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Chronopolitics of crisis: A historical political ecology of seasonal air pollution in northern Thailand
Abstract
Geographers' engagements with environmental crises have taken a number of forms. Some scholars argue that crises judgments are revelatory and expose the contradictions of modes of production through interruptions to socio-economic life that can no longer be ignored. Others contend that crises judgments conceal more than they reveal through the framing of crisis as “error” and the focus on technocratic solutions to political-economic problems. In this article, we argue that the judgment of seasonal air pollution as a crisis is contingent on contestations over livelihoods and worldviews, and in doing so demonstrate how attention to chronopolitics reveals the nuanced ways people account for uncertainty in the causes and effects of anthropogenic environmental change. Based in northern Thailand, the paper focuses on what is described by many residents as the region's annually recurring “haze crisis”. In recent decades, broad shifts from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture and increased volumes of agricultural biomass burning have reportedly exacerbated the production of air pollution in the form of haze—an airborne mixture of pollutants that includes gasses, fine soot particles and carbon dioxide. Once a quotidian phenomenon of relatively little concern, today seasonal air pollution is described as a haze crisis. While causal uncertainty exists surrounding the precise combination of the socio-ecological drivers of haze production, multiple narratives circulate throughout the region, in which blame is frequently placed on smallholder farmers who have recently entered into new market relations. Situated within broader regional agrarian transitions, we draw on mixed ethnographic, archival and geospatial methods to examine the chronopolitics of seasonal air pollution and by what mechanisms such pollution comes to be constituted as a crisis.
... Seasonal haze stemming from forest and agricultural residue burning was common, especially in northern Thailand (Moran et al., 2019), though it was not treated as a particularly acute public health or economic issue. 10 Rather, it was considered as the manifestation of green problems such as forest destruction (Forsyth and Walker, 2008;Mostafanezhad and Evrard, 2020). ...
... Perceptions in the public and among decision makers toward vegetation fires and AP in Thailand have changed following the 1997/1998 transboundary haze episodes caused by massive Indonesian forest fires, and particularly since the onset of the post-2007 haze crisis in Thailand's northern region. Seasonal AP in Chiang Mai City and throughout the rest of northern Thailand has ceased to be viewed as a 'normal' condition, and is now considered a critical public health, economic and environmental problem in the context of the region's ongoing haze crisis (Mostafanezhad and Evrard, 2020). Crucially, however, this viewpoint has principally been an 'urban' one. ...
... Various politicians, academics, and journalists have begun to recognize the 'role' smallholder farmers in mountainous areas of Thailand play in the forest and agricultural residueespecially maize stoverfires leading to seasonal AP 11 (Wiwatanadate and Trakultivakorn, 2010;Schweikle et al., 2015;Arunrat et al., 2018). It is now commonplace to label AP caused by northern Thailand vegetation fires as a national crisis, and to denounce highland ethnic minority farmers as the main perpetrators of such pollution (Mostafanezhad and Evrard, 2020). There is equally increased attention given to the alleged underlying role of unregulated capitalism in the degradation of public health and of the region's landscape. ...
The burning of agricultural residue during the dry season in rural northern Thailand has been identified as an important source of air pollution at the heart of an ongoing haze crisis particularly felt in the region’s urban areas. Public outcry in Chiang Mai over poor air quality pressured the government into developing fire management and prevention efforts in areas with high numbers of open-air fires, such as Mae Chaem district. Nevertheless, the haze situation deteriorated, prompting the 2014–2019 military-led government to develop a pilot fire-reduction project known as the Mae Chaem Model, whose original design to mitigate and prevent fires in the district evolved into a series of sustainable development objectives. Given optimistic discourses surrounding the project’s novel and participatory nature, this paper offers a critical analysis of initial project results. The project claims to offer prized benefits such as tenure security in exchange for the collaboration of villagers in the project. Interviews with villagers and other stakeholders reveal a series of concerns regarding 1) the production of land use history maps for 2002, 2011 and 2016, and 2) substantial expropriation of farmland and other severe land use restrictions. Our calculations suggest that, under a likely scenario, an average of 66% of farmland would be expropriated in the process (88% in one community). In accordance with villagers interviewed in two villages of Mae Chaem district, we are concerned about the capacity of local villagers to sufficiently intensify their production or otherwise limit the negative impact of such drastic land use restrictions on their livelihood. The paper also outlines other problems related to the temporary and revocable nature of the benefits offered and the rather dubious claims of coercion-free ‘participation’.
... Known legally and colloquially in Southeast Asia as 'haze,' chronic air pollution blankets Thailand's national capital of Bangkok from November to February each year (Fotiou & Perkins, 2021), largely to the detriment of low-income households and outdoor workers in the construction, transport and hospitality sectors who cannot insulate themselves in purified indoor settings. By contrast, northern Thailand experiences the worst effects of unregulated biomass burning between February and April, disrupting agricultural and tourism livelihoods, adversely affecting community health, and, in the longer term, contributing to flows of out-migration (Mostafanezhad & Evrard, 2021;Sakdapolrak & Sterly, 2020). The transboundary nature of Thailand's air pollution problem extends well beyond its national borders to affect neighbouring Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Malaysia, and vice versa. ...
