Correspondence from the Unseen: Prismatic Agri-environmental Governance in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Climate change is transforming agriculture and the governance frameworks responsible for it. Adaptation programs, efficiency measures, and technical interventions are offered as solutions, but across many settings they fail to address the conditions that farmers, ecosystems, and animals actually inhabit. This dissertation examines three such settings, drawing on political ontology's concept of the anthropo-not-seen to name what governance categories are structurally unable to perceive, and developing correspondence as the positive term for engaging what governance currently forecloses. Chapter 1 analyzes U.S. nutrient governance and practices and shows how metrological regimes, the arrangements through which environmental flows are turned into calculable variables, produce certain realities as governable while foreclosing others, including soil life as a living ecological community. Chapter 2 draws on ethnographic observations and interviews in Chile's Limarí Valley during the ongoing megadrought, where farmers describe a threshold crossing from chronic adversity into ontological breakdown, and where governance is present and active but cannot perceive the collapse of the configuration that made farming viable. Considering drought as a disaster in the making, the chapter extends the sociological concept of recreancy into slow-onset climate contexts and proposes failure to correspond as an analytical concept. Chapter 3 builds on ethnographic fieldwork at a farm animal sanctuary and argues that empathy, developed through bodily participation in care labor, produces knowledge about animal subjectivity that governance frameworks organized around animals as resources and emissions sources structurally cannot hold. The concluding chapter proposes prismatic governance as an orientation for agri-environmental governance in the Anthropocene, one that accepts ontological multiplicity and works with it. Under conditions where governance categories cannot perceive the situations communities, species, and ecosystems inhabit, the harms of climate change fall unevenly and the frameworks meant to address them reproduce the injustices they were supposed to resolve.