In this inaugural edition of "Notes" we feature writings from UKPEWGers. Hugh Deaner tells us about his strategies to talk with Alberta's oil sands workers about the environment, and we learn from Jairus Rossi about his collaboration with plant geneticists whose restoration efforts in Chicago benefit from the marginalizing presence of former military bases and abandoned factories. Priyanka Ghosh then shares her experience of being simultaneously an insider and an outsider while doing research with a fishing community in West Bengal, India. Patrick Bigger wraps it all up, telling us what it's like to participate in the meetings to determine how to use the revenue from California's new carbon cap and trade program - as climate change burns on all around the US.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for the next call for notes.
Yours,
Eric Nost
UKPEWG
Click 'more' to read notes from the field!
Hugh Deaner
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
“They’re slightly better over here,” I say.
I'm in the showers of the Syncrude Aquatic Centre within the Suncor Community Leisure Centre in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the urban core of the infamous tar/oilsands extraction industry. My remark is directed to an obvious newcomer, who is struggling with the anemic nozzles, which spray water in such a dispersed pattern it is difficult to fully rinse. Thanking me, the stranger takes my advice.
Sensing an opportunity to develop an informant, I continue, "What a waste of water."
"I'll show you a real waste of water," he replies."Oh, yeah? Where's that?"
"Coker drill.""Huh?""Coker drill," he repeats."Ah, you mean at Suncor?" I confirm."Yes."
Suncor, the longest-operating firm in the Alberta tar/oilsands, deploys a high-pressure water drill to chip away the hardened carbon-heavy hydrocarbon bottoms, “coke,” that accumulate inside its refining vessels, known as "cokers." In the case of Suncor, coke is the waste product from the batch process of super-heating extracted bitumen in order to produce lighter oils and vapors for further "secondary upgrading" into synthetic crude oil. I knew all that, but this newest informant flooded me with details: the coker drill demands 800 gallons of water per minute; the discarded coke is so hot and volatile it outgases for a week; the coke dump is Brobdingnagian—90 meters tall by 1,500 meters wide by 5,000 meters long. Envision a 20-story building 1 mile wide and over 3 miles long.
This vignette illustrates one of my more useful approaches for accumulating data to support my dissertation, which seeks to understand socionature at the worker-level of extraction and production. Based upon my field experience in Fort McMurray, I know if you ask a tar/oilsands worker directly about his—or her—interface with the natural world, a terse response can be expected: “Fuck Greenpeace!” Without elaborating here, I suggest this is not wholly-unreasonable. A daily swim and sauna facilitates my personal fitness and places me in a relaxed atmosphere for engaging delicate topics.
Despite the challenge, I remain committed to teasing out my story through individuals, without resorting to official firm channels, which I fear would taint my findings by reducing the candor of my informants. Progress is incremental, but accumulating tidbits are triangulating into a clearer picture. One of my key informants, a person I’ve known for over a year, has worked for Suncor hauling freshly-drilled coke from its discharge pile to the waste dump. His response to my newly-discovered dimensions: “It would be bigger but they’ve buried much more in the old mines.” He had previously explained that waste coke remains unregulated by the provincial or federal government, but Suncor forbids pregnant women to work in it.
In addition to interviews, I’m turning to printed resources to bolster my triangulation. For example, an incidental benefit of the coking process is that it binds-up heavy metals such as mercury and vanadium. On the one hand, this removes potential hazards from the commodity chain; but on the other, outgassing and leaching from the waste dump remain concerns.
In addition to interviews, I’m turning to printed resources to bolster my triangulation. For example, an incidental benefit of the coking process is that it binds-up heavy metals such as mercury and vanadium. On the one hand, this removes potential hazards from the commodity chain; but on the other, outgassing and leaching from the waste dump remain concerns.
I have offered this brief description to record how seemingly mundane interactions can disarm otherwise potentially defensive informants. After a conversation begins, I make certain to identify myself as a geographical researcher interested in human-nature relations; however, when approached in such a manner, most prospective informants express curiosity rather than reticence. In aggregate the resulting qualitative data is contributing to more fully-formed findings.
-----
Jairus Rossi
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
‘So where is this site supposed to be?’
‘According to these directions, we are supposed to look for a pile of tires behind a fence. There should also be a puddle in front of the fence. ‘
‘That could literally describe about five places we just passed.’
