Kregg Hetherington: The paradox of destroying lands in the name of social welfare (ep348)
“This is what I call the agrobiopolitical paradox at the center of the modern agricultural state: Paraguay trying to push hard to get more soybeans out there and on the other hand trying to create institutions to protect people from all the soybeans that the left hand is putting in place.”
In this episode, we welcome Kregg Hetherington, Ph.D., the author of The Government of Beans and a political anthropologist specializing in the environment, infrastructure, and the bureaucratic state. Kregg's long-term ethnographic work in Paraguay chronicles how small farmers caught in a sweeping agrarian transition have experienced the country's halting transition to democracy, showing how activists create new ways of thinking and practicing government.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Kregg Hetherington: My personal trajectory that brought me to Paraguay is not that interesting. It came from traveling and in general a sense of listlessness and not knowing what I was doing with my life for a little bit before college. For a bunch of reasons, I ended up spending some time there in the late 1990s.
I had the chance to encounter a campesino leader, a peasant leader who was living near to where I was. I was completely inspired by the way this person talked. They were living in huts in the middle of the forest with no electricity at that point, and they would often invite me just to stay and to chat about things. (I had been brought in there in order to do some environmental education at the local school.)
I realized just in talking to this person how much of a fraud I felt at the time. On the one hand, because he knew so much more about anything that would be important to [these people] than I could possibly know, as this intruding foreigner, but also because his understanding of what was important about environmentalism was so tied to a social struggle that was going on in the area that, in my conception of the environment, was for a completely separate issue.
Over the next decade or so, I had the chance to go back and try to find ways to interact with more people like him and ultimately wrote a Ph.D. dissertation based on almost two years of living with one of these groups that was struggling for land. [I] didn't even have that much of an environmental component to the way I did the analysis. It was really about land struggles, space, and colonialism.
When I finished that project, I really wanted to come back and see how I could center that study of land politics and the relationship that these movements had with the government in a series of environmental questions that have dogged me for my entire life. That's how I came up with this. The study would really be about the agricultural changes that were happening in the area and the environmental [and] social consequences of those agrarian changes.
Kamea Chayne: This may be based on your earlier research inquiries looking at land struggles, but Guerilla Auditors is your earlier book, which is an ethnography of land struggles in Paraguay and how rural thinking about property and information come into conflict with bureaucratic reform projects promoted by international experts.
I'd love to preface the rest of our conversation with a brief historical backdrop here of this clash between rural and local communities in Paraguay and the types of bureaucratic reform and development that have been imposed on them by more external forces. What is important for us to understand here, and how does it connect the local issues in Paraguay to the global forces that some of us may be more familiar with?
Kregg Hetherington: I'll just preface the way that study came about. I had been interested in [thinking] about why people were losing land in this country that [seemed to have] a commitment to land reform and to the rights of peasant families to access land. Yet they were having a great deal of difficulty getting access to that land, in the late 90s and early 2000s.
A lot of it was supposedly based on informal property rights and the difficulties that people had in securing property rights in the context of widespread land reform.
I went to live with a bunch of people who were on the frontlines of the struggle to find land for people who were landless. The first thing that [struck] me was that even though the leaders of this movement were very often educated only at a high school level, their understanding of the law and their ability to manipulate legal and bureaucratic documents was incredibly high.
If you're a landless person stuck in the tumble of land reform, you learn to figure out what property is and what the state is, [and] you even learn to figure out what a “right” is, and then try to use that knowledge to your advantage. This is what I called “guerrilla auditors”: these people who were certainly not in any way trained to be lawyers or auditors, and yet who had this deep and intimate understanding of the way that state archives and state bureaucracy and so on, worked.
As I [came] to see things this way, I could then see how utterly strange it was to have these development experts coming in and saying what people really need is to have “more information” about their land, or [that] they need to have “more information” about how a property works, that people were being squeezed out of land reform because of an “inadequate amount of information”. That was clearly and patently not the case.
