Lorena Vieli

Sustainable Agriculture: Unifying Concepts

Gasto, J., L. Vera, L. Vieli, and R. Montalba. 2009. Sustainable Agriculture: Unifying Concepts. Cien. Inv. Agr. 36(1): 5-26. This work is the product of a long process that tried to approximate the principia involved in sustainable agriculture in an attempt to analyze it. We believe that these principia are crucial for the systematic, rigorous, and consistent development of sustainable agriculture. The unifying concepts of agriculture sustainability are classifi ed into seven fundamental principles: (i) there is a hierarchy in decision-making with respect to human actions on the landscape and environment; (ii) human impact on the land should be analyzed from different perspectives (local, global, anthropocentric, and ecocentric); (iii) the carrying capacity in an agrarian context is crucial to ecosystem management and design; (iv) humans arrange nature with little consideration of its own natural organization; (v) land-use planning and design are subordinate to the order determinants that occur in a particular situation; (vi) cultural landscape is a result of humans’ actions on the land; and, (vii) the concepts of agriculture and rurality lack a territorial connotation, unlike farm and comarca (a region connected through a common local market). Finally, agriculture sustainability should be addressed from various focal points, with a focus on nature and culture as its main determinants.

Coordinated species importation policies are needed to reduce serious invasions globally: The case of alien bumblebees in South America

Fil: Aizen, Marcelo Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; Argentina

DETERMINACIÓN DE LAS FUERZAS CONDUCTORAS DE LA TRANSFORMACIÓN AMBIENTAL DE LA ARAUCANÍA CHILENA: EL “PAISAJE CULTURAL” COMO MARCO DE ANÁLISIS

espanolEl articulo propone el concepto de paisaje cultural como una perspectiva holistica de analisis de procesos de transformacion del paisaje. Para ello se utilizo como caso de estudio el proceso de degradacion ambiental de la region de La Araucania (Chile). Se esclarecieron las motivaciones de las actuaciones en el territorio y sus fuerzas conductoras. Estas fuerzas se relacionan a objetivos economicos externos a la poblacion local y generaron una transformacion del paisaje impactando la forma de vida de sus habitantes, quebrando el acoplamiento estructural entre poblacion y paisaje, resultando en un paisaje cultural degradado ambientalmente. EnglishThe notion of cultural landscape was deployed to analyze transformation processes of rural landscapes. As a case study, environmental degradation processes in La Araucania (Chile) region were analyzed. The goals of actions over the territory and their driving forces were determined. These actions were related to economic motives external to local inhabitants and produced deep transformations of the landscape and impacted the way of life of its inhabitants, breaking down the structural coupling between population and landscape, resulting in an environmentally degraded cultural landscape.

Agroecology in Chile: precursors, pioneers, and their legacy

ABSTRACT In Chile, as in many other parts of the world, agroecology was first developed from studies on traditional agricultural systems. In the late1970s and early 1980s, when a large portion of Chilean population was under high poverty, the first notions for agroecological thinking arised. In the early 1980s, NGOs were the first entities to do applied agroecology in the country. Of particular relevance is the Center for Education and Technology which was a pioneering NGO that implemented demonstrative agroecological farms making a huge impact in the development of agroecology in Chile. It also influenced academics that in the 1990s incorporated agroecology to some universities, and also state agencies that started to incorporate agroecology in their discourses. Finally, medium and large agricultural export-oriented companies made important efforts to incorporate agroecological principles in their farms. After more than 30 years, some NGOs are still playing a key role in promoting agroecology among farmers and rural communities. However, Chilean agriculture is still mostly dominated by modern conventional practices. Probably, the future conditions of high uncertainty and climatic disturbances will increase the need for agroecological practices that increase farm resilience and food sovereignty.

Nuevos antecedentes acerca de la presencia de Bombus dahlbomii Guérin-Méneville (Hymenoptera: Apidae) en la Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego

El genero Bombus comprende alrededor de 250 especies distribuidas en casi todo el mundo (Michener, 2007; Williams et al. 2008). Para Chile se han descrito cuatro especies de abejorros, dos especies recientemente introducidas Bombus ruderatus (Fabricius, 1775) y Bombus terrestris (Linnaeus, 1758) y dos especies nativas Bombus funebris (Smith, 1854) y Bombus dahlbomii (Guerin-Meneville, 1835) (Montalva et al. 2011). En el caso de B. dahlbomii las poblaciones de esta especie han decrecido drasticamente en lugares donde se observo la invasion de abejorros exoticos a partir de los anos ‘90 (Morales et al. 2013; Schmid-Hempel et al. 2013).