Title: Deep Agroecology and a New Homeric Epic: Our longest day of battle, our final journey home
Speaker: John Head, University of Kansas Law
Date: September 16, 2019
Time: Noon to 1pm
Where: Ostrom Workshop Tocqueville Room, 513 North Park Avenue, IUB campus
Web page: https://ostromworkshop.indiana.edu/events/colloquium-series/index.html
Abstract. In drawing to a close a three-book series on the overlap of international law, agricultural reform, and ecological protection, Mr Head asserts that the Iliad and the Odyssey offer lessons that relate directly to the challenges that confront humanity today in reforming agriculture and addressing climate change. He proposes establishing “new roots for sovereignty” – an international-law centerpiece – in ways resembling what Wes Jackson has called “new roots for agriculture”. Jackson proposes transforming modern extractive agriculture into a revolutionary “new” form of food production – but “new” needs quotation marks because the central feature of such an agricultural transformation actually constitutes in part a return to the natural systems that prevailed in most of the world’s grassland and prairie regions before grain-and-legume production invaded and conquered them. In like fashion, Head proposes transforming international law and institutions in ways that will facilitate the agricultural revolution that Jackson (and many others now) urge us to create.
Bio. John W. Head holds the Robert W. Wagstaff Distinguished Professorship at the University of Kansas, where he concentrates on international and comparative law. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia, an English law degree from Oxford University, and his US law degree from the University of Virginia. Before starting an academic career, he worked in private practice in Washington, DC and at the Asian Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He has written about a dozen books and numerous articles and has taught and studied extensively in Europe and China.
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