Arid America Research Articles

Agri-silvicultures of Mexican Arid America

BackgroundAgri-silvicultures (ASC) are biocultural practices procuring either the maintenance of wild diversity in predominantly agricultural spaces or introducing agrobiodiversity into forests. In the Mesoamerican region, ASC contribute to food sovereignty and territorial conservation and provide strategies for dealing with global changes. Previous inventories of ASC identified gaps in information about these systems in the Mexican Arid America region. This article raises the general question: How have human interactions between cultural, wild, and domesticated biodiversity in this territory? The particular questions in this paper are: (i) How have historical processes shaped human interactions between wild and domesticated biodiversity in the region? and (ii) What types of agri-silvicultures have emerged in Mexican Arid America since these relationships?MethodsWe trace a methodological border where archaeologists have identified the Mesoamerican region to define our study area as Arid America northern of this line in Mexico. We analyzed agriculturalization processes in Arid America through a historical review. Then, we carry out an inventory of Arid America ASC based on academic papers and other documented experiences. We constructed a spatial database and a typology to understand what kinds of agri-silviculture occur in the region.ResultsWe identified several pre-Hispanic agri-silvicultural practices in the region, like hunting, fishing, terraces, gathering, and irrigation systems. The cultivation of native species of maize, beans, and squash even was registered. The Spanish colonization forced the agriculturization in arid northern Mexico, where itinerant hunting-gathering patterns predominated. In the twentieth century, the Green Revolution adopted this area as the principal setting for industrialized agriculture. The industrialized irrigated systems expansion and other political strategies provoked the simplification of productive landscapes. The practices that integrate wild and agricultural diversity systems were marginalized and invisibilized in such a context. Our research group proposes seven types of agri-silvicultural systems (natives agrisilvicultures, the oases agroforestry, Mesquite and Huisache ASC, homegardens and other traditional forms of agroforestry or agri-silvicultures). These agri-silvicultures provide food, medicine, fodder, and other contributions, as income to the families that practice them and protect native and exotic species.Discussion and conclusionThe agriculturization of the arid environments initiated during Spanish colonization and the subsequent modernizing projects shaped dominant actors and ideologies in the arid north of Mexico. However, aridity has favored ancestral and agroecological relationships between cultures and biodiversity, emerging and subsisting Arid American agri-silvicultures. These agri-silvicultures deserve to be understood, adopted, and adapted to new contexts. They could be essential alternatives in the context of environmental changes.

Comparing Wild and Cultivated Food Plant Richness Between the Arid American and the Mesoamerican Centers of Diversity, as Means to Advance Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the Face of Climate Change

Climate change is aggravating agricultural crop failures, and the paucity of wild food harvests for Indigenous desert dwellers in Mexico and the U.S. This food production crisis challenges ongoing efforts by Indigenous communities in obtaining greater food security, prompting them to reconsider the value of traditional Indigenous food systems in both Mesoamerica and Arid America, two adjacent centers of crop diversity. While food production strategies in these two centers share many features, the food plant diversity in the Western Mesoamerican region appears to be greater. However, a higher percentage of plants in Arid America have adapted to water scarcity, heat, and damaging radiation. The phytochemical and physiological adaptations of the food plants to abiotic stresses in arid environments offer a modicum of resilience in the face of aggravated climate uncertainties. By comparing food plant genera comprising Western Mesoamerican and Arid American diets, we detected a higher ratio of CAM succulents in the wild and domesticated food plant species in the Arid American food system. We conclude that food plant diversity in the ancestral diets of both centers can provide much of the resilience needed to advance Indigenous food sovereignty and assure food security as climate change advances.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of climate change, land degradation, and water insecurity in an arid rangeland: The Río San Miguel watershed, Sonora, Mexico

