Dyslexia: cultural diversity and biological unity

The recognition of dyslexia as a neurodevelopmental disorder has been hampered by the belief that it is not a specific diagnostic entity because it has variable and culture-specific manifestations. In line with this belief, we found that Italian dyslexics, using a shallow orthography which facilitates reading, performed better on reading tasks than did English and French dyslexics. However, all dyslexics were equally impaired relative to their controls on reading and phonological tasks. Positron emission tomography scans during explicit and implicit reading showed the same reduced activity in a region of the left hemisphere in dyslexics from all three countries, with the maximum peak in the middle temporal gyrus and additional peaks in the inferior and superior temporal gyri and middle occipital gyrus. We conclude that there is a universal neurocognitive basis for dyslexia and that differences in reading performance among dyslexics of different countries are due to different orthographies.     

Once and future farming: Some meditations on the historical and cultural roots of sustainable agriculture in the United States

American agricultural history, literature, and thought reveal historical circumstances that have often been unfavorable to the development of a sustainable agriculture in the United States. Further critical examination of these historical and cultural roots reveals that sustainable agriculture is an evolving concept that can be traced to the tradition of agrarian idealism, scientific and organic agriculture, and the recent history of ecological ideas, beginning with the Dust Bowl and extending to the present.Carl D. Esbjornson received his Ph. D. in English, with an emphasis in American literature and culture, from the University of Iowa. He taught at the University of Iowa, Oklahoma State University, the University of South Dakota, and, for the last four years, as an assistant professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has published articles on Wendell Berry and on recent American poetry. He is now engaged in a more extended interdisciplinary study of sustainable agriculture. He now lives in Minnesota, working as an independent scholar, free-lance writer, and an advocate for sustainable agriculture.     

The cultural politics of the agroecological transition

Scholarly attention to sustainability transitions is rapidly increasing. This article explores how cultural politics constrain agricultural change. Cultural politics, or conflicting values about appropriate types of agriculture, are an underexplored variable influencing whether or not farmers adopt agroecological methods. The research focuses on the environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms that influence cultural politics. It analyzes the intersection of mechanisms and cultural politics in an Amazonian agrarian reform settlement of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Insights into the factors confounding the agroecological transition are derived from an analysis of longitudinal spatial data derived from historic aerial photographs and remotely sensed images, and ethnographic data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on a political ecology of education perspective, the cultural politics surrounding the agroecological transition are traced to the confluence of the region’s historical usage for cattle ranching (environmental mechanisms), farmer’s conceptions of space (cognitive mechanisms) and the combination of agricultural extension and government credit (relational mechanisms). The MST’s agroecological education initiatives hold the promise to drive the sustainability transition, but are also constrained by these cultural politics and associated mechanisms.     

Beyond agriculture: the counter-hegemony of community farming

In this paper we seek to understand the interplay between increasingly widely held concerns about the hegemony of industrialized agriculture and the emergence of counter-hegemonic activities, such as membership of community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives. Informed by Blackshaw’s (Leisure, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010) work on “liquid leisure,” we offer a new leisure-based conceptualization of the tactics of counter-hegemony, arguing in the process that food politics offers a rich site for new, transitional identity formation. Using a case study of a well-established community farm in southeast England, we demonstrate how the community members devote themselves to transient and inconsequential activities as a means of attempting to realize a larger self-related identity project. We also demonstrate how the seemingly close inter-personal bonds typical of CSA may not reflect the permanence accorded to them, with members able willingly to leave these communities once they can no longer progress their identity project. We conclude by arguing that our findings are emblematic of society in transition, with people moving well beyond the work/leisure activity into a world in which they embody the idea and the practice of being an active co-producer—in our case, of food. While recognizing that this does not necessarily mean that there is simple causality between practice and identity formation, we do argue that there is evidence of an increasing relationship between activity, time, and the performance of a new form of civil labor practice.     

生物资源产业化与农业产业化开发的异同性分析

文章讨论了生物资源、生物资源开发产业的基本内涵，在此基础上，分析了生物资源产业化与农业产业化之间的差异性和相似性。生物资源产业化和农业产业化经营是一个相互联系的统一体，生物资源产业化经营基本包含了农业产业化经营的特征，同样具备农业产业化的5项基本要素。生物资源产业化经营应该是农业产业化经营的扩展与延伸。两者的区别主要表现在：开发经营对象、生产基地建设、产品商品率、附加值、技术含量和产业链长短、缘起时间以及产品消费品质与消费群不同。     

The ghosts of taste: food and the cultural politics of authenticity

We add a political culture dimension to the debate over the politics of food. Central to food politics is the cultural granting of authenticity, experienced through the conjuring of relational presences of authorship. These presences derive from the faces and the places of relationality, what we term the ghosts of taste, by which food narratives articulate claims of the authorship of food by people and environments, and thus claim of authenticity. In this paper, we trace the often-conflicting presences of authenticating ghosts in food along a prominent axis of current debate: the local versus the global. The three cases outlined here—Greek food, Thousand Island dressing, and wild rice—illustrate the recovery and suppression of the lingering spirits of both local and global faces and places in what we taste, and show the mutually interdependent consequence of culture and economics in food politics.     

埃及农业概况与政策措施

埃及地处沙漠地带、地中海沿岸,尼罗河贯穿南北,国土面积100.2万km2,其中沙漠面积达90%以上,现已利用土地525万hm2,其中农田面积为327.6万hm2,人均占有农田面积520 m2.总人口6300多万,农业人口占56%,全国95%人口都集中在占国土面积5%的尼罗河两岸、苏伊士地峡区和沙漠中的少数绿洲上.     

挖掘城郊农业优势潜力,发展农业品牌经济

阐述了玉州区所处的地理位置及农业发展现状,发展品牌农业的必要性及意义。面对市场经济的挑战,针对创品牌存在的障碍,提出:关键是要围绕效益农业的发展,重视农业品牌的创建工作,把打造农业品牌作为农业产业化经营的环节来抓,制定一些切实可行的政策措施,以品牌促规模,以品牌拓市场,以品牌求效益。     

Conviction seeking efficacy: Sustainable agriculture and the politics of co-optation

Proponents of sustainable agriculture seek deeply rooted social changes, but to advance this agenda requires political credibility and work with diverse partners. Asthe literature on political co-optation makesclear, the tension between conviction andcredibility is persistent and unavoidable; nota problem to be solved so much as a built-incondition of movement politics. Drawing on acase history of California's largestsustainable agriculture organization, astructural assessment is made of the strategicchoices facing movement leaders, organizationaltensions that accompany these choices, andperceived gains and losses. The case historydemonstrates how movement leaders craft middlerange strategies that adapt to politicalcircumstances while retaining attachments tocore values and constituencies. Thesestrategies are ripe with tradeoffs, placingdemands on leaders who must implement them in aspirit that sustains organizational vitalitywhile broadening political and social impact.But they also enlarge the democraticsensibilities of movement leaders, increasingtheir ability to listen, learn, and forgealliances based on shared goals rather thansimilar motives.     

我国工业反哺农业的必然性及政策选择

工业反哺农业是我们党在新的历史条件下提出的解决“三农”问题、统筹城乡发展的重大举措。本文从国际发展经验和我国经济发展实际两个方面来分析这一方针提出的必然性,并从增加农业投入、加强制度建设、明确政府职责和提高工业生产效率四个方面提出了工业反哺农业的政策性建议。     

完善支农政策加快转移就业--关于农民种田是否有钱赚,农村劳动力为什么有剩余的调查报告

按照省政府＂三个一＂活动的要求,调查了党的惠农政策在农村落实的情况以及农民担心的问题,并对生产资料价格、惠农政策的延续性及农村剩余劳力的安置等农民关心的问题提出了建议.     

The influence of canadian forest fires on pollutant concentrations in the united states

High carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations from uncertain origins occurred episodically in the southeastern United States during the summer of 1995. We show that these episodes were caused by large forest fires in Canada. Over a period of 2 weeks, these natural emissions increased CO concentrations in the southeastern United States as well as along the eastern seaboard, a region with one of the world's highest rates of anthropogenic emissions. Within the forest fire plumes, there were also high concentrations of ozone, volatile organic compounds, and aerosols. These results suggest that the impact of boreal forest fire emissions on air quality in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, where anthropogenic pollutant sources have been considered predominant, needs to be reevaluated.     

