Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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Field Note
Try, Mali
In this photo, a young man brings home the cotton harvest in the vil-
lage of Try in southern Mali. Prior to my graduate studies in geography,
I spent a number of years as an international development worker con-
cerned with tropical agriculture—both on the ground in Africa and as a
policy wonk in Washington, D.C. I drew at least two important lessons
from these experiences. First, well-intentioned work at the grassroots
level would always be limited if it were not supported by broader scale
policies and economics. Second, the people making the policies were
often out of touch with the real impacts their decisions were having in
the fi eld. As such, geography, and the subfi eld of political ecology, were
appealing to me because of its explicit attention to processes operat-
ing at multiple scales, its tradition of fi eldwork, and its longstan d ing
attention to human-environment interactions. I employed a political
ecology approach during fi eldwork for my dissertation in 1999-2000.
Here, I sought to test the notion that poor farmers are more likely to
degrade soils than their wealthier counterparts (a concept widely pro-
claimed in the development policy literature of the 1990s). Not only
did I interview rich and poor farmers about their management prac-
tices, but I tested their soils and questioned policymakers at the provin-
cial, national, and international levels. My fi ndings (and those of others)
have led to a questioning of the poverty-environmental degradation
paradigm.
Credit: William Moseley, Macalester College
Figure 13.15
Try, Mali
found that poorer farmers in southern Mali were more
likely to use organic materials to preserve topsoil and that
wealthier farmers were more likely to use inorganic fertil-
izers and pesticides. Aside from being able to afford inor-
ganic fertilizers, wealthier farmers did so in order to pro-
duce cotton more easily. Policies and power relationships
at the local, national, and global scales help explain why
wealthier farmers in southern Mali produce cotton. For
example, the government of Mali's agricultural extension
service singled out the wealthiest households for cotton
farming, which “helped these households become even
wealthier in the short term.”
ronment and that a greater number of people on Earth
translates into a greater capacity for environmental
change.
Similarly, environmental change infl uences humans
differently, depending in part on who they are and
where they live. To underscore the spatial differences
in environmental impact on humans, we can consider
two maps of natural disaster hot spots published by the
Earth Institute at Columbia University and the World
Bank in a 2005 report. The maps highlight the places
in the world most susceptible to natural disasters,
whether caused by drought, tectonic activity (earth-
quakes and volcanoes), or hydrological hazards (fl oods,
cyclones, and landslides) (Fig. 13.16). Comparing the
map of mortality risk with the map of total economic
loss risk demonstrates that when a natural disaster hits
a wealthier area, the place will more likely be hit fi nan-
cially, whereas, in a poorer area of the world, the place
will likely be hit by both fi nancial loss and the loss of
lives. This relationship was certainly borne out when
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United
Population
Because humans across the world do not consume or pol-
lute in exactly the same ways, we cannot make a simple
chart showing that each additional human born on Earth
results in a certain amount of consumption or pollution.
We can, however, recognize that humans affect the envi-
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