In August 2020, with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, a mixed group of Venezuelans and Haitians found themselves in legal limbo. They had effectively become stuck on the Ponte de Amizade that connects and marks the border between the Brazil and Peru. They had initially been permitted to enter Brazil after presenting undertakings approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Health committing them to adhere to all national COVID-19 protocols but were subsequently deported back to the bridge, and purportedly to Peru, by Brazilian Federal Police on the grounds that the border had been closed due to the pandemic. However, Peru, too, had in the meantime closed its border for the same reason, so that the group ended up stuck on the border bridge for several weeks, until a Brazilian court issued an order allowing their (re-)entry into Brazil.

(https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qm9pr_v1)

This border bridge is an example of what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the 1950s, called “the organic line.”

Think of the space between the door and door frame, or between the stone tiles on the floor, or in this case the border between two countries. It’s organic because the line is not straight, but rather the border line expands or narrows between two uneven river banks, while the bridge densifies variably with more or fewer refugees. In this way, the organic line, in the words of Irene Small, “dilates a space of contingency” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRc3CidwSME&t=3945s)

What’s policy-relevant about this? “The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning,” wrote another artist earlier. Or better yet,

There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. . .What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State.

(Deleuze and Guattari in https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)

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Source. Irene V. Small (2024). The Organic Line: Toward a topology of modernism. Zone Books: New York.

“Good God, man, get a grip! We’re adults here.”

Major issues affecting the US housing market are the effect of the climate emergency on property values:

As climate disasters hit with greater intensity and frequency, the economic effects will be felt not only as the underlying assets are damaged or destroyed, . . .but also as those experiences, and expectations of similar ones to come, are “priced in” to the judgments of what homes in floodplains, on the storm-exposed coasts, and in the wildland-urban interface are worth. Those homes could become, in effect, economically worthless even before they are physically uninhabitable. This would then put pressure on areas that are, for the time being, environmentally stable, driving up property values to the benefit of some, while creating economic hardships for others. . . .They are left either stuck in place—with assets that are increasingly difficult to insure. . .and potentially financially underwater— or face a decline in the proceeds available to secure housing elsewhere, let alone to build wealth.

(accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article/doi/10.1093/socpro/spae074/7932449, my bolding)

So too you find declinist narratives about pastoralist areas rendered economically worthless under capitalism even before they are rendered physically uninhabitable by the climate emergency.

But of course drylands have noncalcuable use values for pastoralists, whatever is happening to calculated economic values. More, some of these asset values were evident in commercial transactions long before the advent of any capitalism. And in case it needs saying (also see the above link), property values have always been a social construction within and beyond markets and beyond the quantitative, a fact no less true for herders and their resources, including those drylands relied upon.

So too is the climate emergency bringing into better view not just the changes but also the reciprocal tensions when imputing property values, e.g.:

Overall, we show that reciprocal linkages between environmental change and migration clearly exist in the studied rural communities in Ethiopia, which are mediated by various factors occurring at the micro, meso, and macro level (Table 1). These factors cover biophysical, socioeconomic, and institutional aspects. Remarkably, although not surprisingly, our research revealed that most identified factors can act in opposite directions. Hence, they can trigger or accelerate changes, just as they can hamper or slow them down. For example, in northern Ethiopia, unfavorable environmental conditions for agriculture, including increased drought frequency, unreliable rainfall, and advanced land degradation, can increase migration needs and aspirations by undermining the viability of agricultural livelihoods. However, these conditions also tend to lower migration abilities by decreasing agricultural income and hence, financial resources required for migration. Conversely, favorable environmental conditions, such as relatively stable rainfall during the cropping season in “a good year,” can decrease migration needs and aspirations and enable migration via agricultural income (for more details, see below the description of pathways A and B). The precise impact mechanisms significantly depend on a variety of additional mediating factors at the macro, meso, and micro level. . .

(accessed online at https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol28/iss3/art15/)

I want to suggest that, in the case of pastoralist systems, focusing on property (noncalculable use and calculated exchange) values and the tensions their social constructions reveal, balance or evade is a better methodological strategy than appeals to “commodification” or “marketization,” as if the latter terms were differentiation enough.

I

Any number of radical proposals have been made for addressing problems of the globe’s rangelands, including: the end of capitalism, the redistribution of livestock, and reparations.