... Moreover, these wealth inequalities have bred 'other kinds of inequality… built into the structure of society and the attitudes of its members,' including via privileged access to legal and political power structures (Phongpaichit & Baker, 2015, p. 17). As Mostafanezhad and Evrard (2021) The divergent forms that slow violence can take have led to calls for a multi-sectoral and interjurisdictional approach to address it (Scheidel et al., 2020). To the limited extent that the slow violence of poor air quality has so far been considered in Thailand, economic impact assessments have begun to quantify the long-term healthcare costs of air pollution on the country's burgeoning ageing population and declining labour productivity due to pollution-related sick days Transboundary political ecology does not seek to downplay or minimise these difficulties of crossing borders for governance purposes. ...
... This constitutes a form of slow violence as it jeopardises the health of contract farmers while reinforcing unequal power relations to their long-term detriment as a short-term strategy to avoid indebtedness (Greenpeace Southeast Asia, 2020). Subsistence farmers with limited access to agricultural lands have also become increasingly indebted to large agribusinesses since 2012 due to falling global commodity prices, combined with fluctuating yields and reduced government subsidies (Mostafanezhad & Evrard, 2021). Consequently, they are under continual pressure to produce high-yielding crops to Thailand, have sought to accelerate national production in recent years to meet growing regional demand, especially from China, which uses maize to feed livestock used for meat consumption (Blake et al., 2019). ...
This study develops a transboundary political ecology of air pollution to show how its spatially and socially unequal distribution constitutes a form of slow violence among already marginal sections of society. Recent research on transboundary air pollution in Southeast Asia and globally has mainly focused on the supranational or regional scale of environmental governance without taking into proper account the socially differentiated impacts of these cross-border flows of environmental harm at lower organisational scales. Air pollution in Thailand, which ranks amongst the worst in the world, generates spill-over effects across sub-national borders that disproportionately impact the urban and rural poor. We examine the drivers of the three major sources of air pollution in Thailand: vehicular emissions, agricultural emissions and industrial emissions to direct attention toward the barriers and opportunities for collaborative governance in urban, peri-urban and rural settings. The article argues that administrative fragmentation and the protection of vested economic interests by Thai business and political elites have compromised transboundary governance of the air while adding to socio-spatial inequalities and environmental injustices. We recommend legislative reforms centred on cross-sectoral and cross-jurisdictional cooperation to provide redress for the slow violence perpetrated against marginal citizens in the governance of air pollution. K E Y W O R D S air pollution, environmental governance, political ecology, slow violence, Thailand, transboundary
... However, smallholder corn farmers never receive incentives or governmental support in adapting a zeroburning mode for sustainable production [18]. In terms of social impacts, the worst effects of illegal biomass burning between February and April are disruption of tourism with adverse affects people's livelihoods and health [22][23][24]. The loss in Chiang Mai's tourism sector amounted to 477 million baht (1 USD equal to 33.42 THB) and health expenditures amounting to 15,000 baht per person during the open burning period [24][25]. ...
... In terms of economic benefits, corn farmers can benefit from selling corn residues while using biochar as a soil amendment in the corn field with a priority of 27.10%. In terms of the social dimension, biochar production can create employment for corn farmers and local people, with a priority ranking of 22 in reducing soil impacts with a priority of 23.20%. In terms of economic impacts, the volume of corn residues (calculated from corn yield) is appropriate for incorporation in soil, with a priority of 13.13%. ...
... A leading Chiang Mai University scientist, Chaicharn Pothirat, explained that every increase of 10 in PM10 increased mortality by 0.3 percent and asked for safety levels similar to Europe and the United States (TN March 22, 2018). While they kept a relatively moderate tone and did not report, for instance, on the local authorities' cancellation of a rally in Chiang Mai city by residents calling for more accurate air pollution measurements (Mostafanezhad and Evrard 2021), the national newspapers nonetheless echoed civil society's perception of increased hidden risks. They also reported on the launch of independent networks of air pollution measurements, presented as "the people's AQI," based on international standards as opposed to the official AQI given by PCD. ...
... Building on nascent discussions of volume through a political ecology lens (Mosquera-Camacho and Marston 2021; Mostafanezhad and Dressler 2021;Mostafanezhad and Evrard 2021;Roberts 2021;Collins 2024b), we therefore assert that a voluminous political ecology approach can contribute an important dimension to research exploring the relationship between extraction and conservation, one that is focused on the atmosphere as an in-between space more difficult to concretely perceive than land or water. Yet bringing this liminal space more clearly into focus might nonetheless harbor potential for orienting a less contradictory politics of climate change than one focused only on terrestrial spaces, one that recognizes how seemingly disparate spaces shape one another in indirect, often unpredictable ways. ...