What it was, rather, was top-down experts abstracting all of what land was and doling it out in these nice little units rather than understanding that on the ground, there were minute and nuanced relationships—the true practitioners of which were really local folks and their leadership.
Kamea Chayne: To tie in agriculture, you talk about how the state has become involved in crop development, and how various apparatuses have been set up to further the Green Revolution and to sustain and expand what otherwise could be understood as “fragile”—monocultural crops, like soybeans.
What has this looked like in practice, and what has [facilitated] this transformation of the land from what might better support local communities, into something that ends up being extractive, and really serving the interests of those who are outside of the place-based community?
Kregg Hetherington: What my second study did was try to bring in this new agrarian transformation—a transformation from these relatively small-holding export economies, usually cotton and tobacco and a few other small export economies, towards massive soybean expansion. [It was] taking these smallholders and consolidating their farms into huge fields, sometimes ten or fifty thousand hectares, just growing a single crop of beans on top of them. This is a process of transformation that started in the mid to late 1990s and really exploded this century.
[What I realized was happening with soybeans was the propping up of] this model of property in land reform, [which was] this model that said that all land is basically the same thing. As much as that was a myth...
That was the myth on which the ‘90s land reform was being carried out.
[They were essentially saying], “Well, because all land is equal and because the land is just creating value in a fairly linear way, there's nothing wrong with taking half of the country and covering it in a single plant and just trying to make as much as much money as you can on that on that single plant.”
Later on, I really wanted to explore this relationship between abstracting the complex local circumstances and this ability that the Green Revolution [had] to create more and more specialized single crops that could then take over large amounts of territory.
To use that to get [land] was always a problem with my first approach to the Paraguayan rural problems, which was about land distribution. Everyone told me at the time, “It's not just about land distribution, it's also about these invasive plants that are coming in and taking over the whole territory.” [I was then] trying to work out that relationship.
Kamea Chayne: If we were to look at the soy industry, particularly, you shared that, "It's the unseen ways in which soy seeps into our everyday corporeal existence that are more difficult to reckon with. It makes any simple story about local actors and regulations seem almost impossibly quaint by multiplying the cast of characters ad infinitum."
With this, what is it really that has been driving the demand for soy in the global market? I don't believe most people go to the supermarket specifically to buy soybeans. If our listeners were interested in connecting themselves to this story, how would you illustrate this picture?
Kregg Hetherington: Soy certainly isn't the only global commodity that's like this, but it's a particularly good example of something that we're constantly enmeshed with in different ways—usually without realizing it. We had some edamame at my table the other day and my kids asked what it was. I said soybeans, and they said, “Oh my gosh, this is what you've been going on about the whole time!” Of course, it isn't really.
The soy complex is something that grows mostly out of postwar agriculture in the United States. Of course, there's a very long tradition of eating soybeans that comes out of East Asia. But there was a certain moment in the 1950s when meat producers in the United States realized that if they force-fed soybeans to their animals, even animals that do not like eating legumes normally, they could fatten them and make them grow much faster, because soybeans are very high in protein.
That's the basis for what happened over the second half of the 20th century. One of the most important crops worldwide is basically this bean that you crush down—very little of it is eaten by humans as beans—and [turn into] high-protein animal feed the world over. The other part becomes oils and a bunch of industrial derivatives that are all over our lives, without us realizing it. [So] certainly, the big driver of soybean agriculture is meat consumption out of feedlots and places like that. But the other is the way, as with corn and what people call “flex crops”, the huge amount of soybean oil [produced] (that comes out of the crushing for feed) means that people have found all these different complex industrial derivatives [to use].
So that's how we relate to soy daily—either through consuming meat or through these things that we don't even realize are there.
They're in our paint, they're in our glues, they're in our preservatives, all those kinds of places.
Kamea Chayne: It was interesting for me to think about how, as you say, the same infrastructure used to support fragile monocultures are the ones that are then used to protect people's health from the harmful impacts of the agrochemicals necessary to sustain the monocultures that they propped up, to begin with.
What might this tell us about the intentions and orientation of the state? Because it seems like a scenario of problem-creation and then problem-solving, rather than problem prevention in the first place in order to really support people's well-being, which is, of course, tied to the health of the land.
