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Hope Is an Imperative
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Future Farming: The Call for a 50-Year Perspective on Agriculture
Posted Jan 29, 2009 by Wes Jackson
[Excerpt] As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation’s economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature’s economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.
“We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what’s in the bank,” said Jackson, president of The Land Institute. “If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won’t much matter.”
Jackson doesn’t minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a “50-year farm bill,” which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op/ed earlier this month.
Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento.
Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at The Land Institute continue their work on Natural Systems Agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.
Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?
Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.
Originally published January 2009 in Dissident Voice.
Interview by Robert Jenson
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2 comments
Future Farming
From: greenhouse, Feb 6, 10 07:24 AM
I agreed with Wes Jackson, More information regarding the issue that Organic agriculture is an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. Organic farmers prefer to use renewable resources and recycling to return what most conventional farmers would have wasted, back to the soil.greenhouse
Cultivation agriculture caused population overshoot
From: Peter Salonius, Jan 5, 10 08:36 AM
I agree with Wes Jackson as he says that "a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it." ---- as readers will appreciate as if they peruse my recently
re-posted OILDRUM essay entitled:
‘LONG TERM AGRICULTURAL OVERSHOOT'
Reposted December 28, 2009 at:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6048
------ including the comments and discussion that appear UNDER the essay; some of these flesh out aspects of my thinking that have become better developed since the original essay was posted on THEOILDRUM in October, 2008.
The essay is the culmination of my ~ 43 year investigation into the relationship between humans and their supporting ecosystems.
If my thesis is correct -- then the 'population bomb', that continues to make natural resource management problematic, exploded a long, long time ago.
My 'guesstimate' for sustainable human numbers in the 100s of millions, if correct, suggests that the present global population has so far overshot the carrying capacity of its supporting ecosystems that most analyses of the relationship of excessive human numbers to SPECIFIC ASPECTS of environmental damage are simply indulgent academic exercises.
I do not think that Jackson gives adequate attention the effect that population growth has had on our major sustainability problems since the advent of cultivation agriculture.
There are more people on the planet (and have been for millennia) than it can sustainably support.
Many of us have concluded that even TWO CHILD FAMILIES -- that would only slowly stabilize the human population -- are not an adequate response to this problem; we require the VOLUNTARY adoption of NO or ONE CHILD PER FAMILY behaviour to orchestrate the Rapid Population DECLINE that is necessary now.
The world is now at a crossroads where we must choose a sustainable path or eventually suffer a cataclysmic and unplanned demographic and economic contraction - 6.7 billion inhabitants, and their economic activity are devouring the world’s resources and are overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet.
Peter Salonius