In my quest to learn more about gender/feminist theory and understand the crux of the argument between rad-fem and trans-fem thought, Serano's book ha...moreIn my quest to learn more about gender/feminist theory and understand the crux of the argument between rad-fem and trans-fem thought, Serano's book has been by far the most helpful. While the book occasionally seems somewhat repetitive (as though some of the chapters were written to be read independently) it explores all the important historical debates and aspects of gender theory and cultural critique relevant to the discussion. The history of sex science covered in Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality is reviewed in a much more digestible fashion. The history of intra-feminism theoretical debate on the topic is laid out in a clear and comprehensible fashion, which helped me grasp some of the points made in this more academic version (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fem...).
Some of the salient points I wanted to remember (sorry, the bullet list format is more for me than for you, reader):
- media portrayals of trans-women (which tend to focus on deception narratives, makeup and clothes, surgery, and sex work) highlight the artificiality and sexualization of femininity, which is symptomatic of our culture's misogyny more broadly
- misogyny often manifests itself as a disdain for femininity, the "things women do," and this has negative consequences for everyone from femme gay men in the gay rights movement to feminine males to trans women to cis women to even cis boys, whose behaviors and personal expression are circumscribed by the stigmatization of "feminine" traits. This is the key thesis of the book, and Serano argues that we need to embrace the value of femininity itself, its validity as a personal expression for anyone, and its parity with the traits collected as "masculinity."
- in radical circles, freeing individuals from the constraints of androcentrism and the gender binary can result in the apotheosis of androgyny and other alternative gender expressions. However, this can end up in what Serano terms Subversivism, which doesn't reject but merely reverses the gender-normality hierarchy.
- Serano's gender theory (I suppose it could be seen as an alternative to the radfem model, though they easily could be complementary, since Serano's focusing on individual variation and the feminist bit concerns classes and oppression) posits that each of the dozens of traits wrapped up in femininity/masculinity/gender expression, biological sex, sexual orientation, vary independently of each other; are largely intrinsic and not consciously alterable, though they may change over time, especially as our self-understandings, definitions, and terminology evolve; are products of complex interactions between many factors that are little-understood and yield a variety of products on a spectrum in each metric; each factor roughly correlates with biological males and females but there is no exclusivity in any trait. This model eliminates oppositional sexism (the idea that maleness and femaleness are opposites)
- In addition to oppositional sexism, Serano also coins (I think?) the term "traditional sexism" to define the oppression that limits males to male traits and females to female traits and uses violence to stigmatize those who don't conform.
- Her description of cis privilege makes a ton of great points that really clarifies that issue a lot. They're all much more subtle and deep than the obvious issues with government documents, etc. 1. Cis people take gendering of strangers for granted - they assume that it is immediately obvious what gender a person is and don't think of this as an active process of sorting so much as a passive process of observation. 2. Cissexual assumption means that cis people assume everyone else is cis until proven otherwise. This creates a series of awkward situations for trans people - they must "come out" as trans, which is difficult and dangerous given the social stigma about it. 3. Gender entitlement is the presumption that cis people have the right to decide who is and is not a member of a gender - ie, that their gendering is correct despite what the individual may say. 4. Birth privilege - the idea cissexuals' gender is more natural and authentic because they are born into it, while trans people are forced to fight their way into their gender, even though in both cases subconscious sex presumably arises due to the same forces and at around the same times. Serano points out that this birthright is frowned upon in other situations, like caste systems, but never questioned in gender. 5. Never having to confront the idea that your subconscious sex could differ from your body and the way people gender you. This is the root issue of a lot of the above.
Interestingly, Serano makes a lot of the same points that this author (http://liberationcollective.wordpress...), among the least offensive and awful radfem writers on trans people I've seen, makes. - gender is complex - masculinity and femininity are complex bundles of traits that can express in any number of combinations - gender expression goes well beyond stereotypical extremes of masculinity and femininity - all of the traits involved in gender expression are spectra, not dichotomies - gender identity doesn't need to be constant over time to be valid - gender oppression occurs through social perception, regardless of self-perception - femininity is systematically devalued and degraded by nearly every sector of our society (echoing Serano's title thesis)
Points where Serano seems to depart from the reasonable end of the radfem trans critique: - The assertion that there is such a thing as "subconscious sex." This is an empirical question to which the radfems have applied an ideological answer. The way Hungerford talks about trans people makes it eminently clear she has no idea what gender dissonance is like (neither do I, but I listen when people tell me about it), showing that her argument is deeply premised in the very cissexual privilege she's trying to erase.
- The idea that masculinity and femininity have an existence beyond patriarchy's oppressive hierarchy
- Serano warns against oversimplifying gender! Most of the confusion in the radfem school comes from the arrogant assumption that their ideological understanding of gender overrules the complexity of the world and renders empirical investigations unnecessary.
- Respecting people and their experiences, giving validity to their subjectivity, going far enough to listen to them and not accuse them, as a group, of being oppressive by their very existence
Gah. The radfem arguments are very frustrating to me. They're so willfully ignorant and offensive but yet so close to saying exactly the same thing, and being the activists I want them to be in every other way.(less)
"an evolutionary history approach walks right into the house of biology to reach a deeper understanding. One of the questions it encourages us to ask...more"an evolutionary history approach walks right into the house of biology to reach a deeper understanding. One of the questions it encourages us to ask is why species have the traits that they do. It reminds us that species are not givens; they have histories."
The premise of environmental history is that the full story of human history cannot be understood without extensive reference to the interactions between humans and the natural world. Russell's project is to emphasize, within that field, the specifically genetic, evolutionary impacts made in those interactions. It's a very straightforward, uncontroversial suggestion. Insofar as he's right and not enough environmental historians take this aspect of change into account (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution is a great exception - you should probably read it if you're interested in a book like Russell's), then his work is a suggestive palliative. But insofar as the idea itself is obvious and makes reference to things that have been studied extensively before - antibiotic resistance in pathogens, pesticide resistance in weeds and insects, and domestication - most of the book seems bland and superfluous.
I did find his argument about organisms as technology quite compelling. He points out that there's no clear reason to separate tools and processes we use for a purpose based on whether they are alive or not. There are plenty of crossover cases in the middle that make this clear - genetically modified organisms, vat grown vitamins, living houses, bamboo-frame bicycles, and biological weapons are all alive but clearly technology. From there, it's not much of a leap to factory farms, where animals are little more than chemical converters of feed to meat. But if it's the intentional conversion of feed to meat that matters, then any chicken raised by humans is "technology" in the same way. And this argument can extend out into some very ecologically complex farming systems. I find that interesting.
