NONSOVEREIGNTY: DESIGNING POLITICAL ECOLOGIES IN PUERTO RICO
2018
Making people
The advent of postcolonial theory in the 1970s and 1980s brought the realization that liberal political philosophy was guilty of masking, even erasing, the social and political histories of many peoples around the world. Since then it has become apparent not only that political and social histories were displaced, but that whole environments, entire ecologies were subject to degradation, deflection, exploitation, and ruin. What has emerged to confound that dominant Euro-American white male historical imagination? How have these environmental erasures and displacements been addressed, and by whom? Puerto Ricans, I suggest, have some ideas about this.
In Puerto Rico, the longitudinal event of imperialism entangled more groups, motives, and interests than the vast international corporation-government complex that takes the brunt of the blame. Smallholders, plantation owners, tutelary indigenous communities, and even conservation groups all entered into power-bargaining, with colonial militias being replaced by board members, scientists, anthropologists, and NGOs. The imperial objective was to increase economic production through the appropriation of the subject country’s biophysical resource.
The multiple trajectories of human-environment relations in Puerto Rico are not easy to trace, for they are long, braided histories. They involve a collectivization of powers that cross and re-cross economic, linguistic, and biophysical terrains in the ongoing construction of what we might call regional subjectivities. For colonization produces not only commodities such as oil and sugar, but also social relations, minds, values, norms, needs, desires, and indeed, bodies. This we have learned. Like the rest of us, Puerto Ricans think, perceive, act, feel, and develop within the continually evolving, interactive milieu of our shared social ecology. It creates us and we create it. There is not even a separable “us” and “it.” Life and landscape make each other.
Not only is this entanglement shaped by long term patterns of co-evolution, it is also inflected dramatically by sudden short-term events. In the evolution of biopolitical movements, the colonized subject has agency, the framework of colonialism is built together, and an event of extreme significance can change the course of becoming. This is the context within which we may consider the case of Puerto Rico. Let us try, first, to reconstruct the co-creation of subjectivity by means of an imagined example.
In the late-nineteenth century, Gabriela Moreno’s great grandparents farmed in the western highlands of Puerto Rico, just west of Utuado. Poor, mixed-blood peons, they were subsistence farmers, the now-romanticized jibaro. Rice, corn, plantain, green beans, and sweet potatoes surrounded their shack, and a few coffee trees bore heavily in the shade of the plantains. While most of their neighbors cash-cropped coffee, the plant Gabriela’s bisabuelos grew for sale was tobacco, known as the poor man’s crop. Running through the gardens chickens, two or three goats, and always a brood of pigs returned some fertility to the clay soils and provided protein for a family whose increase, as observed by nineteenth century science writers, could be attributed to the natural fertility of Puerto Rican women.
The gardens required no machinery or capital and had low production costs. Working and feeding their family, the couple formed the nucleus of an extended Moreno settlement consisting, like most mountain coffee haciendas, of a few other huts and other families growing the same crops on the same steep slopes lashed by the same seasonal rains. When the season was good they hired Africans and mestizo day laborers to help. At this time, Spanish rule was less despotic and more liberal.[1] There was a life to be had. As a little girl, Gabriela’s great-grandmother chased the chickens for the pot, and waited for something to happen.
By the 1890s, the northern and southern lowlands were mostly sugar. Land-hungry, rapidly industrializing corporate plantations established villages of wage-laborers, of whom there were never enough, the sugar work being so labor intensive. Enslaved Africans were imported. There were a lot of Africans—eighty thousand by the 1890s. Unable to afford large numbers of slaves, the old landowners, such as the Moreno family, became sharecroppers. But even as tobacco held on, the coffee market was changing. South American countries were providing roasts that the US market preferred over the strong Puerto Rican bean. Working for quantity, the large coffee estates felled forest, replaced subsistence crops, and planted the heavy-cropping robusta species in the hills.
When her grandparents came down from the mountains and the US took over from Spain, Gabriela’s father, seven years old, was already laboring on a sugar plantation. The global coffee market had fallen so quickly that his people—highlanders too—had been sucked out of the deep, forested valleys to work in San Juan and Arecibo, the sugar capitals of the north coast plains. Like the coffee adventure, the sugar boom declined as the market diversified and the tariffs came on and tax breaks came off. By World War I the sugar industry in Puerto Rico was pretty much over, and little Gabriela rode to the city on a cart drawn by horses. Her mother brought her thin children to a flimsy shack on the south side of the San Juan finger, in the Puerta de Tierra, where the mangroves grew through thick, still pulp.
