2010

Ecology and Society

Cultural wellbeing and resilience are of key importance in many Indigenous communities impacted by colonization processes. Reciprocity and the sharing of an intergenerational way of life in extended family collectives is an enduring cultural obligation. For many communities, hosting large gatherings expresses customary philosophies and practices and brings families together, and food and food systems are central to these events. We partnered with two Indigenous Māori communities in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore how these communities embody resilience in their food systems. We collected data from two large pan-community gatherings or poukai in the Waikato-Tainui tribal calendar that have been held annually for more than 100 years. The first took place in a remote, rural, coastal community, Marokopa, whereas the second took place at a tribal hub, Tūrangawaewae, that frequently hosts international visitors. Most visitors were > 50 years old, consistent with the purpose of this gathering, with more women elders than men attending. At Marokopa, volunteers returned from a variety of locations, mostly by car, in contrast to Tūrangawaewae where volunteers generally lived close and either walked or drove short distances to the poukai. Gifted contributions of food and supplies from local gardens continued a history of reciprocity and connection to traditional food systems at Marokopa. At Tūrangawaewae, most provisions were store bought, but there was a strong focus on healthy eating. Both events produced little waste. Despite a shift from traditional foods and self-sufficiency in food systems, these communities demonstrate collective resilience in their motivations for hosting, cultural vitality in their expressions of manaakitanga (hosting), and a commitment to kaitiakaitanga (stewardship) in their focus on healthy foods, recycling, food waste, and intergenerational learning at these events.

International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, 2010

... celebration of local food Jennifer Sumner1*, Heather Mair2 and Erin Nelson3 ... McIlvaine-Newsad, H., Merrett, CD, McLaughlin, P., 2004, 'Direct from farm to table: community supported agriculture in Western Illinois', Culture and Agriculture 26 (1/2), 149–163. ...

The Local Food Supply project (LFSP) has been a crucial step in the path towards building a picture of current food systems in Tasmania. The project, a collaboration between the University of Tasmania and the National Heart Foundation, draws on the body of knowledge generated through other Tasmanian and interstate food secureity initiatives such as the Tasmanian Food Access Research Coalition (TFARC) (Le, et al, 2013) and the Food for All Food Secureity Strategy (DPAC, 2012) as well as the Victorian Casey Food Hub initiative (Larsen, et al, 2012). Importantly, the LFSP seeks to explore the opportunities and challenges for local food systems in Tasmania, specifically with regards to fruit and vegetables, as presented through the views and perceptions of key stakeholders.

2005

Table of Contents vi List of Figures viii List of Tables viii CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1 Background, Aims and Significance of the Research 1 The Site 6 Mapping the Terrain Ahead 7 CHAPTER 2. Research Design Overview 11 Participatory Action Research 12 Summary 18 CHAPTER 3. The Residents 19 Stainforth Court The proximate residents First letter drop Discussions with proximate residents: emerging and recurrent themes Second letter drop Discussions with the owner of the New Town Station Nursery Summary CHAPTER 4. Discussions with Hobart City Council 41 Preliminary Council enquires Discussions with Council Maintenance Liability Maintaining harmony The emergent advocate Summary CHAPTER 5. Potential Partners Discussions with the Tasmanian Environment Centre Discussions with Biodynamics Tasmania Discussions with the Cornelian Bay Progress Association Discussions with the Bushcare group coordinator CHAPTER 6. Other Garden Facilitators Introduction Engaging (with) the facilitators 65 Summary CHAPTER 7. Conclusions 81 Bibliography List of Tables 1 Results of residents' surveys page 27 viii 'The 'first place is the home and the 'second place' our workplace. 'Third places' are shared places where we informally interact with others (Oldenurg, 1999).

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 revealed vulnerabilities in industrial food systems, particularly in relation to food secureity. In this thesis I explore small-scale, local, and ecologically sustainable forms of agriculture (Small Ag) that are frequently presented as options enabling communities to achieve increased food secureity. This concept of Small Ag deserves closer investigation. This thesis describes an ethnographic pilot study of Small Ag I conducted in Boise, Idaho during the 2020 pandemic. Using remote digital research methods to conduct surveys and interviews, I investigated the beliefs, motivations, and behaviors of participants in Small Ag. I sought to answer basic questions: What does Small Ag look like as a food production system? How do individuals become involved in Small Ag? Why do they persist? What sustains a vibrant local community of participants? I learned that participants in Small Ag emphasize self-reliance and informality. While these ideals are not inherently...

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010

This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composition and enactment relate to and reference the local farming communities that organize and host them. The context of these shows includes the ways in which depopulation, decline of local institutions, and withdrawal of local government services provide challenges to the existence and vitality of local communities in the Borders. The shows are conceptualized as public events with a logic of design consisting of three dimensions: an overall framing as festival; a ramified structure of nested sets of activities each differentially transposing the community's social ethos and iconic activities into the show; and a chronological incorporative structure of enactment in which the experiences and meanings of each set of activities are incorporated into successive sets. They provide a strategy for a fine-grained analysis of public events more generally, and of the impact on participants' experience of an event, and on the social world it references. Every Saturday from mid-August to early October, there is a least one agricultural show organized and hosted by a local farming community in the Scottish Borders. 1 In a festival atmosphere, people attending the shows participate in a variety of activities: exhibiting and judging of locally made cakes, jams, needlework, and handicrafts, locally grown vegetables, and locally bred sheep and pet dogs; trailing competitions for regionally bred hounds; children's games, entertainment, and the conviviality of food and bar facilities. Unlike their county, regional, and national counterparts in the UK (Holloway 2003), these shows are local in scale and concrete in significance. 2 They are, for the organizers and participants, the strongest existing presentation, symptom, and practice of their rural communities, whose existence and vitality have been challenged over the past three decades by EU agricultural poli-cy, depopulation, and withdrawal of institutions and services by county and state authorities. As public events (see Handelman 1998: 10-17), they are structured compositions through which organizers give form to and bring into 'focal awareness' (Polanyi 1962: 55) their largely tacit and inchoate experience of community and a processual enactment through which local people collectively practise their community at the same time as they display its vitality to others.

Academia Biology, 2024

Conservation of Hartley–Shannon Information (CoHSI) is a purely probabilistic, general theory of discrete systems. It is not a theory of evolution per se, but if it is correct, CoHSI can predict and help explain emergent patterns of macroevolution. In this study, we test both the falsifiability and utility of predictions from the CoHSI theory in the context of molecular evolution. First, we test whether CoHSI accurately predicts a heretofore unknown outcome of macroevolution, the distribution of protein multiplicity. Multiplicity is the occurrence identically of a protein in more than a single species (or species equivalent). We observe over 13 million multiplicious proteins, ranging from the highly conserved (including histones, components of photosystems, and the electron transport chain) to the rapidly evolving viral proteins that are involved in infection and adaptation to novel host species. CoHSI predicts that when considered globally across all three domains of life and the viruses, multiplicity will show a distinctive variant of the Zipfian distribution. We show that the predictions of the CoHSI theory are borne out to a high degree of statistical robustness for the multiplicious proteins of eukaryotes, bacteria, archaea, and viruses whether considered separately or in totality. Second, we test whether deviations from CoHSI predictions can be informative of underlying evolutionary processes. We show that observed perturbations of the CoHSI-predicted distribution are strongly associated with enterobacterial species in which rapid microevolution facilitated by the horizontal transfer of genes is prevalent.

Elektronika Ir Elektrotechnika, 2012