[A-List] Agriculture: Closing the Circle

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 18 2007)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Our modern faith in progress embodies a rich harvest of ironies, but one
of the richest unfolds from the way it redefines such concepts as
improvement and advancement. To most people nowadays, the way things are
done today is by definition more advanced, and therefore better, than
the way things were done at any point in the past. This curious way of
thinking, which is all but universal in the industrial world among
people who haven't though [thought through?] its implications, starts
from the equally widespread belief that all of human history is a
straight line that leads to us. It implies in turn that the only way
into the future that counts is the one that involves doing even more of
what we're already doing right now.

It's easy to see why this sort of self-congratulatory thinking is
popular, but just now it may also be fatal. The entire industrial way of
life is built on the ever accelerating use of non-renewable resources -
primarily but not only fossil fuels - and it therefore faces an imminent
collision with the hard facts of geology, in the form of non-negotiable
limits to how much can be extracted from a finite planet before
depletion outruns extraction. When that happens, ways of living that
made economic sense in a world of cheap abundant resources are likely to
become non-viable in a hurry, and beliefs that make those ways of living
seem inevitable are just another obstacle in the way of the necessary
transitions.

Agriculture, the foundation of human subsistence in nearly all of the
world's societies just now, offers a particularly sharp lesson in this
regard. It's extremely common for people to assume that today's
industrial agriculture is by definition more advanced, and thus better,
than any of the alternatives. It's certainly true that the industrial
approach to agriculture - using fossil fuel-powered machines to replace
human and animal labor, and fossil fuel-derived chemicals to replace
natural nutrient cycles that rely on organic matter - out-competed its
rivals in the market economies of the twentieth century, when fossil
fuels were so cheap that it made economic sense to use them in place of
everything else. That age is ending, however, and the new economics of
energy bid fair to drive a revolution in agriculture as sweeping as any
we face.

What needs to be recognized here, though, is that in a crucial sense -
the ecological sense - modern industrial agriculture is radically less
advanced than most of the viable alternatives. To grasp the way this
works, it's necessary to go back to the concept of ecological
succession, the theme of several earlier posts on this blog.

Succession, you'll remember, is the process by which a vacant lot turns
into a forest, or any other disturbed ecosystem returns to the complex
long-term equilibrium found in a mature ecology. In the course of
succession, the first simple communities of pioneer organisms give way
to other communities in a largely predictable sequence, ending in a
climax community that can maintain itself over centuries. The stages in
the process - seres, in the language of ecology - vary sharply in the
way they relate to resources, and the differences involved have crucial
implications.

Organisms in earlier seres, to use more ecologists' jargon, tend to be
R-selected - that is, their strategy for living depends on controlling
as many resources and producing as many offspring as fast as they
possibly can, no matter how inefficient this turns out to be. This
strategy gets them established in new areas as quickly as possible, but
it makes them vulnerable to competition by more efficient organisms
later on. Organisms in later seres tend to be K-selected - that is,
their strategy for living depends on using resources as efficiently as
possible, even when this makes them slow to spread and limits their
ability to get into every possible niche. This means they tend to be
elbowed out of the way by R-selected organisms early on, but their
efficiency gives them the edge in the long term, allowing them to form
stable communities.

The difference between earlier and later seres can be described in
another way. Earlier seres tend toward what could be called an
extractive model of nutrient use. In the dry country of central Oregon,
for example, fireweed - a pioneer plant, and strongly R-selected - grows
in the aftermath of forest fires, thriving on the abundant nutrients
concentrated in wood ash, and on bare disturbed ground where it can
monopolize soil nutrients. As it grows, though, it takes up the nutrient
concentrations that allow it to thrive, and leaves behind soil with
nutrients spread far more diffusely. Finally other plants better adapted
to less concentrated nutrients replace it. Thus the fireweed becomes its
own nemesis.

