Sustainable Agriculture Movement
See also: Organic Agriculture
Example
As a social movement:
"The Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society publishes a journal, Agriculture and Human Values, and holds an annual conference; the Agro-Food Studies Research Group (AFSRG), based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sponsors a seminar series. Both groups have useful websites: http://www.afhvs.org/ (accessed 14 January 2009) and http://www2.ucsc.edu/cgirs/research/environment/afsrg/index.html (accessed 14 January 2009). Several scholars in the AFSRG have been particularly vocal on the issue of localism, among them Melanie DuPuis, Julie Guthman, Margaret Fitzsimmons, Patricia Allen, David Goodman, William Friedland, Elizabeth Barham, Thomas Lyson, and Jack Kloppenburg Jr. See, in particular, E. Melanie DuPuis and David Goodman, “Should We Go ‘Home’ to Eat? Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism,” Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 359–71, discussed below; and Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson (n. 5 above), 33–42. The AFSRG website defines the group’s purpose as follows: “The intellectual project of the Research Group is to develop theoretical resources to inform critical engagement with trajectories of change in conventional agro-food networks from ‘field to table.’ This project is complemented by a strong commitment to ‘alternative’ agro-food production and consumption logics in promoting socially just and environmentally sustainable patterns of rural development.” This program is indicative of the late-twentieth-century shift within the sociology of agriculture away from what Barham, Lind, and Jett describe as a narrow focus on “agricultural policy and corporate interests” toward the broader conceptual framework of food, which includes “issues of hunger, quality, unemployment, community relations, and ecological sustainability”; see Barham, Lind, and Jett (n. 5 above), 144."
(source [1])
More Information
For the history of the modern sustainable agriculture movement in the United States, which grew out of both New Deal advocacy for “permanent agriculture” and the organic movement, see
- Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence, Kans., 2001);
- Elizabeth Barham, “Sustainable Agriculture in the United States and France: A Polanyian Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, August 1999), chap. 5, esp. 145;
- Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh, 2001), chap. 6;
- Richard R. Harwood, “A History of Sustainable Agriculture,” in Sustainable Agriculture Systems, ed. Clive A. Edwards et al. (Ankeny, Iowa, 1990), 3–19.
(source [2])