One Book 2023-2024: Environmental Justice & No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

Agricultural & Food Justice

Featured Resources by Source Type: Agricultural Justice

Featured Organizations & Online Resources

Community to Community
"We strive for Food Sovereignty: the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems."
Global Issues: Food Security - Peace Corps
Hunger & Food Security Programs - USDA
From the National Institute of Food and Agriculture - find resources, articles, and a list of food assistance programs and other data.
Pesticide Exposure
From the National Environmental Public Health Tracking at the CDC, find information about the pesticide Exposure, as well as statistics and other collected data
Traditional Foodways of Native America: Oral Histories of Native Food Revitalization
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
"The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters."
United Nations Food Security
One of many United Nations programs devoted to global food security and the food security crisis

Featured Articles

Use the links below to find articles from different publication types.

Reference Articles

These background or overview articles are useful for defining and understanding the history and key concepts of a topic. They come from subject-specific books and reports and aim to help you understand the basics. Find more articles like these in the databases Gale Ebooks, Opposing Viewpoints, or CQ Researcher.

Agricultural Ethics A 2015 article from Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: A Global Resource
Farmworkers: Toxicity as an Occupational Hazard from Encyclopedia of Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada: Seeking Justice and Sustainability, 2020
Food Security "Can the global decline be reversed?" A 2021 report from CQ Researcher
Climate Change and Agriculture: Impacts, Adoption, and Mitigation A chapter from the ebook, Climate Change and Environmental Concerns: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice
Famine from Global Warming 2016, Encyclopedia of Climate Change

Popular Source Articles

These kinds of articles are from mainstream publications like the "Washington Post," "The Atlantic," or other publications aimed at the general public., as well as a wide variety of websites, both commercial, educational, and governmental. Find more sources like this in Academic Search Complete, ProQuest Combined, or Science In Context.

Food and Climate Change: Healthy Diets for a Healthier Planet
An article from Climate Action at the UN that talks about the impact of climate change on food production
How a Cup of Nettle Tea Taught Me How To Live Well and Remember the Past
Valerie Segrest, Yes Magazine. 2013
Tribes Look to Expand Cultural Burning to Restore Traditional Practices and Address Catastrophic Wildfire Threats
Tackling the Global Food Crisis
New Scientist. 5/28/2022

Scholarly Articles

Scholarly journal articles are written by scholars/experts/researchers for others in their field with the aim of sharing, reviewing, and building new information. These publications can give us insight into the ways that environmental justice topics are being studied at a research-based, academic levels. Find more articles like these in ProQuest Combined, Agricola, OR Global Issues in Context.

Climate Change and the Urgency to Transform Food Systems Science. 6/24/2022. Without rapid changes to agriculture and food systems, the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change will not be met. Food systems are one of the most important contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but they also need to be adapted to cope with climate change impacts. Although many options exist to reduce GHG emissions in the food system, efforts to develop implementable transformation pathways are hampered by a combination of structural challenges such as fragmented decision-making, vested interests, and power imbalances in the climate policy and food communities, all of which are compounded by a lack of joint vision. New processes and governance arrangements are urgently needed for dealing with potential trade-offs among mitigation options and their food security implications.
Dealing with Climate Change on Small Islands: Towards Effective and Sustainable Adaptation?Managing Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific Region
Oceania. Mar2021.
Food Justice, Intersectional Agriculture, and the Triple Food Movement Agriculture and human values, 2019. Emerging as an intersectional response to social inequalities perpetuated by the mainstream food movement in the United States, the food justice movement is being used by marginalized communities to address their food needs. This movement relies on an emancipatory discourse, illustrated by what I term intersectional agriculture. In many respects, the mainstream food movement reflects contention between marketization (corporate agriculture) and social protectionist (local food) discourses, while the role of food justice remains somewhat unclear as it relates to the mainstream movement. Each movement attempts to restructure the ways in which food is distributed, consumed, and produced, impacting the social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of food. Using the lens of Nancy Fraser’s triple movement framework, I construct an interpretation of food justice as the emancipatory pole of what I term the triple food movement to explore the role of food justice as it relates to the mainstream movement. Specifically, I draw upon the cases of black farmers and queer people in the U.S. creating and (re)creating spaces to address their community food needs and counter systems of domination constructed
Food Justice or Food Sovereignty? Understanding the Rise of Urban Food Movements in the USA Agriculture and Human Values, Mar 2016. As world food and fuel prices threaten expanding urban populations, there is greater need for the urban poor to have access and claims over how and where food is produced and distributed. This is especially the case in marginalized urban settings where high proportions of the population are food insecure. The global movement for food sovereignty has been one attempt to reclaim rights and participation in the food system and challenge corporate food regimes. However, given its origins from the peasant farmers' movement, La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is often considered a rural issue when increasingly its demands for fair food systems are urban in nature. Through interviews with scholars, urban food activists, non-governmental and grassroots organizations in Oakland and New Orleans in the United States of America, we examine the extent to which food sovereignty has become embedded as a concept, strategy and practice. We consider food sovereignty alongside other dominant US social movements such as food justice, and find that while many organizations do not use the language of food sovereignty explicitly, the motives behind urban food activism are similar across movements as local actors draw on elements of each in practice. Overall, however, because of the different histories, geographic contexts, and relations to state and capital, food justice and food sovereignty differ as strategies and approaches. We conclude that the US urban food sovereignty movement is limited by neoliberal structural contexts that dampen its approach and radical framework. Similarly, we see restrictions on urban food justice movements that are also operating within a broader framework of market neoliberalism. However, we find that food justice was reported as an approach more aligned with the socio-historical context in both cities, due to its origins in broader class and race struggles.
Supporting Food Security for Indigenous Families through the Restoration of Indigenous Foodways March 2021. Key Messages • This community‐based research examined determinants of Indigenous food security with First Nation mothers from urban and reserve‐based contexts. • While income formed the most significant determinant of food security, mothers identified culturally and geographically unique food security challenges. • Resolving Indigenous food insecurity will require a range of economic and culturally specific interventions, particularly those focused on revitalizing Indigenous foodways.