He recapitulated some arguments made by others that I found interesting enough to record here:
Bison
Russell hypothesizes that human hunters triggered B. priscus to have smaller horns and travel in herds (which is not advantageous in terms of food and land/individual). wikipedia's narrative goes like this: B. priscus migrated to North America around 500 or 250 ka, diverged almost immediately into two species, with the second, B. latifrons, having much larger horns and travelling in even smaller groups. This makes sense in Russell's logic, since the bison lost adaptations to human hunting when they moved to a continent where there were no humans (whereas B. priscus shouldn't have changed due to human hunting pressure - they were already used to it in Eurasia). B. antiquus emerged from B. latifrons around 250 ka, and B. antiquus led to B. bison by way of B. occidentalis by around 5-10 ka. So the spread of Clovis hunters is associated with bison getting smaller.
Skin color
There are several selective pressures at work on the amount of melanin in skin. Folate breaks down under too much UV, and of course it also causes melanoma. However, UV is required for synthesis of vitamin D. While most humans were dark skinned and obtained vitamin D through extensive sun exposure in Africa, once they migrated out of Africa, they gradually turned to dietary sources of vitamin D (as dark skinned Inuits still did until the malnutrition outbreak caused by the introduction of European diets). However, once humans in northern latitudes shifted to grains and dairy, dietary vitamin D intake was insufficient, which shifted selection pressure towards lighter skin, despite its disadvantages in other arenas. Since vitamin D deficiency (rickets) affects children, it has a much more immediate effect on reproductive success than melanoma, a disease of later life. Russell argues that the shift to lighter skin was aided by the genetic bottleneck of out-of-Africa humans. Russell's argument is supported by this new research claiming that blue eyes (a reduction in melanin production) came from a single mutation around 6-10 kya, approximately the time of agriculture's introduction to the area.
Cotton
The Industrial Revolution was most famously driven by the mechanization of cotton production in England. However, this process was possible because of long-strand cotton from the Americas - shorter cotton from India didn't produce fibers strong enough to endure the rigors of machine handling. Most historians simply ignore this fact and treat cotton as a commodity, or at best take it for granted that long strand cotton arose in the Americas, simply as a happenstance. Russell wants us to flesh out this story and see its resonance in deep time. Long strand cotton was actively selected for (not to say intentionally bred for) by groups of Amerindians in Peru and elsewhere. The plant was able to evolve the traits desired by Amerindians and later the textile industry only because of the genetic flexibility provided by tetraploidy. That is, the "D" genome of cotton found in the Americas was joined by an overseas migrator bearing the Old World "A" genome. Instead of replacing each other, the two combined, leaving each individual with 4 copies of each chromosome - two in each genome, which differed from each other. These extra copies provide back-ups that prevent mutations from being fatal and thus allow a greater range of traits to be expressed. So Russell argues that this means the Industrial Revolution is a product of active biotechnological groundwork done by Amerindians and of a happenstance migration across the Pacific 1-2 mya.(less)
While some exceptions have made their way into popular purview - chiefly the understanding that industrial humans are destructive - ecology is still l...moreWhile some exceptions have made their way into popular purview - chiefly the understanding that industrial humans are destructive - ecology is still largely seen the way it was presented by William Paley: a web of interactions in which inefficiencies and waste are pared away by the exigencies of natural selection and where every piece has its function, even if it's not yet clear to us. This is evident in Optimal Foraging Theory and Optimal Defense Theory, which are essentially tautological: whatever organisms do must be the optimal choice to make, because of Evolution.
The Ghosts of Evolution is Barlow's attempt to explode that vision out into a historically complex picture of the world. The premise, of course, is that there are plant traits (mostly fruit, but a few thorns and growth habits are thrown in for good measure) that evolved in response to a specific sort of mutualism that no longer exists.
The book is initially kind of weak. Barlow's premised the whole thing on a "groundbreaking" paper Dan Janzen and Paul Martin wrote in 1982. She's enamored of the idea, she finds it romantic and exciting. Much of the book is structured around quotes from email exchanges she had with the two authors. For a book about such an old topic, it seems remarkably rich in speculation and low in primary research. She constantly presents these anecdotal "experiments" she's done, with the caveat that they're "not real science" so we shouldn't invest any Truth in them, but with the clear feeling that she really wants the suggestions they made to be true, just because she would find it Cool.
While the premise wears rather thin in the first few chapters - it's really sufficient to assert that honey locust, persimmon, pawpaw, avocado, and the Kentucky coffee tree are anachronisms and why without being so repetitive about it - the book picks up when Barlow broadens her scope.
There's a wonderfully intensive discussion of comparative digestive anatomy. She concludes, reasonably, that most of the anachronism fruit eaters were hindgut digesters - foregut digesters aren't made for fruit. She points out that the Pleistocene megafaunal extinction left a continent devoid of hindgut herbivores larger than a beaver - though she uncharacteristically fails to speculate on why this is. Most of the large animals that moved in from Eurasia were foregut digesters. I like discussions of digestive anatomy because they are inextricably linked with forage chemistry, which turns faunal assemblages into keys to and engineers of a chemical landscape.
The beautiful thing about the book is the way it expands our perceptions of the relationships among organisms. Anachronistic fruits are the living evidence of megafauna, and the present distribution of the plants that produce them is evidence of their absence. Barlow's knowledge of the specific histories of animals, plants, and their interactions as continents moved throughout North America's history seems rich and full, which is unusual. I find the whole thing complex and hard to wrap my head around - camels and horses arose in North America, while Bison arose in Eurasia, but they migrated across the Bering Straits at various different times up to the Pleistocene. I really want to learn this deep history with more familiarity, because I tthink the historical, evolutionary, dynamic perspective is the only way to understand the logic of a land community.
