Sociology Unearthed #16: The Spatial Clustering of Conservation Practices is the Spatial Clustering of Shared Stories

Looking down on the land from above, agricultural conservation practices are spatially clustered. While biogeophysical factors like slope and soil type help explain these patterns, research also indicates that social factors likely play a significant role in organizing farm practices across space (Eades 2006; Ilbery and Maye 2011; Kolady et al. 2021).

A very recent study published in the journal Environmental Sociology by Schewe et al. (2024) investigated the regional clustering of agricultural best management practices (BMPs) in New York state. The results of the study indicate the importance of including spatial factors when trying to understand the diffusion of farming innovations. Specifically, the authors find that the proportion of neighbors who have adopted a practice is associated with a higher likelihood of farmer adoption, as well as that regional factors such as slope and soil type are also linked to likelihood of adoption (p. 1-2). Schewe et al. argue, “adoption of BMPs must be understood within the specific local context” (p. 2). From this perspective, it is not only space that matters but place as well: community, available resources, local programs, local history, and all that shapes geography around a farm.

Wheat and soybeans in Humboldt County, 2024

For example, it is often noted that in Iowa, Washington County leads the state in cover crop adoption (using at least cover crop acres enrolled in cost share as a measure). Some scholars have been investigating why counties like Washington can exhibit remarkably higher rates of a conservation practice adoption than their neighbors. In a 2023 study from Popovici et al., researchers identified pairs of counties in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana where adoption of cover crops varied widely across county lines and then deeply investigated the reasons for the regional disparities. That study identified relevant factors such as “attitudes toward cover crops,” “conservation agency influence,” “presence of experts, advocates, and/or entrepreneurs,” and “local incentive-based programs,” among others (p. 614). In other words, when we look down on the land from above and see cover crops clustering by county, we’re seeing in part the effects of local resources, programs, and culture.

But this issue is further complicated by something else found by Schewe et al. (2024). They looked across New York at the spatial distribution of 3 different practices—soil testing, no-till, and riparian buffers—and found that while each practice’s distribution exhibits clusters, the different practices cluster in different regions. For example, the regional hotspots for no-till are not in the same places as the regional hotspots for riparian buffers. This seems to suggest that these clusters are less indicative of the presence or absence of a local generalized conservation ethic and more indicative of local conditions suitable for the adoption of specific practices.

It’s a finding that is echoed elsewhere. If you’re interested in this general topic, I might start with Prokopy et al.’s (2019) recent meta-analysis, “Adoption of Agricultural Conservation Practices in the United States: Evidence From 35 Years of Quantitative Research.” The researchers identify many of the variables that have been found to be associated with the adoption of agricultural conservation innovation, parsing those social factors with explanatory promise from those factors that seem less relevant. Amid many nuanced conclusions, Prokopy et al. argue that “future research should examine whether decision making is differently motivated based on practice type”, explaining that there is also theory and research from the social psychology of decision making that suggests that “object-specific attitudes” about specific conservation practices “are more important than general attitudes” (p. 532). If we want to understand the diffusion of conservation innovation, at some point, we made need to take things practice by practice, culture by culture, and region by region. That’s a lot to consider.

Restored prairie in Jefferson County, 2024

Understanding the spatial clustering of conservation in agriculture appears to require understanding of how specific practices intersect with locally-specific social and biogeophysical conditions, including systems of resources, local programs, local culture and history, local social networks, and more. It’s a complex system of variables to model. However, each case of farmer adoption of a conservation practices is a living model. Each individual story is nested within both a geographic region and a local experience of living and working. Put differently, the spatial clustering of conservation in agriculture reflects a spatial clustering of shared stories. So, maybe, the fastest and most comprehensive way of explaining regional clustering of any given conservation practice could be to share local stories.

–Jon Dahlem

References

Eades, D. C. (2006). Identifying spatial clusters within United States organic agriculture.

Ilbery, B., & Maye, D. (2011). Clustering and the spatial distribution of organic farming in England and Wales. Area, 43(1), 31-41.

Kolady, D., Zhang, W., Wang, T., & Ulrich-Schad, J. (2021). Spatially mediated peer effects in the adoption of conservation agriculture practices. Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 53(1), 1-20.

Popovici, R., Ranjan, P., Bernard, M., Usher, E. M., Johnson, K., & Prokopy, L. S. (2023). The social factors influencing cover crop adoption in the Midwest: A controlled comparison. Environmental Management, 72(3), 614-629.

Prokopy, L. S., Floress, K., Arbuckle, J. G., Church, S. P., Eanes, F. R., Gao, Y., … & Singh, A. S. (2019). Adoption of agricultural conservation practices in the United States: Evidence from 35 years of quantitative literature. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 74(5), 520-534.

Schewe, R., Fenner, W. H., Iavoriska, L., & Kelleher, C. (2024). Spatial diffusion of innovations: a spatial analysis of agricultural conservation behaviors in New York State. Environmental Sociology, 1-15.

Sociology Unearthed #15: Cemetery or Remnant Prairie?

There are some places where the imaginary line between nature and non-nature is blurred beyond recognition, where “environmental sociology” becomes a redundant term and there is nothing that can be said about ecology or society without commenting on both at once. One such place is Iowa’s Rochester Cemetery. Less than 0.1% of Iowa’s original prairie remains, and some of that is there, just off I-80 east of Iowa City, near Tipton. Rochester’s cemetery is overgrown with deep-rooted native plants, so its dual significances as burial site and prairie remnant push against one another like tectonic plates, shaping the site above.

