Feb 18, 2009 - The book is an intriguing mix of scholarship and investigative journalism, a. ''multisited ethnography'' (271) that introduces the perspectives of ...
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chapter most relevant to my own research on user conflicts in urban natural areas, and as a social scientist I appreciate how Coates’s historical method informs this current resource issue. With this wealth of data in hand, in the final chapter Coates faces the ‘‘Nazi connection’’ thesis head-on. He calls the theories of those accusing today’s environmental movement with eco-nativism ‘‘paranoid’’ and chides the poor scholarship behind them. He distinguishes groups such as the Sierra Club who have called for limits on immigration from racist groups such as Aryan Nation in that the former are concerned about the ecological impacts of uncontrolled immigration while the latter have no real environmental agenda. He also concludes that much of the rhetorical imagery used in current debates about invasive species has lost its association to racist ideology; the metaphors have ‘‘wilted’’ because racism in America has largely dissolved. While Coates’s conclusion might seem justified compared to his earlier period of study, as I’ve found in my own work, actual experiences or memories of such connections are still strongly felt by some individuals. This makes it critical for those involved in this area to be cognizant of the power of imagery in their words and actions. I’m not sure Coates would disagree with me on this point, and his lack of emphasis on perceived versus documented racism could be due to the limitations of his historical approach to study. Studies of racial and ethnic groups’ perceptions of natural environments over the last two decades show we still have a long way to go before issues such as equity and discrimination are ‘‘dissolved,’’ and how natural resource professionals communicate to all current and potential users can hasten this dissolution. As a final note I think this issue also points to the complementarity of historical and social science approaches in studying environmental issues. In American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species, Coates has contributed invaluably to our knowledge in this area, authoritatively addressed one of its most controversial issues, and provided constructive directions for future work.
Jaffee, Daniel. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. 331 pp. $21.95 (paper), $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-520-24958-5.
Reviewed by Tobias Plieninger Research Group on Ecosystem Services Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities Berlin, Germany
There have been many efforts, both effective and ineffective, to change the world through the organization of consumer power. Voluntary consumer abstinence— boycott—has traditionally been used as form of social ostracism against nations, corporations, and individuals. A more recent and materialistic (and thus maybe more successful in affluent societies) way of exerting consumer power is the notion of ‘‘ethical’’ consumerism, which promotes shopping as a political act: Organic food promises to combine sensory pleasure with sustainable agriculture; green electricity offers the choice of carbon-neutral power consumption; and fair trade products are promoted as a means toward a more equitable global economy. These blends of
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social movement and alternative market structure have experienced rapid growth in recent years, especially in Europe and North America. ‘‘Labeling’’ is the process that unites all these forms of ‘‘ethical’’ marketing and guarantee that social and=or ecological standards have been observed throughout a globalized commodity chain. Brewing Justice leads the reader along the coffee production chain—the most iconic product of the ethical movement, the first commodity to be fairly traded, and still the most important one. Global coffee production suffered a severe price crisis in the 1990s and 2000s that impacted smallholders throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In this context, Daniel Jaffee poses a very fundamental question: Does fair trade really make a difference for the livelihood of coffee smallholders? Brewing Justice scrutinizes the benefits, limits, and contradictions of the fair trade model and movement by using a case-study approach where the social, economic, and environmental contexts of two different types of indigenous coffee farmers in Mexico are compared both quantitatively and qualitatively. One group in the study is involved in certified fair trade (and predominantly practices active organic management), and one sells coffee to coyotes, local intermediaries in the conventional supply chain. After two introductory chapters on concepts and history of fair coffee trade, the reader is introduced to Michiza, a small producers’ cooperative that organizes fair coffee trade in southern Mexico’s remote Rinc on de Ixtlan. The members of Michiza are indigenous Zapotec farmers who have been living on this land for centuries and who practice complex traditional forms of land use and land tenure. Commercial coffee production is accompanied by traditional milpa cultivation of maize, beans, squash, and other subsistence crops. With these strong traditional roots acting as ‘‘shock absorbers’’ (277), Michiza members may be better able than other coffee smallholders to buffer the swings of global coffee markets and related food insecurity, social disembedding, and environmental harm. Therefore Jaffee suspects that the empirical findings of the book might rather underestimate the benefits of fair trade. The empirical survey presented in the book identifies an array of significant social and economic benefits that fair trade farmers have, but that their neighbors do not. For a number of indicators of economic well-being, food security, and access to education, Michiza coffee farmers prove to be better off than their conventional counterparts. An important insight is that benefits do not stay only among the coffee farmers, but are also distributed to their entire communities by creating additional employment for day laborers and by introducing extra cash into the local economies. But Jaffee also identifies the limitations of fair trade. For example, fair trade generates both higher gross incomes and higher production costs, and as a result the Michiza member households’ net income is only marginally higher than that of nonmember households. The coffee gardens of Southern Mexico are not only crucial for people’s livelihoods, but also harbor an extraordinary biodiversity and deliver numerous ecosystem services such as erosion control, water filtration, and carbon sequestration. Does the combination of fair and organic coffee trade create tangible benefits for the enhancement of environmental conservation? Interestingly, Jaffee found out that the demand for organic coffee has spawned a strong identity of being ‘‘organic coffee farmers’’ that includes a unique me´lange of indigenous ecological knowledge and of organic techniques newly introduced from outside. Practices such as producing compost, establishing live-plant barriers, and building terraces are applied to certified
