Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

The articles in this issue examine the strategies that farmers, scientists, and citizens use to “save” the things that matter to us (our seeds, our bodies, our farms, and our communities) in the midst of accelerating, human-induced environmental degradation. They investigate the ways that these actors imagine the future—the ways that they seek to preserve what they see as vital, prevent what they see as unacceptable, and (sometimes) give in to what they see as unavoidable. The authors meticulously document the care that these actors invest in saving seeds, cultivating gardens, ensuring farm success, and documenting the information necessary for these things to be sustained (or resurrected) in an uncertain future.

We begin by presenting a special issue of four articles that provide insight into the world of seed banking, which has become a major strategy for preserving plant genetic resources in the Anthropocene. The authors take us inside a few of the major institutions that play a role in collecting and preparing seeds for banking, exploring how they developed historically, how they function today, and who plays a role in caring for these seeds and determining their future use. Together, this collection helps us understand the political-economic machinations, the everyday labor, and the imagined futures involved in seed saving.

Also in this issue, Janette Bulkan provides a meticulous overview of The Place of Bitter Cassava in the Social Organization and Belief Systems of Two Indigenous Peoples of Guyana. Drawing on historical resources and her own ethnographic research, Bulkan explains how and why cassava remains central to indigenous diets and cultural practices in Guyana, despite the availability of processed wheat flour and white rice. She pays particular attention to the role of women in cultivating cassava and protecting and disseminating knowledge about particular cultivars. She also explores the role of cassava in the areruya belief system.

In Beyond Alternative Food Networks: Understanding Motivations to Participate in Orti Urbani in Palermo, Giuseppina Migliore, Pietro Romeo, Riccardo Testa, and Giorgio Schifani examine why residents of Palermo (the largest city in Sicily) choose to participate in urban gardening. While previous studies have focused on political motivations for involvement with orti urbani, the authors found citizens involved in these gardens were primarily concerned about eating safe food. Many cannot afford to buy organic foods; so they choose to grow their own. The authors frame their work within an interesting reading of the history of orti urbani and argue that Palermo should allocate more green space to these gardens.

Thomas L. Henshaw considers collegiate food service systems in Is the Emergence of the “Fresh Prep” Food Service Provider an Entrée into Local Foods? Henshaw considers emergent strategies of food service firms, especially tho

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.

Individual seed saving and exchange are considered important components of contemporary efforts to conserve crop genetic diversity that ramify at local, regional, and global scales. Yet the very fact that the contributions of these activities to conservation need to be made explicit by seed savers and those who study them indicates that the practices of seed saving and exchange may not immediately be recognized as conservation-oriented activities. This article investigates why and how individual seed saving came to be aligned with a broader conservation agenda in Britain through a historical examination of the promotion of seed saving by the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA) in the 1970s and 1980s. It demonstrates how several HDRA initiatives that aimed to preserve vegetable diversity also re-inscribed British gardeners’ ordinary labor as conservation work. This historical study complements sociological and ethnographic studies, highlighting the role of a prominent organization in creating pathways for individuals to engage in local, national, and international conservation through seed saving. It also serves as a reminder that the connections between these activities had to be made explicit—that is, that there was (and is) work involved in connecting individual acts of seed saving to conservation outcomes at different scales.

Scholars are increasingly attending to human emotions in the context of changing environments. Here, we draw on over a decade of collaborative work in the community of Utila, a small Honduran island in the Caribbean, to explore evidence of environmental grief through consideration of three broad themes: (1) population and motorized transportation growth as linked to social and environmental decline; (2) mourning over the loss of the ecological bounty of the past; and (3) anticipatory grieving of further, and accelerated, ecological devastation. The growing body of work on ecological grief and solastalgia, as well as the emergent ecologies literature, together help us to wrestle with the destructive forces of the Anthropocene. We consider the importance of documenting and sharing the experiences of community members vis-à-vis their changing environment as a mechanism for establishing communities of mourning, increasing environmental stewardship, and imagining and enacting alternatives to dominant models.