Abstract Among W. E. B. Du Bois’s many intellectual contributions were his studies of rural Black Americans and the social milieu in which they lived one generation removed from enslavement. These studies, conducted at the end of the nineteenth century and during early years of the twentieth, were groundbreaking theoretically and methodologically, beginning with detailed rural community studies that provided the basis for broader work on race and the class distinctions that quickly emerged among Black farmers and artisans. The focus here is on Du Bois’s work as a rural scholar and his connections with the emergence of rural sociology as a discipline over the first decades of the twentieth century through interactions rural sociologists had with Du Bois and other Black sociologists. Two central insights from Du Bois’s work have continuing relevance to rural sociologists: the centrality of race and the importance of a moral purpose guiding scholarly pursuits.

We use critical race theory (CRT) to examine the involuntary loss of land and homes among Black residents of the southeastern United States and in particular among the Gullah/Geechee. An Afro-indigenous population, the Gullah/Geechee have deep roots in the federally designated Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, an area of sea islands and coastal Lowcountry within 25 coastal counties in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. We identify legal vulnerabilities associated with heirs property, in particular tax sales and predatory partition actions, as mechanisms used within the legal system to dispossess owners of their land. Our use of CRT allows us to understand heirs property as a legacy of the Jim Crow era and to recognize material motivations behind continued racial discrimination that has led to involuntary land loss. CRT also leads us to consider the question of empowerment of the Gullah/Geechee population through a program of reparations for wrongful taking of land and homes since coastal development began roughly 70 years ago. One possible mechanism for reparations is to increase existing lodging taxes on coastal tourism along the Gullah/Geechee coast.

The Vietnamese fisheries sector, including both marine fisheries and aquaculture, has made spectacular progress in recent years, becoming one of the top seafood producing and exporting countries in the world. Looking forward, development goals of this sector must address challenges associated with climate change, including changing distribution of commercially important marine species such as tuna and disruptions to land-based aquaculture production systems. This study investigates the likely impacts of climate change on Vietnam’s fisheries sector by exploring plausible future scenarios for four key commodities representing capture fisheries (tuna), freshwater aquaculture (pangasius catfish and tilapia), and brackish water aquaculture (shrimp). The extent of impact varies, but climate change represents a potentially significant threat to sustainable production in each production system. Producers, policy makers, and other stakeholders need to plan for and adapt to climate change to ensure the sustainable development of Vietnam’s fisheries sector. This study uses a foresight scenario analysis using a qualitative scenario approach as the starting point for additional modeling of climate change impacts.

The Vietnamese fisheries sector, including both marine fisheries and aquaculture, has made spectacular progress in recent years, becoming one of the top seafood producing and exporting countries in the world. Looking forward, development goals of this sector must address challenges associated with climate change, including changing distribution of commercially important marine species such as tuna and disruptions to land-based aquaculture production systems. This study investigates the prospective climate change impacts on Vietnam's fisheries sector, focusing on four key commodities including capture fisheries (tuna), freshwater aquaculture (pangasius catfish and tilapia), and brackish water aquaculture (shrimp). The extent of impact varies, but climate change represents a potentially significant threat to sustainable production in each production system. Producers, policy makers, and other stakeholders need to plan for and adapt to climate change to ensure the sustainable development of Vietnam's fisheries sector.

Focusing on economic methods, this study provides a comprehensive review of the current research in fisheries and aquaculture within the context of climate change. We find there has been remarkable progress in evaluating the biophysical impacts of climate change on fish. However, the effect those impacts have on future fish stocks, yields, and dynamics are less understood. Climate change adaptation strategies in fisheries and aquaculture lack quantitative assessment, while current vulnerability indices rely heavily on subjective weighting schemes. Economic studies involving fisheries and aquaculture have seen some recent advancements but can be improved through incorporating methods from other disciplines, notably agricultural economics. Relative to its increasingly large role in global fish supply, the aquaculture sector is found to be under-represented in the economic literature. We suggest that future research in fisheries and aquaculture should further incorporate methods from agricultural economics, focus on the economics of aquaculture, and refine interdisciplinary research methods such as bioeconomic modelling.

We use a database of property tax records for 13.6 million acres representing every parcel of privately owned timberland in 48 rural Alabama counties to test two hypotheses inspired by Walter Goldschmidt relating land ownership and quality of life. Our data show private ownership is highly concentrated and 62 percent is absentee owned. We employed Pearson correlations alongside Poisson and negative binomial regression models to estimate influence of both concentrated private ownership and absentee ownership of timberland. Our findings support Goldschmidt-inspired hypotheses that concentrated and absentee ownership of timberland exhibit a significant adverse relationship with quality of life as measured by educational attainment, poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, eligibility for free or reduced price lunch at public schools, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program participation, and population density. Low property taxes in Alabama limit the ability of local governments to generate revenue to support public education or meet other infrastructural or service needs in rural areas. We call on rural sociologists and kindred spirits to pay more attention to the fundamental importance of land ownership which shapes the foundations of power and inequality affecting rural life in America and beyond.

