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2009 AFHVS presidential address: the steering question: challenges to achieving food system sustainability

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Abstract

In this address I examine the challenges of achieving food system sustainability. Starting from the position that most people want a food system that is “sustainable” and that we have a great reservoir of unapplied technical knowledge applicable to increasing sustainability, I argue that the big issue is collective decision-making to accomplish the goal of sustainability. Using the metaphor of a sailing ship, I raise three questions about steering collectively toward sustainability: What do we want? What are our options? And, how do we decide among the options?

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Notes

  1. According to www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/226950.html, Mao said “let a hundred flowers bloom” and those persons whose manifested ideas were not acceptable were executed.

  2. Steering involves governance; currently a widely used and variously defined concept. I chose not to use governance because I wanted to draw attention more toward visioning about the future and less about current policies and practices.

  3. Between the global and the individual, the levels arbitrarily included in the figure should be understood represent a continuum.

  4. The overlap between the social and the biophysical aspects as depicted by the artifact layer is intended to illustrate the overlap of these domains. For example, human bodies are altered by diet and exercise and the global ecosystem has arguably been transformed by humans through a host of activities that include transporting and cultivating particular species and extracting and utilizing fossil energy at high levels.

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Correspondence to Gilbert W. Gillespie Jr..

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Gillespie, G.W. 2009 AFHVS presidential address: the steering question: challenges to achieving food system sustainability. Agric Hum Values 27, 3–12 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9243-4

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