The Great Homestead Debate: A Scientific sidebar
A stone wall in Hunterdon county, NJ
Stone walls are relics of European settlements still ubiquitous across the northeastern US today.
The September issue of Frontiers in Ecology in the Environment, an academic journal of the Ecological Society of America, included a great article by Xu and Huntsinger 2022 about fences and their physical, social, and ecological impacts and how those impacts sometimes endure long after physical fences disappear. It really gets back to why thinking about homesteading and its legacies is important when diagnosing root causes of current problems in our food system, and where potential solutions may be. If you read no further, take a moment to sit with Winston Churchill’s words from 1943, “We shape our dwelling, and afterwards our dwellings shape us,” quoted by the authors in this paper. 270 million acres of US land were distributed to homesteaders who have more than 93 million descendants still alive today [1]. What is their legacy and what does it mean for our collective food system future?
Fences are more than biophysical barriers
The authors wrote this article for an audience of ecologists and land managers, a group often focused heavily on biophysical factors and explanations. As a formally trained ecologist and biogeochemist, this is my bias as well, and one I am frequently working to re-examine to better overcome its limitations. This article helps do just that. It widens the aperture for this group, particularly around fence impacts. Their opening framing points to how fences (and other "technological fixes") often proposed to solve "straightforward biological problems" often lead to "unanticipated negative outcomes for society and ecosystem" because of "unrecognized social, economic and political forces".
They show how fences and the biophysical outcomes researchers and land managers have previously focused on are underpinned, or, in some cases, directly driven by 5 social factors:
human mobility
land practices and land use
economic relationships
social relationships
human-nature relationships
They explore these factors through case studies looking at the American West, Western China, and South Africa, though there are also a fair number of references to Kenyan examples as well.
Fences make it hard to see
Fences restricted human mobility in each of their case studies, first due to the physical barrier, but then because it divides people into groups too small to steward herds as they had before fencing. This in turn, redistributes the human footprint, which has "cascading effects on primary productivity, fire dynamics, and system resilience." They're talking about this at the within landscape scale, but I often think about a similar phenomenon that we can observe at the global scale driven by non-physical fences of national borders and company climate accounting where this myopic focus results offshoring or out of scoping emissions to companies or countries where there is no accounting or worse accounting resulting in potentially worse net impacts.
Fences really fray or just straight cut up the social fabric. This starts by just the fundamental shifts in the tasks involved in land management. The shift is typically from interactive tasks often performed collaboratively to repetitive, individual tasks that can be both less social and less intellectually stimulating. For example, they explain, the US cowhand's main work was tending cattle pre-fencing and became fence-mending post fencing. In China, pre-fencing tasks were communal herding and pasture care, which became impossible with fences that forced herders to travel on or adjacent to roads to maneuver around fences and made the work more fragmented and individualized just to literally fit through the spaces.
reciprocity as a key to resilience
This shift in work and interactions goes on to weaken reciprocal social relationships that in turn compromises optimal resource management and resilience. The high economic cost of fencing means that even if land division and parcel allocation occurs somewhat equitably, it is the "wealthier households who are first able to build fences." Because these pastoral regions and traditional livelihoods rely on mobility due to resource patchiness, what fencing actually typically results in on the ground is the unfenced land becoming over exploited. For example, "in Inner Mongolia, certain herders who built fences early intentionally keep their livestock outside their own land as much as possible, exploiting the shared resource of other herders who cannot afford fences." In Western China, researchers measured a decrease in social activities - group singing, dancing, horse racing - following land division and fencing. Over the longer term, these economically stratified and socially disconnected populations fray to the point of shedding a newly created marginalized landless class, who often leave the land and region to pursue wage work, taking with them knowledge and memories necessary to enable unfenced land use and stewardship. This depopulation and knowledge loss makes reversing ecological damage rendered by fencing more challenging than just removing the physical fences.
These authors conclude that many ecological consequences of fencing are socially rooted, and that as we increasingly recognize the importance of connectivity to human and wildlife health, "we may realize that 'there where it is we do not need the wall." What we may need, based on their case studies of historical and recent pre-/post-fence ecology, is enhancement of:
Reciprocal social relationships
Usufructuary property rights
Community management of common pool resources
Other social infrastructure to achieve long-term sustainability and resilience.
Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form.
Pierce Lewis, 1979
How we fulfill these needs takes us back to the debate. Our next piece in the series will dig more into what the homestead landscape legacy and resurgence means - in terms of our values, aspirations, and fears for a better food system.
