Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene

Bibliographic Data

ID3776015
AuthorsEmily Reisman (0000-0002-0199-5746, University at Buffalo, State University of New York), Madeleine Fairbairn (0000-0003-0168-4179, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Year2021
Volume111
Issue3
Pages687-697
Publication date2021-04-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
OpenAlexW3106656463
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited76

Understanding the Anthropocene—as both a set of physiological phenomena and as an existential crisis of modernity—requires interrogating Earth-changing transformations in food and agriculture. Agri-food systems are not only at the core of alarming environmental trends; they also offer opportunities to directly engage important challenges to the Anthropocene concept. Many human geographers and other social scientists have raised critiques of the Anthropocene designation as glossing over social inequities, codifying a separation of humans from their environments, and naturalizing current transformations as complete and irreversible. In this article we interrogate the intersection between agri-food studies and critical Anthropocene scholarship, arguing that agri-food systems serve as a through line to competing Anthropocene origin stories, a source of theoretical insight for the complexity of human–environment relations, and a site of agency for engaging alternative futures. First, we examine four of the most commonly proposed starting points for the Anthropocene epoch, arguing that a focus on food and agriculture at each historical moment reveals the limits, frictions, and social unevenness of anthropogenic change. Second, we highlight theoretical tools from critical agrarian studies that help build a more complex understanding of agriculture and the Anthropocene, emphasizing the active role of agroecosystems and the centrality of structural inequalities to agroenvironmental change. Finally, we examine how food- and agriculture-related social movements are working to forge more livable futures by accounting for precisely the matters that characterizations of the Anthropocene as an epoch of global human dominance frequently overlook: socioecological unity and political economic difference

Agriculture · Anthropocene · Archaeology · Earth system science · Environmental ethics · Food security · Food systems · Geography · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Organic Food and Agriculture · Philosophy · Ecology

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