Agrobiodiversity, Community Participation and Landscapes in Agroecology PDF Download

Author: Tomás Enrique León-Sicard
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2832553249
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Maintaining and managing agrobiodiversity is a key issue proposed by agroecology, not only to maintain high agricultural productivity, but also to increase the resilience, stability and sustainability of the agroecosystems, meant as the functional relationship between the natural assets and the human use of them, at farm and farm matrix scale. The main hypothesis of this approach is that, the greater the interactions between organisms of different trophic levels (edaphic organisms, multiple crops, weed plants, herbivores, carnivores, plants in living fences, corridors or forest patches within agroecosystems), the greater will be the possibilities of obtaining abundant and varied harvests, with fewer external inputs (pesticides, fertilizers) and better environmental performance. The agrobiodiversity is meant as the variety and the disposition of the cultivations, pastures, farms, that affect the soil properties and create habitat diversity, landscape diversity and connectivity. At the level of landscapes or territories, the set of biodiverse agroecosystems generate natural matrices that have a powerful impact on the recovery and restoration of forest corridors, which, in turn, positively influence many ecosystem services for nature conservation and free movement and recovery of many populations of animal species, including those in danger of extinction.

Author: Ivette Perfecto
Publisher: Earthscan
ISBN: 1849770131
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Landscapes are frequently seen as fragments of natural habitat surrounded by a 'sea' of agriculture. But recent ecological theory shows that the nature of these fragments is not nearly as important for conservation as is the nature of the matrix of agriculture that surrounds them. Local extinctions from conservation fragments are inevitable and must be balanced by migrations if massive extinction is to be avoided. High migration rates only occur in what the authors refer to as 'high quality' matrices, which are created by alternative agroecological techniques, as opposed to the industrial monocultural model of agriculture. The authors argue that the only way to promote such high quality matrices is to work with rural social movements. Their ideas are at odds with the major trends of some of the large conservation organizations that emphasize targeted land purchases of protected areas. They argue that recent advances in ecological research make such a general approach anachronistic and call, rather, for solidarity with the small farmers around the world who are currently struggling to attain food sovereignty.Nature's Matrix proposes a radically new approach to the conservation of biodiversity based on recent advances in the science of ecology plus political realities, particularly in the world's tropical regions.

Author: Eric Holt-Giménez
Publisher: Food First Books
ISBN: 9780935028270
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Campesino a Campesino tells the inspiring story of a true grassroots movement: poor peasant farmers teaching one another how to protect their environment while still earning a living. The first book in English about the farmer-led sustainable agriculture movement in Latin America, Campesino a Campesino includes lots of first-person stories and commentary from the farmer-teachers, mixing personal accounts with detailed analysis of the political, socioeconomic, and ecological factors that galvanized the movement. Campesino farmer leading a farmer to farmer training session in Mexico by Eric Holt-GimenezMany years ago, author Eric Holt-Gim�nez was a volunteer trying to teach sustainable agriculture techniques in the dusty highlands of central Mexico, with little success. Near the end of his tenure, he invited a group of visiting Guatemalan farmers to teach a course in his village. What he saw was like nothing he had known. The Guatemalans used parables, stories, and humor to present agricultural improvement to their Mexican compadres as a logical outcome of clear thinking and compassion; love of farming, of family, of nature, and of community. Rather than try to convince the Mexicans of their innovations, they insisted they experiment new things on a small scale first to see how well they worked. And they saw themselves as students, respecting the Mexicans' deep, lifelong knowledge of their own particular land and climate. All they asked in return was that the Mexicans turn around and share their new knowledge with others--which they did. CAC campo3_photo by Food FirstThis exchange was typical of a grassroots movement called Campesino a Campesino, or Farmer to Farmer, which has grown up in southern Mexico and war-torn Central America over the last three decades. In the book Campesino a Campesino, Holt-Gim�nez writes the first history of the movement, describing the social, political, economic, and environmental circumstances that shape it. The voices and stories of dozens of farmers in the movement are captured, bringing to vivid life this hopeful story of peasant farmers helping one another to farm sustainably, protecting their land, their environment, and their families' future.