Kregg Hetherington: That's a really nice way of putting it. Maybe I'll back up and explain one of the phrases that you've used a couple of times, the idea that “monocultures are fragile”.
The Green Revolution was this advance in agricultural science (that we usually associate with the immediate postwar period) [which] gave us [not only] this new meat industry that depended on soy, [but] also gave these new, fabulous, hybrid plants—which were created to do very specialized things.
If you were a soybean, then you were specialized to create particularly large beans and to grow at a uniform height. If you were wheat, then you [were specialized to] grow much more wheat. But these are mutant plants, right? By creating these new forms of plants, they may do something that's useful for agriculture to create more food, for example, at the best of times. But then they also come with all sorts of vulnerabilities.
To the extent that people start growing them on larger and larger extensions of land, they become more and more vulnerable to the kinds of pests and land degradation that comes with growing the same thing over and over again.
When we talk about a monoculture, such as the three million hectares of soybeans that are currently sitting over eastern Paraguay, it's a very, very fragile biological assemblage of these plants that are all vulnerable to exactly the same thing.
When those things come in—rust is one of them: rust comes in and it takes over the entire three million hectares of soybeans—that can be absolutely devastating.
So how do you react to it? In a more traditional agricultural system, by mixing things around, you disperse the vulnerabilities. But in a monocultural system, you react to it by having better and better chemical solutions, to [address] these issues that come up.
The flip side of that Green Revolution in creating these fancy new plants is creating a series of poisons and other kinds of technologies that are meant to kill off anything that might make that plant vulnerable. Monocrops [are a concept] that have one life form at the center, [which] is then scaffolded by this incredibly violent technology that’s killing off all sorts of things that are classified as “pests”—but also things that are classified as just “in the way”, in a variety of ways, [of making] monoculture possible.
Two things happen with this monoculture. On the one hand, in order to get all that land that is then going to be cultivated by machinery, you have to first get rid of a whole bunch of people. Second, [you have to remove] a whole bunch of the things that the people have, like structures. Then you have to get rid of the forest that your bulldozer can't go through...
You have to get rid of all these other things that are there—it's an incredibly destructive imposition to begin with. Then you have to shower the whole thing daily with a variety of toxic chemicals that keep it alive, [which] necessarily is harmful to a whole bunch of people.
Then, [you have] the state supporting this, and it absolutely has in a country like Paraguay (where agriculture was most of the economy for most of the 20th century—the state has absolutely invested in these kinds of technologies). Yet the state presumably is also where we turn when there are widespread social harms.
So if those social harms are being created by the same apparatus, then you end up with these public institutions that are doing double duties.
On the one hand, they're handing out poisons to some farmers, and on the other hand, they're trying to protect other farmers from those same poisons.
This is what I call the agrobiopolitical paradox at the center of the modern agricultural state. You’ve got the same institutions doing both of these things: Paraguay [is] really trying to push hard to make everything possible to get more soybeans out there, and on the other hand, [it’s] trying to create institutions that are [supposed] to protect people from all the soybeans that the left hand is putting in place.
Kamea Chayne: What are the incentives for them? This is a pattern that I think we can recognize, not just in Paraguay, but elsewhere in other nation-state countries as well. But what is the incentive for the government to invest in and to facilitate the development of this monoculture of soybeans? If it's going to create a lot of problems, there must be some advantage that they're getting from supporting this.
Kregg Hetherington: Absolutely. This is why it's not easy to just say, “Well, why don't they just shut it down?” While I was working on this book, soybeans accounted for something like twenty-seven percent of gross national income. This is the way that social programs are being funded—through the income generated by these kinds of industries.
This is certainly true all over the place. It's why in other countries it's difficult to shut down coal mines and it's difficult to do all these things that we know in the aggregate are harmful but are nonetheless very lucrative, usually for a certain number of people. There's an inequality in the way that the wealth is distributed, but nonetheless [it] becomes important to propping up a government.
