This special edition of Culture & Agriculture is a collaboration between the Culture and Agriculture  and Anthropology and Environment Sections of the AAA. Members of both sections share an interest in how humans shape and are shaped by their environment. All of the papers, with the exception of Sullivan's and Paolisso's  were presented at the 1998 Applied Anthropology meetings in a PESO-sponsored session entitled ãAdvocating the Environment.ä

    Advocacy comes in many colors. The word most often evokes images of  groups and/or individuals who, either by word or deed, take a stand  on an issue (i.e., they are admittedly not neutral). Anthropological research on environmental and social justice organizations has contributed to the understanding of this type of advocacy. Furthermore, the possibility of anthropologists acting in this capacity has given rise to a kind of ãself-analysis,ä and an exploration about the role of anthropology as a social science. It is a growing concern in environmental anthropology given anthropologistsâ position in relation to, and knowledge of, social groups disenfranchised due to either environmental degradation or preservation.
The study of negotiated decision-making processes is also a study of advocacy ÷ that of self-interested parties advocating their positions and attempts by a (theoretically) neutral third party to move actors from self-interested advocacy to advocating a consensually produced public good. Advocacy can sometimes be hidden under the mantle of scientific neutrality. Every policy researcher knows that science, as a legitimating discourse, is appropriated by interested parties to further their positions. But science can play an even more subtle role in advocacy efforts. Positionality is embedded in disciplines. Forestry, for example, has traditionally been about cutting lumber, while conservation biology is about saving ecosystems and species. What is studied and how it is studied in itself can be a particularly subtle type of advocacy. The following discussions of environmental advocacy explore all of these dimensions.

    Articles by  Derman and Ferguson and  Meltzoff  examine the relationship between  national policies and local tensions in resource allocation.  Derman and Ferguson  describe attempts to allocate  water in Zimbabwe. Independence did not fundamentally affect resource distribution in Zimbabwe. Large commercial farmers, Zimbabweans of European descent, retained land and rights to the water they needed for irrigation, assuring them a disproportionate share of water. Therefore, the allocation of agricultural resources, including water, is ethnically charged.  The national government has instituted multi-stakeholder watershed groups (known as catchment councils in Zimbabwe) in an attempt to decentralize decision making and to distribute water more equitably. Stakeholder-driven  agreements have grown in popularity in  recent years and are often lauded as the preferred alternative to bureaucratic decision making. However,  Derman and Ferguson describe the way that participatory  decision-making processes are  bounded, and even dwarfed, by the larger political and economic context limiting the ability of such groups to effect change. They describe the problem of ãinvisible groups,ä for example women, who do not get adequate representation on the councils because the councils do not in themselves challenge inequalities in the wider society. They also describe the ways that mobilization of  less powerful groups gets ãset asideä in times of broader social strife.

    Meltzoff  uses rich  ethnographic detail to  describe the effect of national policy at the local level. She examines tensions in the Corn Island (Nicaragua) lobster fishery among five user groups. National bureaucrats are blind to the social diversity within this fishery, and in their rush to cash in on the international tourist boom officials design policies that privilege one local group over the other. Pre-existing ethnic tensions have been reinforced through resource allocation. Environmental activism is played out through  identity politics as Miskito Indians claim that full participation in the lobster fishery is crucial to their cultural survival. For the Miskito of  Corn Island, the past is re-interpreted through the present. Miskito assert indigenous status to legitimate resource claims even though they have been on the island only one generation. Meltzoff points out the difficulties facing anthropologist advocates in such a situation. On what grounds does one judge such claims? Anthropologists (and other mediating groups) can be viewed as resources themselves when competing claims are present. When faced by competing claims of  two relatively powerless groups, as Meltzoff was, how does one choose for whom to advocate?

    Articles by Sullivan, Wali, Paolisso, and Weeks explore the relationship between opinion leaders and the public. They examine the ways that environmental issues are represented to lay audiences, describing how particular representations are linked to advocacy by providing the ideological or cognitive  framework for understanding environmental issues.