The gate at Rochester Cemetery, May 2024

This cemetery prairie is the subject of writer and photographer Stephen Longmire’s book Life and Death on the Prairie. Of Rochester Cemetery, Longmire writes: “A walk through Rochester Cemetery is a walk through time. With its sandy hills, its stunning trees, and its people, above and underground, it defies received impressions of a prairie. The land plainly shows what people have done to make it their own—and how it withstood their efforts. Here, people and place are one, joined for all eternity in a rare and delicate equilibrium.” (p. 6, 2011).

That equilibrium is being tested both by ecological and social forces. Non-native species threaten to one day encroach, and disturbance is limited to sporadic mowing. More sophisticated ecological stewardship of the site, however, is not on everyone’s mind. In 2006, over one hundred citizens of Rochester signed a petition demanding increased mowing, arguing that Rochester is “our cemetery, not a wild flower bed or open prairie for strangers and out-of-towners.” Writer Sam Hooper Samuels documented this local controversy in a 2009 piece for IDNR’s Iowa Outdoors magazine, called “Hallowed Prairie.” In short, the dispute was temporarily settled by a township trustee election that saw victory for those who would keep Rochester Cemetery mostly wild, and mostly wild it has remained.

Gravestones obscured by prairie, Rochester Cemetery, May 2024 (Photo: Liz Dahlem)

Walking at Rochester Cemetery, I indeed felt like a strange out-of-towner. Near one grave, a woman sat playing Top 40 aloud from her phone, any reverence for prairie or burial ground seemingly secondary to her comfort and purpose whiling away a Saturday afternoon there. Elsewhere, two men knelt at a grave under one of the cemetery’s fifteen behemoth white oaks, engaged in some shared mourning that I felt ashamed to witness as a tourist.

In his book, Longmire observes, “If Rochester were wealthier, the entire cemetery might have been mowed more often, with potentially disastrous results. From a geological perspective, it is a set of sand dunes, held in place by the deep roots of the prairie plants and their people. Considerable erosion might result if the prairie were eliminated.” (p. 88, 2011). Often, it’s the other way around. Environmental justice research has thoroughly documented the various ways in which the non-random spatial distribution of environmental “bads” such as hazardous waste as well as environmental “goods” such as public parks can reflect the spatial distribution of wealth inequality and racial segregation. While Rochester Cemetery may not be representative of those trends, its social history nevertheless reminds that the mechanisms by which these unequal spatial distributions of environmental hazards and assets form are largely located at the point of power and control over resources. Such power struggles are ideological, featuring plainly exposed conflicting frameworks of values and beliefs. Whether a cemetery prairie remnant is precious or pernicious depends upon where one stands not only in relation to the site but also in relation to the broad environmental and economic trends in which the site is situated.

A bee on a daisy, Rochester Cemetery, May 2024

The keeping and offering of plants at burial sites is an ancient human practice. To feel empowered and in control of the plants at a loved one’s grave is, I think, an aspirational right. As the “father of environmental justice” (and Iowa State University alumnus) Robert Bullard writes, “Mistrust is engendered among economically and politically oppressed groups in this country when they see environmental reforms being used to direct resources away from problems of the poor toward priorities of the affluent.” (p. 93, 2020). As many of us work to see conservation in Iowa improve and flourish, Rochester Cemetery is another reminder that plants and people put down roots in the same earth, and conservation requires meeting the needs of both.

-Jon Dahlem

References

Bullard, R. D. (2020). Excerpts from “Environmentalism and Social Justice”. In Environment and Society: A Reader (pp. 87-96). New York University Press.

Longmire, Stephen. (2011). Life and Death on the Prairie. George F. Thompson Publishing, LLC.

Samuels, S. H. (2009). “Hallowed prairie.” Iowa Outdoors (July/August), 28-35.

April 2024 Webinar Rewind

You can now find our webinars (2023-present) on YouTube! Go to: youtube.com/@ialearningfarms-webinars. Be sure to subscribe and be notified when a new recording is posted. All our previously recorded webinars can still be found on our website by clicking on one of the two different archive buttons, 2011-2022 or 2023-Present.

Pasture Management Following a Drought: If you turn livestock out on a pasture, then this webinar is a must watch! Denise Schwab shares many tips and insights for managing pastures during dry conditions. Your pasture this spring will need additional attention compared to a normal year to ensure the livestock are getting the correct nutritional content and to prevent overgrazing.  

One Size Does Not Fit All: Targeting Conservation Practices to Reduce Phosphorus Loss Risk in the Lake Erie Watershed: Take a look at customized conservation management strategies for a watershed with great variability in temperature, land use, and snow cover. The NE part of the Lake Erie watershed and the SW part show the biggest differences between each other. Therefore, conservation practices work differently in each area, showing the need for customization.

Pay for Performance: Cost-share Alternative to Increase Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction: Is traditional cost-share with its incentivized and voluntary approach actually working to meet nutrient reduction goals? Short answer, no. Learn about how ShoreRivers, located in the Chesapeake Bay region, is advocating for performance-based incentives, which means monitoring practices once implemented. Farmers are then further rewarded based on actual nitrogen removed or carbon sequestered.

