Economics and “Nature's Standardâ€: Wes Jackson and The Land Institute

Donald Richards ()

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2009, vol. 41, issue 2, 186-195

Abstract: This essay introduces or re-acquaints readers with the work of Wes Jackson and The Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas. At the center of this work is an effort to develop perennial poly-culture as an alternative to industrial agriculture. The latter dominant model of food and fiber production is shown to involve severe problems in terms of short-run ecological costs and long-run sustainability. It is also argued that the perennial poly-culture model has much to recommend it to radical economists as a corrective to capitalist inefficiency. Finally, notwithstanding Jackson's facile criticism of Marx, it is argued that Marx's own writing actually anticipates Jackson's agro-ecological critique of capitalism.

Keywords: agricultural sustainability; perennial poly-culture; Wes Jackson; The Land Institute (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/41/2/186.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:41:y:2009:i:2:p:186-195

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().