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- Convenors:
-
Rocío Gomez
(Virginia Commonwealth University)
Heather Roller (Colgate University)
Claudia Leal (Universidad de los Andes)
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- Chairs:
-
Rocío Gomez
(Virginia Commonwealth University)
Heather Roller (Colgate University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Deeper Histories, Diverse Sources, Different Narratives
- Location:
- Room 8
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel examines how knowledge and information is disseminated and reproduced in rural communities around issues of chemical use, toxic contamination, occupational hazards, and food scarcity.
Long Abstract:
While current politics in the Americas paint rural communities as backwards and uneducated, this panel argues that rural communities participated in the generation of knowledge, the amassing of scientific data, the application of new technologies, and the gathering of raw materials. It asks the following research questions: How did knowledge and information emerge and circulate in rural sites? Was new information generated organically or did it derive from other sources? Who was privy to this knowledge and information, and who benefited from it? How did it change as it traversed borders? Using oral narratives, scientific treatises, industry publications, media reports, and photographs, this panel uses a diverse collection of sources to understand how rural communities participated in knowledge and information production.
We invite contributions focusing on the US and Latin America during the modern period. Examining the fine edge between environmental history and the history of science, this panel acknowledges that the use of raw materials from the Earth and the introduction of synthetic substances into natural environments were subject to scientific inquiry as well as local observations and interpretations. The panelists can consider how rural communities have weighed guidance from outsiders and adapted standard practices of agriculture or extraction to their own purposes. They can also consider how communities have grappled with the toxic legacies of land and resource use, including extractive colonialism, contamination, and displacement of traditional environmental practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The expansion of diverse forms of agricultural credit in the post-WWII era were key financial and political technologies that enabled the rapid growth of pesticides and fertilizers on American farms despite chronic surplus production.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1945 and the early 1970s, US farm production grew at rate without historical precedent, due in large part to the massive influx of industrial chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers. The consumption of farm products, however, did not keep pace and large surpluses quickly accrued. This paper is about the role that the expansion of agricultural credit played in expanding an agriculture of high input use and maintaining chronic overproduction in the post-WWII era. In particular, I explore how the expansion of public and private credit gave farmers the ability to pay for industrial chemicals despite falling market prices, but also importantly, how newly created forms of public credit offered farmers the financial mechanisms to “sell” their crops for a profit without ever actually selling them. Taken together, I argue that the expansion of multiple forms of agricultural credit were key financial and political technologies that enabled the rapid growth of industrial chemicals on American farms despite chronic surplus production.
Paper short abstract:
This paper asks how transnational mining helps produce scientific knowledge regarding the environment and raw materials.
Paper long abstract:
Tucked away in the Pasco region of the Andes Mountains, Mina Ragra existed in relative geographic isolation. In a few short years, this mine in Peru grew from a geological expedition to the most valuable vanadium mine in the world. However, its value also stemmed from the numerous contributions it made to the worlds of industrial chemistry and engineering. Vanadium Corporation of America relied on this site for industrial raw materials as well as scientific production, which it isolated in its laboratory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This paper examines the itinerant knowledges produced by Mina Ragra and how they contributed to transnational corporate colonialism, science, and ideas of the environment. Using scientific treaties, archival documents, and personal correspondence, I argue that extraction at the Mina Ragra site contributed to toxic legacies of not only contamination but also divestment and dispossession of science.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines some of the social factors driving agrichemical use over the past half century, drawing connections between archival sources and a set of oral history interviews conducted in New York, Iowa, and California.
Paper long abstract:
Agricultural chemicals leave some immediately visible effects—yellowed foliage, a pest-free crop—but become harder to detect as they move through soils, waterways, and bodies. We know even less about how these substances have permeated rural communities. Over time, they have filtered into family histories, affected relationships between neighbors, and shaped ideas about what farms should look like and what makes a “good farmer.” This paper examines these social histories of chemical use from the 1970s to the present. To do so, it makes connections between archival sources and a series of oral history interviews conducted with conventional farmers, organic farmers, pest control advisors, and people living or working in proximity to agriculture. The paper weaves together stories from three very different agricultural contexts: (1) the high-value specialty croplands of the Sacramento Valley in northern California, a state that applies more agrichemicals than any other but that also has the most stringent environmental regulations on the books; (2) the large-scale commodity croplands of Iowa, where herbicides were applied to 96% of the corn acres and 99% of the soybean acres in 2021; and (3) the less intensively farmed landscape of Central New York, once home to a much larger dairy industry but currently experiencing a long economic decline with rewilding on marginal lands. The interviews highlight the embeddedness of agrichemicals in rural life histories, as well as the shifting social contexts (in addition to the standard economic ones) in which farmers make decisions about agrichemical use.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes rural responses to three different projects to modernize animal farming, comparing campaigns to support peasant farmers and fight diseases and pests.
Paper long abstract:
From the 1920s to the 1980s, the Mexican state sought to modernize, regulate and sanitize animal farming. This paper analyses how different sections of Mexico’s rural society responded to these efforts, comparing three key episodes: an international campaign against aftosa or foot-and-mouth disease in the 1940s and 1950s; the project to foster small-scale animal farming on ejidos (ganadería ejidal); and another international campaign in the 1960s-1980s to eradicate a pest known as the ‘screwworm.’ Drawing on original archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Europe the paper aims to complicate the conventional image of rural communities of campesinos resisting the incursions of state-backed modernization and the wealthy ranchers. It argues that the three cases provide evidence of communities’ selective and pragmatic engagement with modernizing projects, and a range of political alliances and tactics. More broadly, the paper considers how more histories of animals (livestock or otherwise) could illuminate processes of state and nation-making in modern Mexico.