Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Foreword to Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches

Foreword to Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches As a farmer, I have had a relationship with wild things that has been fraught with ambiguity. I grew up believing that wildness was the enemy of agriculture . I didn’t like blackbirds eating our sunflowers, coyotes attacking our calves, or weeds robbing our crops of nutrients and moisture. So I had an almost instinctive inclination to tear all the wildness out of our farm. I was ready to use any tool or scientific management tactic available to eradicate wild things from the farm. A part of me even felt morally justified in harboring that attitude because it is deeply entrenched in our culture. The early Puritans who settled on New England’s shores considered it part of their manifest destiny to “tame the wilderness” and “build the Kingdom of God” in this “new land.” Cotton Mather (1663–1728) considered the wilderness to be the “devil’s playground.”1 It was, therefore, part of his God-given responsibility to urge his fellow Puritans to replace the wilderness with nice, neat rows of corn. For good or ill, that Puritan ethic shaped much of the culture in North America once Native Americans were driven from the land. I am a product of that culture. Like the generations of farmers and ranchers before me, I have lived, in part, by this wilderness-eradication ethic and have caused devastating harm to natural ecosystems. Meanwhile, conservationists have adopted a countervailing ethic in order to protect the wilderness. In response to centuries of abuse, conservationists promoted designating certain regions as wilderness areas to protect them from human activity. Only with great difficulty have wilderness advocates managed to keep a small proportion of our country 66 This is an edited version of the foreword to Daniel Imhoff, Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2003). 67 Foreword to Farming with the Wild (approximately 5 percent) free from industrial intrusions (though not free of livestock). But by eliminating humans from certain parts of the landscape to preserve it, we have also inadvertently consented to humans using the rest of the landscape without any regard for its wildness. We now know that this dual approach to land use is dysfunctional on both counts. Wildness cannot be “maintained” in isolated pieces of the landscape, and farms cannot be productively managed without wildness . Just as wild organisms need the connectivity of natural ecosystems to thrive, so agriculture needs the wildness of soil organisms to maintain soil quality and pollinators to grow crops—both necessary elements for productive farming. So in the interests of both productive farming and robust wilderness, we need to revisit our dualistic mentality. Because producing as much as possible in one part of the landscape while preserving everything in its natural state in another part of the landscape is not working, and the real goals of conservation—preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community—have been betrayed , we now must face our fundamental role as Homo sapiens within the biotic community. The essential fallacy in our dualistic thinking is that in both cases, wilderness and agriculture, we assumed humans were separate from nature. Isolating wilderness areas from human activity assumes that wilderness thrives best without human intervention. Indeed, large areas uninhabited by people, such as the Brooks Range of Alaska, provide powerful testament. That assumption, however, while probably true in the modern, industrial context, serves only to deepen the schism between humans and wild nature. Isolating wildness from agricultural landscapes presumes that humans, acting separately from nature, can control production systems purely with human ingenuity and technology. Neither assumption encourages the sort of healthy reintegration into the biotic community that humans must achieve—for our own sake and the sake of all life on Earth. Behind that dualistic fallacy lies another, namely that nature is a given, that it has evolved into a state of equilibrium (that it will remain essentially the same) and that we can either manipulate it at will (agriculture) or preserve it in a natural stasis (wilderness). No empirical data justify such assumptions . And this both encourages the alienation of humans from nature and represents a serious underestimation of nature. Fifty years ago, Aldo Leopold attempted to overcome this flawed, dualistic thinking by introducing a new paradigm: ecological consciousness. 68 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience The role of Homo...