The Green Revolution is widely considered agricultural science's contribution to the rise of global U.S. influence in the second half of the 20th century. The Green Revolution was not the first attempt by the United States to further its global ambitions through the extension of state agricultural expertise, however, nor was it the inevitable outcome of scientific attention to agricultural production in the 1930s and 1940s. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the notion that the New Deal era, marked by the U.S. Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, was the start of a radically different mode of transnational agrarian planning, a mode that was actively exported through the Americas during the Second World War. These U.S.-sponsored development programs were rooted in notions of collectivist conservationism, cultural pluralism, and democratic resource management. The result of scientific experiments by teams of U.S. Department of the Interior anthropologists, sociologists, and soil scientists working to combat erosion on U.S. Indian tribal lands, the New Deal-era land management models addressed both cultural and biological processes at work in diverse environmental and political contexts. The doctoral student performing this research will conduct a comparative examination of three local manifestations of this program, drawing on government and foundation records as well as scientific publications, records of congressional hearings, and personal papers in order to understand how New Deal soil management strategies were translated and transformed across the heterogeneous political landscapes of the Americas. She will consider contested de-stocking programs on the tribal lands of the Navajo Nation in the U.S., and she will examine U.S.-sponsored agrarian development under shifting property relations in Colombia's Cauca Valley as well as scientific research and development in the indigenous ejidos of Michoacán, Mexico, two national contexts that were also pilot sites of the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution. Taking into consideration the complex networks of intellectual, political, and economic interests supporting transnational New Deal-era conservation efforts, this project will explore the ways that emerging scientific notions of human and non-human natures were deployed in response to race-based land claims, considering both the successes and failures of these projects in meeting their stated social, political, and ecological goals.
This project will shed new light on an aspect of environmental, political, and intellectual history that has received relatively little attention, and it will develop key theoretical connections between science and technology studies and human geography. The implications of this research for present understanding are expected to be significant. First, as a period confronted simultaneously by world-scale financial, military, and ecological crises, the New Deal era offers important lessons to citizens and policy makers seeking to navigate the challenges of current global conjuncture. Furthermore, this project will reveal critical structural and genealogical aspects of current development strategies, suggesting new possibilities for constructive, collaborative social change. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
I completed dissertation fieldwork funded by NSF Grant # 1031598 in February of 2012. My objective when I entered the field was to better understand the emergence and international dissemination of community-based, nationally-scaled scientific soil conservation programs in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia in the 1930s and 1940s. I hoped to make sense of the links between conservation programs and other globally-inflected changes in rural life, namely the international Great Depression, including both its local effects and the labor migrations, credit transfers, and commodity production that preceded it. Finally, while there was a florescence of soil conservation throughout the region, I chose the United States, Mexico and Colombia in part because they were the originating country and test sites for the Green Revolution. That Cold War-era mode of US-sponsored international agricultural development emphasized high-efficiency farming through chemical inputs and mechanization with the objective of shifting populations from agricultural to urban industrial communities, and I was curious how a community-based, conservationist mode of scientific agrarian development came to be replaced by a more industrialized, urbanizing model. When I entered the field, my intention was to study the national soil conservation agencies in Mexico and Colombia that had been developed in the 1940s on the model of the United States Soil Conservation Service, asking how technical, discursive, and administrative practice translated between those three distinct sites. When I arrived in Mexico and Colombia, however, it was clear that soil conservation work had begun nearly a decade before the formal institution of those agencies. In Mexico, soil conservation had been undertaken in the departments of irrigation and of forestry as well as in the Secretariat of Public Education, where I chose to focus my research. Employing a trope of "ecological dialectics," that agency had made resource conservation a critical part of its program of socialist education beginning in 1934. In Colombia during the same period, where much agricultural and particularly coffee-growing land had been exhausted by the coffee commodity boom of the early 20th century, the National Association of Coffee-growers began an intensive research and public education program focused on soil conservation. When the government finally instituted a federal agency dedicated to soil conservation, its agents were trained by the coffee-growers' agronomists. In both cases, bureaucrats and technicians made use of scientific materials published by the US Soil Conservation Service as well as the landmark USDA yearbook Soils and Men, but they applied US research and techniques selectively based on their particular political, fiscal, and geographic contexts. I also came to understand that in all three countries, conservation work proceeded on the heels of land progressive land redistribution programs and widespread rural mobilization for democratic change. Further, conservation programs proceeded only in the absence of the international investment capital that had driven intensified commodity crop production for international markets in the early decades of the 20th century. Finally, the US decision to emphasize soil conservation as a mode of progressive US-sponsored development in the WWII period was itself responsive to the growing strength of rural leftist mobilization. US leaders strategically courted these allies even as right-wing elements around the Americas lent their support to the Axis powers of Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Following both the discursive structures and legislative actions of these periods of national foment, my work now is to connect the emergence of soil conservation in this period to a broader set of international challenges to 19th century liberalism and laissez-faire resource and financial governance. Moving ahead with my analysis, I continue to give particular attention to the deep relationship between economic and ecological crisis and its relevance to the globalized instabilities of the current moment.