Gabriela was raised in an urban shack. By the middle of her teens she was working in the old town, ladling her mother’s old time criollo sauce onto mofongos for visitors to La Forteleza. Gabriela was caught between two futures that were being touted for Puerto Rico. Her hero, the populist politician Luis Muñoz Marín, wanted Puerto Rico to remain with the United States but develop its own “personality.” His adversary, Albizu Campos, was a firebrand who preached struggle as the only antidote to US capitalism. But Gabriela had a tough upbringing. She liked the money tourists and marines brought to the café. She joined the populares (“Bread! Land! Liberty!”) and became a subject of the new American Commonwealth. A citizen. When Muñoz Marín submitted to Operation Bootstrap (“a godsend!”), it was to develop industry, to breed dollars in the arrabal like pigs and chickens, and to send the hardened, moribund old-fashioned agricultural sector packing. Gabriela was ashamed of the overcrowded Puerta de Tierra and desired a better house in a better district. She moved to Santurce first, as part of the postwar slum clearance program, and then got relocated to a public housing project in Condado, a residenciale where she met Francisco, the dealer. Francisco brought money and children. The 1960s meant less draggy work, a small garden courtyard, guns, lots of men around for cards and mofongo, and life in the black market. A Mercedes parked on the street under the ceiba tree. Then Francisco went to jail.
Gabriela got a job in a pharmaceutical company filing records. She was able to send her daughter to the University of Puerto Rico, where she met a red-bearded Irishman in her psychology class. She brought him home. “We’re going to buy the house next door,” Gabriela was told. “They’re really cheap right now.” So they bought a little house with a garage and rehabbed it into a bed and breakfast. Gabriela, now in her sixties, ran it with her dog Jerry while visitors trooped through: Americans, Australians, Germans, Canadians, Clarke, Wendy, Rudy, Jacqueline, Rod … It was good money. Then Irma and Maria visited, making their payments with surge tides and gales.
Off the grid?
Since the turn of the twentieth century, the United States in Puerto Rico has been creating producers and consumers alike. The construction of subjectivities is so powerful and pervasive that it is not possible for local identities to be established outside of, and protected from, the global machinations of capital and empire.[2] And yet, especially in small towns in rural areas, there is a galvanic history of political resistance within the all-consuming apparatus of Puerto Rico’s liberal political economy. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, obvious environmental degradation, a deteriorating quality of life, and increasing pollution led to the development of geographic and environmental planning as strategies of opposition. A string of activist successes occurred, from halting the mining of copper deposits in the central and western parts of the island to the establishment of the 1980s Casa Pueblo organization, which was developed to lead the citizen movement against proposals for strip-mining. Objections to the proposal for a superport on Mona Island, a designated nature reserve, were extraordinarily effective. Resistance to controversial energy-generating projects throughout the following decades grew as the imperialist, extractivist proposals multiplied. The Cogentrix cogeneration plant proposal in Mayaguez in the late 1980s was stopped, as was a proposal for an incineration and conversion plant in the agricultural Coloso Valley in Aguada. Since 2015, environmental groups have been fighting a similar development in Arecibo, for an incineration and energy plant that would significantly impact soils, water resources, and public health. In the last fifteen years, two major energy transportation projects, the Southern Pipeline and the Northern Pipeline, have faced well-orchestrated opposition.[3] On the basis of their successful resistance to environmentally unsound and socially unjust projects, many of Puerto Rico’s environmental organizations have won prizes and awards.
The much-criticized large-scale systems of the global food industry are actually the source of local food security in Puerto Rico. Since eighty percent of the island’s edible produce is imported from the United States, it is a fragile security. The increasing abundance of imported food has caused oversupply, an imbalance of benefits, an ineffective and environmentally problematic waste stream, and a host of illegal corporate entanglements that are difficult to unravel, even if the global collective wanted to. More importantly for the issue of citizenship, borenquinos have become separated from the lands that sustain their social structure.
