Podcasts about Agrarian

New Agrarian Program hopes to draw climate conscious young people to ranching, farming careers -- Law enforcement plans increased school zone presence as school year begins 

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Hi all! This time, we're doing something a bit different. In this episode, Emma and Austin - hosts of Agrarian Futures - sit down to tell their own story, and share some of their key takeaways of 2.5 years of talking with brilliant farmers and thinkers about the future of our food system. Enjoy!————-Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O'Doherty.

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

In Episode 209 of Wild & Waking, I'm joined by Jack Thomas, a self-taught regenerative farmsteader, food and homesteading educator, printmaker, writer, and founder of ACRE, the Agrarian Co-Learning & Resiliency Exchange. Together, we explore what it means to build a resilient, politically conscious agrarian life beyond the tradwife fantasy - and why growing food, raising animals, baking bread, caring for the land, and creating a softer life do not have to come packaged with right-wing politics, patriarchy, or religious fundamentalism.Our conversation digs into the tradwife pipeline, political identity in rural America, class consciousness, white privilege, vibes-based voting, and the contradictions between the policies many rural voters support and the values they practice in their own communities. Jack offers a compelling leftist alternative to tradwife culture: a life rooted in food resiliency, domestic meaning, agrarian skills, mutual aid, political freedom, and interdependence. We also talk about why farmers need healthcare and economic security, how political messaging shapes rural identity, and what it really takes to change hearts and minds without abandoning nuance, safety, or personal boundaries.We also explore the loneliness of being queer, progressive, liberal, or leftist in agricultural and rural spaces and the importance of creating politically aligned communities both online and in real life. Jack shares the vision behind ACRE (Agrarian Co-Learning & Resiliency Exchange), their upcoming UnTrad podcast, and the possibility of building rural communities centered on co-learning, preparedness, food sovereignty, creativity, and collective resilience. This episode is an invitation to stay open, resist becoming calcified in our beliefs, hold both sacred rage and whimsy, and keep building the world we actually want to live in - one garden, conversation, community, and tiny tomato at a time.In this episode, we explore:Jack's evolution from a conservative upbringing in rural Georgia to life as a queer, AuDHD leftist farmsteader in VermontCareer reinvention, identity evolution, and the “career ego deaths” that helped Jack connect art, education, regenerative agriculture, and community buildingHow COVID disrupted the cultural checklist and sparked personal, political, and professional awakeningThe rise of the tradwife movement and why its promise of softness, certainty, domesticity, and belonging can feel so seductiveReclaiming homemaking, food production, homesteading, and slower living without embracing patriarchy or right-wing politicsThe anti-tradwife alternative: food sovereignty, mutual aid, political agency, interdependence, and agrarian resilienceHow class identity, poverty, grit, white privilege, and rural culture shape political beliefsThe disconnect between rural values, voting patterns, and policies affecting farmers, healthcare, labor, and economic securityThe loneliness of being queer, progressive, liberal, or leftist in rural and agricultural spacesWhy politically aligned community can create safety, belonging, and more honest connectionThe vision behind ACRE, the Agrarian Co-Learning & Resiliency ExchangeBuilding online communities that lead to real-life relationships, regional gatherings, and mutual supportJack's experience with political de-radicalization and helping people question inherited belief systemsJack's upcoming UnTrad podcast and its vision for a more inclusive, resilient agrarian futureResisting ideological calcification and staying open to growth, change, and small ego deathsHolding sacred rage and whimsy at the same timeBe sure to hit subscribe so you never miss the latest episode!Connect with Jack:Learn more about Jack's work, writing, and agrarian community:Join ACRE, the Agrarian Co-Learning & Resiliency ExchangeUse code WILDANDWAKING20 to receive 20% off an annual ACRE membershipRead Jack's writing on SubstackFollow Jack on InstagramConnect with Jack on ThreadsConnect with Emily:Website: www.EmilyReuschel.comInstagram: @emilyreuschelFacebook: Emily ReuschelLinkedIn: Emily ReuschelJoin my Book Insiders List: Sign up here!Resources and Links:Sign up here to get the inside scoop to my book writing journey!Book me as a speaker for your next event - email inquiries to emilyreuschel@gmail.com or schedule a call hereWild & Waking – Produced by Jill Carr Podcasting | Learn More

Mollie Engelhart, former LA vegan chef turned cattle rancher, brings her hot takes on farming, what happened when RFK Jr. came to her ranch, her thoughts on how to change our habits, why comfort is killing us, and her vulnerable personal story on the value of life and how God changed her thinking. A must listen!

Welcome to episode 420 of Growers Daily! We cover: building a compost site, we're talking about what agrarian means and if it is indeed a reasonable future. AND it's feedback friday. We are a Non-Profit! 

Topics:  Cleaning Robots, God THE Way, Trust God, Hot Take, Blessing/Cursing BONUS CONTENT: AI, Naphesh   Quotes: "I trust the tech people." "God wants to be ultimate in your life." "He's your fortress." "Wherever anything is right now, just leave it." "I Went To The Walmart Thing." . . . Holy Ghost Mama Pre-Order! Want more of the Oddcast? Check out our website! Watch our YouTube videos here. Connect with us on Facebook!

Mitch Theissen has the enviable role of Head Gardener at the award winning Agrarian Kitchen in New Norfolk, just outside of Hobart. Having grown up in the Huon Valley, born into a long line of apple farmers, Mitch started his career in the kitchen, first in Hobart, then Sydney, before spending time in Japan. It was here that his thoughts returned to agriculture and produce, and upon returning to Australia he sought out the next phase of his career, landing this dream gig a few years ago and being pivotal in what it looks like, and how it operates, today.  Mitch lives, works and gardens with his partner, and young family on the land of the wulawali people in New Norfolk, in lutruwita/Tasmania's Derwent Valley. Before we get to that, Emily and Maddie are (as well as talking over the top of each other -- sorry about that --) talking about radishes. Yep, that's about it. We also talk about  Compost Soil Salad spinners (lol, yes) And maybe you need to rush out to buy some Japanese Salad Turnip Seeds. IYIYK Mitch is recommending Eliot Coleman's New Organic Gardener.

In this third episode of The Cunning Farmer, Todd Elliott and I tromp-on through Chapter 3 (First Principles of a Magical Worldview) of his pivotal book, The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magical Practices, Mythology, and Folklore, diving first into the idea of a living layered cosmos and then progressing into the notions of Platonic and Hermetic systems of astrology as both a spiritual avenue and practical farming system. Pre-Order The Way of Salmon Moon HERE.Join the Unshod Substack (for free) and commune with us! Purchase The Cunning Farmer HERE.Learn more about Daniel's work HERE.

We're joined by Ian Morris, British historian, archaeologist, and author of Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels Ian's central argument is both simple and radical: our beliefs about fairness, justice, hierarchy, equality, and even democracy are not timeless moral truths floating above history. They are shaped, constrained, and repeatedly reorganised by the ways societies extract and use energy. Across tens of thousands of years, he argues, there is a pattern beneath the chaos.   We dive into: • Why hunter-gatherer societies tended to enforce radical egalitarianism • How agriculture made hierarchy, inheritance, patriarchy, and forced labor more functional • Why fossil fuel societies unexpectedly shifted back toward equality and democracy • How values evolve like adaptations to changing material conditions • Why the industrial age expanded the moral community • Why inequality has begun rising again in recent decades • Whether we are entering a fourth great shift in human values • What energy transitions, AI, and new technologies could mean for democracy and civilisation   Key Takeaways from the Episode: 1. Human Values Are Not Fixed — They Adapt to Energy Systems Morris argues that values are not random, but nor are they eternal. Over the long run, societies repeatedly develop moral systems that fit the material conditions created by how they capture energy from the world. This is not a metaphor. Morris means it in a nearly biological sense: values that match the prevailing energy regime help societies function, grow, and outcompete their neighbours — while mismatched values lead to stagnation, fragmentation, or collapse. The mechanism is cultural evolution, operating on a civilisational timescale. A foraging band that tried to enforce agrarian-style kingship would fall apart. An industrial economy run on feudal principles would be outproduced by its rivals. Morris draws on decades of archaeological and anthropological data — compiled in his earlier work Why the West Rules — for Now — to show that this pattern holds across every major region and epoch. The implication is unsettling: the values we consider timeless may be temporary artefacts of the energy system we happen to inhabit. 2. Hunter-Gatherer Life Favoured Equality In low-energy societies, people lived in small, mobile groups with little surplus and little material inheritance. Under those conditions, strong egalitarian norms were not idealistic luxuries — they were necessary for survival and cohesion. Morris draws on ethnographic evidence from groups like the Kung San of the Kalahari and the Hadza of Tanzania to show that foraging bands actively enforced equality through what Christopher Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” — systems in which the group collectively suppresses anyone who tries to accumulate too much power or prestige. The tools were social: ridicule, gossip, ostracism, and in extreme cases, targeted violence. This was not paradise. Per capita rates of violent death among foragers were far higher than in modern states. But it was a system that worked under the constraints of low energy capture. When you cannot store surplus, when anyone can walk away from the group, when survival depends on mutual cooperation, radical equality is not a philosophy — it is an engineering requirement. 3. Agriculture Made Inequality Functional Once farming emerged, people settled, accumulated land, inherited property, and built larger social structures. In that world, hierarchy, patriarchy, kingship, and coercive labour became easier to justify and more useful for organising society. Morris is careful to frame this not as moral decline but as adaptive reorganisation. Agrarian societies that developed clear lines of inheritance, centralised leadership, and mechanisms for extracting surplus labour — whether through serfdom, taxation, or slavery — were able to build irrigation systems, raise armies, and defend territory more effectively than those that did not. The Gini coefficients of agrarian civilisations, from ancient Rome to Qing Dynasty China, consistently clustered between 0.40 and 0.60 — far higher than anything observed in foraging societies. Patriarchy, too, became structurally embedded: when wealth flows through land and land flows through lineage, control of reproduction becomes an economic imperative. As Morris puts it, agrarian societies did not choose hierarchy because they were morally inferior. They chose it — or more precisely, it chose them — because it was the value system that worked at that scale of energy capture. 4. Industrialisation Reversed the Pattern The fossil fuel age created such a dramatic expansion in energy capture that it supported a return toward broader equality. Democracy, women's rights, religious tolerance, and mass political participation became more functional in industrial societies than they had been in agrarian ones. The scale of the shift is difficult to overstate. Drawing on the data compiled in his Social Development Index, Morris shows that Western economies went from capturing roughly 38,000 kilocalories per person per day in 1800 to 230,000 by the 1970s. This explosion of productive capacity required a workforce that was literate, mobile, and motivated — not coerced. Slavery became economically irrational when a free worker operating a power loom could outproduce a plantation of forced labourers. The franchise expanded because industrial states needed buy-in from the populations whose labour and consumption drove growth. The period between 1945 and 1975 — what economists call the Great Compression — saw inequality fall to historic lows across the industrialised world, a pattern Morris attributes directly to the structural demands of fossil-fuel economies rather than to moral awakening alone. 5. Moral Progress May Be Less Moral Than We Think One of the most provocative ideas in the conversation is that what we call moral progress may often be adaptation. Values spread not simply because they are truer or nobler, but because they work better under new productive conditions. Morris is not arguing that moral reasoning is meaningless — he acknowledges the role of philosophers, activists, and reformers in articulating new ethical frameworks. But he insists that these frameworks gain traction only when the material conditions are right. The abolition of slavery is his sharpest example: anti-slavery arguments had existed since antiquity, from Stoic philosophers to medieval theologians. They gained no lasting foothold until the fossil fuel revolution made free industrial labour more productive than coerced agricultural labour. In this reading, the abolitionists were morally right — but they succeeded because the energy regime had shifted in their favour. The danger in this insight, as Princeton philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues in her response to Morris's Tanner Lectures, is that it can erode our confidence in the permanence of our own moral achievements. If democracy rose with fossil fuels, what happens when fossil fuels decline? 6. The Last 40 Years May Mark the Start of a New Shift Morris suggests the egalitarian arc of the fossil fuel age may be weakening. Since the late 20th century, rising inequality and growing acceptance of concentrated power may signal the beginnings of a fourth great transformation in values. The data supports the concern. According to the World Inequality Database, the share of national income captured by the top one per cent in the United States roughly doubled between 1980 and 2020, returning to levels last seen before the Great Depression. Freedom House has documented eighteen consecutive years of global democratic decline. Morris interprets these trends not as policy failures to be corrected but as potential symptoms of a deeper structural shift: as economies move from mass industrial production toward automation, platform monopolies, and AI-driven services, the number of people whose active participation is economically essential may be shrinking. If the fossil fuel age favoured equality because it needed mass labour and mass consumption, an age of intelligent machines may not. The egalitarian values we assumed were permanent may have been contingent on a phase of industrial development that is now passing. 7. Energy Abundance Does Not Automatically Create Equality Cases like Qatar and other resource-rich states show that energy alone is not enough. The social context into which new energy arrives matters enormously; pre-existing structures can allow elites to monopolise wealth and preserve hierarchy. Qatar holds the fourth-highest GDP per capita in the world, yet ranks near the bottom of the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Brunei tell similar stories: vast energy wealth, minimal democratic development. Morris argues this is not a contradiction of his thesis but a refinement. What matters is not merely how much energy a society captures, but how many people must participate in capturing it. In industrial economies, millions of workers were needed — creating structural pressure for education, wages, and political rights. In petrostates, a tiny elite controls extraction, distributes revenue as patronage, and faces no structural need to empower the broader population. The lesson is critical for understanding the current energy transition: if the next energy regime — whether solar, nuclear, or AI-driven — can be controlled by a narrow class of technologists and capital owners, the democratic dividend may not follow. 8. The Future May Be a Contest Between Democratic and Authoritarian Models As energy systems, technology, and AI evolve, Morris sees a real competitive struggle ahead between more egalitarian democratic societies and more centralised, authoritarian ones. The question is not only what kind of world we want — but which kind will prove more effective. Democracy's advantages are significant: distributed innovation, self-correcting institutions, the ability to attract global talent through individual freedom. But authoritarian systems have their own competitive strengths, particularly in an age of AI-enabled surveillance and rapid state-directed investment. China's ability to mobilise resources for infrastructure, energy, and technology development without electoral friction presents a genuine challenge to the democratic model. Morris draws on the framework laid out by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail — the contest between inclusive and extractive institutions — but adds an energy dimension: the outcome may depend less on which system we prefer and more on which system the next energy regime structurally favours. If renewable energy is distributed and requires broad participation, democracy may thrive. If AI and automation concentrate power, authoritarianism may prove more durable than we hope. Timestamps: (00:00) – Introduction to Ian Morris and the core thesis of Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels (01:00) – Why values are not random: the pattern across history (02:10) – Hunter-gatherers, equality, and the logic of low-energy societies (03:10) – Agriculture, hierarchy, kingship, and why inequality became moralized (06:00) – Energy capture as the hidden driver of value systems (09:10) – Why farming societies relied on inheritance, patriarchy, and force (15:20) – Rousseau, Hobbes, and why both misunderstood early humans (17:20) – Cultural evolution and how values adapt like biological traits (21:20) – Why fossil fuel societies moved back toward equality (28:20) – Factory labor, capitalism, and the widening of the moral community (34:20) – Are we now moving into a fourth great shift? (36:20) – Inequality, EROI, and the current energy transition (38:00) – Why Morris thinks we are still early in a new energy revolution (44:00) – Elon Musk, elite power, and why democracy is being questioned again (46:10) – Oil-rich states, Qatar, and why history still matters (54:40) – What readers should take from the book for navigating the future (56:00) – China, democracy, and the coming civilizational competition

What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received on the ground? In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Taiwan's postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies. A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received on the ground? In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Taiwan's postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies. A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received on the ground? In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Taiwan's postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies. A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received on the ground? In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Taiwan's postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies. A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received on the ground? In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Taiwan's postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies. A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

96 MinutesSafe for WorkGeorge Bagby is a content creator and publisher of long-forgotten books. George joins Pete to continue a series detailing the long lead up to America's Civil War.George's Twitter AccountGeorge's Pinned Tweet w/ Links George's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Interview starts at 28:45 Todd Elliott, The Cunning Farmer joins us to chat about his sacred and magical philosophy on farming, nature and agriculture. We get into his amazing recent book "The Cunning Farmer - Agrarian Magical Practices, Mythology, and Folklore", the cunning folk, petitions and offerings, singing to the plants, eclipses and crops, geomancy, the cardinal directions, solar and lunar cycles, the Seasons, astronomers, astrologers, animism, Neo-Platonism, Christianity, and Hermeticism.   We also touch on ancient wheat, the Mayan calendars, precession, re sacralizing agriculture, the wheel of the year, the four elements, hemispheric differences, the Hopewell mounds, Serpent mound, and intelligence and communication being everywhere.    "finally, an earth-magic book written by someone who actually touches earth."  John Michael Greer Todd Elliott is a farmer, earth worker, Reiki master, Druid, and was certified as an Astrological Magician by Renaissance Astrology. A lifelong student of mythology, religion, spirituality, folklore, and esoterica, he lives, works, writes, and studies on a small ridgetop farm in north central Kentucky, where he and his family ethically raise vegetables, fruits, and livestock.   https://www.innertraditions.com/author/todd-elliott https://thecunningfarmer.substack.com/p/preorder-your-copy-of-the-cunning   Become a Lord or Lady with 1k donations over time. And a Noble with any donation. Leave Serfdom behind and help Grimerica stick to 0 ads and sponsors and fully listener supported. Thanks for listening!! Help support the show, because we can't do it without ya. https://www.amazon.com/Unlearned-School-Failed-What-About/dp/1998704904/ref=sr_1_3?sr=8-3   Support the show directly: https://open.spotify.com/show/2punSyd9Cw76ZtvHxMKenI?si=ImKxfMHgQZ-oshl499O4dQ&nd=1&dlsi=4c25fa9c78674de3 Watch or Listen on Spotify https://grimericacbd.com/ CBD / THC Gummies and Tinctures http://www.grimerica.ca/support https://www.patreon.com/grimerica http://www.grimericaoutlawed.ca/support www.Rokfin.com/Grimerica   Adultbrain Audiobook YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@adultbrainaudiobookpublishing https://grimericaoutlawed.ca/The newer controversial Grimerica Outlawed Grimerica Show Check out our next trip/conference/meetup - Contact at the Cabin www.contactatthecabin.com Our audio book website: www.adultbrain.ca www.grimerica.ca/shrooms and Micro Dosing Darren's book www.acanadianshame.ca Grimerica on Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-2312992 Join the chat / hangout with a bunch of fellow Grimericans Https://t.me.grimerica https://www.guilded.gg/i/EvxJ44rk The Eh- List site. Canadian Propaganda Deconstruction https://eh-list.ca/ The Eh-List YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@theeh-list?si=d_ThkEYAK6UG_hGX Leave a review on iTunes and/or Stitcher: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/grimerica-outlawed http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/grimerica-outlawed Sign up for our newsletter https://grimerica.substack.com/ SPAM Graham = and send him your synchronicities, feedback, strange experiences and psychedelic trip reports!! graham@grimerica.com InstaGRAM https://www.instagram.com/the_grimerica_show_podcast/ Tweet Darren https://twitter.com/Grimerica Can't. Darren is still deleted. Purchase swag, with partial proceeds donated to the show: www.grimerica.ca/swag Send us a postcard or letter http://www.grimerica.ca/contact/ Episode ART - Napolean Duheme's site http://www.lostbreadcomic.com/ MUSIC https://brokeforfree.bandcamp.com/ - Something Galactic Felix's Site sirfelix.bandcamp.com - Should I