Overall, Barlow made an interesting picture and changed my view of ecology and evolutionary history (particularly just noting that evolution can leave anachronistic features as big as avocados for 13,000 years is remarkable). It's not the most eloquent or subtle book, but it works.(less)
I picked this up randomly from the 3rd floor of the Mudd (best floor) because I'm looking into performing restoration as part and parcel of my own Res...moreI picked this up randomly from the 3rd floor of the Mudd (best floor) because I'm looking into performing restoration as part and parcel of my own Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers project. I was hoping it'd be technical and practical, a sort of textbook on restoration. Instead, it's just a series of somewhat repetitive essays on the ways restoration projects are the perfect field study plots for ecologists. They make two nice points, again and again: restoration provides manipulable field sites, places ecologists can fuck with things and usually make them better no matter what; and successful restoration projects are the "acid test" of ecology as a predictive science.
They constantly make a watch analogy: you know you understand a watch when you can put it back together and tune it up to run at the right speed, and thus you know you understand an ecosytem when you can put it back together and have it function correctly, with all the appropriate levels of productivity, biological interactions, and ecosystem services. They point out that since ecosystems are self-healing, artificial systems are often better tests of knowledge. If you know what is important about each component of the system, you can replace each with another that fulfills the same functions. This is exciting, because it is the practice of restoration agriculture (eg, replacing bison with cows that are managed to graze like bison).
While they use the language of succession throughout but point out that the point of restoration is to speed up succession and that the science of succession has shown that it is not a linear process and it does not reach the same endpoint in all circumstances. Changing the nature of the disturbance, the rate of migration, and possibly altering the composition of key soil-influencing plants can shape the community towards desired conclusions. In my case, the desired conclusion is wildlife habitat that fills ecosystem services and produces truckloads and truckloads of nutritious food. There seems to be no moral issue with creating an intensive food-bearing ecosystem - after all, you're starting with a cornfield, so anything you do will improve it. As long as you aren't introducing exotics into the area, you're practicing restoration ecology!
The essays are repetitive and relatively simplistic, and in hindsight I'm not sure why I read the whole thing. Certainly none of it was helpful in practical terms. It did bring up several specific ideas for the farm - ensuring we have mound-building ants for prairie seed distribution; inoculating trees with MR fungi; planting in species-diverse clumps; creating a diverse age structure for the community; possibly encouraging hawks and owls with nests and perches until the trees are mature. It also inspired me to plan a trip to the UW Madison Arboretum later this spring and to try to meet with restoration ecologists there. (less)
Near the end of Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, Manning meets an environmentalist who exhorts him to in...moreNear the end of Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, Manning meets an environmentalist who exhorts him to inform himself and take action on some issue - a gold mine, if I remember correctly. He dismisses the guy a bit flippantly, taking a strangely holier-than-thou attitude that suggests the activist doesn't know the environmental history and the true nature of the place nearly as well as Manning. If he did, he wouldn't just be applying the superficial narrative of environmental degradation and resistance found all over the world, most at home in glossy national coalition campaign materials.
One Round River is Manning's attempt to do a better job, in a sense. Published two years after Grassland, ORR zooms in to a specific watershed, the Blackfoot river, a tributary of the Clark Fork and eventually the Columbia. Up front, Manning admits he's writing this book with an agenda: he wants you to never buy gold, ever again. But rather than making that case overtly, Manning simply explores, makes connections, and takes the reader into the Blackfoot basin. Most of that process walks through the degradation of the land by logging, mining, and overgrazing, the erosion of stream banks, ecological invasions, competitive exclusion of wild animals, and disruption of natural cycles of pond formation.
Manning's narrative brilliance is in bringing the human side of the story, communicating the cantankerous stubbornness of rural Montanans and its manifestations in their unique approach to conservation. The only group that isn't so humanized is the miners: the company is portrayed as being totally outside the life of the community, just as the mine itself, unlike moderate logging and grazing, would be outside the life of the land, entirely antagonistic and with no incentive to maintain its longterm health. This is contrary to the way I've been thinking lately, that while strip mines and point-source polluters get a lot of the attention for environmental causes, they'd probably not be a big deal if habitats weren't systematically attacked by habitat destruction.
After spending most of the book establishing the place, the central character of the story, Manning turns to the conflict: the proposed gold mine in the headwaters of the Blackfoot. He reveals that his position is not neutral, that his wife, a former Earth First! activist (what a badass!) and all of his friends are deeply involved in the fight against the mine, though he has avoided active engagement to maintain a shred of journalistic objectivity. His discussion of their tactics brings forward some of the most interesting insights in the book.
He describes the battle-hardened resolve and extensive experience most environmental activists in the West, especially in his area, have accrued, and goes on to argue that the only effective activists have situated themselves in a place, committed to it (unlike the bright but ephemeral college activist) and coevolved with their foes. He brings in a wonderfully colorful approach to militancy, the campy "Environmental Rangers," led by Ric Valois. The Rangers talk big talk and carry guns and do a bit of espionage, but the mere fact that they were included in the book gives up their chance at effective strategy - their names and intentions are known to the authorities. Manning makes a good point about this, though it may be that he has no reason to apply pessimism here when he's slightly brighter on the mainstream routes of action.
"Were this only an ethical question, I could answer it in a second. . . . I would kill someone in a heartbeat if I thought it could stop that mine. It won't. But it's not just an ethical question, and we know it and have known it since our state developed coercive powers sufficient to make rebellion impossible. This is so obviously true as to make our dilemma no longer interesting." Dedicating ourselves to serious underground sabotage, as Deep Green Resistance exhorts us to do, would necessarily set us in conflict with the most effective counterinsurgency force in the history of the world, a power with no qualms about using violence against its own citizens, and with the power to ensure public opinion remains against us. It's not a choice I could make, and I feel deeply conflicted asking others to do so, knowing the odds. Manning's position, then, takes a long view - seeing the harm of the mine will last "in perpetuity" but acknowledging there's a long history of degradation, that this mine would be a catastrophe but only one battle of many in the fight to save this place.
In the telling of all these things, Manning constantly displays a narrative excellence and depth of thought that just blows my mind. He connects every walk and drive he takes to the seasonal round of the Salish or the journeys of Lewis and Clark or the migration of jobless miners to the coast. He weaves each thread into a marvelously rich and satiating picture of the issue. He seems to live in a world of rich perception, full of stories and a history focused on otters and rivers and workers, a world that seems more real than the one most environmental battles are of necessity fought, or even than the prosaic one we live in.
I love his casual disrespect for the fourth wall, advising readers to remember this or that thought for later application (which is almost never really possible, I found). More than anything, I love his critical lens, which forces him to examine his own values and assumptions - justifying why the value he ascribes to solitude, natural beauty, and intact ecosystems can be said to override the value others ascribe to gold jewelry, or thrashing romantic images of nature and replacing them with slightly more reality based iterations of the same thing.