In a country like Paraguay, which has been systematically marginalized for centuries from having other kinds of income, the country [necessarily] has become extremely dependent on its agricultural sector.
When a boom comes along where there is cheap technology from elsewhere and there's a raging market for meat all over the world that's willing to buy up those soybeans, I think that the thing to explain would be why wouldn't most of the government move in that direction? Why wouldn't the state really support that?
It's also explainable in the sense that most of the people involved in its apparatus are not “bad” people. They are trying to do what they think is best for their country and their community. They're sincere in that, and it's not like there are a lot of other alternatives out there for generating the income that one would need to survive in these places.
But in Paraguay—and again, this is a universal problem—it may be particularly acute. The social safety net and taxation were very underdeveloped when this soy boom happened, so the inequality in the distribution of the resources that came in with the soybean boom was that much more acute and you could see it on the landscape and you could see it in the kinds of violence that allowed people to accumulate the land that they were accumulating, or in the way that people were able to completely disregard environmental laws or health laws or labor laws because there really wasn't the infrastructure in place to make sure that people benefited equally from this boom.
Kamea Chayne: I've shared this before, but I've been thinking about how problem-creation and then problem-solving is always more profitable than preventing the problem in the first place. Then there also is problem-creation and then attempts to solve those problems by only addressing the symptoms using commercial solutions, rather than getting to the heart of the crises. Creating more sets of problems that require another set of solutions that might be commodified as well, that endless chain is still going to be more profitable than just getting to the heart of the issues and addressing that.
In the global picture, when we have this dominant economy that is centered or based on endless economic growth, then, orients us towards many problems and solutions that don't necessarily get to the heart of the issues. This is again another pattern that I've been seeing across different issues that we've talked about on the show.
There's a quote that you share that I want to highlight here, which is, "Capital seeks to simplify biological production." I would love for you to expand on this statement.
Also, I wonder if there's a pattern here that we can recognize in the broader global context in terms of the real impacts of this model of export-led agriculture and export-led growth. We're talking about soy here being what has been capitalized on and in response, there have been, as you share, anti-soy activists. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on whether it's soy or if it's really the “how” and the export model itself that really disempowers local communities and leads to a homogenization of the landscape in order to defeat the desires of capital in the global market?
Kregg Hetherington: Both of those takes are very astute. First, the idea that problem-creation and problem-solving are a way of generating profit. That’s exactly what's happening here. There's also a way in which capital—I don't necessarily want to put a big capital C on that—and the export market have come to dominate places like this, based on a model of simplification and amplification.
One of the ways that this happens is precisely through this scaling-up that soybeans make possible. One of the things that soybeans are so desirable for is that you can grow them on 10,000 hectares. Not every plant allows you to do that. The fact that you can grow them on 10,000 hectares means that you have fewer labor costs and fewer other costs associated with growing them. The bigger you can make it, the more of the product you can fit into the hold of a boat in order to ship it somewhere. Beans are good for that, too.
All those things make soybeans very amenable to a model that is always wanting bigger and bigger and bigger.
When I talk about seeking to simplify biological production, you need to simplify it in order to be able to scale. You need to be able to have these things that are easily measurable and that aren't going to get too complex in their relationships with the other things to scale in that way.
The flip side of that, and you alluded to this with talking about activists, is that it's not always clear how you intervene in a system like this. The story that I tell in the book is mostly focused on bureaucrats who are trying to shift the way that the system is working to make it less harmful. Not just about creating these Band-Aid solutions in that way, but actually trying to get at the root causes of why this structure has this particular momentum in one direction. It's really about how incredibly difficult, if not impossible, that project was for these people. I want to underscore that, just because I think in some ways it feels like it's easy to point to the place where the problem is. There's this assumption that there's a place where the problem isn't or there's a place from which one could intervene.
Yet the incredible difficulty of that is what makes this story like the story of carbon: where the attempt to change it is almost always as much wrapped up in the problem itself as it is something that's going to shift in some other direction.
