coe042_mathews.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome everyone back to the Cultures of Energy podcast I am Dominic Boyer. I'm here with my fabulous co-host Simone. How say hello, Simone?

Speaker2: [00:00:32] Hello, Simone. Bah bah. Well, I couldn't help it because you sounded so cheerful. And I guess that's the kind of the deranged joy of someone who's waiting for the doom of of the elections to kind of come down across

Speaker1: [00:00:47] Your neck trying so hard to hold my shit together. But it has been hard that past week has been tough and I have been losing sleep and I've been doing all the things that that people probably would counsel you not to do, which is overly freak out at every bit of news. Look at the fivethirtyeight.com website too often listen. Anyway, it'll be over soon. This is our last podcast before the election, so maybe this is our last chance to say something and Simone is prepared or short, you know, five or six hundred

Speaker2: [00:01:13] Words inspirational speech. I've got no inspiration

Speaker1: [00:01:17] Oriented towards disenfranchised groups that may just be wanting to sit out this election because they think that the options are terrible. So, Simone, go ahead, inspire us and remember the millennials to

Speaker2: [00:01:28] Millennials in the right. Millennials were the particular object of our affection in this conversation. Well, I don't know. You all should get out and vote. As all I've got to say, it's not really inspiring. It's a kind of a more of a a desperate plea, I guess, but I think everyone understands that. Yeah, I think everyone understands that the stakes are very high and that it's important to to voice your democratic, right? Even if our democracy is not fully functional at the moment. But you've you've got to put the word into the box because otherwise you may regret if you didn't. And I know that's a terrible way to go for it. But sometimes that's just how it be.

Speaker1: [00:02:05] And worst case scenario, we will be giving out free hugs on this podcast. Come come. What is it, Tuesday or Wednesday? I guess if things go really badly, we're going to start a new kind of universe of hugs that will try to get through.

Speaker2: [00:02:20] Oh, that's nice. Like digital

Speaker1: [00:02:21] Hugs. Get through our time of monsters as our colleague Andrea Money-Back has predicted it would be.

Speaker2: [00:02:27] Oh, is that what she called it? That's that's a good to. And it would be horrifying, but good description.

Speaker1: [00:02:32] Yes. So with that, I also say that go cubs. We have to say that because actually, you know, as a as a break, a small ludeke break from all of this teeth gnashing and hair pulling, we stayed up late last night and watched the end of the Cubs game. I was convinced they were going to lose because I'm from Chicago, and that's just how things have been in the past hundred and eight years. Simone was strangely, you know, convinced they were going to. And it was a weird thing. And again, for people who haven't watched the game, sorry. But so there was this rain delay.

Speaker2: [00:03:07] I think I think they've heard the news, even if they have. No, you can't. It's like all of them. It's not a

Speaker1: [00:03:11] Spoiler, but I mean, people just probably don't really give a shit about baseball who listen to this podcast necessarily. But there may be some who do anyway. So so there was this rain delay really late in the game, and the moment the replay happened, somebody was like, That's it, they're going to win. They needed that time to like, recover. And then the hilarious thing is in the post-game coverage, every single one of the Cubs was like, Oh, thank God for that rain delay. I don't know how you figured it out. Like, how did you get into the psychology of baseball because you're not like a huge baseball fan? You probably haven't watched a baseball game in years, and yet you somehow intuitively knew. I don't know. I think

Speaker2: [00:03:44] I. Well, I know. I know about baseball magic. And I mean, there's a lot of magic play that was going on in that game last night, too. And I think that that's always how it is. Yeah. You know, little pats and signs and not quite crossing, but things along that line. So I don't know. I think it was just a deluge from the baseball goddess. Yes, who wanted to give everyone a break. So that's like the news in the New York Times is like, Oh, you know, a reprieve, a breath like something. A harrowing comeback by this team that's been cursed forever. 108 years is a really long time to be losing, right? So it was a pretty phenomenal.

Speaker1: [00:04:22] As somebody who was there, I just want to say you're giving yourself too little credit for your absolute predictive power. And with the conviction with which you were like, they are going to win when it was tied six six going into the 10th or whatever inning it was, and they had just given up three runs

Speaker2: [00:04:37] And a lot of inmates

Speaker1: [00:04:38] To the Cubs ready to choke yet again, and it would be another 100 some years. It's amazing to think that both of my grandfathers were born and died in the time since the Cubs last won. Wow. Think about that. It kind of puts things in perspective. That's pretty incredible. Anyway, not to go on and on. I just, as a Chicagoan, want to say,

Speaker2: [00:04:56] Yeah, well, I was just going to

Speaker1: [00:04:58] Say big up to everyone back home.

Speaker2: [00:04:59] Oh, that's awesome. Ok, well, but see, you forgot the, you know, the pact that you made with the devil, actually?

Speaker1: [00:05:07] I thought we avoided that pact.

Speaker2: [00:05:08] Well, can you? Well, I said that, you know, even even if Trump wins, God forbid. But even if he wins, you could just like if the Cubs win, we could just go bask in the glory of victory. On the north side of Chicago for the next four years, you just kind of you could you could bury Barry or head in the sands of Lake Michigan like an ostrich and

Speaker1: [00:05:31] You mean like a suicide pact? Is that what you're talking about?

Speaker2: [00:05:34] Oh God, I had no listen. I thought it was the metaphorical burying the head in the sand.

Speaker1: [00:05:39] I said yesterday, No, no, don't.

Speaker2: [00:05:41] But the glow, the glow will go for at least four years.

Speaker1: [00:05:43] Don't give voice to that. And you know, I think let us not hope. I just hope that that was not the deal that was struck.

Speaker2: [00:05:51] Yes. Well, the other option is to, you know, go build a little beachfront shack. And in Nicaragua, down by the Costa Rican border, that's another option. You can always leave the country right? Or we could start our own militia, a kind of left wing militia in Wisconsin.

Speaker1: [00:06:07] Yeah. Don't joke that that that would happen. Probably. Yeah. Ok, so let's move on to sunny topics. Let's talk about who

Speaker2: [00:06:14] We're talking to. Wonderful. You really shouldn't have that much coffee. We are talking to the wonderful, which I was just going to say the fabulous, the brilliant Andrew Matthews, who is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UCSC. And my god, like every time you talk about UCSC outside of the context of Santa Cruz, someone has to say like go slugs,

Speaker1: [00:06:45] Which we did in the episode,

Speaker2: [00:06:47] Yeah, oh, shut up, did we? Oh God. I mean, so that's so just been called out for being, but that's OK. You say Oregon, so you can't help it. Anyway, Andrew Matthews is wonderful, and we have a really lovely conversation with him about Oaxaca, also known as wax figure to some Texans

Speaker1: [00:07:06] State, state craft,

Speaker2: [00:07:08] State craft and forestry and environmental politics and bureaucrats and institutions, and how they how they operate and manipulate, but also come into conversation with different groups of indigenous peoples and campesinos in these regions and and a lot of good talk about forests and other eco questions. So Andrew is the author of a book by MIT that was published by MIT called Instituting Nature, Authority, Expertise and Power in Mexican Forests. So that came out in 2011. But he's got a he's going to have a new book coming out soon.