Many developing countries face challenges in managing food safety risks associated with consumption of animal-source foods. Efforts to address these challenges increasingly recognize the role of certification in agri-food systems governance. Understanding consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for food safety certification is fundamental to determining the appropriate design and implementation of programs to reduce the burden of foodborne illnesses in developing countries. To address this need, we implemented a framed field experiment with consumers of eight farm-raised African Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) products varying in certification status (safety certified versus uncertified) and product forms (live versus smoked) to examine their WTP for food safety certification in Nigeria. We applied a mixed-effects model to account for the hierarchical structure of the data with one participant entering multiple bids, and estimated a model with participant fixed effects as a robustness check. We found that consumers were willing to pay between 3.1% and 18.8% more for fish certified as safe compared to uncertified fish. Furthermore, there was an asymmetry in food safety certification valuation, with consumers paying significant premiums for high-value larger-sized certified live and smoked catfish, but not smaller-sized certified live and smoked catfish. The results are robust to a specification in which consumer fixed effects are included. Our findings suggest there exists consumer demand for certification programs to upgrade the food safety standards of higher-value fish products in Nigeria's domestic markets. Lower-value fish products typically consumed by lower-income consumers show less potential for certification. Alternative safety regulation is needed to ensure safety practices for low-end fish products.

Managing timberland can increase productivity and income for owners, but serious constraints to meeting these or other goals face owners of heir property. The term heir property is used to describe property owned as an undivided interest among heirs of an original owner who died without a probated will. Heirs may be numerous, span multiple generations and geographies, and have very different connections to the land. Heir property is a common phenomenon among African American landowners in the southeastern United States ("South"), a region where timberland represents over 60 percent of total land use. Because owners are numerous, title to the land is considered "clouded," limiting access to government programs and commercial credit that could be used to engage in the many activities (e.g., stand establishment, fertilization, prescribed burning, thinning, harvesting, replanting) associated with timberland management. We use available data to estimate that over one million acres of timberland in the South are owned as heir property. We document the financial costs and the specific obstacles likely to be encountered by heir property owners, including long time horizons associated with timberland management and the likelihood that heir owners representing different generations may not agree on how to manage the property. We propose a set of policy changes that state and federal government agencies could consider to increase productivity and income for heir property owners while improving overall forest health.

able to human consumers. Between 1950 and 2016, the global per capita supply of seafood more than tripled from 6 kg to 20.3 kg (FAO 2018b), more than pork, chicken, or beef (see chapter 1). Seafood also is more important in international trade, with 60 MMT— or 35 percent of total world production— entering export markets (FAO 2018b), compared to 27 MMT for all terrestrially produced meats (chapter 1). If we are going to talk about animal protein sources at a global level, we have to include seafood. Seafood production comes both from harvests of wild stocks in marine and inland settings as well as from aquaculture. Capture fisheries are dependent upon biologically renewable resources that for the most part are fully exploited. Marine harvests peaked in 1996 and have declined slightly since then (FAO 2018b, 38). Reported harvests from inland capture fisheries have increased steadily since the 1950s, currently accounting for 13 percent of total harvests from all capture fisheries (Welcomme 2011). Aquaculture, in contrast, has emerged as the world’s fastestgrowing food sector with annual production of 80 MMT in 2016 compared to 1 MMT in 1950 (FAO 2009, 2018b). In 2016 aquaculture accounted for 53 percent of all seafood directly consumed by humans. The primary focus of this chapter will be on aquaculture not only because of its growing importance, but also because aquaculture presents far greater opportunities for corporate investments of the type found in animal agriculture. In common with the growth of animal agriculture, increased demand for seafood stems from growth in human populations, greater purchasing power of emerging middleclass consumers, and changes in lifestyles and consumer preferences favoring seafood for health reasons. The ability of 3 Aquatic CAFOs: Aquaculture and the Future of Seafood Production

Optimal yield (OY) is a conceptual tool for visualizing the trade-offs that often must be made in setting development priorities and goals. This chapter presents the concept of "OY" as a guide to clarify the trade-offs inherent in the decision-making process. OY combines the biological and economic parameters of development policy with a broader set of social concerns. Third World nations would benefit from explicitly incorporating the broader range of issues addressed under the OY model when designing and implementing their own fisheries policies. The concept of OY makes explicit the fact that fisheries management involves choices and that these choices inevitably are based on competing values. The OY concept combines social and cultural variables in addition to the biological and economic variables which traditionally have dominated most fisheries policies. The concept of OY was introduced as a means of visualizing the interplay between social, economic, and biological parameters of fisheries development.