By 2017, many Puerto Ricans were asking if it was possible to Live Off the Grid. But the logic is irresistible. If the political economy of global capital encompasses everything then, ipso facto, you cannot live off the grid. There is nothing external to the decentered and deterritorialized global apparatus that now creates identity and place. This seems to put Puerto Rico in an awkward position:
Puerto Rico We want you to hand the power back to us.
United States We do not have the power. The power is in the hands of the world financial system to which we all contribute and from which we all benefit.
Then came the significant event. The crisis that resulted from Hurricane Maria awakened a monster. It has been an opportunity to “envision, imagine and rewrite Puerto Rico,” as activist Rosa Clemente describes it.[4] What could this new, imagined community be? How do we get there? Is there to be a goal with specific objectives, a strategy? Or are we looking at some other kind of generative reformulation of the conditions of life in Puerto Rico? Will it be like the social protests that have emerged spontaneously in the open-ended space of global activism? Clemente demands more rebellious behavior of her fellow borenquinos, not “scripted protests” or “political theater.” She is assertive and direct. Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, she declares, should come back to Puerto Rico and fight for water. “Water is life.”[5]
Maria “pushed the needle,” Clemente says, and a kind of resubjectification is rapidly occurring. Borenquinos on the ground are reorienting political education and leading in the reconstruction of the collective national narrative. Americans, they say, want a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans (in order to conduct business unopposed). “They will never do the right thing.”[6]
Resurgence
Three critical, hyperlinked initiatives are evolving around a new political ecology that existed prior to Maria, but which the hurricane crystallized into a movement with an agenda. Step one: retake the smallholdings and rebuild the agroecological knowledges that drove the pre-American economy of the highlanders. Shift fresh, organic produce to market. This is agency. Step two: connect the agroecological farms scattered around the islands to each other, to form an island-wide coalition. This is building together, creating the collective. Step three: link the endogenous generation of food security to the struggle for political independence. This is resubjectivization.[7]
Knowing that political independence does not imply or cause economic independence, these already-active individuals and organizations are, after hurricane Maria, forming a loose network of farms and place-based resistance groups. Brigada Solidaria del Oest, for instance, a community initiative self-managed by comrades of different ages, focuses on the development of creative spaces through social struggle. Amigas de MAR, another example, is an environmental organization founded in 1995 with the purpose of protecting Puerto Rico’s natural resources through educational awareness and the reporting of environmental crimes.
These groups include horticulturalists, farmers, university researchers, artists, and political activists. They are attracting the scientific and technical support they need to take advantage of the fruitful capacity of the local soils and to build logistics and infrastructure appropriate for the distribution of their products. A new umbrella collective, JuntaGente, aims to bring diverse organizations together for political action. Its website is a virtual call-to-arms.[8] Canny, enthusiastic, ecological entrepreneurs are investigating new ways to turn Puerto Rico’s abundant natural resource into generators not only of food, but of energy and clean water. Their goals are to build a healthy local supply-and-demand economy within the larger context of global markets.
An agriculture-led model of land and labor sovereignty has been advanced for decades by La Organizacíon Boricuá de Agricultura Ecólogica, which is a member of the Climate Justice Alliance. Jesús Vázquez, an ecologist who works for this agroecologica group, says: “We can feed the people with sustainable small-scale practices that do not harm the environment, that promote resilience within the environment and within the community.” [9]Organizations like the Brigadia Solidaria, Amigas de MAR, Casa Pueblo in Adjuntas, and the eco-educational Orocova Farm are connecting the land they cultivate to the fight for self-determination. They want to free their country from foreign domination by developing food and energy security.
And they are creating an agricultural renaissance. For the first time in thirty years, Puerto Rican consumers are buying rice, vegetables, plantains, and pineapples produced on the island. Food is being grown and sold locally, keeping the money in Puerto Rico and establishing new networks of plants and skills. Local demand, a renewed focus on farms from local leaders, and increased government incentives are encouraging families to develop their ecological resource base. According to the US Department of Agriculture, more than seventeen hundred new farms have begun operations—lettuces, beans, peppers, herbs and other vegetables are being raised, and coffee production is at a new high.[10] Aquaculture and hydroponics are being explored. The physical footprint of Agroponics Cosecha farm, for instance, which is located on a hillside near Caguas, is very small because no land or soil is required to grow product. Instead, the tightly-packed plant roots receive nutrition from a constant flow of water filtered in three large tanks full of tilapia fish.[11] All these new production units are supplying to supermarkets, restaurants, and farmers markets—the number of farmers markets tripled from 2012 to 2016.