Social-ecological Suitability of Agroforestry in the Midwest: Agroforestry is a growing industry, but how do you know what practice is best for you and the land you farm? Well, researchers at the University of Illinois are creating an interactive tool that will allow landowners to identify which practice is most suitable. Check out the webinar to find out more about what went into building this tool.

–Alena Whitaker

Sociology Unearthed #14: “Monocultures of the Mind”

“Monocultures of the mind.” The term comes from the writing and speaking of Vandana Shiva, especially her 1993 book titled Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. The phrase is an argument. It’s an allegation. It is as provocative as it is neat. “Monocultures of the mind” is a name for the thing that has happened. The land has become the purview of a few species. The weeds and the not-weeds have been sorted accordingly. Knowledge of the weeds, other than to know thy enemy, is trivia.

Has it happened? Is there a “monoculture of the mind”? Can we see this monoculture when we consider the role of various organisms in our socio-ecological systems?

Let’s take sumac for example. I’ll admit that I can’t pretend to know what Iowans think about sumac, but we can likely all agree that it’s not the most prized among plants. Of course, we would have to stipulate which sumac we were talking about (Staghorn? Smooth? Fragrant?), but let’s say we took them all as a bunch, all sumac, just as an object of consideration. If I asked, “What does sumac mean to you?” I am curious what answers I would get. What people think, say, and do about various non-human species is the focal point of much of my work.

Short of the will and resources for a systematic study, one way that I can try to look at the cultural significance of sumac is to look at what North American poets have written about the plant.

Renowned Canadian poet Margaret Atwood wrote in “Sumacs” (1983):

“[…] but go outside and down

the bank, among the sumacs

with their tongues of dried blood

which have stopped speaking […]”

Sumac in Iowa, April 2024

Doug Ramspeck, poet and professor of English at The Ohio State University, wrote in “Sumac Prophecy” (2010):

“but she did not think it was a moth

or hawk—she thought a tear had opened

in the seam of things, that the sumac tree

at the field edge had displayed its hairy seeds

[…] the apparition’s

blood-red tail against the apparition’s

blood-red seeds […]”

So, “blood” may be a theme for sumac then. Well, they are both red, but I won’t embarrass myself trying to decipher the metaphor any further—besides, we’re missing context.

Then let’s consider something more fun. How about Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)?  The whimsical little wildflowers named for their appearance are the perfect rarity to go casually searching for in the spring in the Midwest. Instead of the poets, could we consult the scientists?

Dutchman’s Breeches by the South Skunk River, Story County, IA, April 2024

A little research turns up mind-expanding interspecies relationships. The wildflowers are “amazingly well adapted for pollination by queen bumblebees that are common in early spring” (p. 47) according to naturalist Carol Gracie’s (2015) Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast. Dutchman’s Breeches are myrmecochorous, meaning that their seeds are dispersed by ants. The plants, sometimes called “Staggerweed” by ranchers, also contain bicuculine, an alkaloid known to cause tremors, vomiting, seizures, and death if ingested by cattle. Weeds indeed. Though, as Gracie suggests, since the plant is innocuous to sheep, one animal could conceivably clear it for the safe grazing of another. “Everything is food,” Harry Nilsson wrote. So everything is, as long as the necessary biodiversity is present to do the eating.

The point that I hope to make is that these species must be present in Iowa for them to warrant serious consideration by those who deal closely with plants as growers of any kind. If Dutchman’s Breeches are absent, is knowledge of myrmecochory and bicuculine absent? If sumac are absent, is its bloody poetic significance absent? And if far more species are absent, have we then shut out far more possible bridges to new ideas through greater contemplation and understanding of biodiversity? Are we living in a “monoculture of the mind?”

As rain and warmth bring a panoply of non-human life to visibility in Iowa, I find myself searching for biodiversity, privately testing Shiva’s thirty-year-old thesis against my experiences on the landscape. The good news is that there is a conceivable alternative to monocultures of the mind. As Iowa farmers continue keeping prairie strips, wetlands, forests, etc., they prove it is possible to live among a diversity of species and through those species to live among a diversity of ideas.

-Jon Dahlem

References

Atwood, Margaret. (1983). “Sumacs.” The North American Review 268(3):23.

Gracie, C. (2012). Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast: A Natural History. Princeton University Press.

Ramspeck, D. (2010). Possum Nocturne. University of Akron.

Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sociology Unearthed #13: Mammoths, Glaciers

There are mammoth bones under the Iowa farms. We know this because they have been found. Last December, a farmland auction in Muscatine County received some local media attention after sellers revealed that they had once discovered a mammoth femur by a creek after flooding. According to that article, “Archeologists confirmed the discovery, yet refrained from further excavation given the commonality of mammoth remains in the region.” Mammoths are just one of many Pleistocene mammals whose remains have been unearthed in Iowa, including saber-tooth cats, mastodons, 8 ½ ft. long American cheetahs, dire wolves, and giant ground sloths. The result of paleontology going back more than a century, “over a million specimens” are now held at the University of Iowa Paleontology Repository.

I wonder: is Iowa culture at all shaped by the knowledge that there are mammoth bones under the Iowa farms? What does it mean for a society to know this? How might it change behavior, reasoning, values, or other social factors? If I am cooking in a kitchen, I won’t often actively remember that there is a fire extinguisher tucked out of sight under the sink, but it does make me less afraid of a stovetop fire. Children can’t really see or hear monsters under the bed, but they can still lose sleep when haunted by them. When the ancient bones of lost megafauna shake themselves loose from the Iowa soil, what impact is had on Iowa culture?

