Ritual Survival, Ecological Devastation

Of numerous attempts to explain the ecological dimension of ritual, Rappaport's (1967) materialist interpretation of swine sacrifice among the Maring of New Guinea probably is the best known. For Rappaport, the periodic kaiko ceremony, marked by mass immolation of hogs, is a mechanism for regulating the balance between human and animal species. This socioeconomic mode of "ritual regulation" is said to contrast sharply with that of the often ecologically destructive resource allocation mechanisms of the market (Rappaport 1979: 73, 148).

Such a model has no currency in contemporary Buguias.^[5] Although its economy has come to be regulated almost entirely by market forces in the past generation, its ritual regime has not significantly changed since prewar days. One would be hard-pressed to find any "adaptive" qualities in Buguias Paganism, which if anything has predisposed its believers to enmesh themselves in a commercial order that Rappaport deems maladaptive. While retaining

its ritual forms, Buguias has served the global economic system handsomely. The profits earned by a handful of local entrepreneurs pale next to those garnered annually by the chemical and seed companies. How well it has served its own environment is another matter.

Environmental Threats

Contemporary Buguias illustrates the diverse array of causal patterns that converge in any particular instance of environmental deterioration. Within the Philippines, the village occupies a peripheral locale, long neglected and at times actively victimized by the state. Given demographic expansion, poor growers have little option but to clear new gardens on steep slopes, accelerating soil loss in a pattern common to many tropical and subtropical uplands. To this extent, the community conforms to the expectations of political-ecological theory, which emphasizes the marginalization of impoverished growers as the primary cause of ecological despoliation in the Third World (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Buguias's most blatant degradation, however, is directly attributable to the elite, particularly to those individuals who use bulldozers to clear carelessly new gardens in the cloud-forest highlands.

To put it most succinctly, the specific forms of environmental degradation evident in Buguias derive from the actions of a stratified, demographically dynamic community with a highly entrepreneurial ethos, engaging in chemical-intensive commercial vegetable production in typhoon-prone tropical upland with a deeply weathered bedrock mantle. Truck crops simply cannot be grown profitably here without large chemical doses, owing to the vigor of insect pests and fungal growths in the moist and mild climate. Massive soil loss is similarly inevitable where root crops are grown in the wet season, when fields must be steeply sloped to allow drainage. And expansion into the eastern cloud forest, while affording entrepreneurs rich fields and cheap labor, not only aggravates local erosion and deforestation but also creates increasingly serious water shortages at lower elevations.

The Philippine state has contributed to the problem, but its actions have been contradictory and confused. Outright government hostility has occasionally threatened the livelihood of farmers, forc-

ing them at times to deforest their own lands. And even the state's well-intentioned environmental safeguards have proved ineffectual, as competing interests have successfully lobbied for contradictory policies. Overall, the state has influenced the vegetable economy most directly through road construction, the consequences of which have been decidedly ambiguous. Roads offer gardeners profound benefits, yet by permitting continual expansion they also further watershed denudation. And even their beneficial attributes are often the unintended byproducts of policies designed primarily to enhance central control; the major roads east of Buguias, for example, were constructed to help the Philippine military combat the New People's Army.

Similar mixed consequences accrue to local land investments. As Blaikie and Brookfield show (1987:9), cultivators can forestall—and sometimes even reverse—land degradation by building walls, terraces, and irrigation facilities. Such works are ubiquitous in Buguias, forming an essential foundation for the vegetable economy. Yet it is precisely the newest and largest of such investments, the megaterraces now being leveled by bulldozers, that cause the worst losses of soil.

The commercialization of agriculture in Buguias has greatly accelerated the pace of degradation, but we should by no means assume that the prewar environment was in any sense pristine. Over the course of several centuries, the Buguias people remolded their landscape to anthropogenic contours. Many Benguet districts were extensively deforested well before the colonial era, and the entire Agno Valley has long been cleared of a number of animal species. More importantly, prewar population growth in Buguias was generating increasing environmental strains, and while it is possible that adaptive solutions could have been devised, it is unlikely that the transition would have been entirely forgiving of the landscape.

In any case, the question is now moot; the Buguias people will not, and cannot, return to subsistence cropping. Nor can they revive old land-management techniques to make their commercial farming more sustainable; the current crop complex lies entirely outside the realm of traditional horticultural methods. More feasible would be the adoption of new, less environmentally taxing forms of commercial agriculture, such as some have suggested might be found in citrus or other fruit crops. Arboriculture would

demand considerable local restructuring, as well as state (and international) assistance, but it may yet prove a way out of the dilemma.

Prospects

As distressing as forest loss, soil erosion, biocide poisoning, and wildlife extinctions are, Buguias's agricultural system is in no danger of immediate collapse. To pronounce commercial farming hopelessly unsustainable here would be premature; the present system could conceivably limp along for years, as farmers devise makeshift solutions for each new ecological impasse. But we must wonder whether they will manage to sustain their living standards while doing so, and how much trauma their lands will suffer as a result.

For the nonce, at least, it would be difficult to substantiate the view that vegetable farmers are worse off for having abandoned subsistence cultivation. Successful engagement in a commercial economy has given Benguet's highlanders a degree of power vis-à-vis the Philippine government uncommon in small-scale indigenous societies, and the Buguias people themselves voice overwhelming approval of the changes they have undergone since the war. But the Benguet vegetable industry confronts an imperiled future. Already the economy is deteriorating, and absent an unforseen miracle, it will continue to do so for some time. Encouraged by their belief in the manipulability of fate to continue pushing back the vegetable frontier, the people of Buguias are indeed wagering the land against high odds.

As a counterexample to received wisdom in much of contemporary ethnography and development studies, the story of Buguias is instructive. But the particularity of the place and time—the uniqueness of Buguias's historical geography—cannot be overemphasized. It is essential to the argument presented throughout this work, as to the theoretical framework in which it has been couched, that generalized conclusions not be extrapolated from this one case. Moreover, the situation described is transitory, a fleeting moment in a historical process that defies prognostication. Schumpeter (1942) insisted that destructiveness was at the heart of capitalism's creativity. Destruction is amply evident in Buguias; whether the process could ultimately prove creative is a question for later years.