PROJECT: Green Crop Lifting – an Alternative Producing Healthy Seed Potatoes in the System of Organic Farming

The standards of organic farming require the use of organically grown seeds in organic potato farming. Presumably the use of conventionally grown seeds under exceptional circumstances will end in 2003. Only organically grown seeds can be used thereafter. Therefore, it is important to check alternatives for organic potato seed production, which will reduce the cultivation risk, guarantee a high quality of seed potatoes (virus-free and healthy seed), and increase the fraction of marketable potatoes. On 7 farms in Northern Germany (4 sites in the coastal region (Schleswig-Holstein) and 3 sites in the inland region (Lower Saxony)) the green crop lifting (GCL) at two different dates was checked against the traditional process (haulm cutting) and a control plot (natural senescence) with regard to the effect of presprouting in the years 1999 to 2001. The focus of the investigation was the amount of viral load (tested with ELISA) and detection of other diseases (valuation) on / in the harvested potatoes. Yield reduction and tuber damage was recorded. Flying activity of aphids was monitored by yellow water traps.In the coastal region a very low pressure of aphids was observed over the three years. In contrast there was a higher pressure of aphids in the inland region, but only 1999 brought an early and outstanding pressure. In peak times (middle of July 1999) the number of aphids was more than 12 times higher compared to the coastal region. Only in 2000 an early aphid pressure was recorded in the middle of May. If there was a high pressure of aphids the early green crop lifting (in the middle of July) was an effective way reducing the virus diseases.Caused by the early date of GCL the total tuber yield reduction averaged out at 18,8 % over the three years compared to the control. Related to the marketable seed potatoes (28-50 mm) the yield reduction amounted 14.1 % only

Against wasted politics: a critique of the circular economy

The discourse of zero-waste and the circular economy has been championed by key players, such as the European Commission, management consultancies, NGOs, academics and multinational companies, in recent years. Given the all too obvious social and environmental crises associated with out-of-bounds growth capitalism, the circular economy has been one of the main references for rebuilding and reforming a political economy of sustainable growth. In this paper we detect a de-politicizing strategy in this attempt of reform, and, consequently, aim at re-locating a position for the politicization of growth-driven capitalism and the circular economy. We do this by offering a unique discursive-material theoretical framework, bringing together Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalytic readings. This will allow understanding both the subjective relation with the meaning of waste and the material exchanges that place the subject in the position to produce and consume waste as a valuable commodity. In our quest to (re-)politicize waste, we offer three practical steps that aim at interrupting the endless repetition of waste, which include attempts to eradicate it. This argument will be illustrated by making reference to the circular strategies of Apple Inc., the world’s largest and most iconic consumer electronics company

Prefigurative Partaking: Employees’ Environmental Activism in an Energy Utility

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record The separation between an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of organizational politics has become untenable in a rapidly changing political landscape, where people engage in environmental activism in many different domains. To understand contemporary environmental activism, we situate ourselves empirically within an energy utility, Ordalia [pseudonym], a large corporation active across Europe and heavily criticized by external activists for its carbon emitting operations. By merging Rancière’s method of equality and notion of ‘partaking’ with literature on prefiguration in social movements, we analyse everyday green actions pursued by Ordalia’s employees, which we conceptualize as ‘prefigurative partaking’. By focusing on six characterizing themes of prefigurative partaking – aspirational, individual, professional, critical, loyal and communal – we have found that employee activism is incremental, horizontal and boundaryless. We discuss these findings in relation to recent calls for more fruitful exchanges between social movement theory and organization studies, arguing that Rancière’s conceptualization of politics can help us study actions that span civil society and business. This complements and expands our understanding of environmental activism as a dispersed set of actions that can take place anywhere, and hence also at work.Swedish Energy AgencyBritish Academy Mid-Career Fellowshi

Full O(alpha) Radiative Corrections to High-Energy Compton Scattering

Using computer-algebraic methods we derive compact analytical expressions for the virtual electroweak radiative corrections to polarized Compton scattering. Moreover the helicity amplitudes for double Compton scattering, which prove to be extremely simple in terms of Weyl-van der Waerden spinor products, are presented for massless electrons. The inclusion of a finite electron mass is described, too. Finally numerical results both for the purely photonic and the full O(alpha) electroweak corrections, which turn out to be of the order of 5-10%, are discussed for energies ranging from 10GeV to 2TeV.Comment: 20 pages, LaTex (uuencoded figures appended on tex-file), Bi-TP 93/6