I first came across Richard Manning when Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization jumped out at me from the "agriculture is bad" s...moreI first came across Richard Manning when Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization jumped out at me from the "agriculture is bad" section of the Mudd's wonderful third floor. Manning makes the "agriculture is bad" argument deftly in that book, covering each aspect thoroughly but quickly, with a deep understanding of his sources, and he provided me with probably the best reading list I've found in a single book. I knew there was something special about him then, but I didn't follow up until I saw Food's Frontier: The Next Green Revolution at the APL.
In Grassland, Manning shows what he is capable of when he's free of the tight constraints of argument and expository description. Given the deep ecology creds established in Against the Grain, it's really not that surprising that Manning would shine in deeply felt bioregional environmental history. Grassland is impressive. Manning's main goal is to really look at the biome, to see its parts and appreciate that its inhabitants and functions are as important and wonderful as any of the more well-loved systems like mountain valleys, rainforests, and tidepools.
It is somewhat general for a really place-based history, covering grasslands from western Montana to Kansas to western Wisconsin. Manning focuses on the big changes in ecological function and the associated cultural and economic factors. In the deep past, these include the Laramide orogeny, which put much of North America into the rain shadow that drove out the forests, the Pleistocene extinction (and the less well-known replacement with Eurasian mammals) and the immigration of the Clovis peoples, and the introduction of horses to Plains society and the associated shifts in lifestyle and politics.
Much more attention, of course, is focused on the ecological imperialism of European settlers, the central tragedy of the story. Manning focuses first on grazing, railroads, road construction, which allowed settlers to replace the bison-horse-native american system with ranches and begin the process of degradation.
Agricultural, Manning argues, was much worse. The ecological package that aided conquest of the East coast was ill-adapted to conquering the dry Plains, so the USDA actually sought out new plants to help them destroy the ecosystem. They brought in new varieties of winter wheat from Siberia, adapted to the dry conditions. Dozens of other invasives were sought that enabled settlers to plant trees, shrubs, and other civilized amenities on their grassland homesteads. Many of these species became noxious invasives, while others introduced devastating diseases to which North American plants had no immunity (this effort is supposedly responsible for the demise of the American Chestnut, for instance).
The process of wheat expansion turned rangeland that was relatively degraded but still hosted dozens of plant species into a monoculture. The moldboard plow and tile drainage essentially destroyed the pedological and hydrological basis for diverse life in the plains. It was the worst disaster the place had ever seen, and as agriculture has intensified, it has only gotten worse.
Manning finishes the book off with a discussion of activism, but he spares us the standard exhortations to action. He points out that the only sustainable way of life on the Plains is one that respects what the place wants to be - he says "the song the land calls forth" or something. He goes so far as to assert that the plains are not meant for writing, so our stories here must be written in the landscape of the place.
This is a clever way of dismissing the environmental activism narratives he seems to find rather cloying, based on Romantic ideals that favor sublime vistas and paint humans out of the landscape. The activism he sees, based on words not places, has not yet managed to really help the land. While conservation is well-established in various government agencies, it is a vision based on urbanite recreation, which leads, eg, the USFWS to stock streams with non-native fish and kill birds that compete with ducks, favored game birds. It is an extension of the ecological imperialist mindset, not a rejection of it, much less a return to the land. Worst is when people who are advocating just that solution - a bison and elk-based economy premised on the restoration of native vegetation and natural hydrology - are challenged by "animal rights" activists who fail to see that a healthy landscape is the only thing in the interest of animals, including humans. In general, Manning's cynical perspective is a refreshing change of pace from the standard activist book formula.
I failed to appreciate these aspects as much, but Manning delved pretty deeply into the literature of the Plains, a historical hub of bioregionalism and home to many authors who thought they needed such a literature. This may belie his earlier notion of an "illiterature of the Plains" but it does help flesh out and humanize his story. His coverage of Native American culture and history was way too thin, which is a shame.(less)
Gourevitch makes a really well-done narrative from dozens of interviews with Abu Ghraib prison guards, as well as some of the officials involved in it...moreGourevitch makes a really well-done narrative from dozens of interviews with Abu Ghraib prison guards, as well as some of the officials involved in its planning. I was consistently impressed with the skill he had in distilling the interviews into plot, character, tone, and a fascinating exploration of the psychology and causation of the prisoner abuse there.
The only issue I had was that Gourevitch never attempts to analyze the cause of the atrocities. He thoroughly undermines the "one bad apple" excuse offered by the Bush administration but never replaces it with a more comprehensive systemic explanation. Officers are at worst described as passing the buck, overlooking the atrocities, and failing to implement policies to avoid them. Even the appalling SOP from Guantanamo Bay is rejected, never implemented for some reason. Yet ending the conversation here makes it seem like the whole thing was caused by a psychological disorder that emerged among the group and was simply never addressed. It is never tied to the larger theme of American brutality in pursuing imperial aims abroad, a pattern it is frighteningly at home in. Compared to some of the US military's worse abuses, Abu Ghraib actually comes off as rather tame - just somewhat weirder and a lot better documented than most.(less)
Looks at farming with nature in a relatively shallow way, seeing only the straightforward organic practices like crop rotation and hedgerows that give...moreLooks at farming with nature in a relatively shallow way, seeing only the straightforward organic practices like crop rotation and hedgerows that give wildlife a marginal part of the farm; doesn't even consider more interesting things like Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers, which just builds the habitat into the farm. The problem with this approach is that it just works back to farming around the 1900s, which was diverse out of necessity but still perpetuated the already well-advanced destruction of North American biota brought by the European colonists. Otherwise, seems like a nice introduction to farm issues that destroy habitat, and harm the world, along with fairly simple modest ways to combat that, and a lot of practical experience dealing with community members, discussions of how to create the impetus in communities to support these practices. Awesome deep ties to Aldo Leopold and the Foundation.(less)
I picked this up on a whim while scanning the shelf at the APL; I'd read Manning's excellent Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilizat...moreI picked this up on a whim while scanning the shelf at the APL; I'd read Manning's excellent Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, which I think led me to more excellent recommendations than any other book I've read. Food's Frontier is a completely different kind of book. Manning really doesn't make an argument. Instead, he writes a vignette explaining the context and goals of each o the McKnight foundation's grant-funded projects in sustainable agriculture in the developing world.