Replica woolly mammoth at the Mahaska County Conservation Board’s Environmental Learning Center, Oskaloosa, IA, March 2024

I have a thought. It’s not a theory, not even a hypothesis, just a thought. Are mammoth bones one of a handful of factors that contribute to Iowa culture being more concerned with glaciation, “Ice Ages”, and the idea of dramatic, cyclical climatic change? It’s anecdotal, but interviewing farmers around Iowa, one thing that has been remarkable to me is the frequency with which long-melted continental glaciers are raised in conversation, particularly regarding climate change.

Of course, we know that understanding both the shape of the Iowa’s regional landscapes and its soil composition requires recognition of “glacial activity,” ~2 million years of ice episodically advancing and melting that most recently occurred 12,000 – 14,000 years ago and ultimately formed the Des Moines Lobe among other foundations of Iowa. To reckon with the geological scales on which the term “glacial dynamics” makes sense is boggling and humbling. Yet, it’s essential knowledge. Iowa was made by ice.

There is a decent bit of social scientific research on the cultural significance of glaciers. The Iowa ice may be long melted, but elsewhere, rapid glacial retreat alongside the Earth’s warmest recorded annual temperatures raises alarm about the transformation of landscape and therefore the transformation of local culture. Allison (2015) writes, “the loss of glaciers represents not only a loss of water and livelihoods, but also a rupture in the social and moral fabric of society. […] such changes can have profoundly dislocating and long-lasting negative effects.” (p. 502). As Carey et al. (2016) simply put it, “Ice is not just ice” (p. 787).

It’s estimated that humans followed the retreating glaciers into Iowa about 11,000 years ago, and it’s thought that these populations were sustained by mammoth hunting. In other words, for thousands of years, Iowa was home to people for whom mammoths and glaciers would have been among the foremost objects of cultural significance. That cultural significance, constructed over the same timescale, still exists for many cultures for whom local ice is now threatened with disappearance. Consider for example that the ice atop the western summit of Kilimanjaro is known as the “house of god” (Allison 2015) or that the agricultural practices of Peru have long relied on the ice atop the Andes mountain range. You might imagine the cultural sorrow and alarm at rapid change to these systems, especially if that change is understood to be anthropogenic.

Spring Beauties in an Iowa wood, March 2024

 “Ice is not just ice.” Melting is not just melting. So, Iowa mammoth bones are not just mammoth bones…? Maybe it’s a stretch, but I do wonder if the Iowa of melting ice and woolly mammoths that geology and paleontology gives us a window into doesn’t provide a context in which climatic change seems normal, inevitable, cyclical, even passively benevolent. Again, it’s anecdotal, but much (not all) of what I’m hearing from farmers so far in Iowa about climate change isn’t sorrow or alarm. It’s sort of wistful and resigned, like a headshaking shrug.

If (1) there are patterns in cultural responses to exogenous forces like climate change and (2) these patterns are directly or indirectly informed by the historical and environmental conditions from which a culture emerges, then just as we should expect communities living under retreating glaciers to express a contextually rational alarm, we might also expect communities living where transformative past climatic change appears to resemble current climatic change to express a contextually rational unworried knowingness. Do the ghosts of Iowa’s ancient mammoths subtextually impose themselves? Do they collectively murmur something inaudible yet nevertheless evocative about the impermanence of the Holocene and the inevitability of a return to ice? And does this evocation, in however small a way, shape contemporary Iowa discourse about climate change?

-Jon Dahlem

References

Allison, Elizabeth A. “The spiritual significance of glaciers in an age of climate change.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 6.5 (2015): 493-508.

Carey, Mark, et al. “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” Progress in Human Geography 40.6 (2016): 770-793.

Sociology Unearthed #12: Getting into Ethnomycology

Within Osage’s Milton R. Owen Nature Center, among educational displays and taxidermized local wildlife, is a sizable chunk of illustrated Artist’s Conk (Ganoderma applanatum). It’s a perennial fungus found across North America, and if you find one in the wild, it might be worth stooping to check its underside for hidden messages, as it famously can be readily drawn into with any pencil-like tool. Alternatively, the fungus can be harvested and the art made more permanent by drying and/or finishing. It’s an artifact that starkly demonstrates something often obscured: the relationship between local human culture and local fungi. The systematic examination of this relationship has been the focus of decades of research in ethnomycology, “the study of fungi in folklore, fiction and rituals from prehistoric times to the modern era” (Singh 1999).

Artist’s Conk, donated to the Milton R. Owen Nature Center by the artist David Lacour (Photo: Jon Dahlem, 2024)

I am only recently getting into ethnomycology, but I hope that I might use this blog to improvise a bridge behind for anyone who wants to join me. The thing is, while the roots (or perhaps mycelia?) of ethnomycology trace primarily to popular books by R. Gordon Wasson such as Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968), most everything produced in the name of the discipline has been written since the late 1990’s. In other words, most of us are only recently getting into ethnomycology.