This scenario is common in my fieldwork as I am interested in the social and scientific aspects of knowledge production in ecological restoration work. To do this, I spend a lot of time with population geneticists who are part of a broader effort to restore ecosystems in the Chicago area. Because direct genetic studies of plants and their population demographics are relatively expensive, these researchers often focus on rare species. Many of these species are found in the interstices and blind spots of highly industrialized and suburbanized spaces. Many of these species lay dormant in root masses and soil seed banks underneath places like regularly manicured baseball diamonds. These sites have been used as the source for the reintroduction of many previously rare species.
There is no shortage of stories about where restorationists find unique seed sources, but many of them revolve around Cold War military installations, boom and bust cycles in the housing market, and intense industrial expansion. Remnant prairies were found in a Navy airport that contained a large buffer zone managed with regular mowing. Similarly, a few acres of prairie remained adjacent to a Nike missile platform, now decommissioned but surrounded by office parks. Illinois Beach State Park holds a number of unique species directly beside a retired nuclear reactor. Midewin prairie, near Joliet, is a 20,000 acre restoration project at a former munitions manufacturing and storage site. Here, restorationists plant prairie grasses and flowers on and around ammunition bunkers. Near Elgin, there was the kame that was supposed to be mined by the Vulcan Materials Company for road construction. A group of restorationists placed the top foot of this gravel prairie in a few large trucks and moved it 5 miles down the road and reassembled it on top of a rock pile. Finally, the Dupont Prairie, in the Calumet region, is jointly owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy and the Dupont chemical company. The EPA wants to dredge out much of what is currently considered a high quality dune, and swale prairie, while leaving much of the invasive reed stands, because it is extremely contaminated by waste from Dupont’s factories.
Those involved in restoration work are ambivalent about Chicago’s industrial history. They recognize that the persistence of currently rare species is an unexpected result of industrial development. They point to the comparative lack of species in the rest of Illinois, dominated by monocropped agriculture, as proof of this uneasy socionatural assemblage. Setting aside the obvious critique that these agricultural spaces are critical for urban metabolism, I find myself drawn to this thesis. It reinforces the suggestion, at least from a biophysical standpoint, that ecosystems evolve and persist even when faced with the most destructive acts of the military-industrial complex.
At the same time, many of these sites seem to persist only because of the active exclusion of humans, whether by soil contamination or for national security purposes. By focusing odd juxtaposition of industry, military and nature, I come precariously close to fetishizing the exotic and evacuating the active social from these socionatures. This is a constant source of anxiety, even as I try to document the contingent re-integration of human action in these landscapes. Ecological restoration, in its most optimistic forms, is partially about overcoming the human-nature dualism. Many restorationists that I work with delineate forms of practice and engagement with the landscape that simultaneously emphasize a project’s ecologically and socially productive aspects. While these restorationists sometimes advance romantic, essentialist and prelapsarian discourses about native species, prairies, and the frontier, these positions are rather subdued. For the most part, these folks are interested in restoration that is about restoring ecosystems’ capacities for evolution and that sees the industrial-military history of these sites as something to be acknowledged and written into the restoration process.
As my research and these restoration projects are ongoing, I’m reluctant to advance any normative statements regarding the social-ecological value of this work. There are definitely class issues involved in these restoration networks, especially as they focus on rare species and ecological assemblages. On the other hand, as a political ecologist with training in genetics, I am very interested in how restorationists advance positions of contingent openness regarding normative ecosystem states to animate specific knowledge-making practices. It seems that this approach leaves the social and practical aspects of this restoration work open to continual negotiation.
-------
Priyanka Ghosh
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
How is my research going? Well, it's a question one needs to ask occasionally in the field, to be conscious about what's happening around them. However, if one dwells on this question too much in the field one might become tired of questioning oneself, which might lead to a lack of motivation in the field. Instead of trying to control every situation, trying to turn it in one's favor it is better to let those go! This "letting go" type of attitude is very necessary in the beginning, when someone starts fieldwork in an unknown setting, when one is not so sure how to begin with and whom to talk to. The first few weeks could be tiring and there could be little or no progress in terms of academic productivity. At least that is what happened to me. I arrived in Kolkata in the Middle of March, 2011. It was not until April 16 that I could visit my primary study site: Gosaba. Those days were simply spent on settling in my ancestral house in Kolkata. I had no internet connection in my house and things had changed since I left Kolkata in 2009. Wireless internet connection was now available in the city and I applied for one in which you simply carry a data card with you wherever you go. However, in my field there is no electricity so carrying a laptop means one would just increase the weight of their luggage. So, my initial days in Kolkata were very frustrating in terms of "doing things in the field" and I was not very poised and calm. Often I felt I was stuck and controlled by situations on which I had hardly any control. During this initial phase of my fieldwork I met the secretary of the Tagore Society for Rural Development (TSRD), an NGO working in the Sundarban region since 1970s, to arrange my accommodation in Gosaba.
