The Future of Food
Module 9.1 Formative Assessment: Resilience, Adaptive Capacity, and
Vulnerability (RACV)
Name________________________
1. Please place your name on the worksheet above.
2. If you have not already done so, read pp. 129-138 in Nabhan’s book Where Our Food Comes
From, regarding the Southwest United States1 (on the library reserves system at your
institution), which describes different aspects of RACV in the Hopi farming system.
3. The exercise in this evaluation requires you to first fill in some of the blanks in the worksheet
on the next page, based on the reading.
4.
5.
6.
7.
a. Two of the shocks that the Hopi food system has been exposed to have already been
filled in on the worksheet, the main one being periodic drought. Within the human
system box, fill in some of the agricultural methods (ways of growing food) described
by Nabhan that represent adaptive capacity to drought shocks.
b. In the natural system box, fill in how agrobiodiversity and their seed systems also
represented adaptive capacity of the Hopi against drought.
During the more recent drought, Nabhan states that an additional climatic factor related to
climate change tended to worsen the effects of drought. What was this? Place it in the
additional shock box at the lower edge of the diagram.
A shock that emerged from the human system was the pumping of groundwater for coal
mining and coal slurry transport in the region. What was the vulnerability to drought in the
local natural system that this water extraction created? Fill it in in the “vulnerabilities” box
in the natural system part of the diagram.
In the last part of the chapter, Nabhan notes first a social/cultural vulnerability that has
emerged in recent times.
a. What is this social vulnerability? Note it in the vulnerability space of the Human System
rectangle
b. Nabhan also notes a new social adaptive capacity that has arisen to challenge this
vulnerability. What is this newest change that gives Nabhan hope about the fate of Hopi
seed and agricultural systems.
Of the three shocks now documented in the diagram, to which one would the Hopi
knowledge system and adaptive capacity been most exposed to over recent centuries?
Answer in one sentence.
8. Compare the level of success the Hopi food system had in adapting to the older, better
known shock you chose in (7), in comparison to the other two shocks, at least during the
last thirty years. (3-4 sentences, this may make the page run over to the next)
Nabhan, G.P. "Rediscovering America and Surviving the Dust Bowl: The U. S. Southwest ", p. 125-138, Chapter 9 in
Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. Washington: Island Press.
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