Paul Robbins

Dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

May 26, 2021

The Political Ecology of Native Presence, American Psyche, and John Muir

 

The great naturalist and environmental advocate John Muir is well-known for his silence around the question of native peoples, even and especially those who were violently removed from the lands in and around the places he most revered. Yet his 1913 book, “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth,” is notable for its saturation with descriptions of native people and activity in the places around which the Muir family settled in Wisconsin in the 1840s, a little more than a decade after the violent conclusion of the Blackhawk War. Combining a close reading of the text with a psychoanalytic interpretation of this remarkable reversal reveals Muir’s repression of native memories, which parallel the larger American erasure that accompanied that era’s genocide. A Lacanian analysis, moreover, suggests that such repression is necessarily never complete, and tends to erupt in the form of repetitive compulsion, announcing itself repeatedly through the activities of conservation and the founding of the national parks system. Meaningful steps towards redressing historical inequity and violence, while advancing a more just model of conservation, require acknowledgment of this repression in Muir’s psyche and our own as settlers. This holds further implications for the role of the unconscious in political ecology more generally.

Paul Robbins is the dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where he guides the institute in serving as a world leader in addressing rapid global environmental change. With writing focused on diverse interdisciplinary audiences and the broader public, he is author of the award-winning book Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (2007), widely recognized as one of the most accessible books on the environmental politics of daily life.

Chernoh Bah

PhD Student, History, Northwestern University

March 24, 2021

Resolving an Empire Problem: Public Health, Convict Labor, and the Revenue Crisis in Colonial Sierra Leone, 1914-1944

 

This presentation explores how prison labor became central to different kinds of medical and agricultural projects in Sierra Leone in the years between the First and Second World Wars. In early 1914, colonial authorities introduced a new prison ordinance in Sierra Leone as part of a range of legislative and administrative reforms undertaken just as fighting commenced in the Great War. An important feature of the 1914 ordinance was that it introduced the “prison grading system,” a classification regime that grouped prisoners into units according to their skillsets and ability to do different kinds of labor.  A precedent setting law for the British empire, the ordinance and “grading system” transformed Sierra Leone’s prisons from an ad hoc approach meant to “morally shame and uplift” so-called criminals into an organized and expanded network of convict labor designed to support the colonial government.

This presentation examines how officials of the Alfred Jones Research Laboratory – Sierra Leone’s first tropical medical research laboratory – came to conceive of "hard labor" as constitutive of good health for prisoners and what consequences this had for colonial development projects. It explores the ways tropical medical research served to accelerate and rationalize the use of convict labor in the service of colonial finance and development.  

Joseph Klein

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

February 17, 2021

No Limits: Compressor Diving on Indonesia's Coral Frontier

 

Just beyond the shores of Kendari, the provincial capital of Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, lies a vast network of coral reefs which for decades have supplied beautiful and increasingly rare live corals for the saltwater aquariums of the global elite. To access coral and other marine products, fisherfolk in the late 20th century began putting truck tire compressors on their boats, breathing the unfiltered air through hundred-meter lengths of garden hose as an alternative to expensive SCUBA equipment or traditional breath-hold diving. The diving compressor revolutionized the marine product economy, including the collection of live coral, and fundamentally transformed what was possible for the human body at sea.

This paper considers the embodied experiences of compressor divers who plumb the reefs around Kendari. Diving for coral, like lobster, pearls, live fish, and other luxury marine products, once offered a lifestyle of relative affluence sustained by the windfalls of cash that followed a lucky day on the water. But as the sea has been slowly emptied of life, divers are forced to search longer and dive deeper just to stay afloat, and their communities struggle to negotiate new ways of living on the water. Based on extended ethnographic research with divers at sea and onshore, this paper examines how coral collectors and their communities navigate the shifting tides of fortune on the reefs of Southeast Sulawesi.

Perdana P. Roswaldy

PhD Student, Dept. of Sociology, Northwestern University

November 18, 2020

Remaking Gender Without Flipping the Script: Socio-Ecological Limits of Undoing Gender in a Post-conflict Community

Watch Perdana P. Roswaldy's talk here

This project examines the limitations of undoing gender in a community that has been exacerbated by environmental shocks and changes. The author asks whether and how environmental shocks and the rearrangement of the ecosystem alter the gender structure and performance. She argues that environmental shocks readjust the community’s awareness of gender inequality, to reconfigure, subconsciously or not, their gender prescription to a certain degree. It operates not out of a vacuum and not solely because of the changed ecosystem, but through women’s undervalued labor central to the productive and reproductive economics that involves the environment.

Roswaldy's research took place in the indigenous Batak Toba villages of Pandumaan-Sipituhuta in North Sumatra, Indonesia. The people there recently won their customary right from a corporation that landgrabbed their forest and, consequently, destroyed their livelihoods. She obtained the data through ethnography, interviews, and labor time records to triangulate them with soil quality testing.

Keywords: gender, environment, labor, ethnography

Jayson Maurice Porter

PhD Candidate, Dept. of History, Northwestern University

October 28, 2020

Oilseeds and Slippery Slopes: Political Ecologies of Violence in Coastal Guerrero

Watch Jayson M. Porter's talk here (Part I) 

Part II

Based on a new essay with a similar title, Porter argues that coconut development in coastal Guerrero from 1930 to 1970 was plagued by three forms of environmental insecurity--economic, social/spatial, and ecological--which in turn led to migration, insurgency, and drug cultivation by the 1970s in the region. Porter will also describe the environmental justice related to oilseed contamination among Afro-Indigenous populations in the region. Both arguments come from his recent essays:

Oilseeds and Slippery Slopes: https://www.noria-research.com/oilseeds-and-slippery-slopes/
Dying Lagoons: https://www.okayafrica.com/environmental-racism-in-mexican-lagoons/