WHF Post #2: Repeat of Email to email list

This post was ostensibly put on the Blog on June 19th. It turned out that apparently did not appear because I had not checked a proper box. With Wynne Wright's help, I hacked my way to a solution (i.e., found the right box to check), and thereupon got the text entered in the right place so that this should appear to all bloggers. Ave Maria, but I think I finally got this right and will also correct the next post which also failed to appear. That will turn up as Most #3. Here is what I posted back on the 19th:


Dear Colleagues:

This is the second exploration aimed at setting up a blog for progressive agrifood researchers (PARs, academic researchers working on agrifood issues). If any of you failed to get the first exploration, I’ve attached it with this email. If you didn’t get it, it was because of some haste in getting the first email together amplified by technical incompetence (I’m a frustrated luddite).

The response to the first email indicated a definite interest in such a blog. This second one is a follow-up to bring everyone up to date on what’s happening. Problems have arisen and some consultation would be useful.

This email will deal with some substantive agrifood issues, after which we’ll get to organizational details.

I won’t repeat what I wrote in the first email which is attached. Although it was sent out 29 May, since that time, awesome events have continued to unfold directly and indirectly concerned with food. For example, the full impact of Burma’s Cyclone Nargis has revealed that the country’s military government would rather let a significant percentage of its population die rather than permit outside aid providers open access to the population. In Zimbabwe, food has become an explicit weapon by Mugabe (and his military and others) to maintain power. The weakness of civil society in both countries is painful. Equally significant but encouraging has been the massive response of civil society in South Korea to their president’s opening the country to American beef. The Korean example almost certainly involved issues other than the US failure to set up stringent inspection for Mad Cow disease but this was the central issue in the Seoul demonstrations.

Simultaneously, the full impact of the petroleum crisis with $4+/gallon of gas (already passing the $4.50 mark), compounded by the Australian drought, corn and sugar ethanol, and other factors, has hit home devastatingly in countries such as Egypt (food price and availability riots); Spanish, French, and other truckers and fishermen, etc. Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch (“3M”), in their book Worlds of Food, make the point that, current food movements, taken in the aggregate around the world, constitute the most massive social movement of our time. Published in 2006, recent events seem to prove their point.

It was for those reasons that I suggested the organization of a blog in that first email: we PARs could talk to each other more rapidly and flexibly than through our publications (which lag too long) and our professional society meetings (which happen, in most cases, only once a year).

Several of you, responding to that first email, asked: why not invite others to the blog, and suggested various others. My sense of the blog is that we PARs need to get our own conversation going; I’m not, for example, opposed to opening the blog to others after we have had some time to talk together. But I’d like to keep the conversation focused on what we, as researchers with progressive orientations, can do in focusing our individual research or perhaps some collective efforts, to strengthening the alternative agrifood movements and civil society.

Perhaps there is little or nothing we PARs can do about any of the unfolding or future events; but I’d like to think that we might be able to find places, locations, interstices in the social structure where we might do something useful for the movements and civil society through our research, as well as to our professional careers in the academy.

Let me turn to some organizational issues.

First, Wynne Wright (Michigan State University; wrightwy@anr.msu.edu ) set up a blog on Google right away. She and I started working on a set of instructions (for technical incompetents such as myself) on how to get registered to participate in the Google blog and access it. This got delayed when we each ran into scheduling problems with other emergencies.

Wynne also ran into a significant problem: The blog program she is
familiar with (Google's Blogger program) only permits 100 subscribers to
any individual blog and I am sending this email to 150 names. Of course,
not everyone on the list may want to participate; some of you got into my
address book years ago and have since shifted interest to topics other
than agrifood. Others may find my definition of "progressive' too
onerous, limited, or political. In pulling the list from my address
book, I decided to be as open as possible to potential inclusion. This
leads to a primary consideration: since we cannot accommodate all 150
names in my address book - we will only be able to accommodate the first
100 who respond to this email. If you want to be included as a member
of the blog (with rights to post to the blog as an author) send an email
to me asap. Wynne and I will then add your name to the blog as an
author. Once you have been added you will receive an email asking you
to register to this blog. This is a short and easy 2 minute process for
most people.

We understand some are less comfortable with new technical programs so Wynne has developed a set of instructions on how to join/register to the blog. These are attached to this email. Armed with the instructions, you should respond to the invitation email you receive from Google (Actually the “from” line will read "Agrifood Action Researchers"). It may take a day or two from the time you email us and tell us you want to be included in this experiment until you actually receive the email from Google inviting you to join.

If anyone wants their name withdrawn from the list of potential blog joiners, please send me an email.

Second, we decided to proceed with the Google-based blog because, at least at the moment, we are unsure that we will have over 100 people want to join the blog as authors, i.e., with the “right” to initiate a new topic. Some of you may just want to read the blog and/or make comments put on the blog by an author. Let’s therefore begin and see how many want to get author status. If we get close to that 100 figure, we’ll have to see what can possibly be done to overcome that barrier.

Remember that anyone can access the blog to read the comments and can add comments; authorship means that you can initiate a topic.

Third, I have drawn the list of names for these two emails from people I have met, talked to, read your scholarly production, over the years. But please don’t think of the proposed blog as mine. This blog should belong to PARs as a group. I will be delighted to pass the responsibilities of its operation to a group of you interested in maintaining it and deciding how it should develop. Wynne and I will be handling organizational matters initially but neither of us lays claim to “ownership”; this should be a collective effort by PARs.

Collegially,

Bill