    Sullivan examines representations of commercial fishermen in the print media. The media have contributed to the public view of fishermen as ethnically and socially homogenous (i.e., white males). The work and views of women and minorities in the fishery are largely invisible.  Sullivan differentiates between the investigative, neutral arm of journalism whose goal it is to balance diverse accounts and the sports-page writers who are writing for a particular and interested party ÷ sports fishermen.  There is a crossover in their accounts in that the perceived homogeneity portrayed by investigative reporters supports sports writers who favor recreational over commercial fishermen. In the view of the latter, all commercial fishers are uniformly resource destroyers.  Such representations have repercussions for  allocation, as seen in the Florida referendum on a commercial net ban in which the public went to the polls and severely curtailed commercial fishing rights based on their  negative perceptions of  commercial fishers.  In this context, patterns of resource use becomes another behavior in the constellation of  behaviors constituting class (or ethnic in the case of Derman and Ferguson and Meltzoff articles) stereotypes, resulting in sanctions on the stereotyped group.

    In his investigation of the Pfiesteria bloom in Maryland, Paolisso noted that the discourse surrounding Pfiesteria quickly shifted from an examination of the organism itself to nutrient loading in the watershed. The nutrients were traced to poultry farms and farmers were quickly blamed for the algal bloom.   Flat, somewhat stereotypical depictions of  them in scientific and public discourse portrayed farmers as polluters. Additionally, as in the fisheries case described by Sullivan, farmers were portrayed as a homogenous group. Contract growers were not differentiated from their corporate ãemployers.ä In this manner, blame was assigned to the least powerful sector of the poultry farming system.  Missing from the media and scientific discourse on Pfiesteria was the fact that farmers themselves had long recognized the need to reduce agricultural runoff and had been working toward that goal by instituting voluntary best-management practices. Also missing was an analysis of the productive constraints facing contract growers and the role of the large poultry corporations in the production of runoff. The stereotype  of farmers as polluters served to marginalize them in the discussion of  potential solutions to the Pfiesteria problem  and their concerns and ideas  were not taken into account by scientists and regulators.  Paolissoâs concluding comments about anthropologyâs role in uncovering competing cultural models, thus promoting dialogue among diverse social groups  are guide us toward a  kind of advocacy most anthropologists feel comfortable with.  I refer to advocating democratic process and open communication, in contrast to advocating for a particular social group.

    The articles by Wali and Weeks  illuminate an ideology which underwrites much of current conservation efforts ÷ namely that humans are outside of nature and, more importantly,  responsible for ecological degradation. Wali traces the evolution of museum representations of nature from a reductionist focus on taxonomy to the inclusion of human/nature interactions. Although humans are now included in exhibits about wilderness, they are still largely represented as destroying interlopers.  Exhibits largely focus on anthropogenically caused degradation. Wali points out that natural history museums have adequately portrayed the link between the destruction of nature and global capitalism. Missing from these accounts  is an examination of the relationship between global capitalism and unequal access to resources. Museums also fail to point out the positive relationship between biological and cultural diversity.

    Weeks continues with this theme in her analysis of  the representation of wildlife (specifically tigers) and people on the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) website. Environmental NGOs are an important contributor  to conservation education and increasing Internet access makes it an attractive venue for their education campaigns. WWF, like natural history museums, focuses on the destructive aspects of the human-environment relationship. Using scientific reasoning to support its position, it privileges eco-tourism over extraction, ignoring the allocation of resources from one class to another that such a cognitive framework supports. Weeksâ article highlights the blaming aspect of  the discourse on environmental degradation in which one social group, often  relatively marginalized, is singled out as negatively affecting the environment.

    In reading the articles in this volume of Culture & Agriculture, I was struck by the ways in which class and ethnic differences are played out through environmental conflict. Virtually all of  the authors found some degree of scapegoating of  less powerful social groups ÷ small-scale commercial fishers (Sullivan, Meltzoff), small-scale farmers (Derman and Ferguson, Paolisso), and poor villagers (Weeks). While this comes as  no surprise to anthropologists, it is not widely acknowledged by environmental policy makers and activists. Their primary concern is dealing with the ecological destruction itself, hence they often tend to regulate or design programs for the scapegoated groups ( e.g., Weeks, Paolisso).  Things are changing, and increasingly environmental activists and policy makers are thinking about the relationship between environmental policy and  social equity. The analysis of the class and ethnic dimensions of  environmental conflict is one important contribution anthropology can make to the reconfiguration of environmental policy and praxis.