While we are currently experiencing a renaissance in philosophical work on agriculture and food ( Barnhill, Budolfson, & Doggett 2016 ; Thompson 2015 ; Kaplan 2012 ), these topics were common sources of discussion throughout the three-thousand-year history of Western thought. For example, the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (2014 ) explored connections between fulfi lling human promise and systems of agriculture ( Thompson & Noll 2015 ) and Hippocrates (1923 ) stressed the importance of cultivating agricultural products provided (...) by nature ( Zwart 2000 ). In order to live a truly human life, Hippocrates argued, one must not passively consume crude food products, as such brutish living leads to terrible suffering. Later, both the Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels provided clear ethical mandates concerning agricultural practices and the consumption of food. These mandates or ethics needed to be observed regardless of context ( Zwart 2000 ). More recently, Thomas Jefferson added to this literature, as he engaged in agricultural production at his Monticello plantation and wrote extensively on how farming is intimately connected to the political system of democracy ( Thompson & Noll 2015 ). This refl ection on food and agriculture continued into the 20th century, albeit not in the discipline of philosophy. Scientists and agricultural leaders, such as Henry Wallace and Liberty Hyde Bailey, provided important critiques of agricultural practices contemporary to their time. (shrink)

Agricultural biotechnology has long been criticized from an environmental justice perspective. However, an analysis, using golden rice as a case study, shows that golden rice is not susceptible to the main criticisms that are appropriate when directed at most products of agricultural biotechnology, and that golden rice has important humanitarian potential. For these reasons, an environmental justice evaluation of golden rice may need to be more nuanced and complex than a more traditional environmental ethics can provide. Study of the complexity (...) of this issue may pay off in a more effective environmentalism on its own terms. (shrink)

In this thought provoking work Thomas DeGregori presents the uncommon premise that technology is a human endeavour and a positive force that defines our humanity. Examining a number of revolutionary technological advances in this century, especially those in the agricultural areas, the author debunks common conventional wisdom that would dictate otherwise. For instance, the use of chemicals, including DDT and other pesticides, id often maligned as damaging the environment and the quality of life. Dr DeGregori counters this argument with documentation (...) that demonstrates how use of these chemicals has actually increased life span. Agriculture and Modern Technology will prompt readers to re-examine current popular belief in technology. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a transpacific dialog on the role of agriculture and food, especially within traditions of Chinese and Japanese philosophy and social thought.

In “Farming Made Her Stupid,” Lisa Heldke suggests that those who inhabit the metrocentric position participate in the marginalization of rural people and farmers through a process of “stupidification.” Rural people and farmers become “stupid,” a status that, on Heldke’s account, is worse than ignorant because “stupid people” are thought to be constitutionally incapable of knowing the right sorts of things because they know the wrong sorts of things . It seems reasonable, I suggest in this paper, to think that (...) contemporary urban agriculture movements can serve to mitigate the harms which Heldke argues arise from practices of stupidification. However, I argue that, insofar as such movements rely on and perpetuate the image of the Idyllic Farmer—an image constituted by early, romantic versions of agrarianism—they cannot serve this function. This is because the Idyllic Farmer, which is to agricultural ethics as the Ecological Indian is to environmental ethics, is both descriptively and prescriptively problematic. As such, any urban agricultural movement that takes this image as its guide—which, I argue, some important elements of the movement do—will not help to undermine stupidification and the harms it causes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

This chapter contains sections titled: Health and Environment Topsoil Erosion Monocrops Global Trade Genetically Modified Food Animals.

Portland, Oregon enjoys a growing reputation as a beacon of urban sustainability. Its modern planning history has seen effectve efforts to curb urban sprawl and introduce a comprehensive mass transit system. More recently, the city has also become a hub for a “makers” movement involving a plethora of local, small-scale craft production. Within this context, Portland is also home to a thriving urban agriculture scene, featuring community gardens, community-assisted agriculture, farmers’ markets, food co-ops, and various farm-based education and (...) outreach programs. While recent case studies of Portland insist that the social sustainability case made for urban agriculture (UA) remains open, this position is arguably unwarranted and lacks an adequate grasp of the critical urban geography perspective developed in the work of David Harvey and Neil Smith. Following the lead of what Chiara Tornaghi calls “the critical geography of urban agriculture,” Portland’s urban agriculture should, on the whole, be seen as an adjunct to rather than a resistance movement against advanced neo­liberal urban governance. (shrink)

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for the University of Idaho Press Explores contemporary social criticism of agriculture by analyzing assumptions regarding matters such as animal welfare, biotechnology, ethics and human nature. Dr. Lehman carefully investigates the various meanings and criteria of "rational" without presupposing prior knowledge of philosophy, making the material accessible to students, agriculture scientists, and members of the public concerned with agriculture.

Ghana is aware of women farmers’ climate adaptation challenges in meeting the country’s food security needs and has strong intentions to support these women, but is stymied by economic limitations, poor organization in governance, persistent social gender biases, and either little or counter-productive support from international policy makers and advisory bodies. Focal issues are the global impacts of climate change on agriculture, Africa’s growing hunger crisis, and women’s contribution to food production in Ghana. Of special importance are the issues (...) of gender-inclusiveness and gender-sensitivity of Ghana’s climate and climate-related policies, including its integration of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change policy, as well as the influence of international economic policy on Ghana’s gender development. Because women farmers provide the majority of the country’s national food-basket, Ghana should focus on building women subsistence farmers’ adaptation needs to avert mass starvation. People should understand that starvation in Africa is not a future event but is already underway. (shrink)

Theological literacy is an important asset in the development of a comprehensive agricultural ethic and philosophy. Four areas are delimited in which theological reflection is relevant for agricultural study.

The Correctional Service of Canada is currently re-instituting animal-based agribusiness programs in two federal penitentiaries. To situate the contemporary function of such programs, I provide a historical overview of prison agriculture in relation to Canadian nation-making. I argue that penitentiary farms have functioned as a means of prison expansion and settler territorialisation. While support for agricultural programming is rooted in its perceived facilitation of rehabilitation and vocational training, I show that these justifications are untenable. Rather the prison farm ought (...) to be viewed as an institution made possible by and that reproduces, settler colonial power relations to animals, labour, and territory. Prison agribusiness is then an expression of colonial, agricultural, and carceral powers. (shrink)

Roman agriculture suffered traumatic changes during the 2nd century B.C. The traditional farmers who tilled their few acres and served family, gods and community were being squeezed out by large estate owners using slaves for investment farming. Politicians, scholars and poets tried to revive the ancestoral rustic life.In 133 B.C. the Gracchi legislated land reform to relieve the distress of the farmer soldiers who had won the empire. Although their efforts led to political confrontation that deteriorated into civil war, (...) programs for the traditional farm became a permanent part of government policy from the late Republic until the end of the empire in 476 A.D.Scholars and poets made a contribution to the revival of agriculture with knowledge for improving the farm and by encouraging an agrarian mentality. The agricultural manuals (e.g. Cato (c. 150 B.C.), Varro (c. 50 B.C), and Columella (c.65 A.D.), defined the nature of the desirable farm and gave practical advice. Profit was the goal, but good farming practices made for pleasure and virtue as well. The image of the ancestoral farmer was perpetuated as was the notion that farming was the only honorable and respectable occupation for a Roman gentleman.In the Augustan Age (34 B.C.—14 A.D.) poets were encouraged by the government to adopted a rustic theme in hopes it would stimulate a return to the land and aid in the rebirth of Rome and Romans. In the GeorgicsVirgil begins with the practical details of farming, but uses myth and philosophy to explore the nature and meaning of life. He admits that Jove made life perilous. But Jove also gave man the art of agriculture and with hard work man could know the pleasure of a simple, virtuous, productive life.Horace directed his poetry against the allure of city life and in praise of rustic living. Epicureanism and Stoicism, in the guise of life on the farm, could show that although fate was unpredictable, the world was orderly and, if one recognized and accepted its limits, one could make a garden of the world and live a simple but happy life.By 300 A.D. Rome missed the peasant-farmer-soldier and by the 470's life had returned to an agrarian condition. Bishop Sidonius, trying to furnish meaning and perspective for the emerging new age, resorted to the Roman agricultural traditions still cherished as that world disappeared. (shrink)

Since agriculture constitutes what is probably humankind’s most extensive and prolonged engagement with the natural world, the scant attention paid to it in much of the environmental ethics literature represents something of a paradox. This paper is an attempt to address that paradox. First we offer some explanations for this neglect, tracing it to some key features of environmental ethics as it is currently practised. Then we identify some hopeful signs that things are changing in a direction that is (...) more conducive to the inclusion of the issues raised by agriculture. Finally we offer a synthesis of these hopeful signs, incorporating a suggestion as to what it is that they all have in common. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Agriculture, in the ubiquitous debate concerning the environment, is often accused of being environmentally destructive as if farmers are waging a war on nature. The article discusses the role of aggression, competition and killing in agriculture and concludes that those warlike characteristics are a necessary part of agricultural practice. The article stresses, however, that agriculture is not literally a war on nature and points to a number of unwarlike characteristics that also belong to agriculture.

Comprising almost a third of greenhouse gas emissions and having an equally prominent role in pollution of soils, fresh water, coastal ecosystems, and food chains in general, agriculture is, alongside industry and electricity/heat production, one of the three biggest anthropogenic causes of breaching the planetary boundaries. Most of the problems in agriculture, like soil degradation and diminishing biodiversity, are caused by unfit uses of existing technologies and approaches mimicking the agriculturally-relevant functioning natural ecosystems seem necessary for appropriate organization (...) of our toxic and entropic agro-technologies. Our thesis is that eco-curative and sustainable uses of agro-technology require a paradigm shift from the chemical model of agro-systems to the ecological system-design model of agriculture. Particularly, following the new biomimetic paradigm of ecological innovation, we question in what sense can we mimic natural solutions in agriculture. We discern among Integrated agriculture and Permaculture, analyze their biomimetic status from the perspective of the philosophy of biomimicry, and argue that the former nature-mentored approach is a more appropriate solution for sustainable broadscale agriculture necessary for the growing world. However, it is not clear how this agricultural bio-integration will interact with the predicted automatization of work, urban demographic momentum, and the Earth system instability, and can the Permaculture alternative emerge as a social safety-net for the anticipated technologically-redundant or economically or environmentally endangered workers. We argue both for the importance to understand Permaculture as a social safety-net and as experimental testing ground for cutting edge biomimetic technologies. (shrink)

As the primary ingredient in gunpowder, saltpeter was an extraordinarily important commodity in the early modern world. Historians of science and technology have long studied its military applications but have rarely focused on its uses outside of warfare. Due to its potential effectiveness as a fertilizer, saltpeter was also an integral component of experimental agricultural reform movements in the early modern period and particularly in seventeenth-century England. This became possible for several reasons: the creation of a thriving domestic saltpeter production (...) industry in the second half of the sixteenth century; the development of vitalist alchemical theories that sought a unified explanation for the “growth” of minerals, metals, and plants; the rise of experimental natural philosophy; and the mid-seventeenth-century dominance of the English East India Company in the saltpeter trade, which allowed agricultural reformers to repurpose domestically produced saltpeter in agriculturally productive ways. This paper argues that the Hartlib Circle – a loose network of natural philosophers and social reformers – adopted vitalist matter theories and the practical, experimental techniques of alchemists to transform agriculture into a more productive enterprise. Though their grandiose plans never came to fruition, their experimental trials to develop artificial fertilizers played an early role in the origins and development of saline chemistry, agronomy, and the British Agricultural Revolution. (shrink)

In recent decades, the governance of food safety, food quality, on-farm environmental management and animal welfare has been shifting from the realm of ‘the government’ to that of the private sector. Corporate entities, especially the large supermarkets, have responded to neoliberal forms of governance and the resultant ‘hollowed-out’ state by instituting private standards for food, backed by processes of certification and policed through systems of third party auditing. Today’s food regime is one in which supermarkets impose ‘private standards’ along the (...) food supply chain to ensure compliance with a range of food safety goals—often above and beyond those prescribed by government. By examining regulatory governance in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom we highlight emerging trajectories of food governance. We argue that the imposition of the new private forms of monitoring and compliance continue the project of agricultural restructuring that began with government support for structural adjustment schemes in agriculture and that these are most evident in the UK and Australia where neoliberalism is an entrenched philosophy. However, despite Norway’s identity as a social democracy, we also identify neoliberal ‘creep’ into the system of food governance. Small-scale producers in all three nations are finding themselves increasingly subject to governance through private, market-based mechanisms that, to varying degrees, are dominated by major supermarket chains. The result is agricultural restructuring not through the traditional avenues of elected governments, but via non-elected market operatives. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger notoriously linked industrial agriculture and the Holocaust in a lecture given at Bremen while he was still banned from teaching under denazification measures. What has largely been overlooked is that Derrida also compared the two: in 1997, in an address given at the third Cerisy conference devoted his work. This apparent repetition will be understood within the broader framework of his reading of Heidegger and, in particular, with what the latter says concerning technology. It will be argued (...) that while Derrida views industrial agriculture as a series of technical issues, each demanding of particular attention, Heidegger sees its only as an instance of Technik. Most significantly, while the latter’s philosophy offers no resources for treating it as demanding an ethical response, for Derrida our relation to animals should be guided by compassion. (shrink)

Every year, the US government pays farmers billions of dollars not to grow anything. Especially within urban constituencies, politically and geographically distant from food production centers, these decoupled agriculture subsidies may seem to be unjust uses for public tax dollars. But can any argument be given in favor of such payments? I argue the affirmative by linking decoupled agricultural subsidies to the solution of pressing moral issues: obesity and food deserts. First, I argue that decoupled subsidies offer growers the (...) economic freedom to try to grow fruits and vegetables, and to develop their capacities growing such foods. Such changes to which crops are produced is essential to augmenting availability of fresh produce and thereby addressing food deserts and obesity. Second, I argue that because food deserts and obesity are actually byproducts of our agriculture and food distribution system, we have a social obligation to adopt policies like decoupled agricultural subsidies to resolve them. The essay closes with considerations about four objections, and my responses to them. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, activists, farmers and scholars have been arguing that the industrialized global food system erodes democracy, perpetuates injustices, undermines population health and is environmentally unsustainable. In an attempt to resist these effects, activists have proposed alternative food networks that draw on ideas and practices from pre-industrial agrarian smallholder farming, as well as contemporary peasant movements. -/- This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault’s method of genealogy as a practice of critique and historical problematization of the (...) present to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses. While alternative food activists appeal to food sovereignty and agrarian discourses to counter the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies, these discourses remain entangled with colonial logics. In particular, the influence of Enlightenment ideas of improvement, colonial practices of agriculture as a means to establish ownership, and anthropocentric relations to the land. In combination with the genealogical analysis, this book brings continental political philosophy into conversation with Indigenous theories of sovereignty and alternative food discourse in order to open new spaces for thinking about food and politics in contemporary Australia. (shrink)

The concept of stewardship as resource development and conservation, a shallow environmental ethic, arises out of a domination framework. Stewardship as earthkeeping arises out of a keeping framework and falls somewhere between an intermediate and deep environmental ethic. A notion of agricultural stewardship, based on earthkeeping principles, can be used as a normative standard by whichto judge a range of agricultural economies and practices.

This article returns to an old but not hitherto satisfactorily solved question, and aims at putting forward a new approach to the study of the sources and authorship of two contemporary treatises on agriculture: the Nabatean Agriculture and the Geoponica. Each of them embodies a long tradition reaching from Antiquity to the 10th century in two different cultural provinces expressed in Greek / Latin and Arabic languages. But there is another common feature of these works. Both of them (...) survived in a significant number of manuscripts, and constitute a kind of revision of previous compilations which drew their contents from more ancient treatises brought to light between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, and to some extent could be qualified as the outcome of an effort for systematising the corpus of agronomical science. Texts and translations from Greek to Latin, from Greek to Syriac or to Arabic, and from Arabic to Armenian attest to this cultural intercommunication. (shrink)

The Disenhancement Problem in Agriculture: A Reply to Thompson Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0138-2 Authors Soraj Hongladarom, Department of Philosophy and Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757.

We introduce a novel form of experimental knowledge that is the result of institutionally structured communication practices between farmers and university- and local community-based agronomists (agricultural extension specialists). This form of knowledge is exemplified in these communities’ uses of the concept of grower standard. Grower standard is a widely used but seldom discussed benchmark concept underpinning protocols used within agricultural experiments. It is not a one-size-fits-all standard but the product of local and active interactions between farmers and agricultural extension specialists. (...) Grower standard is in some ways similar to more familiar epistemic objects discussed in philosophy of experiment, such as controls or background conditions. However, we argue that grower standard is epistemically novel, due to how knowledge arising from it is coproduced by farmers and agricultural extension specialists. Further, in the United States, this knowledge coproduction is institutionally structured by federal legislature dating back to the 19th century. We use our analysis of grower standard to focus a discussion of the positionality of the coproducers as well as the epistemic products of this form of knowledge coproduction, and we explore the role extension work plays in shaping agricultural science more broadly. (shrink)

