Planetary Health as Atmospheric Cultivation: Lessons from Nicaragua’s Sugarcane Zone

The Anthropology Department, co-sponsored by the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, welcomes Alex Nading to deliver his lecture, “Planetary Health as Atmospheric Cultivation: Lessons from Nicaragua’s Sugarcane Zone.”

Chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) is among the first pathologies to be directly associated with climate change. Increasingly, scientists believe that the disease is caused by workplace exposure to extreme heat. A desire to test that hypothesis has drawn international occupational health researchers to Nicaragua’s sugarcane zone.

While the coming of such research offers some hope to workers, this talk shows how the recent scientific focus on mitigating heat elides the fact that rising heat is enabled by national policies and transnational industry norms that permit the expanded use of agrochemicals. The systematic push to find ways of continuing to profitably produce sugarcane under conditions of extreme heat is paralleled by the efforts of nonworkers, particularly women, to make knowledgeable claims about the slower and more accretive changes in climate wrought by chemically driven cane production.

Alex Nading is an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.