The projects all center around removing an obstacle to yield increase - this is probably the reason that Manning continually frames the research as an attempt to extend, revitalize, or repeat the Green Revolution. The comparison is straightforward in some projects, where breeders are literally attempting to do the Green Revolution's classic short-stemmed modification on more obscure plants like teff and chickpeas. Other cases are more interesting.
Manning does an excellent job at communicating the complex interactions of ecology, culture, cuisine, and economics involved in each situation, the factors that make them both fascinatingly unique and frustratingly intractable. In China, scientists are attempting to genetically modify a microbial symbiont of the ricehopper that carries rice stripe virus to produce a vaccine to protect the rice. In Chile and Brazil, potato production involves massive pesticide overuse, a problem that could be overcome by breeding in sticky hairs, a trait wild potatoes use to trap insect predators - a system that has the advantage of being immune to simple biochemical arms race escalation.
The most interesting projects also seemed the least clear. One delved into the traditional agroforestry and permaculture practices perpetuated by only a few villages in rural Mexico. The system is fascinating and in danger from encroaching industrial ag, but I don't even know what McKnight was trying to do about it. Record it? Support it? Either way, it was fun to read about.
As much as the book jacket might make you think Manning is writing about some big issue in agriculture, this really is a book without a thesis or argument. It is chiefly descriptive, and for that it is great. But Manning does make some really nice arguments (I think he's great and love to hear his perspectives) about agriculture. He has particularly incisive things to say about GMOs.
"It takes some stretch of the imagination to agree with critics' charge that genetic modification could create an environmental catastrophe, but we know for sure that farming is already an environmental catastrophe."
Speaking more broadly, he means that whether genetic modification in the lab is involved is nearly irrelevant. What we should be concerned about in agriculture are more prosaic down to earth concerns: does making this change help the flora and fauna of the area, or hurt them? Does it help the nutritional status of local communities, or hurt it? Does it benefit local farmers and their children, or large foreign/elite corporations? Does it require inputs of imported and non-renewable resources? Is it sustainable? The answer to all of these questions can be negative in an organic system, a traditional peasant system, a progressive peasant system benefiting from research and new varieties, and even a progressive permaculture system, as much as in an industrial context. It's just that, when your goal is to help people and the planet, your more likely to accomplish that than you are if your goal is to profit at any cost.
For instance, many of the organic and breeding solutions applied to pest management suffer from the same problems as GMO pest resistance: the chemical arms race. Breeding corn to produce Bt (not legally organic) is no different from spraying Bt (certifiably organic) from the point of view of resistance. Solitary bees don't care if you use pyrethrin (OG) or DDT. It's about the system, and the consequences, not the ideology.
Manning does a lot of interviews with scientists and portrays them in an unusually human and compelling way, rare even among good pop science. He should be commended for that!(less)
Massacre at El Mozote is an extension of a New Yorker article, so it's fairly short and not particularly dense. It chronicles the course of the Salvad...moreMassacre at El Mozote is an extension of a New Yorker article, so it's fairly short and not particularly dense. It chronicles the course of the Salvadoran civil war leading to the massacre and the response by the US government to the news. It's a standard Cold War imperialist atrocity narrative - the US gave arms, advice, and training to the Army of the military junta government to keep them in power against a popular rebellion supported by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who presumably had something to do with Communism. Danner starts with the background: 12-year civil war, starting with a purge of the urban left (first union leaders and activists, then teachers, then girls in jeans and tennis shoes), evolving into a counterisurgency against guerillas in the mountains. As with any of these cases, there's no question who's on the right side here, and no excuse for the US to fall so heavily on the wrong one.
The interesting thing is that the focus on El Mozote somehow undermines the atrocities of the rest of the war. El Mozote is interesting because they were born-again Protestants, immune to the Liberation Theology inspiring the guerillas. They supported the Army, had contacts within it, and expected to be spared in the scorched earth campaign in the area. An officer friendly to El Mozote's shopkeeper advised him to keep everyone in the village - those who fled would be presumed guilty. However, this ends up seeming like a deliberate trick (though it's not obvious that the massacre was so planned), when troops show up and kill 99% of the village and those who had fled there from neighboring towns, seeking its promised asylum. It's almost as though Danner is suggesting the massacre was bad because it was a betrayal, because they were "innocent." There seems otherwise no reason to focus on it - it was slightly larger in scale than previous incidents, but otherwise not particularly noteworthy. This is unfortunate, because it is not obviously more "atrocious" than the rest of the government's US-encouraged war, nor was it the only opportunity the US had to learn about the Salvadoran military's violation of human rights conditions on which military aid was legally supposed to depend.
It's instructive for me to come back to US military regime change and intervention stories after letting my ideology cool a bit, because I can now see the cause of these things in a clearer light. Before, I would have jumped at the Embassy, the Military, and the CIA for conspiring to hide these things from the public, trying to avoid getting caught with the hands in the blood jar, so to speak. But it is now quite obvious that the whole operation, the utter stupidity and willful blindness about the relationship between the rebels and Communism (they apparently believed that ANY atrocity on the part of the government would pale in comparison to what the rebels would do if they took power), were in part a product of media-amplified public fear of the Soviet Union, of changes in the power balance that might threaten their hemisphere.
This explains the Congressional schizophrenia: members needed to maintain the pretense that they were basically decent human beings without making decisive inaction that could lead to them being called out for "losing El Salvador to the Communists" - a situation that would be perceived as directing threatening US security. Imperialist atrocities weren't just an plot that greedy corporate-purchased politicians and revolving-door civil servants pulled over the public's eyes. They were that, but they were also well within the spirit of the foreign policy many Americans wanted the government to pursue.(less)
Nutrition is tasked with answering the age-old question: what are the characteristics of a healthy diet? This is a rather complex problem. It involves...moreNutrition is tasked with answering the age-old question: what are the characteristics of a healthy diet? This is a rather complex problem. It involves tremendous individual variation due to gene interactions and life history. It requires a thorough grasp of metabolic pathways and the roles chemicals play in the body, how they move around, and how the body compensates for changes in their intake. It is tasked with sorting through an enormous bevy of phytochemicals only recently recognized as important. The techniques we have to go about answer the question are further limiting. Conducting a controlled experiment with sufficient replication is almost impossible given variations in individual diet and lifestyle. More invasive and direct experiments are generally unethical and/or impractical. On top of all that, the subject is further confounded by the role of corporate money in funding and thus guiding research agendas, influencing public agency recommendations, and marketing products that are cheap to produce or earn a premium as "healthy."
