Suchergebnisse

The discourses of agricultural extension reveal how actors represent their scientific activities and goals. The "transfer of technology" discourse developed with the professional U.S. extension service, reproducing its expert/lay power relations. Agroecology is emerging as a systems approach to preventing agricultural pollution. Its theoreticians argue that agroecology cannot be transferred like technology but must be extended through networks of participatory social learning. In California, hundreds of actors and dozens of institutions have cocreated agroecological partnerships using this alternative extension model. They have developed three alternative extension discourses to represent and explain their activities. Bruno Latour's "circulatory system of science" model provides a superior theoretical framework for interpreting the participation and discourses of diverse actors in this extension practice.

The California wine-grape sector has invested considerable time, money and effort in collective enterprises to reach fellow growers and assess the industry as a whole on sustainability. At the same time, California wine-grape production has become increasingly branded by particular geographic regions. Premium wine grapes are grown in regions with high population growth, high land values and often, charged environmental politics. Growers and their institutions have developed several agro-environmental partnerships to assess, improve and publicly represent their environmental stewardship and farming practices. We review trends in several regional and statewide indicators of sustainability, including crush prices, grape acreage, population growth and pesticide use. This review is based on 2 years of field research with participants in wine-grape partnerships, a review of documentary evidence, technical advisory work with the programs and summary assessment of case-study data, as well as an analysis of 10 years of Pesticide Use Report data for California wine-grape growers.

Three of the greatest minds in Franciscan theology, Ilia Delio, O.S.F., Franciscan Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M., and Pamela Wood, come together to discuss one of the greatest crises of our time-the destruction of the Earth. This book takes both a theological and practical approach to developing a Franciscan spirituality of the earth. Four sections highlight the distinct relationships creation has with the world: incarnation, community, contemplation and conversion. In this meticulously researched book, the authors propose ways in which we can all understand our own roles in relationship to the Earth and ways in which we can make it better.

Reliance on a limited number of methodologies may be distorting scholarship in religious environmentalism. This article describes a religious environmental educational intervention, uses a qualitative ethnological approach to describe the response of local congregations to this intervention, and uses a quasi-experimental, quantitative psychological methodology to assess the impact of this intervention on the behavior of religious congregational leaders. This article reports the impact of the Living Ocean Initiative, a ten-month interfaith envi­ronmental outreach intervention that engaged forty-nine diverse religious congregations and their leaders in California 2006-2007. This study indicates the value of studying religious environmental interventions, and suggests that carefully designed interventions may be able to increase religious environmentalism. It found that religious leaders were more inclined to engage in personal pro-environmental behavior within their congregations than pro-environmental behavior in the political realm. This study reports expressions of religious environmentalism at the congregational scale. It suggests that the potential of religious environmentalism to transform environmental beliefs and politics proposed by scholars and religious leaders may be unrealistic, yet it does demonstrate impacts of an intervention on pro-environmental behavior, thus clarifying some of the ambiguity in past correlational studies, and suggesting that religious environmentalism can help foster a more sustainable society.

Environmental Justice and Climate Change: Assessing Pope Benedict XVI's Ecological Vision for the Catholic Church in the United States provides the most thorough theological treatment available on Benedict XVI's statements on human responsibility for addressing environmental degradation. Contributors include lay, ordained, and religious Catholic theologians, a philosopher, and bishops highlighting the contributions Pope Emeritus Benedict has made to Catholic teaching while offering fruitful directions for advancing concern about ongoing threats to the integrity of Earth