Subtle Tyranny

Abstract

Neoliberal reforms and social constructs that legitimate the full exploitation of nature intersect with political power to produce an inherently violent social atmosphere in which economic development is based on exclusion, submission, and dispossession of rural and indigenous communities. Historical ecological study of Lake Xochimilco reveals the way in which imposed constructs of nature that exclude traditional ecological knowledge have transformed landscapes and livelihoods to the detriment of all the inhabitants of Mexico City.

Las reformas neoliberales y las construcciones sociales que legitiman la explotación plena de la naturaleza se cruzan con el poder político para crear un ambiente social inhe-rentemente violento en el cual el desarrollo económico se basa en la exclusión, el sometimiento y el despojo de las comunidades rurales e indígenas. El estudio histórico de la ecología del Lago de Xochimilco revela la manera en que las construcciones de la naturaleza impuestas que excluyen el conocimiento ecológico tradicional han transformado el paisaje y los medios de subsistencia en detrimento de todos los habitantes de la Ciudad de México.

Keywords

Environmental Orientalism Traditional ecological knowledge Xochimilco Chinampa agriculture Periurban agriculture

The ways in which different societies use nature depend on cultural adaptations derived from the ways they perceive, imagine, and understand the natural world. While based in biophysical reality, nature becomes a system of representations framed by political and economic forces that render it a subjective and ungeneralizable construct (Latour, 2002) whose components vary from culture to culture (Cronon, 1996; Descola, 1996). The diversity of notions of nature results in a wide range of strategies for assessing and exploiting the materials that nature provides. Similarly to the way in which Orientalism (sensu Said, 1978) became a way of exerting authority over North African and Asian cultures by depicting them as inferior, the imposition of a single culture’s notion of nature attempts to subdue others. The hegemonic representation of nature is presented as unequivocal and objective knowledge by authorizing particular ways of describing, teaching, and ruling over it.

Pálsson (1996) identifies three general epistemes regarding the use and appreciation of nature: Orientalism, paternalism, and communalism. Orientalism sees nature as a composite of elements over which there is legitimate ownership and the right to its full exploitation and transformation. Paternalism also claims some ownership over nature but differs in considering that humans have a duty to preserve nature, at least partially. Finally, communalism promotes generalized reciprocity between humans and nature, of which humans are part.

When societies come into conflict, their conceptions of nature collide as well. The culture that emerges as dominant imposes, along with many other values, its notions of nature on those subject to domination. This imposition is linked to the introduction of particular extractive schemes. In this article we focus on the imposition of environmental Orientalism on rural and indigenous societies.

Environmental Orientalism is pervasive throughout Mexico (see Toledo, Garrido, and Barrera-Bassols in this issue) and highly visible throughout Latin America, where mining (e.g., Gordon and Webber, 2008; Munarriz, 2008), water management and hydroelectric power generation (e.g., Bartolomé, 1993), logging (e.g., Southgate et al., 2000), and other mega-projects (see Grandia, 2013) impose concepts of nature and the economy on indigenous and marginal populations. Turner and colleagues (2008) have argued that the ideological clash arising from differences in cultural uses of nature has psychological, physical, and cultural consequences when local conceptions are not included in policy making. Thus environmental Orientalism acts as a vector for social and environmental violence.

Contemporary capitalism suggests that the sole purpose of societies should be steady increase in the gross domestic product (Bauman, 2007). Gross domestic product has been discursively constructed as the only objective measure available for determining the health of the human community (Graeber, 2011). In this scheme, the depletion of natural resources is seen as inevitable for economic development and serves as the foundational argument for the imposition of environmental Orientalism. When a particular construction of nature is imposed instead of being mediated, it destroys people’s social, cultural, and environmental assets and reduces them to petty consumers.