Featured Videos

There are some DVDs you can check out from the library on environmental topics as well. The links here, however, are largely for online videos as there are so many great organizations with content. Streaming education films can also be searched in the database Films on Demand, linked in the "Digging Deeper in Your Research" tab of this guide, or from the library's homepage.

Revitalization from Destruction: The Movement to Protect Indigenous Food Systems April 2022. In this second installment of MAZON's 2022 Insider Briefing Series, MAZON’s Vice President of Programs Mia Hubbard was joined by Valerie Segrest, Native nutrition educator and member of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, and Maria Givens, sustainable food systems expert and member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, to explore the destruction of food systems as a colonial tool of genocide, and how these colonial legacies impose continuing barriers for tribal communities. Rooted in this experience, we discussed the powerful movement to support the reemergence of traditional food systems in Indian Country.
Beef Is Bad For The Climate. Can We Make It Better? A ~4 min. video from the "Hot Mess" series, streaming on Films on Demand
Food (Justice) for All "All across the country, the ways and means of America's small farmers are evolving. Young Hispanic farm laborers in California’s Salinas Valley are moving up the economic ladder, training to become tomorrow’s organic farm owners. In Houston, Congolese refugees are creating communities around vacant urban lots." 24-min. video.

Featured Podcasts

Toasted Sister
After contact, Indigenous foodways and knowledge were devastated, nearly destroyed and replaced with foods that are far from the people. So today, I’m talking to Native chefs and foodies about what Indigenous cuisine is, where it comes from, where it’s headed and how it’s used to connect them and their communities to their origins and traditions.
Celebrating Juneteenth, Farming While Black and more
Earth on the Air, June 17 2022
Rodrigo Alatriste-Diaz on the Intersection of Labor and Environmental Rights
Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Podcast,
Outrage + Optimism: The Future of Food (podcast)
A collection of episodes of the climate change-focused podcast, Outrage + Optimism - from a special series of food
more...less...
"A food revolution is germinating across the globe. The linear model of growing, producing and distributing food is destroying nature, damaging human health and devastating farmers - and it is also a major cause of climate change. Join us for a healthy dose of outrage and a serving of stubborn optimism as we explore the radical shifts underway toward a regenerative food system."
Agriculture, Water & Health
A 2021 episode, #17, of the podcast We All Live Downstream - "In today's episode, we discuss the impacts big agriculture has on our water, health, environment and communities - and what we can do to support more sustainable practices, enact stronger clean water policies, and hold the industry accountable.

Featured Books & eBooks - click on titles to access

Search Tips & Terms

Search Terms & Topics

Consider searching some of these topics as search words when trying to locate resources in the library's collection.

Food safety | Food additives | Food waste
Food-related greenhouse gases (from agriculture and land-use)
Food availability or food insecurity, or food deserts
Food systems, food production and distribution
Agricultural productivity | Intensive farming and biointensive farming
Land degradation | Land use / Land use planning (includes urban sprawl)
Habitat loss - destruction, fragmentation, changed use
Livestock | Animal health | Animal welfare | Animal products
Endangered species | Invasive species - weeds, pests, feral animals
Genetically modified organisms, GMOs, and other forms of genetic engineering or modification
Grassroots solutions (local and regional environmental issues solved from the bottom-up)