On April 16, I was immensely delighted because I visited Pramila's house in Satjelia, Gosaba and talked to her about my staying. I was accompanied by my friend Debarati Mukherjee on this first visit. I was extremely excited to spend my days in a village something that I had never done in the past. In my mind I was worried too because this was the first time I was going to live in a mud walled straw thatched house without electricity, without a proper toilet and without a private space to take bath. Entering my study site was not difficult for me because I was introduced to Pramila in 2009 during my preliminary fieldwork. At that time Pramila was working at a primary health sub-center in Luxbagan, Gosaba. She was an active health worker of the Tagore society for Rural Development (TSRD). After arranging accommodation I was stuck again for a few days in Kolkata. During this time I met an official from the Forest Department and talked about my possibility of venturing deep into the forest to watch fishing and crab collection. What I needed from the department was to get permission to enter the protected area (STR), but I was discouraged by that officer. He was worried about my safety in the forest, accompanied only by some fishermen in a boat (which means entering the forest in a fisherman's boat without the protection of any forest guards). He was also hesitant to send me with some forest guards in a boat provided by the Forest Department. The safety issue with regard to sexual overture was his main concern! And if that happened to a female researcher the department's reputation would be at stake! Here, I don't feel comfortable revealing our conversation which went on at his office. I would say that he is one of the top-ranked officers of the West Bengal Forest Department. After my meeting I was very depressed and humiliated thinking of women's position in the Indian society! At that moment I realized that every researcher needs some sort of mental support from their close friends or family members when they are working in the field and this might be much needed for those who work in somewhat unfamiliar environment, far away from their homes. Interestingly, the same officer helped me in obtaining some reports and documents of the Forest Department without which my research wouldn't have taken a good shape. So, I personally have no grudge against him and I think it is the patriarchal mentality embedded in our society which tends to think of women as lesser beings than men. The reflection of the same mentality was embedded in my interviewees' queries, both among men and women of the fishing communities of Gosaba. They were surprised to know that I have no brother and my mother only has two daughters! In the beginning I used to get annoyed and used to try hard to be calm in front of them, but as my fieldwork progressed slowly in the fishing community I secretly started taking pride in declaring that I have no brother! The women of the community were also interested to know my age and marital status. Some men also suggested that I should get married with a fisherman and live the rest of my life in the village. In that way I would be able to consume fish and crabs every day. They commented that in Kolkata people don't get a chance to eat fresh fish. The other reason they provided was that a rural, less educated man will listen to an educated urban woman and will be under her control forever! Even we, the researchers, might differ from our subjects in terms of personal opinions we should try to be patient while interacting with them. I think it is necessary to be open enough to listen to their opinions (not related to the fieldwork always) and try to understand those underlying factors which have shaped their world view over the years.
Before ending this field note I would also like to point to the issue of positionality, which my fellow researchers, who are right now working in a rural setting in a non-Western world, like me, might experience. It's, we the researchers, are the intruders in the lives of our interviewees and that is why my whereabouts were being constantly observed. One day, when I was returning from the schoolpara (the area where a high school is located) in the afternoon I was asked by a man whether I went to the ferry-ghat in the morning. I was surprised because I had gone to the ferry-ghat that morning to see one of my friends off who had visited the village just for a day. By this time people knew me well and I thought that I wasn't observed anymore, but I was wrong! Each and every day I was observed by the local residents because I was considered an outsider in the community who encroached on their space. In terms of positionality I was considered both an insider and outsider simultaneously. I could speak their language, Bengali, fluently but my Bengali was sophisticated and urbane. On the other hand I did not know some of the local expressions. The residents of the fishing communities largely arrived from several districts of present day Bangladesh before the partition of India in 1947. So, their Bengali dialect is somewhat different from the Bengali dialect of those who live in West Bengal, India. Nevertheless, I shared the same ethnicity with my interviewees, local residents considered me an urban elite of Kolkata, who had no knowledge of the tides, rivers, forests and animals. Speaking the same language provided me an immediate access to people's lives, their culture and religion. I already had information related to rituals like worshipping the goddess Banabibi (the goddess of the forest) before entering the forest for catching fish and crabs and collecting honey. But this information probably restricted me from making further, detailed observations. It blocked my thinking process on the role of Banabibi in fishers' lives. So, maintaining naivety was harder in my situation and because of this I might have missed some additional information in the field.
