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New Featured Article!: “From a Blind Spot to a Nexus”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”From a Blind Spot to a Nexus: Building on Existing Trends in Knowledge Production to Study the Copresence of Ecotourism and Extraction”—comes from Volume 3 (2012). In her article, Veronica Davidov investigates how instances of copresence between ecotourism and resource extraction are marginalized in literature about ecotourism and extraction, constituting a “blind spot” in academic literature.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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Can Markets Save Agricultural Diversity?: Quinoa as a Case Study

Quinoa’s Exceptional Interspecific Diversity

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) has been cultivated in the Andean highlands for millennia. Domesticated five thousand to seven thousand years ago by agriculturalists living along the shores of Lake Titicaca, quinoa is one of only a handful of crops to survive in the Andean Altiplano’s harsh clime. In fact, quinoa thrives at altitudes between 2,500 and 3,900 MASL, where frequent droughts, constant aridity, and extreme diurnal temperature fluctuations present a formidable environment for most agricultural production (even hardy crops like maize and sweet potatoes that thrive just 1,000 meters closer to sea level, for instance, cannot bear fruit on the Altiplano).

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To Be Human Is to Live as if There Is Hope

One February day, I visited organic farmers Liz and Mike Lane in their southwestern Wisconsin farmhouse. Wounded old cats wandered around in the yard, where goats stuck their muzzles through slats in the fence. The clapboard farmhouse was not as neat as a pin. Seed catalogs, seed packets, CSA sign-up sheets, tax documents and forms, and piles of newspapers, books, and almanacs covered every surface of the dining room. The couple looked exhausted. We settled in the living room and they told me about the CAFO that had moved in around the corner.