Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T13:14:10.982Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Critical agrarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2013

Liz Carlisle*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of California–Berkeley, 507 McCone Hall 4740, Berkeley, CA 94720-4740, USA.
*
*Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of ‘critical agrarianism’ to describe and advance the pursuit of land-based work as a means of realizing social justice and environmental sustainability. Encouraging new agrarianism to more carefully scrutinize its agenda, critical agrarianism celebrates the promise of a close working relationship with the natural world while insisting that a return to the land—per se—is insufficient. In the practice of linking people and land, past and present, critical agrarianism continually questions and reshapes the very category of agrarian, toward a more equitable and enduring prosperity. I revisit both canonical agrarian writing and its critics, pulling out ‘back-pocket tools’ that can keep critical agrarians on track in building our alternative futures. I then offer several case studies of critical agrarianism in practice, encouraging a move beyond idealized models of agrarian ties, toward an empirical account of who has actually been doing the work to put food on the table. Noting the historical gap between working the landscape and having a property or citizenship right, I call for an agrarianism in which practices—not land title—are the basis of material and social community. Furthermore, I suggest that agrarianism must extend its web outward rather than inward, forging connections to the work of land tenure reform, education, community development, immigrant advocacy and trade policy. To be a critical agrarian is not to preserve fixed social-natural ties, but rather to practice a powerfully open and dialogical engagement with the world and one another.

Type
Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1Sayre, L. 2011. The politics of organic farming: Populists, evangelicals, and the agriculture of the middle. Gastronomica 11(2):3847.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2Locke, J. 1690. Of property. Second Treatise on Civil Government. Available at Web site http://constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.htm (verified May 26, 2012).Google Scholar
3Jefferson, T. 1781. Notes on the State of Virginia. Available at Web site http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (verified May 26, 2012).Google Scholar
4De Crevecoeur, J.H. St. John 1782. Letters from an American Farmer. Available at Web site http://xroads.virginia.edu/∼hyper/CREV/contents.html (verified May 26, 2012).Google Scholar
5Leopold, A. 1949. The land ethic. In A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, New York. p. 201226.Google Scholar
6Berry, W. 1972. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York.Google Scholar
7Berry, W. 1977. The Unsettling of America. Avon Books, New York.Google Scholar
8Jackson, W. 1971. Man and the Environment. William C. Brown Co., Dubuque.Google Scholar
9Kirschenmann, F. 2010. Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays of a Farmer Philosopher. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10Berry, W. 1987. Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. North Point, San Francisco.Google Scholar
11Berry, W. 2009. Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food. Counterpoint, Berkeley.Google Scholar
12Jackson, W. 1994. Becoming Native to this Place. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.Google Scholar
13Jackson, W., Berry, W., and Colman, B. (eds). 1984. Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship. North Point Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
14Williams, R. 1973. The Country and the City. Chatto and Windus, London.Google Scholar
15McClintock, N., Wooten, H., and Brown, A. (Harper). 2012. Towards a food policy ‘first step’ in Oakland, California: A food policy council's efforts to promote urban agriculture zoning. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 2(4):1542.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16Harper, A., Shattuck, A., Holt-Giménez, E., Alkon, A., and Lambrick, F. 2009. Food Policy Councils: Lessons Learned. Institute for Food and Development Policy. Development Report #21. Available at Web site http://www.foodfirst.org/en/foodpolicycouncils-lessons (verified May 24, 2012).Google Scholar
17Worster, D. 1979. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
18Guthman, J. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
19Slocum, R. 2007. Whiteness, space and alternative food practice. Geoforum 38(3):520533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20Allen, P. and Sachs, C. 1993. Sustainable agriculture in the United States : Engagements, silences, and possibilities for transformation. In Allen, P. (ed.). Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability. John Wiley & Sons, New York. p. 139167.Google Scholar
21Sachs, C. 1983. The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production. Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ.Google Scholar
22Freyfogle, E.T. 2003. Private property rights in land: An agrarian view. In Wirzba, N. (ed.). The Essential Agrarian Reader. Shoemaker and Hoard, Washington, DC. p. 237258.Google Scholar
23Thompson, P.B. 2010. The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.Google Scholar
24Wirzba, N. 2003. Why agrarianism matters—even to urbanites. In Wirzba, N. (ed.). The Essential Agrarian Reader. Shoemaker and Hoard, Washington, DC. p. 122.Google Scholar
25DuPuis, E.M. and Goodman, D. 2005. Should we go ‘home’ to eat? Toward a reflexive politics of localism. Journal of Rural Studies 21:359371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26Wittman, H. 2009. Reframing agrarian citizenship: Land, life and power in Brazil. Journal of Rural Studies 25(1):120130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27McClintock, N. 2010. Why farm the city? Theorizing urban agriculture through a lens of metabolic rift. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society 3(2):191207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28Kloppenburg, J. 1991. Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: Local knowledge for an alternative agriculture. Rural Sociology 56:519548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29Anderson, M.K. 2005. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. University of California Press, Berkeley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30Carney, J. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31Matsumoto, V.J. 1993. Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American community in California 1919–1982. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.Google Scholar
32Mitchell, D. 1996. Lie of the Land: Migrant workers and the California Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
33Ngai, M. 2003. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
34Pulido, L. 1996. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35Minkoff-Zern, L.-A. 2011. Pushing the boundaries of indigeneity and agricultural knowledge: Oaxacan immigrant community gardening in California. Agriculture and Human Values 29:381392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36Treviño Hart, E. 1999. Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child. Bilingual Press, Tempe.Google Scholar
37Rivera, T. 2008. The Complete Works. Arte Publico Press, Houston.Google Scholar
38Minkoff-Zern, L.-A., Peluso, N., Sowerwine, J., and Getz, C. 2011. Race and regulation: Asian immigrants in California agriculture. In Alkon, A.H. and Agyeman, J. (eds). Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability. MIT Press, Cambridge. p. 6586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39Wells, M. 1996. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.Google Scholar
40Figueroa, M. 2012. Building an ark to the promised land: Memory, hybridity, and resilience in a South Chicago food desert. Paper Presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, February 26, 2012, New York, NY.Google Scholar
41Royte, E. 2009. Street Farmer. New York Times Magazine. July 1. Available at Web site http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05allen-t.html (verified May 26, 2012).Google Scholar
42Allen, W. 2009. A Good Food Manifesto for America. Growing Power. June 10. Available at Web site http://www.growingpower.org/blog/archives/5 (verified May 26, 2012).Google Scholar
43Smith, K.K. 2003. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence.Google Scholar
44Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar