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.
This article aims to disclose the nature and underlying causes of the recent food crises focusing on both conjunctural and structural factors; to analyze the socio-economic and geopolitical impacts of food price increases; to identify the possible strategies to minimize the trade-off between the increase of agricultural production and the sustainable use of natural resources.
This article focuses on perceptions and memories of the “Groundnut Scheme”, an enacted peanut monoculture in East Africa and one of the largest colonial agricultural development initiatives in history, trying in particular to trace the different functions that were assigned to the social and ecological landscape of Tanganyika.
Using the Central Coast of California as a case study, this article argues that a nexus of ambitious growers and a growing state agricultural bureaucracy worked to create a “brand name” and teach cultivation approaches with increased production and expanded markets. But these same actors also made efforts to keep the long-term health of the industry and the community in mind.
The Moo Man was filmed over four years on the marshes of Sussex, and tells the story of a maverick organic dairy farmer and his small herd of unruly cows.
In the United States the 1985 Farm Bill lead to the creation of a program called the Conservation Reserve Program. It allows farmers to enter into a rental contract in which they are paid for idling and reverting agricultural land to natural ecosystems for conservation purposes.
During the fall of the Soviet Union, a depleted Cuba implements various measures—including sustainable and environmentally sound practices—to avoid devastation.
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.
On 8 October 1871 a brush fire took hold of northeastern Wisconsin that destroyed acres upon acres of woodland areas and settlements and took up to 1,500 lives.
Managing the Unknown offers essays that show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress. This volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.