Within political ecology research, a dominant focus on the hard physicality of the world limits engagement with how events taking place on land mediate and are mediated by other material spaces like the atmosphere. This article engages with burgeoning research on the extraction–conservation nexus to show how the clearly demarcated land-based boundaries on which nexus thinking relies limit an awareness of how processes of conservation and extraction cohere and take shape in and through the aerial atmosphere. The article substantiates this argument with case studies on Guyana and Suriname, two countries that have been working on avoiding deforestation through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation for over a decade in the aim of mitigating climate change. In each case, we examine three years of news reporting on recent, major oil finds in the Guyana-Suriname Basin. The news reports, set against longer
term research, demonstrate a narrative pivot from “green,” land-based avoided deforestation narratives to “black,” offshore extractive ones. The reports show that reference to the competing atmospheric effects of the mutual pursuit of these activities is scarce, even at a time of rapidly intensifying climate change. Hence, we argue that a voluminous analysis of the extraction-conservation nexus integrating a vertical awareness of the ever-present and unbounded atmosphere harbors potential for orienting a less contradictory politics of climate change—one that recognizes how activities deemed oppositional on land take shape in the shared, unbounded atmosphere. These activities consequently go on to affect other spaces and places in indirect, often unpredictable ways.
... On one hand, researchers attribute seasonal air pollution to biomass burning by farmers in forested highlands at the end of the dry season as well as transboundary haze from Myanmar and Laos. On the other hand, Highland residents contend that their farming practices have not dramatically changed over the past several decades (Mostafanezhad and Evrard 2020). Although upland and primarily ethnic minority farmers are the widely blamed culprits, recent research indicates that urban-based pollution including vehicular emissions and industrial discharge is also a major source of toxic air pollution (Sirithian et al. 2018). ...
... Butt et al. 2017). However, comparatively less scholarship focuses on the human dimensions of air quality or the myriad ways in which individuals, groups, and societies experience, interact with, and make decisions about collective air resources (Calvillo and Garnett 2019;Cupples, Guyatt, and Pearce 2007;Cupples 2009;Lu 2020;Mostafanezhad and Evrard 2021). The papers in this special issue offer a deeper understanding of these human dimensions by highlighting how humans across varying cultures, geographies, and identities relate to air resources. ...
... The high level of PM2.5 concentration in Chiang Mai is mostly from open burning in the agriculture life cycle, urban-based pollution, transportation, and transboundary haze from nearby countries. One significant factor affecting PM2.5 concentration is the topography of Chiang Mai, which is surrounded by high mountains which can affect the airflow and atmospheric circulation, and thus affects how pollution is distributed (Mostafanezhad and Evrard, 2020). Consequently, different areas possess different concentrations of pollution, leading to different levels of exposure and effects. ...
Ambient Particulate Matter; PM2.5, with an aerodynamic diameter smaller than or equal to 2.5 µm, has emerged as the most critical health hazard concerning air pollution. The small size enables ambient particulate matter to go through the respiratory system, easily entering the lung or blood stream. Chiang Mai is one of the cities with the highest level of PM2.5 that exceeds the standard level of PM2.5 concentration (10µg/m3, recommended by the World Health Organization). High concentration levels have severe consequences for the health of the population in Chiang Mai. The objective of this study is to estimate the risk area of health impact due to exposure to PM2.5 in Chiang Mai. This study illustrates the data of PM2.5 concentration gathered from ground-based monitoring sites named DustBoy and data of hospital admissions from the Chiang Mai Provincial Public Health to reveal the population exposure related to human health effects such as heart diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, cardiovascular disease. In addition, correlation coefficient is employed to estimate the relationship between population exposure to the high ambient PM2.5 and the health effect due to PM2.5 pollution. The results are presented in the Chiang Mai Risk Map as a spatial pattern of population exposure using the spatial distribution method. These results support the high correlation between population exposure to PM2.5 and health impact and strongly suggest priority areas to prevent and control air pollution and social equality in health.
... It has been argued that chronopolitics are the dominant practice in the era of logistics, but rather than meaning the overcoming of space, chronopolitics are woven into the politics of space (Klinke 2013). This is because chronopolitics are not only meaningful because they control times but mainly because the time regimes they enact mediate wider spatial practices, discourses, and imaginations (Norum and Mostafanezhad 2016;Mostafanezhad and Evrard 2020). Indeed, thinking about the city through chronopolitics highlights the heterotemporality (i.e., the temporal plurality) of the city and the "mutual contamination of 'nows' that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from one meta-narrative about how they all fit together" (Hutchings 2008, 166). ...
This article discusses the enactment of conflicting time regimes in contemporary urban retail and consumer services. We draw on the theories of time–space compression, social acceleration, and the fast–slow dichotomy to argue that retail and consumer services act on urban life by enacting two apparently conflicting time regimes: fast time and slow time. Although retail and consumer services are not able to establish urban time regimes by themselves, they enact time regimes in their stores by offering the temporal resources that consumers need to perform their preferred timestyles. These temporal resources stem from the store’s concepts, sales model and management strategies, and ambiances. We draw on our ongoing field research in Colinas do Cruzeiro, an upper middle-class suburban neighborhood in greater Lisbon, Portugal, which has included field surveys, nonparticipant observation, and semistructured interviews. Our findings identify three time regimes that retail and consumer services in Colinas do Cruzeiro enact in their stores. This finding allows us to understand the processes through which retail, consumer services, and urban rhythms tend to synchronize. We discuss the geographical implications of understanding the processes that underpin the enactment of time regimes in contemporary urban retail and consumer services.
