Royden Loewen (Author)
Johns Hopkins University Press
Physical Details: 348
Language: English
Mennonite farmers can be found in dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative world-scale environmental history, Royden Loewen draws on a multi-year study of seven geographically distinctive Anabaptist communities around the world, focusing on Mennonite farmers in Bolivia, Canada, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States, and Zimbabwe. These farmers, who include Amish, Brethren in Christ, and Siberian Baptists, till the land in starkly distinctive climates. They absorb very disparate societal lessons while being shaped by particular faith outlooks, historical memory, and the natural environment. The book reveals the ways in which modern-day Mennonite farmers have adjusted to diverse temperatures, precipitation, soil types, and relative degrees of climate change. These farmers have faced broad global forces of modernization during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from commodity markets and intrusive governments to technologies marked increasingly by the mechanical, chemical, and genetic. Based on more than 150 interviews and close textual analysis of memoirs, newspapers, and sermons, the narrative follows, among others, Zandile Nyandeni of Matopo as she hoes the spring-fed soils of Matabeleland's semi-arid savannah; Vladimir Friesen of Apollonovka, Siberia, who no longer heeds the dictates of industrial time of the Soviet-era state farm; and Abram Enns of Riva Palacio, Bolivia, who tells how he, a horse-and-buggy traditionalist, hired bulldozers to clear-cut a farm in the eastern lowland forests to grow soybeans, initially leading to dust bowl conditions. As Mennonites, Loewen writes, these farmers were raised with knowledge of the historic Anabaptist teachings on community, simplicity, and peace that stood alongside ideas on place and sustainability. Nonetheless, conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and local values, they put their agricultural ideas into practice in remarkably diverse ways. Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.
...MoreReview Benjamin W. Goossen (2024) Review of "Mennonite Farmers: A Global History of Place and Sustainability". Environment and History (pp. 342-344).
Review Mark B. Tauger (2023) Review of "Mennonite Farmers: A Global History of Place and Sustainability". Agricultural History (pp. 483-485).
Similar Citations
Book
Lindsay Ems;
(2022)
Virtually Amish: Preserving Community at the Internet's Margins
(/isis/citation/CBB882667788/)
Book
Lucas, Anton E;
Warren, Carol;
(2013)
Land for the People: The State and Agrarian Conflict in Indonesia
(/isis/citation/CBB001422260/)
Book
Slongwhite, Dale Finley;
Economos, Jeannie;
(2014)
Fed up: The High Costs of Cheap Food
(/isis/citation/CBB001422400/)
Book
Peter Dauvergne;
(2016)
Environmentalism of the Rich
(/isis/citation/CBB501954470/)
Book
Lucas Richert;
Jim Mills;
(2021)
Cannabis: Global Histories
(/isis/citation/CBB469806689/)
Book
Hanno Jentzsch;
(2021)
Harvesting State Support: Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB353340663/)
Book
Dvera I. Saxton;
(2021)
The Devil's Fruit: Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice
(/isis/citation/CBB347232041/)
Book
Andrew Flachs;
(2019)
Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India
(/isis/citation/CBB234890843/)
Article
Tom Brooking;
(2019)
“Yeotopia” Found … But? The Yeoman Ideal that Underpinned New Zealand Agricultural Practice into the Early Twenty-First Century, with American and Australian Comparisons
(/isis/citation/CBB390264948/)
Article
Les Levidow;
Davis Sansolo;
Monica Schiavinatto;
(2021)
Agroecological innovation constructing socionatural order for social transformation: Two case studies in Brazil
(/isis/citation/CBB130494145/)
Article
Rudy, Kathy;
(2012)
Locavores, Feminism, and the Question of Meat
(/isis/citation/CBB001202115/)
Article
Loconto, Allison;
(2014)
Sustaining an Enterprise, Enacting SustainabiliTea
(/isis/citation/CBB001421216/)
Article
Nicole Mottier;
(2019)
The Origins of Mexico's Banco Nacional de Crédito Ejidal, in Thought and Practice
(/isis/citation/CBB285024227/)
Book
Monica M. White;
LaDonna Redmond;
(2019)
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB970559485/)
Book
Paul Brassley;
Michael Winter;
Matt Lobley;
David Harvey;
(2021)
The Real Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of English Farming, 1939-1985
(/isis/citation/CBB165574810/)
Article
Anne Effland;
(2021)
Small Farms/Family Farms: Tracing a History of Definitions and Meaning
(/isis/citation/CBB720739392/)
Article
Mary Summers;
(2021)
A Dog with a Bone: A Critique of Paul Taylor’s Small-Farm Essentialism
(/isis/citation/CBB519115951/)
Book
Whayne, Jeannie M.;
(2011)
Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South
(/isis/citation/CBB001200642/)
Article
Albert G. Way;
(2023)
The Grass Problem: Agrostology, Agriculture, and Environmental Transformation in the New South
(/isis/citation/CBB300240604/)
Book
Swindell, Ken;
Jeng, Alieu;
(2006)
Migrants, Credit and Climate: The Gambian Groundnut Trade, 1834--1934
(/isis/citation/CBB001422392/)
Be the first to comment!