Toward an Historical Agroecology: an academic approach in which time and space matter

Market Dependency as Prohibitive of Agroecology and Food Sovereignty—A Case Study of the Agrarian Transition in the Scottish Highlands

“…However, Cullen makes this claim based on an extrapolation of dearth recorded in the Southern Uplands, the eastern areas of the uplands (Montquhitter), and in Orkney and Shetland Islands (pp. [49][50][51][52], none of which were under clanship social property relations at the time. Only one mention is made of an area of the Highlands which would have then been governed under clanship: Glenorchy.…”

“…Tenants, on the other hand, suffered the loss of wages, and thus experienced poverty which further eroded their resilience [97] (pp. [51][52][53]. This poverty was perceived, however, not to be a result of the contextual factors compounding the social property relations in the area, but rather a result of overpopulation, ignorance, laziness and lack of entrepreneurship (a narrative not uncommon in other colonised territories throughout the world).…”

“…While this case study is focused in a country of the Global North, it is of relevance to the Global South in that during the 18th and 19th centuries, the Scottish Highlands can be considered to be a 'periphery', providing goods to the 'core' of capitalist England and lowland Scotland [49] (p. 10), [50], and thus shares some similarities with today's Global South which is seen as a 'periphery' to the 'core' Western countries within globalised capitalism [51]. Through its empirical analysis, this study seeks to concretise and nuance the concept of agroecological food systems and the framework of 'market dependency' specifically, and thus is situated within a small but growing number of geographically situated, historically formed analyses within the literature on agroecology (see, e.g., [52,53]).…”

The concept of ‘palimpsest’ in a reconceptualization of biodiversity conservation

“…Historical ecology, archaeology and agroecologyincluding the concept of agrobiodiversitysubscribe to this concept of palimpsest as a historical landscape with successive layers of environmental change in which Homo sapiens acts as a keystone species through a variety of cultural manifestations (Sinclair & Crumley 2017, Rivera-Núñez et al 2020. The challenge is to categorize and determine the magnitude or scale of the cumulative effects of such transformations (Crumley 1994).…”

“…Many indigenous communities in the Neotropics, Palearctic, sub-Saharan Africa, North America, Indo-Malaya and Australasia have radicallyalbeit often constructivelymodified the physical and biotic conditions of the ecological systems that they inhabit (Ellis 2015). It is necessary to revise the assumption that human actions always degrade the environment, through a reconceptualization that we have previously called 'anthropogenesis' (Rivera-Núñez et al 2020). Instead of the naïve portrayal of the 'good Anthropocene' (Hamilton 2016, Fremaux & Barry 2019, anthropogenesis seeks to enrich the biodiversity debate with the historical human expressions of constructed environments that the conservation-focused 'Edenic sciences' and the 'pristine syndrome' (Robbins & Moore 2013) tend to ignore, or 'Anthropo-not-see' (de la Cadena 2019).…”