Guest post: We need a new narrative and a new agriculture
Originally a comment by Laurent on Hurtling down the path to extinction.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that would go well.
That’s because the idea that only intensive agriculture is working is deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. It would be good to assess what good it does to us all, actually, and start questioning it and look at what the data is actually telling us. It may have been necessary to step into this narrative post-war in order to increase food safety, but we are now in need of a new narrative and a new agriculture.
It’s only partially true, thus. There are workable scenarios within reach with only partial intensive agriculture and remaining environment friendlier agriculture can work out both a green sustainable future and a socially integrated society.
We should first realise more food is produced from small scale agriculture, which is also friendlier to both environment and social. We should note that there’s an ever going debate as to try to understand why small farms are actually more productive than the bigger ones. (The debate is known as the “inverse farm size-productivity relationship”, it is not trivial, and it is a very counter-intuitive fact, but fact nonetheless). There are several competing explanations for this, but clearly the work surface ratio is an interesting factor in the equation.
We should then realise the unleveled effect of very basic agroecology and agroforestery management at the many scales involved (not just primary productivity). It is certainly not a huge loss to accept small scale decreases in productivity if that means huge gains in coexisting biodiversity. (Amazingly, this debate is framed in reverse too in North America: we should intensify more to save space for full wilderness).
Last, it is important to realise that relying on a handful of crops, even with a very heavy knowledge and technology around them, is not a safe bet at all. Conversely, increasing agrodiversity and food diversity is known to lead to a much greater resilience in the face of both coming climate challenges and diversity challenges. We should not do it by the dime, rather, we should focus on increasing our efforts toward increased agrodiversity stewardship, both in our science and in our daily citizen life.
Letting natural systems operate in as unfettered a way as possible is a good idea because we don’t know enough to create an environmental prosthesis to replace those parts we have destroyed and are destroying. Unfortunately I fear such “small decreases in productivity” will be fought tooth and nail by vested interests trying to protect their bottom line.
More pieces of the bigger picture we’re a part and have been messing with are being unearthed or discovered all the time. It looks like the devestating and catastrophic depopulation of the New World in the aftermath of European contact, helped exacerbate the Little Ice Age, with forests reclaiming former agricultural lands, pulling more CO2 out of the atmosphere and adding to the cooling underway.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/feb-9-2019-psychology-of-solitary-confinement-mind-over-genes-genocide-and-climate-change-and-more-1.5008739/50-million-deaths-in-the-new-world-drove-cooling-in-the-the-little-ice-age-1.5008748
It reminds me of a quote of Ronald Wright from Stolen Continents: Five Hundered Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas :America seemed a virgin land waiting for civilization. But Europe had made the wilderness it found; America was not a virgin, she was a widow.
And our influence may go back farther than we realized. Wiiliam Ruddiman believes that the human invention of agriculture started shifting the climate 8,000 years ago, possibly delaying the end of the current interglacial period. These sorts of connections and the science behind them are really fascinating, but at the same time scary as hell. It shows that humans mustn’t continue with its current accidental civilization. If there’s anything we need to take control of, it’s ourselves and our actions, as you note when you say
Whether there is time enough to wrest control away from the forces of libertarian, de-regulating, free-market fetishism before it’s too late is the question.
I know that these changes are a grassroots thing, but I think there has to be support and incentive from the top down, too. We’ve seen how having the wrong bunch of people at the top can all too easily stall or undo the modest and unambitious, yet still hard won progress that more knowledgable and sympathetic governments have tried to initiate. This one step forward, two steps back routine makes coordinated action a lot harder, particularly when it’s held hostage by the perrenial election cycle churn, and where cranks are given a platform in the name of media “balance.”
Personally, I find it hard being pulled between pessimism and optimism. It’s wearying. I’d like to have hope, but I’m familiar enough with history to temper those hopes and fear for the worst (or at least the really, really bad). What you’ve written here has pushed me a little more towards optimism. For that, thank you. How long that will last…who knows?
Letting natural systems operate in as unfettered a way as possible is a good idea because we don’t know enough to create an environmental prosthesis to replace those parts we have destroyed and are destroying.
True enough. Though I would like to stress yet another common myth associated with that. It’s our view that nature does best when left untouched, including regarding biodiversity. Probably it’s not far from the Western intertwined views of both foundational idea of Gardens of Eden and the Rousseauist Good Savage (it is not only telling about human nature, it is a broader view on nature itself).
First, and grossly, diversity is actually maximized at intermediate levels of disturbance, be they natural happenstances or consequences of human impacts. That’s just because some species strive at specific stages of ecological succession process between ‘void’ habitat to natural climax, and they replace each other along that continuum.
Second, many man-made environments evolved into species rich diversity hot-spots. Old World pastoralism system notoriously created meadows with very high plant and insect diversity, for example. Our understanding of the Amazonian Bassin is also evolving toward a stronger historically man-made/managed environment. This does not mean that human is the single factor in all this of course, but clearly low to middle levels of human disturbance led to highly diverse systems.
Therefore, there are ways to cope with maintaining high biodiversity levels along the environmental transformation forward a world with a ten billions population (which won’t last at that peak neither) all while ensuring food production. The first thing is to take diversity impacts into account and make preserving diversity a priority among other priorities. It’s more difficult a task if we keep focusing on issues with single priorities in mind, rather than keeping multiple goals to aim for in mind. It’s amazing to realise that mono-tasking is basically a stereotype attribute of maleness in a patriarchal society, and it’s still exactly part of the issue at stake: that we think of agriculture and food production as a single simple issue of productivity alone.
Absolute maximum production isn’t all that great if its accompanied by enormous losses and waste in distribution and storage. Fence-post to fence-post corn and soy can be ‘productive’ without really doing all that much good for the actual population.
I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales where the ground is mostly vertical and only things like sheep and sheep dogs can stick to it. Those farms are sustainable in ecological terms but successive governments don’t seem to want to help them be sustainable in economic terms. It’s way better – apparently – to buy sheep bits that need to be frozen, flown in, and driven about between supermarkets than to promote the farming of sheep on a small scale on land that can’t be used for anything else and the sheep being butchered and sold locally.
Old-fashioned Dales farmers don’t tend to destroy hedgerows, do tend to use dry stone walls and aren’t the environmental problem that larger-scale farmers very definitely are.
By way of contrast, some of my other relatives own enormous tracts of land in the very flat and fertile Vale of York and love nothing more than buying up smaller farms, ripping up hedges and growing unsustainable crops that nobody really needs. Sustainable farming is as much about foreign policy as domestic but here both are a mess with no apparent resolution in sight, less still in the light of brexit.
Can we ever stop hitting ourselves?
I should add that my closest arable-farming relative, my sister, who has an amazing piece of land in the Vale of York, does quite a lot to preserve hedgerows and other boundaries and isn’t entirely awful. She and her husband really want to do their duty in curating the land and his parents – who owned that land before – felt the same. They hated intensive farming too.
But they – and my sister – still take subsidies that they know are unsustainable in order to keep the business running. I’m not sure they have any alternative. But at least they will never – ever – allow anyone to build on that land.