In an important sense, though, these are not be radical enough. I have in mind the “twelve rules for radicals” of the late organizer, Saul Alinsky, two in particular being:

RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

https://sliwainsights.com/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals/

II

By extension, use the logic of capitalism to benefit rangelands and pastoralists, e.g.:

1. Start with the EU’s Emission Trading System for CO₂ emission credits. Imagine member/non-member states and companies are now able to enter the ETS to buy credits directed to offsetting GHG emissions in dryland localities committed to transitioning to more environmentally friendly production systems and livelihoods based in or around livestock.

2. Start with the European COVID-19 initiative, NextGenerationEU (issuance of joint debt by EU member states to fund pandemic recovery). Imagine employee support schemes under this or some such initiative, with one aim being to augment remittances of resident migrants back to dryland household members and communities.

3. Imagine other EU-financed schemes to improve the greening of EU localities now heavily resident with dryland migrants (e.g. subsidies to EU residents for more sustainable lifestyles in the EU). In this case, a “greening of rangelalnd households” takes place where EU member states support EU-resident migrants, thereby indirectly supporting their dryland households of origin..

The aim, again, is not to dismiss other radical proposals, but to find opportunities to exploit all twelve of Alinsky’s rules for radicals.

Not really a monarch but rather a long-seeking prime minister, “with a notorious and colourful private life,” advertising himself all over the place, always wanting more money.

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Source: James Gillray, The Daily-Advertiser, 1797 (caricature of Charles James Fox).

My bête noire is the dentist’s assistant–“hygienist”–and what they call teeth-cleaning. “Our gums still don’t look good, do they, Mr. Roe?”

I’ve been doing this leeching for over 50 years and the only thing to change in that time is my having to do more and more of the work myself. What, they ask, surely you brush at least twice a day? You don’t floss! You’re shoving wood and plastic splinters between every one of your teeth, right? You’re now using a water pick, correct?

Where—I ask them when able—is that innovative tooth paste with it quantum leap in plaque/tartar reduction? That truly restorative mouthwash and its dramatic protection? Those easy teeth caps or permanent enamelization or something to stop the need for further blood-letting?

One. Half. Century of zero, nada, zilch. “We’d have to sterilize mouths, Mr. Roe, and we can’t do, can we?” I suppose I’ve not helped by calling them Butcher Bobs.

1. We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity!

2. Government agencies and donors working in pastoralism ask to be overhauled so as to meet pastoralist needs faster and more effectively. (“The C.D.C. director, Rochelle Walensky,. . .called for her agency to be overhauled after an external review found it had failed to respond quickly and clearly to Covid.”)

3. Pastoralists explain their responses to government and donor initiatives this way: “We corrected a few things on the ground. Our job, after all, is to protect you.”

4. Researchers on pastoralism agree that the people and areas they study are usefully marginal and marginalized. In point of fact, pastoralisms provide the only valid commentary on the center where many researchers, among others, are also routinely to be found.

5. We refuse to play the game conjured up by analyses that start with tables and numbers of livestock. The follow-on question, almost immediate, is who owns the livestock and, sooner than a blink of the eye, we are down to: “But what about the old woman with 5 goats or fewer?”

As if to ask: “What are you going to do about these inequalities?” Thus leaving us hardly any time to reply that, well, the most ethical thing in response is to see if there are more effective ways to think about this problem than one starting with livestock owned and held.

Google the phrase “environmental criticisms of pastoralism because of the climate emergency” and you get the AI-generated response (January 15 2025):

Environmental criticisms of pastoralism in the context of climate change primarily center around the potential for overgrazing, leading to land degradation, reduced biodiversity, and increased greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, especially when faced with changing weather patterns that can limit access to grazing land and water sources, making pastoralists more vulnerable to climate change impacts.

It is easy to find empirical evidence to counter this narrative. The AI-generated sweep itself goes on to support the well-known finding, e.g.: “Strong community-based management systems can help regulate grazing practices and protect fragile ecosystems.”

I draw attention, however, to what is missing, at least in my reading, from the crisis narrative and its versions but more clearly seen in the counternarratives: technologies.

I

Climate change–more correctly, climate emergency–is a set of threat scenarios increasingly important to the evolving genre variously called “useful fiction” or FICINT (fictional intelligence). While the terms are recent, much has been written about them and their deep roots in past literary developments.

