The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance

Abstract: Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place‐based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market. After reviewing the Polanyian claims about these labels, the paper examines how these labels are operationalized and notes important differences in the sort of barriers to entry they erect, which in turn have quite different distributional consequences. It then goes on to discuss how these labels look to be an expression of roll‐out neoliberalization. Following Heynen and Robbins who note four dominant aspects of neoliberalization of environmental governance (governance, privatization, enclosure, and valuation), to which a fifth (devolution) is added, the paper shows how these labels not only concede the market as the locus of regulation, but in keeping with neoliberalism's fetish of market mechanisms, they employ tools designed to create markets where none previously existed. In recognition that neoliberal political economies and subjectivities have delimited the possible, the paper also grapples with how these labels may produce political openings outside of their most proximate effects.     

Lives Versus Livelihoods? Deepening the Regulatory Debates on Soil Fumigants in California's Strawberry Industry

Soil fumigants have been critical to the California strawberry industry's success, but they are also highly toxic to farmworkers and nearby residents. This article traces recent regulatory debates over restrictions on their use which were cast as a contest of lives and livelihoods: activists emphasized the danger of the chemicals while industry emphasized their necessity. Activists’ claims were typical of environmental justice battles that focus on disproportionate toxic exposure to marginalized populations, but I problematize that they downplayed industry concern with farmworker jobs. Drawing on Marx, Foucault and recent literature on surplus populations and disposability, I suggest that the analytical separation of lives and livelihoods is complicit in the making of disposable workers such as California farmworkers. Strategically, upholding the separation was a missed opportunity to leverage the strawberry industry's new‐found concern with farmworker employment and push for measures that protect current and future farmworker health.     

Disruptive Voices and Boundaries of Respectability in Christchurch,New Zealand

In 1998, New Zealand's TV3 broadcast two programmes featuring women who alleged that a prominent Christchurch physician and local politician had sexually assaulted them while they were patients in his care. The allegations unleashed an immediate and decisive backlash in the mainstream media and this article explores that media response. The analysis of the media debate demonstrates the ideological work which must be constantly carried out by the hegemonic groups in society in order to hold on to the power to define normative geographies, which in this case had been destabilised by the women's allegations. The mainstream media attempted to restore the boundaries of hegemonic respectability by calling on gendered notions of typical female behaviour in order to undermine the validity of the women's experiences. The 'official' image of Christchurch was also evoked in order to reassert ideological values in the face of resistance. The process whereby hegemonic groups attempt to secure control of established geographies is always open to contestation, however, and some media forums opened alternative discursive spaces within which to explore women's narratives. This media event highlights the underlying tensions in society surrounding the production of meanings attached to spaces and places, tensions which problematise the common-sense notions regarding public and private, identity, subjectivity and credibility.     

Defining and Contesting Environmental Justice: Socio-natures and the Politics of Scale in the Delta

Abstract:  This article examines a contemporary process intended to "identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California" ( Delta Vision 2008 , http://deltavision.ca.gov/AboutDeltaVision.shtml ). Environmental injustices in the Delta are exacerbated by connected conflicts between knowledge and power, over the scale at which "environmental justice" and the "Delta" are understood through public policy. The rejection of environmental justice and the socio-natural in the Delta Vision process represents how contemporary policy processes are recreating and reenacting the power/knowledge dynamics that have defined the Delta, placed it on a path to ecological collapse and injected high levels of social and racial injustice in its landscape over the past 150 years. Our article combines an ethnographic and a historical geographical approach that contributes to the literature on environmental justice and scale and links with the literature on water governance and power to advance the task of defining environmental justice from the academic and policy perspectives.     

Dietary change in Fijian prehistory: isotopic analyses of human and animal skeletal material

We examine evidence for prehistoric diet in the Fiji Islands through the analysis of stable isotope ratios (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) for 26 samples of human and animal bones from various archaeological sites, time periods, and local environments. The oldest individuals in this study, dating to about 2700 BP and living on the small island of Waya, consumed a predominantly marine-based diet. Subsequent populations on this island showed reduced consumption of marine resources, with greater reliance on terrestrial ones, throughout the cultural sequence. In contrast, populations of humans and pigs living inland on Viti Levu, the largest island, relied on terrestrial resources since at least 1500 BP. Thus, our results suggest that human and pig diets throughout Fijian prehistory relied variably on marine or terrestrial resources, and this distinction is largely a product of geography. This finding and our analyses provide a model for understanding ancient diets in Remote Oceania.     

Geochemical sourcing of basalt artifacts from Kaua‘i,Hawaiian Islands

We report on energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) sourcing of 807 basalt artifacts and 34 basalt ecofacts recovered from stratified midden at Nu‘alolo Kai, Kaua‘i. These data are compared with EDXRF analyses of 473 alluvial pebbles from Waimea Canyon, 34 adzes from the Kaua‘i Museum, and published geochemical data for Kaua‘i basalts. Formal tools, such as adzes, chisels, and mirrors were predominantly manufactured from sources not available at Nu‘alolo Kai. Most adzes and chisels are consistent with sources available elsewhere on Kaua‘i, but two basalt mirrors are outside the expected geochemical range of Kaua‘i basalts. In contrast, almost all expedient tools were manufactured from basalts available at Nu‘alolo Kai. These findings support the existence of an island-wide distribution system for adze material on Kaua‘i, and challenges extant models of pre-contact Hawaiian economics to consider the mechanisms through which specialized commodities were produced and distributed.