Environmental Orientalism is inherently violent. It makes use of physical violence to impose a particular notion of nature and dispossess societies of their resources and traditional ecological knowledge (Toledo, 2013). The violence becomes structural (sensu Galtung, 1969) when the values and interests of dominant economic systems are imposed on the marginal societies and cultures of the world (Shiva, 2002). Significant and sustained economic growth is illusory because the fundamental premise of Orientalism, infinite economic growth, demands the exhaustion of finite natural resources (Naveh, 2000). Orientalism exerts violence by compromising the ability of environments to provide people with enough resources to thrive.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Traditional ecological knowledge is a cognitive system made up of knowledge, practices, behaviors, and beliefs by which local populations internalize the structure and ecological functioning of the geographic zone from which they get natural resources to fulfill their needs (Berkes, Colding, and Folke, 2000). These resources are not limited to the materials for creating clothing, food, and tools (Schultes, 1992) but also include the materials to fulfill housing (e.g., Speck and Dexter, 1952), ornamental (e.g., Johnston, 1968), medicinal (Berlin and Berlin, 2005), ludic (e.g., Ruan-Soto, Garibay-Orijel, and Cifuentes, 2006), and sexual (e.g., Andrade and Costa-Neto, 2005) needs, among others. Traditional ecological knowledge has helped local populations to maintain the ecological processes and biodiversity of their immediate surroundings. In addition to providing adaptive strategies of vital importance, by offering pragmatic ways of encoding ecological notions and ways of handling nature’s life support systems it is a potential alternative to prevailing conservation schemes and the so-called sustainable exploitation promoted by neoliberal capitalism (Pierotti and Wildcat, 2000).

However, within the Orientalist scheme, ruled by the logics of environmental modernization (Hajer, 1995), alternative constructs of nature, including traditional ecological knowledge, are integrated into relatively homogeneous representations that are treated as inferior, invalid, mythological, archaic, irrational, and nonscientific (see Bonfil, 1989; Pérez Ruiz and Argueta Villamar, 2011) and are not given due importance in policy making. The violence that the global economic system generates around traditional ecological knowledge is not limited to the erosion of that knowledge but has social and environmental impacts ranging from loss of identity to the dismantling of entire habitats.

An ideal empirical referent for understanding how violence operates on traditional ecological knowledge is the urban evolution undergone in the Basin of Mexico and particularly in Xochimilco. The area has suffered substantial anthropogenic alteration for 2,000 years. This alteration has resulted in a drastic reduction of vegetation coverage (Merlín et al., 2012), an apparent alteration of rainfall patterns (Narchi, 2013), diminishing groundwater availability (Bojórquez et al., 1998; Espinosa and Mazari, 2007; Ezcurra et al., 1999), and a drastic reduction in biodiversity, including the extinction of several species (Contreras et al., 2009).

Environmental Deterioration around Lake Xochimilco

The municipality of Xochimilco has 128.1 square kilometers and represents 8.9 percent of the Federal District. It contains seven mountainous towns, a downtown made up of 17 original barrios, a peripheral barrio of relatively recent formation known as Barrio 18, and seven towns that border the lake. Topographically, it can be divided into three major areas (Cordero, 2001): a mountainous area shaped by the Ajusco-Chichinautzin range, which extends along the southern edge of the lake; Topilejo–Milpa Alta, also mountainous, in which the basaltic soils are less permeable and conditions drier; and an area of lacustrine and alluvial deposits that is the iconic zone for the entire biome. Lake Xochimilco is the most emblematic feature of the municipality.

Lake Xochimilco is a 25-square-kilometer remnant of a five-lake system originally occupying 920 square kilometers in the Basin of Mexico (Zambrano et al., 2009). The area has been occupied since 20,000 BCE (González et al., 2006; Lorenzo, 1981; Peralta, 2011), with incipient agriculture emerging around 1500 BCE (Peralta, 2011). Like other agroecosystemic landscapes, the lake is considered important for reflecting specific techniques built upon traditional ecological knowledge for achieving sustained land use (UNESCO, 1996). In contrast, agro-industrial landscapes (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984) are conceived as merely fulfilling the economic premise of maximizing gains in the short term, with little or no consideration for overarching ecological processes (Farina, 2000).