Kamea Chayne: Right, and to add another layer to the challenge that people are having to confront, you've shared in passing before that soy lobbyists have been exerting their influence over the scientific community. Peeling back the layers to look at what is behind the curtains is so critical because it helps us to calibrate the information that we then receive from the legitimized sources that we learn from.
For example, in the dominant Western culture, lessons from the scientific community and from scientific research are often very highly valued and prioritized as the reference in policymaking. This is, of course, not to detract from this form of knowledge at all, but it is important for us to understand the institutional biases that affect what types of knowledge and research are invested in and then ultimately published and produced.
Can you elaborate more on what this has looked like in terms of maybe legitimizing a scientific justification for this destructive model of agriculture for soybeans?
Kregg Hetherington: Yeah, it's really important. One of the ways that science plays out in this in this story—again, through a whole bunch of well-meaning people who often enter into the scientific side of this in order to try to ameliorate the problem—is that they find themselves in a paradigm of knowledge creation that very easily moves in the same direction of the monocrop, rather than against it.
One of the things that agricultural science is good at is breaking things down into their components and figuring out which components are vulnerable to what and then seeing how you can deal with those vulnerabilities in an abstract way. Knowing that this particular plant is vulnerable to this particular caterpillar, and that caterpillar is vulnerable to this toxin, means that you can come up with a scientific solution to that issue. Western science has been extremely good at that. It's where we get the Green Revolution as we know it.
Then what happens is that people start to use [the] same tools to think about the harms that are being caused by something like three million hectares of soybeans.
You start to realize the limits of what that science can tell you.
You can start to break down, “Well, there is erosion, right? There's an erosion problem.” Then you can try to fix the erosion problem or there's a problem like rust. Then you can throw on chemicals to try to deal with that. But how can you deal with the fact that there are all these communities that no longer feel comfortable using the roads in order to get to the local clinic because the roads have been completely chewed up by soybean farmers and because there are pesticides wafting into those roads? What social harm is that? What help do we get from agrarian science? Well, we don't get very much…
But you just have to visit these places. Everyone knows perfectly well that there's something off-kilter about the relationship between really wealthy farmers and their massive machines and their pallets full of poisons versus these people who are just being cut off from the roads and schools and things like that.
Agrarian science doesn't have much to say to that. Yet the whole regulatory apparatus moves us towards asking questions in that vein. What can we do so that this one little thing doesn't happen?
The same thing is true of the courts. I spend a bit of time in the book talking about the way that people have tried to adjudicate pesticide poisonings, which are sometimes the most extreme or noticeable harms that come from this type of agriculture.
Very often, even something like a pesticide poisoning in a court of law is extremely difficult to prove because the relationships involved in why a particular toxin might have affected a particular body in a particular way are incredibly complex. When the scientists and the lawyers can't quite come to an agreement on something, then we just throw up our hands and say, “Well, it's inconclusive, so forget about it.” That way of thinking is really unhelpful for figuring out how to better live in the world, basically.
This is what it comes down to, which I think also comes back to what you said about creating problems and then solving problems [rather] than just trying to live better, to begin with. But that does seem to be the takeaway from the way these regulatory apparatuses keep tripping over themselves and recreating the same knowledge, which is almost invariably helpful for monocrops, rather than the other way around.
Kamea Chayne: That certainly speaks to the limitations of having a myopic lens as opposed to taking a step back to look at everything with a more holistic view and across disciplines as well. Definitely an important lesson there.
This touches again on what we discussed earlier in terms of problem-creation and then problem-solving, but at the heart of your message is this paradox of how local ecosystems and communities are being destroyed in order to improve social welfare based on economic growth, for example. Again, this appears to be a pattern across the world, whether it's done in the name of economic growth or job creation or addressing hunger, and so forth.
How have your research inquiries challenged the dominant ideas of how social welfare and life quality are even measured and understood? How do we make sense of this paradox that life is being destroyed and then simplified in order to improve these metrics, supposedly indicating a community's quality of living and wealth?
Kregg Hetherington: That's a really big question. And it's one that, even after the book came out, I struggle with.