Speaker1: [00:07:44] Yeah, we talk about instituting nature and we also talk about the project he's working on in Italy. But since we talk about those at length, I think we won't rehearse them here, but rather simply say to everyone,

Speaker2: [00:07:54] Oh well, I, I was going to say one more thing with the Cubs. So I just wanted to remind you that last summer I had to do a kind of an emergency T-shirt buying at Marshall Store. And so I got I bought a Cubs T-shirt. Oh my God. It was like three dollars, right? I just needed a shirt, like a workout shirt, and I was like, OK, here's this shirt. I knew that these cubs who were cursed, I had heard about that, about the shirt. And I showed it to you and you're like, Oh my god, you can't wear a you can't wear that on the sell side.

Speaker1: [00:08:23] Yeah. I pointed that

Speaker2: [00:08:24] Out. And then the second part being like, you know, why would you want to wear the insignia of such a sad team?

Speaker1: [00:08:31] And now it's like, you're the delphic oracle or something like that. And one more thing I'm going to point out somehow, and for some reason, you painted one half of your toenails, the cubs color blue, and I don't think you even knew what that color was necessarily, and I don't think you were even aware they were in the World Series.

Speaker2: [00:08:49] So, yeah, yeah, that that's that's a good question. Yeah, I don't know. I guess this was just like conjuring from the feet on up. All I know is that for the next week, I'm going to proudly wear my my three dollar cubs shirt.

Speaker1: [00:09:02] And what I tried is that my co-host is some kind of a magical creature. That's what I that's what I have come to learn in this podcast and in the past 24 hours. So on that note, let us turn to the

Speaker2: [00:09:15] Wonderful idea that you go, Andrew. Welcome back, dear listeners, we're really, really thrilled to have Dr. Andrew Matthews here visiting with us from the esteemed UCSC. That's University of California, Santa Cruz,

Speaker1: [00:09:47] Banana

Speaker2: [00:09:47] Slugs, banana luggage. And Andrew is is visiting us here in Houston. We're really glad to have you. Welcome to the pod.

Speaker3: [00:09:56] Welcome, Andrew. Well, thank you for bringing me here. It's really fun. I'm looking forward to some questions and finding out what I might have for answers.

Speaker1: [00:10:04] Cool. So one of the reasons we're so thrilled to have you here is, of course, as we were just talking about, we are part of a small but robust and lively community of Oaxacan guests. We all have done work in Oaxaca, Mexico. And so I'm wearing a shirt from Mohawk. Actually, I wanted to signal that as part of our this is a shirt I bought in Oaxaca City

Speaker2: [00:10:23] Or or as some Texans like to say, in the airport wax aka

Speaker1: [00:10:28] Wax figure.

Speaker2: [00:10:31] But I didn't mean to throw your game.

Speaker1: [00:10:33] No, no, it's fine. You throw my game off all the time. That's part of a good co-hosting relationship is about. I think so. Don't mind us, Andrew. So I want to. I wanted to start, of course, with your wonderful book Instituting Nature, which is, you know, one of the most interesting studies of Mexican government bureaucracy that's out there. And I wanted to, you know, there was a point in the book, and it's about forestry and conservation and state community relationships in a town in Iceland, Juarez. I get it right, not far from Oaxaca city to the northeast. And you say in the book at one point you said one of the things I had to explain to people when I was starting this project is that, yes, Mexico does have forests. But then I thought, Here, let me, let me, let me be a little provocative and say, But does Mexico have a state? And if it does, what kind of a state is it? Because all we've been hearing up north for, especially during the Calderon period, was all about drug war, narco terror. You know, I think the Mexican state has gotten quite a bad rap or is perhaps a misunderstood beast of some kind. And so I don't know, would you be interested in weighing in with some of your thoughts about the Mexican state as an entity? What is this thing?

Speaker3: [00:11:50] Sure. Well, as you guys know, the literature on the state and anthropology is vast and deep, and there are many disagreements in it. And so in the book, I'm really thinking through my puzzlement with the state, which the state is a weird thing because on the one hand, it's everywhere, and on the one hand, it's always somewhere else. That was one of the puzzles. So and I began a rather simple minded way to just try to map out just infrastructural and human terms. Where is the state and what is it up to? So in a funny sort of way, I was just being a like a structural functional list and saying, OK, where the kinship networks, except in my case, it was where the biographies of the bureaucrats like, how did they get to be here and how long do they spend here? And where do they go? And that was just my way of dealing with this bizarre situation. And so then I came up with I realized that, well, concretely, yes, the Mexican state is very powerful. It does lots of things. It's an infrastructure, really quite massive state like all states. It promises much more than it can deliver. So this is true of the US state also.

Speaker3: [00:13:00] Really, really? Oh yes, indeed. Exactly. So, so really, there was this conflict between a vast apparatus of environmental regulations, which in theory covered, you know, everything from what was it, what direction you're going to set your agricultural fire in planned two weeks in advance to how firewood travels from the forest to the markets with multiple documents and bills of lading. The level of detail was extraordinary, right? And I was just puzzled. Well, OK, but what's really going on? So I just started following around bits of paper and seeing OK, but in fact, where does the fire would go? And the answer is it goes directly to the market, but it does not travel with documents. Fires get set, but they do not get. No one applies for permission to set a fire because it's too complicated. So. I found it helpful to think about the state as a sort of material presence that comes up in some places and disappears in other places, which is a very interesting thing for an anthropologist to study. And actually, I think that as anthropologists were supremely well equipped to follow the state around because we can be a little bit simple minded and say OK. But on this day of the week, who is acting for the state and with what capacities and who's paying attention, which is a very empirical question which might be less easy for, you know, if you stay in the capital city and just read the policy documents where you have no idea of what kind of traction does the state have upon people's fear or love or hope or right? And you have to tack back and forth between the countryside and the city to get a sense for for that.

Speaker3: [00:14:43] I don't. I've tried very hard to say this is not about Mexico not having a proper state. Right, right. And it's just about the state as it works in Mexico. Because it's easy and forestry officials and officials in Mexico often say things like we don't have a proper state like other people do. But in fact, they the experiences they have resemble or at least have some resonance with people who work for the Bureau of Land Management in the U.S. or people who work from the Italian state. So I think it's a more generic problem of the vast aspirations of the state and the very limited capacities of all states to get these promises to kind of manifest themselves concretely. Long answer Sorry. No, not

Speaker2: [00:15:32] Perfect. I mean, one of the important conversations that's been happening for the last couple of decades around anthropology of and about the state is the need to sort of disassemble the state as a as a unified, monolithic entity. So you know this this trajectory very well, I'm sure. And I wonder, though, if there aren't some ways as we're sort of looking at further and deeper environmental crisis that we might want to begin to put that state back together and to think of it, perhaps at times, you know, with all the provisos or brackets around it as something that that we might want to take or we want might want to support him as something that's a little less disassembled than the the multiple states, the heterogeneous state ness that we've been talking about in anthropology for so long. So do you see anything to that? Is there any is there any way in which we might want to recuperate the idea that there is a state or the state, whether it's in Mexico or United States or Italy or or should we keep it sort of crumbled and and and localized and.

