Gaia contributions to agroecology by James Lovelock (1919-2022)

In writing about the history of agroecology we too often ignore the valuable contributions of British scientist James Lovelock who recently died on his 103rd birthday. A prolific inventor and influential theorist, Lovelock is best known for the Gaia hypothesis first proposed during his innovative work in the 1960s with NASA. He suggested that ‘the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life’ as written in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock 1979). Lovelock further proposed that humans have strongly impacted the planet’s capacity to maintain this vast, living, self-regulating system

Teaching agroecology: preparing students for navigating uncharted territory

Agroecologists understand that farming and food systems are more complex than the aggregation of their components. This realization drives our choices of learning strategies and activities that will prepare students for complexity and uncertainty. Our quest for a just, sustainable, and nutritious food system adequate to equitably serve everyone on the planet today and into the future is an enormous challenge. An undertaking of this magnitude will be met only with major adjustments informed by thoughtful teaching and practicing problem solving skills through a new educational lens. The principles of agroecology help us focus this lens on the wicked problems of today and the future, and prepare students for navigating uncharted territory. The dimensions of such education are broad, transdisciplinary, and long term. In this commentary, we explore agroecology as an emerging platform to understand the holistic nature of systems, to navigate the complications of unpredictable change, and to deal with how we can frame relevant questions for ourselves and our students in a rapidly changing biological and social environment

Sustainability in Agriculture and Local Food Systems: A Solution to a Global Crisis

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines a food system as the entire range of stakeholders and their interlinked value-adding activities involved in the production, distribution and aggregation, processing, marketing, consumption and waste management of food products that originate from agriculture, forestry, and parts of the broader economic, societal and natural environments in which they are embedded (Take and Systems 2015). To be considered sustainable, a food system must deliver food security and nutrition for all in such a way that the economic, social, and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised (Bassarab et al. 2019; FAO 2017; FAO et al. 2018). A sustainable food system lies at the heart of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition : Proceedings of the International Symposium on Agroecology in China

International audienc

Sustainability Policy Research: A Review and Synthesis

This paper reviews theoretical and empirical approaches drawn from influential journal articles and books on sustainability policy published over the last 10 years (2007 through 2017). Due to the widespread application of sustainability as a concept and space limitations, the paper more narrowly focuses on sustainability research in three critical policy areas: climate change, urban development, and agroecology and food systems. Drawing from information provided primarily by citation indexes, the study identifies and analyzes the research literature related to sustainability in these three fields. Future theoretical and empirical research approaches that can better integrate and connect the current diffuse and incongruent literature on sustainability are discussed in the paper. The findings of the literature review generate a number of possible future research directions that are discussed in the study