----
Patrick Bigger
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
Last week, California finally approved the United States’ first high speed rail line. It will run from LA to San Francisco, will cost a substantial amount of money, and, if all goes well, may be completed before both those cities are washed away by rising seas. I mention this because the logical second line of this high-speed rail between the Bay Area and Sacramento would have aided my fieldwork thus far tremendously. I’ve been spending a lot of time on trains. My work hinges on the creation of California’s carbon market, the first economy-wide carbon abatement scheme in the US. This summer I’ve been shuttling back and forth between Sacramento, the state capital and home of the California Air Resources Board (ARB) which is developing the project, and the Bay Area, hub of global finance on the West Coast and the location of UC Berkeley, where economists are feverishly modeling different aspects of the market in anticipation of an influx of money. Most of my work so far has been sitting in on hearings at California EPA headquarters and attending sessions of the California State Legislature as they try to hammer out regulations for the market, which is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2013. Then I hop on the train and blow down to Berkeley to listen to economists from UC and Stanford explain how they’ll be modeling markets, what the potential pitfalls are, and try to surreptitiously guess SoCal-Edison’s trading strategy. Below I want to make two observations that are only tangentially related to my fieldwork- this probably isn’t the place to muse about the epistemological difficulties of melding cultural economy approaches with finance and robust critical political economy or the materiality of carbon dioxide.
First, CalEPA headquarters is massive and beautiful. The Joe Serna Jr. building is twenty-five stories tall, is ranked by USEPA as the most energy efficient high-rise in the nation, features copious bike parking, and it’s just a really damn good looking building. I mention this because, tragically, it’s unlikely that the state will be able to undertake any buildings of this magnitude and quality anytime soon. The state is poised to embark on one of the biggest state-level austerity programs in US history. While everyone has their own theory about how California’s fiscal situation became so dire (I’ll toss my hat in with Ruthie Gilmore) and how to fix it (auctioning pollution rights is projected to bring in between $600 million and $1.8 billion…), it’s hard to see new state buildings of that quality in California’s near future. California can’t even afford to keep their own state parks open, including an historic former state capitol building in Benicia which I tried to visit while dropping in on the massive Chevron refinery located there. This sort of mirrors a broader trend across the US, in which less and less money, creativity and quality materials are being put into public buildings. Think only of crumbling schools, closing post offices, and the clapboard, cookie-cutter federal buildings that have popped up in many small cities across the US in the last 30 years. This follows arguments made by Giovanni Arrighi and Corrigan and Sayer, and an idea I’ve kicked around with Aaron Kappeler in the past-–namely that shoddy public architecture and degradation of the built environment are manifestations of failures of government and imperial decline. In many ways, it’s emblematic of the state’s decline that the last great building erected by the state of California (as far as I can tell) was built for CalEPA- it’s arguably the most important governance function the state has control over, and most people I’ve spoken with are proud that California is leading the way (although through questionable means) in reducing GHG emissions. Perhaps if California could control derivatives markets beyond its own environmental financial commodities it would have built a similarly great building for its own financial regulatory apparatus. However, in the current atmosphere of austerity, it’s more likely that California’s public buildings will suffer a decline similar decline to that of public infrastructure in other parts of the country.
My second and related observation is based on what is being said by my informants, rather than where is it being said. To put it bluntly, people are simultaneously drawn to, and repulsed by the power of finance. One of the more interesting hearings attended dealt with how to spend the aforementioned auction revenues from selling the rights to emit GHGs. It was organized with two panels of 8 people, each allocated 5 minutes to talk about how to spend auction revenue. The first thing that kept coming up was the insistence of Mary Nichols, the chairwoman of ARB, that the auction's main purpose was not to raise money for the state, but to provide regulated entities with a price signal for what GHGs should cost. The money is just a happy byproduct! That stance is sort of tough to swallow because of the fiscal crisis the state is staring down right now.
