Curry, Helen Anne (Author)
Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
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Book
Helen Anne Curry;
(2022)
Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction
(/isis/citation/CBB577676778/)
Article
Helen Anne Curry;
(2021)
Taxonomy, Race Science, and Mexican Maize
(/isis/citation/CBB190762642/)
Article
Helen Anne Curry;
(2022)
Hybrid Seeds in History and Historiography
(/isis/citation/CBB907533787/)
Book
David Sepkoski;
(2020)
Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene
(/isis/citation/CBB534040952/)
Thesis
Adrian Van Allen;
(2016)
Crafting Nature: An Ethnography of Natural History Collecting in an Age of Genomics
(/isis/citation/CBB344626435/)
Book
Jeff Karnicky;
(2016)
Scarlet Experiment: Birds and Humans in America
(/isis/citation/CBB488937827/)
Book
Alagona, Peter S.;
(2013)
After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California
(/isis/citation/CBB001451505/)
Book
Barrow, Mark V.;
(2009)
Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology
(/isis/citation/CBB000952142/)
Article
Germán Vergara;
Alberto Lafón;
(2022)
Living on the Edge: A Transnational Perspective on the Mexican Wolf and Its Near-Extinction
(/isis/citation/CBB404801613/)
Article
Heise, Ursula K.;
(2010)
Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction
(/isis/citation/CBB001023612/)
Thesis
Varno, Theodore James;
(2011)
The Nature of Tomorrow: Inbreeding in Industrial Agriculture and Evolutionary Thought in Britain and the United States, 1859--1925
(/isis/citation/CBB001567261/)
Book
Mitchell, Don;
(2012)
They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California
(/isis/citation/CBB001421811/)
Chapter
Uekotter, Frank;
(2013)
Farming and Not Knowing: Agnotology Meets Environmental History
(/isis/citation/CBB001420339/)
Book
Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell;
(2018)
Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union
(/isis/citation/CBB161957194/)
Article
Dolly Jørgensen;
Isla Gladstone;
(2022)
The Passenger Pigeon’s Past on Display for the Future
(/isis/citation/CBB029545778/)
Book
Fox, Sarah Alisabeth;
(2014)
Downwind: A People's History of the Nuclear West
(/isis/citation/CBB001422378/)
Book
Rafi Youatt;
(2015)
Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB911557825/)
Article
Courtney Fullilove;
(2022)
“Famine Foods” and the Values of Biodiversity Preservation in Israel-Palestine
(/isis/citation/CBB413280713/)
Book
Gregory, Annabel;
(2013)
Rye Spirits: Faith, Faction and Fairies in a Seventeenth-Century English Town
(/isis/citation/CBB001201312/)
Article
Wilcox, Hui Niu;
Kong, Panyia;
(2014)
How to Eat Right in America: Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Hmong American Food and Health
(/isis/citation/CBB001320893/)
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