Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
show that the farm industry can effectively regulate itself without having
to take on too much change. Neither case was an attempt to “greenwash”
the industry's environmental impacts (not entirely, anyway) (Athanasiou
1996; Austin 2002). At the same time, neither case was an especially radical
transformation of the industry's farming practices. Similar to the fi eld trials
used to create consent around a new practice (see chapter 5), the quick test
system and the weather stations were conservative, middle-of-the-road
approaches to environmental change. Thus, the object of repair in these
projects was industry control and power just as much as the environment
itself.
The complex interaction between advisors and growers vis-à-vis environ-
mental issues bears upon the question of how much impact applied scien-
tists can have on environmental change. The incrementalist approach that
advisors take to repairing environmental problems refl ects the location
of the advisors themselves: their integration into the local community of
growers gives them a special entrée that outsiders do not have and cannot
easily acquire. Because they are situated in this space, familiar with the
local farm community and its systems of production, advisors have
the potential to create networks and devise new techniques that may not
be apparent to either the industry or to regulators. They have “gone local”
and can “see” the ecology of the farm industry in ways that others may
not. This location, however, also has special pressures, including the temp-
tation to choose an easy compliance with growers' desires to avoid change.
No doubt the advisors' wariness when describing their identities as envi-
ronmentalists and their distrust of regulators has at least some basis in their
very localized domain of infl uence. At the same time, advisors form close
connections with some of the biggest contributors to water pollution,
providing the advisors with a unique chance to create the conditions for
environmental change. If they can make even a relatively modest change
in the practices of the industrial growers who provide a majority of the
produce for the United States, then their work could have a larger overall
impact.