By contrast, later seres tend toward what could be called a recycling
model of nutrient use. The climax community in those same central Oregon
drylands is dominated by pines of several species, and in a mature pine
forest, most nutrients are either in the living trees themselves or in
the thick duff of fallen pine needles that covers the forest floor. The
duff soaks up rainwater like a sponge, keeping the soil moist and
preventing nutrient loss through runoff; as the duff rots, it releases
nutrients into the soil where the pine roots can access them, and also
encourages the growth of symbiotic soil fungi that improve the pine's
ability to access nutrients. Thus the pine creates and maintains
conditions that foster its own survival.

Other seres in between the pioneer fireweed and the climax pine fall
into the space between these two models. It's very common across a wide
range of ecosystems for the early seres in a process of succession to
pass by very quickly, in a few years or less, while later seres take
progressively longer, culminating in the immensely slow rate of change
of a stable climax community. Like all ecological rules, this one has
plenty of exceptions, but the pattern is much more common than not. What
makes this even more interesting is that the same pattern also appears
in something close to its classic form in the history of agriculture.

The first known systems of grain agriculture emerged in the Middle East
sometime before 8000 BCE, in the aftermath of the drastic global warming
that followed the end of the last ice age and caused massive ecological
disruption throughout the temperate zone. These first farming systems
were anything but sustainable, and early agricultural societies followed
a steady rhythm of expansion and collapse most likely caused by bad
farming practices that failed to return nutrients to the soil. It took
millennia and plenty of hard experience to evolve the first farming
systems that worked well over the long term, and millennia more to craft
truly sustainable methods such as Asian wetland rice culture, which
cycles nutrients back into the soil in the form of human and animal
manure, and has proved itself over some 4000 years.

This process of agricultural evolution parallels succession down to the
fine details. In effect, the first grain farming systems were the
equivalents, in human ecology, of pioneer plant seres. Their extractive
model of nutrient use guaranteed that over time, they would become their
own nemesis and fail to thrive. Later, more sustainable methods
correspond to later seres, with the handful of fully sustainable systems
corresponding to climax communities with a recycling model of nutrient
use and stability measured in millennia.

Factor in the emergence of industrial farming in the early twentieth
century, though, and the sequence suddenly slams into reverse.
Industrial farming follows an extreme case of the extractive model; the
nutrients needed by crops come from fertilizers manufactured from
natural gas, rock phosphate, and other non-renewable resources, and the
crops themselves are shipped off to distant markets, taking the
nutrients with them. This one-way process maximizes profits in the short
term, but it damages the soil, pollutes local ecosystems, and poisons
water resources. In a world of accelerating resource depletion, such
extravagant use of irreplaceable fossil fuels is also a recipe for failure.

Fortunately, as last week's post showed, the replacement for this
hopelessly unsustainable system - if you will, the next sere in the
agricultural succession - is already in place and beginning to expand
rapidly into the territory of conventional farming. Modeled closely on
the sustainable farming practices of Asia by way of early 20th century
researchers such as Albert Howard and F H King, organic farming moves
decisively toward the recycling model by using organic matter and other
renewable resources to replace chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and the
like. In terms of the modern mythology of progress, this is a step
backward, since it abandons chemicals and machines for compost, green
manures, and biological pest controls; in terms of succession, it is a
step forward, and the beginning of recovery from the great leap backward
of industrial agriculture.

This same model may be worth examining closely when it comes time to
deal with some of the other dysfunctional habits that became widespread
in the industrial world during the fast-departing age of cheap abundant
fossil fuel energy. In any field you care to name, sustainability is
about closing the circle, replacing wasteful extractive models of
resource use with recycling models that enable resource use to continue
without depletion over the long term. It's a fair bet that in the
ecotechnic societies of the future - the climax communities of human
technic civilization - the flow of resources through the economy will
follow circular paths indistinguishable from the ones that track
nutrient flows through a healthy ecosystem. How one of the more
necessary of those paths could be crafted will be the subject of next
week's post.

_____

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA),
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland,
Oregon.Tuesday,

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/agriculture-closing-circle.html#links


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