Parsons on Pigs and Acorns

Many articles in the Geographical Review hold stories that resonate in the history of geography only when the passage of time provides the necessary detachment to put these accounts into a context of larger significance. The circumstances behind the selection of a particular topic, vicissitudes of the research phase, personality of the author, and exchanges during the editorial process that bring it to publication together provide insight into the different layers of geographical scholarship. To all that can be added another dimension: explaining the impact that the piece of writing has had on individuals who have read it. One article in the Geographical Review profoundly affected the formation of my geographical imagination. It did so without appealing to any theory, showcasing some dazzling new technique, harboring an advocacy agenda, or exhorting the reader in any way. Now, nearly half a century after its publication, this text opened another level of reflection about its content, author, journal, editor, and changes in the place that was under study. A COMPELLING NARRATIVE The article at issue, written by James J. Parsons (1915-1997) and published in the Geographical Review (1962a), had as its evocative title “The Acorn-Hog Economy of the Oak Woodlands of Southwestern Spain.” It seamlessly commingled the study of landscape and livelihood in a Mediterranean environment having the twin constraints of summer drought and poor soils. Trees, mainly holm oak (Quercus ilex) and secondarily cork oak (Quercus suber), yielded kindling, the raw material for charcoal, cork, and at an earlier time tanbark. Periodic pruning increased the production of acorns that dropped from the oaks in the last quarter of the year. Of the livestock, pigs consumed most of this mast, whereas cattle and sheep primarily pastured on surrounding grasses. (1) About once every five years farmers plowed plots of ground between the trees and sowed them, mainly in winter wheat. Such an intervallic regime responded to the infertile soils that ruled out annual cultivation. Cultivation not only freed trees to grow larger and yield more acorns but also kept in check the spontaneous shrubby undergrowth that, if allowed to take over, provided fuel for devastating wildfires. Parsons explicitly articulated two main points that were original to him at the time: the interconnectivity of the various elements of the agro-silvo-pastoral system and its durable use of resources. If a land-use system could be described as demonstrating the beautiful logic of sustainability, this is it. Such an intricate use of the oak woodland–dehesa, as it is called in Spain–expanded during the Reconquista (722-1492), when Christians recolonized abandoned land and emphasized the keeping of swine that their former Muslim masters had eschewed. The landscape itself was one in which human activity determined the size, shape, and spacing of the oaks. It was a humanized landscape that could not be neatly split into “natural” versus “cultural” components. Except for the halftone showing a crop-dusting plane fumigating the woodland against a caterpillar invasion, the article’s illustrations bespoke a preindustrial tradition. Somewhat puzzlingly, however, the title did not include Portugal, even though Parsons referred to it several times. In fact, Parsons took the evocative photograph of this parklike landscape across the international border in the Alentejo, near Evora in Portugal. AN EXTRAORDINARY FIELD GEOGRAPHER Jim Parsons, a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley when the article was published, conducted the research for this study during 1959 and 1960, a year in Spain funded by the Guggenheim Foundation. Leading up to that project, Parsons had spent more than a decade working on Latin America, starting with a dissertation project on the Antioquenos of Colombia. The published monograph that grew out of that effort went through two English and four Spanish editions (Parsons [1949] 1968).