Fire, a prevalent land management tool in rotational shifting cultivation (RSC), has long been debated for its immediate disruption of surface soil, vegetation, and microbial communities. While low-intensity and short-duration slash-and-burn techniques are considered beneficial for overall soil function, the dual nature of fire’s impact warrants a comprehensive exploration. This review examines both the beneficial and detrimental effects of fire on soil properties within the context of RSC. We highlight that research on soil microbial composition, carbon, and nitrogen dynamics following fire events in RSC is gaining momentum. After fires, soil typically shows decreases in porosity, clay content, aggregation, and cation exchange capacity, while sand content, pH, available phosphorus, and organic nitrogen tend to increase. There remains ongoing debate regarding the effects on bulk density, silt content, electrical conductivity, organic carbon, total nitrogen, and exchangeable ions (K+, Ca2+, Mg2+). Certain bacterial diversity often increases, while fungal communities tend to decline during post-fire recovery, influenced by the soil chemical properties. Soil erosion is a major concern because fire-altered soil structures heighten erosion risks, underscoring the need for sustainable post-fire soil management strategies. Future research directions are proposed, including the use of advanced technologies like remote sensing, UAVs, and soil sensors to monitor fire impacts, as well as socio-economic studies to balance traditional practices with modern sustainability goals. This review aims to inform sustainable land management practices that balance agricultural productivity with ecological health in RSC systems.
In Thailand, the volatile period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by changing material and political atmospheres. Air pollution, the COVID‐19 pandemic, and government restrictions on speech transformed how Thai citizens breathed and how they related to the monarchy. Understanding this period as a history of breath reconceptualizes the citizen‐body as volumetric, recasting politics as an intermaterial practice. Breath, its vibrations, and its constraints, as it moves across the topologies of the respiratory system, generate densely material, richly symbolic political relations that bind citizens to one another, to the polity, and to the world. Small particles, dust, viruses, speech restrictions, and tear gas constrained the breath of Thai citizens while shaping the conditions in which dissenting vibrations could shake the country's cosmologies. Attention to the citizen‐body as volumetric thus recasts the lungs as relational chambers of political capacity, resituating political analysis within the material world and suggesting that all politics are, in some sense, environmental.
Folklore actually represents a society's civilization, including how to manage and preserve the environment. Folklore, for example, can be a valuable resource for humans involved in efforts to save the environment. This study investigates the Banyumas indigenous people's local wisdom in terms of environmental preservation as found in Banyumas folklores. The ecological wisdom of the Banyumas community is a term used in this study to refer to folklore from Banyumas, Central Java, Indonesia, that contains the value of local wisdom in terms of environmental conservation. This study took an ecocritical approach to folklore texts as a type of literary work. The data for this study came from Banyumas folklore, and the research method was qualitative content analysis. The findings revealed that Banyumas folklore describes the Banyumas community's ecological wisdom in environmental conservation activities. These wisdoms include: respect for nature, living in harmony with nature, wisely using natural resources, using ecological knowledge for toponymy, and using nature as a spiritual tool. Readers can use these wisdom values as a guide to optimize environmental conservation.
Lately, the Hill Pond Rice System (HPRS) is being promoted as a form of alternative farming systems in selected northern provinces of Thailand, in which the land conversion is designed to maximize rainwater harvesting in farmland consisting of forest trees, water reservoirs, paddy fields, and high-value crop cultivation to serve environmental and livelihood needs. This study employed the double-hurdle model and the tobit technique to investigate the farm-level factors associated with land conversion from maize monocropping to the HPRS using primary data collected from 253 households in Nan, Chiang Mai, Tak, and Lampang Provinces. It was found that education, farming knowledge, understanding benefits of the HPRS, access to water sources, access to advis, and workforce sharing raised the likelihood and extent of farmland conversion into the HPRS. In contrast, perceived complexity of the HPRS, experiences with negative shocks, and land tenure security lowered the likelihood and extent of land conversion. The findings suggest that on-farm collective action should be promoted to mitigate labor constraints in implementation and that access to equipment should be enhanced through HPRS advisors’ visits.
Peatland burning in Indonesia’s state forest has increased in recent years, causing protracted “haze” crises across Southeast Asia and opening up new ways of thinking about how the political forest extends into the atmosphere and the subterranean. I take up political geographers’ call to consider territory volumetrically, rather than as two‐dimensional area, to analyse the politics of contemporary forest territoriality and of cross‐border biophysical forest phenomena. Doing so acknowledges the increasingly volatile materiality of forests but also the ways in which state, extra‐state, and non‐state actors respond to forest‐based crises under neoliberalism. As fires in Indonesia’s peatlands affect the subterranean and atmospheric spaces beyond the enclosed surfaces that have traditionally rendered forests political through territorialisation, analysing the vertical and volumetric dimensions of forest territory reveals the ways in which contemporary political forest‐making occurs through strategic control of the expansive space above, below, and beyond forests themselves. I further suggest that such territorialisation plays out through surveillance‐based legal and representational practices, such as laws that seek culpability for polluted transboundary airspace and satellite‐based remote sensing of underground fires, in ways that obscure the economic and political objectives of such territorial strategies.
How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define ‘slow emergencies’ as situations marked by a) attritional lethality; b) imperceptibility; c) the foreclosure of the capacity to become otherwise; d) emergency claims. We conclude with a call to reclaim ‘emergency’.
The wide range of wildlife tracking and surveillance technologies (radio and satellite tracking, cameras, and audio) that are being deployed in conservation have important implications for a geographical understanding of care for non-human nature. This report explores four dimensions of their influence. First, their detailed view of spatial dimensions of non-human lives affects conservation’s demarcation and control of space. Second, the application of surveillance technologies to people is central to the rise of coercive conservation strategies. Third, such technologies enable the creation and commoditization of spectacular nature. Fourth, spatial digital data enables the automation of conservation decisions, a trend described here as ‘conservation by algorithm’.
Thailand’s near-total elimination of opium poppy cultivation is attributed to “alternative development” programming, which replaces illicit crops with licit ones. However, opium poppy cultivation was not drastically reduced because substitute crops earned the same income as opium: nothing can equal the price of opium to smallholder farmers, especially those without land tenure. Thailand’s reduction in poppy cultivation was achieved by the increased presence and surveillance capability of state security actors, who, year by year, were able to locate and destroy fields, and arrest cultivators, with increasing accuracy. This coercion was also accompanied by benefits to cultivators, including the provision of health and education services and the extension of roads; both stick and carrot constituted the encroachment of the Thai state. The provision of citizenship to hill tribe members also gave them a vested interest in the state, through their ability to hold land, access health care, education and work opportunities, amongst others. These initiatives did not occur without costs to hill tribe cultures for whom a symbiotic relationship with the land was and remains disrupted. These findings indicate that alternative development programming unlinked to broader state-building initiatives in Afghanistan, Myanmar and other opium poppy-producing areas will fail, because short-term, high-yield, high value, imperishable opium will remain the most logical choice for poor farmers, especially given the lack of a farmer’s vested interest in the state which compels them to reduce their income whilst offering them no other protections or services.
Forests Are Gold examines the management of Vietnam's forests in the tumultuous twentieth century―from French colonialism to the recent transition to market-oriented economics―as the country united, prospered, and transformed people and landscapes. Forest policy has rarely been about ecology or conservation for nature's sake, but about managing citizens and society, a process Pamela McElwee terms "environmental rule." Untangling and understanding these practices and networks of rule illuminates not just thorny issues of environmental change, but also the birth of Vietnam itself.
This special issue of Human Organization on the applied anthropology of risk, hazards, and disasters, became possible as a result of the overwhelming number of submissions on the part of practitioners, researchers and academics who responded to a call for papers on these topics for the 2013 Society for Applied Anthropology Annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. The motivation behind the call for papers originated from the Society for Applied Anthropology’s presentation of the Malinowski Award, the association’s most prestigious lifetime achievement Award, to Anthony Oliver-Smith for his contributions to the anthropological study of human-environment relationships and the sociocultural dimensions of disaster vulnerability and impact. In this article, we provide a brief introduction to advancements in the field of disaster studies as well as the historical antecedents and the intellectual collaborations that contributed to contemporary work in the field. Finally, we review the multiple directions, methodological approaches, and theoretical leanings that comprise today’s diversified field of disaster anthropology and discuss how the monographs included in this edition of Human Organization showcase the variety of topics and themes engaged by applied anthropologists who work on disaster-related issues.
Our brief overview of developments in environmental anthropology since 1980 and their antecedents is organized around three themes: systems ecology, political ecology, and cognitive science. In some areas, the context is familiar. As Latour recently observed, the intellectual themes captured by the emergent concept of the Anthropocene have long been familiar to anthropologists. After decades of research on human-environmental interactions, anthropology, and more particularly environmental anthropology, suddenly finds itself pushed into prominence. A vibrant and kaleidoscopic research agenda has ensued and borrows extensively from other disciplines. This agenda coincides with increased interest in coupled human and natural systems from both the social and the natural sciences. Such attention is not solely the product of academic integration or the analytical reflection of empirical realities; it also stems from growing concern over the role of humans in the global transformation of the environment.
This paper provides a counterpoint to recent discussions of 'eco-governmentality' or 'environmentality,' which analyse how states use knowledge to regulate citizens and make problems governable. Adopting the concept of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper argues that well-known approaches to environmentality fail to acknowledge how both state and citizens can both actively participate in reifying authoritative expertise about environmental problems; and that this expertise can be based on shared visions of social order, which also exclude alternative perspectives about environmental management. The paper illustrates this debate with the history of legislation and social movements about community forestry in Thailand, where different state agencies and non-governmental organisations have disagreed about policies, but also demonstrated hidden alliances that reify and legitimise statements about the hydraulic functions of forests that exclude long-standing scientific research or alternative options for watershed management. The paper argues that political debates about community forestry should therefore pay more attention to how political opponents agree-and the social groups and policy options that are excluded from these agreements-rather than only analyse how one party might have power over another.
We all-too-often think of the spaces of geography as areas, not volumes. Territories are bordered, divided and demarcated, but not understood in terms of height and depth. ‘Secure the area’ is a common expression for the military and police, but what happens if another dimension is taken into account and we think what it means to ‘secure the volume’? This article draws on the emergent literature on vertical geopolitics and Peter Sloterdijk's work on spheres, but also looks at what happens below the surface, with a particular focus on tunnels. Using Paul Virilio's work, and some examples from the West Bank and Israel's border with Lebanon, it demonstrates how we need to think volume—think about volume, through volume, with volume—rather than simply the vertical to make sense of the complexities of territory today.
