Tai Johnson

“Shifting Nature” is grounded in fifteen years of collaborative work with the Hopi Tribe to document how policy and global environmental change transformed one of North America’s oldest and most biodiverse food systems, disrupting human and ecological health in the process. Intertwining oral histories with Hopi agriculturalists, biocultural museum collections, and deep archival research, the book asks questions of global significance. How do communities lose or maintain control of the resources in which their subsistence is rooted? How does the erosion or resilience of traditional foodways shape human and ecological health? And how can collaborative environmental history illuminate historic shifts in food systems, environments, and health in a rapidly changing world?