In this episode of Pro Mindset® Podcast host Craig Domann welcomes St John Craner—rural sales trainer, psychology enthusiast, and founder of Agrarian and Rural Sales Success—to explore the art of selling without selling. St John shares his unique approach to sales, focusing on serving rather than selling, and how understanding psychology can transform sales strategies. Discover how St John's commitment to intent and buyer safety has revolutionized his approach, offering valuable insights for anyone in the sales industry.Episode Takeaways: 

The National Strategic Project (PSN) under President Prabowo Subianto's administration has now sparked a nationwide wave of protests. In Merauke, thousands of still-operating machines are accused of eroding forest and indigenous land, sparking a fierce clash between development ambitions and the rights of local communities. - Proyek Strategis Nasional (PSN) di bawah pemerintahan Presiden Prabowo Subianto kini memicu gelombang protes nasional. Di Merauke, ribuan alat berat yang terus beroperasi dituding telah melumat hutan ulayat dan tanah adat, memicu benturan keras antara ambisi pembangunan dan hak masyarakat lokal.

In this episode we look at if we can learn about simple living from these two groups. Turns out, a lot!

Jason and Ashley welcome back Chris Smaje to discuss his new book, “Finding Lights in a Dark Age,” now available for purchase. Chris is a returning guest who first appeared on the podcast to discuss his influential book “Small Farm Future,” which helped shape many of the show's conversations about agricultural futures and sustainability. He returned previously to discuss “Say No to a Farm-Free Future,” his critique of George Monbiot and proponents of lab-grown food alternatives. In this episode, Chris discusses his third book, which assumes a transition to a lower energy future and explores practical approaches to living well despite new challenges.The conversation covers his solar system model of political organization, distributism and Catholic social teaching, the complexities of managing commons and collective resources, lessons learned from running his own farm, and the potential for relocalization of food systems and community structures.Chris draws on his experiences managing a small farm with a community of people, including challenges with woodland commons, cooperative work arrangements, and the practical realities of collective decision-making. The discussion explores demographic challenges, migration patterns, the role of family and household economies, and the distinction between romanticized visions of agrarian life and the nuanced, practical arrangements required to make local systems function effectively.The book argues for a more distributed, locally-oriented approach to politics and economics, moving away from centralized state power toward bottom-up community organization. Chris explores how people might navigate the breakdown of high-energy modernity by developing local autonomy, access to land, and new forms of community organization that balance individual agency with collective needs. The conversation ends with reflections on what flourishing might look like in a post-abundance future and why the so-called Dark Ages may not have been dark for everyone.

Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and the expert knowledge associated with managing the countryside in colonial India opened paths for urban concepts and forms to permeate agrarian settings where they were previously thought to have little relevance. This process indelibly shaped idioms and modes of agrarian life, just as it gave rural problems and processes a structural role in urban discourse. By illuminating the intellectual paths by which agrarian and urban processes came to be understood as co-constituting, and exploring multiple vivid, empirically rich case studies of projects where those relations were made evident, this book presents a compelling case to move beyond traditional intellectual silos and enter new theoretical territory to understand processes of urban and rural transformation. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In this episode, Dr. Jarvis McInnis, author of Afterlives of the Plantation, joins PJ to explore the deep cultural, intellectual, and historical legacy of Black life in the American South. Focusing on the Tuskegee Institute and the complex legacy of Booker T. Washington, McInnis reveals how Black communities transformed the plantation's afterlives into spaces of creativity, education, and empowerment.In this episode, Dr. Jarvis McInnis, author of Afterlives of the Plantation, joins PJ to explore the deep cultural, intellectual, and historical legacy of Black life in the American South. Focusing on the Tuskegee Institute and the complex legacy of Booker T. Washington, McInnis reveals how Black communities transformed the plantation's afterlives into spaces of creativity, education, and empowerment.Make sure to check out Dr. McInnis' book: Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South

