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An introduction to a special journal issue titled Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal begins with a look at the character & causes of the 2008 global food crisis. It is contended that basic trends identified a decade ago, eg, ecological damage, continue today as the basic motivation for the agrifood system remains profit generation. Critical remarks are offered on genetic engineering of crops, the free market & free trade ideology, European & US consolidation of the agrifood system, the global purchasing of land in foreign countries in the name of food security, rural-urban migration in the South owing to poor conditions in the countryside, & the impact of climate change on food production. A call is made for agroecological approaches to crop production & land reform as the basis for achieving food security & sovereignty, environmental sustainability, & stable employment. Adapted from the source document.

Essay in the symposium on The Legacy of Murray Bookchin that highlights the impact of the author's life on the environmental movement. A brief biography narrates Bookchin's life in New York City in a leftist family, & the development of a social ecology in the 1960's. Underground distribution of Bookchin's essays influenced popular ecological movements to surface through the 1970's. In the 1980s, Bookchin's collaboration with other social ecologists followed the emergence of the West German Green political movement. The growth of the Greens during the 1990's led to active connection with the Institute for Social Ecology to promote global Justice & challenge capitalist globalism. The confidence crisis of the traditional environmental movement throughout this past decade raises questions on the relationship between capitalism, the environmental crisis, & future directions for the environmental movement. J. Harwell

From the 1960s to the present, the utopian dimension of Bookchin's social ecology inspired several generations of social and ecological activists, from the pioneering urban ecology movements of the sixties to the 1970s back-to-the-land, anti-nuclear, and sustainable technology movements, the beginnings of Green politics and organic agriculture in the early 1980s, and the anti-authoritarian global justice movement that came of age in 1999 in the streets of Seattle. Even as numerous social movements drew on his ideas, however, Bookchin remained a relendess critic of the currents in those movements that he found deeply disturbing, including the New Left's drift toward Marxism-Leninism in the late 1960s, tendencies toward mysticism and misandiropy in the radical environmental movement, and the growing focus on individualism and personal lifestyles among 1990s anarchists.

Today environmental politics in the U.S. appears hopelessly polarized. Liberals and progressives try to sustain and occasionally strengthen environmental legislation, while those on the right are inalterably opposed, even seeking to defund core institutions such as the EPA. This extreme polarization, where anti-environmentalism has become part of the cultural as well as the political apparatus of the right, is a recent, and hopefully short-lived, phenomenon. In the early years of the environmental movement Republican politicians, allied with outdoor enthusiasts and some in the corporate world, often supported the passage of environmental laws. For some it was mainly because they preferred a predictable and relatively malleable set of uniform rules to what in the late 1960s was a trend toward increasingly stringent regulations and punishing lawsuits at the state and local levels. Adapted from the source document.

[...]it confirmed that regulation remains a far more efficient means of achieving environmental goals.

You can hardly open up a major newspaper or national magazine these days without encountering the latest hype about biofuels, and how they're going to save oil, reduce pollution and prevent climate change. Bill Gates, Sun Microsystems' Vinod Khosla, and other major venture capitalists are investing millions in new biofuel production, whether in the form of ethanol, mainly derived from corn in the U.S. today; or biodiesel, mainly from soybeans and canola seed. It's virtually a \"modern day gold rush,\" as described by the New York Times, paraphrasing the chief executive of Cargill, one of the main benefactors of increased subsidies to agribusiness and tax credits to refiners for the purpose of encouraging biofuel production. Even Brazilian sugarcane, touted as the world's model for conversion from fossil fuels to sustainable \"green energy,\" has its downside. The energy yield appears beyond question: it is claimed that ethanol from sugarcane may produce as much as eight times as much energy as it takes to grow and process. But a recent World Wildlife Fund report for the International Energy Agency raises serious questions about this approach to future energy independence. It turns out that 80% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions come not from cars, but from deforestation - the loss of embedded carbon dioxide when forests are cut down and burned. A hectare of land may save 13 tons of carbon dioxide if it is used to grow sugarcane, but the same hectare can absorb 20 tons of CO2 if it remains forested. If sugarcane and soy plantations continue to spur deforestation, both in the Amazon and in Brazil's Atlantic coastal forests, any climate advantage is more than outweighed by the loss of the forest. The utility of incorporating the amylase enzyme into crops is questionable (it's also a potential allergen), gains in starch production are marginal, and the use of genetic engineering to increase crop yields has never proved reliable. Other more complex traits, such as drought and salt tolerance (to grow energy crops on land unsuited to food production), have been aggressively pursued by geneticists for more than twenty years with scarcely a glimmer of success. Genetically engineered trees, with their long life-cycle, as well as seeds and pollen capable of spreading hundreds of miles in the wild, are potentially a far greater environmental threat than engineered varieties of annual crops. Even Monsanto, always the most aggressive promoter of genetic engineering, has opted to rely on conventional plant breeding for its biofuel research, according to the New York Times (Sept. 8, 2006). Like \"feeding the world\" and biopharmaceutical production before it, genetic engineering for biofuels mainly benefits the biotech industry's public relations image.

\"Free market environmentalism\" reduces everything, including the rights to clean air and water, into a marketable commodity. The assault on environmental regulation has caused environmentalists to resort to mechanisms of the \"free market\" to advance their causes, unaware that they are actually compromising them. The need to reestablish social control over the economic markets and relationships as fundamental to social progress is emphasized.