Speaker3: [00:16:44] Well, I think that actually states there are projects that states need to carry out. And, you know, we need to sort of be able to acknowledge that not everything that states do is bad or dangerous. So that's, I think, helpful. On the other hand, empirically states, I think, have always been internally chaotic and complicated, and I don't see any sign of that ever going away. Right. So that's just the condition of I mean, it's true of universities, every organization of Arabian, you know, people say, Well, we don't really know what the people in the next office do or the office of the president. Lord only knows what they do. Right. So it's a generic feature of human social life and of bureaucracies that they are, you know, both chaotic and organized, both kind of together. And at the same time, I will say, I think that and this maybe will get to the as we move along in the conversation. I think that modern statecraft is changing and it's to do with really handling enormously complicated socio ecological systems and the modes of knowledge and certainty that modern states used to apprehend society through statistical reason and prediction literally don't work anymore and are increasingly felt not to work. So, you know, simulation modelling, scenario modeling, crisis apprehending, crisis, all of these are things which the apparatus of the state is.

Speaker3: [00:18:14] Struggling with or invariably in different places, and I think that it's probably also going to call for states to reconfigure how they present themselves to their audiences. And I think that's in motion right now, and we'll I don't know how it all works, but I think it's very interesting to watch it happening. So for me, a very telling moment was when there was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and because my ear had been primed by some reading and obsessions of mine. And I said, he said something really interesting. He said, What kind of scenarios were these people using? Hmm. Right. And a scenario is very interesting because it's a conditional, plausible account of a future that might come into being. It's nothing like the kinds of modes of prediction that states used to use and used to hold themselves accountable to. It actually comes out of Cold War, military planning and other kinds of histories, but it's very interesting when he's criticizing somebody for not imagining the future with the right kind of conditional, but also sort of broad imagination to be good managers of a technology.

Speaker1: [00:19:27] Yeah, that's true. I mean, scenarios have become increasingly important aspect of governance. I, after hitting you with those like really complicated, abstract questions about the state, I feel like we should go back maybe to the beginning, especially for people who don't know your work as well. And maybe you could talk to us a little bit about how you got interested in forestry in Mexico, conservation in Mexico in the first place. And maybe, you know, to illustrate that last point you made, maybe talk us through the transformation of the state's relationship to conservation. Sure. Through your research a little bit. So we can we can ground ourselves a bit more. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:19:59] Good, yes. So I will say, first of all, that my lifelong practice for understanding the world is walking around and looking at things. And so I was trained as a forester and I actually went to to graduate school thinking I was going to do a PhD in forest ecology. And I kind of went in through one door and came out of another, and I ended up doing a PhD in anthropology with forest ecology or forestry thrown in. And the reason why it became anthropology was, I think that most of us would think I realized that the sociocultural complexities were far more mysterious than the ecological ones, at least to me at that moment. Both are mysterious, but right. So I went to Mexico, I was going to study forests and forestry. And at that time, you know, people were talking a lot about community natural resource management, and that was looking at indigenous forest communities and the Sierra Juarez, who had managed to get control of their forests and run them quite successfully as communal businesses. After a long period in which, you know, rather rapacious logging companies had really extracted most of the benefit and done quite a lot of damage to the landscape. So these are actually pine oak forests, which have their analogs in the United States, even around us in Houston, you know its oak forest. And there's also pine different species, different relations. But there is a kind of a family relationship, so that might help both on the East Coast and on the West Coast.

Speaker3: [00:21:27] There are ecological analogs to these forests. What more can I say? So I actually ended up realizing that the reason that these communities were able to manage their forests had a lot to do with political and environmental histories. Politically, they had been very. Highly organized and even militarized during the 19th century, and they were then able to claim control of quite large territories and ecologically these were areas that had been mined quite. There were different mining areas during the 19th century and into the 20th century, so they had, if anything, they had recovered from sort of wide scale burning and logging and grazing, and they were post disturbance forests. There are forests in which fire was very important, where the dominant species are pine species that both burn and need fire for their reproduction and in which the state language was very much that fire was destructive and alien. And yet, of course, I could see evidence of fire everywhere. So what I saw. Kind of out of a textbook, but it's very surprising when textbooks turn out to be right. Right? You know that wherever there was a fire, there would be prolific growth of young pine trees. I mean, you know, you practically it was like a lawn, really. It would come back very generously. And yet the state language was that the greatest threat to the forests under all circumstances was fire and indigenous agriculturalists who were recklessly burning the forest. So I loved the sense of a contradiction between the state language and the actual material histories.

Speaker3: [00:23:17] And it's sort of like I began to think, well, there's a contradiction between the state that's busy sawing off the ecological branch that it's sitting on because if the state actually managed to prevent fires from happening, then the forest that the state is depending on for logging would disappear. But luckily, they're not succeeding. So, you know, and that was part of the puzzle. And I guess the other part of the puzzle was that it's what people want to talk about. So it was, you know, I came to study one thing, but they wanted to talk about something else, and I was quite shy and I didn't really know how to do interviews and I would talk to them about, I don't know, logging plans. Said, Yeah, but let us tell you about fires because they're really interesting. And you know, if you're an anthropologist and people want to talk about something and you don't have to, you can just write things down and ask more questions and say, and then what happened? And it turned out that fire was this thing that everyone obsessed about. They read, they talked about their neighbors, our neighboring community. They're not good people because they recklessly burn. Not like us. We fight fires, right? So it was a metaphor for moral life and goodness and hard work and environmental restoration. And it was also about transformation because fire moves landscapes from one state to another. So again, it's a way of thinking through whether transformations are good or bad. Hmm.

Speaker2: [00:24:32] I want to ask you a question about fire. But first, I want to ask you, I guess, another abstract question and that is what is a forest? And and I guess that might be from the vantage point of of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Mexican state. I mean, what what sort of falls into that purview of of of management like, you know what, what fits that rubric of management of forest? And I love the image of this little lawn of of pine trees coming up. That's just it's a really lovely image. So then you start thinking about the soil and the beetles and you know, the stone beneath or maybe the skies above. So I don't know what kind of fits into the category of forest either maybe for the state, but maybe also just for forestry or a kind of anthropological reading of of the forest.

Speaker3: [00:25:26] So, so Forest is a legal category that comes to us out of sort of medieval European forms of state landscape control insofar as medieval Europe had states as opposed to feudal polities. But so it's a legal term. And it came to stand for nature. Forests stood for nature, for a large chunk of European history and even to some degree, still now. And some of those histories travel to Mexico, but they get reworked. So in Mexico, the the way that forest laws kind of come into being in the mid-19th century, but really in the late 19th century, towards the end of the bird feeder, cattle are actually French forestry engineers who are brought there to set up this forestry school in Mexico City, and they bring the full European mode of thinking about forests, and it really inhabits the bureaucratic imagination. In fact, to this day, no one knows what a forest is not just in Mexico, but around the world. So the FAO has got this problem of defining what a forest is, and it's very weird. And it's like, What is it, 20 trees per hectare of a certain size? Or is it 50? And I cannot remember anymore because everyone struggles to use the term. And that's why, like international deforestation, statistics are very hard to understand because different countries use different terms, and it's confusing. So then what does forest mean in a country like Mexico, where various forms of Sweden agriculture are extremely important? So in Sweden, agriculture, you cut forest, you burn it, you cultivate for a few years, it grows back to forest and you come back later or pastoralism where you have mixtures of burning and trees. If you burn more, you have less trees. If you burn less, you have more trees, you have your sheep running around. Is it forest? Is it pasture? It's both. Is it forest? Is it agriculture? It's both depends on when you look at it and how so the term forest does a lot of work of obscuring process and transformation in the landscape. Right? Benito Juarez. 19th century president of Mexico, the only indigenous president of Mexico, still a hero.