The main thing that I wanted to take away from this is that forms of life—and I tend to construe that as communities of different kinds of creatures that thrive together—are always in some way destructive. It's worth being really clear about that when we try to get into the morality of “some forms of life are better than others”. Every time we cultivate something, we are taking away the possibility of something else to grow in that spot, even if we're doing it in the most holistic way.
I wanted to start from that basis to think, “Ok, if every if every form of life that we choose to support or to allow to thrive comes at the expense of some other one, then we can interrogate the large-scale programs that have been put out, often with the best intentions for thinking about new forms of life.”
One of the ones that I focus on quite a bit in the book is this notion of welfare, which comes out and the welfare state as it first emerges in in Europe and North America and then is imposed via various kinds of development programs in some other countries. This notion of the welfare state is a model of life. It's a model of life that says that people ought to be supported in their capacity to thrive, to a certain extent. (This is one of the ironies that I alluded to earlier.)
A lot of the folks that I'm talking about [that are] now being displaced by soybeans were beneficiaries of that model of life, a model of welfare. This is why I wanted to be really clear about the fact that that did come with a cost. This was a redistribution of land and the creation of a certain cash economy for people who had previously been excluded from the cash economy. Nonetheless, [it] came at the expense of a lot of forests and a lot of Indigenous territories.
What does that tell us about this moment, in which there is an expansion of what we call "welfare" that nonetheless rides on so much destruction?
It is the relationship between that and the current justifications of the soybean economy, which we were talking about a little bit earlier. The “why you do it.”
We do it because it creates so much income. But then what are the costs of that income? What are the costs of someone who says, “Well, we can't expand the health care system without having a bigger tax base” (which from a myopic view of things is absolutely true)? We can't make better schools unless we have a better tax base. Where are we going to get the tax base? If our main industries are soybeans, what are we going to put into soybeans?
I think that calculus is something that I certainly don't say that I can resolve, but it's one that I wanted to put to the front of mind when people think about these relationships between development, welfare, and something like agriculture, where the destructiveness of “welfare” becomes so obvious.
If there are goods in there that one wishes to be able to think with or one wishes to be able to allow to thrive, then how do we square that with the death that's also meted out along the way? Is there a different way to think about what that relationship or that equation might be? Again, I don't have the answer to that, but I think it points to—the word “holistic” that you've been using a bit is a useful one—a larger way of understanding how these systems come into being.
Kamea Chayne: There's a lot to think about, and there are no easy answers… it's not a simple problem that has one root because, at this point, it's so embedded across everything within our society that there are not going to be easy answers. We just have to sit with these difficult questions.
In terms of the approaches that people have taken to resist the devastation caused by the soy industry, you've looked at how some activists have chosen the path of capturing political power in order to be in a position to enact change from that top-down method. What difficult questions have you seen people needing to confront when taking this approach to change-making? Also, what are the limitations, as in what are the constraints of the system itself? Or how does the system even change people once they begin to master and then play by its rules and incentives?
Kregg Hetherington: This really gets at the crux of what was so troubling for me about this book. Maybe to personalize it a little bit, when I started this project around 2009, something had just happened in Paraguay that was really enormously hopeful for people like me: someone who considers themself an environmentalist and on the left and was a supporter of a whole bunch of social movements in Paraguay, in a country that had been dominated not only by single industries but by a dictatorial political system for two centuries at that point.
In 2008, against all odds, they managed to elect a very small coalition of activists into the presidency of the republic and a lot of the people who acceded to higher office at that moment were people I knew really well and people whom I considered and still consider myself to be allied with, in the way that I think about these kinds of situations. You can imagine, particularly in a country that has been dominated by dictatorial politics for an awfully long time, that this was an incredibly hopeful moment.
Yet over the next couple of years—without discounting some of the really amazing things that people did during that time—I'd say much more than that, people found themselves to be ground down by this system that was larger than themselves, which forced them to ask questions in particular ways and largely made it impossible to touch more structurally the issues that they were concerned with.
