing “grassed
waterways” and other conservation practices.9 (A grassed waterway is a grass-lined channel for taking
excess water from farm fields without causing erosion and nutrient runoff.) While most research has
documented resistance from farmers to reducing phosphorus and nitrogen overloading, Loka and Noelle
found something quite different. The government, in the case of Agraria, was the blockage in the flow of
democracy, not the farmers. Once people learned about the problem, they wanted to do something
about it. And they did.
Things don’t always work out that way, of course. People often do require a bit of a stick to do the right
thing. Maintaining a balance between individual participation, laws, bureaucratic structures, and legal
rights can be a daunting challenge for any democracy. The engine of democracy takes a lot of parts to
run. Citizens, to vote and participate, require information to make decisions and a sense that their
participation matters. For society to function, laws protect individual rights, while ensuring one person’s
rights don’t trample another’s—like a farmer’s right to plant a crop and a neighbor’s simultaneous right
to clean water. Bureaucratic rules protect those rights, enforce the law, and deliver services. But
sometimes, as with Eugene and Charles, protecting bureaucratic positions becomes more important
than the public purpose their jobs are designed to serve. So they try to keep people quiet and in the
dark, even though the discomfort that comes along with debate is precisely what keeps democracies
strong.
How do we balance structure with individual autonomy to allow for dialogic and ecologic governance?
This chapter starts with the organization of the democratic state, and the opportunities and challenges
afforded by democratic equality. Then we move to review the legal framework that provides
environmental protections, and how determined groups and individuals prompt bureaucratic
enforcement of seminal pieces of legis...
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