The CSI Guests Seminar welcomes
Kregg Hetherington
Concordia University Research Chair in Environmental Ethnography
to discuss his book
The Government of Beans
Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops
Introduction to the discussion by Guilhaum Panas
Back cover: The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country’s massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America’s new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.
Kregg Hetherington, The Government of Beans. Regulating Life in the age of monocrops, Duke University Press, 2020.
The Guest Seminar Series is organized collectively by the CSI PhD students. It is open upon registration.
Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2023, from 3pm to 5pm
The session will be held by videoconference.
Registration: please fill out this form
Contact: Léone-Alix Mazaud or Allyson Pallisser