Growing Resistance: Canadian Farmers and the Politics of Genetically Modified Wheat by Emily Eaton

Review of Growing Resistance: Canadian Farmers and the Politics of Genetically Modified Wheat by Emily Eaton

Review of \u3ci\u3eWriting in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally\u3c/i\u3e by Jenny Kerber

When do the prairies begin in history? And are they now in danger of ending? Jenny Kerber notes that settler cultures have relied upon two narratives to understand the Great Plains of North America. The first is about how history begins on the prairie when it is recultivated as an Edenic garden; the second is about how that garden falls from grace into a barren wasteland. Kerber opens up these Western, Christian traditions for interdisciplinary critique. By considering ecological, feminist, Indigenous, and other marginalized perspectives, she explores how different stories might contribute to a vision of sustainable dwelling on the prairies in the twenty-first century. Writing in Dust should be read by anyone interested in the past and future of the prairies

Review of \u3ci\u3eConquests & Consequences: The American West from Frontier to Region\u3c/i\u3e by Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg

The textbook Conquests & Consequences provides a cohesive narrative framed by the question: How does a historical perspective of cultures, empires, and environments in the American West inform and influence understandings of the West as a frontier, colony, region, borderland, or center of power in its own right ? To engage undergraduate history students, Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg employ a folksy, conversational style (Native pit houses are roughly the length of an average single dormitory room ). The text also contains an impressive number of photographs and illustrations. Most importantly, Higham and Katerberg introduce terms and content in the context of their broader critical questions, encouraging students to reflect upon and challenge conventional narratives. Chapter 1 introduces Native peoples and cultures, beginning primarily in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though Native Americans are discussed throughout the book. Subsequent chapters depict the Spanish and French empires before turning to English settlement and conquest and to American history. Nearly 180 pages are devoted to the twentieth century. Following the lead of New Western Historians, the authors discuss extensively the federal government\u27s influence in the West, as well as politics, natural resources, diverse populations, globalization, and the cost of growth

Review of \u3ci\u3eConquests & Consequences: The American West from Frontier to Region\u3c/i\u3e by Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg

The textbook Conquests & Consequences provides a cohesive narrative framed by the question: How does a historical perspective of cultures, empires, and environments in the American West inform and influence understandings of the West as a frontier, colony, region, borderland, or center of power in its own right ? To engage undergraduate history students, Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg employ a folksy, conversational style (Native pit houses are roughly the length of an average single dormitory room ). The text also contains an impressive number of photographs and illustrations. Most importantly, Higham and Katerberg introduce terms and content in the context of their broader critical questions, encouraging students to reflect upon and challenge conventional narratives. Chapter 1 introduces Native peoples and cultures, beginning primarily in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though Native Americans are discussed throughout the book. Subsequent chapters depict the Spanish and French empires before turning to English settlement and conquest and to American history. Nearly 180 pages are devoted to the twentieth century. Following the lead of New Western Historians, the authors discuss extensively the federal government\u27s influence in the West, as well as politics, natural resources, diverse populations, globalization, and the cost of growth

Sensing scale in experimental gardens: un-lawning with Silphium civic science

Gardening experiments are timely in the context of what many now call the Anthropocene, an era that highlights questions of how humans collectively relate to the larger Earth systems in which we are embedded. In “Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept”, Timothy Clark reflects on the “unreadability” of the Anthropocene. He invites ecocritics to address this challenge by practicing “scale framing,” reading texts in variable and increasingly broad scales, and engaging the contradictions that emerge. We applied a scale framing approach to a story of relationships with “Silphium integrifolium” in an experimental gardening project. Silphium is a native North American perennial prairie plant being domesticated as a future oilseed crop. We are researchers and participants in a civic science project, in which individual garden sites are designed to collect data on and conserve silphium ecotypes while being linked into a wider network. In particular, we analyzed a civic science video story created by Ellie Irons called “Un-Lawning with Silphium.” Through our ecocritical analysis, we generated a framework to visualize nested and cross-scalar relationships in gardening projects. This framework could help inform the design and assessment of experimental gardening projects that feature the arts and humanities (e.g., digital narratives, ecocriticism, and pedagogy) and connect them with the natural and social sciences (e.g., plant breeding, botany, geography, and ecology) through transdisciplinary and participatory research methodologies for public engagement (e.g., civic science). We found that civic science gardening with silphium, and other gardening experiments in the Anthropocene, can guide public sensory engagements with scale, help spark recognition and investigation of contradictory scale effects, and motivate us to imagine and build relationships of caring responsibility.Los experimentos de jardinería son oportunos en la época que muchos denominan el Antropoceno. En esta época resaltan preguntas sobre cómo los seres humanos se relacionan con los sistemas terrestres que los rodean. En “Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept [Ecocrítica al borde: El Antropoceno como concepto umbral]”, Timothy Clark reflexiona sobre la "ilegibilidad" del Antropoceno. Invita a los ecocríticos a afrontar este desafío utilizando “scale framing” [marco de escalas], leyendo textos utilizando marcos distintos y cada vez más grandes y analizando las contradicciones que surgen entre escalas. Aplicamos este enfoque a historias de relaciones con “Silphium integrifolium” que surgen en un proyecto experimental de jardinería. El silphium, una planta perenne originaria de las praderas norteamericanas, se está domesticando como futuro cultivo oleaginoso. Somos investigadores y participantes en un proyecto de ciencia cívica en el que se diseñan huertos individuales mientras se participa dentro de una red más amplia, para recopilar datos sobre los ecotipos de silphium a fin de conservarlos. Analizamos "Un-Lawning with Silphium", un vídeo de ciencia cívica creado por Ellie Irons. A través de nuestro análisis ecocrítico, generamos un marco conceptual para visualizar las relaciones anidadas y trans-escalares en proyectos de jardinería. Este marco conceptual podría orientar al diseño y la evaluación de proyectos experimentales de jardinería que incorporen las artes y humanidades (como narrativas digitales, ecocrítica y pedagogía) y los integran con las ciencias (como fitomejoramiento, botánica, geografía y ecología), empleando metodologías transdisciplinarias y participativas para generar un compromiso público (ciencia cívica). Descubrimos que la ciencia cívica mediante la j ardinería de silphium, y otros experimentos de jardinería en el Antropoceno, invitan a la reflexión pública sobre la escala mediante actividades sensoriales, fomentan el reconocimiento y la investigación de los efectos contradictorios de la escala, e impulsan la imaginación y la construcción de relaciones solidarias