This paper examines the major trends since the 1950s in social science writing on forest management in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is simultaneously rich in and dependent on natural resources, both for local and national use or sale. Among renewable resources, forest products have played critical roles in the region's national, provincial, and local economies before, during, and after colonialism — for as long as two millennia. Their importance in international trade illustrates that Southeast Asia's forests linked the region to other parts of the world for quite some time, dispelling myths that parts of the region such as Borneo were “remote”, “primitive”, or “pristine”.
We undertook this study to investigate whether there is an association between atmospheric fine particles (PM2.5) levels and inpatient admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in Taipei, Taiwan. Data on inpatient admissions for COPD and ambient on air pollution levels in Taipei were obtained for years 2006 to 2010. We estimated the relative risk of inpatient admissions for COPD using a case-crossover design with the following control variables: weather measures, day of the week, seasonality, and long-term time trends. For the single-pollutant model (not controlling for other atmospheric pollutants), COPD admissions were significantly and positively associated with higher PM2.5 levels during both warm days (>23 °C) and cool days (<23 °C), with an interquartile range increase of 12% (95% CI = 8-16%) and 3% (95% CI = 0-7%) in COPD admissions, respectively. In the two-pollutant models, PM2.5 remained significant even controlling for SO2 or O3 on both warm and cool days. Taken as a whole, our study demonstrates that higher levels of PM2.5 may increase the risk of inpatient admissions for COPD.
The development of domestic (or national) tourism in Thailand in the second half of the 20th century relied on a new kind of relationship between the state and local cultures. Rural spaces have been reinvented and transformed into appealing visual and conceptual archetypes which sustain discourses on both local and national identity and history. Thai tourism allows a kind of pacification of the relations between the centre and the periphery, but it also perpetuates an internal colonialism, both towards Tai and non-Tai populations. This article investigates the social significance of domestic tourism in Chiang Mai and the links between non-Western representation of travel, nationalism and localized identity. It focuses on three attractions scattered along the road going up to the mountain of Suthep (Doi Suthep), one of the most famous tourist destinations in northern Thailand: a Buddhist temple, a royal palace and an ethnic village. These three attractions provide crucial insights into the history of domestic tourism in Thailand: its similarities to and differences from previous forms of travel, its relations to the idealization of the rural and its role in the pacification of the relations between the Thai state and its geographic and social margins.
How have national and state governments the world over come to “own” huge expanses of territory under the rubric of “national forest,” “national parks,” or “wastelands”? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local people and “protected” by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergence of historical circumstances. These circumstances have enabled certain state authorities to supersede the rights, claims, and practices of people resident in what the world now calls “forests.”
The prevailing scientific view of the losses suffered by human communities from flood, drought or storm is a quite recent invention. In many ways the model which has been so carefully constructed and which is so insistent in further research is the single greatest impediment in understanding natural calamities and their alleviation. We have separated these events from past understanding of them and from other work on the man-environment relationship. Most calamities are characteristic, not accidental events, and are closely bound up with the afflicted societies. -K.Clayton
Ecologists, biogeographers, and paleobotanists have long thought that climate and soils controlled the distribution of ecosystems, with the role of fire getting only limited appreciation. Here we review evidence from different disciplines demonstrating that wildfire appeared concomitant with the origin of terrestrial plants and played an important role throughout the history of life. The importance of fire has waxed and waned in association with changes in climate and paleoatmospheric conditions. Well before the emergence of humans on Earth, fire played a key role in the origins of plant adaptations as well as in the distribution of ecosystems. Humans initiated a new stage in ecosystem fire, using it to make the Earth more suited to their lifestyle. However, as human populations have expanded their use of fire, their actions have come to dominate some ecosystems and change natural processes in ways that threaten the sustainability of some landscapes.
Erosion of biodiversity is of global concern. Habitat destruction is the main cause. Many governments have established national park systems to try to protect habitat. National parks have traditionally excluded human settlements and extractive uses, often creating problems for local communities. This has resulted in support for human occupancy of parks, particularly by indigenous peoples. However, indigenous peoples can also have a significant impact on local ecosystems. Thus, a more refined management response is called for, based on assessment of ecosystem impacts and sensitive to local cultural characteristics. A first step is to assess the nature of the interaction between the local peoples and the park. This approach is taken with reference to Doi Inthanon National Park in Northern Thailand. Different ethnic groups have different impacts and therefore warrant different management responses. Some 40% of the park area has been encroached upon. The situation is further complicated because of a development program that has goals that are in conflict with those of the park. Data on use of park resources by local populations reveals an inverse relationship between use and distance from the park. Possible management strategies are suggested.