Author: Jose Luis Vivero-Pol
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351665529
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings. Chapters 1 and 24 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Author: Boris S. Kerner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642026052
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The understanding of empirical traf?c congestion occurring on unsignalized mul- lane highways and freeways is a key for effective traf?c management, control, or- nization, and other applications of transportation engineering. However, the traf?c ?ow theories and models that dominate up to now in transportation research journals and teaching programs of most universities cannot explain either traf?c breakdown or most features of the resulting congested patterns. These theories are also the - sis of most dynamic traf?c assignment models and freeway traf?c control methods, which therefore are not consistent with features of real traf?c. For this reason, the author introduced an alternative traf?c ?ow theory called three-phase traf?c theory, which can predict and explain the empirical spatiot- poral features of traf?c breakdown and the resulting traf?c congestion. A previous book “The Physics of Traf?c” (Springer, Berlin, 2004) presented a discussion of the empirical spatiotemporal features of congested traf?c patterns and of three-phase traf?c theory as well as their engineering applications. Rather than a comprehensive analysis of empirical and theoretical results in the ?eld, the present book includes no more empirical and theoretical results than are necessary for the understanding of vehicular traf?c on unsignalized multi-lane roads. The main objectives of the book are to present an “elementary” traf?c ?ow theory and control methods as well as to show links between three-phase traf?c t- ory and earlier traf?c ?ow theories. The need for such a book follows from many commentsofcolleaguesmadeafterpublicationofthebook“ThePhysicsofTraf?c”.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art festivals
Languages : en
Pages : 45

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Book Description
Sixteen artists from 9 countries created works of art inspired by ecology and the environment that were specifically developed for the exhibition, in dialogue with the MAMBO curatorial team. Most of the artistic projects were specially commissioned for the 32nd São Paulo Biennial. "Incerteza viva is a collective process that began in early 2015 and brings together teachers, students, artists, activists, educators, scientists and thinkers in Brazil, Colombia and other places." --Page [1].

Author: David Schlosberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198841507
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In the face of a set of environmental crises, a growing number of environmental and community groups are focusing on more sustainable practices in everyday life. This book focuses on sustainable materialism, and examines the political and social motivations of activists and movement groups involved in this growing and expanding practice.

Author: Ian Scoones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000442063
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘authoritarianism’ and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key – not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples’ disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Author: Annie Shattuck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351849271
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Food sovereignty has been a fundamentally contested concept in global agrarian discourse over the last two decades, as a political project and campaign, an alternative, a social movement, and an analytical framework. It has inspired and mobilized diverse publics: workers, scholars and public intellectuals, farmers and peasant movements, NGOs, and human rights activists in the global North and South. The term ‘food sovereignty’ has become a challenging subject for social science research, and has been interpreted and reinterpreted in a variety of ways. It is broadly defined as the right of peoples to democratically control or determine the shape of their food system, and to produce sufficient and healthy food in culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable ways in and near their territory. However, various theoretical issues remain: sovereignty at what scale and for whom? How are sovereignties contested? What is the relationship between food sovereignty and human rights frameworks? What might food sovereignty mean extended to a broader set of social relations in urban contexts? How do the principles of food sovereignty interact with local histories and contexts? This comprehensive volume examines what food sovereignty might mean, how it might be variously construed, and what policies it implies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

Author: Geo Maher
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822354527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Since being elected president in 1998, Hugo Chávez has become the face of contemporary Venezuela and, more broadly, anticapitalist revolution. George Ciccariello-Maher contends that this focus on Chávez has obscured the inner dynamics and historical development of the country’s Bolivarian Revolution. In We Created Chávez, by examining social movements and revolutionary groups active before and during the Chávez era, Ciccariello-Maher provides a broader, more nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maher presents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below. Led by leftist guerrillas, women, Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, and students, the social movements he discusses have been struggling against corruption and repression since 1958. Ciccariello-Maher pays particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the Chávez government, revolutionary social movements, and the Venezuelan people, recasting the Bolivarian Revolution as a long-term and multifaceted process of political transformation.