Böcker i Yale Agrarian Studies Series-serien

This no-holds-barred narrative of the failure of conservation in northern New England's forests envisions a wilder, more equitable, lower-carbon future for forest-dependent communities

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world

A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China's political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data

How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics

An exploration of radical megaprojects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, considering the fate of utopian fantasies under conditions of global capitalism

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape

A seminal anthropological work on the age-old question of the paradoxical relationship between human consciousness and the environment

An exploration of the relationship between possession and legalization across Indonesia, and how people navigate dispossession

"An exploration of life in the early medieval West, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy. In the early medieval West, from North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture. In this fascinating book, Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far-reaching consequences. Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals-and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig's own identity was transformed: at the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself."--

A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, Catherine Corson reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. In this important ethnographic study, Corson reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.

Based on twenty years of global research, this is the first comprehensive reference on crop genetic diversity as it is maintained on farmland around the world. Showcasing the findings of seven experts representing the fields of ecology, crop breeding, genetics, anthropology, economics, and policy, this invaluable resource places farmer-managed crop biodiversity squarely in the center of the science needed to feed the world and restore health to our productive landscapes. It will prove to be an essential tool in the training of agricultural and environmental scientists seeking the solutions necessary to ensure healthy, resilient ecosystems for future generations.

This book is the first to investigate the gap between the plans and the reality of the Soviet Union's mid-twentieth-century project to industrialize and modernize its agricultural system. Historians agree that the project failed badly: agriculture was inefficient, unpredictable, and environmentally devastating for the entire Soviet period. Yet assigning the blame exclusively to Soviet planners would be off the mark. The real story is much more complicated and interesting, Jenny Leigh Smith reveals in this deeply researched book. Using case studies from five Soviet regions, she acknowledges hubris and shortsightedness where it occurred but also gives fair consideration to the difficulties encountered and the successes-however modest-that were achieved.

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of social and environmental certification programs that are intended to promote responsible business practices. Consumers now encounter organic or fair-trade labels on a variety of products, implying such desirable benefits as improved environmental conditions or more equitable market transactions. But what do we know about the origins and development of the organizations behind these labels? This book examines forest, coffee, and fishery certification programs to reveal how the early decisions of programs on governance and standards affect the path along which individual programs evolve and the variety and number of programs across sectors.

During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround themslavery, conscription, taxes, corve labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an anarchist history, is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of internal colonialism. This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scotts work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

This ambitious work is the definitive account of Russias land reform initiatives from the late 1980s to today. In Russia, a country controlling more land than any other nation, land ownership is central to structures of power, class division, and agricultural production.The aim of Russian land reform for the past thirty yearsto undo the collectivization of the Soviet era and encourage public ownershiphas been largely unsuccessful. To understand this failure, Stephen Wegren examines contemporary land reform policies in terms of legislation, institutional structure, and human behavior. Using extensive survey data, he analyzes household behaviors in regard to land ownership and usage based on socioeconomic status, family size, demographic distribution, and regional differences. Wegrens study is important and timely, as Russian land reform will have a profound effect on Russias ability to compete in an era of globalization.

This book deals with an important and timely issue: the political and economic forces that have shaped agricultural policies in the United States during the past eighty years. It explores the complex interactions of class, market, and state as they have affected the formulation and application of agricultural policy decisions since the New Deal, showing how divisions and coalitions within Southern, Corn Belt, and Wheat Belt agriculture were central to the ebb and flow of price supports and production controls. In addition, the book highlights the roles played by the world economy, the civil rights movement, and existing national policy to provide an invaluable analysis of past and recent trends in supply management policy.

Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in nineteenth-century America. Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, the book shows how and why agrarian Americansyeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alikeaccepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. By detailing the changing perceptions of soil treatment, Benjamin Cohen shows that the credibility of new soil practices grew not from the arrival of professional chemists, but out of an existing ideology of work, knowledge, and citizenship.