Speaker1: [00:27:48] Also governor of Oaxaca,

Speaker3: [00:27:49] Also governor of Oaxaca, was born only a few miles from Eastland, and he was in fact a shepherd. He supposedly ran away to a Jakarta. I think it was a merchant, but it's somewhat a patron who would sort of shelter him and recognize his abilities, but in part because he let the sheep get out and they destroyed some neighboring fields. Right. So I actually searched really, really hard for evidence that Benito Juarez setting fires to help his sheep, which he must have done, but there's no evidence of it. But I had this fantasy that I would one day find something or other. I went through all these biographies to see because I imagine to myself that he couldn't not have been involved in burning the landscape, and it would have been so great to find that. But if anyone ever finds it, please send it my way. It would sort of tie the tie the story up very well with both state formation and the paradoxes of what actual people in the landscape do.

Speaker1: [00:28:41] Well done in the isthmus. They remember him doing a lot of burning of, you know, his main road towns. So I mean, that's probably for sheep, not for sheep and not for for, you know, any kind of local good. Yeah, yeah. But you were saying you weren't just about fire?

Speaker2: [00:28:55] Well, yeah. So Benito Juarez and his fire, I think one of the really interesting points that we see in the book that you make is that how you how you take and understand and work with fire has to do with where you set generationally right. So different generations of communities of people see fire and its utility or its fearsome ness in different ways. And we were talking last night, you're now living in a fire escape. Mm hmm. Not a fire escape, but a fire escape mentioning that, you know, what was it a couple of days ago? You looked out your office window and there's smoke everywhere billowing out of a very fine forest right in on the coast of Central California. So I know that in that context, because there's been a lot of wildfires in California, increasingly so and increasingly dramatic, I think in a lot of ways. Surely you're reading about this and hearing about it on the news and people are talking about it. Do you see any connection between, you know, the kind of managed or less managed fires in Mexico and these quote unquote wildfires that are erupting all over California as there are kind of a is there a semiotics that they share? Is there a kind of material quality that they share or their? Do you see overlaps and connections between these, these different fire worlds?

Speaker3: [00:30:17] So actually, California is I hear it's not a I don't study the California fire landscape properly and fully, but I sort of try to read a few things and understand what's going on. I would say that in the media coverage of fire, it's now well understood that fire has an ecological role in landscape process. In other words, that these are forests which in which burning can allow ecological processes to occur that ought to occur. There is often recognition that fire suppression has set us up for stronger and more intense fires. So that typically doesn't get said during a fire where they focus on disaster and the immediate impacts of fire. But later on, it begins to pop up. However, there's very little discussion of previous landscape burning traditions. So like, I don't see people talking about Native American burning or even, you know, 19th century, you know, Spanish or Mexican ranch burning, which was quite widespread. And I see people worrying about climate change and the way that it's made forests more vulnerable to fire, which I think is definitely the case, right? Mm hmm. So if anything, I would say California is less hostile to the ecological. Positive aspects of fire than Mexico was when I was doing my work now prescribed burning, for example, has been introduced to Mexico by a very interesting international network with Mexican collaborators in the last few years. But I think it's still a relatively small part of the landscape, whereas the overwhelming discursive legal understanding of fire is that it's a one way ticket to destruction and that nothing ever comes back. So that's still pretty strongly in the place.

Speaker1: [00:32:10] What do you think that's a symptom of? I mean, looking at it from through the eyes of the state, so to speak, what is the state's fear of fire about? Because, you know, again, they have scientists, psychologists working for them and so forth. It seems they would know that textbook understanding of how fire has a is it really at the end of the day, a doubt that indigenous people are capable of managing fire? Is it kind of a Prometheus myth that's kind of being smuggled in here in some way?

Speaker3: [00:32:35] That's certainly the historical part of it. Certainly the idea, the idea that indigenous people are recklessly burning the landscape sits at the heart of a Mexican environmental state making right across the 20th century. So I would say it's a what is it? You know, there are signs of change growing in different parts of the system, but it's only been in the last five to 10 years. So I know I could probably figure out the half a dozen or so people who have done the research to support that, and they're definitely there and they're telling their story. But. You know, states respond to sudden disasters. You know, one thing I learned from talking to senior officials in Mexico, but then I learned it again later by comparing notes with colleagues who study American officials, which is that, you know, senior people move from one crisis to the next, and a fire is a crisis in a disaster. And it's a moment in which order and the state have to be reaffirmed. So even if in the long term and in the day to day, people know that fires produce ecological consequences that are helpful in the moment of crisis.

Speaker3: [00:33:38] Fire is the enemy and must you know the enemy must be destroyed is simple and yet largely correct. Right? And, you know, think of the metaphor never waste a good crisis. You know, a crisis is a chance to do political work if you respond to a fire in the right way. You are seen to have been a responsible agency. You are trusted and you get budgets. The amount of money you get for firefighting is an order of magnitude greater than the amount of money you get for doing practically anything else, both in Mexico and in Italy and in the U.S., right? It's a it's just a fact of life. And I think it's about how states parasitized crisis because crisis is exciting. So if you think of statecraft, not as being the mundane, bureaucratic, ongoing knowingness which it is, but also as being a theatrical response to crisis and disaster and the budgets that can come into being and feed off disaster, you might see two different modes of state making that have different temporal cities and which in some ways don't really talk to each other.

Speaker1: [00:34:42] Right? Right. I mean, if I if I can pull on the thread of the kind of state indigenous relationships a little further, I mean, I think one of the things you show, I mean, this gets us back a bit to the question of what the whether the Mexican state is a quote unquote weak state or not. But you talk at one point at least about the the the relative strengths of the bureaucrats Oaxaca City, Mexico City, et cetera, that are involved in the governance of forestry. And then these very old, strong communal authorities. And we should mention that that I guess all or most of this forest land is held in, not in a private property regime, but in a communal property regime, which is something that's, you know, particularly typical of Oaxaca within Mexico. And there's maybe more to say about that. But so that you found in a way you had a lot of a lot of the book turns about on the politics of knowledge, if I may, or knowledge in ignorance that's going on. And in some ways, you argue at the end that knowledge and not knowledge need to be taken. Both have to be taken seriously and understood in terms of how they're produced. I wonder if you wanted to say a little bit more about that in the context, especially of how the state engages the communities and the communal authorities.

Speaker3: [00:35:57] Yes. I have to kind of pause and think back to the person that I was when I finished the book, who is no longer me. So, yeah, so certainly one thing that I realized kind of along the way was that when you study bureaucracies, they spend most of their time saying that we're all about gathering information and processing it and what what's fantastically interesting and in Mexican case was quite helpful was that it was very clear that people were gathering information but not using it. And therefore I began to think about this is not about a dysfunctional Mexican state. This is just about statecraft in general. So control of information is rhetorically important. But then what you actually do is another matter entirely. So these indigenous communities had this ongoing presence on the landscape, which stood them in good stead. So they had this attitude towards any successive state intervention along the lines of, well, things come and things go. But you know, we're still around and they're largely correct. So which is interesting because of course, the bureaucrats would say things like the communities keep changing their governing authorities and we can't figure out who to talk to. Right. But so then I actually did this. I did two kind of sets of again being like a structural function list, a little bit about I don't understand what's going on, so let me just follow the bodies.

