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Chapter 14 Eating in the Gardens of Gaia Envisioning Polycultural Communities Harriet Friedmann Three principles are at the heart ofa food system that can support human communities within the earth community: 1. Grow what is good for the earth. 2. Eat what is good to grow. 3. Live in relationships that make the first two possible. Like most principles, they are easy to state but difficult to achieve. They are radically different from the principles that organize industrial monocultures and mass-produced edible commodities. They reflect a conclusion opposite to that of an influential book which ten years ago brilliantly described the relationship between political economy and nature: Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson (1989:188-89) concluded that with microelectronics and biotechnology, "the agrofood system ... joins the broader long-run tendency in industry to trivialize primary commodity inputs, or nature," ending "the pre-history of the food industry" and marking its "incorporation within the broader dynamics of the industrial system and post-industrial society." I see in the "trivialization of nature" a transformative potential. Indeed natural processes cannot be trivialized, but the biotic and material cycles that are disrupted by the linear workings of the industrial food system can create crises for human foodgetting. This is one way to interpret the pollution of water, air, and soil, the change of water and air cycles controlling climate, and the loss of species, leading to what Leakey and Lewin (1995) call the sixth extinction since life began some four billion years ago. New sciences of symbiotic evolution, ecosystem dynamics, and biosphere regulation of the conditions sup- Eating In the Gardens of Gala 253 porting life suggest that human activity in the food web will either lead to unknown catastrophes-check your newspapers for famines, plagues, and wars-or human foodgetting will enter a new phase of learning from and working with earthly cycles. This new phase of life on earth is called "neotechnic" by design visionary John Tillman Lyle (1994) and more broadly, "the ecozoic era" by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (1992). A new approach that goes under several names suggests a new way for humans to work with the rest of nature. Bill Mollison (e.g., 1988), who calls his approach "permaculture," has demonstrated in a variety of agro-ecosystems and social contexts that working with natural cycles creates more abundance with less work than the dominant industrial approach, which forces a small number of species to grow in conditions rendered as homogeneous as possible. Vandana Shiva (1993) has shown that standard measures of productivity ignore most of the polycultural species of traditional agriculture. When measures take into account the great diversity of cultivated and wild plants, each harvested from and returned to one of many interwoven cycles, polycultures yield more food and renew conditions for further harvests. Productivity of human labor, calculated as a ratio of monetary inputs and outputs, is misleading, especially when production entails burning fossil fuels. If one wishes to analyze the long-term sustainability of a production system , it is more accurate to calculate the ratio ofenergy inputs and outputs . Bayliss-Smith's (1982) calculations show swidden cultivation to be far more productive than industrial agriculture; so was preindustrial English farming, which used scientific observations to further enhance harvests from natural cycles. Permaculture and related ways of working with natural and material cycles promise to increase rather than diminish fertility and to enhance human harvests from natural cycles. The social organization appropriate to polycultural foodgetting is the subject of this chapter. History can be stylized as monoculture in tandem with hierarchy, with both contained within the limits of local ecosystems; both disasters and successes demonstrate the point. History , exactly as old as writing, coincides with what we call civilization, and began with specialist roles of scribes, priests, and aristocrats, as well as the newly specialized roles of artisans and farmers (Kautsky 1982). In what is probably the oldest civilization, Mesopotamia, division of humans into dominating and dominated classes coincided with the dominance claimed over plants and animals (Diamond 1997:265-92). Plants and animals of Mesopotamia, notably wheat, barley, and cattle, were already organized through monocultures, and the civilization 254 Harriet Friedmann that grew out of that particular complex of hierarchies eventually birthed European modernity with its industry, communications media , and other extensions and deepenings of homogeneity.l As Western civilization engulfs, contests, and transforms other societies, both civilized and preliterate, human society may be reaching the social and ecological limits of monoculture. In that sense...

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