Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

Achieving cleaner water for rural and suburban communities in a sustainable way requires approaches tailored to the unique socioeconomic, ecological, and historic contexts embedded in a particular community and place. Water quality trading (WQT) is a payment for ecosystem services style policy that is currently popular across North America as a mechanism to reduce water pollution from rural communities. Yet this approach is failing to generate markets with enough trades to measurably improve waterways. Some failures are attributed to poor program design and others to stakeholder communities who are averse to the premise or morality of WQT. However, rural communities are not homogenous and many are in fact amenable to payment for ecosystem services policies such as WQT. Although our case study identified Tennessee watersheds as “feasible” locations, we present evidence that the typical program design parameters would fail, despite having a willing population of farmers. We argue that identifying amenable communities or feasible locations simplifies the agency of stakeholders and is ultimately insufficient to make ecosystem services programs work unless the design and implementation phases of the programs include local stakeholders.

In June 2017, a geopolitical crisis that emerged in the Arab Gulf between Qatar and several of its neighboring countries resulted in the severing of diplomatic ties and the imposition of a land, sea, and air embargo on Qatar. This article explores how the import, production, and consumption of food in Qatar came to constitute a key geopolitical axis during the first year of the crisis. Building on scholarly work that examines food as not just a part of the economic and social fields but also a form of political engagement, I argue that food became an important arena of politics during the blockade in several ways. First, the state’s reorganization of trade networks and its support for Qatari agricultural production became a site for the expansion of the state’s food security agenda. Second, the consumption of food—and the physical space of the supermarket itself—became a geopolitical battleground as new trade arrangements led to the replacement of products made by “blockading countries” with those from alternative ones. The intensification of local agricultural production, in turn, forged a “buy local” consumer culture that shaped, and was shaped by, nationalist sentiments. Looking closely at the import, production, and consumption of food during the blockade illuminates the ways in which food is an everyday medium through which state ideologies and state imaginings of the nation are constructed and circulated.

This article draws together data from two of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center's recent research projects and combines these data in new ways to elucidate the relationship between Mesa Verde region soil development and non-irrigation farming practices. The Pueblo Farming Project (PFP) seeks to preserve traditional farming knowledge and educate the public concerning traditional farming and the place of corn in Pueblo cultures. The Basketmaker Communities Project (BCP) focuses on understanding the Basketmaker III Period and the development of Early Pueblo communities. Pedologic data from each of Crow Canyon's experimental gardens, a mature piñon–juniper forest, and four Basketmaker sites reveal patterns of soil development. The Mesa Verde Loess-based soils become indurated with use and must be remediated, fallowed, or abandoned, with implications for site choice and residence time. Induration and productivity appear to vary inversely over time, with impacts due to management, vegetation, exposure, and use-life. Understanding the interplay of climate, cultural practice, and pedogenesis is, therefore, key to deciphering this geocultural record and pursuing agricultural sustainability in this region. We present a framework for unifying these lines of investigation and to facilitate moving future studies forward together.

The implications of freezing seeds to conserve genes statically and for the long term are complex and deserve further reflection to appreciate seed banking as an attempt to detach seeds from their life cycle. Here, I use a cryopolitical framework to explore this in the context of the activities of the International Board of Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) between 1973 and 1984. I suggest that the emergence of seed banks is a shift toward a cryopower mode of governance, where technoscientific intervention in the biology of seeds was presented as a means to manage the survival of seeds. The project of ex situ conservation is a socio-technical effort by international institutions such as IBPGR and a variety of institutions with seed repositories. In creating a coldscape, they sought to make genetic resources into frozen seeds that were stable and mobile, not only across space but, importantly, over time. Consequently, our interpretations of seed banks as sites of geopolitical significance in the controversies over access to seeds can be complemented by considering their biopolitical importance as interventions that extend the power of IBPGR and other institutions toward plant life, and the future.

Conserving wild plant seeds at the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) provides insurance by facilitating the reintroduction of threatened species. However, seed bank collections also provide an easily accessible resource for research into innovative conservation approaches and the adaptive management of natural resources and landscapes. In this regard, the MSBP corresponds with an emerging body of practice dubbed “New Conservation” that responds to the environmental implications of the Anthropocene and introduces the prospect of “gardening” nature. By examining the attitudes expressed by seed bank staff in the UK and United States. This article illustrates their awareness of the tension between the need to mitigate species extinction and the anthropocentrically governed, or gardened, form that the species’ survival might subsequently take. Those within the MSBP were often thoughtfully engaged with the ideological questions their practice raises. However, external expectations of what seed bank collections facilitate, such as those of funders, will also impact how these collections are used. These expectations present selective pressures that risk limiting and thus filtering which species are reintroduced from the bank and the form in which their place in the world is forged.

Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to “tech” work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds for their ultimate storage at the largest seed bank of wild plants—the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in West Sussex, England. Contributing to the growing scholarship on care in technoscientific practice, I investigate how scientists summon their bodies, imaginations, and feelings to clean, screen, and count seeds, all the while producing knowledge that renders the seeds legible in the bank. By following the seeds through the experimental care practices espoused by scientists involved from the moment seeds arrive at the bank until they are ready for storage, I study how seemingly mundane tasks radically influence how “life” is being prepared for the future. [seed banking, gene banking, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, care practice, laboratory studies, affective labor].

The articles in this special issue contribute to our understanding of the historical emergences and present-day functioning of various modes of conserving plant genetic diversity in seed banks. Exploring both crop plant and wild species conservation at different times and scales, the papers examine how various actors articulate their role in stewarding plant life for the future as seeds. They reveal seed banking and its corollary, seed saving, as responses to uncertainty, which do not resolve this condition but instead generate new ambiguities and new uncertainties.