The politics of economics: Sustainability and paradigms in world environmental history and agriculture.

摘要

The premise of this dissertation is that agricultural sustainability is an issue which environmental history is uniquely situated to analyze. In the opening chapter I point out that the field of history has so far failed to contribute significantly to debates about sustainability, although other disciplines have created a rich discourse. After discussing various paradigms current in world environmental history, I argue that a common thread among many of them is an assumption that economics is the root cause of many environmentally destructive decisions. Thus modern unsustainability is commonly linked to market forces.; In opposition to this trend, this dissertation proposes that politics, meant in the broad sense of struggles over power, are an important and underconsidered source of multiple levels of environmental and agricultural decision making. Firstly, the political and social context creates and defines the economic realm. Secondly, decisions based on race, nation, gender, or workplace control may actually override financial considerations. If environmentally unsound decisions are to be understood, not just economics but also politics must considered in analyses. I suggest a return in the paradigm of political economy to an emphasis on the political.; A case example of irrigated agriculture in the desert is chosen as a terrain in which to apply this paradigm. A series of chapters considers how a conflict-conscious historian might read or reread historical and topical questions in this geographic and chronologic context.; I conclude with a chapter advocating interdisciplinarity in environmental studies, and in particular suggesting that history can begin to take on proto and prehistoric time periods if it rejects the economically based assumption of the exceptionalism of the modern era.; Parallel to the arguments related to sustainability and agriculture are two other threads: firstly, that history as a discipline is relatively unreflective about theory and that a resurrection of the discussion of historiography, in the sense of historical paradigms, would greatly enrich the history we write. Secondly, I argue that the project of synthesis, which a true conflict and anti-economistic paradigm can enable, is necessary to counter the increasing fragmentation which threatens to make academic knowledge meaningless.