The central idea is to combine very different media–visual as well as written (and written not only in the form of fictional passages with characters and plot, but also incorporating current statistical trends and scholarly findings)–so as to persuade readers that the scenarios portrayed are in fact existential threats and must be acted upon. Much of this genre has been developed in the areas of national security and extreme climate (see Sources below from which points have been extracted here).

For our thought experiment below, what is of special interest is that FICINT

has developed a framework of guidelines that center around the ‘no vaporware’ rule. Vaporware is technology that has been imagined, but is not yet created. To ensure that FicInt remains feasible and grounded in legitimate technology, all technology included in the story must be developed or in development. In addition, FicInt character behavior should be based on past real-world situations. Finally, FicInt should use appropriate facts and research to justify the narrative.

II

So, let’s say that important parts of pastoralist development are full of useful fictions. While some of the associated narratives are orthogonal to others (e.g., models of open-access grazing versus models of the managed commons), others appeal to varieties of different evidence and different trends to support their versions of realistic, near-term threat scenarios.

Focus on those cases where empirical uncertainties are high with respect pastoralist development in the midst of abrupt, extreme climate. For those cases, which narrative(s) to believe?

One answer is to focus on the curious asymmetry between the aforementioned dominant narrative and counternarratives when it comes to the role and presence of technologies in each. The primary technology in the dominant narrative and its versions is the cow, and here negatively as a methane producer and not positively as possessor of that rumen also able to make use of that lignin content in dryland grasses. This technology–and so too for other primary livestock–also move across grasslands and water points that however are, technologically speaking, either there or not.

In contrast and again in my reading, the counternarratives are much more populated by technologies and different socio-technical systems for their operation and management. Even the model of the managed commons can have fences. Cattle boreholes have to be operated and maintained. Livestock are transported by lorries, even airlifted for mountain pastures. Supply chains going out drylands and coming in are important. Agro-pastoralism adds even more technologies. Once again, add context and contingency, and counternarratives about socio-technical systems are inevitable.

So what, though?

III

Now take a hypothetically context-less technology called “rotational grazing” and insert it in each narrative, dominant or counter. Ask yourself: How can this insertion be rendered into a useful fiction?

Well, in some cases “rotational grazing” is already going on, even if the actual practice (e.g., use of a drift fence to separate grazing from crops, but open to grazing of the stubble after harvest) doesn’t look like the textbook ranch. In other cases, even if it doesn’t reduce overgrazing, the fiction of “rotational grazing” is kept so as to ensure claim to the land and its water point(s). Or in different instances, livestock are transported by lorry for fattening or supplemental feeding, even if it’s still useful to liken this to the “mobility” of old-time rotations between wet and dry season grazing in earlier or less extreme climate periods.

Which pastoralist development narratives, then, are likely to be found more credible by more people when it comes to (still arguably) realistic or near-term threat scenarios: those that center around a few technologies–cattle, water points and fences–or those narratives far more differentiated technologically for management purposes?

*******

Sources

Annick, A. (2021) “FicInt: Anticipating Tomorrow’s Conflict.” Accessed online at https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021/march/ficint-anticipating-tomorrows-conflict

Di Feo, M. (2021) “Overcoming Complexity of (Cyber)War: The Logic of Useful
Fiction in Cyber Exercises Scenarios.” Accessed online at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2940/paper32.pdf

Engberg-Pedersen, A. (2025). “The National Security Novel: ‘Useful Fiction,’ Persuasive Emotions, and the Securitization of Literature.” Critical Inquiry, 51(2) Winter.

Imagine that you’re in a room with four very tall walls, and they’re totally smooth. There are no footholds, and there’s no way out, and you’re in there with nothing, and there’s water pouring in from the top in all directions. What do you do? We were stumped, proposing one solution after another, and none of them worked. And then, the answer to his riddle was: Stop imagining.

https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perhaps-a-lot-of-our-future-is-behind-us/

Not, “stop imagining” because what’s imagined is already here. But rather, “stop imagining because it’s getting us nowhere.”

As in: “Imagination: Always ‘lively.’ Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination” (Gustave Flaubert, novelist).

And yet: “What we have here is a failure of imagination,” intone the critics of this or that policy failure. Yet they are just as likely to demand we take seriously any of their crisis scenarios, even when they are unable to specify what it takes to disprove the scenarios or prevent their recurrence or come up with details about the response structure to be in place after the losses incurred by said crises.

To do the latter requires deep knowledge and realism—that is, far far far far more than the touted imagination. Having the former may even cure us of some crises.