The Agrarian Mind

Ou Ning

128_Ning_01

Government food rations sent out by local officials to alleviate food shortages consisted largely of counterfeit products. Yuan Wei, Untitled, 2022, Shanghai.

Issue #128
June 2022










Notes
1

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2006).

2

Quoted from US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech (State of the Union address, 1941).

3

“One Love Community Fridge works to empower and engage the community through education and by providing access to healthy fruits and vegetables.” One Love Community Paper, no.1 (Winter 2022).

4

Ban Gu, “Treatise on Literature,” in the Book of Han (《漢書·藝文誌》), Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 AD).

5

“In China, while many of the founders of the ‘hundred schools’ of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States were wandering sages who spent their days moving from city to city trying to catch the ears of princes, others were leaders of social movements from the very start. Some of these movements didn’t even have leaders, like the School of the Tillers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who set out to create egalitarian communities in the cracks and fissures between states.” David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2012), 237.

6

All of Shōeki’s terms come from his book Shizen shin’eidō, which he originally wrote in variant Chinese. The manuscript is now in the collected works of the General Library of the University of Tokyo. The English translations here are quoted from Toshinobu Yasunaga, Andō Shōeki: Social and Ecological Philosopher in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Weather Hill, 1992).

7

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Penguin, 1999), 18.

8

Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

9

John Crowe Ransom, “Art and the Human Economy,” Kenyon Review, no. 7 (1945): 686.

10

Quoted in Erik Reece, “Wendell Berry’s Wild Spirit,” Garden and Gun, August–September, 2011 .

11

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Counterpoint, 2015), 70.

12

According to research by Dorothy Matthews, Department of Biology, Sage Colleges, Troy, New York .