Basically, the panelists could be broken down into four camps: naysayers who don't think that ARB has the authority to conduct an auction because that amounts to a sort of complex argument around the commerce clause and the seizure of private property; those who were only concerned that revenue spending be narrowly tailored to the intent of AB32 per Prop 13, which states that all revenue from fees must be plowed back into the issues from which they arise; people advocating for direct investment in marginalized communities; and the most interesting group (only two of 16 speakers) who advocated financializing revenue by way of either a green investment bank or a state-backed reinsurance scheme. This last group's comments elicited by far the most interest from the Board members, to the tune of 90% of all questions. Board members wanted to know if they could get a much higher return on investment (both monetarily and socially) by creating low interest loans for technology startups, pilot projects and the like.
Interestingly, this hearing was the same week as the Facebook IPO, and more than one commenter wondered aloud about the wisdom of creating new financial products based on an already abstract commodity. Often the same board member would ask a question about the stunning array of projects a green bank could sponsor, then in their next question pontificate on their skepticism about the stability of financial markets. One thing that kept popping up was that any plan to spend the money will have to go through the California Department of Treasury, which apparently (though I’ve had little luck finding specific examples) has a long track record of securitizing income streams- in this way the state could borrow against expected revenues from future auctions to plug the deficit because the securitized revenue streams apparently don't have the same Prop 13 requirements as direct spending. The issue was never close to satisfactorily resolved; and in fact, the state legislature ended up passing a bill that much more narrowly tailored how the revenue could be spent. It was still fascinating to see a group of very bright people struggle with the world of possibilities created by the financialization of carbon revenue versus its potential costs.
My next several months of fieldwork entail spending quite a bit more time on the train, shuttling between the finance ambivalent regulators and their financial interlocutors. The first auction for GHG emission rights comes on November 15 and market activity will start buzzing while money flows into state coffers all under the backdrop of dramatic environmental collapse mirrored in magnitude by ongoing economic crisis.
Jairus Rossi
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
‘So where is this site supposed to be?’
‘According to these directions, we are supposed to look for a pile of tires behind a fence. There should also be a puddle in front of the fence. ‘
‘That could literally describe about five places we just passed.’
This scenario is common in my fieldwork as I am interested in the social and scientific aspects of knowledge production in ecological restoration work. To do this, I spend a lot of time with population geneticists who are part of a broader effort to restore ecosystems in the Chicago area. Because direct genetic studies of plants and their population demographics are relatively expensive, these researchers often focus on rare species. Many of these species are found in the interstices and blind spots of highly industrialized and suburbanized spaces. Many of these species lay dormant in root masses and soil seed banks underneath places like regularly manicured baseball diamonds. These sites have been used as the source for the reintroduction of many previously rare species.
There is no shortage of stories about where restorationists find unique seed sources, but many of them revolve around Cold War military installations, boom and bust cycles in the housing market, and intense industrial expansion. Remnant prairies were found in a Navy airport that contained a large buffer zone managed with regular mowing. Similarly, a few acres of prairie remained adjacent to a Nike missile platform, now decommissioned but surrounded by office parks. Illinois Beach State Park holds a number of unique species directly beside a retired nuclear reactor. Midewin prairie, near Joliet, is a 20,000 acre restoration project at a former munitions manufacturing and storage site. Here, restorationists plant prairie grasses and flowers on and around ammunition bunkers. Near Elgin, there was the kame that was supposed to be mined by the Vulcan Materials Company for road construction. A group of restorationists placed the top foot of this gravel prairie in a few large trucks and moved it 5 miles down the road and reassembled it on top of a rock pile. Finally, the Dupont Prairie, in the Calumet region, is jointly owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy and the Dupont chemical company. The EPA wants to dredge out much of what is currently considered a high quality dune, and swale prairie, while leaving much of the invasive reed stands, because it is extremely contaminated by waste from Dupont’s factories.
Those involved in restoration work are ambivalent about Chicago’s industrial history. They recognize that the persistence of currently rare species is an unexpected result of industrial development. They point to the comparative lack of species in the rest of Illinois, dominated by monocropped agriculture, as proof of this uneasy socionatural assemblage. Setting aside the obvious critique that these agricultural spaces are critical for urban metabolism, I find myself drawn to this thesis. It reinforces the suggestion, at least from a biophysical standpoint, that ecosystems evolve and persist even when faced with the most destructive acts of the military-industrial complex.