Ezcurra (2003) suggests that the first anthropogenic modifications of true significance occurred when the Paleo-Indian population extinguished most of the megafaunal species around the basin, driving its inhabitants to adopt incipient agriculture. However, the most dramatic modification that Lake Xochimilco has suffered as a result of human activity occurred ca. 500 CE with the introduction of chinampas, a traditional-ecological-knowledge-based agroecosystem that completely changed the lacustrine landscape (Frederick, 2007). Chinampas are artificial garden islands constructed by overlapping layers of organic matter, mineral-rich soil, and organically rich silts. Chinampa agriculture was originally not dependent on irrigation; all the watering was administered through adsorption, and plots were fertilized with a mixture of aquatic plants and organically rich muds dug from the lake’s floor. The agroecosystem spread throughout the basin from 1200 to 1500 CE (Peralta, 2011), transforming the relatively homogeneous and barren surface of the lake into a complex network of islands and channels—a cultural landscape (sensu Sauer, 1963). Armillas (1971) conservatively estimated that the total area of land reclaimed from the lakes for constructing chinampas amounted to 120 square kilometers.

The combination of organic foundations, uninterrupted watering, and constant and rich fertilizing enabled the pre-Columbian peoples to build a highly productive agroecosystem that could easily produce maize yields of more than 5.0 tons per hectare (Rojas, 1993; Scialabba and Hattam, 2003). The contemporary national average (1996–2005) for all other maize agricultural systems combined is 2.59 tons per hectare. (These statistics cover only grain and not the maize by-products and other vegetables associated with maize production on the chinampas [Aguilar, Illsley, and Marielle, 2007].) The introduction of chinampas reshaped the lacustrine environment into a semiartificial and intensively managed agroecosystem in which the division between natural and cultural environments was hard to discern.

During colonization, the government of New Spain decided to drain the lakes in order to foster European-style farms and production. This occurred in spite of strong opposition by José Antonio Alzate, the only man with the vision to recommend the use of indigenous techniques to manage the lakes (Ezcurra, 2003). The conquistadores appear to have been eager to mimic the arid environments of their Extremadura homeland in this recently conquered landscape (von Humboldt and Black, 1822). Nonetheless, much of the lacustrine environment remained relatively undisturbed until the late nineteenth century except for an increase in crop diversity (Canabal, 1997).

Major ecological impacts in Lake Xochimilco began in the early twentieth century, when Xochimilco’s groundwater was exploited to provide Mexico City with water (Torres-Lima, Canabal, and Burela, 1994). Deforestation rates increased with the growth of the timber, paper, and coal industries, and by the 1940s Lake Xochimilco had almost dried up. During the 1960s the construction of new infrastructure opened new periurban areas to urbanization (Lozada et al., 1998). Rapid urbanization and overexploitation of groundwater caused differential soil subsidence in much of the lacustrine area. The government compensated for the lack of water by injecting partly treated sewage from a nearby plant into the lake. As water quality declined, food production was replaced by flower production (Torres-Lima, Canabal, and Burela, 1994). To attract moisture, a reforestation campaign was implemented, but the campaign made use of introduced species that consumed much more water and displaced native vegetation (Lozada et al., 1998).

In 1987, the agrarian landscape of Lake Xochimilco was included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (ICOMOS, 1987) as the sole remnant of traditional land use before European occupation (UNESCO, 1987). UNESCO’s declaration voiced strong concerns for the site’s preservation, viewing the whole area as threatened by the advance of urbanization. Mexican President Carlos Salinas responded by implementing an official conservation program (Wirth, 2003). The Plan de Rescate Ecológico de Xochimilco (Ecological Recovery Plan for Xochimilco) called for better water quality, expansion and support of agriculture, intensive studies of Lake Xochimilco’s agricultural systems, and better urban services for its inhabitants. It also included an end to urbanization of the chinampería (the lacustrine zone in which chinampa agriculture is carried out), prevention of differential flooding, and a restoration of ecological equilibrium (Wirth, 1997). It included the expropriation of 1,100 hectares of land from peasants to create a reserve of around 2,600 hectares (DOF, 1992).

