OUR FACULTY
Slash-and-burn agriculture in Belize By studying the relationship between human populations and swidden — or slash-and-burn — agriculture, associate professor of anthropology Sean Downey hopes to develop a better understanding of the dynamic between rural communities, the ecological and environmental impacts of their subsistence farming techniques, and how that applies to contemporary cultures and environmental sustainability. These ponderings have ultimately led Downey, an ecological anthropologist, to the remote Q’eqchi’ Maya farming villages nestled within the lush, green jungles of southern Belize, where he’s in the midst of a five-year, National Science Foundation-backed research project titled “CAREER: Analyzing the Emergence of a Complex Swidden Management System in the Toledo District, Belize.” “The main goal is sustainability,” Downey said. “We have growing populations, and we need to know how to feed them without ruining the planet that we’re living on. Swidden is a form of subsistence that has been used for the last 10,000 years and currently feeds between 200 million and 500 million people. Yet we do not have particularly good models explaining how it works and the conditions when it’s most sustainable. We need to know much more about the social and environmental factors related to it.” Much of the research project’s first two years focused on comprehensive social and environmental data collection. Downey and a team of researchers conducted household surveys, took extensive notes while participating in day-to-day tasks and used game theory to make behavioral and social observations from an interactive agriculture field experiment they developed that simulated agricultural decision making. The game — which represents the forest using a 10x10 square
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board with removable game pieces — requires participants to choose between their own financial interests and the good of the group, as well as their understanding of the forest’s ability to provide sustainably for the duration of the game. The experiment is aimed at shedding light on the relationship between social traditions and ecological and environmental longevity and sustainability.
The main goal is sustainability. We have growing populations, and we need to know how to feed them without ruining the planet that we’re living on. “I was really happy when I was doing interviews afterward with folks and how they responded,” Downey said. “I’d ask them if the game seemed familiar, and one person I was interviewing looked at me with a note of surprise and said, ‘This is our village.’ When he was playing the game, he was struck by how familiar it was — both in the way it modeled social norms for labor exchange and labor reciprocity, and the circumstances that caused certain people to overuse the forest but also to come together to preserve it. Perhaps the most technically challenging and intensive datacollecting technique Downey and his collaborators at the University of Maryland Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site
