Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

TMDL implementation in agricultural landscapes: A communicative and systemic approach

Increasingly, total maximum daily load (TMDL) limits are being defined for agricultural watersheds. Reductions in non-point source pollution are often needed to meet TMDL limits, and improvements in management of annual crops appear insufficient to achieve the necessary reductions. Increased adoption of perennial crops and other changes in agricultural land use also appear necessary, but face major barriers. We outline a novel strategy that aims to create new economic opportunities for land-owners and other stakeholders and thereby to attract their voluntary participation in land-use change needed to meet TMDLs. Our strategy has two key elements. First, focused efforts are needed to create new economic enterprises that capitalize on the productive potential of multifunctional agriculture (MFA). MFA seeks to produce a wide range of goods and ecosystem services by well-designed deployment of annual and perennial crops across agricultural landscapes and watersheds; new revenue from MFA may substantially finance land-use change needed to meet TMDLs. Second, efforts to capitalize on MFA should use a novel methodology, the Communicative/Systemic Approach (C/SA). C/SA uses an integrative GIS-based spatial modeling framework for systematically assessing tradeoffs and synergies in design and evaluation of multifunctional agricultural landscapes, closely linked to deliberation and design processes by which multiple stakeholders can collaboratively create appropriate and acceptable MFA landscape designs. We anticipate that application of C/SA will strongly accelerate TMDL implementation, by aligning the interests of multiple stakeholders whose active support is needed to change agricultural land use and thereby meet TMDL goals.

“Properly, with love, from scratch” Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

Setting his sights on Huntington, West Virginia, acclaimed British chef and food activist Jamie Oliver set off last fall to change how America eats, one lunch at a time. This revolution was televised, airing on ABC beginning in late March 2010. Over six episodes, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (JOFR) told the story of his work in this city — dubiously named the “unhealthiest city” in the United States1 — to reshape eating behaviors and, in so doing, mitigate the high rates of dietrelated morbidity and mortality characterizing the area. Oliver’s Food Revolution Web site claims, “This food revolution is about saving America’s health by changing the way you eat . . . it’s not just a TV show, it’s a movement for you, your family and your community.”2 Oliver directed attention to an issue the public finds extremely compelling — food quality and its effects on health — and from the attention the show has received, it appears he inspired many viewers.3 However, much as U.S. consumption may need attention, the extent to which a reality show can change the food system is under debate.4 More importantly, we are troubled by elements of Oliver’s “revolution,” specifically, its similarity to past efforts, the use of shaming, the show’s race politics, its arbitrary designation of authentic food, and JOFR’s promotion of heroic over collective action. These problematic elements are also evident in the broader public debate and in U.S. food politics.5 For those who have not seen the series, the cameras follow Oliver as he warns community members of the dire futures awaiting those who fail to change their

Spatial Order, Scenic Landscapes and Sprawl: Peri-urban Studies at the Interface between Landscape and Planning History

Hybrid landscapes at the urban edge have been regarded as an intractable problem within modern planning for more than a century (Qviström, in press). An early commentary on urban sprawl by Benton MacKaye depicts urban edge landscapes as ‘‘not city, not country, but wilderness—the wilderness not of an integrated ordered nature, but of a standardized, unordered civilization’’ (1928, p. 160). As Vicenzotti and Trepl (2009) and De Block (2011) illustrate, similarly dramatic and disapproving representations of peri-urban landscapes have been a significant part of planning discourse during the twentieth century. Attempts to stigmatise these areas have usually been supported by arguments echoing Raymond Unwin and his generation of planners, calling for orderly alignments of city and culture, nature and country according to the modern cosmology. In recent years, however, alternative interpretations of the urban fringe have evolved, arguing for the recognition of specific values in these vernacular landscapes (e.g. De Block, 2011; Furuseth & Lapping, 1999; Gallent et al., 2007; Masuda & Garvin, 2008; Woods, 2009). One of the values brought forward in this new approach to sprawl landscapes is the ability to question the modern polarities of urban and rural. When brought into a planning discourse, this reinterpretation of the urban fringe is a paradigmatic turn, especially given that the majority of cases that consider the peri-urban interface do so in the context of attempting to constrain ‘urban sprawl’ by invoking the traditional poles of urban and rural. However, despite some signs of a shift toward more nuanced accounts of the hybrid nature of the peri-urban interface, it remains to be seen how the recognition of ongoing negotiation of the meaning of and relationship between urban and rural will be