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 March 2026 doing that!
As of today, I am mostly focused on:
- Catching up on overdue grading, after missing parts of the semester to attend the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (in Cartagena, Colombia), and AAG (geographers’ conference), and a nasty flu.
- Teaching my full course load: four classes per term. Spring 2026 that’s:
- Sustainable Food Systems (Lab); Sustainability and Social Justice; Sustainable Development; and (new class) World Regions and Development.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…eventually.
- 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.