From the labour order of delivery riders to the insights into symbiosis offered by mycelial networks, more than ten new books published in 2024 across food, agriculture and ecology record the hope intertwined with contradictions between people, land and nature.
Foodthink Founding Editor Chang Tianle and Sijia, host of 100 Ways of Living, chat about ecological agriculture, supporting local farmers, and how office workers can still cook proper meals without ordering a takeaway.
Bunong woman Langheng has guarded a 2,282-hectare community forest in Cambodia for years, yet chainsaws devour the woodland in secret after dark. REDD+ is designed to convert forest carbon into community conservation funding, but “additionality” hurdles and profiteers bypassing consent make it ever harder for indigenous peoples to defend their land.
Late April: the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market’s eleventh annual gathering at Zhongtuan Village ecological farm, Hengzhou. Traditional farmers, young returnees and volunteers brought their own tents, bowls and chopsticks beneath the banyan tree, huddling through shortfalls of people and money to sustain this urban–rural community of sustainable living.
For four decades, Benedikt Haerlin – Head of the Berlin office of the Future Agriculture Foundation – has been deeply involved in the anti-GM agenda, from driving the EU’s first GM Directive to launching a global advocacy campaign, covering key milestones such as mandatory labelling, Golden Rice and CRISPR/Cas9.
Mycorrhizal fungi are the living threads of the soil, sustaining its water and crop health. Sequencing by Agroscope confirmed that intensive agriculture has reduced their keystone species to near zero — yet restoring these underground networks is far more complex than scattering an inoculant across the soil.
Three farming friends growing vegetables in Shunyi, Beijing, and Chuxiong, Yunnan have weathered downpours battering trees and droughts cracking reservoirs — their experiences trace the link between rising vegetable prices and climate change.
Wu Longlong, a Beijing University of Agriculture graduate, returned to Ning County in Gansu, letting his black pigs roam free-range on the hills beside the Ziwuling Reserve — rooting grass, gnawing acorns, lapping up spring water, with the occasional brush with a leopard.
A Foodthink intern at Zhiliangtian Ecological Farm in Alxa confronts the risks of farming at the mercy of the weather and the frictions of communal living — yet among the plants, birds, and beasts beneath the Helan Mountains, discovers the quiet confidence to keep tending the land.
At Yulin’s Longquan Green Vegetable Shop, several owners bound in an egalitarian partnership tend local ecological produce and the daily weigh-and-close routine. Professor Xu Leiqing’s Research Group 408 at Tongji University finds such a community space — most accessible, most frequently visited — is itself a therapeutic setting.