Though not officially considered a 'policy' by the Lao government, resettlement of ethnic minorities has become a central feature of the rural development strategy in Laos. Over the past ten years, a majority of highland villages have been resettled downhill, and the local administrations are planning to move the remaining villages in the coming years. This article draws on a national survey about resettlement in Laos, commissioned by UNESCO and financed by UNDP, that was undertaken by the authors. It focuses on the consequences of these huge shifts of population and on the social and cultural dynamics that underlie them. It shows that the planned resettlements, which are intended to promote the 'settling' of the highland populations by enforcing the ban on slash-and-burn agriculture and opium growing, actually cause increased and diversified rural mobility. This in turn complicates the implementation of the rural development policy and the political management of interethnic relationships. In other words, the 'settling' process promoted by the State, because of its broad and often tragic social consequences, can paradoxically generate unplanned or unexpected further migrations, which could be called 'resettlement-induced forms of mobility'
A disaster and a crisis are two different, and related events. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Man-made disaster that occurs at an industrial organization, may develop into an industrial crisis. Crisis can happen to any organization. It has been noted that there were no universally accepted definitions yet developed for disaster and crisis. There is also no universally available criteria, to define the disaster in terms of the consequences, such as the casualties and the cost of damage. This paper reviews the definitions, types, characteristics, criteria and models of disaster and crisis. Also the types of crisis were rearranged and the differences between the disasters and crises have been summarized.
▪ Abstract Recent perspectives in anthropological research define a disaster as a process/event involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of vulnerability. From this basic understanding three general topical areas have developed: (a) a behavioral and organizational response approach, (b) a social change approach, and (c) a political economic/environmental approach, focusing on the historical-structural dimensions of vulnerability to hazards, particularly in the developing world. Applied anthropological contributions to disaster management are discussed as well as research on perception and assessment of hazard risk. The article closes with a discussion of potentials in hazard and disaster research for theory building in anthropology, particularly in issues of human-environment relations and sociocultural change.
Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) has been on the ascendancy for several decades and plays a leading role in conservation strategies worldwide. Arriving out of a desire to rectify the human costs associated with coercive conservation, CBNRM sought to return the stewardship of biodiversity and natural resources to local communities through participation, empowerment and decentralization. Today, however, scholars and practitioners suggest that CBNRM is experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose, with even the most positive examples experiencing only fleeting success due to major deficiencies. Six case studies from around the world offer a history of how and why the global CBNRM narrative has unfolded over time and space. While CBNRM emerged with promise and hope, it often ended in less than ideal outcomes when institutionalized and reconfigured in design and practice. Nevertheless, despite the current crisis, there is scope for refocusing on the original ideals of CBNRM: ensuring social justice, material well-being and environmental integrity.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that a third of all global deaths from stroke, lung cancer and respiratory diseases can be linked to air pollution. In some cities, breathing polluted air is as dangerous as smoking 25 cigarettes a day. This is a literature review that focusses on the problem of the annual haze in Northern Thailand, in order to ascertain workable policies to help alleviate this annual smog or haze. The review was conducted from over 1000 peer reviewed papers from both Scopus and the ISI databases with preference given to papers published within the past 5 years. This paper is divided into five sections. The first section deals with the cause of the haze, the technologies and models that are being developed and used to monitor and predict pollution and the meteorological conditions specific to the North of Thailand. The second section concerns the effect from air pollution on the health of the general public both from Thailand and other countries. The third section looks at policies from around the world that have been used to successfully reduce haze and smog. These include conservation agriculture, low emission zones and education methods. The fourth section suggests policies that should be implemented in the North of Thailand to help alleviate this annual problem. The overall conclusion is that the annual pollution is a complex multi-faceted problem requiring coherent policies across multiple departments, provinces and countries.
The modernist usage of the word crisis conveys the idea of an event that acts as a historical judgment, marks an epochal transition, and sometimes leads to a utopian era. Furthermore, current uses of crisis in the political sphere often figure catastrophic events as the result of errors and malfunctions, drawing attention away from the quotidian and normatively accepted practices and policies that produce them. Anthropological definitions of disaster, in contrast, understand catastrophes as the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Despite this fundamental difference between customary and scholarly definitions of crises and disasters, the former term is commonly used to refer to the latter by political elites and academics alike. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the crisis concept in the analysis of disasters on the basis of anthropological research on catastrophes during the last 40 years and provides an overview of the analytical diversification of disaster anthropology since the 1970s. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 46 is October 21, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Smoke from agricultural waste burning causes hazardous haze pollution in Southeast Asian countries every year. Besides traces of a few toxic gases several persistent organic pollutants, natural, and anthropogenic emissions are released, resulting in adverse health effects. The study focuses on identification of sources of PM 2.5-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) during the non-haze and haze seasons and investigates the concentration and toxicity of fine particulate matter, especially in the middle of biomass burning period. Totally, 12 fine particulate PAH congeners were selected and analysed at air quality observatory sites located in nine administrative provinces of Northern Thailand during four different sampling periods from 7th December 2012 to 27th March 2015. Nisbet and Lagoy's toxicity equivalent concentration (TEQ) equation revealed that the B[a]P Equivalent value for 2014e2015 roughly surpassed the value of 2012e2013 by a factor of 17. This can be attributed to the significant rise in five-to six-ring PAHs levels in the past two years. Diagnostic binary ratios and linear regression analysis highlight the roles of vehicular exhausts and biomass burning as two major contributors of PM 2.5-bound PAHs. Interestingly, principal component analysis (PCA) reveals similar loading patterns for PC1 during the non-haze and haze periods, indicating that agricultural waste burning cannot be considered as the sole contributor of particulate PAHs in Northern Thailand.
