This is a segment from Laurie Johnson’s presentation in the first session of The Maurin Academy’s Fall 2022 short series on Agricultural Biotechnology and the Information Economy. She is guided by information from the first part of Jack Kloppenberg’s First the Seed. The short series with Laurie Johnson and Jakob Hanschu brings Kloppenberg’s scholarship to bear on McKenzie Wark’s The Hacker Manifesto, and vice versa.
Our guest is Nik Gaffron talks to us about his personal experience fighting fracking on public lands in Pennsylvania. We learn a lot about the fracking process as well as the politics and economics, especially how it impacts people who live near a fracking operation. Why do public officials so easily consent to these large-scale industrial operations in or close to residential areas? Why is it so hard to fight fracking in an effort to protect not only public lands but private property and its value? What are the hidden costs financially and to our health?
This Maurin Academy short series will run on Tuesdays from 7-8:30 p.m Central US time starting August 23 and ending September 20. Laurie Johnson and Jakob Hanschu will analyze the political economy of agricultural biotechnology using insights from critical studies of the information era. We invite participants to join us. If you would like to … Read more
Register for our latest short series on Agricultural Biotechnology and the Information Economy on Eventbrite! We are requesting a donation of any amount for this five session series with Jakob Hanschu and Laurie Johnson. This short series will analyze the political economy of agricultural biotechnology using insights from critical studies of the information era. Through … Read more
History Ph.D. candidate Bryant Macfarlane joins Spencer Hess and Laurie Johnson for a discussion of the conditions that made for the 1930’s Dustbowl and continue to operate today to deplete soil fertility and instigate climate change. Hannah Holleman’s book, Dustbowls of Empire is the subject of the first part of our conversation. Macfarlane later explains how Latin Common Law was practiced in the American Southwest prior to the Mexican-American War, and how practices that treated water as communal good rather than private property were eliminated by the advent of the English view of property. That began the era of accelerated metabolic rifts that led to the Dustbowl and our current dilemmas, such as ocean dead zones due to fertilizer runoff.
Spencer Hess and Laurie Johnson talk about the “Spoils of Egypt” concept from Christian theology, how it has operated in the past, and what is keeping people from using it now. In the past, Christian theologians have often “plundered” secular theology for its riches, taking what was useful and true in light of Christian revelation, and leaving what was not. Today, much philosophy is left un-plundered because it is perceived to be “evil” and untouchable. This is certainly true of critical theory and Marxism. But while much of the positive claims of Marxism, such as atheism and materialism, can and should be left behind, the deposit of negative theory regarding the abstract and impersonal operations of capital and the market ought to be carried off as spoils, because in order to get anything done we must understand our world accurately.
We are an institutional supporter and member of the Dorothy Day Guild, dedicated to the canonization of Catholic Worker Dorothy Day. From the Guild website: Dorothy Day has been called many things: an activist, a journalist, a radical, a bohemian, a mother, a convert, a mystic, a prophet, a faithful daughter of the Church. After her … Read more
Summer 2022: Laurie Johnson will offer a Seminar on Christian Anarchism. All proceeds from this course after fees are paid will go to support the mission of MORTC/Blue Valley Greens organic farm in Kansas City, MO. To enroll in this course on MORTC’s in Kansas City’s store, go to their Square site. Friends of MORTC, … Read more
Spencer Hess and I (Laurie Johnson) are getting ready to launch our new podcast, Dustbowl Diatribes, with a discussion of the US Dustbowl in the 1930’s in all its ramifications. But this isn’t a history podcast. The dustbowl symbolizes a slow moving disaster–environmental, economic, spiritual, political–which is materializing even now. We will be getting at this topic at first through an examination of Hannah Holleman’s Dustbowls of Empire. Coming in late March or early April, 2022.