Over the last several decades, sources of income derived away from farms have come to play a much bigger role in rural Indonesian households. How do rural people in Indonesia engage with farming and social and economic spheres beyond their villages? What do their changing forms of engagement mean for land relations, sustainability, and the future of agrarian communities? Jeff Neilson's Fortress Farming: Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2025) offers an explanation that centers on a defensive livelihood strategy observed among, in particular, coffee producing smallholders. This livelihood strategy, understood as “fortress farming”, is undertaken by smallholder households that are reluctant to maximize production despite their engagement with major coffee roasting companies. Instead, they maintain their small farms to defend themselves from insecurity while pursuing sources of wealth off farm. The book considers the implications of fortress farming for broader structural reforms and illuminates how social institutions shape forms of capitalist agriculture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Over the last several decades, sources of income derived away from farms have come to play a much bigger role in rural Indonesian households. How do rural people in Indonesia engage with farming and social and economic spheres beyond their villages? What do their changing forms of engagement mean for land relations, sustainability, and the future of agrarian communities? Jeff Neilson's Fortress Farming: Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2025) offers an explanation that centers on a defensive livelihood strategy observed among, in particular, coffee producing smallholders. This livelihood strategy, understood as “fortress farming”, is undertaken by smallholder households that are reluctant to maximize production despite their engagement with major coffee roasting companies. Instead, they maintain their small farms to defend themselves from insecurity while pursuing sources of wealth off farm. The book considers the implications of fortress farming for broader structural reforms and illuminates how social institutions shape forms of capitalist agriculture. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

To keep you motivated in your aim of a simpler lifestyle, you need to keep yourself provided with inspiration, direction, new ideas, and new ways to live. This episode discusses how to stop cherry picking, and how to start gold mining. 

