Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert

I came across an interesting and relevant (both to the film and content of this blog) excerpt from one of my readings. Cabin (2007b) in a series of debates on restoration ecology process, a key management and scientific tool to restoring ecosystems and their services, one amongst numerous strategies to preserve our Earth from total degradation. He focuses on the issue of agricultural encroachment into the remaining natural areas of the terrestrial biosphere;

Since the early Holocene, agriculture altered and eventually dominated landscapes. The scientific advances that have governed our technological process have led to vastly-increased food production, longer life-spans, and even resistant strands of crop-species to prevent crop failures, something our ancestors dreamt of. Cabin counter-argues Giardina et al. (2007) in that “science is absolutely the foundation on which day-to-day agricultural decisions should be made”, and a holistic approach to this field reveals a host of “unintended horrors” in the double-edged sword of science-driven enterprise. Despite the impressive yields globally, the rise in “malnutrition, starvation, epidemic diseases, social inequities and oppression, and population explosions… combined with the corresponding environmental disasters agriculture created or exacerbated, have led to some… [to consider the invention of] and the modern, high-technology, industrialised agricultural sciences in particular as being the ‘worst mistakes in the history of the human race’” ((Cohen & Armelagos 1984; Diamond 1987; Manning 2004a, 2004b; cited in Cabin, 2007b). Although I find this view rather extreme, its point is well established.

Despite the obvious benefits, the mechanisation of agriculture in particular has had spectacularly destructive impacts on ecosystems and the environment in general (methane emissions from cattle, reduced sequestration of, and release of, carbon as a result of forest-clearing, etc), and seemingly little overall benefit at solving the world’s true problems;

(1) With ample supplies of food to make all six (seven) billion of us fat, still over a billion people go hungry and malnourished, contributing directly or indirectly to the deaths of tens of thousands of children;

(2) Developing countries continue a negative food balance in the pursuit of development – exporting more food than they import, most of the export supplying wealthy developed countries like the United States (where obesity is arguably the most pressing public health problem), and Europe;

(3) As a result of scientific-obsession and free-market capitalism, unsurprisingly a minority of multinationals are siphoning control to ever more concentrated levels; production, processing, distribution, and most importantly, returns. They justify the industrial/mechanised scale of farms under “scientific progress”, ousting “small, diversified, highly productive, ecologically sustainable, locally controlled, indigenous agricultural systems (developed in the absence of western science) with ever larger genetically engineered monocultures that displace the local human community, require many calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food, and contaminate the land and water with synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides”, (Lappe et al. 1998; Gliessman 2000; Lappe & Lappe 2002; Nestle 2002; Manning 2004a, 2004b; Pimentel et al. 2005; Pollan 2006; Cited in Cabin, 2007b).

Therefore we return to the original point of this post; is science absolutely the foundation on which to govern agriculture, in light of a growing population, and a severely degraded natural environment, when we consider the “progress” so far?