Speaker3: [00:37:20] So I actually looked at all of the institutionalization of the Mexican Forestry Agency changed names like a dozen times in the last century. You got moved between ministries. I don't know how many times. So the bureaucrats were complaining about the instability of indigenous communities while dealing with extraordinary career instability of their own and institutional instability. And it's that shows no signs of going away. Or at least it hasn't until quite recently, right? So they in some ways were mapping their own personal dilemmas and uncertainties onto the indigenous communities who are their interlocutors, indigenous communities of no paradise. They have their internal political problems like every human organization. But what was quite clear was that they had a more enduring ongoing relationship, both to keeping things going and running their landscape, then the state. And so they were able to outlast state initiatives and imperatives just by going along with things is the best way I can put it. Sometimes doing what they were supposed to do, sometimes just ignoring it and hoping it would go away. So then how to bridge this gap between the rhetoric of state knowledge and the reality of the state being very confused and often not knowing what was going on? And I realized there's a lot of creative alliance building between communities and the state.

Speaker3: [00:38:47] And sometimes these alliances take the form of. Pretending to go along, sometimes they take the form of actually going along and doing things. And that in many places, officials are quite careful and fearful of the power of some indigenous communities, especially those who have charisma and authority and a certain amount of political clout, right? Which again, was surprising to me because if you read the paper, you would think that the state was an oppressive bureaucracy that knew everything and did everything in the forests. And then you would go to the office and you'd see this one person who had piles of documents and files and never had time to go to the forest and was desperate to find some interlocutor in the Sierra Juarez or the Sierra sir who knew something about the forest, which was more or less correct so that he or she wouldn't get in trouble for writing a document that wasn't truthful. So I realized then that not knowing what was going on was a central feature of statecraft

Speaker1: [00:39:46] And indeed is something you talk about just just quickly that you talk about this. And I think this is a kind of a provocative argument towards environmental anthropology, but maybe towards environmental studies more broadly that generally speaking, perhaps we have overestimated the the strength of the kind of apparatus of of resource management, conservation, whatever.

Speaker3: [00:40:07] Yes, I think that's that's exactly. I am now reminded where I was going with that book. I've moved on a little bit, so I have to refresh my memory and I can now look back on the person who wrote the book with interest and sympathy, which is actually quite nice because I'm less aware of the of the many flaws that I used to see, and I'm sure everyone who writes a book knows about that, right? Yeah, and it goes, it's a two part thing. One is just that. I feel that. When I started my Ph.D., we were rightly looking at the apparatus of conservation with a skeptical eye because we were realizing that conservation was not automatically a good thing. So I think political ecologists, you know, made visible the harm that both forestry and conservation organizations might do, and very rightly so. And sort of building off of that. I started out with that idea in mind, and I certainly wanted to look at it. And I then began to realize that most of these organizations are infrastructure really quite weak, right? So they have rhetorical power, but little actual ability to get things done.

Speaker3: [00:41:19] So they were a very strange kind of creature. And therefore, you know, as anthropologist, we have to be very empirical about studying these creatures and pay attention to basic stuff like I think in I can't remember the numbers, but you know, for the state of Oaxaca, there were, I don't know, seven officials and 20 sub officials for the whole state. And you know, how often could they actually visit the forest? Can they enforce any of their regulations? The answer was largely not right. And in some places, states do have the power to do these things and can do them and enforce them with, you know, violence and, you know, cause great suffering. But we need to pay attention to what's happening in different places and at different times. So that was really it's a point about method. And then it's a point about. Not letting rhetoric, state documents and even discursive apparatuses confuse you too much. They're part of the story, but you also have to sort of follow things out onto the landscape and see what actually happens. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:42:22] I mean, one of the concepts that you develop in the book is what you call uncertain authority. Yeah. Can you describe what that what that is? I mean, I think you've been sort of narrating it just in these last few minutes sort of describing it. But what is what is uncertain authority?

Speaker3: [00:42:36] What is uncertain authority? Ok, so actually, I was I would have liked to call the book something like trees of doubt, because the thing that I the thing that I got most of all, from talking to senior forestry officials, but even officials in Oaxaca is that they themselves felt like they didn't know what was going on out in the landscape or in the villages or in the forests. They felt like, Well, we don't really know what goes on over there. So they had this weird situation where they had and they produced very authoritative speeches about what the state was and what the forests were and they would do these operations. And in some sense, they were an expected genre of statecraft. They were supposed to narrate the state for its audiences as being this knowledgeable, beneficent, reasonable kind of being. I think we can probably all recognize something of that. I have to say some of the speeches were extraordinarily tedious to sit through and being who I am, if I sit through a boring speech, I start drawing pictures in my notebook and then I start wondering what would happen if I did something that I wasn't supposed to do at such a meeting. And you know, the counterfactual of what if I ask the wrong question would come to mind. Right. But the uncertain authority I realized that behind this authoritative form of expression, which they more or less all adopted in public meetings. But then I would go and talk to them afterwards, and they would say things like, Well, yes, we don't really know about those statistics. And actually, we're not too sure about many things. And then they would start to tell me their own personal biographies. The fact that they weren't sure where they would be after the next change administration, the fact that they were fearful that at least in certain certain officials were fearful that if they caused a public opposition, a protest, a public scandal of some kind, they could lose their jobs.

Speaker3: [00:44:33] And to me, it seemed a very interesting combination of this rhetorical authority with this personal sense of uncertainty and doubt. And if anything, the one feeds off the other, right? Because the more you have to sound as if you're confident but you don't really think you are, the more doubt you have when you step off the stage and you, you know, glad that's over. But what on Earth is really going on, and there's a practical part of this, because these meetings are so highly choreographed public meetings that it's an absolute certainty that no one is ever going to raise any contradictory points or say, Well, that's not right or we don't believe that. They just sort of clap politely and ask questions. So then senior officials are themselves aware that their mode of authority somehow prevents them from finding out information. So then you have this wonderful back channel information where people are sick. And I found this is not just Mexico, it's kind of everywhere where, because it's known that the channels of information flow prevent information from traveling, people will add anonymous documents. And now it's Post-it notes to the file, which have neither signature nor they're not complete. They're not dated and they can be removed, which help other officials know when a certain file is dangerous and should not be approved. But it can be removed so that there's no credible authority. There's no there's nobody can have. Nobody can be blamed for adding or removing this kind of thing from the file. Right?

Speaker2: [00:46:09] That's correct. Yeah, that's a great idea. The subterfuge of the Post-it note, right? Kind of claiming authority by putting the note there and yet subverting it at the same time because you don't have to be accountable to it, right? It's sort of unmarked.

Speaker3: [00:46:22] Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:46:25] Yeah, no, I have another question.