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coffee parcels, but also have spread out to conventional coffee fields and even to milpa food crops. A recent study (Philpott et al. 2007) confirmed the environmental benefits of coffee growing in traditional agroforestry systems, but did not detect any differences in bird richness, vegetation diversity, and other ecological parameters between certified organic and conventional plantations. This may be a consequence of the fact that organic techniques have spread from certified organic to conventional coffee parcels, blurring the distinctions between these two types of systems. However, the presence of shade trees (that contain a significant part of the original forest biodiversity) is a much more effective determinant of biodiversity in coffee plantations than simply applying organic standards. Jaffee recommends promoting a complementary triple certification of fair, organic, and ‘‘bird-friendly’’ coffee, which seems to be a sound way to lessen the environmental impact of coffee cultivation. In the concluding chapters Jaffee transmits three messages to his readers: First, fair trade coffee does make a real difference, and delivers an array of social, economic, and ecological advantages to the coffee-producing regions—although the issues are more complex and the impact may be less impressive than commonly expected. Second, issues of democracy, privilege, and power distribution between northern consumers and certifiers and southern producers are not sufficiently addressed within the movement. The rules of the game have been established without the active participation of rural producers (some of which, as a consequence, dismiss organic certification as a form of ‘‘ecological neo-colonialism,’’ 152). Jaffee suggests a fundamental adjustment of fair trade and organic standards and policies to incorporate the cultural and economic perspectives of southern producers. Key issues are specification of the minimum price to be paid, changing the current practice of allocating certification costs to rural producers, and integration of southern producers’ viewpoints into fair trade institutions. Third, the power of fair trade is based on its role as a model of alternative economic exchange, not on its trade volume. Therefore Jaffee cautions against a dilution, co-optation, and manipulation through ‘‘McFair coffee’’ (203), the entry of corporate partners (e.g., Starbucks or Procter & Gamble) into fair trade and the related logics of mainstream commodity markets that come along with them. Instead he encourages fair trade to ally to larger global justice movements. The question of whether to aspire to a broad effect (by increasing market share through entry into mainstream markets) or a deep effect (by strengthening alternative trading structures) is familiar to those who been involved in the debate of small-scale versus corporate organic farming. I have some doubts on whether these strategies really must be mutually exclusive, as Jaffee seems strongly convinced. Why exactly can fair trade not work in different intensities? And is it, after all, possible, or desirable, to keep corporate enterprises out of fair trade? But Jaffee is correct to point out that the sustainability consequences of the current extraordinary growth of fair trade must be carefully scrutinized—this screams out for a subsequent study of ‘‘McFair’’ coffee. The book is an intriguing mix of scholarship and investigative journalism, a ‘‘multisited ethnography’’ (271) that introduces the perspectives of both ‘‘local’’ and ‘‘global’’ actors, including indigenous coffee smallholders, trade politicians, fair trade campaigners, and corporate coffee roasters. It is a passionate plea for strengthening and defending fair trade, and it is well grounded in sound empirical findings. This multifaceted book is equally an empirical case study and a policy analysis, and it is enjoyable to read, well structured, and vividly written. It seems perfectly
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applicable for environmental justice classes and will find a wide readership among those interested in conceptual and applied aspects of fair trade.
Reference Philpott, S. M., P. Bichier, R. Rice, and R. Greenberg. 2007. Field-testing ecological and economic benefits of coffee certification programs. Conserv. Biol. 21:975–985.
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Durant, Robert F. The Greening of the U.S. Military: Environmental Policy, National Security, and Organizational Change. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. 298 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 9781589011533. Reviewed by Kathleen E. Halvorsen Social Sciences Department and School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science Michigan Technological University Houghton, Michigan, USA Imagine setting out to write a book about the entire Department of Defense (DoD), a daunting task in and of itself. Now, imagine writing a book about its ‘‘greening’’— a truly Sisyphean task. Durant was brave enough to take this on, and the book succeeds in at least one important way. The author focuses on the Clinton-era 1990s. This was a time when the Clinton= Gore team attempted the greening of many federal agencies, with highly variable degrees of success. Many of you familiar with the USDA Forest Service (USFS) history will be thinking of the parallels between it and the DoD. The two, as I argue later, experienced many of the same pressures with very different outcomes. Durant chronicles the optimism and efforts of an early Clinton administration setting out to move the DoD to a ‘‘beyond compliance’’ state relative to environmental regulations. Unfortunately, as the book chronicles, moving the DoD to basic compliance was a difficult and, apparently, unachievable task. One way that Durant makes his enormous task more manageable is to focus on the evolution of attempted solutions to just a few problems. He starts with the Clinton administration’s appointment of Sherri Wasserman Goodman as deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security. The idea was to give her office sufficient independent civilian power to achieve efficacious enforcement of environmental regulations and pollution prevention programs integrated across all branches of the military. The rest of the book chronicles the erosion of her ability to achieve this goal as the DoD effectively counters her every move. Durant then uses the cases of the 1990s decommissioning and pre-transfer to civilian ownership cleanup of bases, the cleanup of unexploded ordinance on military sites, and the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, requiring the destruction of a significant amount of highly toxic material, to illustrate how the DoD, largely successfully, resisted efforts to force organizational change. This history is very useful, as I suspect it has not been pulled together before. It adds a fairly comprehensive chronicle of the environmental record of a key federal
