Budding Explorations-

      In wrapping up our guided research of The Anthropocene and The Capitalocene as theories of explanation of the current era and environmental impacts, we now have the opportunity to shift our research to a third and final topic of choice. For this final situated project, our attention, and thus research, has been drawn to understanding how negative environmental impacts have occurred due to the illicit drug industry. This $400B+ a year global industry, while hard to track and keep informed data on due to its dubious and closeted nature, has inarguably caused environmental harm through its processes of production, distribution, and use. Various species and landscapes are being threatened, putting a strain on biodiversity and changing levels of overall Environmental Justice for many Indigenous peoples. Thus posing my framing question: “Could a reduction in illicit drug trade reduce the impacts of deforestation?”

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Gathering the Framework-

     In exploring this newly hypothesized era that we refer to as The Narcocene, we found a particular interest in the illicit drug industry in Mexico, specifically due the active amount of attention that the United States government and news broadcasters place on drug war violence there (not to mention current political tensions and border security that is influenced by this). Thus, while we are framing this global issue in hopes of better understanding, we will be focusing on situated fluctuations in Mexico. Through the use of various reputable sources, collected in our online library on a database host site called Zotero, we use this approach to delve deeper into the forest loss and biodiversity impacts associated with the illicit drug industry in Mexico. By doing so to learn more about these various drivers of environmental degradation, we found ourselves revisiting the same vital question

How do the impacts of deforestation fluctuate between areas more or less influenced by the illicit drug trade?

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      In beginning to research any new topic of which we have little understanding, sources of information are crucial. Our first step in confronting our concept of a newly hypothesized era was to narrow down the type of sources that we would be using for research. We agreed that any sources we used must be either published books, or peer reviewed articles/ highly cited publications (at least 200 or recent and relevant). Our two starting sources/search engines were Google Scholar and the Lewis and Clark College Watzek Library, each providing us with a multitude of reputable sources for free access online. After establishing our source engines and types of sources to look for, we had to also decide where to begin our research in order to identify key references. Our focus was to find articles that referenced Mexico, the illicit drug industry, and environmental crises, or as many of the three as possible, in order to connect our situated context in the broader light of our framing question.

      In order to save and share our sources, we utilized an application called Zotero to create a virtual library that we could all access and edit. Titling our library, “The Narcocene” it stores over twenty publications (articles, books, etc) that we believe are key resources in addressing and connecting our framing question and situated context. We then sorted our library using ‘tags,’ which label each reference as being more helpful in addressing our overall framing question that drives our research, or in addressing and formulating our focus question. In addition, we edited the abstract of each source to include not only a short summary, but a possible connection in how each source is crucial during our research over the next few weeks. 

(See Lab Ten for more information)