Speaker1: [00:46:26] Yeah. Maybe just a couple more on this in because we do want to hear about the new work you're doing to which which is following the theme of landscape to a distant and other exotic, romantic wonderful place. But I just to pick up on the on that the idea of the fragility of these bureaucrats lives and how dependent they were upon, you know, what's often been called patron client relationships in Mexico, but more specifically through the party mechanisms. Because Oaxaca is a curious place. In one way day, it was one of the most solid strongholds for the PRI, the party, the party of the institutionalized revolution, I guess. Yeah, that's right. For, I don't know, eighty years until until the most recent governorship. And so it was it was a pretty strong hold, but then also has all these decentralized kind of communal land authorities, traditional authorities to because of the large indigenous population. And you know, I always thought and we were there at a different time than you were, we were there when that pre-party state essentially crumbled and we saw how, in essence, that meant that all of the the networks that had been built up to foster, in our case, wind development simply just started to just ignore what was happening in Waqa City, ignore the state government altogether and just go directly to to the to the government where there was still the intact PRI structure. So it really gave us a sense of just how the state government could be left, you know, completely out out at sea from a really important development project. At the same time, it was being blamed for not being able to maintain order and rule of law, even though it had no control. I had no funding to even manage this. So you know that part of your book really rang true, and I just wanted to ask to what extent you think that not just the state, but in particular political parties, those kind of systems are also an important part of understanding what political power is in Mexico as regards forest conservation and so forth.

Speaker3: [00:48:20] So I think things were changing and are changing. So, you know, in some sense, this is already a little bit what was and I don't know quite what is anymore because I haven't been looking closely at, you know, the forms of client villages. I'm a bit wary of the patron client literature because it sometimes is deployed as accusing Mexico or Italy, where I now work for being non modern and backward, whereas as an anthropologist in the American Academy, I think that patient client systems are alive and well in our actual professional practice. Not necessarily in a bad way, but just in the sense of the of the professor apprentice relation which. Has its has its links with the patron client? It's different, but it's it's a family friend.

Speaker1: [00:49:11] You have to remember we're still at a medieval profession. And you know, and that's we carry that through in terms of our conception of ourselves in all sorts of ways. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:49:20] So I think that I ended up with the way the patron client stuff works for me is in terms of the effects and how it all feels and these sort of these kinds of what it feels like to be in a mode of dependence and fictive friendship with someone who is both your friend and your political patron who to whom you owe a kind of deference, but from whom you expect to get things right. That's the, you know, I was that was how I understood what it felt like. It's very hard to map out these patient client relations in actual practice of who did what, for who. Right. So you more like you see it in conversations of how people talk about each other, but you never or at least I never got to see, you know, someone doing a deal right or the kind of deal that gets this whole apparatus moving along. So, OK, the breakdown of the Oaxaca, you know, state control, you know, environmental questions. But forests questions in Mexico have always been the prerogative of the federal government. Right. So the Oaxaca state was trying to rhetorically get control of forests, but had very little resources to do so when I was doing my fieldwork. I think that's still largely the case. So the main budget of the state of Oaxaca at that time was actually the education budget, which is why when there was that eruption around the apple, the teachers protesting against the governor a few years back, it was around education because that was the major resource of the state government was around education. Wind energy, it sounds like it got more involved with the federal apparatus rather, as far as always, were. But of course, I'm going to get to read about it in your book and I'm going to say, Oh, there's all these things that I didn't learn that I would like to know. And this is one of the very nice things of working on sort of environmental or climate change questions as they

Speaker1: [00:51:21] Come on your podcast to talk about this.

Speaker3: [00:51:23] Absolutely. Well, no, that's how it's going to have to work, but that we're all working on different parts of this enormous beast. And so we need each other. There's a there's a quality of collaborative ethnography in this, and I know you guys are doing a collaborative or a comparative collaborative thing. And so in working on, say, climate change or the Anthropocene, I feel like there's so many people working on different parts of it, and I just need them desperately because I can't make sense of it without their help. So, you know, the wind question and the forest question are related and yet different.

Speaker2: [00:51:56] Mm hmm. Absolutely. Well, we're all in this boat together, actually, whether it's, you know, whether it's floating or sinking. I wanted to go back to the performance of authority. So it creates this kind of precariousness for the subject him or herself, right? It's a kind of a claim to authority that's not even real in your own mind. And it brings to mind this question of for whom authority is being performed right. Is it being performed for the state? Is it being performed for indigenous communities? Is it being performed for, you know, U.N. meetings, international collaborations of NGOs and nonprofits? There's all kinds of ways in which you can imagine this authority unfolding. And one of the projects, actually, a couple of years ago, I wrote a paper that I think I suspect you were one of the peer reviewers for. I'm not 100 percent sure, but I do think and now you're nodding. So now I know

Speaker1: [00:52:50] This is total collusion, guys. Your whole peer review system is falling down around us. It's been ruined.

Speaker2: [00:52:55] That's OK. You can edit that part out.

Speaker1: [00:52:57] Yeah, we'll just going to we're in a censor that.

Speaker2: [00:52:59] But so but the whole the idea that I was working with at that time was what I was calling Anthropocene Eco Authority, and it was trying to examine these different ways. That authority gets established over the environment, over ecological systems and how different groups of people or individuals are able to establish that. And the audience for whom that authority was being performed was very important. So among indigenous populations that are trying to preserve their local ecosystems like present and past and future, there are, you know, a set of bodies that they're performing that eco authority to. And it's, you know, the international news media. It is non-profits, organizations, it's Greenpeace, et cetera, in terms of how the state is trying to perform its authority. You know, you have it at the level of local to state, maybe performing for the federal level. In the case of these wind developers who are trying to develop the wind parks, their claim to authority had is a kind of global dimension where it's speaking to these larger conversations about climate change and remediation. And we need to sort of save the world through, you know, placing wind parks where we have very, you know, windy conditions. So I don't know that there's a question here. I just wanted to hear you think out loud a little bit about how how these different authorities get, not just establish, but in which direction they're being performed. Mm hmm.

Speaker3: [00:54:34] That's a really great question. So. At the time that I wrote the book, I hadn't thought about this as much as I should, and it would later on actually through my colleague Dan Rutherford, who knows about publics, I began to realize that, you know, the thing that I thought was weird about Mexico was a generic feature of performance in general, which is that you don't really know who the public is for. Your performance is indeterminate, and that is what creates the possibility for the public to sustain your performance. So weirdly, the indeterminacy of audience is actually central to authority. So this hereto for me has I realized there's a kind of inversion of the logic of knowledge and expertise for me? Because, you know, classically stz modes of science and technology studies, modes of thinking about knowledge have been something like, you know, you build your facts and you have a solid network or a solid web of relations to sustain it. And if you have a strong network, you're in business and everyone believes you. And I sort of began to realize that I felt like it was almost the opposite, which is that knowledge and expertise actually are this performance in relation to what is not known, what is indeterminate, what yet might come to be. And so I saw these parallels between bureaucratic authority and scientific expertise. So and it's about the liveliness and the non unknowability of the world, right? Which I think again, are parallels between efforts by officials to control on an uncertain world, efforts by climate scientists to understand indefinite complexity or ecological modelers or, you know, all the way down. So I think that Sheila Jackson talks about the songlines of risk, right? But is there is a sense that expertise is about narrating a journey from strangeness and non understandable entity into a mode of certainty.

