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Full-text, in-print version here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671400014XCitation: Nost, E. 2014. Scaling-up local foods: commodity practice in community supported agriculture (CSA). Journal of Rural Studies 34, 152-160.Non-profit, consumer, and government advocates are working to expand access to locally-produced foods as a way of addressing major social and ecological issues. Some activists, however, suggest that farms “scaling-up” production and distribution may lose sight of the movement's aims by circumventing a direct exchange between growing and consumer and by delivering “local” shares long distances. I argue that in order to answer whether scaling-up is misguided, we first have to understand how farms come to scale differently. I describe the varied practices that three community supported agriculture (CSA) farms in the Midwest perform in order to give their products market value as embedded in a specific socio-ecological context. I focus on three key moments of CSA that advocates are concerned about in scaling-up: 1) the employment of different kinds of labor; 2) operating within the seasons; 3) the management of sharer expectations about produce quantity and quality. As what I call commodity practice, farm decisions about these factors produce differently scaled local food commodities. These different practices are not necessarily incongruent with the aims of the movement. My main point in this approach is to advance an awareness of hybridity in local food institutions. As CSAs and other institutions like food hubs grow and evolve, a look at commodity practices can shed light on and confound some of the apparent contradictions in scaling-up.

Authors: Eric Nost, Heather Rosenfeld, Kristen Vincent, Sarah A. Moore & Robert E. RothHazMatMapper is an online and interactive geographic visualization tool designed to facilitate exploration of transnational flows of hazardous waste in North America (http://geography.wisc. edu/hazardouswaste/map/). While conventional narratives suggest that wealthier countries such as Canada and the United States (US) export waste to poorer countries like Mexico, little is known about how waste trading may affect specific sites within any of the three countries. To move beyond anecdotal discussions and national aggregates, we assembled a novel geographic dataset describing transnational hazardous waste shipments from 2007 to 2012 through two Freedom of Information Act requests for documents held by the US Environmental Protection Agency. While not yet detailing all of the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America, HazMatMapper supports multiscale and site-specific visual exploration of US imports of hazardous waste from Canada and Mexico. It thus enables academic researchers, waste regulators, and the general public to generate hypotheses on regional clustering, transnational corporate structuring, and environmental justice concerns, as well as to understand the limitations of existing regulatory data collection itself. Here, we discuss the dataset and design process behind HazMatMapper and demonstrate its utility for understanding the transnational hazardous waste trade.Printed at Journal of Maps: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17445647.2017.1282384Project here: https://geography.wisc.edu/hazardouswaste/map/

Full-text, in-print version here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616688.2012.699090Citation: Nost, E. 2013. The Power of Place: Tourism Development in Costa Rica. Tourism Geographies. 15(1): 88-106.In this paper, I question how representations of tourist destinations color and are colored by development. Presenting the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, I find that the authenticity of portrayals of place is important not for its veracity, but for the social work it performs. Authenticity is not merely socially constructed but expressive of social relations which value people and places. Tourist perceptions of the caribe sur as genuinely underdeveloped—gauged by an analysis of photos and guidebooks as well as surveys—produce an approach to resource use within the community that is limiting. Because the value of the place is its underdevelopment, development itself constrains the possibility of sustaining further growth. Ultimately, reading development via place can be a guide for critically appreciating contemporary patterns of tourism and sustainable development in the caribe sur and elsewhere.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Organizations included in website analyses and their geographic scope.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Organizations included in website analyses and their geographic scope.

At the center of debates regarding food system transformation are socio-technical innovations involving novel foods and novel ways to produce food. In this thesis, I examine digital agriculture technologies such as e-commerce platforms, and alternative proteins such as cellular agriculture as two agri-food innovations with much promise to fundamentally transform the way we produce, process, distribute, and consume food across scales. I contribute to sustainability transformation literature and practice by undertaking empirically informed critiques of agri-food innovations, developing a more nuanced characterization for their potential promise, and advancing community-based research to scrutinize their impacts on-the-ground. My thesis begins by examining the sustainability-related tradeoffs of entomophagy and cellular agriculture. I found that alternative proteins have substantial potential to positively impact the global food system across multiple dimensions, such as food price stability and environmental sustainability; however, technical barriers to scale and high potential cost may dampen their impact. In my later chapters I assess the framings of and potential futures for agri-food innovation. I found three distinct framings for how digital agriculture technologies are transforming food systems, and a lack of civil society participation within these discussions. In addition, I found that access, integration, and centralization are key dimensions across which cellular agriculture can be assessed in terms of its promise to transform food systems. In my final phase of research, I partnered with an e-commerce platform to survey local food system stakeholders in Ontario to better understand their digital technology needs. I found that stakeholders are keen to use digital tools, but political economic barriers across the digital platform sector prevent their widespread benefits from being realized. This thesis advances sustainability transformation scholarship by explicitly considering its normative dimensions: transformation of what? For what purpose? By whom? Crucially, the myriad ways in which agri-food innovations are governed can result in diverse forms of change, following less or more business-as-usual processes. Hybridized governance processes and increased public and civil society participation are crucial to achieve sustainable food system transformations. Future scholarship that advances actionable research projects with civil society and public stakeholders can open space for imagined, desired, and possible futures. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

High resolution digital soil maps and precision farm technologies are changing the way scientists, policy makers and land managers communicate the ecosystem service values of soils. Soil organic carbon decision-support systems are a way to combine human and computer power to better account for the multiple benefits of conserving carbon in agri-environmental decision-making. This study evaluates opportunities and barriers surrounding the adoption of SOC DSS on working lands in Southern Ontario by conducting document analysis, Q survey and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in Ontario and the US. Applying the framework of salience, credibility and legitimacy, this research reveals insights to achieve more effective communication about SOC management with DSS by identifying four ways of thinking about their development, design and deployment. The current emphasis on precisely measuring and monitoring SOC has implications for working lands stakeholders due to the cost, complexity, rigidity and lack of social trust surrounding precision approaches. The SSHRC Institutional Explore Program and the Food from Thought Digital Agriculture Research Fund.

The climate crisis is the greatest threat facing humanity today, and global agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change. Canadian agriculture is largely industrial and export-oriented, with many environmental consequences. Despite the hegemony of conventional agriculture in Canada, agroecological farmers are using farming methods rooted in respect for our ecosystems, communities, and food sovereignty. Furthermore, agroecology also has an impressive potential to mitigate the climate crisis through the sequestration of carbon in soils. This research investigates the opportunities and barriers agroecological farmers in Canada face, with PEI as a case study. I interviewed 30 farmers and farm organization representatives, finding that agroecological Island farmers are already experiencing climate anxiety and undertaking a variety of resilience strategies as a result. However, these efforts are not being structurally supported by governments who claim to prioritize climate justice and climate change mitigation. SSHRC, OGS