Citizenship
A collective vision is slowly coming into focus, but there is still a way to go. As these communities connect with each other they begin the transition to an interactive exchange and market economy that can provide goods and services in a way that the foreign investment-driven capital economy of Puerto Rico cannot.[12] But what is this movement cohering around, if anything? I visited biologist Alvia Menendez-Ackerman in her department at the University of Puerto Rico, Piedras, to see if she could tell me how the Puerto Rico government is supporting the agrarian renaissance. She leaned forward in her chair. “In terms of a plan for Puerto Rico, most people are in the dark. There is a lack of transparency from the government, except we can see they still put economic growth first, when it’s really about quality of life.”[13] Menendez-Ackerman insisted that it is the “agrarian collectivities” that are organizing to attain independence for the basics such as food, electricity, and water. At these sites of power (my term, but what the United States government would call “critical infrastructure”) the revolution is occurring in Puerto Rico as social and cultural capital is re-made.
Citizenship is not an urban condition. Even the ancient Greeks, with their agoras and townhouses, knew this. The basic geographical unit of Greek life was the deme, a territory which focused on the polis but included both the town and the productive countryside that supplied it with food.[14] In the Eclogues Virgil gave an account of the relationship between the human passions (subjectivity + affect) and the natural world. His Georgics show how those passions can channel natural systems into a specific type of production through labor. Combined, the Eclogues and the Georgics give us the agroecological: labor + landscape. Borenquinos have found a program to make themselves into citizens of their own environment. It’s not a question of localism. The local is a western idea. The reformulation of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the productive ecologies in which it is embedded is an autocatalytic sharing ecology of agriculture that exists inside the democratic model of life. It puts pressure on neoliberal versions of democracy and citizenship that legitimize extractive and unsustainable resource use and ignore alternative models of organization of social organization.[15]
Shared projects can create a bond among historically different people if their differences are respected. We move from individual identity through shared projects to multi-centered forms of governance where citizenship is exercised at diverse levels and in a multiplicity of ways. The Puerto Rican experiment is not a return to subsistence living. Rather, it is a re-articulation of the resource base in a new configuration, as a networked ecology of goods mapped on to the existing market economy, and working within the existing institutional field. By constructing new land use practices and new subjectivities, farmers hope to subvert the existing configurations of power. Through persistence, and the development of well-constructed interventions, a common political ecology can be composed, based on difference and activism, on interaction and negotiation.
Such a project is in no way guaranteed, though. It is crucial that the growth-driven techniques of capitalist production are not re-inscribed in the social ecology of Puerto Rico as a national strategy for decolonization. The machinery of imperialism can never be deployed for anti-imperialist objectives. Moreover, the outcomes of multi-evolutionary, self-generating operations cannot be predicted. Perhaps a strategy that incorporates bifurcations in its schematic planning can develop a robustness, an eagerness even, for unpredictable events. Like rainforests and wetlands, these agroecological systems may just thrive on disturbance. And then, there is the big question of whether the re-articulation of imperial structures of management and control can really be achieved through self-organization. While the lesson of the Arab Spring might seem to be “no,” we need not accept that institutionalization is imperative.
Instead of generalizing from these limited examples, we should allow ourselves to become enchanted by their potential. Following Chantal Mouffe, we can say that Puerto Ricans are identifying “nodal points of power” and re-arranging them into new assemblages.[16] They are calling on their people to be involved at diverse and multiple nodes of production in order to transform them into new geographies of power. They are re-designing their political ecology from within.
Nonsovereignty
But any project that sets out to achieve self-determination must come to terms with two paradoxes of sovereignty that undermine this attempt. The Puerto Rican soberanistas (the fastest-growing political movement in the country) seek “full sovereignty” within a redefined relationship with the United States. Sovereignty is seen by many as the only possible option for independence and self-realization. In the previous section I argued that the evolving political ecology in Puerto Rico, based on interaction and negotiation, must avoid the re-institutionalization, indeed the re-westernization, the auto-exploitation, that lurks within all efforts at free association. Now I suggest that to do this it has to abandon the concept of sovereignty. Why? First there is the tragic double-bind, to which I have already alluded: the story of Gabriela Moreno traces the processes of subjectivization that bring individuals to bind themselves to their own identities at the same time as to the all-encompassing structures of external power.[17] Second, modern sovereignty as exemplified by the US, constructs a “we” that is not inclusive, because it is founded on an exceptionalism that places the sovereign condition outside the order of control it seeks to work within.