That knowledge gap is non-randomly occurring. Ethnomycologists use a simple conceptual framework to categorize human cultures as mycophilic (liking/using fungi) or mycophobic (avoiding/fearing fungi). American culture has tended to be mycophobic, evidenced by historical depictions of fungi in art and media, the unpopularity of mushroom foraging here compared with continental Europe and elsewhere, and the 1970 legal classification of the psychoactive psylocibin and psilocin as Schedule I drugs. Even in mycophilic cultures, knowledge about fungi is often maintained through informal practical channels kept especially by women who forage them for food and medicine, creating a common gendered stratification of knowledge that has further contributed to the invisibility of mycology in the mainstream (Garibay-Orijel et al. 2012).

As further evidenced by the recency of the scientific description of many fungi species, the systematic cultural avoidance of the biological kingdom of fungi has impacted the scientific production of mycological knowledge. In response, ethnomycology sends natural scientists and social scientists alike on anthropological excursions to inventory the ways in which fungi are integrated into human culture and society across the planet, seeking what has been forcibly forgotten. While there are certainly postcolonial overtones to this variety of Western-university-as-ivory-tower knowledge collection, ethnomycology also explicitly engages in the task of listening to and learning from indigenous groups. It is in many ways a collective effort to reclaim information and practices that have been historically ignored and subjugated as superstition, now understood to be wisdom rendered through generations, carrying practical applications for the advancement of agriculture, medicine, nutrition, and more.

One reason why ethnomycology is important is that fungi, and not just the psychoactive kind, seem to have the power to topple paradigms. As mycological knowledge hit the mainstream, a whole new lexicon emerged to describe the ways in which ecosystems, and particularly plants, were understood to function, especially to behave. The scientific literature on fungi is full of verbs affording exciting agency to non-animal life. Far beyond mere parasites, fungi help plants to “speak” to one another and to themselves through mycorrhizal networks, mutualistic symbiotic relationships that can be traced back at least 400 million years in the fossil record (Rhodes 2017). Fungi also seem to pop in and out of existence unpredictably as if to betray a tenuous confinement to linear time. They can carry intrinsic medicinal, nutritional, and, yes, psychoactive properties. There is even research suggesting that mushroom spores have the power to make it rain. In other words, fungi seem magical, which is about as loud an invitation for an evolution in scientific thought as the natural world can pronounce.

If you’re wading in, I suggest Washington State University scholar Frank M. Dugan’s Conspectus of World Ethnomycology: Fungi in Ceremonies, Crafts, Diets, Medicines, and Myths. It’s an academic text, but it’s ~100 pages, full of color photos, written in a personable and frank tone, and agreeably tours ethnomycology by world region. Dugan also reflects candidly on the state of the discipline, arguing that ethnomycology suffers a bit from a “founder effect,” exhibiting a heightened collective attention on the psychoactive properties of fungi, as well as the oft depicted (should we say charismatic?) red-and-white Amanita muscaria mushroom. In addition, all ethnomycological studies published in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine are freely accessible online, and the articles tend to produce charts and lists of practical use. You can, for example, easily use the journal to compare what is known about various cultures’ folk uses for various species of fungi.

Cover of Conspectus of World Ethnomycology (2013) by Frank M. Dugan

I think one can probably understand Iowa agriculture to exhibit these broader trends in mycological cultural significance and knowledge production. Anecdotally and understandably, I have observed that most mentions of fungi in Iowa agricultural spaces tend to describe them as agents of plant disease. However, research and discourse in sustainable agriculture poses a far more open-ended question about mycology. Fungi are now used to promote plant growth, increase plant disease defense, and improve salinity and drought tolerance, among other benefits. A practical resource on this topic is Agriculturally Important Fungi for Sustainable Agriculture (2020), edited by Ajar Nath Yadav, Shashank Mishra, Divjot Kour, Neelam Yadav, and Anil Kumar.

The time of scientific inquiry into agricultural uses of fungi appears to be right now, but because we’ve spent hundreds of years fearing and avoiding molds, toadstools, mildews, and slimes, the assembly of that knowledge will have to rely on anthropological consultation with mycophiles, who are often women and/or indigenous groups from rural areas. Moreover, to “understand” fungi means developing a conception of ecology that affords agency to non-animal life and embraces, rather than fears, mycological magic.

-Jon Dahlem

References

Dugan, F. M. 2011. Conspectus of world ethnomycology: fungi in ceremonies, crafts, diets, medicines, and myths. APS Press.

Garibay-Orijel, R., Ramírez-Terrazo, A., & Ordaz-Velázquez, M. 2012. “Women care about local knowledge, experiences from ethnomycology.” Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine, 8(1), 1-13.

Hassett, M. O., Fischer, M. W., & Money, N. P. 2015. “Mushrooms as rainmakers: how spores act as nuclei for raindrops.” PloS one, 10(10), e0140407.

Rhodes, C. J. 2017. “The whispering world of plants:‘The wood wide web’”. Science Progress, 100(3), 331-337.

Singh, J. 1999. “Ethnomycology and folk remedies: Fact and fiction.” Pgs. 11-17 in: From Ethnomycology to Fungal Biotechnology: Exploiting Fungi from Natural Resources for Novel Products. J. Singh and K.R. Aneja, eds. Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York.

Yadav, A. N., Mishra, S., Kour, D., Yadav, N., & Kumar, A. (Eds.). (2020). Agriculturally important fungi for sustainable agriculture. Cham: Springer.

