No abstract
This article compares Western permaculture theory and practice with the indigenous agricultural system of the Kichwa-Lamistas in the Department of San Martin in High Amazon Peru. It draws on indigenous theory and collaborations with the Kichwa-Lamistas to argue that the bioculture of the latter represents an alternative not only to modern, industrialized agriculture but also to permaculture. The article profiles the agroecological system used by the Kichwa-Lamistas, which employs agroforestry, the use of anthropogenic Terra Preta soils, and other sustainable practices. Although both the Kichwa-Lamista chacra (farm) and the permaculture farm or garden represent, in theory, two forms of closed-loop, polycultural, agroforestry-based subsistence farming, we argue that the enactments of reciprocity and other spiritual components of Kichwa-Lamista bioculture constitute an alternative to permaculture’s rootedness in scientific, materialist, and universalist traditions, which ultimately treat the natural world as other.
This article investigates the manner in which the French press of the late eighteenth century treated the suicides of Grub Street writers. The main argument is that the secularisation of suicide allowed for new attitudes toward self-inflicted death. One finds that the underground press callously mocked the suicides of hack writers. Secondarily, the article challenges the notion that suicide became 'medicalised' in the eighteenth century, and that contemporaries viewed it solely as an act of insanity.
As hard as it might be to believe, the world once made do without the words “sustainable” and “sustainability.” Today they’re nearly ubiquitous. At the grocery store we shop for “sustainable foods” that were produced, of course, from “sustainable agriculture”; ministries of natural resources in many parts of the world strive for “sustainable yields” in forestry; the United Nations (UN ) has long touted “sustainable development” as a strategy for global stability; and woe be the city dweller who doesn’t aim for a “sustainable lifestyle.” Sustainability first emerged as an explicit social, environmental, and economic ideal in the late 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, it had become a familiar term in the world of policy wonkery—President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, for instance— but the embrace wasn’t universal. Bill McKibben, perhaps the most prominent environmentalist of the past 30 years, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 1996 in which he dismissed sustainability as a “buzzless buzzword” that was “born partly in an effort to obfuscate” and which would never catch on in mainstream society. In McKibben’s view, sustainability “never made the leap to lingo”— and never would. “It’s time to figure out why, and then figure out something else.” (McKibben preferred the term “maturity.”) Many others have since accused “sustainability” and “sustainable development” of being superficial terms that mask ongoing environmental degradation and facilitate business-as-usual economic growth. Those are debatable points that will be discussed in this book. But one thing is clear: McKibben was quite wrong about the quick decline of “sustainability.” One way to demonstrate this growing interest is to look at book titles that bear the word “sustainable” or “sustainability.” It’s difficult to find books published before 1976 that employ these words as titles or even as keywords. Indeed, as Figure 1 shows, no book in the English language used either term in the title before 1970. But since 1980 there has been an explosion of books and articles that not only use those words as titles but also deal with the many facets of sustainability.
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