I was inspired to get a scientist's-eye-view of the nutrition question by my interest in food chemistry and physiology, by my own issues with wheat and possibly other things, and most of all by the desire to be an educated voice on the perennial debates that come up in our house. The nature of our diet at Greenfire is mostly dictated by preference and environmental/ethical concerns, but our community focuses so much on our food that food fads come and go all the time. We've had raw food diets, purges and cleanses, veganism, the primal diet, dairy and gluten free eaters, plenty of vegetarians, a few fish allergies, people who love tofu and hate butter, others who love butter and hate soy products, and a few sugar addicts (myself chief among them). This is all, from what I understand, a product of the human compulsion to load food choices with a significance, culturally and medicinally, that is found in few other issues, a way to deal with the immense burden of choice omnivory imposes.
For all those reasons and more, I buckled down and read this nutrition textbook cover to cover in ten days. This was a very useful exercise, though it ended up being somewhat unsatisfying on the recommendations end and gave a somewhat poor account of the history of research in the area. The book overwhelmingly describes physiology, biochemistry, and metabolic pathways at the expense of broader issues. This reflects the state of knowledge: biochemistry and physiology have been researched thoroughly for a century and this research has yielded insights that provide the groundwork for understanding more complex issues. It was occasionally a bit tedious, though I felt like I could have grasped most of it if I'd spent the time. I skipped the list sections and the extensive naming of enzymes in digestive pathways, knowing I can come back if I have more specific questions.
The occasional tedium is punctuated by a series of wonderful revelations about physiology and food chemistry, and I really enjoyed the first part of the book for that reason. I learned (view spoiler)[the difference between soluble and insoluble fiber (and why soluble fiber doesn't help with constipation – it consists of mucilages, gums, and pectin to begin with, and most of it is degraded by intestinal bacteria), why polyunsaturated fats are considered healthier than saturated fats (omega-3 and -6 PUFAs are essential precursors to a series of messenger molecules called eicosanoids; saturated fats increase “bad” low-density lipoprotein cholesterol), why poop is brown (red hemoglobin breaks down into brown stercobilin), what cooking accomplishes chemically for digestion (it breaks down crystalline starch groups), which protein represents the ideal amino acid ratio for humans (eggs; beef is around 65% as good), and why fermentation in the intestines causing changes in poop schedule (fermentation produces gases that expand the lumen, the trigger muscles await to begin squeezing food towards the rectum). (hide spoiler)]
Further, I know in some detail why various conventional wisdom dietary chestnuts are suggested. (view spoiler)[Saturated fats and trans fats raise the proportion of bad cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease. Unsaturated fats counteract that effect but are only half as effective – consuming equal amounts of each leaves cholesterol on the rise. The specific saturated fats dominant in butter, palm oil, and coconut oil are the chief culprits here. High PUFA diets also depress fat synthesis, decreasing weight gain. High Na:K ratio and low Ca are risk factors for heart disease as well, since they increase blood pressure. The ratio of energy from fat and carbs is not a clear factor in obesity the key in is ratio of total energy intake to expenditure. (hide spoiler)]
Given the support throughout for these rather mainstream dietary conventional wisdoms, I was somewhat surprised when they ended the book by suggesting that the “paleolithic diet probably provides a template for modern dietary design.” I was hoping to take the lessons I'd learned here and apply them to the paleo diet, as well as the recommendations I'll find in Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (which I get the impression fall more on the Weston Price Foundation side than the paleo, but that might be wrong).
But the authors have done that for me, suggesting that the paleo diet provides high fiber, low phytate (a compound that chelates minerals and prevents their uptake), lean meat with great unsaturated fat contents, a low glycemic index, and a rich source of phytochemicals, nutrients, and minerals well above the standard American diet. They cast doubt on research suggesting high protein diets are linked to heart disease and some cancers, pointing out that saturated fat acts as a lurking variable with known causal links to those issues. That's exciting, because the paleo diet model is much easier to produce sustainably than vegetarian diets are.
Since the emphasis is squarely on the known biochemistry and physiology, the recommendations throughout the book are always offered with a grain of salt (sylvite, preferably!), and it seems a lot of them have been thrown into doubt by research since the publishing date. The saturated fat issue particularly has come into question, as research has dismantled the connection between them and heart disease. A lot of research, specifically, that seems to throw its weight behind the fat- and protein-loving, simple carb hating conventional wisdom research from the past few decades.
Questions I still have: why does glycogen break down/disappear, leaving meat a poor source of starch? Where does it go? What's up with fructose - is it as bad for you as Robert Lustig would have you believe? Am I really consuming an unhealthy amount of sugar? What's the deal with dietary antioxidants?
Most interestingly, what is the relationship between fats consumed and fats stored? I've heard it argued that fat storage comes from carbohydrates, not fats, that excess fats consumed are flushed out in urine; that energy intake is what determines fat storage, and ratio of carbs to fats as a source is irrelevant; that PUFAs decrease fat storage. What's up here?
Edit: I've spent the rest of the day reading various more modern diet sources - the Vegetarian Myth, MarksDailyApple.com, and this guy: http://authoritynutrition.com/11-bigg.... It's quickly become apparent that Medeiros overlooked a lot of interesting and important debates in nutrition science - the controversy over the lipid hypothesis v. the carbohydrate hypothesis, which was actively debated for decades before the book was published. In hindsight it's clear they did not thoroughly cover the debate in actual diet recommendations, in favor of focusing heavily on the known biochem and physiology. It's fine to focus on the known and elide the unknown, but they presented one side of the debate without making it clear there was a strong opposition to it, which is shameful.
There a host of other interesting issues I wish they'd covered, but which may be more recent topics of research, so I'll give them a pass there - lectins, phytates and other anti-nutrients, soy hormone mimics, inflammation and the possible negative side of effects of PUFAs (which are constantly touted in the book), the chemical role of cooking in digestion, etc.(less)
Since it was the first book on trans politics I was ever exposed to, I got the impression this book was something of "the manifesto," the standard com...moreSince it was the first book on trans politics I was ever exposed to, I got the impression this book was something of "the manifesto," the standard comprehensive intro to the topic. It kind of is that, but the speech-collection format is something I never enjoy, and it's certainly not a good way to make a book. The ideas are repetitive and shallow for book content, since Les has to cover the same ground for each audience and doesn't have the time to go to deep into any one thing.