Land is at the heart of my argument. Any project that strives for political autonomy is ultimately about land: who owns it, who manages its resources, who are its custodians. The situation in Puerto Rico reminds me of the Maori “renaissance” that occurred in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s. In her book Maori Sovereignty, Donna Awatere set out the platform for Maori resistance. The movement was populist and leftist. But neither trade unions, nor the political left, neither feminism, nor even the struggle of Pacific island nations could provide useful outcomes for the Maori sovereignty movement in Aotearoa. Why? Because, Awatere argued, they are all products - even Pacific island populations - of “white cultural imperialism.”[18] All white peoples are captives of their own culture, she asserted, and Maori are engaged in an “epic war” with them that will set them - yes, white people - free. Awatere had a battle plan that would confront the weapons of white settler society, the individualism, history-as-progress, spatialization of time, use-value, private property, Christianity, mechanical materialism and so on. Wanting sovereignty, Awatere made very clear, is wanting to be like white people. And, deep down, even white people don’t want that.
It is not coincidental that President Trump’s “A nation without borders is not a nation” was first spoken by Ronald Reagan. It is an expression of the sovereign impulse that Reagan’s program for globalization exemplified. Awatere’s “white people” had invented sovereignty in early modern Europe, a geopolitical framework that assumed most social categories are eternal and spatially consistent. The idea of sovereignty based the rule of law in the power of a monarch, the sovereign, whose authority came from God. When in 1790 the United States congress transferred this authority to the people, to “citizens,” it defined a citizen as a “free, white person” who had resided in the US for two years.[19] The burgeoning settler society envisioned property as something owned by white individuals, and native societies as disappearing within an evolving project of land acquisition. Black people were not legally regarded as persons but as property. The idea of sovereignty therefore encompasses at its heart principles and assumptions inimical to the transition from decolonization to self-determination. In the principle of sovereignty, colonialism is perpetuated. And colonialism perpetuates the double-bind.
But there’s more: multi-ethnic biopolitical transformations, such as that which the commonwealth of Puerto Rico is undergoing at the moment, have to take account of reticulated indigenous histories.[20] They need to acknowledge that indigenous historical experience is not monolithic, and that great diversity is discoverable in the relations between indigenous peoples and the landscapes they manage. Prior to contemporary social infrastructures (physical, linguistic, aesthetic), the histories of landscapes are therefore already multiple, and from the contemporary perspective largely unknowable. For hundreds of years the movement through Puerto Rico of Taino, Carib, African, Spanish, English, and French people has been distorted by the lens of a single narrative: Puerto Ricans are one people. This narrative of Puerto Rican unity is often said to have grown from the three “roots” of its culture and society - Taino, Spanish, African - to flower into a unifying ideal of nationhood. Each group, however, has its own interpretation of geographies and histories. This makes the national discourse fluid and evolutionary, subject to negotiation and reconstruction, depending on who is speaking. That’s why some Puerto Ricans are building a multivariate island discourse comprising the different histories and different voices that were constructed under conditions of colonialism and imperialism.
As a concept that implies singularity rather than multiplicity, sovereignty would instantiate the “we are one people” narrative, even as the people of Puerto Rico reclaim their blended histories, and Afro Latino, Latinx and Nuyorican Taina identities come out of the shadows of globalization. In the US “the people” speak through the medium of representation, where difference is flattened and active transformation criminalized. Puerto Rico is an island of contingencies, ambivalences, specifics, micro-systems, autopoeisis. It should preserve its sensitivity to small events and use this to build resilience in the face of large ones.
Here’s the issue. Puerto Rico’s vulnerability has been explicitly produced by investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, international agribusinesses and forestry corporations. The banks and corporations of sovereign nations have lent the country billions of dollars so that its government can pay the very same banks and corporations billions to build infrastructure to improve the living conditions of its people. It is sovereignty that has produced an economic polity in Puerto Rico, by constructing a collective subjectivity trained to speak a global language of commerce, finding it amenable that the cluster industries are invited to move their addresses to the commonwealth and receive a 4% tax rate and tax-free dividends in return. A national discourse that thinks the crypto-currency “Puertopia” shilled by blockchain millionaires is good for a fragile, emergent political ecology. But the blockchain millionaires are only there for tax relief and land. Lots of sun-filled tropical land.
