Below, an adaptation of part of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, written with Jason W Moore, published in The Guardian. If you’ve read the book, do look out for the post-publication addendum of the story of Oklahoma-based Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery. CAAIR was set up by chicken executives so that survivors of the opioid epidemic might pray by day and work on the understaffed night-shift at slaughterhouses. Do read the full story, as researched by the Center for Investigative Reporting. And, meantime, here’s the excerpt as published in the Long Reads series at the Guardian.
Terrorism for trolls: A note from Austin
Practice Reparation
I was asked to contribute to Letters to a Young Farmer, a collection patterned on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. For inspiration, I re-read America’s poet laureate of the soil, Wendell Berry. His 1973 Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front is very good. Its last line: Continue reading “Practice Reparation”
Developing the Syllabus for an Agroecology Course
Bob St Peter, activist and farmer in northern Maine, is working on developing a syllabus for an agroecology course. Miguel Altieri sends these two sources to help. What else can Bob look at to develop his own curriculum? Please share your ideas in the comments and if you want to join the school, more details are below, and you can contact Bob at Agroecologymaine@gmail.com
Continue reading “Developing the Syllabus for an Agroecology Course”
Ask Not What Refugees Can Do For Us…
Co-written with Eric Tang, and published by Reuters on World Refugee Day, 2016.
Today is World Refugee Day, the most contentious one in recent memory. Refugee resettlement once enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, but in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and Orlando there are few issues more polarizing in this election year. At the center of the storm are Syrian refugees fleeing persecution, many of them making the deadly passage across the Mediterranean. Fear-mongering conservatives demand that all Syrians be kept out of the United States. Liberals call for granting entry to a select few, albeit under strict guidelines.
Alimentary, My Dear Austin
Published in the Austin-American Statesman, based on the Food For All: Inclusive Food Planning in North Austin report.
Message to FLOTUS: Let’s *All* Move
My comrade here at the LBJ School Erin Lentz wrote this with me, to welcome Michelle Obama to Austin. Republished here from the Austin American-Statesman.
Ida B Wells, Science Fiction Writer
Ida B Wells deserves her place in the canon of journalism and social change. In the science fiction, not so much. I found her “A Story of 1900”, written in 1886, while digging for other things. It may not be a classic, but not only was it written two years before Edward Bellamy’s epochal Looking Backward, but the story lives and breathes Octavia Butler’s thoughts on the use of science fiction for black people.
A Window in the Cathedral of the Green Revolution
When the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations announced it was going to take agroecology sufficiently seriously to hold a conference on it, reasonable people were pleased, and sceptical. Pleased because the FAO has been agnostic about agroecology’s scientific developments in addressing problems that the FAO itself is charged with tackling. Sceptical because the reason’s for the FAO’s historical reticence are hardly going to be fixed by a conference. Nonetheless, the great and the good from agroecology made the case in front of a bevvy of senior officials. After the event, José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the FAO, proclaimed that “today a window was opened in what for 50 years has been the cathedral of the Green Revolution.”
Continue reading “A Window in the Cathedral of the Green Revolution”
Apologies to mailing list subscribers
Sorry gang – I was working on the Green Revolution post in idle moments over the past week, and didn’t realise that I’d set it to ‘public and password protected’. You can read the finished post now. Apologies.