Attention to climate now dominates much of the global discussion about conservation issues in tropical countries, particularly forests and biodiversity, as well as poverty and development concerns. One of the most prominent options is a policy for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) to tackle land-use generated carbon emissions. But how different will REDD+ be from the numerous forest protection policies that have gone before? Using the case study of Vietnam, this chapter historicizes forest management and the recent development of REDD+, and finds there are major similarities between the ‘new’ climate-inspired policies and previous, usually unsuccessful, approaches. This chapter posits that a major barrier to implementation of REDD+ will be in knowledge production about forest environments and forest peoples, and in overly simplistic ‘checklist’ approaches to safeguards and participation. In these challenges, REDD+ faces many of the same problems as previous policies for tropical forest management.
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In this essay I consider the current logics of crisis in American media cultures and politics. I argue that “crisis” has become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century, a means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of violence across militarism, economy, and the environment. Assessing nuclear danger and climate danger, I critique and theorize the current standing of existential crisis as a mode of political mobilization and posit the contemporary terms for generating nonutopian but positive futurities. © 2017 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet also seemingly intractable. This book offers novel insights on this contemporary challenge, drawing together the state-of-the-art thinking in anthropology. Approaching climate change as a nexus of nature, culture, science, politics, and belief, the book reveals nuanced ways of understanding the relationships between society and climate, science and the state, certainty and uncertainty, global and local that are manifested in climate change debates. The contributors address three major areas of inquiry: how climate change issues have been framed in previous times compared to the present; how knowledge about climate change and its impacts is produced and interpreted by different groups; and how imagination plays a role in shaping conceptions of climate change.
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In this review, I examine the contribution of social anthropology to the study of risk. I define social anthropology as the study of ‘other cultures’ and note that such studies have a long history, for example the Greeks and Romans were interested in exploring and understanding ‘barbarians’ and using such studies to reflect on their own society. However, in the early twentieth century, with the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits and Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, the study of other cultures shifted from an assumption of western cultural superiority to respect for other cultures with anthropologists seeking to understand and explain the unique logic and rationality of different cultures. This new approach to other cultures tended to stress the universality of the challenges which societies face while documenting their unique responses. Thus, all societies have to cope with uncertainty, the essential unpredictability of the future and account for past misfortunes. In western societies, risk now plays a central role in making the future more predictable and manageable and enabling the forensic investigation of the past. For example, in the area of health, epidemiologists map the incidence of disease and their spatial, temporal and social distribution providing a way of predicting and preventing future incidence. In other cultures, various forms of divination and ritual activity perform the same function. For example, Malinowski identified the importance of dangerous long sea journeys for the Trobriand Islanders and examined the ways in which they sought to deal with these dangers through a combination of technical skill and magic. Douglas used historical and anthropological evidence to develop a cultural theory of risk. She argued that the nature of social relations in a group influenced which hazards that group chose to highlight and sought to counteract, and how they chose to do this. Although it is possible to identify issues of risk and uncertainty in anthropological studies, it has not been a central or major theme and the contribution of anthropology to risk studies has been more limited than the contribution of disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Part of the problem relates to globalisation. The development of anthropology as a mature discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, one which respected other cultures, coincided with the peak of European colonisation. While social anthropologists wanted to explore and understand ‘pristine’ pre-modern cultures, the reality was that these cultures were already being reshaped by European institutions such as hospitals and medicine. In terms of uncertainty, this means that pre-modern systems of predicting and managing the future, such as oracle and magic, coexist and compete with global systems such as risk-based medicine. It is possible to recover and reconstruct such pre-modern systems by using historical sources. However, most contemporary ethnographies must take into account competing systems and how individuals choose and move between them.
In this article, I propose five ways to move beyond the analytical scheme of James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998). I question the spatial optic that posits an “up there,” all-seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power, spread progressively outward to “nonstate” spaces beyond its reach. I highlight the role of parties beyond “the state” that attempt to govern—social reformers, scientists, and the so-called nongovernmental agencies, among others. I look beyond authoritarian high modernism to the more general problematic of “improvement” emerging from a governmental rationality focused on the welfare of populations. I explore the recourse to mētis (contextualized, local knowledge and practice) situated beyond the purview of planning. Finally, I reframe the question posed by Scott—why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed?—to examine the question posed so provocatively by James Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What are their messy, contradictory, conjunctural effects?
This work takes a close look at disasters and the response of victims in the immediate aftermath and over the long-run. It demonstrates how disasters arise from human propensity to take risks which make them vulnerable to cataclysms, whether natural or technologically related. This collection is the first to adequately represent the cultural, historical and geographical scope and complexities of the problem of disaster. It introduces a range of perspectives and arguments, with compelling examples.
How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. Thus, the image of planetary crisis in the US was increasingly doubled during the Cold War – the immediacy of nuclear threat matched by concerns about rapid environmental change and the cumulative effects of industrial civilization on a fragile biosphere. This paper examines the evolution of (and competition between) two ideas of planetary crisis since 1945: nuclear war and climate change. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative history of the nuclear age and considers the US national security implications of a shift in the definition of planetary crisis from warring states to a warming biosphere.
Farmers and herders in Madagascar depend on fire to help them prepare cropfields and maintain pastures, but burning contributes to land degradation and loss of unique habitat. Farmers and herders have long been at odds with state authorities trying to control the use of fire. Natural resource conflicts such as this fire stalemate are difficult to resolve because they are shaped by many factors, including their wider ecological and political contexts.