This article outlines the “global P problem sphere” before moving to insights obtained from a Canadian case study that examines the opportunities of applying a paradigmatic focal shift to phosphorus understanding—“from noxious to precious”— as assessed and evaluated through the direct participation of local stakeholders.
This essay is drawn from a larger research project that examines the expansive, varied, and complex region of Northern Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In this issue of RCC Perspectives, Frank Uekoetter addresses monocultures as more than a cultural phenomenon, considering the science, economics, and technology behind the trend.
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Disease, hunger, war, and religion have shaped human existence over many centuries. This volume of RCC Perspectives presents exciting syntheses between research in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and history.
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The authors regard migration as a form of adaptation and argue that Irish migration in 1740–1741 should be considered as a case of climate-induced migration.
Ferrieres, Madeleine. Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
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.