So Les makes a couple really great, simple points, but that's really all. First, that we should respect everyone's unique gender expression, and that there are tons of those outside the man/woman binary in a zillion ways, including transsexuals and transgender people. Second, that the struggles of trans people are deeply intersectional with the struggles of all other oppressed groups (though distinct from each other - it's not the same as misogyny). Third, that transsexuals don't reinforce binary gender norms by their very existence any more than anyone else does by performing any other gender norms. It's not the people, and their expression of unique gender, that's the problem; it's the policing of deviations from those norms with violent force and systematic discrimination.
Overall, it's a nice short and layperson oriented book that was a very welcome reprieve from intricate bullshit knots of debate in feminist theory like this thing I just read: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fem... (which is great but just really overwhelming and complex). Feinberg's ideas seem almost naively simple and genuine at points - much more on the "why don't we all just respect each other and get along" end of the scale.
Couple nice quotes I wanted to save, with some interpretive notes-to-self:
"To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write."
"Many in the [second wave feminist] movement who yearned not only for women's liberation, but also for human liberation, embarked on a bold social experiment. They hoped that freeing individuals from femininity and masculinity would help people be viewed on a more equal basis that highlighted each person's qualities and strengths. They hoped that androgyny would replace masculinity and femininity and help do away with gendered expression altogether.
Twenty years after that social experiment, we have the luxury of hindsight. The way in which individuals express themselves is a very important part of who they are. It is not possible to force all people to live outside of femininity and masculinity. Only androgynous people live comfortably in that gender space. There's no social compulsion powerful enough to force anyone else to dwell there. Trans people are an example of the futility of this strategy. Mockery and beatings and unemployment and hunger and threats of rape and institutionalization have not forced us as trans people to conform to narrow norms.
Why would we want to ask anyone to give up their own hard-fought-for place on the gender spectrum? There are no rights or wrongs in the ways people express their own gender style. No one's lipstick or flattop is hurting us. No one's gender expression is any more "liberated" than anyone else's." - just as femininized women aren't responsible for patriarchal norms because they enact them, so too are trans people not responsible for them. Such norms are caused by violent policing and disrespect for the choices of others, not by what anyone, of any gender expression, chooses to do or not do.
"Holding transsexual men and women responsible for the man-woman binary is tantamount to accusing anyone who uses a public toilet with a gendered stick figure on the door of upholding patriarchal paternity and inheritance."
"Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition." - and, when opening up that world is paired integrally with combating oppression based on gender expression, it is by definition destroying the oppressive system of binary gender known as patriarchy. (less)
Mintz and DeRouen try to summarize a broad set of literature that models and tries to understand the key criteria in foreign policy decisions. The goa...moreMintz and DeRouen try to summarize a broad set of literature that models and tries to understand the key criteria in foreign policy decisions. The goal is admirable, trying to bring a scientific objectivity to an ideologically cluttered subject matter. As so often happens in social sciences, however, the answers they give are a series of theories and lists and categories, which are occasionally brilliantly explanatory but more often tedious and self-important.
There a lot of insights to take away from this book, but it was a tedious slog to read, because it is organized by broad categories like "media marketing," "psychological factors," and "models of decision making." This means that it often covers the same ground over and over and over again. It seems like the authors might have been better off structuring the book around the historical development of FPDM's explanatory techniques, looking at how major models were created and verified and later challenged, refined, and replaced, using a synthesis of all these aspects. This would have emphasized the broad set of phenomena to be explained (which is really the interesting bit).
Further, presenting the theories and categories themselves as the meat of the book, with history-of-poli-sci and case studies as examples to support them, belies the self-evident fact that each model or point of view can never stand alone - they are not competing with each other but simply apply to different extents in different situations. The authors acknowledge this throughout, but the way the book is set up frames the theories as possible facts, not useful tools.
One of the key insights from the class I read this for (US Foreign Policy) was that FP is not just about conflict and other major events. For a book about FPDM in general, the emphasis on US/Israeli examples, particularly those involving invasions and conflict, was somewhat disappointing. It prevented the book from achieving a broader synoptic view of foreign policy.
The insights that I found valuable concerned the network of constraints that limits possible decisions: a leader's first priority is to maintain his power (essentially, self-preservation); after that, a series of domestic lobbies, the media, and the way foreign institutions perceive various actions, effectively limit the number of things a head of state can realistically do. Poltical science, like any science, shows the determinism of the world (by definition, since it actively seeks out these patterns and explanations).(less)
Mark Shepard's presentation at 2013's MOSES organic farming conference was among the most influential, rousing, and revelatory moments of the past few...moreMark Shepard's presentation at 2013's MOSES organic farming conference was among the most influential, rousing, and revelatory moments of the past few years of my life. He said nothing I didn't already know, but he put all the pieces together in a way that seemed new and showed me that the oft-discussed but rarely practiced ideal of a perennial polyculture could feed people really, really well, and restore ecosystem functions, and be a phenomenally successful restoration ecology project. A farm could heal the land and create nutritious diets in a totally ethical way at the same time, with little compromise.
It was everything I had ever wanted, and it was finally a real option on the table. I am presently about to graduate, I have no debt, and I benefit from an unusually strong support network. I have the opportunity to make Mark's dream my reality. It was also clear that every goal I planned to attend graduate school to accomplish would be simple to do on the farm: fulfilling curiosity by reading academic papers and books, but also by looking and watching and taking pictures: learning to understand ecology by doing it, trying to put the complex system back together and tune it up.
Mark's book, in consequence, was a rather large disappointment. I'd imagined that the presentation was sort of a teaser for the book, but having read it, it's clear Mark is a much better speaker than a writer, and more importantly that his book is nothing like the practical how-to manual he made it out to be. It's essentially an extended explanation of the system and an advertisement for it, with only the most cursory advice for an aspiring practitioner (though of course there were plenty of interesting ideas I took away - I'll get to that in a bit).
Restoration Agriculture is sorely in need of an editor, or a flock of them (in leader-follower mob grazing rotation, perhaps!). It is rife with typos, embarrassing things like "it's" instead of "its" or "compliment" instead of "complement." The prose is invariably clumsy and unpleasant to read. You can see Mark typing it out in Word or something - it doesn't feel polished from that point at all.