If we frame the contemporary problem facing the archipelago as rooted in the relationship between the people and the ecosystems that sustain them, it should be here that we look for a radical reconstitution of the colony as self-determining and independent. I have suggested that autonomy is possible only on the basis of a reformulation of the relationship between Puerto Ricans and the matrix of environmental systems with which they interact in the most global and the most intimate of ways. The transformation has begun, with the development of dozens of sites of power across the islands. (Sites of power are what I call those places scattered across the archipelago where borenquinos are developing ecoagricultural farms and orchards and moving their produce to local markets).
Environmental self-determination does not require that land be owned. In fact, shared environmental wealth can become the very basis of production. Even now, the social and political projects emerging in Puerto Rico defy the rule of private property and promote the rights of the common - open and equal access to resources based on small groups and communities focused on specific issues. This is exactly what that confederation of millennials mentioned earlier is doing: creating communidad especiales or temporary autonomous zones,[21] forming organizations such as Libertad Red, a routing center for resistant organizations, and the Our Power Solidarity Brigade, focused on food, labor and energy independence, or DeMos, a collective of teachers and professors of UPR Cayey that “denounces the nefarious impact of the austerity measures imposed” by “an unelected Fiscal Control Board,” and Guakiá Colectivo Agroecológico, whose mission is to produce food and technology learning experiences accessible to the Puerto Rico community.
Already, then, sites of power are becoming held in common by the people who participate in their development. Not private, not public, but shared by all, and participated in by those who wish to join. The wealth of the ecological common can build novel material, social, affective and cognitive mechanisms through the production of new cultural epistemologies. With the control and management of the land comes the control and management of organic life, which is the biological basis of livelihoods. Maori knew that ownership of their land would be critical to the establishment of autonomy and independence. When they won back their confiscated territories, the “they” in each case was a tribal organization, not individuals. The tribes now own and manage tribal land. Maori knew this. Métis know this, Latoka know this, Rohingya Muslims know this, African Americans know this. (Malcolm X, speaking in 1963: “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice and equality”[22]). Puerto Rican soberanistas know this. But how can sovereignty be the goal of revolution if sovereignty itself is based on a land-ownership fealty that is at the heart of injustice, malpractice and foreign control?
Caribbean anthropologist Yarima Bonilla’s research points in the direction of divestment. We should not think of places like Puerto Rico as sites that need to achieve sovereignty through postcolonialism, she says, but as places that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself, where alternative political frameworks, moving beyond sovereignty, are both necessary and inevitable.[23] Let us, then, reconsider the idea of the commons, of land held in common, of a community that is composed or produced through the development of open and equal access to health, education and livelihood. It is through a consideration of how to formulate a common that we can rescript the project of sovereignty.
Environmental Design
Self-determination, multiracialism, environmental management, land rights, political change … these concerns contribute to the evolutionary practices of environmental design. Landscape architecture is an example of a politically-motivated design profession. Forged in 2016, the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s New Landscape Declaration states that landscape architects “can build a new identity for society as a constructive part of nature.”[24] No longer independent of nature, but co-constructing planet Earth, socially-engaged design practices are changing away from the idea of human sovereignty itself. New intellectual and cognitive frameworks are being built, and the ecological condition of nonsovereign autonomy requires designers to work within the systems they are helping to reformulate, in a kind of critical immersion. The new breed of environmental designers understands that humans are not separate from their environment but are produced in time and space along with it. Political ecologists by training, landscape architects know first hand that social and political issues are spatial issues. And, conversely, that territorial issues are biopolitical issues. The new emphasis on the social interaction of spatial, temporal and ecological conditions provides a way to think about power concretely and geographically - as embedded in spatial practices. We now know that profit-driven social programs (such as the development of old-school infrastructure and the privatization of shared space) can radically affect the composition and evolution of communities. But social inequities must be addressed through design strategies that are more than spatial, since they involve the influence of non-spatial decisions about the trading of stocks and shares, and the education of peoples.
