Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture

Chapter 7. Restoration, Reciprocity, and Repair: Revising the Ecological Imagination

Restoration, Reciprocity, and Repair To this point I have argued that narrative might help us view the task ahead of us: achieving more sustainable relations with the earth and the biotic community and rethinking human roles within that community, particularly with regard to agriculture. Studying the story of Balaram and the Yamuna River helps us understand human behavior in an agricultural context, and reflecting on this story helps us ask, In what ways do we act out our membership or citizenship within the biotic community ? Although all members of the biotic community play, or have been assigned, roles in this drama, human choices of narrative have a disproportionate effect on nonhuman members of the biotic community. Industrial agriculture has caused much of this disparity, largely as the result of increasing demands for meat, processed food, and profit from newly commodified objects, such as genetic materials. The unsustainable pressure on the earth to increase production to feed humans necessitates an assessment of our narrative choices and their effects on members of the biotic community as well as the community as a whole. This chapter describes the lexicon that underlies alternative agricultural models and how this lexicon is enacted in agricultural praxis. Exploring the metaphors and narratives that underlie these alternative practices enables us to trace the consequences of both existing and alternative ones. Only then can we develop agricultural practices that reflect responsibilities to multiple biological and human communities. This is not a new call. More than fifty years ago, Aldo Leopold in “The Land Ethic” argued that human mores should expand to include the biotic community, and his work provided an alternate model to frame human interactions in that community. Today, organic agriculture and Chapter 7 Revising the Ecological Imagination Restoration, Reciprocity, and Repair 195 practices such as agroecology, ecological agriculture, and restoration agriculture provide alternatives to industrial agriculture and offer a range of metaphoric structures that provide ways for us to think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community . These practices rest upon metaphors such as reciprocity and interdependence, and these existing models reveal how the ecological imagination has shaped practice. Before we can construct and enact new agricultural narratives, we must recognize that the “scientific objectivity” of industrial agriculture is only one among many possible narratives. Then we need to explore how the underlying metaphors and narrative structure of industrial agriculture offer the opportunity to explore other metaphors and narratives .Onceweunderstandexistingstructures,wecanexplorealternative metaphors, such as relationship and citizenship in the biotic community . Citizenship entails responsibility and fairness to other community members and acknowledges the competing moral allegiances of agriculturalists , for example, to themselves and to others in the biotic community . Relationship, drawing upon the context of our personal relationships, entails themes of respect and trust. Themes of reciprocity and mutual obligation—part of the community metaphor—are consciously enacted in the physical process of ecological restoration and in forms of sustainable agriculture, and we can see how shifts in metaphor emerge in alternative practices. The alternative agricultures I explore here demonstrate concrete practices and illuminate alternate agricultural paradigms. This work is rooted in the present but looks toward the future, so my exploration of these practices is a means to ask how we might move toward adopting the values and themes that underlie them. The urgency of the problems with our food systems demands that we rethink and revise agricultural practice at multiple levels, from individual food choices to larger-scale shifts to sustainable forms of agriculture. Alternative agricultures, such as ecological agriculture, can be scaled up or down for different needs and scenarios. For example, I might revise plant combinations in my garden based on insights I derive from restoration ecology, or a small farm seeking to improve soil fertility might adopt theories of agroecology . My exploration of the paradigms and metaphoric structures of these systems does not mean that I seek a grand narrative or universal 196 Growing Stories from India answers, a one-size-fits-all solution, so to speak, because, in the spirit of biodiversity, variety and redundancy trump the single solution. We can learn from attempts to rethink food production at individual, group, and even corporate levels, while recognizing that solutions will emerge based on a combination of personalities, local structures, and biophysical realities. The narrative of modernity has preached the virtues of sameness, standardization,andefficiency.NowisthetimetotakeupFredKirschenmann ’s call for a postmodern agriculture, replacing the safety and predictability...