Sociology Unearthed #11: Scruffy Patches of Woods Against Environmental Generational Amnesia

In my time as an environmental sociologist, I have had the chance to interview a good number of conservation professionals. When I ask them in so many words how, why, when, and where they became conservationists, most begin to describe their childhood. Some remember knowledgeable parents who took them hunting, fishing, camping, or hiking. Others recall programs like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts that provided them with ecological literacy, basic survival skills, and a general appreciation for nature. The link between childhood exposure to wildlife and conservationism has been extensively discussed and substantially researched. In short, according to Rosa and Collado (2019), while there is “empirical evidence suggesting a positive link between direct experiences in nature and people’s environmental attitudes (EA) and behaviors (EB),” the question of how and where to provide those experiences in nature is complex. According to the USDA’s Forest Service, due to urbanization and suburbanization, the U.S. converts about 6,000 acres of open space each day.

As Robert Michael Pyle, renowned lepidopterist and founder of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, writes in The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, “When people connect with nature, it happens somewhere. Almost everyone who cares deeply about the outdoors can identify a particular place where contact occurred. This may have been a wilderness, a national park, or a stretch of unbounded countryside, but more often the place that makes a difference is unspectacular: a vacant lot, a scruffy patch of woods, a weedy field, a stream, a green ravine […] – or a ditch.” (p. xv).

A scruffy patch of woods near Ioway Creek, Ames, IA (Photo: Liz Dahlem)

These coinciding phenomena have led some to the reasonable conclusion that as fewer people have access to a diminished and degraded pool of wild spaces, fewer people should experience the psychological effects of an ecologically rich childhood, including expression of some form of conservation ethic. In The Thunder Tree, Pyle eventually puts forth a theory of the extinction of experience, writing, “As cities and metastasizing suburbs forsake their natural diversity, and their citizens grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat. This breeds apathy toward environmental concerns and, inevitably, further degradation of the common habitat.” (p. 146).

University of Washington psychologist Peter Kahn has described a similar process of environmental generational amnesia by which, “With each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation in its youth takes that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition—as the normal experience.” (2002, p. 106). Studies of the tendency of fisheries science and management to normalize fallen species abundance resulted in the related concept of shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), a more generalizable process by which all kinds of experiential shifts in systems can affect how those systems become measured over time. One way to make sense of these concepts is to understand generational amnesia as being a kind of shifting baseline; as the available resources and experiences diminish, shifting the common experience, expectation for what is a normal, abnormal, and/or desirable exposure to ecology shifts alongside.

I recently spoke with an Iowa conservation professional who made a strong case for generational amnesia as a culprit behind Iowa’s inertia toward restoring its natural ecosystems. Part of what is so compelling about the idea is that the more it is researched, the more it becomes clear that what we are describing is a kind of universal reality of the human experience. That is, environmental generational amnesia might be experienced by all cultures and societies facing environmental degradation of various kinds due to the inherent psychological, sociological, and anthropological conditions created by diminished human-environmental interaction. Indeed, Pyle and Kahn both cite naturalist E.O. Wilson’s (2002) concept of biophilia, or “our innate tendency to focus upon life and life-like forms and, in some instances, to affiliate with them emotionally” (p. 134). If biophilia is shared across human beings and societies, ecological deprivation should result in common psychological trends across cultures. Psychological research from around the world has indicated that lack of childhood exposure to nature produces a variety of effects, from inexperience catching oneself while falling over difficult terrain to “plant blindness,” the inability to notice or identify plants in one’s life and understand their significance and relationship to oneself.

Undergrowth near Ioway Creek, Ames, IA (Photo: Liz Dahlem)

However, perhaps what is most useful about concepts like Pyle’s “extinction of experience” and Kahn’s “generational amnesia” is that they provide clear prescriptions for treatment: we need access to wild spaces (even just the little scruffy patches), and we need to provide children the opportunity to learn about and engage with nature. According to Kahn, “We need to engage children in constructivist environmental education to maximize their exploration of and interaction with the nature that still exists within their purview—bugs, pets, plants, trees, wind, rain, soil, sunshine.” (2002, p. 113).

Of course, this call is being answered by those such as my colleagues here at Iowa Learning Farms and Water Rocks! who help to provide children with an environmental literacy, as well as by teachers, parents, grandparents, community members, and local children’s organization leaders who help to enrich Iowa kids’ sense of belonging to and responsibility for ecology. The call is also answered whenever a wetland is restored or when a farmer puts land into the conservation reserve program. The conceptual framing of these issues as a matter of shifting baselines, intergenerational loss, and experiential extinction asks us to understand the intimate link between ecological restoration, the psychological development of children, and our social responsibility to both.

–Jon Dahlem

Sociology Unearthed #10: Suggesting “Deep Farm Mapping”

Recently, I listened to an Iowa farmer describe the importance of walking one’s land, a practice that affirmed their conviction not to arbitrate farm decisions from afar. They had stood at and seen with their own eyes the erosion taking place on part of the land, and the experience became an essential motivator to alter on-farm practices. To walk the local land, to get to know its intricacies, to record its features, to map them, and to alter decision-making based on those maps—it reminds me of an interesting idea from the humanities and social sciences: deep mapping.