Still, for environmental design to be an effective agent in the connection of sites of power to political self-determination requires commitment to radical new techniques of design investigation. It requires a critique, even, of design epistemologies. First, the profession needs to re-examine concepts such as community, agency, social capital, participatory design, power, civil society, and ecology (and many landscape architects are doing just this). Second, to assist with the evolution of permanent - not temporary - autonomous zones it must avoid and protest the instrumental delivery of environmental design services that provision communities with quickly naturalized forms of consumption. Third, it must resist the spatial practices of legislators whose profit motives marginalize whole peoples. Fourth, the environmental design disciplines must link with other activists and resistors to achieve genuine sites of power in a collective, sustained engagement with systems, spaces and peoples. Its not just about small pockets of agroecology production units supplying farm-to-table restaurants and local consumers. As the Puerto Rico Brigades are well aware, they cannot build a 21st century economy on that.
Ultimately, in Puerto Rico as around the globe, it is not so much physical sites of power that need to be designed, as the new agroecocultural economy that these embody and exchange goods and services within. So, how do you design a land-based sharing economy within the global context of mass food production, on-call energy supply, mass tourism, climate change, diaspora socialism and increasing nationalism; in markets that don’t respect seasonality; in an economy that participates in the global crush, but is driven by the specific needs and practices of a highly-networked local ecoagricultural political ecology? How can landscape architects do this? Are there models?
Of course, there are models for Puerto Rico’s sites of power all over the world, where environmental cadres are reclaiming the rights of production through land use.[25] It’s not a question of models, however, for the very idea of a model implies the problem of the copy. The autopoetic process I promote is by definition endogenously-generated - it comes from within. This is why, when considering other people’s formulae, we should stick closely to our own provenance, our own, deep, braided sense of becoming. Exactly to what extent Puerto Rican sites of power can unplug from the Great Grid of geopolitical trade and economics is a matter for the Brigades to decide. Landscape architects can bring their extraordinary sensitivity to the design - or we should say, rearrangement - of systems, of multiplicities, to the project. As Panthea Lee of Reboot says, It’s not about the design of products or things, but the management of systems:
I think the challenge with a lot of these products is that people say, 'We've gone in and done our research. We understand the local context.' And then they go and design something for that existing context: 'Oh, there's no energy, there's no clean water.' That's a good temporary solution but... why don't people have clean water? Why are people hungry? Someone said, 'Let's make this emergency food with nutrients so people can have just one meal a day.' That's not a solution! [26]
What systems are we talking about? The same ones that Gabriela Moreno’s great grandparents lived and farmed within. If the goal of a successful ecoagricultural economy is the production of common wealth from sustainable activities deploying baseline knowledge and expertise, there is no better place to look than the traditional gardens of the borinquenos in the western highlands of 19th century Puerto Rico. In places like Utuado, where Sandra Farms continues to grow coffee, and Orocovis, where Dalma Cartegna operates an agriculture education program teaching students the practical skills of agroecology. In these fertile territories traditional farming practices actually produced knowledge along with crops. Knowledge of three tier farming - coffee trees bearing heavily in the shade of the plantains; of supplementary production - tobacco (known as the poor man’s crop) growing for sale to villagers; of recycling and nutrition - those pigs and chickens. These gardens required no machinery or capital and had low production costs. This socialized expertise developed within a fabric of shared knowledges and norms of behavior, languages, habits, understanding and trust (Canario, African and mestizo kids chasing chickens for the pot). But it cannot and should not be mimicked. Today’s paradigms of capitalist production raise complicated paradoxes of regulation and control that the Puerto Rican communidad especiales must confront if they are to succeed in reformulating the whole island as a productive unit based on the autonomous organization of social cooperation.
The role of environmental design is infrastructural and logistical. The current nexus of private corporations, overseas shareholders, foreign expertise, and distant markets has gradually to be replaced by a language of landscape infrastructure, using landscape both as an aesthetic form of expression, and a medium of social production through the reallocation of natural resources. Logistics is the key to the control of territory, particularly the supply of operational energy.[27] Can’t we imagine a collaborative formulation of landscape infrastructure that replaces the unholy marriage of urban planning and large-scale engineering that have caused so much destruction in Puerto Rico? This new political ecology will require a diversification of economic hubs and collectors, the decentralization of Puerto Rico’s ragged service infrastructure, and the appropriation of administrative operating systems by networked sites of power.
