Restoring environments as the making of a new world

Restoring environments as the making of a new world

Week 12: Rethinking restoration as reconstruction

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/12.2

Main reading: Barra (2024)

What is happening in Plaquemines Parish?

The landscape of this environment is “semi-solid, semi-liquid” (Barra 2024, 151).

• Google Maps of Plaquemines Parish
• Bernstein, Joel, prod. and Dan Rather. “Sons of Leander.” 1980. Video. 60 Minutes. CBS. https://commerce.veritone.com/search/asset/42901330.

The total land available is shrinking, and this area may need to be flooded so that other areas can stay dry.

Two ideologies of restoration

• Based on a rational mastery of nature through technology, engineering, and scientific prediction
• Based on a sense of place and of “continuity” with the past

The plantation and the plot

A plantation is an example of and metaphor for the colonial dispossession of land and its transformation

• New World colonialism was based on a “triangle trade” between Africa (a source of slave labor), agricultural enterprises in the US South, Caribbean and Latin America, and Europe (a source of capital and market for products).
  • Plantations were the first steps toward industrial agriculture, and needed a lot of empty land and slave labor to produce commodities like tobacco, cotton, sugar, etc.
• When you see a borderlands as an empty frontier, you believe you can (and must) create something from nothing.
  • In various parts of the world, colonial settlers planted themselves, taking over and transforming land according to their own design.
  • In the abstract, we can speak of ranches, stations, missions, etc. as plantations of a kind as well.

The plantation system does not completely transform the land in which it exists. It is shadowed by a distinct alternative, the plot (Wynter 1971, 99–100; see also McKittrick 2013, 10–11)

• In New World plantations, slave masters often gave slaves small parcels of land, known as plots, for their own household cultivation (much like peasant agriculture).
  • In some plantations, slaves produced enough to feed themselves and engage in market trade, reducing costs for owners, and making the whole plantation system viable.

Plots sustain plantations, but also contain the potential to escape from them

• Plantations are planned spaces. They are the projection of one society’s values onto nature.
• Plantations, as actual systems, are necessarily incomplete; and so, plantation owners allowed for people to work plots.
• Work on a plot is not based on land or labor as a resource to be owned, managed, or quantified.
• Work in plots thus also promotes the flourishing of alternative values and creates the possibility for individual and collective autonomy.
  • Plots are, in another sense, similar to spaces of marronage, or refuge from plantations.
• The history of the world economy, whether told as a story of capitalism or colonialism, contains within it a “secretive” history, a separate, parallel world based on distinct values of communal interdependence and collective self-determination (Wynter 1971, 101).
• Side note: This distinction is relevant to how anthropologists talk about modes of subsistence.
  • You can’t have plantation agriculture without spaces for people to engage in horticulture. Moreover horticulture is not a distinct technology; it’s a distinct way of life.

Are you concerned about cultural continuity?

In the article by Monique Barra we read this week, she argues that Ironton people’s approach to restoration is a “practice of cultural continuity” (Barra 2024, 153):

Many of the Black coastal communities I worked with were similarly steeped in histories of autonomous worldmaking deeply rooted to local ecologies that shaped their approach to coastal restoration. Compared to frameworks of restoration predicated on land loss and natural processes, many Black community leaders in Plaquemines Parish approach questions about land and future of Plaquemines around the past—specifically through invocations of holding land across generations of kin over time. (Barra 2024, 153)

She also writes,

Potawatomi scholars Kyle Powers Whyte and Robin Kimmerer suggest ecological repair is a cultural practice that mends and strengthens relations between human and nonhuman kin across time. Whyte calls this as “collective continuance:” the practice of (re)establishing restorative relations between humans and the environment through ecological practices. Collective continuance refers to relations of interdependence, responsibility, and care for the social resilience of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and the environment as they shift and evolve over time. (Barra 2024, 154)

How do you interpret the idea of cultural continuity here?

Should anthropologists seek to understand the basis for people’s cultural continuity?

Here is a Padlet for your thoughts: https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/what-does-cultural-continuity-mean-nxgik12cpp3jl7ap

Adapting to climate change is an opportunity to destroy plantations and build plots

We can use the conceptual distinction between plantation and plot as a metaphor for two different responses to climate change.

We can also connect the idea of the plot to a radical form of social change.

• We live with legacies of colonial domination and capitalist expansion, a world built on plantations in an extended sense.
  • The unequal effects of climate change are themselves a delayed and ongoing harm and wrong done by these systems of domination.
• Many people now call for powerful groups to pay reparations to the communities who were and are subordinated under these systems.
  • Making reparations is to work to repair what is broken.
• We can also make a distinction between emancipation (freeing) and abolition (eliminating).
  • Emancipation frees people (serfs, European Jews, African slaves, Indigenous Australians) in the sense of giving them rights as citizens.
  • Abolition is the elimination of a system of slavery (or segregation, or Apartheid, etc.)
• Reparations in the sense of repair is a crucial element in abolition of past systems of oppression. Emancipation isn’t enough to make a new society. “Reparations, or the deliberate efforts to make meaningful material amends for the oppression done to African Americans through and since slavery, are central to abolitionist praxis focused on securing economic self-determination, addressing harms, and changing ‘laws, institutions, and systems’ to ensure ‘that harm will not happen again.’” (Luke and Heynen 2020, 605; quoting Ritchie and Stahly-Butts 2019, 32)

References and further reading

Barra, Monica Patrice. 2024. “Restoration Otherwise: Towards Alternative Coastal Ecologies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42 (1): 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221146179.

Luke, Nikki, and Nik Heynen. 2020. “Community Solar as Energy Reparations: Abolishing Petro-Racial Capitalism in New Orleans.” American Quarterly 72 (3): 603–25. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/765825.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2013. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17 (3 (42)): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378892.

Ritchie, Andrea, and Marbre Stahly-Butts, eds. 2019. “Reparations Now Tool Kit.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Reparations-Now-Toolkit-FINAL.pdf.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1971. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou 5 (June): 95–102. https://trueleappress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/wynter-novel-and-history-plot-and-plantation-first-version-1971.pdf.