I’ve been turned on to the “now” page as a place to try to update about what is most currently on my agenda. However, I’ve been confronted with a series of challenges to this task. First, wrist tendonitis that makes my computer time limited. Second, perpetual website management issues (ah, wordpress and its popularity among hackers as a target!). Third, I apparently have too much “real work” to have time for keeping up a website. The last time I updated this page was 2024. Eep. YET, I still aspire to share what’s up for me, and so here I am in June 2026 doing that!
As of today, I am mostly focused on:
- Starting the new semester, with some new classes (Environmental Challenges of the 21st Century) and old ones. Getting to know students. Ironing out issues (with online learning especially!). Staying on top of grading. Making new PPTs.
- Enjoying the afterglow of having just played reunion shows, one with Dear Nora, a wonderful outfit that I used to drum for back in 2003-2006.
- Arranging new interviews for my new research on land politics in California, and generally trying to move forward on that research.
- Promoting by forthcoming book North Stars of Emancipation: California’s Diverse Food and Farming Movements in Times of Racial Reckoning, out July 14, 2026 on MIT Press. This book is based on my dissertation; I am also setting up book tours and events to discuss the contents!
- Still sorta distributing the Zine version of the dissertation, available here.
- Writing a small book on “agrarian anarchism”. I have spent years on this topic, but it’s been on the backburner. In 2024 I gave this talk (among others) on anarchism in relation to degrowth and food sovereignty, which eventually became this 2025 paper on overlaps and tensions between these concepts.
- Organizing around “land reform” as a frame, coming off the heels of this commentary I wrote for this special issue on Land and Sustainable Food Transitions, on why land reform is not so visible in US food movements. For instance, I started a political education monthly gathering (“Radical Agroecology Dinner and Discussion”) that recently conducted a “Land Reform Winter School”, and that same organizing effort led up a delegation of 12 land activists to the ICARRD conference mentioned above.
- Beginning to plan for a land reform-related webinar for my Red Natural History Fellowship.
- Enjoying the freshly-arrived copy of Nourishing Food Justice, an updated new edition of this now-classic book on Food Justice. With the great help of editor Alison Alkon, my chapter was included as the very first chapter! It is a sort of synopsis of my book’s arguments, entitled: “North Star politics of emancipation: how radical and BIPOC traditions influence food movement approaches to the market and state”.
- Organizing the Agroecology Research-Action Collective (ARC) in North America
- Finally gardening again (more)! At home in Berkeley, mostly. Also, I started a new garden with my students at CSUEB and have been managing that since late Fall 2023.
- Circulating my recent album, “Dark Times Moonlight”, plus the two other albums I have managed to make in recent years, this one in 2019 and this one 2022. I have 3 new songs in the works, and am hoping to again record some stuff in November if all goes well.
- Writing songs and parts and playing drums for my friend Kyle’s band. We are called The Green Straw and probably will have an album out…this year?
- Parenting a very charming child who is amazing, stays up late reading fantasy novels, but is sadly less interested these days in nature, plants, the outdoors, etc. He loves D&D and kitties and is a total sweetheart. No complaints.
- Surviving the fast but also confusing collapse of modern US society and empire.