Alastair Iles

Diversified farming systems: an agroecological, systems-based alternative to modern industrial agriculture

This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination. We explore to what extent DFS overlap or are differentiated from existing concepts such as sustainable, multifunctional, organic or ecoagriculture. DFS are components of social-ecological systems that depend on certain combinations of traditional and contemporary knowledge, cultures, practices, and governance structures. Further, as ecosystem services are generated and regenerated within a DFS, the resulting social benefits in turn support the maintenance of the DFS, enhancing its ability to provision these services sustainably. We explore how social institutions, particularly alternative agri-food networks and agrarian movements, may serve to promote DFS approaches, but note that such networks and movements have other primary goals and are not always explicitly connected to the environmental and agroecological concerns embodied within the DFS concept. We examine global trends in agriculture to investigate to what extent industrialized forms of agriculture are replacing former DFS, assess the current and potential contributions of DFS to food security, food sovereignty and the global food supply, and determine where and under what circumstances DFS are expanding rather than contracting.

Livenotes: a system for cooperative and augmented note-taking in lectures

We describe Livenotes, a shared whiteboard system and educational practice that uses wireless communication and tablet computing to support real-time conversations within small groups of students during lectures, independent of class size. We present an interface design that enables group members to interact with one another by taking lecture notes cooperatively, as well as to augment student note-taking by providing instructor slides in the background to annotate over. Livenotes was designed to facilitate more efficient, stimulating modes of learning that other collaborative approaches do not. We report how the system impacts cooperative learning in an undergraduate class and how students interacted with background slides in the workspace. We conclude with directions for improving the system and learning practice.

Mapping Environmental Justice in Technology Flows: Computer Waste Impacts in Asia

In the 21st century, technology and material flows constitute an ever-growing set of global environmental change. In particular, electronic wastes are emerging as a major transnational problem. Industrial nations are shipping millions of obsolete computers to Asia yearly; Asian countries are emerging as generators of e-waste in their own right. This article argues that an environmental justice approach can help illuminate the impacts of technology and material flows. To do so, however, environmental justice definitions and methodologies need to account for how and why such flows occur. Using the case of computers, the article analyses some factors shaping the e-waste recycling chain, shows how e-waste risks depend on design and manufacturing chains, and evaluates inequalities in the ecological and health impacts of e-wastes across Asia. It proposes a definition of environmental justice as obviating the production of risk, using a framework that brings together the global production system, development models, and regulatory action.

The Social Dimensions of Energy Transitions

The future of energy systems is one of the central policy challenges facing industrial countries. This challenge is complex and multifaceted. Energy systems are among the largest human enterprises,...

Nurturing Diversified Farming Systems in Industrialized Countries: How Public Policy Can Contribute

If diversified farming systems (DFS) are to thrive again in the United States, policies and preferences must evolve to reward the environmental and social benefits of sustainable farming and landscape management. Compared with conventional agricultural policies, policies aiding ecological diversification are underdeveloped and fragmented. We consider several examples of obstacles to the adoption and spread of diversified farming practices in the U.S. industrialized agricultural system. These include the broader political economic context of industrialized agriculture, the erosion of farmer knowledge and capacity, and supply chain and marketing conditions that limit the ability of farmers to adopt sustainable practices. To overcome these obstacles and nurture DFS, policy makers, researchers, industry, farmers, consumers, and local communities can play pivotal roles to transform agricultural research, develop peer-to-peer learning processes, support the recruitment and retention of new farmers through access to credit and land, invest in improved agricultural conservation programs, provide compensation for provision of ecological services in working landscapes, and develop links to consumer and institutional markets.

Identifying environmental health risks in consumer products: non-governmental organizations and civic epistemologies

Chemical politics are increasingly focusing on chemical use in consumer products. Emerging scientific research, including endocrine disrupter studies and body burden surveys, suggests that products are important sources of chemical risks. This article uses the concept of civic epistemology to investigate knowledge production about chemical risks in products. Using the case of phthalates in toys and cosmetics, this article analyzes how environmental health non-governmental organizations are critiquing regulatory science, attempting to change standards of evidence and proof, and introducing data about product use. Briefly comparing developments in the United States and Europe reveals such civic epistemology elements more clearly.

Sovereignty at What Scale? An Inquiry into Multiple Dimensions of Food Sovereignty

Abstract Food sovereignty has struggled to make inroads into changing the structures and processes underlying the corporate food regime. One reason is that scale is still underspecified in the politics, strategies, and theories of food sovereignty. We suggest that much can be learned from examining the multiple dimensions of scale inherent in ongoing food sovereignty struggles. A gap exists between these in vivo experiments and the maturing academic theory of scale. The concept of ‘sovereignty’ can be opened up to reveal that movements, peoples, and communities, for example, are creating multiple sovereignties and are exercising sovereignty in more relational ways. Relational scale can aid movements and scholars to map and evaluate how spatial and temporal processes at and among various levels work to reinforce dominant agri-food systems but could also be reconfigured to support progressive alternatives. Finally, we apply relational scale to suggest practical strategies for realizing food sovereignty, using examples from the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes.

Making seafood sustainable: merging consumption and citizenship in the United States

In the United States, an emerging alliance of environmental groups and marine aquariums has created sustainable seafood campaigns aimed at consumers as a new environmental protection strategy. These science-based campaigns seek to turn consumers into politically engaged citizens influencing policy through their purses, by using discursive devices such as wallet cards to create communities of concerned actors. While promising to make seafood production chains more transparent, the campaigns have several defects that may limit their ability to mobilize citizens. The campaigns can become more effective by attending more to facets such as making producers, not just fishers, more transparent and accountable to consumers. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Collaboration across disciplines for sustainability: green chemistry as an emerging multistakeholder community.

Sustainable solutions to our nations material and energy needs must consider environmental, health, and social impacts while developing new technologies. Building a framework to support interdisciplinary interactions and incorporate sustainability goals into the research and development process will benefit green chemistry and other sciences. This paper explores the contributions that diverse disciplines can provide to the design of greener technologies. These interactions have the potential to create technologies that simultaneously minimize environmental and health impacts by drawing on the combined expertise of students and faculty in chemical sciences, engineering, environmental health, social sciences, public policy, and business.

Greening chemistry: emerging epistemic political tensions in California and the United States

Green chemistry promises to make the global chemical industry more sustainable through redesigning chemical production. Nonetheless, many green chemists in the US have focused on persuading other chemists and industrial corporations to change through education and voluntary industry action. Green chemistry in the US may have stagnated relatively because of missing societal input and public scrutiny of chemistry choices. Using recent green chemistry policy experiments in California and the US, I explore how new epistemic political tensions over the roles of expertise, societal participation, and regulation may be creating new societal input and, perhaps, greater industry take-up. I consider whether the concept of socially robust knowledge can help illuminate California’s experiments more broadly, and find that this concept needs to be expanded to include the politics of expertise and institutional innovations for increasing information flows between experts and societal actors.