Speaker3: [00:56:33] That's expertise, then becomes situating yourself between mystery and doubt and something that's credible and knowable, right? So again, this movement from the unknown to the known, which is the unknown and the known that are positioned in relation to each other, which is maybe a little bit of an abstract answer. So I think what you described just now about the different audiences that are being interpolated, I think it's a structural feature of performance that we hope we know who's paying attention, but we never know for sure. And it's the not knowing for sure is the nature of performance. But I have thought a lot about genre around these questions of bureaucratic authority, and it seems to me that failure of genre has high consequences and that bureaucrats know this very well. And both in my earlier and then later work on climate change, you know, failure of genre seems to have catastrophic consequences for individuals and for careers. You know, in other words, if you don't manage to perform the authoritative knowledge in the right mode, you might lose your job, which is a very concrete kind of concern. And empirically, I think that this is quite often the case. So if you think of bureaucracy as theater and if the audience does not clap, then you know you could have bad consequences. It's it's helpful because you begin to see. The amount of stagecraft that goes in to producing, you know, the state and the amount of doubt on the part of the stage manager and the director and the actors and the the sense of relief when it all comes off and the terrible consequences when it doesn't, it's quite helpful.

Speaker1: [00:58:20] That's why that's why Alexei, your checks study of the the last years of the Soviet Union is so great because of how because of the fear. And you know, in some ways, tedium is preferable. But but people would you know, if you were in the Communist Party Youth League, you would just take out, you know, an old report that had been given rather than write a new one because everything was very formulaic and true to tone. So you would just kind of cut and paste together. Excerpts So the entire language of power became this weird kind of pastiche of of old formulas and what they used to be called in Russian spoken and language. That's fantastic. I think all bureaucracies probably have a bit of that. But listen, we have been so monopolizing this conversation about Oaxaca, which makes a lot of sense given the who the three of us are and what we've done. But we really also want to hear about your work in Italy, which sounds fascinating. We we're hearing a bit about it yesterday. So do you want to make the pivot for us and how did you get from Oaxaca to Italy?

Speaker3: [00:59:12] Sure. So, so while I was finishing the book on Oaxaca and Mexican forests, I was also beginning a project on sort of climate change and forests. And so in most of the tropical and developing world, protecting forests has been a central feature of climate change policy because when you burn forests, carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere. To put it quite simply. And in the case of Mexico, preventing the burning of forests or the destruction of forests through logging, which comes to more or less the same thing. But it's mainly burning or land clearance came to be a central feature of how climate change policy was going to be adopted. They were also doing other things in cities, but that was not what I was working on. So I started working on this forest protection in the name of climate change, and it was being done through payments for environmental services. The idea was that you were going to pay landowners for not burning their forests and you were paying them for the carbon that their forests were absorbing, thereby reducing climate change. And they're called Redd, and now they called Redd Plus. And probably they're called something else in some circles at this point. But it's a comes out of the UN treaty process. I could give you the acronyms. It's like our follow agriculture, forests and other land use. I mean, the acronym soup is thick and fast, right? But the logic of it underneath it all is this is the presumption is that poor rural people in the tropics are destroying forests and that if we pay them money, they will stop doing it.

Speaker3: [01:00:50] It's a very eminently market based, neo liberal approach, and I was studying that for a while and I had been thinking about doing work in Italy for some time anyway because I partly grew up there and I know quite a lot about the Italian landscape, just from having worked as an agricultural labourer and there and selling wine and all kinds of things. But then I began to confront this very strange paradox that in tropical countries, you pay people not to burn forests. Hypothetically, although actual implementation has been slow and thin on the ground. But let's pretend like it's actually happening. And in developed countries like Italy and even the U.S., the premise has been that forests can be burned to produce, say, electricity in order to prevent climate change. So there's this paradox where you pay poor people not to burn forests to prevent climate change, but you support rich people to burn forests to prevent climate change, which is a strange paradox, right? So I thought to myself, Well, I need to bring the two the two modes of thinking forest in relation to climate in relation to each other. So I actually thought, well, I'll do a comparative project on Mexico and Italy to make this contradiction come alive. Of course, once I started doing it, life got more complicated. It's practically speaking very hard to do a bi continental, bi national ethnography. So I thought, OK, I'll do an Italy book and I'll do some articles on the Italy Mexico comparison, which I am actually working on. Then, of course, once I got to Italy, I got sucked into other things and projects change and mutate in good ways.

Speaker3: [01:02:29] So just to say the comparison of the two is still important to me because what I realized then is that how forests are modelled and how these models are linked to the nation state is one of the reasons why, you know. Destroying forests is what you do in Italy to prevent climate change and why protecting them is what you do in Mexico to prevent climate change. It's all about the temporal duration of the modelling and it's about the futures that you imagine you're preventing. So in Italy, in Mexico, you say? Indigenous people would be destroying forests, but we're paying them not to. In Italy, its forests would be growing even more than they already are. We can take away some of that excess and burn it and get rid of fossil fuel plants that we would have built. So hypothetical futures are being linked to landscapes in order to justify these diametrically opposed biomass energy or forest protection policies. At the time, I thought it was weird and shocking, and now I'm realizing that thinking about hypothetical futures as I kind of briefly gestured towards earlier, is now becoming a central feature of statecraft and environmental statecraft. You know, more specifically, so it means that the techniques of political anthropology, anthropology of the state are actually really critical to making sense of and, you know, environmental futures because the environmental futures contain imaginations about the state, about the citizen, about trust in the state, about fear of the state, and it's all there in the ways that models move into policies.

Speaker2: [01:04:14] I kind of brings us back to the scenarios that we mentioned before, and it's kind of living in that that future subjunctive tense. Isn't it the possibility of what might be and sort of expecting the risk and planning around how that might unfold?

Speaker3: [01:04:29] Yes, that's exactly right. So then once I got to Italy, I I got I was interested in landscape histories and in how these histories inform or don't inform, you know, climate forest policies. So in fact, the landscape histories in Italy are extremely interesting because the Italian landscape, like many Mediterranean landscapes, was actually has been managed for a very, very long time, right? So we can say 3000 years of agriculture, of terrorist building and of complicated kinds of tree crop management systems. So I was looking writing now about chestnut cultivation, pine nut cultivation, to some extent, you know, olive and vine growing. And the point about this is that these traditions of landscape management. Are alive in how people interpret the causes of climate change and its consequences. So in Italy right now, when I talk to people about climate change, I kind of come at it sideways. I don't go in and say I am doing research on climate change. I usually say I'm looking at what's happening in forests and we talk about that. And then towards the end, I say, So what about climate change? And almost everybody says we're not really sure what climate change is. Hmm. Ok, but then they say, but weather is a problem. And I go, how is weather a problem? And they say, Well, we have these big rain events which cause floods and landslides. And the reason we have floods and landslides and I'm conflating a lot of conversations, but is that the landscape is not being cared for properly. And I said, Oh, what's being cared for properly? And he said, Well, the the the canals and drains are not being kept clean, i.e.

Speaker3: [01:06:15] they have too much vegetation in them and the landscape is not being the trees aren't being cut properly. So the understanding in Italy is that if trees get too big, they fall over and cause landslides. And if there aren't enough trees, there are landslides. So landslides and movement of water across the landscape are contemporary political questions around which the state is held accountable. Right. So the tradition of thinking about landscape is something that you produce and stabilize through. Tree management is of contemporary relevance, and it has a particular relevance to biomass energy because the Italian state kind of maybe brilliantly, maybe less so interpreted its tree, its international climate change obligations to reduce its carbon emissions. And they said, Well, the thing we're going to do is we're going to set up biomass energy plants all over the country and they are going to they're not that big as electricity plants go. They're like, you know, they don't get as high as a gigawatt. They're like 800 megawatts, which apparently for electricity people is no big deal, but for landscapes is a huge deal. And they because they thought, Well, we are going to reduce our carbon emissions. So there's this nice mismatch between the Italian state's desire to prevent climate change by addressing atmosphere and Italian public's interest in addressing climate change, by stabilizing landscapes and forests and preventing erosion or landslides and floods. Right? So rather diametrically not interests that don't meet, right? And then in Italy, people have distrusted by mass energy plants because they fear that any burning industrial waste. They fear they may get controlled by the mafia or by the Camorra or by the ndrangheta or whatever.