Back on the Farm: The Trade-offs in Ecocritical Lives

In this reflective dialogue, the authors explore how the decisions they are making about where and how to live, teach, and write are reflected in the concerns of the field of ecocriticism, as well as in the agricultural fields of their rural home places. The apparent tension between lived ecocritical practice and productive ecocritical scholarship suggests that individuals must make a difficult trade-off, in which they give up one aspect of ecocriticism in order to gain the other. But the authors argue that by understanding individual trade-offs in more nuanced ways—as investments of energy within complex ecological and social relationships—it is possible to reflect on the assumptions that frame our choices and to envision new choices. Ecocriticism could offer a method for optimizing the systems people use to produce and share ideas. For example, ecocritical scholarship could take new forms, of which the authors’ conversation is one example. Since ecocriticism must strive for diversity as well as inclusivity in order to be relevant, the authors find that marginal voices will continue to matter to the task of imagining alternative methods for engaging in ecocritical theory and lived practice

Culturally induced range infilling of eastern redcedar: a problem in ecology, an ecological problem, or both?

The philosopher John Passmore distinguished between (1) “problems in ecology,” or what we might call problems in scientific understanding of ecological change, and (2) “ecological problems,” or what we might call problems faced by societies due to ecological change. The spread of eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) and conversion of the central and southern Great Plains of North America to juniper woodland might be categorized as a problem in ecology, an ecological problem, or both. Here, we integrate and apply two interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving—social-ecological systems thinking and ecocriticism—to understand the role of human culture in recognizing, driving, and responding to cedar’s changing geographic distribution. We interpret the spread of cedar as a process of culturally induced range infilling due to the ongoing social-ecological impacts of colonization, analyze poetic literary texts to clarify the concepts that have so far informed different cultural values related to cedar, and explore the usefulness of diverse interdisciplinary collaborations and knowledge for addressing social-ecological challenges like cedar spread in the midst of rapidly unfolding global change. Our examination suggests that it is not only possible, but preferable, to address cedar spread as both a scientific and a social problem. Great Plains landscapes are teetering between grassland and woodland, and contemporary human societies both influence and choose how to cope with transitions between these ecological states. We echo previous studies in suggesting that human cultural values about stability and disturbance, especially cultural concepts of fire, will be primary driving factors in determining future trajectories of change on the Great Plains. Although invasion-based descriptors of cedar spread may be useful in ecological research and management, language based on the value of restraint could provide a common vocabulary for effective cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary communication about the relationship between culture and cedar, as well as an ethical framework for cross-cultural communication, decision-making, and management

Proceedings - U.S.A Agroecology Summit 2023

This docket is a memory of the meeting held in Kansas City from May 22-25 called the 2023 USA Agroecology Summit and contains all the documents generated before, during, and after the meeting

What\u27s A Goin\u27 On? People and Place in the Fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924-1941

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great Plains, we can better know the complex and problematic cultural history we have inherited. Furthermore, by considering what Draper for the most part does not do in her work—such as perceive the Native American inhabitants of her place—we can better appreciate the need for literature that challenges readers to temporally and spatially broaden their scales of perception beyond the level of an individual human character to include other human and non-human beings

Plants We Live by: Ecocriticism and American Ethnobotanical Literature

If we as a settler American culture want to understand the social and ecological problem of our agriculture, learn where we are, and contribute to Indigenous efforts in decolonization and healing, we would do well to study the long-standing relationships with plants that Indigenous cultures have in the bioregions in which we have come to live. One way to begin is to read publicly-accessible texts about Indigenous plant knowledge. Anthropologists and scientists have catalogued Indigenous plant knowledge as ethnobotany, and I use their multi-lingual catalogs on the northern Great Plains as starting places for a more expansive conceptualization and analysis of texts that I identify as part of a tradition of American ethnobotanical literature. I provide ecocritical studies of key metaphors related to plants in these texts, including Indigenous fiction and non-fiction as well as stories of collaboration and interaction between Indigenous peoples, plants, and Euro-American writers. Authors whose work I examine include Melvin R. Gilmore, Wes Jackson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gary Paul Nabhan, John G. Neihardt, Michael Pollan, Carter Revard, Eden Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gilbert L. Wilson. When we read ethnobotanical literature through a practice of listening rather than appropriation, we can begin to hear the complex resonance of the language used to connect plants and peoples: personhood metaphors such as friends and relatives; problem-solving metaphors such as roots and teachers; energetic metaphors such as producers and green machines; and planetary metaphors such as the garden and tree of life. By identifying and understanding the language people use in American ethnobotanical literature for knowing and relating to plants in the context of social, historical, agricultural, and ecological changes in plant-people relationships (that is, in the context of the environmental humanities), we can make more informed and creative choices about the ways we relate to the plants we live by