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The once and future georgic: agricultural practice, environmental knowledge, and the place for an ethic of experience

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  • Benjamin Cohen

Abstract

This paper re-introduces the georgic ethic and the role it has historically played in debates about new agricultural practices. Public engagement, participatory research, and greater local involvement in crafting new means to work the land flood the literature of agrarian studies. Putting the experience- and place-based georgic into that discourse can help deepen its character and future possibilities. The paper draws from recent sociological research into the acceptance and resistance to new practices to show the georgic’s explanatory, descriptive utility in studies of those controversies. It also highlights how agricultural and environmental ethicists can draw from the georgic tradition for its prescriptive and normative possibilities to put practitioners back into the agricultural policy process and to draw more firmly from the notion that knowledge of the environment is constituted in practices of living in it. Placing the language and terms of the georgic ethic more centrally into public conversations about agricultural ethics and policy can enrich those conversations by structuring them with attention to experience, place-based values, and the moral space of interaction between humans and the land. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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  • Benjamin Cohen, 2009. "The once and future georgic: agricultural practice, environmental knowledge, and the place for an ethic of experience," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 26(3), pages 153-165, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:26:y:2009:i:3:p:153-165
    DOI: 10.1007/s10460-008-9172-7
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Jasper Eshuis & Marian Stuiver, 2005. "Learning in context through conflict and alignment: Farmers and scientists in search of sustainable agriculture," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 22(2), pages 137-148, June.
    2. Michael Carolan, 2006. "Social change and the adoption and adaptation of knowledge claims: Whose truth do you trust in regard to sustainable agriculture?," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 23(3), pages 325-339, October.
    3. Jeffery Bentley, 1994. "Facts, fantasies, and failures of farmer participatory research," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 11(2), pages 140-150, March.
    4. Kazumi Kondoh & Raymond Jussaume, 2006. "Contextualizing farmers’ attitudes towards genetically modified crops," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 23(3), pages 341-352, October.
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