Environmental Resilience And Food Law

Agrobiodiversity and agroecology go hand-in-hand in promoting environmental resilience in international food systems as well as climate change resilient food policy. This book contextualizes how various legal frameworks address agrobiodiversity and agroecology around the globe and makes it accessible for audiences of students, practitioners, educators, and scholars. Some chapters focus on the legal regulation of agroecology from a food law perspective. Others are geared toward providing regulators, lawmakers and attorneys with the scientific and policy background of those concepts, so that they are equipped in the field of food law in everyday practice and policy. Climate change dimensions of the issues are woven throughout the book.

This book brings together an international group of agriculture and food lawyers and scientists to define the field of Food System Transparency in three parts: the big picture, food safety and health, and the global view. Each part adds to the whole but zooms in through a unique lens. Investigating social, economic, political, scientific and legal frameworks, this comprehensive volume addresses topics such as food authenticity, agroecological evaluations, and consumer protection. Interwoven themes of transparency contextualize concepts of food safety, information sharing and regulatory opportunities at a local and global scale. Editors’ notes provide blended legal and scientific commentary to facilitate further discussion and context within the classroom. Advantages of this volume include: Chapters written by foremost international experts in their fields Editors’ notes written for classroom use and background information Figures and tables providing illustrations of important concepts Case studies delivering practicality and in-depth analysis to current events A special chapter on COVID-19 and its implications for the food system This book is important reading for graduate-level students, legal scholars, nonlegal academics, advocates for food system transparency and resilience, agroecology and environmental conservation, and practitioners in any cross-disciplinary areas relating to food policy. It will be of interest to all those who seek to deepen their understanding of the concepts and trends surrounding the information that centers around our food system, both domestically in the United States and the European Union, as well as in many major trading nations such as China. Check out the Support Materials tab on www.routledge.com/9780367440367 for a short video previewing some the key themes in the book.

Chapters written by foremost international experts in their fields Editors’ notes written for classroom use and background information Figures and tables providing illustrations of important concepts Case studies delivering practicality and in-depth analysis to current events A special chapter on Covid-19 and its implications for the food system

Key features: Presents summaries of key points after each chapter and includes color graphs to visualize the big-picture concepts Demonstrates how urban rooftop farms (URFs) can contribute to city greening and climate change mitigation worldwide while providing fresh locally-sourced produce for growing urban populations Provides cutting-edge ideas from the the emerging field of food law and places international and comparative legal concepts into an accessible context for non-lawyers Examines major disputes surrounding food products that have been brought before the World Trade Organization (WTO) to illustrate how trade trends have pushed toward GMO proliferation Uses examples of food labeling, pollinator protection, pesticide permitting, invasive species control, and GMO regulatory policy in the US and the EU to illustrate various methods of bringing public law to the forefront in the struggle toward achieving food integrity The proliferation of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in our increasingly globalized food system is trivializing the inherent risks to a sustainable world. Responding to the realities of climate change, urbanization, and a GMO-dominated industrialized food system, Gabriela Steier's seminal work addresses the interrelationship of these cutting-edge topics within a scholarly, legal context. In Advancing Food Integrity: GMO Regulation, Agroecology, and Urban Agriculture, Steier defines food integrity as the optimal measure of environmental sustainability and climate change resilience combined with food safety, security, and sovereignty for the farm-to-fork production and distribution of any food product. The book starts with a discussion of the food system and explores whether private law has sufficiently protected food or whether public law control is needed to safeguard food integrity. It proceeds to show how the proliferation of GMOs creates food insecurity by denying people’s access to food through food system centralization. Steier discusses how current industrial agricultural policy downplays the dangers of GMO monocultures to crop diversity and biodiversity, thereby weakening food production systems. Striving to promote agroecology by providing a fresh and compelling narrative of interdisciplinary questions, Steier explores how farming can be geared toward more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices worldwide in the future. This book belongs in the libraries of all those interested in food law, environmental law, agroecology, sustainable agriculture, and urban living practices.

Environmental law envisions ecological systems as existing in an equilibrium state, or a “balance of nature,” reinforcing a rigid legal framework unable to absorb rapid environmental changes and innovations in sustainability. For the past three decades, “resilience theory,” which embraces uncertainty and nonlinear dynamics in complex adaptive systems, has shown itself to be a robust and invaluable basis for sound environmental management. Reforming American law to account for this knowledge is key to transitioning to sustainability. This volume features top legal and resilience scholars speaking on resilience theory and its legal applications to climate change, biodiversity, national parks, and water law.

Social-Ecological Resilience and Sustainability by Shelley Ross Saxer and Jonathan Rosenbloom is designed to help students understand and address new, changing, and complex economic, environmental, and social systems. This book introduces resilience and sustainability as analytical frameworks and illustrates how these concepts apply in various contexts: water, food, shelter/land use, energy, natural resources, pollution, disaster law, and climate change. The first two chapters (Part I) provide students with a conceptual foundation to explore the interdisciplinary nature of resilience and sustainability and the meanings of, complexities embedded in, and the overlap and differences between these frameworks. Each of the remaining eight chapters (Part II) views resilience and sustainability in a specific law and policy context. Strategically placed throughout Part II, the authors describe eight useful tools — “Strategies to Facilitate Implementation”—to help identify, assess, integrate, or utilize resilience and sustainability as analytical frameworks. Key Features: A two-part approach that first provides students with a conceptual foundation and then allows students to view resilience and sustainability in eight law and policy contexts (described above) Numerous graphics throughout to illustrate concepts, depict events described, and otherwise enliven the content Case studies that examine human decisions that led to unsustainable and non-resilient systems and societies New and innovative ways to explain complex systems and in turn rethink traditional notions of law and policy

This cutting-edge book considers the functional inseparability of risk and innovation within the context of environmental law and governance. Analysing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ innovation, the book argues that approaches to socio-ecological risk require innovation in order for society and the environment to become more resilient.

This book asks how we are to understand the relationship between capitalism and the environment, capitalism and food, and capitalism and social resistance. These questions come together to form a study of food regimes and the means by which capitalism organises both the environment and people to provision its distinctive system of ever-expanding consumption with food. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty explores whether there are environmental limits to capitalism and its economic growth by addressing the ongoing and inter-linked crises of food, fossil fuels, and finance. It also considers its political limits, as the globally burgeoning ‘precariat’, peasants and indigenous people resist the further commodification of their livelihoods. This book draws from the field of Political Ecology to approach new ways of analysing capitalism, the environment and resistance, and also to propose new solutions to the current agro-ecological-economic crisis. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of Environmental Sociology, Human Geography, and Environmental Geography.