Doctoral Dissertation Research: Grounding New Deal Power in the Americas: Soil Science and Development, 1929-1949

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Green Revolution is widely considered agricultural science's contribution to the rise of global U.S. influence in the second half of the 20th century. The Green Revolution was not the first attempt by the United States to further its global ambitions through the extension of state agricultural expertise, however, nor was it the inevitable outcome of scientific attention to agricultural production in the 1930s and 1940s. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the notion that the New Deal era, marked by the U.S. Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, was the start of a radically different mode of transnational agrarian planning, a mode that was actively exported through the Americas during the Second World War. These U.S.-sponsored development programs were rooted in notions of collectivist conservationism, cultural pluralism, and democratic resource management. The result of scientific experiments by teams of U.S. Department of the Interior anthropologists, sociologists, and soil scientists working to combat erosion on U.S. Indian tribal lands, the New Deal-era land management models addressed both cultural and biological processes at work in diverse environmental and political contexts. The doctoral student performing this research will conduct a comparative examination of three local manifestations of this program, drawing on government and foundation records as well as scientific publications, records of congressional hearings, and personal papers in order to understand how New Deal soil management strategies were translated and transformed across the heterogeneous political landscapes of the Americas. She will consider contested de-stocking programs on the tribal lands of the Navajo Nation in the U.S., and she will examine U.S.-sponsored agrarian development under shifting property relations in Colombia's Cauca Valley as well as scientific research and development in the indigenous ejidos of Michoacán, Mexico, two national contexts that were also pilot sites of the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution. Taking into consideration the complex networks of intellectual, political, and economic interests supporting transnational New Deal-era conservation efforts, this project will explore the ways that emerging scientific notions of human and non-human natures were deployed in response to race-based land claims, considering both the successes and failures of these projects in meeting their stated social, political, and ecological goals. This project will shed new light on an aspect of environmental, political, and intellectual history that has received relatively little attention, and it will develop key theoretical connections between science and technology studies and human geography. The implications of this research for present understanding are expected to be significant. First, as a period confronted simultaneously by world-scale financial, military, and ecological crises, the New Deal era offers important lessons to citizens and policy makers seeking to navigate the challenges of current global conjuncture. Furthermore, this project will reveal critical structural and genealogical aspects of current development strategies, suggesting new possibilities for constructive, collaborative social change. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.