Abstract
Overintensification and subsidies have long made American commodity farmers the enemy of conservationists. Yet, environmental conditions are improving in the Mississippi Delta where farmer-based groups, water management districts and conservation organizations have improved environmental quality and redefined the role of agriculture in environmental preservation. This work is all the more remarkable given the region’s deeply conservative politics that discourage regulation. This paper examines this mainstreaming of environmental values in light of debates on the role of the state in fostering environmental subjectivities. Following cultural examinations of the state, we caution that the presence or retreat of the state is insufficient to understanding environmental subjectivities. Instead, an ethnographic focus is necessary to identify connections between the state and particular human-environment relations. In the Delta, this focus shows that local environmentalism is consonant with a politics of unsustainability, one that simultaneously advances radical ecological change and defense of the region’s social hierarchies.
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Delta refers to the fertile crescent of land that stretches from Memphis, TN, to Vicksburg, MS, about 7,000 square miles in its entirety. The central Delta, where this work was conducted, includes the area around Bolivar and Washington Counties. This is an agriculturally intensive region, focusing on rice, soybeans, and to a slightly lesser degree, cotton and corn.
Delta commodity farmers hold approximately 2,000–10,000 acres and most have incomes that exceed several hundred thousand dollars.
The NRCS manages programs such as the WRP (Wetland Reserve Program) into which farmers apply to put their land and for which they receive money to stop farming it; the CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) in which farmers again apply to enter their land into conservation and get money for it but are allowed to put it back into farming in one year’s time if they so desire; and EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentive Program) which is an environmental cost share program.
The TMDL is the regulated measure of certain substances, such as sediment, organic enrichment, legacy pesticides, DDT, fecal coliform, and mercury that are allowed to be present in a waterway over a given period of time.
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Shoreman, E.E., Haenn, N. Regulation, Conservation, and Collaboration: Ecological Anthropology in the Mississippi Delta. Hum Ecol 37, 95–107 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9218-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9218-5