While the federal government touted its creation of a 160-hectare ecological park in which native flora and fauna are protected (DDF, 1989) and tourism is permitted (DuBroff, 2009), the conservation program has been considered an attempt to privatize and eventually urbanize communal productive lands (Legorreta, 2005; Zabaleta, 2010). Conceptions of nature imposed from elsewhere have turned into political power. Unable to see the areas bordering Lake Xochimilco as anything other than barren land, two of the most important political parties, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, have encouraged illegal land occupation in the area for at least two decades, prioritizing residential over agricultural land uses (Canabal, 1997). Currently, in spite of expensive conservation efforts, Lake Xochimilco is in peril (see Stephan-Otto, 2005). Current estimates suggest that the total chinampa coverage is 22 square kilometers (UNESCO, 2006). (Other estimates [Alcántara, 2005] calculate it as 0.25 square kilometers.) With poor and insufficient water resources, land use coverage has rapidly changed from agricultural to urban, resulting in a decline in food production. These changes have caused a significant reduction in the quality and quantity of the ecological systems that have long supported large human populations in the Basin of Mexico (Merlín, 2009).

In 2003 the World Heritage Committee decided to support a new initiative, as suggested by the Mexican authorities, to update the conservation strategies by encouraging the participation of the people of Xochimilco (WHC, 2003; 2006). However, local government was criticized for the purely theoretical nature of this participation. Zabaleta (2010) argues that the citizen participation was useless because the technical and political bodies running the new conservation plan did not fully consider the concerns of Xochimilco’s inhabitants in the planning and implementation of mitigation and conservation policies.

Simulated Conservation

Since European contact, the ecological integrity of Lake Xochimilco has deteriorated as a result of successive imposition of exogenous perceptions of nature and methods for exploiting it not only within the lacustrine area but also in the mountains that surround it and keep it alive with runoff. The ways in which exogenous notions of nature have conceptualized Lake Xochimilco have had little or no concern for achieving sustained use of the area. In recent times, and in spite of a better-informed ecology, efforts to preserve the lake have largely ignored the cultural aspects of this landscape. First, the cultural links between the lacustrine area and its surroundings have been overlooked. This neglect has decoupled the productive forces of the 14 towns of Xochimilco from the social, economic, and environmental context that bound them together as a diverse and productive society (see Barkin, 2012 [1999]). Secondly, the potential of the chinampa agroecosystem as opposed to industrial agriculture has not been addressed. The incapacity of local and regional governments to understand the local concepts of nature by which Lake Xochimilco has been managed for centuries has had deleterious consequences for the biological diversity and productivity of the area. Consequently, as in other parts of the world (see Shiva, 2002), environmental deterioration has transformed self-sufficient producers into consumers of seeds, agro-chemicals, and nonadaptive agro-industrial technologies.

The conservation schemes for Xochimilco are neoliberal-Orientalist, considering the preservation of nature worthwhile only if it produces immediate economic profit (Büscher et al., 2012). The concept of nature that the authorities have imposed upon Lake Xochimilco is shallow and incomplete. The real problems of the area include low water quality and quantity, differential subsidence of the chinampas, clandestine sewage discharge, and exotic-species invasion. If these core issues were taken into account in conservation planning, governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations could charge environmental taxes, trade carbon bonds, and benefit from the revenues of the so-called environmental services¹ provided by Lake Xochimilco (water uptake, air purification, carbon dioxide sinkage, etc.). Deriving such benefits from conservation would fit squarely within the neoliberal conception. Instead, the conservation plans for Lake Xochimilco include the creation of flower markets, athletic fields, artificial lakes, and interpretative parks.

The parks are without any doubt the most ill-founded of all the conservation proposals for Lake Xochimilco. Customarily presented as a way of preserving the lacustrine biota, their various formats bear little or no relationship to the agroecology of the lake. A 2008 project consisted of a water park and a six-story aquarium hosting marine mammals and a live coral exhibit (Ramos, 2008). Four years later the project proposed to rescue the lacustrine habitats by building a 3,000-square-meter artificial lake surrounded by 8,000 square meters of parking space (Royacelli, 2012). The area allocation makes one wonder what is really being recreated when the local authorities consider activities such as ziplining, rappelling, visiting a petting zoo, riding a tractor, and riding a mini-train appropriate for enabling visitors to get close to and learn about the vibrant culture of Xochimilco. Far from representing, reenacting, or preserving Xochimilco, projects like this are aimed at disengaging both visitors and the local community from its landscape, traditional ecological knowledge, and cultural assets. The presence of an out-of-context park that misrepresents the area will gradually reshape the notions of nature pertaining to Xochimilco. The developers are professionals who know very well what they are doing despite the detrimental and violent nature of their actions (Ascher, 1999). The case of Lake Xochimilco is remarkably similar to Fletcher’s (2001) “capitalism of chaos,” in which capital harnesses crises to which it has contributed in order to expand from them.

