The Impacts of the UK Wine Industry on People, Place and Climate

Climate change has moved the boundary at which viniviticulture is possible to above 49.9N+ degrees above latitude, in the UK this has made commercial wine production both possible and profitable. This has triggered a movement in land-use, as vineyards increasingly replace other arable land in England and Wales; a movement of people, as wealthy business professionals return to the land to establish vineyards; and a movement on menus, as English and Welsh wine is stocked at establishments from Weatherspoon’s to The Fat Duck. Concurrently, climate change is severely disrupting agricultural production and livelihoods, prompting passionate calls for a far reaching transformation of the food systems. Agroecology is one potential route to transformation, offering a pathway to an environmental sustainable and social just food system. This paper will explore how the UK wine industry and agroecology have respectively moved from positions of ridicule into a spaces where they are publicly respected. Critically, it will identify if transformative agroecological thinking and practice holds and place in the UK wine industry. This will contribute to the growing body of work that is examining how agroecology appears in practice and what it means in different contexts

The lords of guano: science and the management of Peru's marine environment, 1800-1973

textThis is an ecological history of a development project planned and managed by technical experts: the origin, decline, spectacular revival, and tragic fate of the Peruvian guano industry. In another sense, this is a social history of an elite type-- the environmental technocrat--and those they served. During the nineteenth century, scientific travelers appropriated Andean knowledge of vast, ancient deposits of nitrogen fertilizer for use by farmers in the Northern Hemisphere. During the early twentieth century, environmental scientists reoriented the guano industry for Peruvian use. They oversaw the development of perhaps “the greatest of all industries based upon the conservation of wild animals.” This project had both global and local repercussions. The two-way exchange of personnel, ideas, and technologies between Peru and the rest of the world revolutionized scientific understanding of the Peru Current ecosystem. This knowledge led directly to international recognition of the global importance of the El Niño phenomenon. Through the issue of human population control, Peru’s experiment inspired the emergence of an environmental movement that spanned the Americas after World War II. In Peru, technical experts fundamentally influenced the political process, input-intensive agriculture, artisanal and industrial fishing, the organization of “big science” institutions, as well as the guano birds and their ecological community. Ultimately, technocrats enriched and empowered a new ruling class for Peru. Beginning in the 1940s, the specter of an impending catastrophe in the global food supply gave impetus to the exploitation of the world’s fish stocks. To serve this demand, scientists helped engineer for Peru the largest industrial fishery on Earth. Their studies legitimated the decision to let the guano birds pass into oblivion so their food, the anchoveta, could be processed into animal feed. As a reflection of persistent global trends of food distribution, rather than feed the world’s undernourished, this fishmeal enabled affluent northerners to consume more meat. This fishery was carefully supervised by experts, but they proved unable to prevent its collapse during the El Niño of 1972-1973. This ecological disaster reveals how fleeting “sustainable growth” can be, even for the bestmanaged development projects.Histor

Agroecology : Researching the Eological Basis for Sustainable Agriculture Volume 78

xiv,380 hal,;ill,;21 c