Polyculture,autonomy, and community: the pursuit of sustainability in a northern Thai farming village

A growing body of literature tracks small farmers worldwide engaging in new, proactive forms of ecologically oriented mobilization in a quest for community sustainability. We present the case of a group of farmers in northern Thailand who have converted from high-input, export-focused commodity crop production to organic vegetable polyculture systems. We analyse their motivations and the effects these changes have had on their households and community and find similarities with other small-scale agrarian communities reclaiming peasant modes of farming. The farmers of Mae Ta are primarily driven by an increased aversion to the cycles of debt, poor health, and restricted autonomy that accompany industrialized production. Those who have transitioned to organic polyculture have largely rid themselves of cyclical debt and persistent health maladies, feel more empowered and satisfied in their farming systems, and speak of broader impacts on the overall community.     

The calling of a creative transdisciplinarity

A relational approach to the problem of interdisciplinary studies is presented and arguments made for rethinking our disciplinary identity from our experiential and aspirational vantage point of transdiciplinary participation. But transdisciplinary participation requires overcoming our disciplinary chauvinism and an openness to the perspectives of other disciplines. In transdisciplinary participation, the other perspective, the other disciplines, need recognition and invitation into the hard core of the disciplinary self and for this the method and weltanschauung of the conventional interdisciplinary research is not enough. Interdisciplinary research now calls for a transdiciplinary interrogation, opening and enrichment which transforms the pious hopes and waiting for interdisciplinarity into a calling of transdiciplinary striving.     

Beyond West and East: Co-evolution and the calling of a new enlightenment and non-duality

Evolution was once a dividing mark between the “developed us” and the “underdeveloped or primitive them” but there has been certain foundational transformations in the theory and normative quest of evolution which challenge us to overcome this. Developments in both the discourse and practice of socio-cultural evolution as well as biological and cosmic evolution point to the need for cultivating a new enlightenment and non-duality going beyond the dualism of environment and the organism, ontogenesis and socio-genesis and much more fundamentally, “us” and “them.” The present essay discusses the contours of a new evolutionary theory under the rubric of “co-evolution.” It builds upon the seminal works of both Bergson and Sri Aurobindo and discusses the outline of a new enlightenment and non-duality. It also discusses the evolutionary challenge before self and society in terms of realizing a new enlightenment which just does not valorize rationality and dualism but strives for realization of non-duality in manifold relations of being and becoming in self and society.     

Population change and economic development in Indonesia

Standard demographic transition theory holds that transition takes place concurrently with socioeconomic development. Oshima has generalized that the pace of demographic transition in Indonesia has been slow and in keeping with standard theory. This article, however, challenges Oshima's contentions and points out that Indonesia has been able to attain a level of demographic transition with a lower level of economic development than that experienced by present-day developed countries during their transitions from high fertility and mortality to low fertility and mortality. Sections consider the theory of demographic transition, population and economic change in Indonesia, and the likely impact of demographic changes on the future of Indonesia's economy. The more rapid demographic transition experienced in Indonesia may be used to stimulate even faster economic progress in the country.