The poor quality of the water of Lake Xochimilco has pushed farmers to search for new technologies. In the late 1970s one of the most common alternatives for increasing yields was the use of greenhouses, which were placed on top of the chinampas but displaced their function. The system worked for a while, but the chinamperos (chinampa farmers) began to depend on irrigation systems, modified seeds, and chemical fertilizers to maintain their production. As a short-term consequence, the water became eutrophic as farmers stopped managing the aquatic plants previously used as fertilizers, and in the long term it became polluted, since greenhouses require more herbicides and pesticides that ultimately ended up in the lake (Torres-Lima and Burns, 2002). Despite the fact that greenhouse revenues amount to 2.03 pesos for every peso invested while chinampas yield an average of 2.26 (Merlín, 2009), the local authorities are still promoting the use of greenhouses. A recent conservation proposal with a total budget of US$30,131,025 allocates US$1,667,500 to chinampa maintenance and twice as much to greenhouse subsidies (GDF, 2011). While the chinampa funds will be used for repairs, the items budgeted for greenhouse expenses are intended to subsidize the construction of greenhouses over 10 hectares, the introduction of a watering system, and the purchase of agricultural inputs and materials to be distributed among greenhouse owners. This lack of equity makes greenhouses appear more productive and discourages the use of traditional ecological knowledge. Among chinamperos there is a feeling of betrayal and abandonment so strong that some have felt discouraged from continuing with their livelihoods and sold their agricultural land when they had a chance to do so. JG, a part-time chinampero and chronicler of Xochimilco, says that the local administration and the city and national agencies “will only support introduced technologies. There is no fostering of traditional agriculture, which is treated as obsolete and inefficient.”

Besides imposing a neoliberal construct of nature, the conservation schemes for Lake Xochimilco have a strong component of dispossession. Originally, the towns and barrios of Xochimilco produced specific goods that were traded with other settlements by well-established chains of exchange, often following kin ties. For example, people living in Xochimilco’s mountains thrived by exchanging corn, lima beans, forage crops, and livestock, several types of fruit, and an unrecorded number of wild edibles (Olivares, 2010) for products of the lacustrine area. Throughout the twentieth century Xochimilcans, particularly those living in mountain settlements, managed to preserve this type of exchange by resisting the construction of large projects such as penitentiaries (Rudiño, 2010), golf resorts (Nájar, 1996), housing projects, and chain grocery stores (of which downtown Xochimilco has just one). However, the new administration of the municipality has granted permission to construct a 16,000-square-meter grocery store in Santiago Tepalcatlalpan (Salgado, 2013) that local farmers believe will devastate the economy and productivity of the area (Quintana and Chávez, 2013).

The introduction of chain grocery stores is a general problem among farming communities, and it may be argued that this claim is typical of small business owners everywhere. In Xochimilco, however, there is a strong division of opinion on the subject. LS, who considers herself an active blogger in favor of modernization, says that chain stores will not affect local producers, since most of the people in Xochimilco have always traveled to Villa Coapa to buy preserved foods, specialty groceries, and cookware while buying their fresh produce directly from producers in Xochimilco’s central market. Others, such as AG, claim that “there will be serious social and economic consequences for the people coming from all of Xochimilco’s neighborhoods to sell their products once a week.” It has long been known that patterns of material production are strongly linked to the production of social relations (Marx and Engels, 1970 [1846]). On the one hand, the introduction of chain stores might obliterate traditional patterns of production and the social processes that emanate from them. On the other hand, the social relations established in Xochimilco have historically been key factors in providing enough cohesion for people to claim a livelihood and an identity and mount resistance to external impositions.

