Matrix of Inquiry
Agriculture and History
How is food produced? what are the class relations between growers, owners, and the rest of society? What are the historical trajectories of these basic facts? What kind of transformation is needed, socially, politically, and economically, for a just, communistic, and sustainable system?
History and Environment
What is the historical trajctory of environmental degradation and climate change? How have past societies responded to these kinds of problems? What sort of future should we anticipate?
Environment and Agriculture
How does the current agricultural system produce climate change and environmental degradation? How does it respond to it? What kind of transformations are needed, technically, for a just, communistic, and sustainable system?
Reading List, Longform
- The Triple Helix, Richard Lewontin
- People’s Green New Deal, Max Ajl
- Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis
- Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason Moore
- Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon
- Trampling out the Vintage, Frank Bardanke
- Every Farm a Factory, Deborah Fitzgerald
- Beginning to End Hunger, M. Chappel
- Capitalism and Civilization, Fernand Braudel
- Capital, Karl Marx
- Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois
- Fanshen, William Fanshen
- Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz
- Rice in the Time of Sugar, Louis Perez
- Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing
- The River, the Plain, and the State, Ling Zhang
- Against the Grain, James Scott
- Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby
- The Columbian Exchange, Alfred Crosby
- Darwin, on the Origin of Species
- Lost Wolves of Japan, Brett Walker
- Dust Bowl, David Worster
- People of the Ecotone, Robert Morrisey
- Hegel's Concept of Life, Karen Ng
- Life Itself, Robert Rosen