Worst of all, he just butchers native bee taxonomy. He implies that all N. American natives are Megachilids, while all Eurasian natives are Apids - ignoring the other families entirely. He goes on to speculate that there is "something about North America" that discourages sociality in bees - dismissing the achievements of all bumblebees and a few Halictids who have been doing just fine at social living here for millions of years.
Mark's treatment of scholarship is upsetting. He constantly throws out claims (most of which I'm sure are true and backed by at least a fair amount of research, since most of it is stuff I'm familiar with from more responsible sources) with clauses like "scientists claim" or "there is reason to believe." He essentially doesn't cite anyone but Paul Martin, and that case feels more like a recommendation than a citation. This betrays not only a lack of respect for the scientists whose work he is taking advantage of, but also a relatively ideological and thin understanding of the material in general.
This is symptomatic of Mark's conflicted relationship with science and research overall. His claims are based in a complex and rich body of work. At many points throughout the book he bemoans the lack of research and development on restoration agriculture systems. This is right - part of the reason perennial polyculture systems are perceived as financially unfeasible is because none of the efficiency-increasing equipment for them has been designed yet. But often he seems to scorn "science" and "scientific theories" and in his presentation he actively encouraged the audience to go plant trees instead of going into research.
This hits close to home for me, of course, because right now I'm essentially trying to decide between going into doing restoration agriculture or being paid to research it (and of course practicing it on the side). Mark makes two things clear that definitely support the latter option: farmers, even those with low input costs, diverse crops, and high-value products, don't make enough money to support themselves, so there's no shame or failure in seeking off-farm work to support yourself; and research is desperately needed, and is still so rare that any new entries would be extremely helpful in guiding new practitioners. Yet in his presentation and speaking to him in person, he constantly heckled (it seemed like) me to not wait, to plant the trees now! Very stressful, confusing, annoying.
While it's clear that literally anything is better than an industrial cornfield (even parking lots are accompanied by drainage ponds, and have lower pesticide loads) and Mark's system is substantially better than any other agricultural system I know of, I'm interested in doing him one better. He has a cavalier disregard for invasives, going so far as encouraging people to plant the Siberian Peashrub because of its vigor. His system probably reproduces many of the ecosystem services we might expect from such a plot. But it doesn't go as far as it could in actually monetizing restoration of modified native ecosystems. The system is advocated for its benefits to the farmer and to society, and the "restoration" aspect is only vaguely referred to with some handwaving about bird species and tree frogs. Mark seems to be implying that if you put together something that resembles an ecosystem, the self-repairing aspects of ecology will take care of the rest.
Thus Restoration Agriculture lacks the flavor of deep ecology, bioregionalism, of love of place, that, for instance, Richard Manning communicates so beautifully in Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie. There's a little too much of the engineer. Members of each canopy layer are interchangeable parts, altering the hydrology is a water harvesting strategy, not a return to free meandering rivers and the “story the land calls forth.” In some ways it's still an organic machine. This isn't just a sentimentalist complaint tied to a misled vision of wilderness – it's pragmatic: it influences the choices you make and the results you get.
On the flip side, this pragmatic lens is a clear advantage. Mark is far more interested in monetizing good practices and achieving financial sustainability than in remaking the pre-Columbian Exchange oak savannah. This is a really, really important line of thinking because it unlocks a wonderfully appealing transition path. With restoration ag, we can restore cornfields to functioning ecosystems resilient to climate change, produce enough food to not only feed urban populations, but feed them in a way that solves serious nutritional issues, and at the same time engage in a restoration agriculture project that pays for itself in cold, hard dollars. Mark makes a number of suggestions that make this track seem feasible, but most of them boil down to putting in every niche an organism that yields marketable products. Large animals in the system are completely replaced with livestock; trees are chosen for their growth rate, timber quality, and edible bits; trees are laid out in patterns that facilitate mechanical harvesting and soil management. Even most of the ecosystem services are meant to reduce work and investment by bootstrapping themselves into perpetuity.
I've been ragging on the book quite a bit, so I want to emphasize the quiet enormity of Mark's idea. He doesn't express it very well (hopefully I can write a better book a few years down the road ;) but it really is totally revolutionary.
Mark does what sustainable agriculture practitioners have been saying they want to do for ages but have never thought they could really get away with. He uses ecological means to manage weeds, pests, diseases, and fertility. He makes food production compatible with wildlife – theoretically all of it. Mainstream organic farmers, on the advice of the Xerces Society, install hedgerows and insectary plantings and windbreaks that provide marginal habitat for insects on the borders of fields. The fields themselves are still essentially “sacrifice zones.” Mark builds the solutions into the system. It's organic farming that finally makes sense, that finally fulfills its promises.
It's the same in nutrition. Organic farmers play up the lack of poison and the nutritional density of fresh vegetables. They're marketing a product that is easy for them to produce, and they're right about those claims, but they aren't actually putting themselves in a position to solve global nutrition issues. Mark instead looks at what people eat and want to eat, and asks how he can supply that in a restoration agriculture system. Unlike most organic growers, he is attempting to create a nutritionally complete diet. Of course, this is the only way the movement can ever fulfill its goals. We can only end the devastating reign of industrial agriculture by replacing it completely.
So Mark's brilliant, incomparable, and endlessly worthwhile contribution is simply the explication and proof of concept of a great idea – perennial polyculture food ecosystems – but there were a few other great ideas in the book as well. His concept of on-farm plant breeding is empowering and exciting, and likely a necessity in dealing with the vicissitudes of catastrophic climate change. It takes the long view of diverse outcomes in succession, acknowledging that if we are going to shape artificial but permanent food-producing ecosystems, we will need to shape the genetics of each component as well, mimicking the locally specific and therefore regionally diverse gene pools found in nature.
While he wasn't particularly good at focusing on deep ecology and his particular place, he did make great strides in integrating environmental history into his design. He brings it back to pre-Clovis North America, to the Pleistocene megafauna, and uses that lens to translate functioning ecosystem traits (like what I saw in Tanzania) into lessons for the farm. I think a lot of the problems organic farmers have when implementing solutions stem from the fact that few people have a grasp of what truly rich and healthy ecosystems are actually like. This insight made me appreciate my lessons in Tanzania much more. It really puts the lie to the zero-sum thinking that encourages specialization and simplification of agroecosystems, showing that many different plant and animal species can coexist productively together. It is the norm in natural ecosystems. (less)
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