Xochimilco’s Resistance

The people of Xochimilco have constructed their culture around traditional agricultural production. The intensive input of labor required by the chinampa agroecosystem has fostered an extended-family assemblage, and the extended family has woven an intricate and sound social organization. In addition, morality and strong religious beliefs are important components of resource management strategies (sensu Anderson and Anderson, 2011), strengthening people’s identity by keeping alive the observance of religious dates and rites (Cordero, 2001). Their identity helps the people of Xochimilco to engage in intense cultural exchange with the core of Mexico City, a city that they consider their own but that has assaulted them with constant pressure for urbanization seeking to feed off Xochimilco’s land, water, air, landscape, and culture. The people of Xochimilco have resisted antipeasant agrarian policies, unfair competition, greenhouse production, chain store encroachment, and lack of recognition of a traditional ecological knowledge that has helped sustain one of the biggest cities in the world for more than 1,000 years. They have not given up their land because of the deep cultural and emotional attachment they have developed to a place that has provided them with a sui generis livelihood and a landscape that enables them to engage with nature in a way that is intelligible to them (Stephan-Otto, 1998).

Globalized modernity is characterized by the production, standardization, and reproduction of a ubiquitous consumer society transcending geopolitical borders and cultural frontiers in the pursuit of economic growth. Policy makers in Mexico City will continue to push for so-called modern projects and visions despite the existence of valuable pragmatic livelihoods that are adapted to exploiting the landscape in ways that have proven sustainable and highly productive. Globalized modernity and its development models dismantle any livelihood that may offer an alternative to the pursuit of productivity, competition, and profitability (Bauman, 2005). Alternative livelihoods are discursively portrayed in mainstream culture as inferior, primitive, complicated, and impoverished, producing barely enough material goods to make it through the day. Yet it is clear that poverty is relative to values often tied to means of production (Sen, 1983). Despite a lack of commodities, social groups may generate and accumulate capacities for food sovereignty and economic independence, among them the traditional ecological knowledge behind food production and the moral economies that help to distribute resources outside of formal market schemes. These capacities, still vibrant in Xochimilco’s communities, are constantly being attacked by the formal market economy because they pose a threat to its foundation, the logic of pure economic growth (Bauman, 2007).

Violence Beyond Xochimilco

The violence exercised throughout the twentieth century against the peoples and environments of Xochimilco is not limited to the loss of a landscape and the assault on their conceptions of nature. Damage to subsistence practices is not limited to the loss of native vegetables but extends to Xochimilco’s original fauna. The disappearance of animals that were once extremely important in the diet of the inhabitants of the villages of Xochimilco (Rojas and Pérez, 1998) has had an immediate impact on protein intake. Combined with the effects of ever- increasing integration into the market and the resulting changes in diet, this has meant increasing rates of cardiovascular, mental, and degenerative diseases (Belino, 2009). The number of deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants today is led by cardiovascular disease (64.9) and diabetes mellitus (64.4) (Carmona, 2000). With increasing urbanization, Mexico City has lost the capacity to be self-sufficient in terms of food production (Rico and Reyes, 2000). Besides the cost of production, there is an increase in food prices based on transportation and storage costs (see Nelson, 2009), a situation that is particularly worrying for a city in which at least half of the population is malnourished because of low income (Torres, 2002).

According to Alberto González Pozo, 50,000 chinampas survive in all of the lacustrine area (Vértiz, 2013). Of these, only 6 percent have been catalogued in some way (Villanueva, 2011), and this makes it extremely difficult to estimate the potential production of the cultural landscape. In spite of the uncertainties about their actual number and productive condition, local authorities have argued that the remaining 22 square kilometers of chinampería are insignificant for food production. This argument is based on Sanders’s (1993 [1957]) calculations of Xochimilco’s original capacity for food production, some 3,000 kilograms of corn per hectare per year. Sanders assumes that chinampas are capable of producing only corn. However, chinampa agriculture depends on polyculture, which almost doubles the amount of food produced per unit of land (Gliessman, 1998). Canabal (1997) provided a list of at least 13 cultivars still grown on chinampas in 1995. There has been no official update in the number of cultivars produced, but R, a fair-trade marketer specialized in chinampa products, told us that 78 of the 120 different products he sells are generated from chinampa agriculture, and A, one of the youngest chinampa producers in all of Xochimilco, offers 17 different vegetables to his clients.

