Category: Blog

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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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Some Chemical and More-Than-Human Transformations of Sugar/Energy

Oblivious, or maybe not, to a warming planet and intense global discourse around renewable bioeconomy futures, a tiny sugar molecule one day is synthesized and then makes its way into a cell wall of a sugarcane plant in the southern region of Brazil. This is not the type of sugar that would be found on the kitchen table. The molecule remains there for the life of the plant, offering fibrous structural support for the towering stalks as they grow up to five meters tall. This sugar compound is called cellulose and is found in all plants and several types of microbes. It is the earth’s most abundant biopolymer made on land and its largest carbon reservoir (Li et al. 2014). While not on the kitchen table per se, cellulose is likely in it (if the table is wooden).

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New Featured Article!: “Food Sovereignty”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Food Sovereignty: A New Rights Framework for Food and Nature?”—comes from Volume 2 (2011). In her article, Hannah Wittman reviews the origins of the concept of food sovereignty and its theoretical and methodological development as an alternative approach to food security, building on a growing interdisciplinary literature on food sovereignty in the social and agroecological sciences.

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 We Have a Moment, Please?: The Potential of Multiple Perspectives on Beekeeping and Pollinators

A Mini Research Moment: Social Science and Pollinator Declines

Honey bees and pollinators have been a core environmental news item in the English-speaking media for the past five to eight years: dying of mysterious illnesses, affected by pesticides, and as generally responsible for the production of many fruits and vegetables on which we rely. Honey bees in particular have had a long, close relationship with people, something often forgotten in the flurry of crises and new discoveries. However, their increasingly frequent presentation alongside polar bears and glaciers as emissaries of environmental collapse and human destruction means it is important to consider both the biological/ecological and the social when discussing honey bee and pollinator declines (Harries-Jones 2009; Mathews 2011). However, bridging this divide can be challenging—and we’d like to know how to do it more effectively.

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Bears Ears: In Defense of Public Lands

bears ears |berz irz| (noun) def. (1) the organs of hearing in a bear; (2) a geological feature over 8,700 feet tall consisting of two sandstone buttes in southeastern Utah; (3) a prominent landmark featured in the sacred geography of several Native American tribes in the Four Corners region of the United States; (4) the newest National Monument in the United States that has become central to struggles over land rights in the western United States

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New Featured Article!: “Climate Changing Small Islands”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Climate Changing Small Islands: Considering Social Science and the Production of Island Vulnerability and Opportunity,” comes from Volume 1 (2010). In her article, Amelia Moore argues that climate change has influenced the way in which small island nations are viewed and understood by the international climate community.

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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Mauritian Energyscapes: Compromise and Contestation

“I went there. You don’t want to go, trust me. You can’t breathe. [There’s a] heavy smell of petrol in the air that can’t be good.”

In the early morning hours of 21 June 2016, disaster struck just off the shoreline of the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius. MV Benita, a Liberian bulk carrier en route to southern India, ran aground on a sandy atoll just shy of the village of Le Bouchon on the island’s southeast shore.[1] For a small island developing state such as Mauritius, any sort of large-scale environmental event becomes cause for alarm. The scale of ecological destruction and the fallout of MV Benita were catastrophic.

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Interview with Keely Maxwell, General Anthropologist for the EPA

This post is presented in this week’s series recognizing Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.

Keely Maxwell is an environmental anthropologist. She develops and applies interdisciplinary research to environmental problem solving. Keely has conducted research in the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, Peru, and now works on community resilience. She is a former American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow, as well as a mom of two, and she works at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Disclaimer: Keely is talking purely in a personal capacity and not as a federal employee. She is expressing her personal opinion, not official EPA policy.

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Anthropology, Social Science, and the March for Science

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This post is presented in this week’s series recognizing Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.

Anthropology has an unusual relationship with science. As scientist and anthropologist H. Russell Bernard points out in the preamble to his now-canonized Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches:

With one foot planted squarely in the humanities and the other in the sciences, there has always been a certain tension in the discipline between those who would make anthropology a quantitative science and those whose goal it is to produce documents that convey the richness—indeed, the uniqueness—of human thought and experience. (2011: vii)

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