Coevolutionary Agricultural Development

Doubts about the appropriateness of models of economic development-about their ability to predict in advance or describe in retrospect the consequences of their own prescriptions for growth-have been increasing over the past decade.' While much of this discontent has centered on broad issues such as economic and political inequality, agricultural development-whether neglected or not-has rarely followed the path established for it by economic planners. Many of agriculture's detours and dead ends have been explored needlessly, because economic prescriptions have been incongruous with ecological knowledge.2 My own research has recently emphasized development failure and environmental degradation in the Amazon, a manenvironment interaction with analogues in tropical rain forest ecosystems in Central America, Africa, and Asia.3 Other sociosystemecosystem combinations, notably nomadic herding in the vast semidesert regions of Africa and subsistence agriculture in the mountainous regions of South America and South and Southeast Asia, are also temporarily accommodating larger populations through environmental degradation rather than through improved forms of interaction. The coevolutionary perspective outlined in this paper provides a linkage between economic and ecological paradigms. The perspective emphasizes how man's agricultural activities modify the ecosystem and how the ecosystem's responses provide cause for subsequent individual action and social organization. A linkage is quite different from a grand synthesis of previously incongruous paradigms. Through a linkage, each discipline enriches the other because of their differences. Neither discipline must abandon its past. Eventually, however, new emphases and approaches arise because of the enrichment. A similar linkage between anthropology and ecology produced the fertile subdiscipline of cultural ecology. This paper outlines some of the differences in economic and ecological thinking, the advantages of enrichment,