At the same time, many of these sites seem to persist only because of the active exclusion of humans, whether by soil contamination or for national security purposes. By focusing odd juxtaposition of industry, military and nature, I come precariously close to fetishizing the exotic and evacuating the active social from these socionatures. This is a constant source of anxiety, even as I try to document the contingent re-integration of human action in these landscapes. Ecological restoration, in its most optimistic forms, is partially about overcoming the human-nature dualism. Many restorationists that I work with delineate forms of practice and engagement with the landscape that simultaneously emphasize a project’s ecologically and socially productive aspects. While these restorationists sometimes advance romantic, essentialist and prelapsarian discourses about native species, prairies, and the frontier, these positions are rather subdued. For the most part, these folks are interested in restoration that is about restoring ecosystems’ capacities for evolution and that sees the industrial-military history of these sites as something to be acknowledged and written into the restoration process.
As my research and these restoration projects are ongoing, I’m reluctant to advance any normative statements regarding the social-ecological value of this work. There are definitely class issues involved in these restoration networks, especially as they focus on rare species and ecological assemblages. On the other hand, as a political ecologist with training in genetics, I am very interested in how restorationists advance positions of contingent openness regarding normative ecosystem states to animate specific knowledge-making practices. It seems that this approach leaves the social and practical aspects of this restoration work open to continual negotiation.
Priyanka Ghosh
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
How is my research going? Well, it's a question one needs to ask occasionally in the field, to be conscious about what's happening around them. However, if one dwells on this question too much in the field one might become tired of questioning oneself, which might lead to a lack of motivation in the field. Instead of trying to control every situation, trying to turn it in one's favor it is better to let those go! This "letting go" type of attitude is very necessary in the beginning, when someone starts fieldwork in an unknown setting, when one is not so sure how to begin with and whom to talk to. The first few weeks could be tiring and there could be little or no progress in terms of academic productivity. At least that is what happened to me. I arrived in Kolkata in the Middle of March, 2011. It was not until April 16 that I could visit my primary study site: Gosaba. Those days were simply spent on settling in my ancestral house in Kolkata. I had no internet connection in my house and things had changed since I left Kolkata in 2009. Wireless internet connection was now available in the city and I applied for one in which you simply carry a data card with you wherever you go. However, in my field there is no electricity so carrying a laptop means one would just increase the weight of their luggage. So, my initial days in Kolkata were very frustrating in terms of "doing things in the field" and I was not very poised and calm. Often I felt I was stuck and controlled by situations on which I had hardly any control. During this initial phase of my fieldwork I met the secretary of the Tagore Society for Rural Development (TSRD), an NGO working in the Sundarban region since 1970s, to arrange my accommodation in Gosaba.
On April 16, I was immensely delighted because I visited Pramila's house in Satjelia, Gosaba and talked to her about my staying. I was accompanied by my friend Debarati Mukherjee on this first visit. I was extremely excited to spend my days in a village something that I had never done in the past. In my mind I was worried too because this was the first time I was going to live in a mud walled straw thatched house without electricity, without a proper toilet and without a private space to take bath. Entering my study site was not difficult for me because I was introduced to Pramila in 2009 during my preliminary fieldwork. At that time Pramila was working at a primary health sub-center in Luxbagan, Gosaba. She was an active health worker of the Tagore society for Rural Development (TSRD). After arranging accommodation I was stuck again for a few days in Kolkata. During this time I met an official from the Forest Department and talked about my possibility of venturing deep into the forest to watch fishing and crab collection. What I needed from the department was to get permission to enter the protected area (STR), but I was discouraged by that officer. He was worried about my safety in the forest, accompanied only by some fishermen in a boat (which means entering the forest in a fisherman's boat without the protection of any forest guards). He was also hesitant to send me with some forest guards in a boat provided by the Forest Department. The safety issue with regard to sexual overture was his main concern! And if that happened to a female researcher the department's reputation would be at stake! Here, I don't feel comfortable revealing our conversation which went on at his office. I would say that he is one of the top-ranked officers of the West Bengal Forest Department. After my meeting I was very depressed and humiliated thinking of women's position in the Indian society! At that moment I realized that every researcher needs some sort of mental support from their close friends or family members when they are working in the field and this might be much needed for those who work in somewhat unfamiliar environment, far away from their homes. Interestingly, the same officer helped me in obtaining some reports and documents of the Forest Department without which my research wouldn't have taken a good shape. So, I personally have no grudge against him and I think it is the patriarchal mentality embedded in our society which tends to think of women as lesser beings than men. The reflection of the same mentality was embedded in my interviewees' queries, both among men and women of the fishing communities of Gosaba. They were surprised to know that I have no brother and my mother only has two daughters! In the beginning I used to get annoyed and used to try hard to be calm in front of them, but as my fieldwork progressed slowly in the fishing community I secretly started taking pride in declaring that I have no brother! The women of the community were also interested to know my age and marital status. Some men also suggested that I should get married with a fisherman and live the rest of my life in the village. In that way I would be able to consume fish and crabs every day. They commented that in Kolkata people don't get a chance to eat fresh fish. The other reason they provided was that a rural, less educated man will listen to an educated urban woman and will be under her control forever! Even we, the researchers, might differ from our subjects in terms of personal opinions we should try to be patient while interacting with them. I think it is necessary to be open enough to listen to their opinions (not related to the fieldwork always) and try to understand those underlying factors which have shaped their world view over the years.