Speaker3: [01:08:08] I think that they are right to fear these things. Right. So trust in the state and fear of what the state might do and what state elites might do in collaboration with organized crime have everything to do with the credibility of biomass energy, right? So the question of statecraft comes in to the question of biomass energy. And then finally, there's the question of the models that make biomass energy seem sensible. And I've been working with I'm working now with two different ecological modeling groups and sort of trying to show how the kind of historical ecology or natural history of landscapes that I do might broaden the kinds of futures that modelers are concerned with. So, for example, in this area of forests between Pisa and Luca, where I've been working, two different rounds of chestnut blight came in and practically wiped out low elevation chestnut forest. So that means we know in the historical record that disastrous disease events can cause very rapid ecosystem change. But ecological modelers? Don't incorporate that into their models, because they just don't know about it, so I and an assistant are sort of providing that scenario of disastrous and rapid environmental change and then asking the modelers how would that make a difference to carbon absorption or how would that make a difference to the ways that species are supposed to move in relation to climate change? With the idea being that we as anthropologists, we are rather undisciplined, which is a good thing, thank God. Yes, and we have modes of curiosity that can broaden or complicate the imaginations of these ecological modelers and the stories about the future that they bring into being.

Speaker2: [01:09:51] So are they willing to take that input then and place it into the model?

Speaker3: [01:09:55] So far, yes, you know, it's in motion, but so far, yes, partly because modellers already do this to some degree, so they kind of know. I would say in general, and this is where I would say the modes of knowledge of. Modern science have changed quite quickly in the last 15, 20 years because. Modelling has become central to the practice of, you know, ecologists and biologists and practically every scientific discipline, and of course, modellers know that what they do is not prediction. It's a kind of subjunctive mode of attention to futures. A good model is not necessarily one that predicts well, but one that gives you a causal account of the world that makes sense according to your understanding of the biophysical processes. Right. So I mean, prediction is good, but sometimes prediction is less helpful than understanding complexity. Right? And I had an interview with an ecologist with a with a I guess he's an ocean ocean science person at Santa Cruz. And I said, so modelling is empirical storytelling. And he said, Yeah, that's right. Right. So I think that kind of complexity is an increasing feature of the environmental sciences, and it's very properly something that we, as anthropologists can contribute to because we've been dealing with complexity for quite a long time and we can have a more collaborative and less, maybe less oppositional relationship to the natural sciences. I think it's very different from what, you know, foresters were doing in 1960, something new in the world there that we don't really understand. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [01:11:38] Are you going to ask? Well, I just want to. I just was going to very quickly follow up on it just as a final point for me that, you know, I think that there is something, as you say, that is kind of nice about this hypothetical turn in a way when you think of it in comparison to the kind of deep technocratic imaginations of the middle of the 20th century, this idea that we don't have all the answers and that actually we're trying to think through the complexity of systems that we might be open even to listening to what anthropologists have to say. At the same time that I know publicly speaking, whether you're talking about citizens or government, there is increasing pressure upon scientists precisely not to do that, but to predict and to give us, you know, let us know exactly what we're facing and you know, and then a frustration when science isn't predictive. So there's a kind of a double bind there that I think is, I mean, again, that we can solve it here in this podcast, but just something to be read into the record, so to speak.

Speaker3: [01:12:32] I completely agree, and I think that we need anthropologists of the science policy interfaces as they're called to understand this weird relations between when scientists inform policy and policymakers inform scientists and they tell each other's stories and they might be changing or they might be the same, or you might be getting worse, I don't know.

Speaker2: [01:12:54] Well, I don't know this maybe taking us backward a little bit, but I'll ask it anyway. And that was the idea of landscape. Mm hmm. And so I'm curious about that as a as a kind of the conceptual work that it's doing. I imagine that that is the term that people are using and Italy when they're speaking to you. But I wonder what the difference is from your point of view or maybe from what you've heard from people between landscape, as with a kind of horizon all vista. Apparatus that it involves right versus land or versus a forest, or it's interesting to me that people are kind of talking about, you know, mudslides or these, these different catastrophes of of the land. But talking about in terms of landscape. Mm hmm. So.

Speaker3: [01:13:44] Well, I would say that landscape is is the is a basket that I'm using to grasp many things that are going on. I've actually been doing quite a lot with both the methods of natural history and with drawings to understand. How we struggle, how we struggle to describe living and non-living beings and their relations, so, you know, so I started with trees and then I got into trees and they're pruning and grafting practices and into the soils and the terraces that are built to sustain the trees, right? And. You know, for Chestnut, there are 80 varieties in Lucchesi alone. And then there are many, many technical terms for the shaping of trees and how trees should be formed, there are aesthetic judgments about your neighbor's trees. There are moral judgments about the laziness or the capacities of your neighbor. Right. So, you know, people read off the form of landscape or the form of trees or the form of terraces. Stories about his, about the past and about the present, right? So. In some sense, I'm actually sort of suggesting that, and I'm following really, you know, lines of work in, among others, my colleague and Singh, but that anthropology can kind of return to a conversation with field natural history, which was present maybe earlier on in the discipline or it could have been present if certain paths had gone in other ways, right? It's a broadening of what counts as evidence for making. Anthropological arguments, I will say that I was I've always done this kind of landscape reading and forest reading and reading the histories of forests. But I didn't feel like I could bring it as a respectable kind of argument into my ethnography as much as I now do. So I'm eternally grateful to the kind of groundwork that was done by people like Donna Hathaway, which made anthropology more comfortable for people like me, which I think has been tremendous. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [01:15:54] Mm hmm. Well, more so than usual. I want to say this is hopefully just the first part of a long conversation that we will have with you. But I think we're going to have to leave it there because sir, you have to get to lunch and and but thank you so much for coming on the podcast for for sharing all of this remarkable research with us, and we're certainly going to be on the lookout for the book. Does it have a provisional title the next one yet?

Speaker3: [01:16:21] Oh, does it have a provisional title? It was going to be plant politics, but now I'm not sure because it's plants and soils and waters and climates. So if you guys can come up with a better title, I will be entertaining, you know?

Speaker1: [01:16:36] Well, maybe we can crowdsource that. If anyone wants to send in anything to send it into

Speaker2: [01:16:40] The or we could do some brainstorming when we do the intro.

Speaker1: [01:16:43] Ok to do.

Speaker3: [01:16:44] Excellent. Well, certainly it's in motion. But how plants come to be political and to allow people to imagine forms of politics is part of it.

Speaker2: [01:16:53] Cool. Great. Nice.

Speaker1: [01:16:54] Very good. Terrific. Then with that, we will bid you ado until next time. Yes.

Speaker3: [01:17:00] Thank you for great questions. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:17:01] Thank you, Andrea.