farming

Dirt! The Movie takes a humorous and substantial look into the history and current state of the living organic matter that we come from and will later return to.

Highland Sanctuary unravels the complex interactions among agriculture, herding, forestry, the colonial state, and the landscape in the Usambara mountains of Tanzania.

Napier Shelton offers a tour of notable natural sites in Missouri through the eyes of the people who work with them.

Natalie Porter analyses a participatory health intervention in Việt Nam to explore how avian influenza threats challenge long-held understandings of animals’ place in the environment and society.

Brian Donahue offers an innovative, accessible, and authoritative history of the early farming practices of Concord, Massachusetts.

This chapter argues that transforming knowledge requires a radical shift away from the existing top-down and increasingly corporate-controlled research system and toward an approach which devolves more responsibility and decision-making power to farmers, food workers, and consumers/citizens for the production of knowledge in the natural and social sciences.

This chapter explores processes that can help claim active forms of citizenship, including learning from the rich history of face-to-face democracy, strengthening local organizations, using the potential of community controlled media (such as digital video, radio, press, and Internet), and engaging in deliberative and inclusive processes (DIPs) that can significantly enhance citizen voice and agency in decision-making today.

This chapter provides empirical evidence about the importance of local organizations for sustaining food systems, livelihoods, and the environment.

For the past 60 years, mainstream neoliberal policy has encouraged and justified the elimination of small-scale food producers in both industrially developed and developing countries. This process of undermining and eliminating small-scale food producers is linked with the expansion of a development model that considers small and medium-scale farming, artisanal fishing, nomadic pastoralists, and indigenous communities to be outside “modernity.” This chapter uses the latest information available to summarize the high social and environmental costs of this model of development.

Taking a historical, cross-cultural, and trans-disciplinary perspective, this e-book includes some of the most recent references in the scholarly and policy literature on food, agriculture, environment, and livelihoods. The photos and the embedded video clips, animations, and audio recordings show farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, fishers, food workers, urban farmers, and consumers all working to promote food sovereignty, highlighting the importance of locally controlled food systems to sustain people and nature in a diversity of rural and urban contexts.