The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics

Chapter 1: Sustainability and Environmental Philosophy

Chapter 1 Sustainability and Environmental Philosophy The word environmentalism is often used to indicate a loosely organized social movement that emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, leading to the formation of national parks and wildlife preserves. The most active early period in the United States coincided with the terms of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), which saw a considerable emphasis on conservation and an expansion of the national park system. Environmentalism enjoyed a resurgence during the 1970s with the passage of key environmental legislation such as the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It has reemerged in recent times in connection with the opposition to globalization and in response to climate change. The idea of sustainability has considerably broadened the concerns of the environmental movement and, at the same time, has helped bring environmentalism itself into the mainstream. Sustainability and environmental action alike involve implicit, unstated assumptions about the principal aims and focus of the environmental social movement. As we shall see, environmental philosophers often emphasize wild nature, but many ecologists and geographers who tackle environmental problems start with the human impact on land and water more generally. This starting point quickly leads them to agriculture . The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that 5,872,738 hectares of the world’s 13,048,300-hectare landmass are used for agriculture: when small garden plots and marginal lands used for occasional grazing are included, slightly more than half the land on planet Earth is used for plant and animal production. Another third consists of forests and woodlands. The remaining 4,002,828 hectares can be categorized as (1) deserts, tundra, and swamps not habitable by human beings; (2) wetlands and savanna set aside for recreation and wild- Sustainability and Environmental Philosophy 19 life preservation; (3) lands used for mining and manufacturing; and (4) urban areas. In the United States, about half the landmass is used for agriculture; in the United Kingdom, the figure is 40 percent. Excepting multiple-use forests, U.S. lands set aside specifically for conservation or recreation (including uninhabited deserts, swamps, and high mountain ranges) make up a mere 20 percent of the total. From one perspective, then, agriculture is a key to humanity’s impact on the environment. Sustainable land use cannot be thought of strictly as a matter of protecting island ecosystems from all human use, however important that continues to be. If we shift from land to water, we note that agriculture uses the largest share of fresh water. In fact, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and coiner of the phrase sustainable development, has always believed that food production is the key to sustainability. He wrote, “There is a tendency in public discourse to talk about the water problem and the food problem as though they were independent. But with some 70 percent of all the water that is pumped from underground used for irrigation . . . the water problem and the food problem are in large measure the same.”1 Thus, even when our focus is narrowed to environmental sustainability (that is, before we even begin to ask about fairness, justice, or whether the human population will have enough to eat), we note that a very large portion of what we take to be the environment—nonurban land and water—is caught up in agriculture. The agricultural focus can be expanded even further if we take a science or policy perspective. In many cases, the science underlying forestry and fish and wildlife management resides in institutions that originated as colleges of agriculture. This is because basic science disciplines traditionally eschewed applied problems, so agricultural colleges became the natural home for all manner of applied biology. In most nations, executive policy for the management of forests and fisheries resides in the same ministry as agriculture. For good or ill, the lead administrators of agencies devoted to policy making for biological systems often have farming backgrounds and perspectives. Agriculture is, in this broad sense, the human management of ecosystems, and all natural ecosystems are increasingly being viewed as in need of management, if only to shield their natural functions from impact by the ever-expanding human species . To this way of thinking, agriculture represents the ensemble of ways in which the human species both shapes and is shaped by the ecosystems 20 The Agrarian Vision that human beings inhabit. Although I do...