Biomass energy plants: see themselves as a cost-effective solution for farmers who need to get rid of dead trees and other woody waste that pose wildfire risks without openly burning them; they also produce energy
Utilities companies: looking for the "least-cost, best-fit" source of energy, don't care where it comes from just that it's reasonably priced
Farmers: need cheap ways to dispose of waste
Technology to dispose of woody waste from almond trees in ways other than open burning or biomass facilities doesn't exist yet, at least at the scale needed for massive almond orchards
Closures of biomass energy plants have forced SJVAPCD to allow more open burning of agricultural waste, which produces particulate matter and contributes to already severe air quality in the Central Valley
Act 35, United Teachers of New Orleans, white flight and school integration, DEI and racialization; will be important to conceptualize overall linking of education to political economy. Further, the text produces many questions for me: How do reforms become spaces for racecraft? How might education restructuring in NOLA provide insight to education restructuring post- and during disaster? How does it help questioning the normative and the prescriptive?
Further, in interviews of new hires of charter schools, Tompkins reveals how they are ambivalent about what they can do and about their positionalities and ethics, arguing that it leads to atomization and desocialization of the individual, and that prevents collective action. How can ambivalence be interpreted as a space for collective potential rather than collective paralysis? Can it be interpreted as such? Since action does not follow knowledge of contradictions and ambivalence, how can this subjectivity be articulated as politically productive?
The gift of the money caused discord in the community - rather than buying the good tea for a better price, so that it feels earned, it is a bigger power dynamic to gift the money
The publication of standards, inspections, certification, decertification, branding - connection to policy for organic certification
I don’t think they particularly see themselves as helpful to the tea growers - they are more about codifying/enacting a “final vocabulary” around their view of environmental sustainability
In the context of a supply chain where the Global North [sic] corp/buyer is at the top, they are defining and enacting “the ethical” and environmental “responsibility” in their standards and their inspections and their certifications and labels and branding, without any real awareness of how these things are already happening, for different reasons, in the context of somewhere like Tanzania where the tea is actually being grown.
Standards development organizations, which include heavy influence from corporations in the Global North [sic], are “codify[ing] values of sustainability that are to govern practices” p825
Not much on the context of CSR or the history of these SDOs and why they exist.