In Amazonia (29 page)

Nevertheless, an important politics is held in the gap between the utopia of methodological purity and the awkward realities of field practice, a politics that can be found well beyond the FMP. There are, for instance, the irresistible imperatives to data precision, underwritten by anxieties about the relatively low scientific status of ecology.
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One important example in the context of project design is experimental replication.
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Although a primary disciplinary necessity, replication, Paul explains to me, is often “silly” in a field of this type. This, of course, does not mean he considers it valueless. In fact, he puts tremendous energy into its pursuit. For the sake of replication, he works at three separate sites in south Pará in addition to Fazendinha, tracks the seasonal migrations of deepsoil water across two slopes rather than one, and carries out inventories at four paired top- and bottomslope plots, creating the annual task of measuring an additional 2,500 trees. The difficulty lies in both the inability of replication to absorb variability effectively, and in the porosity of surveillance and control. It is not that replications are unnecessary, but that they are inadequate. They are demanded by an appreciation of the extraordinary heterogeneity of this landscape, yet this same variability produces two significant problems. In the first place, there seems to be no way of truly establishing the identity between distinct experimental units; and, in the second, the basis on which the specific number of replicates is determined involves a decided arbitrariness—and is often dictated by the everyday logic of logistical imperative.
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Nevertheless, precision's powerful rhetoric arbitrates the Project's legitimacy, and methodology provides the key focus of the critical interrogation to which the professional review process subjects Paul's reports and papers.
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One morning, we are all standing under the shimmering silver crown of a tall mahogany tree, swatting at deerflies as we wait for the measurements to be completed. Pointing to a nearby
garra branca
(a larger but less valuable species than mahogany), Paul muses out loud that you often find these trees growing close to mahogany. He doesn't know why—maybe they like similar growing conditions? After a moment's quiet, Luiz responds. It's true: when the
explorador
, the spotter on a logging team, sees garra branca, he gets excited. He knows there'll be mahogany nearby. Similarly, Luiz continues, confirming an upslope-downslope
distribution pattern that Paul is keen to demonstrate, the explorador will look for mahogany by following a stream, but he knows he won't find any until the channel narrows and he reaches the top of the watershed.

Luiz has four years' experience working with logging teams in this area, accompanying the spotters in their hunt for the R $3 paid for each tree found.
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Out in the forest at four in the morning, marking trees, bulldozing trails, dragging out the trunks with heavy equipment until ten at night all through the dry season. A non-stop, ear-splitting whorl of engines and chainsaws. Luiz learned a lot about natural history here in those four years with the loggers and he gained an ability to read the marks of prior political economy in the landscape, a sharp narrative eye that turns a slash in a tree trunk into the
maldade
, the malice, of the passing explorador. If the FMP folds, the chances are he will utilize his expertise again in the same line of work. This, of course, is an irony lost on no one. Others on the team have done their share of logging, and Jaime smiles wryly: “First I was cutting the forest, now I'm saving it.”

Paul is respectful of the team's forest knowledge, and, he tells me, his understanding of the landscape and floral ecology in this place has come about through “a joint learning and teaching venture with them.” Yet, he also tells me, these people are relatively new to this landscape. Although in the early days his dependency on them was thoroughgoing, now it is more a case of logistics and labor. They are colonists and immigrants in south Pará, fieldworkers whose situated botanical experience does not compare with that of the Dayaks with whom he worked years before in Southeast Asia. These Brazilians' awareness of ecological relationships, he tells me, is uneven and limited. Jaime agrees, and when I ask him if he knows the forest well, he says he knows this part of it pretty well. Born and raised outside the nearby town of Conceição do Araguaia, he is not merely being self-effacing:
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he knows this forest well enough to understand the significance of location and the indeterminacies of ecological heterogeneity.

Although heterogeneity presents challenges for a scientific method that arrogates the right to generalize heroically from the particular, spatial restriction in itself is not confounding to a research practice that operates on a principle of synecdoche. By necessity, the FMP will have something—however hedged by caveat—to say about the region. And it is therefore not parochialism that limits the scientific relevance of Luiz's observations. This is a problem of translation and rhetoric. His is information but not data, and—although what counts as data is always
dependent on the community and moment in which those data are being circulated—it is on such distinctions that methodological practice reproduces and justifies itself.

Luiz and Paul were demonstrating something important about the way methodology arbitrates multiple knowledges. Out in the forest, method emerges as a complicated sorting procedure with a simple, but crucial, goal: the manufacturing of objects that can convince as data. It is a process through which the hierarchies of knowledge relevance are established and in which the descriptive is distinguished from the analytic, the anecdotal from the systematic, the mythic from the factual, the information from the data. As such, it is the inescapable ground on which the credibility of ecology as a science must be tested. Yet, equally, performed in this particular natural-cultural world where the main characteristics are instability and excess, methodological purity is the one test that a field science can only fail. What practice produces, rhetoric must be dedicated to erasing.

However necessary the analogy, the forest is not very much like a laboratory. In fact, it is only through some very specific exclusions that it is able to function as a site for data generation at all. It goes without saying that the forest emerging in conventional natural scientific rhetoric is one in which the collaborations of humans and the obstinacies of non-humans that are so fundamental to the practice of field experimentation are absent. But, given that this is a forest designed to save the forest, there is a certain logic to these exclusions. The FMP that circulates as an intervention in debates on the future life of mahogany relies on the purity of nature for its work in the public language of policy discourse—as a scientific research site and in the form of data.
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Yet, this clinical identity through which arguments over the regulation and management of species are waged is, in practice, only a supplement to the affective meanings of mahogany. Once more pointing to both the ambivalence and the excess from which data are produced, it turns out that rather than effacing mahogany's romance, the FMP relies on it, using this tree's historical charisma to generate justification, funding, and attention from loggers and environmentalists alike.

C
OMPLICITIES

Paul's research reflects long-standing disciplinary struggles to make sense of the natural world while not losing sight of the conservationist
impulse to intervene in it. Committed to describing the functional interrelationships of a relatively coherent natural system, he is forced to devote considerable energy to managing the extravagant density of complicating presences. In Fazendinha, as we have already seen, some complications find their way back in.

As well as struggling against the everyday corruptions of the human and the intractability of the non-human, Paul and his IMAZON colleagues are attentive to the profoundly anthropogenic character of their research sites in south Pará. In other words, although they milk the duality in their political sacralizing of the forest, they also appreciate the shifting artificiality of the nature-culture divide. I remain skeptical about the hunt for natural processes in which they are ultimately involved, with its peeling away of the accreted layers of culture in a search for the essential. Yet Paul and I call a truce somewhere in the region of a critical realist approach to the non-human. Similarly caught in webs of affect and uncertainty, I concede a limited, strategic version of his claim for those things—relatively autonomous in their biophysicality—that he calls nature.

Something else that occupies our conversation is the apparent convergence over recent decades between theoretical developments in ecology and the social sciences. The rise of non-equilibrium ecology, influenced by chaos theory and emphasizing landscape heterogeneity and the contingency of disturbance, seems to map readily onto parallel moves in the human sciences to resist totalizing narratives by valorizing the heterogeneous and the paradoxical.
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Paul traces his own deconstructive lineage through the Yale School of Forestry, where his training brought him into conversation with David M. Smith, a key figure in the elaboration of a natural historical approach to silviculture, and with Herbert Bormann, whose partnership with Gene Likens produced the seminal Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study of the 1960s and 1970s.
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As might be expected from distinguished faculty in a school founded by Aldo Leopold, both of these scholars promoted the role of basic research in the context of a managerial approach to nature. Both also drew on a U.S. tradition of the working forester with an intimate knowledge of trees as both individuals and species, and both developed practices self-consciously sensitive to immanent patterns in natural systems.
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In its allegiance to ideas of succession and homeostasis, the Hubbard Brook project was more conservative than the research that geographers and anthropologists now champion as pointing to the obsolescence
of the ecological models utilized by social scientists.
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Yet Bormann and Likens did depart from the abstractly technicist orthodoxy of systems analysis promoted by H. T. Odum, emphasizing instead forest history (that included human history), ecological complexity, disturbance, and temporal and spatial patchiness. They envisioned their New England watershed as an unevenly processual “shifting mosaic.”
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In addition, they recast the emerging research archetype of long-term, large-scale “big science” by stressing multidisciplinarity, hands-on empirical labor, and non-hierarchical working relations.
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The transposition of this research model from temperate to tropical systems raised significant theoretical and logistical dilemmas. Tropical forests have far longer growing seasons, considerably greater diversity in plant and animal populations, more intricately co-evolved reproductive biologies, and population structures of a different order of complexity from their temperate analogs. Even basic mechanical techniques, such as those for calculating the age of trees, were found to be ineffective.

Equally challenging were the frequently opaque institutional and personnel arrangements that emerged in the process of undertaking what could be highly capitalized research projects around obscure agendas in the developing world. In Fazendinha, for example, Paul finds himself not simply the employer of his crew, but their
patrão
, a regionally conventional figure binding the Project together through intimate and reciprocal patronage relationships. The assumed transparency of cash-based exchange thickens into the sticky soup of mutual but differential duties, obligations, and rights. Over the years, the pool of FMP workers has narrowed to the members of one extended family, so that Paul now confers with Ana about the potential impacts of seasonal layoffs on particular relatives and the best way to ensure that her brother-in-law uses his salary to benefit his wife and children. It means, for example, that Paul is pulled into the logic of some highly particular Amazonian social relations, advancing salary on credit to his most senior workers with paternalist provisos that specific monies be used for specific domestic purchases, such as a chainsaw, a plot of land, or construction materials. In this way, Paul finds himself responsible for a large number of connected people who are not his direct employees, and decisions about the Project's future and its labor capacity become significantly freighted.

There are, then, closely related methodological and social conundra here. At first sight, forest ecologists might appear to be involved in an
endeavor that, however oriented to heterogeneity, is ultimately and inevitably a restrictive procedure of simplification. However, when we consider ecological practice in a more inclusive sense—to encompass the writing of research papers, the demarcation and construction of field sites, the employment of assistants, the coordination of collaborators, the elaboration of patron-client networks, the circulation of technologies, the consultation in local political process, and so on—it becomes clear that such traveling projects are highly productive of all kinds of new and altered social and discursive relations.