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Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Agriculture Sustainable agriculture is often presented as an alternative to conventional agriculture. Framing the issue in that fashion leads to the conclusion that sustainable agriculture is simply another way to farm, or another way to produce food. However, sustainable agriculture may be part of a much more comprehensive change in society. Some have referred to this more inclusive shift as an “ecological revolution.”1 From this perspective, sustainable agriculture may be part of a conceptual revolution that could be as mind-bending as the Copernican revolution that began in the sixteenth century. Stepping Out and Stepping Back In In Dominion: Can Nature and Culture Co-Exist? Niles Eldredge evaluates changes we might anticipate in our short- and long-term future based on our evolutionary past. He explores who we have become as a human species and how we relate to nature. Such an evolutionary perspective sheds light on the prospect of an ecological revolution and agriculture’s role in it. Agriculture has played a key role in shaping the way we see ourselves and our relationship to the earth. Agriculture, introduced some 10,000 years ago, started us down the path of believing that we could “step out of” our local ecosystems.2 The practice of domesticating plants and animals for food led us to believe that we could survive and solve all of our problems through human cleverness. For the first time, we believed ourselves 48 A condensed version of this essay was delivered as a speech at the Northeast Organic Farming Association New Jersey Annual Conference, March 6, 1996. This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared in For All Generations: Making World Agriculture More Sustainable , edited by J. Patrick Madden and Scott G. Chaplowe, 38–57 (Glendale, Calif.: OM Publishing, 1997). 49 Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Agriculture capable of escaping our dependence on local ecosystems: “As here and there we plucked local populations of a few plant and animal species from their natural surroundings, domesticating them, we of course transformed ourselves . We removed ourselves from the fundamental position in nature that we had heretofore shared with absolutely all other species since life began. We abruptly stepped out of the local ecosystem. We told Mother Nature we didn’t need her anymore, that we could take care of ourselves.”3 This sense of having stepped out of our local ecosystems fostered two perceptions that have now brought us to the brink of disaster. First, believing that we were no longer dependent on our local ecosystems, we fancied we could control or manipulate those systems with impunity. Second, we concluded that we could solve all our problems on a global scale. This dual belief was repeatedly vindicated by our ingenious ability to seemingly “technofix” most of our problems. But we have now reached a point where we need to make some radical course corrections if we want to survive beyond the next century with any kind of quality of life. No doubt we will continue to come up with many additional technological fixes, but such fixes are no longer adequate. Furthermore, our fixes sometimes create their own set of problems, often the very problems the fixes were designed to solve. As Eldredge puts it: “No doubt we will go on thinking up neat things. That’s what we are good at, and what has brought us to our present state—a state that has many wonderful things to commend it. But it is a state also marked by out-of-control human population growth and its direct consequences: rapidly escalating degradation of the physical state of the planet’s surface, mushrooming destruction of the Earth’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, loss of thousands of species every year, loss of less technologically advanced human societies— all of which lead to some grim prognostications of our own midterm ecological survival.”4 Moreover, if we are to restore the planetary system to ecological health, we cannot do it on a global scale because there is no global ecosystem, only local ecosystems. The only way we can have a healthy global environment is by restoring the health of a lot of local environments.5 This raises a number of interesting propositions for agriculture in the next century. The obvious task is to bring the human population into equilibrium with other species and then to design an agriculture that keeps the human population fed while maintaining that equilibrium. More importantly, agriculture may play a key...

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