Group items tagged

Farm Together Now in its most elemental form is a book about American farmers in the 21st century. In particular, this book addresses the other side of American agriculture: innovations moving towards sustainable farming practices. This is achieved through 20 interviews with farmers and activists across the nation along with 60 beautiful photos of their lives.  Although honing all 20 of the interviews down into one specific argument is difficult, the purpose of this book is to see the unity in all of their individual and sometimes philosophically contradictory approaches to sustainable agriculture. The authors argue that a shift in the dominant agricultural paradigm will not occur unless farmers and citizens are united in resisting it and are invested in working together to forge a more sustainable agricultural system.  What this book lacks is a deeper discussion of conflicting views in sustainable agriculture. The three issues that Franceschini and Tucker identified are provocative and would make a very interesting follow-up book.  Despite the author's insistence that we "Farm together now", they do not explore how sustainable farmers can reconcile their differences to do just that.  Although it's likely that urban, educated people are the main consumers of this book, I feel that it has value outside of those exclusive communities and would be beneficial for farmers, artists, and anyone looking for solutions to local problems. Personally, I would recommend this book to anyone because I feel that the authors made a sometimes-scary topic more approachable through this intimate portrayal of farmers. 

Looks a lot like GIS to me. But what's this? Not using a broad tract system to generate region averages, but instead more detailed and neighborhood specific system? These maps only show racial segregation, but its a promising basis for the improvements for which Davidson advocates in EJ analysis.

Here's Portland's map: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4982015862/in/set-72157624812674967/ This is an important and significant perspective. Compared to other cities, we're not working with a lot when we talk about diversity and segregation in regards to environmental justice. Comparing our EJ mapping to EJ mapping in cities with much more significant segregation would be interesting! (Who wants to do some more GIS mapping for fun over fall break??)

This (http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots) is Bill Rankin's website, the cartographer who first produced one of these detailed maps in 2009 and inspired Eric Fischer to produce all the others (found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624812674967/with/4981417821/). Check out the downloadable files on Rankin's website (there's one for race and one for income); he includes includes a traditional GIS map of the same data for comparison. (I recommend saving them to your computer and viewing them at a smaller scale to see the patterns more easily.) This is from his website: "There are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries... But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult - in a good way."

Not totally environmental, but it definitely relates to the symposium. I feel like we talked about ethics and economics a lot more than safety, but here is a compelling look at another issue in today's food system. Complete with photo gallery: http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/From-Field-to-Fork-The-foreign-and-domestic-food-chain

This cool infographic shows how poverty in America, long considered an urban problem, has expanded out from cities and into the suburbs.