The necessary marriage between ecology and agriculture

Our subject here is "the problem of agriculture" no t "problems in agriculture." We proceed with the assumption that problems in agriculture are primarily derivatives of the problem of agriculture. Soil erosion beyond replacement levels is an agriculture-old problem. And though the synthetic chemicals accumulating in the soil an d waters of our land are a recent event, their use is a consequence of our ancient attempts at pes t control, a major feature of our struggle to stay ahead of famine since agriculture began. Even though our increasing fossil-fuel dependency for traction and fertility may be a product of the industrial age, in the main it represents our most recent response, a mere detail in the long history since the time those most-revolutionary-of-all ancestors scaled their patches upward to the level of fields. Even the problem of narrowing the germ plasm in our major crops is not a recent pheno menon. Those first few cuts of selection by humans may well have yielded the steepest decline i n germ plasm in the history of crop evolution. In a real sense, then, we live in a "fallen world": the nature that produced us - particularly nature's ecosystems which fed and clothed us as we gathered and hunted - has been almost totally destroyed or seriously damaged during the 8 ,000-10,000 years of agriculture. We have really changed the face of the earth. The major feature of this split with nature, then, has been the exercise of human cleverness in transforming earth's landscapes to yield an abundan ce of food and fiber. This "human cleverness" approach to the world stands at the opp osite end of the spectrum from the application of "nature's wisdom." The problem of agriculture, t herefore, lies at the very core of the human condition. Is it not time to give emphasis to anoth er tack? For even though humans may learn faster than nature, natural plant and animal commun ities have been shaped by climatic and evolutionary histories beyond complete human comprehension. After all, we recognize now that such concepts borrowed from industrial models as pr oducer, consumer, and competitor are inadequate to convey accurately the complex relatio nships within natural ecosystems. Those who settled the North American continent brought with them visions of a European-style agriculture in which their familiar crops and lives tock could thrive and satisfy markets in the homeland (Crosby 1986). Tragically, as the New World ecosystems were dismantled, stabilizing processes were decoupled, and species were extirpat ed before their roles in the ecosystem could be understood sufficiently. In short, as Wendell Be rry (1987) has said, "We have never known what we were doing because we have never known what we were undoing." The few relicts of pre-Columbian vegetation that remain must serve as our best standards by which any agriculture touted as sustainable is to be judged.