TracyFood

What can I say? It’s finals week. 21 March 2007 10:58 pm

Posted by Tracy in : agriculture, environment, politics, responsibility, school, sustainability , trackback

My paper was going really well until about 7:30 PM or so, when I realized I had started to backtrack and revise earlier sections instead of writing onwards first. Oooops. Also I realized I was missing the UC Berkeley webcast about the 2007 Farm Bill, which would actually have been sort of relevant to the subject at hand:

What are the prospects of approximating sustainable agriculture on a global scale over the next half century? What models are already in place and what would need to change? Include some discussion of individual vs. institutional approaches.

Anyway. In case you’re curious, here’s the first paragraph of my final essay-in-progress, a response to these questions and my sustainable agriculture class in general. It’s definitely my favorite paragraph so far; the rest is sort of a mess, even the parts I got sidetracked revising. I’m just about done discussing individual food consumers in affluent industrialized countries where food is cheap and plentiful, and struggling to finish writing about the U.S. at the national or maybe federal farm policy level and use that as a transition into discussion of international food issues and back to sustainable agriculture (there will be plenty in there about the after-effects of colonialism and the plantation system in there for sure).

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I am baffled by the long-term prospects of sustainable agriculture on a global scale. That is not intended as a cynical statement; if I have learned anything from this class, it is that there are no shortage of obstacles to implementing any kind of agriculture, sustainable or otherwise, on almost any scale. Sustainable agriculture seeks to address many of these problems, which are not just technical or technological in nature — they are also environmental, social, political, educational, economic — and their solutions will have to be equally diverse. How appropriate, considering how often our class discussions returned to the importance of biological diversity to both healthy natural ecosystems and the polycultures that attempt to mimic them with domesticated species. Other difficulties in thinking about sustainable agriculture on a global scale are also related to recurring themes from our class. For instance, in addition to diversity, another feature shared by the least destructive (and in some cases, most productive) approaches to farming is careful attention to the appropriate scale of an agricultural operation, and very few specific methods or models seem well-suited to global-scale use. Many general concepts are useful, of course, like site-specific adaptation to local conditions, to use one more example of a common characteristic of the most sustainable agriculture, but — again, I write without meaning to sound cynical — the planet Earth is just too big a site for any one-size-fits-all approach. All that said, I am nonetheless optimistic about the prospects for more sustainable agriculture in the next half century — both an increase in methods that are less socially and ecologically damaging, and wider adoption of approaches to farming that address the “triple bottom line” of environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

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If you read this far, I’m impressed. You are awesome. Thank you so much. I only hope the final version of this paper contains a small fraction of your dedication and badassitude.