Nick Cooney is the founder and managing partner of Lever VC, an early stage fund focused on food and ag tech innovation. He also founded the Lever Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing a humane and sustainable food system, and authored "What We Don't Do: Inaction in the Face of Suffering and the Drive to Do More." In this episode, Nick tackles the Malthusian Trap debate and explains why more people face starvation today in raw numbers than ever before, despite technological advances in food production. He argues that capitalism alone cannot solve global food insecurity because it represents a complex systems problem requiring economic development, better governance, and philanthropic intervention beyond market mechanisms.  Nick draws on evolutionary psychology to explain why people naturally care more about local issues than distant suffering, advocating for logic-based approaches to maximize impact. He emphasizes that organizational success breeds engagement more than empowerment structures, warning that flattened organizations often create accountability confusion and poor decision-making when people lack necessary expertise.  Nick stresses that leaders should focus on helping teams achieve clear, meaningful results rather than prioritizing feel-good management approaches that may undermine actual effectiveness. Listen to this episode to explore how leaders can address complex global challenges while building more effective and engaged organizations. You can find episode 478 on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts! Watch this Episode on YouTube | https://bit.ly/TLP-478   Key Takeaways [02:17] Nick reveals something not found online that he practices what he preaches by donating a large portion of his annual income to support efforts that reduce suffering in the world. [03:03] Nick explains the struggle with food distribution despite production advances noting that while technology has made food production more efficient there are more people living in extreme poverty and facing starvation today than hundreds of years ago due to raw population growth. [06:45] Nick outlines why investment money sometimes goes to the wrong places explaining there is a fadish nature to venture capital where certain things get in fashion plus ag-tech innovation is often slower to be adopted than other technologies and faces regulatory challenges. [10:26] Nick addresses why capitalism has not solved world hunger stating that while there has been good progress with the percentage of global population in extreme poverty trending down free markets alone are not going to be a full solution. [14:38] Nick explains what drives people to care about issues noting that humans are descended from apes optimized for survival in pre-Agrarian life giving us strong instincts to care about those close to us but having far less concern for those out of sight. [19:16] Nick clarifies his focus is not specifically on hunger but on animal suffering because he spends most of his time on animal suffering since it is an area where there is huge amounts of extreme suffering that does not have to be there. [22:05] Nick discusses managing teams in impact-focused organizations explaining he has been fortunate that his entities were working in areas with clear positive impact so people were attracted to work there because of the positive impact they knew they were having. [27:20] Nick agrees with concerns about flattening organizations stating that excessive flatness can lead to suboptimal results because people may not have the expertise to make smart decisions and it can make empowered people feel discouraged when they fail. [30:49] Nick confirms the abundance-scarcity parallel in organizational design explaining that companies flush with cash get very fat with higher burn rates while cash-tight companies are forced into much smarter decision making by economic necessity. [33:44] Nick explains the impact of inaction in corporate settings noting there is a huge bias towards focusing on what we are doing ethically rather than consequences of inaction but today the biggest harms are caused by failing to put time, money or mental energy into helping those facing extreme suffering. [39:53] Nick reflects on duty of care laws stating it is interesting that legally we treat a child 10 feet away versus 200 feet away dramatically differently even though the outcome is exactly the same if both children suffer and die. [45:28] Nick emphasizes the incredible power individuals actually have, explaining we can save hundreds of lives and spare hundreds of thousands of animals from suffering through really cost efficient charities which means we have a greater level of responsibility to use that power well. [47:21] And remember...“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” - George Bernard Shaw   Quotable Quotes “What did evolution optimize us for as a species? Survival." "I think it's really important to bring in logic, thoughtfulness, a quantitative analysis if we really want to do the most good that we can." "Any one of us, at least those of us living in the us, Europe, semi industrialized or industrialized countries, we have the ability to literally save the lives of hundreds, thousands of people, spare hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of others from intense suffering." "Free markets alone are not going to solve the problem. They can help it, but there's, or in some cases could hurt it as well." "Today the biggest harms that we cause to others are not caused by bad actions we take. They're caused by our inactions failing to put time, money, or as you were alluding to mental energy into helping those who are facing extreme suffering." "We actually have this really incredible amount of power. We don't think that we do." "Occasionally when everyone is empowered to do something, like no one knows who's supposed to step up and do something, and you kind of get into this situation where you can be a victim of, let's say, the bystander effect." "There is a system for many things that does keep us in check about, keep us accountable for the things we do not do. And that would be in our legal system." "Part of the job of a leader, whether you're trying to run a business or a nonprofit or save the world, is you're trying to get people to care." "I don't know that we spend enough time on the design part and step back and go, well, how do we design an environment where we get the right behaviors psychologically."   These are the books mentioned in this episode   Resources Mentioned The Leadership Podcast | Sponsored by | Rafti Advisors. LLC | Self-Reliant Leadership. LLC | Nick Cooney Website | Nick Cooney X | Nick Cooney Facebook | Nick Cooney LinkedIn | Nick Cooney Instagram |  

I've been away for some time - why?

Anna Claussen, Ash Hanson and Matt Jorgenson are three innovative social entrepreneurs we met at the Old Salt Festival, who work at the intersection of art, culture and enterprise. They tell their stories of how they are uplifting the creativity of rural people and communities.

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on a good comrade of ours, Max Ajl (much overdue, we might add)!  Here, we get a primer on the agrarian question and discuss its importance to national liberation struggles globally!  Max is the perfect guest for this conversation, and we know you'll get a lot out of it. Max Ajl is is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment, a researcher on decolonization, post-colonial planning, Arab dependency theory and food sovereignty at Ghent University, and the author of the outstanding A People's Green New Deal.  You can follow Max on twitter @maxajl.  Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

With the onset of the 1920s, Bulgaria's firebrand Agrarian leader Alexander Stamboliiski rises to become the preeminent political power in the country. But with each new triumph the opposition steadily grows to his regime. Supporters like you make this podcast happen! Check out www.patreon.com/bulgarianhistorypodcast to see the great perks you can get for supporting us. You can find images for this episode at: www.bghistorypodcast.com/post/237-experiment-part-1