Author: EnviroSociety

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New Featured Article!: “Beyond the Anthropocene”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch”—comes from Volume 6 (2015). In their article, Valerie Olson and Lisa Messeri examine the Anthropocene’s emerging rhetorical topology, showing that Anthropocene narratives evince a macroscale division between an “inner” and “outer” environment.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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New Issue of Environment and Society!

Berghahn Journals is pleased to announce that the latest volume of Environment and Society has recently published and is available online at www.berghahnjournals.com/environment-and-society.

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Volume 8, edited by Dan Brockington, revolves around the theme of “Measurements and Metrics” and explores how “themes of measurement are played out in diverse settings, including counting fish stocks, migration, social resilience, local measures of sustainability, oil exploitation, forest conservation, calculating ecosystem services, and measuring heat.” The editor’s introduction is available to all readers for free. The volume also features two Open Access articles freely available to all readers.

Environment and Society 8 is rounded out by a section of book reviews on recent and relevant publications.

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New Featured Article!: “Agroecology and Radical Grassroots Movements’ Evolving Moral Economies”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Agroecology and Radical Grassroots Movements’ Evolving Moral Economies”—comes from Volume 5 (2014). In his article, David Meek focuses on the role of agroecology in rural proletarian social movements, drawing on a case study of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, one of the most vocal agroecological social movements.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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New Featured Article!: “Explorations in Ethnoelephantology”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Explorations in Ethnoelephantology: Social, Historical, and Ecological Intersections between Asian Elephants and Humans”—comes from Volume 4 (2013). In his article, Piers Locke charts the emergence of an interdisciplinary research program and discursive space for human-elephant intersections under the rubric of ethnoelephantology

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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A Political Ecology of Ohio’s Opiate Crisis

“After moving here to the east side of town, after living on the west side my whole life, I had really really bad dizzy spells, which I was admitted for time after time, and which they called it Pot’s disease, where the blood pressure bottoms out. But I was never sick … I don’t remember ever being sick at all until we moved to where we are.”

These are the words of Connie, a 40-something grandmother and church pastor. Connie, by her own admission, does not look the part of a stereotypical heroin addict: she is five feet tall, with short bright red hair and a big personality. She talks openly about her love for Christ and family. Connie is a recovering heroin addict who has now been clean for two years. She has struggled with illness over the past two decades, having many surgeries performed. Her doctors prescribed a variety of opiates over this time to help her cope with her illness. Eventually, one day, she tells me that her opiate addiction led her to try heroin:

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Salt, Seeds, and Flamingos: On the Politics of Infrastructural Ecology in Turkey

In June of 2017, as I prepared to leave Izmir, my friend Esra gave me, as a gift, two jars of sea salt mixed with herbs and finely ground sun-dried vegetables. Handmade labels indicated this was salt from the Gediz Delta (a large river delta on the Bay of Izmir) and that “Zeytinci” Fadime had prepared the mix. Esra herself, she told me, helped her friend Fadime abla, an experienced organic farmer who lives in one of the former Greek Orthodox villages at the edge of the Gediz Delta, not far from the city of Foça. The vegetables were from Fadime’s garden, and the salt from the delta’s saltpans, Çamaltı.

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New Featured Article!: “From a Blind Spot to a Nexus”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”From a Blind Spot to a Nexus: Building on Existing Trends in Knowledge Production to Study the Copresence of Ecotourism and Extraction”—comes from Volume 3 (2012). In her article, Veronica Davidov investigates how instances of copresence between ecotourism and resource extraction are marginalized in literature about ecotourism and extraction, constituting a “blind spot” in academic literature.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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Can Markets Save Agricultural Diversity?: Quinoa as a Case Study

Quinoa’s Exceptional Interspecific Diversity

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) has been cultivated in the Andean highlands for millennia. Domesticated five thousand to seven thousand years ago by agriculturalists living along the shores of Lake Titicaca, quinoa is one of only a handful of crops to survive in the Andean Altiplano’s harsh clime. In fact, quinoa thrives at altitudes between 2,500 and 3,900 MASL, where frequent droughts, constant aridity, and extreme diurnal temperature fluctuations present a formidable environment for most agricultural production (even hardy crops like maize and sweet potatoes that thrive just 1,000 meters closer to sea level, for instance, cannot bear fruit on the Altiplano).

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To Be Human Is to Live as if There Is Hope

One February day, I visited organic farmers Liz and Mike Lane in their southwestern Wisconsin farmhouse. Wounded old cats wandered around in the yard, where goats stuck their muzzles through slats in the fence. The clapboard farmhouse was not as neat as a pin. Seed catalogs, seed packets, CSA sign-up sheets, tax documents and forms, and piles of newspapers, books, and almanacs covered every surface of the dining room. The couple looked exhausted. We settled in the living room and they told me about the CAFO that had moved in around the corner.

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