In this paper we analyse scientists’ perspectives on the release of genetically modified (GM) crops into the environment, and the relationship between their perspectives and the context that they work within.
Wild rice was “tamed” when domesticated in the 1950s, yet both cultivated and foraged wild rice face shared contemporary challenges.
This film follows an Indian farmer whose situation becomes a microcosm of the conflict between Monsanto and rural people living in poverty in India.
In 1997 and 1998 peat swamp forests burned in Borneo, Indonesia, spewing big amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
This article, “Artificial Apple Production in Fraiburgo, Brazil, 1958–1989,” by Jó Klanovicz explores connections between the “domestication” of apples in Southern Brazil, the polemic on contaminated apples in 1989, and the reactions of the apple industry to the news published in the press on the use of pesticides in Brazilian orchards.
This study historicises environmental issues at the Chinhoyi Caves that are of contemporaneous resonance with the ecological crisis faced by the modern world. It deals with important themes like water-resource management, indigenous knowledge and its efficacy in the preservation of nature, colonialism and its environmental implications, forest use and deforestation, dislocation and displacement of indigenous people, and the interaction of the local with the global.
The interview with Piero Bevilacqua touches on a broad range of subjects: From the use of pesticides to the “Green Revolution”; from GMOs to biodynamic and biological agriculture, and the respect of biodiversity; from modern farming’s wasteful use of water to Common Agricultural Policy with its nonsustainable exploitation of farmland.
Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this paper questions the usefulness of regional data for understanding food insecurity, and shows that the supposedly novel ideas of the present in fact have a strong colonial lineage.
The essay focuses on the scientific approaches emerging from WW II that attempted to identify key risks to food security and to highlight how wartime experiences informed notions of food security within international organizations for many decades to come.
