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Existential crises hang over the producers of the world's food. In Bananapocalypse, Alyssa Paredes reveals how many dilemmas facing Big Ag come from self-inflicted wounds. Philippine banana plantations exporting to Japan—a network dubbed “Asia’s banana republic”—unleash chemical drift, food waste, polluted effluent, and fungal pathogens into the environment but are then regularly confounded when the by-products they view as external to their operations double back to haunt them. Paredes traces the afterlives of this detritus as the workings of trade, science, and law run up against the imperiled ecologies of the twenty-first century. Wielding a wide analytic lens, Bananapocalypse turns the commodity chain inside out, recounting how communities on the plantations' edges turn moments of industrial exhaustion into opportunities for paradigm shifts.
Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and coeditor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food.
“Bananapocalypse is an instant classic of political ecology, written with the seriousness, curiosity, and care that a ruined world is owed.”—Raj Patel, coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
“What hovers around the banana on its journey from land to mouth? Bananapocalypse tells it straight—but this includes ‘pole-vaulting,’ water lily theft, and divine intervention, making the reader’s journey both strange and wonderful. Alyssa Paredes is a committed and insightful raconteur.”—Anna Tsing, coauthor of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature
“Brilliantly decentering the commodity, Bananapocalypse makes visible the conditions plantation capitalism requires to thrive, the harms it leaves in its wake, and the justice coalitions arising to challenge it.”—Marina Welker, author of Enacting the Corporation and Kretek Capitalism
“A fantastic book and a much-needed addition to the literature on plantation ecologies. In her masterful telling of the apocalyptic plight of an industry ‘downstream from itself,’ Paredes takes us deep into the uncomfortable histories of liberalism, colonialism, forced labor, global commodity chains, and monocrop ecologies. Wide-ranging and erudite, Bananapocalypse never settles for an easy analysis or critique but rather, much like the alternative agrarian techniques it highlights, searches for ways to thrive amid damage.”—Kregg Hetherington, Research Chair in Environmental Ethnography, Concordia University
“Written in engaging prose and bursting with creativity and originality, Bananapocalypse is an extraordinary intellectual accomplishment that speaks to an interdisciplinary audience about the political economy and ecology of plantations. It radically alters how we scientifically study and publicly debate the global food system and capitalism.”—Saturnino M. Borras Jr., coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics