Urban Agriculture and Community Values

This book addresses the evolving crisis in agriculture and sketches the 'community economy' that grounds agricultural enterprise more accurately than the industrial model. In its current practice, agriculture is (in the United States but increasingly in the rest of the world) unsustainable and destructive. The most immediately unsustainable feature of industrial agriculture is its dependence on the products of petroleum-as feedstock for fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, and as fuel for the farm machinery and transport of agricultural products into the cities. The problems of agriculture and in general the food systems to which it is attached range from the vulnerability of monocultures to new and stronger pests to the emerging medical problem of obesity. The need for agricultural reform is widely acknowledged; one part of the new work being done suggests that food production in the cities may solve several of its problems at once. This book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students in agriculture and environmental studies.

Lisa Newton retired after 42 years in the Philosophy Department at Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, where she founded and directed the Program in Applied Ethics from 1982 until retirement, and the Program in Environmental Studies from 1985 to 2005. During this time she published 14 books, mostly on Business Ethics and Environmental Protection, numerous Encyclopedia entries (many on agriculture), and upwards of seventy articles in peer-reviewed journals. Now settled in Vermont, she continues to write and consult (and occasionally teach) in the fields of social and political ethics, bioethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics.