THE DESTRUCTIVE NATURE OF OUR BOUNTIFUL HARVEST PRECIS

Article by Malcolm G. Scully

Precis by Reggie Gay

This article operates under the assumption that, although agriculture is largely beneficial, it’s brutalizing nature has played a large role in the fall of civilizations throughout history. Wes Jackson, founder of the environmental studies program at Cal State University Sacramento in the 1970s, is the key figure in the article. He proposes that there is a “problem of agriculture,” despite increasing productivity and the “success of the green revolution.” He claims that the economic success of industrial agriculture has lead us to believe that there is no problem, but that the chemical requirements (dependence on fossil fuels, pesticides, and fertilizers) are unsupportable. A good metaphor to the agricultural situations might be an athlete on steroids: chemicals heighten productivity, but degrade the body. His solution is what he calls “natural systems agriculture:” creating a system that mimics native ecosystems. But is it a good way to think about agriculture? To pretend that it is working on a deeper, more cooperative level because it “mimics nature?” The effect is creating something that looks like nature, but is necessarily not. Jackson says, “We must make this subject as complicated as it is,” and I think his system is not a bad solution, but I don’t think it takes into account the affect of the scale of industrial agriculture in tandem with its use of chemicals. Four “basic biological questions” are presented that address crop yields and natural vs. artificial fertilizers and pesticides, but not how a man-made ecosystem is replacing a natural one. An alternative solution presented in the article is the use of biotechnology. Jackson is not against the idea of biotechnology, but it’s affect of enabling corporations to “turn DNA into capital” and possibly degrading a crop’s genome. He suggests that all the issues and stakes are subtle, and in fact unfathomable, but that we need a breakthrough in agriculture that makes the unknowable knowable.