The passing of infrastructural service provision to landscape-based systems involves the re-bundling and redesign of these systems. My study of small-scale land-based production economies in different countries with wildly different circumstances tells me that if you have these things: fertile land, an abundant water source, constant energy, skilled labor, three-tier farming, efficient recycling, mobility, and network communications, then in order to create a biopolitical agroeconomy you need these things: market development, transportation, storage systems, diverse means of production to divide work according to seasonal rhythms, affective landscape expression. Landscape architecture provides the infrastructure design to enable the reorganization of Puerto Rico’s brutal colonial industrial legacy into a responsive, localized, and fiscally effective form of life, based on the integrated development of sites of power.
Conclusion
In summary, the land-based political agenda I have outlined for Puerto Rico goes like this. Build agroecological knowledge by creating sites of power. Develop a landscape infrastructure that connects these production units to each other in an island-wide coalition. Materialize the struggle for independence by rescripting the project of sovereignty as the design of a common political ecology based on territorial control.
Land is the engine of citizenship and self-determination. Land is power.
References
[1] In 1897 the Spanish Queen Regent María Christina signed the Autonomous Charter granting Puerto Rico more self-government than ever before or after. See Duany, Jorge 2017. Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 40.
[2] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 2000. Empire Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press: 32.
[3] Harrison Flores Ortiz, Brief Environmental History of Puerto Rico, ( https://encilopediapr.org.). Last accessed 3/20/2018.
[4] YouTube. Last accessed 01/03/18. Also see Naomi Klein 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster.
[5] Throughout the 20th century Puerto Ricans migrated to the continental United States, particularly to Florida and New York. These natives, their children and grandchildren are the “diaspora.”
[6] Op.cit.
[7] Badiou said that you do not become a subject until you have a project. Badiou, Alain 2007. Being and Event. Continuum.
[8] www.juntagente.org
[9] Interview at the #ITR Action Camp. YouTube. Last accessed 07/2318.
[10] NBC News. www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-experiences-agricultural -renaissance-n656001 (Hurricanes Irma and Maria have dented this revival somewhat).
[11] The Guardian “Colony, State or Independence” 07/07/15.
[12] Dan Lyons calls this “stakeholder capitalism.” See Lyons, Dan 2019 Lab Rats: Why Modern Work Makes People Miserable. London: Atlantic Books.
[13] Pers. Comm., College of Natural Science, University of Puerto Rico at Piedras, 12/29/17.
[14] Barnett, Rod 2013 Emergence in Landscape Architecture. London: Routledge: 136
[15] In Bruno Latour’s terms, borenquinos are redefining the local by divesting it of the reactionary. See Latour, B. 2018 Down to Earth Cambridge UK: Polity Press (trans. Catherine Porter): 38-45.
[16] Mouffe, Chantal 2013 Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London and NY: Verso.
[17] The double-bind is Michel Foucault’s formulation. See Rabinow, Paul (ed.), 1984 The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin Books: 22.
[18] Awatere, Donna. 1984 Maori Sovereignty. Auckland: Broadsheet: 9
[19] Iyenger, M.M. 2014 “Not Mere Abstractions: Language Policies and Language Ideologies in U.S. Settler Colonialism” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society. Vol. 3. No. 2: 34
[20] Belanger 2017. Landscape as Infrastructure. New York: Routledge: n8
[21] Based on Hakim Bey’s 1991 book T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone in which he promotes “the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control.”
[22] Malcolm X 1963 “Message to the Grass Roots.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku2JzolPt50. Last accessed 11/28/2018.
[23] Bonilla, Yarima, 2015 Non-Sovereign Futures: French-Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[24] https://lafoundation.org/news-events/2016-summit/new-landscape-declaration/
[25] I think of Knepp Farm in West Sussex, of the Worsfold farm in Northland, New Zealand, Dunn Ranch in Missouri, the age-old rural economy of Cortona, Italy, the SAFFIES project in the UK and Europe …
[26] https://www.core77.com/posts/20698/a-better-world-by-design-spotlight-on-panthea-lee-of-reboot-20698
[27] Belanger, Pierre and Alexander Arroyo, 2016 Ecologies of Power. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. This book is a critical contribution to the urgent design of new political ecologies.