Issues in agricultural biotechnology and biodiversity for sustainable agroecosystems

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada defines an “agroecosystem” as an “ecosystem under agricultural management — an open dynamic system connected to other ecosystems through the transfer of energy and materials.” While the importance for agriculture of such natural resources as soil, water, and air has long been recognized, the agroecosystem approach puts biological resources at the center of agricultural concerns. Issues related to biological diversity in sustainable agroecosystems and their implications, with a particular focus on the impact of biotechnologies are discussed

Freedom, Gravity, and Grace pt.2

In this article, the author concludes her exploration of the relationships between the elements in the title (freedom, gravity and grace), and shows how the dancer utilizes them to expand the range of freedom and art

On Weiss on Records and on the Significance of Athletic Records

Athletic records cannot provide complete insight into the nature of an athletic event. However, certainly they can provide at least some approximation of what happened, and that is enough to justify the significant interest that we take in athletic records

Get Messed Up: Intentionality, Butoh and Freedom in Plasma

Nature relative to subjectivity is an under theorized area of performance philosophy, one that we ignore at our peril. There is such a thing as nature. It encompasses all that humans are not, and suffuses all that we are and do. It is not merely a social or cultural construction, as we consider in this essay. In order to speak more definitively of nature and the body, we employ the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and reach back to the lifeworld (lebenswelt) philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Some read Husserl as an essentialist, but there are other readings, such as the one developed here. One of Ricoeur’s major works, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary, concerns motives and values at the organic level, studying how habits inform individual habitus and become embodied as nature in flux. Accordingly, this essay explores subjectivity, intentionality and nature in performance using examples from butoh relative to metamorphosis, a ubiquitous process in the rhythms and multi-tiered rhizomes of nature. Through Sartre and Ricoeur, the text also considers lived values of freedom relative to intention. In this light, readers are invited to explore their own porousness and evaporations via Freedom in Plasma, a butoh to do at the end of the essay