essential readings, classic and new 

BOOKS

Max Arax, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California (New York: Vintage Press, 2020)

Max Arax, Rick Wartzman, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (New York: PublicAffairs Press, 2003)

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (New York: Avon Books, 1978)

David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010)

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Mariner Books, 1962)

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991)

Pete Daniel, Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2005)

Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Earthworms with Observations on their Habits (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896)

Alex de Waal, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Starvation (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Press, 2018)

Frederick Errington, Fuzikura Tatsuro, and Deborah Gewertz, The Noodle Narratives: The Global Rise of an Industrial Food into the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)

Gustavo Esteva, The Struggle for Rural Mexico, (South Hadley MA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1983)

Gustavo Esteva and Catherine Marielle, Sin maíz, no hay país, (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2007)

Alan Guebert and Mary Grace Foxwell, The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015)

Jonathan Fox, Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Picador Press, 2018)

Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1978)

Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)

Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)

Julie Guthman, Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019)

Richard Hazlett, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Agriculture and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, updated edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret Keck, Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Sir Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (New York: The Devin Adair Company, 1947)

Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (New York: Avery Press, 2012)

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press 1968)

Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1998)

Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little Brown, 1944)

James McWilliams, Eating Promiscuously: Adventures in the Future of Food (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2017)

James McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Eat Truly Sustainably, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2010)

Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of Peruvian Land Reform (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)

Peter McCoy, Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing and Working with Mushrooms (Portland, OR: Chthaeus Press, 2016)

Eleanor Melville, A Plague of Sheep (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Char Miller, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993)

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Press, 1985)

David Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

David Montgomery and Anne Biklé, The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016)

Enrique Ochoa, Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food in Mexico since 1910 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)

Tim Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)

Miriam Pawel, The Union of their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009)

MIriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014)

Stephen Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1995)

Brinda Sarathy, Pineros: Latino Labor and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012)

Brinda Sarathy, Vivien Hamilton, Janet Farrell Brodie, Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)

James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)

Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World (Emeryville, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2005)

Kendall Thu and E. Paul Durenburger, Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)

Heather Williams, Planting Trouble: The Barzón Debtors’ Movement in Mexico (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies Press, 1996)

Duff Wilson, Fateful Harvest: The Trust Story of a Small Town, A Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret (New York: Harper Collins,, 2001)

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)

Wendy Wolford, This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press 2010)

Donald Worster, Dust Bowl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)

Angus Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Berkeley: Food First Books, 2003)

Samuel Yamashita, Hawai’i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai’i Eats (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019)

ARTICLES AND REPORTS

Hunt Allcott et al., “The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices across the United States,” Working Paper 3631, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Ronald Amundson et al, “Soil and Human Security in the 21st Century,” Science 348 (May 8, 2015), 6235, 1261071

Zygmunt Bauman, “Excess: An Obituary,” parallax 7 (2001), no. 1, 85–91 [link]

Norman Borlaug, “Ending World Hunger,” Plant Physiology, October 2000, Vol. 124, pp. 487–490

Alexander Cockburn, “A Short, Meat-Oriented History of the World. From Eden to the Mattole,” New Left Review 215, no. 1, 16-42

Craig Cox et al., Losing Ground (2011), Environmental Working Group [link]

Timothy Crews et al., “Is the future of agriculture perennial? Imperatives and opportunities to reinvent agriculture by shifting from annual monocultures to perennial polycultures,” Global Sustainability 1, (2018) e11,1–18 [link]

Jonathan Fox and Libby Haight, eds., Subsidizing Inequality: Mexican Corn Policy Since NAFTA, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars/CIDE/UC Santa Cruz, 2010 [link]

McFadyen and Rober VogelDoran, “The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,” OXFAM (2009) [link]

Marc Edelman et al., “Introduction: critical perspectives on food sovereignty,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (2014), no. 6, 911-931

Elizabeth Guillette et al. “An Anthropological Approach to the Evaluation of Preschool Children Exposed to Pesticides in Mexico,” Environmental Health Perspectives, 106 (6): 1998

Claudia Korol, “Land for the Women Who Work It: Struggles in Latin America,” GRAIN, October 17, 2016 [link]

Wes Jackson et al., “Transforming Human Life on Our Home Planet, Perennially,” The Ecological Citizen, Vol 2 (2018), no. 1, 43-46

Michael Pollan, “Naturally,” The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2001 [link]

Michael Pollan, “Power Steer,” The New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2002 [link]

Jacqueline Solway, “Drought as a ‘Revelatory Crisis’: An Exploration of Shifting Entitlements and Hierarchies in the Kalahari, Botswana,” Development and Change 25 (1994) 471-495

Leslie Touzeau, “‘Being stewards of land is our legacy’: Exploring the lived experiences of young black farmers,” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 8 (2019), no. 4, 45-60 [link]

Angus Wright, "Downslope and North: How Soil Degradation and Synthetic Pesticides Drove the Trajectory of Mexican Agriculture through the Twentieth Century" in Christopher R. Boyer, ed. A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2012, pp. 22-49

Eduardo Zattara and Marcelo Aizen, “Worldwide Occurrence Records Suggest a Global Decline in Bee Species Richness,” One Earth 4 (2021), January 22, 114-123 [linkhttps://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(20)30651-5]