The Profit of the Earth
The Profit of the Earth

Author: Courtney Fullilove

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 022645486X

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While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtney Fullilove shows, is that seeds are inherently political objects transformed by the ways they are gathered, preserved, distributed, regenerated, and improved. In The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove unearths the history of American agricultural development and of seeds as tools and talismans put in its service. Organized into three thematic parts, The Profit of the Earth is a narrative history of the collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds. Fullilove begins with the political economy of agricultural improvement, recovering the efforts of the US Patent Office and the nascent US Department of Agriculture to import seeds and cuttings for free distribution to American farmers. She then turns to immigrant agricultural knowledge, exploring how public and private institutions attempting to boost midwestern wheat yields drew on the resources of willing and unwilling settlers. Last, she explores the impact of these cereal monocultures on biocultural diversity, chronicling a fin-de-siècle Ohio pharmacist’s attempt to source Purple Coneflower from the diminishing prairie. Through these captivating narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, Fullilove explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development—ultimately challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture’s past and future.

Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future
Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future

Author: Bartow J. Elmore

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1324002050

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An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018—but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time. A company employee sitting on potentially explosive information who weighs risking everything to tell his story. A town whose residents are urged to avoid their basements because Monsanto’s radioactive waste laces their homes’ foundations. Factory workers who peel off layers of their skin before accepting cash bonuses to continue dirty jobs. An executive wrestling with the ethics of selling a profitable product he knew was toxic. Incorporating global fieldwork, interviews with company employees, and untapped corporate and government records, Elmore traces Monsanto’s astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products—including PCBs and Agent Orange—to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology. Skyrocketing sales of Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready system stunned even those in the seed trade, who marveled at the influx of cash and lavish incentives into their sleepy sector. But as new data emerges about the Roundup system, and as Bayer faces a tide of lawsuits over Monsanto products past and present, Elmore’s urgent history shows how our food future is still very much tethered to the company’s chemical past.

Fiscal Hangover
Fiscal Hangover

Author: Keith Fitz-Gerald

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-12-10

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0470591080

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The rules of making money have changed-forever With the collapse of investment banks, trillion-dollar-plus government bailouts, and the Dow plunging like a rock, it's never been more important to understand-and actually profit from-the "new rules." Fact is, Fiscal Hangover, will give you an investing blueprint that will allow you to profit from the changing global economy. For the first time in 200 years, American consumers are stepping down from their position as the driving force behind the world's economy. In Fiscal Hangover, Keith Fitz-Gerald analyzes the declining power of the American consumer and introduces you to the resulting investment opportunities. Without question, the American consumer and the United States government have provided the rest of the world with liquidity in the form of cheap capital and abundant debt. But in light of recent economic events, the rules of the game have changed and that means you must change with them-if you intend on securing your financial future. Unlike most of today's finance books that simply examine the end of the American Empire, Fiscal Hangover shows you how to prepare for the fall, effectively allocate your investments, and thrive in the new global economy. This book offers specific analysis and concrete actionable steps for individual investors interested in grabbing their fair share of what will be the greatest wealth creation in the history of mankind. Examines our current financial situation and offers practical investment advice to overcome the challenges you'll face Analyzes the declining power of the American consumer and introduces you to the resulting investment opportunities Details new investing benchmarks and discusses why the old ones no longer work Explores big picture economic issues that will affect your individual investment endeavors The coming years may hold the greatest investment opportunities of our times, but in order to take advantage of this you'll need the insights that can only be found in Fiscal Hangover.

The Money Garden
The Money Garden

Author: Julie Austin

Publisher: Castle Lake Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780615328997

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According to a study by the Small Business Administration, multiple business owners are more likely to be classified as high income and high wealth. The only real security comes from inventing your own future, and that includes a business portfolio. The Money Garden shows you how to use the talents and skills you already have to create a lifetime of income, no matter where you're starting from. You'll learn: * How to create a lifetime of moneymaking ideas * How to develop your own uniqueness and stand out from your competition * Why you should have seasonal & non-seasonal, low, medium and high-end products and services * Why you should "pyramid up" to avoid going into debt * How to cross market for maximum profit

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money

Author: Woody Tasch

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2010-05-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 160358112X

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Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?Such questions-at the heart of slow money-represent the first steps on our path to a new economy. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations and serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. Leading the charge is Woody Tasch-whose decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur now shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility. He offers an alternative vision to the dusty old industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when dollars, and the businesses they financed, lost their connection to place; slow money, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in the new economic, social, and environmental realities of the 21st century. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built around not extraction and consumption but preservation and restoration. Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.

Cause for Success
Cause for Success

Author: Christine Arena

Publisher: New World Library

Published: 2011-02-08

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1577319214

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Stung by corporate scandals and media mayhem, many companies have begun integrating terms like "sustainable business," "conscious capitalism," and "ethical business" into their annual reports. Is it more corporate greenwashing or are businesses today really changing how and with whom they do business? Can corporate social responsibility become a new business standard? When it comes to implementing the kind of business strategies that create vital social and economic returns, many corporate leaders find themselves at a loss. "This is because, unlike branding or accounting, there are far too few solid industry case studies that profile the success stories and how those companies got there," says author and award-winning marketing specialist Christine Arena. Arena finds reasons to be optimistic while she examines new business paradigms for doing good and translating that good into profit. From Hewlett-Packard to British Petroleum to Stonyfield Farms and The Body Shop, Cause For Success profiles two case-study companies per chapter, exploring ideas such as philanthropy partnerships, ethics-driven businesses, how companies are serving the world's poor, bottom-line advantages of standing for social justice, as well as how some of the worst corporate citizens have become some of the best.

Hungry for Profit
Hungry for Profit

Author: Fred Magdoff

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2000-09-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1583673946

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Millions go hungry every year in both poor and rich nations, yet hundreds of thousands of peasants and farmers continue to be pushed off the land. Applied in increasing volumes, chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers deplete the soil, pollute our food and water, and leave crops more vulnerable to pest outbreaks. The new and expanding use of genetically engineered seeds threatens species diversity. This penetrating set of essays explains why corporate agribusiness is a rising threat to farmers, the environment, and consumers. Ranging in subject from the politics of hunger to the new agricultural biotechnologies, and in time and place from early modern Europe to contemporary Cuba, the contributions to Hungry for Profit examine the changes underway in world agriculture today and point the way toward organic, sustainable solutions to problems of food supply.

Brave New Seeds
Brave New Seeds

Author: Robert Ali Brac de la Perrire

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9781856499002

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Farmers around the world are being pressured by half a dozen giant corporations to grow genetically engineered crops. What are the possible downsides for them, particularly for those hundreds of millions of farmers living in developing countries? On their environment? On their health? On their independence? On their traditional export crops? On their access to the marketplaces of their own countries? This important book comes out of a dialogue between farmers' representatives and experts. The result is a clear statement of principles and urgently needed measures which should guide governments and communities in bringing this profit-motivated deployment of scientific power under democratic control.

Not for Profit
Not for Profit

Author: Martha C. Nussbaum

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-12-03

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0691264392

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A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Translated into twenty-five languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.