NB – Reposted here since it doesn’t seem to be available online elsewhere yet.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 20, 2020
A Green New Deal for Agriculture
Here’s a piece run by Jacobin, written by Jim Goodman and me, on the history of the New Deal, and how it matters for rural America today. Agriculture policy in the original New Deal sprang from a heady mix of class struggle and uneasy alliances. The Green New Deal will have to stitch together a different coalition that can challenge the dominant mode of agriculture and create a more just food system.
Continue reading “A Green New Deal for Agriculture”The New Columbus
Here in the US, it’s “Columbus day”, a federally recognized holiday. Jason W Moore and I take a dim view of Columbus. We’re sympathetic with the move to rename today “Indigenous peoples day” but, if that doesn’t suit, we’ve got an alternative suggestion…
Land struggles are God’s way of teaching racists geography…
… and history and current affairs. Here’s a recent article I wrote for The Guardian.
Continue reading “Land struggles are God’s way of teaching racists geography…”
Chicken, for Christ’s sake
Below, an adaptation of part of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, written with Jason W Moore, published in The Guardian. If you’ve read the book, do look out for the post-publication addendum of the story of Oklahoma-based Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery. CAAIR was set up by chicken executives so that survivors of the opioid epidemic might pray by day and work on the understaffed night-shift at slaughterhouses. Do read the full story, as researched by the Center for Investigative Reporting. And, meantime, here’s the excerpt as published in the Long Reads series at the Guardian.
Terrorism for trolls: A note from Austin
Seven Cheap Things in Three Minutes Forty Five Seconds
Get a copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which I wrote with Jason W Moore, at your local independent bookstore in the US and Canada. If you must, here’s the Amazon link
We’re committed to making sure these ideas spread far and wide. The book’s introduction, in which we lay out our argument at some length, is available for free here. Continue reading “Seven Cheap Things in Three Minutes Forty Five Seconds”
Practice Reparation
I was asked to contribute to Letters to a Young Farmer, a collection patterned on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. For inspiration, I re-read America’s poet laureate of the soil, Wendell Berry. His 1973 Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front is very good. Its last line: Continue reading “Practice Reparation”
Developing the Syllabus for an Agroecology Course
Bob St Peter, activist and farmer in northern Maine, is working on developing a syllabus for an agroecology course. Miguel Altieri sends these two sources to help. What else can Bob look at to develop his own curriculum? Please share your ideas in the comments and if you want to join the school, more details are below, and you can contact Bob at Agroecologymaine@gmail.com
Continue reading “Developing the Syllabus for an Agroecology Course”
Ask Not What Refugees Can Do For Us…
Co-written with Eric Tang, and published by Reuters on World Refugee Day, 2016.
Today is World Refugee Day, the most contentious one in recent memory. Refugee resettlement once enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, but in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and Orlando there are few issues more polarizing in this election year. At the center of the storm are Syrian refugees fleeing persecution, many of them making the deadly passage across the Mediterranean. Fear-mongering conservatives demand that all Syrians be kept out of the United States. Liberals call for granting entry to a select few, albeit under strict guidelines.