Rangelands are complex social-ecological systems (SES) commonly used to support ranching and other agrarian livelihoods. Common to Earth's drylands, rangelands are susceptible to drought, desertification, and land degradation from both climatic and human activities. In the arid Americas, ranching communities are often located in watersheds and rely on local riparian resources (e.g. surface- and ground-water) to support crop and animal cultivation. However, anthropogenic climate change in combination with intensified agriculture integrated into international markets degrade both landscape and water resources. In Sonora, Mexico's Río San Miguel Watershed we find via an interdisciplinary set of methods that rangeland productivity, surface-water reaches, and aquifers are reduced to critical levels, agrarian livelihoods endangered, and within this dynamic, that downstream locations are less resilient and water secure than operations upstream. This spatio-temporal dynamic to water insecurity is due both to (a) latitudinal-based climatic changes and (b) upstream groundwater pumping activity. Participatory rapid rural appraisal, agro-ecosystem analysis, and remote sensing tell us how climate, landscape, water, and ranching operation dynamics are interrelated and affect SES morphology and resilience across time, operations, and sub-watersheds. Partnerships and cooperation among ranchers, sub-watersheds, and institutions are among the management and policy interventions available to prepare for or mitigate the developing social-ecological crisis in the watershed. Lessons from Mexico's Río San Miguel Watershed are relevant for other drylands, agrarian systems, and groundwater-reliant economies, especially as the specter of long-term global climate change and water insecurity looms large for many of the Earth's social-ecological systems.

Dialogic science-policy networks for water security governance in the arid Americas

Addressing wicked problems challenging water security requires participation from multiple stakeholders, often with conflicting visions, complicating the attainment of water-security goals and heightening the need for integrative and effective science-policy interfaces. Sustained multi-stakeholder dialogues within science-policy networks can improve adaptive governance and water system resilience. This paper describes what we define as “dialogic science-policy networks,” or interactions -- both in structural and procedural terms -- between scientists and policy-makers that are: 1) interdisciplinary, 2) international (here, inter-American), 3) cross-sectoral, 4) open, 5) continual and iterative in the long-term, and 6) flexible. By fostering these types of interactions, dialogic networks achieve what we call the 4-I criteria for effective science-policy dialogues: inclusivity, involvement, interaction, and influence. Here we present several water-security research and action projects where some of these attributes may be present. Among these, a more comprehensive form of a dialogic network was intentionally created via AQUASEC, a virtual center and network initially fostered by a series of grants from the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. Subsequently, AQUASEC has significantly expanded to other regions through direct linkages and additional program support for the International Water Security Network, supported by Lloyd's Register Foundation and other sources. This paper highlights major scientific and policy achievements of a notable suite of science-policy networks, shared practices, methods, and knowledge integrating science and policy, as well as the main barriers overcome in network development. An important gap that remains for future research is the assessment and evaluation of dialogic science-policy networks' long-term outcomes.

Analyzing water policy impacts on vulnerability: Cases across the rural-urban continuum in the arid Americas

Climate change is posing emerging threats to people and the environment, particularly in arid regions. However, some groups are more vulnerable than others, depending on their levels of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, which are determined by climatic and non-climatic factors. In water-scarce environments, water policies become key non-climatic factors that affect vulnerability yet enable modifications if their impacts unintentionally exacerbate vulnerability. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the impacts of water policies on vulnerability, particularly for disadvantaged groups. In this paper, we analyze four cases in the arid Americas that illustrate an array of challenges at different scales and across the rural-urban continuum: (1) irrigated oases in Mendoza, Argentina, where groundwater and surface water management are disconnected; (2) rural communities in central Sonora, Mexico, where local water rights have been transferred to large scale mining; (3) peri-urban marginalized neighborhoods in Hermosillo, Mexico, where competition for water is driving changes in land use; and (4) underserved communities in Tucson, Arizona, USA who are left behind in a rainwater harvesting movement. Our analysis shows that water policies in arid regions interact with land and neoliberal policies between sectors across different scales, exacerbating vulnerabilities disproportionately in less privileged groups and enhancing disparities. Here, we offer recommendations for more inclusive policymaking processes that can build capacity, protect the livelihoods of disadvantaged groups, and reduce their vulnerability to climate change.

Urban water security: a comparative study of cities in the arid Americas

In this study we analyse how three cities in the arid Americas have addressed urban growth while facing water scarcity: Hermosillo, Mexico; Mendoza, Argentina; and Tucson, USA. We use the urban water security framework to examine five domains of water management: sociodemographic, economic, technological, ecological and governance (SETEG). Our analysis indicates that, in spite of water scarcity, urban growth has been promoted in the three cities. We argue that this expansion, although encouraged for economic development, is not sustainable in the long term. In the three cities, groundwater plays a major role in water supply, but growth has negatively affected riparian ecosystems, the health of the aquifers and access to domestic water. In order to pursue water security, several options are essential to enhance social–ecological system resilience. These include limits or reduction of urban expansion, reuse of treated effluent for riparian conservation, and community conservation efforts such as rainwater harvesting and other green infrastructure practices.

Unraveling transboundary water security in the arid Americas

ABSTRACTTransboundary waters are characterized by diverse and complex socio-politico-economic obstacles to effective water management. We examine five distinct cases in the arid Americas – in locations from the US–Mexico border to the Andes mountains – employing water security as a conceptual prism to unravel the multiple and varied attributes of transboundary water challenges. We describe how borders complicate water security in arid regions and explore how institutional arrangements and practices – within and across jurisdictions – respond to these challenges. We find that institutional capacity is needed on multiple levels for effective water management, and institutions must be responsive and flexible to change.

Water Security and Adaptive Management in the Arid Americas

Societal use of freshwater, ecosystems’ dependence on water, and hydroclimatic processes interact dynamically. Changes in any of these subsystems can cause unpredictable feedback, resulting in water insecurity for humans and ecosystems. By drawing on resilience theory, we extend current productive–destructive framings of water security to better address societal–ecosystem–hydroclimatic (SEH) interactions, dynamics, and uncertainties that drive insecurity but also offer response opportunities. Strengthening water security in this sense requires strategies that (1) conceptually and practically interlink SEH subsystems; (2) recognize extreme conditions and thresholds; and (3) plan for water security via structured exchanges between researchers and decision makers in ways that account for institutions and governance frameworks. Through scrutiny of case evidence from water-scarce regions in western North America and the Central Andes, we assert that ensuring water security requires adaptive management (interactive planning that accounts for uncertainties, initiates responses, and iteratively assesses outcomes). Researchers and stakeholders from these regions are pursuing a multiyear series of workshops that promote science-based decision making while factoring in the political implications of water planning. This study briefly reviews an emerging water security initiative for the arid Americas that aims to enhance understanding of adaptive approaches to strengthen water security. Finally, by synthesizing efforts in the arid Americas, we offer insights for other water-insecure regions.

Science-Policy Dialogues for Water Security: Addressing Vulnerability and Adaptation to Global Change in the Arid Americas

www.EnvironmEntmagazinE.org voLUmE 54 nUmBEr 3 Climate change and watersupply uncertainty coupled with mounting human demands for water are straining the availability and quality of freshwater in much of the world. These twin forces cause a palpable rise in societal vulnerability, here considered as susceptibility to adverse effects of global environmental change.1 The vulnerability of water supplies (or, water vulnerability) places human communities at risk for exposure,2 or change,3 and thereby creates huge adaptation challenges. The actions being taken to reduce risks and capitalize on opportunities are considered adaptation or adaptive strategies.4 The most sensitive and vulnerable communities are those that face the greatest exposure and are most limited in their capacity to adapt. Rapidly growing and ever wealthier urban populations, expanding agribusinesses, diverse industries, extensive mining, power generation, and tourism often deprive water from or degrade its quality for use by marginalized populations of smallholder farmers and the urban poor, as well as for ecosystems along streams, lakes, and coasts recognized as biodiversity hotspots in the arid landscape. The arid5 Americas—as characterized by the southwestern United States, northwestern Mexico, north-central Chile and Argentina, and northeastern Brazil—manifest the just-described challenges especially well.6 This article focuses on two areas where our research team has been developing science-policy adaptation strategies: (1) the Sonora-Arizona drylands shared by Mexico and the United States (See map at right), and (2) the drylands east and west of the Central Andes in Chile and Argentina (see map, page 32). In these areas water remains acutely limited even as drought and flood extremes increase, ecosystems are under growing pressure, and economic globalization drives water demand. These global-change conditions threaten the security of access to water. Yet the foregoing conditions prevail—with little regard for constraints to supply, insufficient understanding of vulnerability, and inadequate attention to adaptive measures.7 To the extent that such problems are attributable to human agency,8 there is evidence that effective policies and actions can alleviate some of the harm.9 Our article describes two interactive Science-Policy Dialogues for Water Security:

