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Cuba faced challenges in provisioning urban agriculture with a workforce, extension services, and material inputs, the Cuban efforts to deal with which this chapter addresses. There exist extensive training, education, and dissemination efforts by various institutions, such as ACTAF, ANAP (farmer-to-farmer), GNAU, Centers for Sustainable Agriculture Studies, INCA, Agroecological Beacons Program, and GNAU. The efforts in educating school children include circles of interest (primary level) and a network of Agricultural Polytechnic Institutes (IPAs, secondary level). In terms of material inputs, seeds are available through municipal seed farms, and individual producers are encouraged to produce their own seeds. There also exist large-scale programs for providing organic/biological fertilizers, such as compost and worm humus, as well as a network of over 200 CREE centers producing biological pesticides. These materials are made available to the producers through CTA stores providing both sales of material inputs and extension services.

This chapter goes into a detailed discussion of the causal theory of action (CTA) and attempts to address the questions that have arisen in recent years. In light of recent developments, the fundamental principles of the CTA are reexamined here. The discussion of recent developments is divided into three parts, each corresponding to the three fundamental principles of the CTA. Criticisms of the CTA are divided between those that refuse to identify actions, even in part, with bodily movements; those that refuse to identify the causes of those bodily movements that are actions as mental states of desire, belief, intention, or the like; and those that deny that the relationship between volitions and the bodily movements that are their objects is causal.

Worldwide, transportation accounts for roughly a quarter of the total final energy demand and a similar share of energy-based carbon dioxide emissions (IEA, 2016f). The transport sector has the most homogenous of fuel mixes, with petroleum-based products accounting for roughly 95% of the overall final share (Kahn Ribeiro et al., 2012). Biofuels and other options, like electric vehicles, have the potential to displace a notable portion of petroleum and CO2 emissions in the transport sector. Global use of ethanol, the most widely used among biofuels, has grown significantly in recent years. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, ethanol utilization increased 350% worldwide, with trade increasing by a factor of 5 and usage equaling 74 billion liters in 2010 (Valdes, 2011). This chapter examines the underlying roots of the biofuels transition in Brazil. Two micro-shifts—one that is government- led and a second that is industry-led—are evaluated, demonstrating how a new, energy market and industry can develop at a national scale through the retooling of existing industries and infrastructure. Insights on policy inflections, market longevity, and dual-use technology are also covered. Brazil is the historical leader in biofuels and the only country to substantially alter its automotive fuel mix with ethanol, shifting from 1% in 1970 to 34% in 2014 (see the section entitled “Modern Transition” later in this chapter). Ranked sixth globally for its population of roughly 206 million people and eighth for its economy of $3.1 trillion in mid-2016 (CIA, n.d.), Brazil has been a leading pioneer in the production and export of ethanol, its principal biofuel. In 2015, Brazilian ethanol equaled 28% of the global supply (Renewable Fuel Association [RFA], 2016). The country is known for having the lowest production costs of ethanol (Goldemberg, 2008; Shapouri, and Salassi, 2006; Valor International, 2014). Brazil also has a unique distribution network of more than 35,000 fuel stations supplying the renewable fuel (Agência Nacional do Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis, 2008).

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

This chapters looks at FutureChurch—and along the way Call to Action (CTA) as well as VOTF. All of these organizations challenge, to varying degrees, the doctrinal orthodoxy as well as the behavioral and institutional customs of Catholicism. Founded in the bicentennial year 1976 under the auspices of the American bishops, CTA soon broke away to press for women's ordination, optional celibacy for the priesthood, and similar causes. Sr. Christine Schenk founded FutureChurch in the Cleveland area in the 1990s and has concentrated on promoting the “female diaconate”—that is, allowing women to be ordained as permanent deacons, a step just below the priesthood in the Catholic hierarchy. Schenk's agenda opens up a gray area between permissible and expressly forbidden change. Her advocacy inside the church is analogous to the liberalization that John Courtney Murray sought decades earlier in the relations between church and state.

This introduction offers a brief historical examination of the three key stages of the development of the causal theory of action (CTA), namely, the ancient classical period represented by the work of Aristotle, the early modern period represented by the work of Thomas Hobbes, and the contemporary period represented by the work of Donald Davidson. Usually, philosophy of action is interpreted either broadly, including all of the problems in philosophy dealing with human action and agency, or more narrowly, concerned merely with the cluster of issues dealing directly with the nature of intentional action and the explanation of action. However the philosophy of action is characterized, only a single theory has recently enjoyed the title of “the standard story” of human action and agency in the literature, and that pleasure belongs to the CTA. This chapter presents contemporary versions of the CTA and the main topics of debate surrounding it.