Sanders also fails to consider the tremendous amount of animal protein available from 38 species of waterfowl (Sahagún, 1975), 12 species of fish (Berres, 2000) of which at least 3 were eaten by humans (Rojas and Pérez, 1998), 2 species of amphibians (Rojas and Pérez, 1998), 2 species of reptiles (Niederberger, 1979), numerous edible insects (Ramos and Pino, 1989), one crustacean (Rojas and Pérez, 1998), and domestic poultry. Animal species have played an extremely important role in the nutrition of Xochimilco’s inhabitants, especially in times of famine. Rojas and Pérez (1998: 101) provide us with an account of people’s dealing with the postrevolutionary scarcity of food by eating wild edibles and game. Therefore, anyone taking Sanders’s estimates at face value will neglect the functioning of the municipality as a large-scale cultural landscape in which people have survived by understanding the environment, developing specialized production, and engaging in constant material exchange.

The productive technologies of Lake Xochimilco have been acknowledged ever since European contact, making it one of the better-known agroecosystems in the world. Paradoxically, the lack of recent and trustworthy data on the food production capabilities of Xochimilco’s chinampería suggests that it is one of the world’s least-studied agroecosystems today. Torres-Lima et al. (2010) have pointed to the scarcity of studies focusing on urban agriculture, which may partially explain the increasing abandonment of agricultural land in Mexico City (Torres-Lima and Rodríguez-Sánchez, 2008). Just 6,000 of the nearly 500,000 people living in Xochimilco are engaged in chinampa agriculture (Delavaud, 2009). PR, a 45-year-old man, explained:

There are no chinamperos anymore. For good or for bad, our parents gave us the opportunity to get better education, so now it is much easier to go and work elsewhere, even for minimum wage, than to come here and bust one’s ass working the land. That is why there are no young farmers anymore. Living off the land represents a good income, but working in agriculture is too damn hard.

If there is genuine interest on the part of the government in restoring and maintaining the natural presence of a lacustrine city (e.g., Kalach, 2010), Xochimilco’s agroecosystem is certainly capable of offering considerable amounts of vegetable and animal foods at lower cost than imported edibles. Nonetheless, the most valuable aspects of preserving this cultural landscape lie in the fact that urban agriculture contains increasing urban sprawl (Torres-Lima, Rodríguez-Sánchez, and García, 2000), preserves one of the most biologically rich agroecosystems known today, allowing us to understand how flora is managed and used and creating in situ repositories for domesticated and nondomesticated plants alike (Jiménez and Gómez, 1991), provides the people of Mexico City with very much needed green spaces (Delavaud, 2009), offers alternative livelihoods and incomes (Canabal, 1997), serves as a natural sanctuary for 212 bird species (Meléndez, 2012) and 29 mammal species (Hortelano and Cervantes, 2011), and provides an integral life support system that sinks carbon, captures water, stablilizes microclimates, generates oxygen, reduces soil erosion, adds aesthetic and recreational value, attenuates land collapse and fracturing, and reduces the risk of severe flooding (Merlín, 2009). If these reasons are compelling enough to advocate for the preservation of the area, the planning and implementation of conservation strategies will have to acknowledge that Xochimilco has been shaped and maintained by traditional ecological knowledge. If there is no change in official policies toward including traditional ecological knowledge in development plans for the area, we can only hope to be overestimating the environmental and social consequences.

Final Remarks

Our species has lived on this planet for some 180,000 years. Throughout this period, in every latitude and in every ecosystem humans have thrived by developing traditional ecological knowledge systems suitable for the habitats they occupy. Societies using unsuitable cultural strategies may be selected against and collapse (Diamond, 2005). We have described the severe deterioration in the quality and size of the natural environment of Xochimilco throughout the last century as a consequence of the implementation of an Orientalist development model. We highlight that the development strategy in question has proved unsuitable for the long-term maintenance of this environment, in contrast with chinampa agriculture, a surviving agroecosystem established some 1,500 years ago in the Basin of Mexico that hosts a cornucopia of plant and animal species capable of meeting the needs of human beings in a sustainable way. We have attempted to show that the effects of imposing an Orientalist view are not limited to eroding traditional ecological knowledge—that they create a halo of social and environmental violence that extends beyond Xochimilco to include all the inhabitants of Mexico City.

