culture

This book offers a new view of the Okefenokee, its inhabitants, and its rich and telling record of thwarted ambitions, unintended consequences, and unresolved questions.

Fiona Cameron, Carson Fellow from August 2011 until March 2012, talks about her research on ‘Museums, Education, and Climate Change’ at the intersections between science, technology and nature.

An original history of “ecological” ideas of the body as it unfolded in California’s Central Valley.

Sharon McKenzie Stevens views the contradictions and collaborations involved in the management of public land in southern Arizona through the lens of political rhetoric.

By looking at works by Native Americans, African Americans, European Americans, and others, and by considering forms of literature beyond the traditional nature essay, Myers expands our conceptions of environmental writing and environmental justice.

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.

Based on ethnographic and archival data, this in-depth study of the Venetian island of Burano shows how its inhabitants develop their sense of a distinct identity.