Uneven Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing by Stephanie L. Sarver

WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 on two different coasts, the pressure of movements for suffrage and labor, the economic transition to what the nineteenth century called “speculation.” (118) Tracing fractures and fissures at once denaturalizes the linear divisions of civ­ ilization moving west from the eastern seaboard, multiplies lines of regional and racial differences beyond the Mason-Dixon line and implicitly argues for the centrality of the West in the literature and culture of the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Goldman’s readings of seemingly unlikely pairings (Gertrude Atherton and Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather and Owen Wister) force readers to consider the interconnectedness between regions. She argues particularly for the influence of the Southwest, the Mexican War, and the Gold Rush in the national imaginary, tracing out novels that draw on, substi­ tute, cross-dress, and otherwise play out national tensions on the Southwest territory, the land taken from Mexico in 1848. This focus on the Southwest is by no means reductive: she demonstrates how this landscape, its history and inhabitants, impact African Americans, Jews, Anglo-Europeans, as well as Native Americans and Mexican Americans. Ultimately, Goldman puts forth a compelling and complex argument that models the kind of scholarship that it calls for: interregional studies enriched in both scope and content through metaphors of mobility (tourism, Mexican War, train travel, migration, Gold Rush, forced removals, immigration), each ofwhich has its own regional, racial, gendered, and class dynamics. Continental Divides is an invitation to American studies and western scholars to examine relationships and interconnectedness in the way one studies a coastline: forever Assuring, jagged, rough, devoid of straight and smooth lines to contrast and differentiate. Uneven Land: N ature and Agriculture in American Writing. By Stephanie L. Sarver. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 207 pages, $40.00. Reviewed by A lan Brew Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin “The most difficult problem that an agricultural writer faces,” Gene Logsdon writes in The Contrary Fanner (1994), “is convincing readers that farming is very much a part of the whole societal structure” (225). In Uneven Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing, Stephanie L. Sarver addresses this problem by opening with a tour of the Shields Library at the University of California at Davis. The tour, which winds from floor to floor and from wing to wing, traces the path that students must follow to achieve a thorough under­ standing of agriculture. Clearly, it demonstrates, farming is “an activity entan­ gled in manifold aspects of American life and thought” (2). B o o k r e v i e w s 119 The specific focus of Uneven Land is the period between 1850 and 1920, when western immigration, diminishing availability of arable land, and tech­ nical innovations in transportation and irrigation transformed the practices of American farmers. The authors in Sarver’s study—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frank Norris, William Ellsworth Smythe, Hamlin Garland, and Liberty Hyde Bailey—responded to this transformation by “embracing new agricultural real­ ities while resisting and sometimes mourning the loss of an earlier agrarian way that allowed for a more intimate experience of nature” (4). Sarver, who is particularly interested in how her authors’ discussions of agriculture reflect attitudes about the human relationship with nature, finds that the writers who experienced agriculture in the Northeast or Midwest (Emerson, Garland, and Bailey) continue to “recognize farming as a means of realizing a deeper connection to nonhuman nature,” while the authors whose focus is western agriculture (Norris and Smythe) show through their writing how “farming increasingly disassociates from an awareness of terrestrial nature as it becomes entangled in human dramas” (16-17). In an 1858 address titled “Farming,” for instance, Emerson opens and closes with images of the farmer as an individual whose patient work in the earth leads to a reverent bond with nature (30, 34). Norris, on the other hand, alters geographical details of the San Joaquin Valley for his novel The Octopus and “looks to the land exclusively as the set on which he unfolds his epic” (78). Similarly, Smythe, who published The Conquest of Arid America in 1900, promotes irrigation agriculture by sug­ gesting that features of the land are not “part of a vital and...