We provide evidence that environmental Orientalism is still being implemented despite its potential long-term ecological consequences. We have shown that the development scheme being used by the local authorities is not an unintended consequence of naive decision making but the result of thoughtful planning aimed at extinguishing a particular notion of nature that is still pervasive in the minds of Xochimilco’s chinamperos, who have suffered attacks on livelihoods based on moral economies and local consumption. The goal of imposing a particular view of nature upon the area’s inhabitants is economic profit alone.

It is not our intention to argue against a given economic system, as it is obvious that any economic paradigm, whether overt neoliberalism or pristine Marxism (see Burkett, 2003), that does not take into account ecological and environmental constraints will face ecological degradation. However, human adaptive responses to environmental deterioration may cloud the perception of ecological collapse, making it slow, gradual, and intangible until it is too late to turn back. On the one hand, Xochimilco’s potential collapse is masked by the fact that a number of chinamperos have adapted their chinampas to massive flower production and others have diversified their crops and introduced more resistant species, giving the impression of a still healthy environment. On the other hand, and in addition to a long history of environmental deterioration, the collapse is masked by the actions of a local government that, in an effort to impose a particular notion of nature that would allow for total transformation of the landscape, has allowed at least 591 illegal settlements (Delavaud, 2009), 21,000 clandestine sewage pipes (PAOT, 2008), and a series of extravagant projects lacking any ecological logic or ecosystemic engineering that could match the environmental requirements of the place.

One would think that the primal ecological settings of the area could be restored by applying traditional environmental knowledge regardless of governmental restraints. However, it seems as if the pursuit of eternal growth in the gross domestic product generates fear for freedom and life, with freedom emerging from moral economies and life emerging from traditional ecological knowledge. For a neoliberal scheme to work in Xochimilco and elsewhere, traditional ecological knowledge needs to be discarded unless it is converted into a commodity either by patenting it and its products or by transforming the whole ecosystem. The process is structurally and physically violent. It is imposed instead of being mediated; it destroys people’s social, cultural, and environmental assets and generates inequality, dependence, and submission. As A puts it, “Earlier, peasants could make a profit because everything they used was self- produced; they hardly spent on anything.” The process we have outlined for Xochimilco is also manifest in other places and economic spheres (e.g., Ibarra et al., 2011).

An Orientalist approach promotes an artificial obsolescence of traditional ecological knowledge and a detrimental transformation of the landscape. It diminishes the opportunities for passing traditional ecological knowledge on to future generations by extinguishing their biocultural experience (sensu Nabhan and St.-Antoine, 1993). JG explains succinctly: “Without chinampas, there are no chinamperos, and without chinamperos, the whole chinampería is doomed.” The extinction of experience subjects people to imposed views of nature without an alternative construct to compare them with. When environmental Orientalism prevails, it erodes social ties, transforms cultural practices (especially food systems), weakens local economies, and extinguishes species and ecosystems, leaving the human inhabitants of a landscape under a subtle tyranny.

Footnotes

Notes

Nemer E. Narchi is an associated researcher with Centro de Estudios en Geografía Humana - El Colegio de Michoacán. He developed this paper as a postdoctoral fellow at Mexico’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Unidad Xochimilco, where he analyzed the relationships between urbanization and ethnobiological knowledge erosion. His long-term research goal is a synthesis of biocultural research and conservation. Beatriz G. Canabal Cristiani is an associate professor at the UAM-X, where she teaches courses on the peasantry and rural-urban relations, and the author of Rescate de Xochimilco (1991), Xochimilco: Una identidad recreada (1997), Los caminos de la montaña (2001), and Agricultura urbana en México (2000). They are grateful to the people of Xochimilco for providing them with empirical and historical information over the years. They thank Arli De Luca-Brown, Toben Lafrancois, and Benjamin T. Wilder for helpful comments and Marjorie Bray, George Leddy, and David Barkin for improving the manuscript with thoughtful recommendations. This work was supported by UAM’s Agua y Recursos Naturales en la Historia y Culturas del Campo Mexicano Project and its postdoctoral fellowship program.

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