Farm mapping and the evolution thereof is a complex enough topic to warrant its own post, and someday I’ll return to it. In my short time in Iowa, I have heard some farmers express regret over the loss or absence of farm maps from decades past and other farmers describe the existence of farm maps filed away in the possession of prescient, resourceful caretakers. If one looks backward in time at the record of advice for beginning farmers, farm mapping seems a fairly prevalent suggestion. For example, in Lynn R. Miller’s 1993 book Buying and Setting Up Your Small Farm or Ranch, Miller writes, “Your dreams and your planning may both be helped by the actual physical mapping process. [….] I mean literally sitting down with a pen in hand and sketching where the house would go, where the chicken house is to be situated and how a cow looks drinking from the trough.” (p. 69-70). Rutgers University agricultural extension published a 2013 guide to farm mapping, which encourages special focus on planning the space between manure-runoff contaminated water and clean water. It follows; reflection on the layout of a farm promotes thoughtfulness in total design.

Nowadays, farm mapping can often refer to employing some of the wide variety of technological tools available to store and analyze spatial data. Farm app FieldBee defines farm mapping as “a precision agriculture technique” that allows for the combining of data derived from drones, satellites, moisture sensors, and soil analysis devices, while marketing for the app fieldmargin promises to help “map your farm in 30 minutes.” This kind of farm mapping doubtlessly provides benefits and conveniences to farmers and others who use industry analytics. However, I suspect that another type of farm mapping is possible, a kind that largely requires a pen, paper, a pair of boots, and some time.

View across low-lying land near man-made Lake Red Rock, Marion County, IA (January 2024)

Deep mapping is the creation of maps that seek to represent a complexity of conditions beyond what is possible in a two-dimensional “thin map” by incorporating a wide variety of different kinds of data in the mapping process, including memories, folklore, natural history, interviews and stories, and natural science. Deep maps do not look like 2-D maps, and there is no single correct way to make one. Often, deep maps look like books or essays. To do it, one must simply strive to include all kinds of data, especially those kinds that require seeking out written, oral, or remembered histories.

The practice of deep mapping was pioneered by Missourian William Least Heat-Moon in his widely celebrated work PrairyErth: A Deep Map (1991), which is a dense, rich rendering of a single Kansas county. On one page, PrairyErth recounts jokes told at local bars, and on another, it shares second-hand memories of the spot where someone was swallowed by a tornado. It is a powerful artifact that records more than any 2-D map could and, importantly, maps what was to make greater sense of what is. It has been suggested that deep mapping’s origins in the American heartland are not coincidental. Rather, perhaps the altered landscape and illusory emptiness here have inspired a collective quest, especially among literary figures, to illuminate the hidden roots, histories, and folklore of the prairies.

Recently, intensive, scholarly deep mapping has been used to produce a rural environmental history of the drainage of northern Iowa’s “lost lakes.” As Iowa State University researcher Kristen A. Greteman writes, “While Lake Cairo, one lake in the land of one thousand lakes, no longer exists as a feature of the landscape in Hamilton County, Iowa, it still exists as a place. It exists within the record. It exists within memories. It exists within the soil type.” (p. 92). For anyone seeking to understand how and why northern Iowa’s lakes and prairie potholes have vanished, Greteman’s research is sure to provide deep insight through its concentration of collective memory.

View of man-made Lylah’s Marsh, Howard County, IA (October 2023)

Least Heat-Moon tackles the issue of memory directly: “The American disease—and I’m quoting someone I can’t recall—is forgetfulness. A person or people who cannot recollect their past have little point beyond mere animal existence: it is memory that makes things matter.” (p. 342). Fundamentally, deep mapping is about recollection, about uncovering and organizing collective memory to more fully describe a place.

So, my humble thought is this: While farm mapping is certainly useful, could deep farm mapping be useful as well? Is there utility in collecting and assembling the stories and histories of relatives and neighbors, the memories of one’s own experiences on the farm, the historical records that mention the farm or town, and the quantitative data gathered by satellites and sensors, to create a deep farm map? If for no other reason, I wonder if it might be useful simply because deep mapping asks us to understand the present as coexisting with the past. To do so is perhaps one kind of treatment for that “American disease” of forgetfulness, a practice that echoes the writer William Faulkner’s famous reminder that, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

-Jon Dahlem

Sociology Unearthed #8: The Social Construction of El Niño

2023 enters the books as the hottest year on record while National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists affirm the arrival of an El Niño global climate event likely set to last until April-June 2024, and so Earth braces for the unknown ecological, economic, and social impacts of unusual and extreme weather in 2024. Here in Iowa, weather records indicate that El Niño means increased likelihoods of warmer winters, matching the season thus far. Research suggests that when Americans experience El Niño effects, they demonstrate increased interest in local climate in the form of concerned social media discourse, heading online especially to express heightened distress about climate change. We may indeed be in for an unusually warm winter, but a quick review of weather records reminds us that the 2009-2010 El Niño event saw an Iowa winter 35” above average snowfall. Undoubtedly, we shall all soon discover the weather.

Snowless central Iowa fields on a December day, 2023

El Niño is signaled when a tropical section of the Pacific Ocean off Peru’s coast temporarily increases in temperature, part of a “butterfly effect”-style chain of events weakening trade winds, dropping air pressure, and generally producing conditions that increase likelihoods of unusual or severe weather on every continent, bringing heightened risks of shocks to ecology and society such as disease and drought. Collectively called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the phenomenon broadly consists of an oscillation in climatic conditions perhaps best indicated by variability in those Peruvian waters between states of El Niño (warmer than average), La Niña (colder), and a neutral state (near-average) irregularly and somewhat unpredictably, with El Niño occurring every 2-7 years and generally persisting for several months. Peruvians noticed the phenomenon at least hundreds of years ago, naming it “Little Boy” because it tends to arrive at Christmas alongside ritual celebration of the birth of Christ. La Niña (Little Girl), also called anti-El Niño, was identified and named much later to describe the opposite state of El Niño.