William Ellsworth Smythe’s Draina of Reclamation

S T E P H A N I E S A R V E R Gustavus Adolphus College William Ellsworth Smythe’s Drama of Reclamation i In The Conquest of Arid America (1900, 1905), William Ellsworth Smythe writes the history of American expansion as a national drama, whose final act will culminate with the massive irrigation of the American West.1 Smythe defines American history in terms of tropes, suggesting that we associate different stages of expansion with emblems: the Mayflower, which brought home-builders to New England, is the emblem for the first stage of history; the pack-horse, which carried home-builders into the Kentucky wilderness and the Ohio Valley, is the emblem for the second stage; and finally, the prairie schooner, which brought home­ builders into the West is the emblem of the third stage.2 Smythe focuses on isolated moments as a means of establishing a plot that corresponds to the three stages. United States history is a cavalcade. He tells us, “The first act in the drama of American settlement ended in the eastern foothills of the Alleghany mountains about 1770; the second, in the neighborhood of the Mississippi river about 1860, the third, midway on the plains of Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, about 1890.” He tells us, “The won­ derful drama of American colonization has reserved a fourth and crowning act, for which the scenery is arranged and the actors ready” (18). For Smythe, the history of the United States has been a drama. If the United States has faltered in fulfilling its destiny, he suggests, it is because the drama has been enacted on the wrong “stage”: the eastern United States. The Conquest represents the culmination of Smythe’s efforts to promote irrigation agriculture and the reclamation of desert lands, and documents the role he played in the transformation of popular notions about the feasibility of farming in arid America.3 This paper will consider 214 Western American Literature The Conquest of Arid America and explore the socio-environmental impli­ cations of Smythe’s rhetorical approach, which transforms the desert lands into a “stage” on which the drama of reclamation would be enacted. Smythe was born in Massachusetts in 1861 and followed a career in journalism that eventually led him to Nebraska. When the region experi­ enced a severe drought in 1890, he was in an ideal position to take up the banner for the irrigation crusade (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography). Realizing how Nebraska farmers could avoid future agricul­ tural disasters if they employed irrigation systems, Smythe prevailed upon his editor at the Omaha Bee to allow him to write a series of articles on irrigation—a move that was not without risk of public backlash. As Smythe explained in The Conquest, “it was then considered little less than a libel to say that irrigation was needed in that part of the country” (266). With these articles, Smythe began his career as a propagandist for the irrigation movement. In addition to promoting the irrigation cause in edi­ torials, he helped to form the National Irrigation Congress in 1891, and founded The Irrigation Age, which he edited until 1895. This journal chronicled efforts to garner government support for irrigation, offered advice about irrigation farming, and promoted irrigation colonies by fea­ turing glowing reports of their success. His work also found an audience in numerous popular eastern journals.4 Smythe called for government support of reclamation, which would make possible the formation of irrigation colonies that would transform the West into a perfect agrarian society. These colonies would be sustained by families practicing subsistence agriculture, and would include good schools, ordered streets, and a thriving but wholesome social life. Smythe argued that irrigation would support “common people” on small farms that would be a model of progress: “Irrigation will make its crops absolutely sure and enable its proprietor to cultivate it intensely and scientifically to the end that each acre shall produce the largest possible crop of the best possible quality” (“The Republic of Irrigation” 191). Moreover, Smythe believed, the subsistence-level farmer could remove himself from the larg­ er economic complex and thereby avoid risks of economic depressions.5 Smythe was...

Romancing the Sand: Constructions of Capital and Nature in Arid America

Hard upon the heels of a philosophy which glorifies success must follow a philosophy which rationalizes failure.1 Commodities borrow their aesthetic language from human courtship; but then the relationship is reversed and people borrow their aesthetic expression from the world of the commodity. 2

Handbook of Indian Foods and Fibres of Arid America

Handbook of Indian Foods and Fibres of Arid America

Handbook of Indian Foods and Fibers of Arid America. Walter Ebeling. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986. xxviii + 971 pp., appendix, glossary, literature cited, index. $75.00 (cloth).