Before ending this field note I would also like to point to the issue of positionality, which my fellow researchers, who are right now working in a rural setting in a non-Western world, like me, might experience. It's, we the researchers, are the intruders in the lives of our interviewees and that is why my whereabouts were being constantly observed. One day, when I was returning from the schoolpara (the area where a high school is located) in the afternoon I was asked by a man whether I went to the ferry-ghat in the morning. I was surprised because I had gone to the ferry-ghat that morning to see one of my friends off who had visited the village just for a day. By this time people knew me well and I thought that I wasn't observed anymore, but I was wrong! Each and every day I was observed by the local residents because I was considered an outsider in the community who encroached on their space. In terms of positionality I was considered both an insider and outsider simultaneously. I could speak their language, Bengali, fluently but my Bengali was sophisticated and urbane. On the other hand I did not know some of the local expressions. The residents of the fishing communities largely arrived from several districts of present day Bangladesh before the partition of India in 1947. So, their Bengali dialect is somewhat different from the Bengali dialect of those who live in West Bengal, India. Nevertheless, I shared the same ethnicity with my interviewees, local residents considered me an urban elite of Kolkata, who had no knowledge of the tides, rivers, forests and animals. Speaking the same language provided me an immediate access to people's lives, their culture and religion. I already had information related to rituals like worshipping the goddess Banabibi (the goddess of the forest) before entering the forest for catching fish and crabs and collecting honey. But this information probably restricted me from making further, detailed observations. It blocked my thinking process on the role of Banabibi in fishers' lives. So, maintaining naivety was harder in my situation and because of this I might have missed some additional information in the field.
Patrick Bigger
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
Last week, California finally approved the United States’ first high speed rail line. It will run from LA to San Francisco, will cost a substantial amount of money, and, if all goes well, may be completed before both those cities are washed away by rising seas. I mention this because the logical second line of this high-speed rail between the Bay Area and Sacramento would have aided my fieldwork thus far tremendously. I’ve been spending a lot of time on trains. My work hinges on the creation of California’s carbon market, the first economy-wide carbon abatement scheme in the US. This summer I’ve been shuttling back and forth between Sacramento, the state capital and home of the California Air Resources Board (ARB) which is developing the project, and the Bay Area, hub of global finance on the West Coast and the location of UC Berkeley, where economists are feverishly modeling different aspects of the market in anticipation of an influx of money. Most of my work so far has been sitting in on hearings at California EPA headquarters and attending sessions of the California State Legislature as they try to hammer out regulations for the market, which is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2013. Then I hop on the train and blow down to Berkeley to listen to economists from UC and Stanford explain how they’ll be modeling markets, what the potential pitfalls are, and try to surreptitiously guess SoCal-Edison’s trading strategy. Below I want to make two observations that are only tangentially related to my fieldwork- this probably isn’t the place to muse about the epistemological difficulties of melding cultural economy approaches with finance and robust critical political economy or the materiality of carbon dioxide.