Agriculture is defined normatively and, as such, is an area of research and practice where values are an inextricable constituent of research, where facts and values elide, and normative constraints generate new ethical categories. While discussions of normativity are part and parcel within agricultural ethics and play a prominent role in ethical discussions, I suggest that other areas of agricultural philosophy such as agricultural metaphysics or ontologies present valuable case studies for philosophical discussion. A series of case studies (...) focusing on how products are classified, graded, and measured illustrate conceptions of existence, causal relationships, and practice-oriented notions of category-making distinctive of agricultural practice. The first of these case studies shines a light on the process of knowledge integration in agriculture. I show how innovative integration, a process discussed within socially sustainable egg production, is an ineliminably normative process. The second case study, and the main focus of the chapter, concerns the normative role of agricultural standards. I discuss how standards and classes in use within egg production systems and the development and measuring techniques make AA eggs and transformed a highly toxic oilseed rape (used as a machine lubricant) into the non-toxic food-grade agricultural commodity, canola. I contend agricultural products like eggs, peanut butter, and canola oil are constituted by prescribed standards (like AA eggs and double-zero canola) that define not only the product, but also the activities related to its production and the practices that producers perform. Because standards and standardization define the categories of not only agricultural products but also agricultural practices, I suggest standards and standardization are best understood as “ontologizing activities.”. (shrink)

This open access book provides the first systematic overview of existing challenges and opportunities for responsible data linkage, and a cutting-edge assessment of which steps need to be taken to ensure that plant data are ethically shared and used for the benefit of ensuring global food security – one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The volume focuses on the contemporary contours of such challenges through sustained engagement with current and historical initiatives and discussion of best practices and prospective future (...) directions for ensuring responsible plant data linkage. The volume is divided into four sections that include case studies of plant data use and linkage in the context of particular research projects, breeding programs, and historical research. It address technical challenges of data linkage in developing key tools, standards and infrastructures, and examines governance challenges of data linkage in relation to socioeconomic and environmental research and data collection. Finally, the last section addresses issues raised by new data production and linkage methods for the inclusion of agriculture’s diverse stakeholders. This book brings together leading experts in data curation, data governance and data studies from a variety of fields, including data science, plant science, agricultural research, science policy, data ethics and the philosophy, history and social studies of plant science. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief comparative overview of the development of the reproductive sciences especially in agriculture in the UK and the US. It begins with the establishment by F. H. A. Marshall in 1910 of the boundaries that framed the reproductive sciences as distinct from genetics and embryology. It then examines how and where the reproductive sciences were taken up in agricultural research settings, focusing on the differential development of US and UK institutions. The reproductive sciences were also (...) pursued in medical and biological settings, and I discuss how the intersections among all three allowed the circulation of both ideas and scientists’ careers. Across the twentieth century, scientific leadership in the reproductive sciences alternated between the UK and US, and these patterns are elucidated. I conclude with thoughts on future research that might emphasize the elaboration of industrialization processes in agriculture and new capacities to transform both reproductive processes and their products—life itself—as biopower comes to be more ambitiously understood as extending across all species. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Right presents us with a vision of bureaucratic paternalism that is designed to check the excesses of free markets set in motion by the triumph of natural-law thinking, which abstracted the principles of private property and subjective freedom from the institutions that had tamed them and situated them in a stable context. Against these excesses Hegel pits the agricultural estate, which has not succumbed to natural-law thinking; and a “universal estate” of bureaucrats who are educated in (...) Hegel’s philosophy itself, freeing them of the natural-law conflation of human needs with arbitrary and endlessly expanding preferences. Taught by Hegel to look after the needs of the organic whole that is society rather than the gratification of their own preferences, the task of the bureaucrats of the universal estate is to curb the tendency of free markets to produce the social preconditions for an alienated “rabble” to bring down the system. (shrink)

The U.S. agricultural research establishment has been severely criticized by biological and physical scientists, humanists, and various activist groups. The scientists have criticized concentration on short-run problems to the neglect of basic hard science research. The humanists have criticized agricultural researchers for failing to give adequate attention to such basic values as equity, the value of family farms, environmental values, etc.Closely related to the humanists' criticisms are those of activists who have railed against (1) an alleged alliance between big agribusinesses, (...) the agricultural research establishment, and large farmers, (2) multinational corporations, (3) alleged premature development of labor-saving technology in order to dispossess small farmers and eliminate jobs for farm laborers, and (4) the creation of technology unduly emphasizing fertilizers, pesticides, and fuels derived from exhaustible fossil energy. These activists' criticisms have been offset, in part, by activists who support the status quo.This paper demonstrates that logical positivism mitigates against the objective research of intrinsic (as opposed to exchange) values needed to satisfy such criticisms. Attention is given to the advantages of placing greater reliance on pragmatism and various forms of normativism. These philosophies have distinct advantages as guides for structuring and understanding the problem-solving and issue-oriented research that the land-grant colleges of agriculture are uniquely qualified to conduct. Such practical problems and issues will be numerous as we expand land use 50 to 100 million acres, double yields, and intensify land use in the next 50 years. (shrink)

In present day’s sustainable agriculture is relatively a new area which required more attention by scientist/researchers and this one treated as basic need of human survival. In past decades, sustainable agriculture meets environmental and economic goals simultaneously, that’s why this field has received widespread interest. Green Chemistry is described as the ‘‘design of chemical products and processes to eliminate or reduce the use and generation of hazardous substances. Green chemistry mainly based on 12 principles and plays a very (...) important role in environmental protection. For human development sustainable agriculture and green chemistry both are essential. This article discussed 12 proposed principles of sustainable agriculture inspired by existing 12 principles of Green Chemistry. (shrink)

Martin Calkins proposes the “combined use of casuistry and virtue ethics as a way for both sides to move ahead on [the] pressing issue [of agricultural biotechnology].” However, his defense of this methodology relies on a set of mistaken, albeit familiar, claims regarding the normative resources of virtue ethics: (1) virtue ethics is egoistic; (2) virtue ethics cannot defend any particular account of the virtues as the objectively correct ones and is therefore inextricably relativistic; (3) virtue ethics cannot supply a (...) procedure for providing practical or policy guidance in concrete situations; and (4) virtue ethics cannot adequately account for the possibility of conflicting or partial virtues. After a brief overview of the basic structure of virtue ethics, I take up each of these misconceptions in turn. I conclude with some comments on the implications of these considerations for Calkins’s proposed methodology for addressing theissue of agricultural biotechnology. (shrink)

While cloning, stem cells, and regenerative medicine are often imagined in a futurial idiom—as expectations, hype, hope and promises—this article approaches the remaking of genealogy in such contexts from a historical route. Through a series of somewhat disparate historical connections linking Australian sheep to the development of clinical IVF and the cloning of Dolly at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996, this article explores the linkages through which agriculture, embryology, and reproductive biomedicine are thickly intertwined. Key to this (...) examination is not only the history of experimental sheep breeding, and its somewhat unexpectedly genealogical connections to national identity , but also the re-emergence of a distinctive frontier ethos in the context of assisted conception, and later human embryonic stem cell derivation. I have set this scene of genealogical interconnection against the criss-crossing traffic between Britain and Australia, and the wool trade, to emphasise the importance of global, as well as local, connections in the bloodlines of animals such as Dolly. In sum, this article examines the idea of the ‘biological frontier’ by exploring its histories as a means to offset the assumption that this frequently encountered idiom describes a future that is, or must be, by definition, unknown and unknowable. (shrink)

There is a gap between the methods and techniques discussed in planning and management literature, and practitioners’ experiences of agricultural research and extension. This gap is attributable to the fact that outcomes of research and extension (R&E) initiatives are shaped by the interactions of contending coalitions that form around issues or approaches and promote or oppose them. This framework is used to elucidate the development of technologies and methodologies in the past. Implications are drawn for future planning and management, based (...) on seeing the use of methods and techniques in terms of the broader social and political contexts of research and development. (shrink)

Germline gene editing has many applications or uses. This article focuses on specific applications. Specifically, the article draws on a moral norm arising from the thinking about the value of communal relationships in the Afro-communitarian _ubuntu_ philosophy to interrogate key issues that specific applications of germline gene editing – for xeno-transplantation, agriculture and wildlife – raise. The article contends that the application of germline gene editing in these areas is justified to the extent that they foster the capacity (...) to relate with others and to be communed with by others. The article grants that our today’s decisions about germline gene editing will likely affect future humans, but will attempt to justify how this may be ethically permissible. (shrink)