Far from any kind of handwaving explanation for unusual weather, El Niño is perhaps better thought of as a part of Earth’s metabolism that feeds heightened variability in systems across the globe. El Niño is an inscrutable harbinger of the risks for which we prepare, from plagues of locusts to historic floods. While El Nino’s broad impacts on Iowa and North American agriculture are worth monitoring, effects elsewhere have historically been disastrous. Dry, hot Australian spring and summer brings risk of wildfires. Risk of coral bleaching events broadly increases. Antarctic ice melting occurs at higher rates. The Caribbean can experience heat waves and increased hurricane intensity. The impacts in Africa include but are not limited to drought, floods, landslides, and outbreaks of diseases such as malaria and cholera. In Thailand, ENSO is linked to dengue epidemics.

It may be simpler to imagine where ENSO, and El Niño in particular, does not impact human society. Some historians have speculated that El Niño was the culprit for the disastrous European winter of 1788 that brought famine sparking the French Revolution. Others suggest that El Niño may have been instrumental in the nautical migration of indigenous Polynesian people to islands across the Pacific. El Niño has brought disruptions to the production of rice, palm oil, sugar, cotton, shrimp, fish, corn, and much more, and it is generally understood to restrict economic growth. During El Niño conditions, native animal species populations can crash, invasive species can proliferate, and diseases can emerge. El Niño is essentially a matter of environmental justice, its effects experienced with inequitable severity along axes of social inequality related to social class, race, and gender. As just one example, exposure to abnormal heat from El Niño increases risks of negative health impacts for pregnant women, especially among the world’s poor.

Cold but unfrozen water at the Don Williams Recreation Area, Ogden, Iowa, 2023

El Niño is therefore essentially sociological, but fair warning, the social scientific investigation of El Niño, though somewhat nascent, is decently complex. This recent intellectual endeavor is being led by U.K. researchers Richard Grove and George Adamson, who have traced the human history of El Niño but also theorized its simultaneous proliferation both as a scientific and ideological concept. Adamson argues that the social construction of El Niño can partly be explained as an example of “path dependence,” an economic and political concept describing how institutions become locked into arbitrary practices as conventions. A popular example is the QWERTY keyboard, as research suggests that design may be popular despite its failure to optimize typing.

Indeed, Adamson’s meta-scientific investigations of El Niño indicate that the concept may not be optimal or even wholly necessary to describe the complexity of annual variation in Pacific Ocean temperature and subsequent weather patterns. What, then, motivates its persistence as a concept? Adamson suggests a connection between the rise of El Niño science in the 20^th century and the broader development of global economic perspectives, driven by American scientific and administrative institutions once highly concerned with popularizing the idea that the market systems of North and South America are fundamentally interconnected, including in their stability. If the economies of the world are interconnected, so then are the politics, a notion with considerable implications.

Now, El Niño has become an essential part of climate discourse and the systems-focused imagining of the complex interconnectedness of global atmospheric, oceanic, ecological, and societal realities. As something of a counterpoint to Adamson’s critical perspective, some climate scientists cite the productive impact that conceptualizing El Niño (particularly the 1997-1998 event) has had on the development of climate science, risk governance, and public awareness. My takeaway? The direction that the social construction of El Niño takes from here will depend not just on what scientific knowledge is produced about El Niño but how that knowledge is translated through political, economic, and cultural forces at work in the present day. Of course, it will also depend on the weather.

-Jon Dahlem

November 2023 Webinar Rewind

The year is almost over, but fantastic webinars are still happening weekly. Here is a quick recap of Novembers webinars in case you missed any!  

Movement of Soil in Corn and Soybean Fields Managed with Prairie Strips: Do prairie strips stop erosion? Does their location in the field matter for erosion reduction? Jessica Nelson, Iowa State University graduate student, discussed results from a 12-field study analyzing prairie strips effectiveness with different tillage managements.  

Perennial and Winter Annual Crops for Economic and Environmental Benefit: Tune into this webinar to learn about University of Minnesota’s Forever Green Initiative, which is studying continuous living cover ability with 16 different crops. Matt Leavitt discussed how a continuous living cover can reduce soil erosion and impact water quality. Check out the webinar to learn more about the 4 crops Matt says are best for integrating into a corn-soybean rotation system.  

Impact of 100 Years of Agricultural Practice Changes on Sediment and Nutrient Loss on One Farms in Osceola County, IA: Farming has changed a lot in 100 years and Dr. Matt Helmers presented one farm and its watershed’s changes. Watch this webinar to see erosion loss through the years, precipitation amount changes, nitrate changes, and a few pictures of Matt helping out on the farm while growing up.  

ManureDB: The Creation and Launch of the Largest Manure Nutrient Database in the US: Learn about the new manure database created to update manure book values. In the webinar, Nancy Bohl Bormann, University of Minnesota PhD candidate, discusses how the samples are analyzed by different labs across the country and added to the database.  

Blast from the Past: November 25, 2020 – Can Moments of Awe and Gratitude Improve the Environment?: Tune into Dr. Jacqueline Comito’s webinar to learn what science says about how experiences of awe and expressions of gratitude can impact environmental attitudes and behaviors.  

–Alena Whitaker