Daegan Miller presents four essays rooted in landscapes of nineteenth-century America to make the case that there have always been thinkers and actors for whom nature had a higher purpose than capitalist greed. Trees—characterized as “the past’s oldest witness” (from the book’s first sentence)—play a central role throughout This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. Each essay has what Miller calls a witness tree that “stands as the central, organizing, orienting landmark” for the tale to be told (6). Miller starts with the willow under which Henry David Thoreau stood. Thoreau made his living as a surveyor dividing land into knowable fragments essential for establishment of property rights, the accumulation of wealth, and the advance of capitalism. But Thoreau dissented, using his maps, and particularly a map of the Concord River, to document and protest privatizing of public good in an act Miller described as “liberation cartography” (43).

Migrant labor is a global phenomenon and remittances of migrant workers from non-industrial nations can play an important role in improving quality of life at family, community, and national levels. We focus on workers from Guatemala who obtain visas from the United States (US) Department of Immigration's H-2B program that allow them to spend six or seven months a year planting and maintaining pine plantations in the southeastern US. Forestry is economically important in this region and the industry has come to depend on migrant labor. Our specific interest is how the H-2B program affects livelihood strategies of these workers, their families, and their communities. Based on primary data from 49 interviews conducted in eight Guatemalan communities, we explain motivations to engage in seasonal migration and positive changes brought about by the H-2B program in nutrition, housing, healthcare and long-term investments in agricultural lands, microenterprise development, education, and family stability.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, vertically integrated forest products companies have divested their forestland with much of the new ownership being real estate investment trusts (REITs) and timberland investment management organizations (TIMOs). These new landowners and their associated behavior of intensive timber management and higher and better use conversion has given rise to issues such as land-use change, fragmentation, and conservation. To better gauge harvesting patterns and ownership changes associated with the divestment of forestland by forest industry and the arrival of TIMOs and REITs on the forested landscape, eleven Landsat scenes were used to detect harvest activity within the Alabama counties of Bibb, Hale, Pickens, and Tuscaloosa from 1984 to 2014. Detected harvesting activity was paired with county parcel data and then classified based on landowner type: REITs, TIMOs, forest product industry, government, and non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners. Overall harvest trends showed a decrease in harvest rates from 1984 to 2005 with a slight increase in harvest rates after 2005. Per scene interval, acres harvested were highly variable for NIPF and relatively stable for forest industry during this time. Government ownership maintained relatively low and stable harvesting behavior throughout the study period. Acres harvested by REITs was relatively low. TIMOs showed an ever increasing rate of harvest within the study area until the last scene interval (2011-2014).

Although the contemporary agricultural revolution has allowed a significant increase in thevolume of food produced in the world, one of the most direct and fatal consequences of themodern agrifood system is the continued hunger of millions of people. Aquaculture is an activityrecognized for its great potential to generate high nutritional value food, however, theability of aquaculture to contribute to food and nutritional security can be questioned. Thisstudy describes the practice of aquaculture by peasant producers in the Vaza-Barris estuary,Sergipe, and discusses the adoption of agroecology paradigms by these producers as a way toincrease the contribution of aquaculture systems to the food and nutritional security of humanpopulations. The traditional ecosystem knowledge of the peasant producers of Sao Cristovao,Sergipe, results in aquaculture production methods that represent an important contribution toour understanding of agroecological knowledge.

Over the past 30 years, ownership changes in the United States have affected more than 50 million acres of timberland. Corporations in the U.S. forest products industry either sold off most of their timberland or restructured themselves to take advantage of changes in the tax code. These changes were the result of broader economic shifts in the U.S. economy related to the process of financialization. As a result, ownership of timberland has been separated from manufacturing capacity tied to the production from that land. The central questions we address are how have these changes in ownership affected management of timberlands and what impacts have been experienced by people and places dependent upon this resource for their livelihoods. This study focuses on Alabama, one of the nation's leading states in the production of wood‐based products. The study is based on 40 formal semistructured interviews with key actors in the industry, and frequent informal interactions with residents in timber‐dependent regions throughout the state. Our research suggests that there have been significant changes, but that these are not necessarily catastrophic and are in keeping with longer‐term trends associated with absentee ownership.