Conclusions
This case study documents the links between the local, national and global political economy, the decisions made by local actors, and environmental change in the Copán Valley. The rise and fall of flue-cured tobacco provides a clearly defined starting and end point that enables us to trace the links between causal agents at varying levels of analysis and the local social and natural landscape. In this case, the local social and ecological landscape was transformed by the actions of relatively few, but powerful, local actors – tobacco growers who linked up with a transnational corporation (BAT) to harness large numbers of laborers in the production of an international commodity, flue-cured tobacco. This production process had substantial ecological impacts in terms of deforestation and the use of a suite of highly toxic agrochemicals. The case draws our attention to the importance of preexisting social structural relationships, especially control over and access to resources, in shaping the nature of environmental change in particular localities. It also emphasizes the importance of local agroecological conditions in shaping environmental change. Rather than a static backdrop, the local agroecology is an active “actor” in this transformation; local agroecological conditions permitted the flourishing of BAT’s flue-cured model in the Copán Valley. The fall of flue-cured tobacco, linked to changing macro-economic conditions associated with the pull-out of BAT, created a crisis of livelihood for both growers and laborers alike. As such, it was clearly a factor in the rise of the ethnopolitical movement aimed at recovering ancestral lands for the formerly landless laborers in order to provide an alternative livelihood to the now-vanished agricultural labor in the growers’ fields. Growers are still casting about for alternative production strategies to replace flue-cured tobacco, which essentially ended with BAT’s withdrawal from contract production in Copán. This case study illustrates the importance of paying close attention to interactions among local agroecology, social conditions, the natural environment, and the impulses emanating from the broader political economy and how these resonate at the local level. While it is important to focus on “land managers,” this case study demonstrates important interactions between national and international actors as well as the local social and natural landscapes that are the frequent objects of analysis of human ecologists. BAT chose to invest in the Copán Valley at least in part because local agroecological and social conditions were propitious for flue-cured production. At the same time, we can only understand the local social and natural landscape with reference to broader political economic forces that shaped non-local interventions in the region and the responses of local actors.
Thus, this case study presents examples of several trends in human ecology research: the progressive contextualization approach advocated by Vayda (1983) in which the investigator traces out whatever relationships are necessary to understand the given social and ecological questions under consideration (and ignores others). It is also an example of “classic” political ecology that links levels of analysis. It follows other successful examples of a “social life of commodities” approach, pioneered by Mintz (1985), in which a particular commodity or production process is used as the lens to examine social, economic, and ecological relationships. It also follows conceptual frameworks suggested by various “hybrid” political ecologies derived from theorists such as Nygeres (1997), Balée (1998), and Bebbington and Batterbury (2001), particularly in recognizing the importance of contingent, historical events that shape local agency. The study also incorporates remote sensing as a means of measuring environmental change and links this technique with ethnographic and historic research in creative ways, following methodologies pioneered by Moran and others (see Moran et al. 2003). While this article may represent “just another case study” (albeit an interesting one!), the methods pursued and the conclusions generated build on the insights generated by a number of threads of scholarship in human ecology and point the way toward a synthesis of theoretical frameworks and methodologies to guide human ecological inquiry in the future.