Handbook of Indian Foods and Fibers of Arid America. Walter Ebeling. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986. xxviii + 971 pp., appendix, glossary, literature cited, index. $75.00 (cloth). - Volume 53 Issue 2

The Conquest of Arid America

The Conquest of Arid America

Review: The Conquest of Arid America, by William E. Smythe

Review: <i>The Conquest of Arid America</i>, by William E. Smythe

Environment and Man in Arid America

Environment and Man in Arid America

Intercultural Relations in the Greater Southwest

KIRCHHOFF'S paper, which initiates this symposium, has divided the Greater Southwest into a number of small cultural provinces. I shall propose some larger groupings of these, on the basis of intercultural relations. Suggestions, in this brief presentation, apply only to Oasis America. References to Arid America will be confined to the Great Basin, where the culture of that large and vaguely bounded area appears in its best known form. Beals (1943b), Kroeber (1925) and Lowie (1923) have suggested that a Basin-like culture was once common throughout the whole of the Greater Southwest. Lowie (1923) called it a primeval ultramontane layer. Where weather and soil conditions permitted, this layer was overlaid by patterns from the south, coming either direct from Mexico or sometimes, as we now surmise, by a roundabout route through the Plains. Among the agriculturists of Oasis America the substratum shows through, now at one point, now another (Map I). Beals (1932:155-219) and Kroeber (1925:583) have listed some of the substratum traits, mostly in material culture. To these Zingg adds captive eagles and perhaps the kickstick race suggested by two feather-stuffed balls found in Lovelock Cave (1939:14). In the nonmaterial realm, Kroeber lists puberty rituals, the unsought vision and magic rather than true shamanism (1943:195). I would add to this some other devices for negating the dangerous power of the supernatural: the semicouvade or restrictions on the father after a birth as well as on the mother, and some form of purification for the mourners after a death. These procedures, seen in their simplest form in the Basin, are intensified and elaborated in California and on the Northwest Coast, so that we have a public ceremony for girls at puberty and a mourning anniversary for the dead. In other parts of America they appear, now simple and now elaborate, from the Eastern Algonkians to the Northwest Coast. Driver has suggested that the girl's puberty observances, in simple form, were brought over by the first immigrants (1941:62). I would go further and surmise that rites for all three events in the life cycle-birth, girl's puberty and death-were brought over very early in simple form and survive among the hunting and gathering peoples. I do not include boy's puberty here. That is a more complicated ceremonial with organizational and theological implications. It often arises after the more magical ceremonial for the girls has been abandoned. The sucking shaman, another Basin trait, seems to me equally ancient. Clements (1932:241) suggests that he was one of the earliest healers in the Old World as well as the new. In the Basin, there are also Snake and Bear shamans and some who retrieve lost souls, an echo of the Northwest. The individual vision may be another early trait. It too is widespread among hunting and gathering peoples who function as individuals and need such power more than

A method of estimating rainfall by the growth of trees. Ellsworth Huntington: The correction and comparison of curves of growth, The curve of the Big trees och the interpretation of the curve of the sequoia, utgörande kap. 11-14 i E. Huntington: The climatic factor as illustrated in Arid America, Carnegie Instit., Pub. 192, Washington 1914

A method of estimating rainfall by the growth of trees. Ellsworth Huntington: The correction and comparison of curves of growth, The curve of the Big trees och the interpretation of the curve of the sequoia, utgörande kap. 11-14 i E. Huntington: The climatic factor as illustrated in Arid America, Carnegie Instit., Pub. 192, Washington 1914

The Climatic Factor cis Illustrated in Arid America. By Ellsworth Huxtington. Published by the Carnegie Institution. Washington, 1914. 4to. 341 pp

The Climatic Factor cis Illustrated in Arid America. By Ellsworth Huxtington. Published by the Carnegie Institution. Washington, 1914. 4to. 341 pp