The social life of the tortilla: Food, cultural politics, and contested commodification

Resurgent interest incommodities is linked to recent attempts toovercome the constraints posed by the binariesof economy/culture and production/consumption.Commodities and commodification represent acontentious convergence of economic, social,cultural, political, and moral concerns. Thisessay develops a conceptual framework forunderstanding this interconnectedness byexamining the relationship between commoditiesand our discourse, practices, and assumptionsabout food. We argue that the movement of afood artifact between local/global andglobal/local contexts is mediated by dynamicsof power and resistance that represent contestsof meaning regarding the criteria of that artifact's exchangeability. We apply thisframework to the case of the tortilla, tracingits social life through an historical accountof its transformation from the staple food ofthe Mayan and Aztec people to its introductionas a fast food component of the diets of21st century Americans. This exampledemonstrates that food provides a powerful lensthrough which to trace and illustrate theinterconnectedness between material andsymbolic exchanges around the world that arecommonly associated with globalization.     

生物技术在农业中的应用

利用植物基因工程技术,改良作物蛋白质成分,提高作物中必需的氨基酸含量,培育抗病毒、抗虫害、抗除草剂的工程植株以及抗盐、抗旱等抗逆境植物,在当前农业生产中已显示出巨大的作用,并展示了生物技术在未来农业生产应用中的广阔前景。     

Values and policy conflict in West German agriculture

Family farming became a major social force in the Federal Republic following World War II. Several political, economic and social factors facilitated the development of a unified political representation within the farm sector. The German Farmers Union (Deutscher Bauernverband) became the main representative of the farm sector. Its platform included the preservation of family farms and it attempted to realize this goal through the promotion of commodity price support policies. Political support for these programs was legitimized with the elaboration of a system of values espousing the positive qualities of family farms. Price support policies were opposed by free market advocates with an alternative system of values that fundamentally contradicted those of family farm advocates. Although commodity price supports promoted by partisans of family farming dominated agricultural policy formation in the 1950s and 1960s, fiscal crisis in the EEC and economic differentation within the farm sector began to undermine the position of family farming as a social force. But economic stagnation also prevented the free market position from gaining dominance. Economic differentiation within the farm sector has had an important regional dimension, and this has served as a basis for policy compromise. Economic changes over the post-WWII period have undermined the family farm as a social force. Nevertheless, values associated with family farming continue to have a place in agricultural policy. However, family farming is valued less as an end in itself, and more as a means to the realization of more practical ends such as the preservation of rural landscapes for recreational purposes.     

Reconsidering diversity in agriculture and food systems: An ecofeminist approach

The concept of diversity is at the center of environmental and social movements. This paper discusses four aspects of diversity related to agriculture: biological, social, cultural, and product and suggests that viewing diversity solely as difference skirts the issues of redistribution of power and shifting social relations. Ecofeminist conceptions of diversity are discussed with a focus on seeds, forests, and sustainable agriculture. Women's activities at the grassroots level provides new insights and pathways to diversity that combine social, agricultural, and biological issues.     

Alternatives, traditions, and diversity in agriculture

This review essay examines several recentbooks about agriculture, including two books on thelinks between cultural and biological diversity intraditional agriculture, two books on the US farmcrisis, and a collected volume examining globalaspects of agricultural restructuring andsustainability. Finally, a history of ``alternative'agriculture provides a framework for thinking aboutthe ways the different cases shed light on the complexrelations between tradition and innovation inagriculture. A historical perspective highlights theextent to which ``alternative' is a relative term. Themonocrop, ``factory' mode that dominate US agriculturetoday certainly differs from what has characterizedfarming for most of history and in most of the world.Small-scale, more or less organic, diversified farms,which appear so ``alternative' in the present context,have until lately counted as the norm, here andelsewhere. These books also highlight both the dangersof the currently dominant industrial agriculture andthe potential for genuine alternatives.