First, CalEPA headquarters is massive and beautiful. The Joe Serna Jr. building is twenty-five stories tall, is ranked by USEPA as the most energy efficient high-rise in the nation, features copious bike parking, and it’s just a really damn good looking building. I mention this because, tragically, it’s unlikely that the state will be able to undertake any buildings of this magnitude and quality anytime soon. The state is poised to embark on one of the biggest state-level austerity programs in US history. While everyone has their own theory about how California’s fiscal situation became so dire (I’ll toss my hat in with Ruthie Gilmore) and how to fix it (auctioning pollution rights is projected to bring in between $600 million and $1.8 billion…), it’s hard to see new state buildings of that quality in California’s near future. California can’t even afford to keep their own state parks open, including an historic former state capitol building in Benicia which I tried to visit while dropping in on the massive Chevron refinery located there. This sort of mirrors a broader trend across the US, in which less and less money, creativity and quality materials are being put into public buildings. Think only of crumbling schools, closing post offices, and the clapboard, cookie-cutter federal buildings that have popped up in many small cities across the US in the last 30 years. This follows arguments made by Giovanni Arrighi and Corrigan and Sayer, and an idea I’ve kicked around with Aaron Kappeler in the past-–namely that shoddy public architecture and degradation of the built environment are manifestations of failures of government and imperial decline. In many ways, it’s emblematic of the state’s decline that the last great building erected by the state of California (as far as I can tell) was built for CalEPA- it’s arguably the most important governance function the state has control over, and most people I’ve spoken with are proud that California is leading the way (although through questionable means) in reducing GHG emissions. Perhaps if California could control derivatives markets beyond its own environmental financial commodities it would have built a similarly great building for its own financial regulatory apparatus. However, in the current atmosphere of austerity, it’s more likely that California’s public buildings will suffer a decline similar decline to that of public infrastructure in other parts of the country.
My second and related observation is based on what is being said by my informants, rather than where is it being said. To put it bluntly, people are simultaneously drawn to, and repulsed by the power of finance. One of the more interesting hearings attended dealt with how to spend the aforementioned auction revenues from selling the rights to emit GHGs. It was organized with two panels of 8 people, each allocated 5 minutes to talk about how to spend auction revenue. The first thing that kept coming up was the insistence of Mary Nichols, the chairwoman of ARB, that the auction's main purpose was not to raise money for the state, but to provide regulated entities with a price signal for what GHGs should cost. The money is just a happy byproduct! That stance is sort of tough to swallow because of the fiscal crisis the state is staring down right now.
Basically, the panelists could be broken down into four camps: naysayers who don't think that ARB has the authority to conduct an auction because that amounts to a sort of complex argument around the commerce clause and the seizure of private property; those who were only concerned that revenue spending be narrowly tailored to the intent of AB32 per Prop 13, which states that all revenue from fees must be plowed back into the issues from which they arise; people advocating for direct investment in marginalized communities; and the most interesting group (only two of 16 speakers) who advocated financializing revenue by way of either a green investment bank or a state-backed reinsurance scheme. This last group's comments elicited by far the most interest from the Board members, to the tune of 90% of all questions. Board members wanted to know if they could get a much higher return on investment (both monetarily and socially) by creating low interest loans for technology startups, pilot projects and the like.
Interestingly, this hearing was the same week as the Facebook IPO, and more than one commenter wondered aloud about the wisdom of creating new financial products based on an already abstract commodity. Often the same board member would ask a question about the stunning array of projects a green bank could sponsor, then in their next question pontificate on their skepticism about the stability of financial markets. One thing that kept popping up was that any plan to spend the money will have to go through the California Department of Treasury, which apparently (though I’ve had little luck finding specific examples) has a long track record of securitizing income streams- in this way the state could borrow against expected revenues from future auctions to plug the deficit because the securitized revenue streams apparently don't have the same Prop 13 requirements as direct spending. The issue was never close to satisfactorily resolved; and in fact, the state legislature ended up passing a bill that much more narrowly tailored how the revenue could be spent. It was still fascinating to see a group of very bright people struggle with the world of possibilities created by the financialization of carbon revenue versus its potential costs.
My next several months of fieldwork entail spending quite a bit more time on the train, shuttling between the finance ambivalent regulators and their financial interlocutors. The first auction for GHG emission rights comes on November 15 and market activity will start buzzing while money flows into state coffers all under the backdrop of dramatic environmental collapse mirrored in magnitude by ongoing economic crisis.
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