It's a real question. The people who spent all this time building up, for example, that institution of the state that's meant to regulate pesticides, if ultimately that institution is the same institution that allows for the importation of large numbers of pesticides in order to grow the soy industry, then what exactly did they accomplish after four years, when they were thrown out office and taken over by a rabble of far right-wing soybean supporters? It's not clear, right? Likely the main impact was just to increase the capacity of the state to continue imagining crops at that scale.
So a lot of people, including myself, coming out of that experience, once they were thrown out of office, a lot of the reflections were really “thinking at the scale of the state is really part of the problem.” Then, ultimately what we ought to be doing is thinking at a much smaller scale about the kinds of thriving that one can try to support in particular situations without getting into that knowledge creation that we talked about before that allows this scaling up of everything.
Maybe the scale is part of the problem.
Kamea Chayne: Since a lot of this can be heavy, to offer some inspirations, what are some stories of resilience you've heard from local communities at the grassroots level in regard to how they have confronted and even thrived amidst the impact of the invasion of the soy industry taking over?
Kregg Hetherington: For anyone who reads this book, they should know that I finished writing it at a moment of a real deep pessimism among most folks that I knew. Partly, it felt like a dark time after everyone was turfed from office. But I can say afterward that life continues as normal and people are amazingly able to do great things, even in the margins of totally destructive industries.
There's a group that's been around for quite some time now called Conamuri, which is a group of Indigenous and peasant women who come together and created several very small-scale, organic industries around Paraguay. Some of them export yerba mate as one of their products. There have been some seed exchange institutions that have come up where people have really tried to think more about how to relate to more Indigenous products in Paraguay without having to go through standard markets.
There are a lot of personal stories of people who have disconnected from that desire to change things at a large scale and have instead reconnected on their plots in their farms with new ways of carrying on. All of that is what keeps me thinking that you can beat people down for very long.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has restricted my ability to continue this research. But that would be the ultimate goal for the next project—really to track down these sorts of communities and often just individuals who are thinking differently about agriculture and how to how to move it forward.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Kregg Hetherington: In the last year, I've read a lot of amazing books, but the one that comes immediately to mind is this book called Pollution as Colonialism by Max de Waal, who is a Métis scholar based in Newfoundland right now. They are one of the people who is just bringing a brilliant and original voice to the question of what's the relationship between knowledge creation, decolonization, and environmental destruction. I've now gone through that book twice. There's so much coming out of this scholar right now.
Kamea Chayne: What are some mottos, mantras, or practices you engage with to stay grounded?
Kregg Hetherington: This will probably sound pretty cheesy, but I do think—again in a pandemic moment where I'm feeling my life is somewhat restricted—it useful to remind myself to ask to what extent what I'm doing in a given day or given week or given lifetime, how much those things are fostering the thriving of living beings in relation to each other. If they're not doing that, then what is it that I'm doing exactly with my time here on Earth? That notion that everything we do is somehow connected to thriving communities is the thing that I try to keep reminding myself.
Kamea Chayne: And what is your biggest source of inspiration right now?
Kregg Hetherington: These small communities of farmers who weathered the impact of the soy boom and are now thriving in its margins. I would include, alongside this, the new generation of young scholars in Latin America. And particularly Paraguay, there's this great efflorescence of scholarship.
What I find particularly inspiring about it is that it's starting in a moment where thinking environmentally is really thinking in terms of environmental justice. I don't think that was the case in the 90s when I was studying. I always found it difficult to put my environmental justice questions and my social justice questions together with my environmental questions. Now I see folks coming out of Latin American universities for whom those are absolutely and constantly intertwined with one another. I love that, and I can't wait for the next decade of scholarship coming out of this new group of people.
Kamea Chayne: Kregg, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and leaving us with so much to dig deeper into and think about what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Kregg Hetherington: I'm not sure I have any wisdom, and I'll just say this from the perspective of someone who has lived an incredibly privileged life. Sometimes I think it's best for me to just step aside and say institutions like the green dreamers are great. I love the kinds of voices and conversations you're bringing to everybody. I look forward to hearing more from you and from all the listeners here.
