Food production and biodiversity conservation are commonly thought to be separate entities, but sustainable agriculture necessitates the marriage of the two.
When Wes Jackson first spoke about the problem of agriculture, he referred to the separation between agriculture and ecology. That separation is representative of the constructed dualism between humanity and nature. We are here and nature is out there. It follows then that agriculture is a necessary evil. We need it to survive, but it presents a problem because it threatens the environment, our home.
Keeping with this philosophy, conventional thinking places agriculture and biodiversity conservation at odds. Following the Green Revolution, the diversity of crops and livestock diminished, resulting in more or less homogenous farmland around the world. The proliferation of industrial agriculture created the image of the farm as a destructive force. Now, conservation biologists often debate how we will balance the need for an increase in food production and the need to preserve biodiversity and avert the disaster of a sixth mass extinction.
Some might reply that there’s no need for the debate, as we already produce enough food to feed 9 to 10 billion people, therefore the problem isn’t about production, but about distribution, food waste, and the inefficiencies of meat production. Those are important issues to address. If the demand for meat decreased as a result of widespread dietary changes, and food waste was eliminated, then we could feed the world on existing agricultural lands even without increasing yields. But changing deep-seated behaviors can be very difficult, and relying solely on these measures may increase the risk of failure to adequately address food insecurity issues. We ought to try to reduce the demand for meat and reduce food waste for the sake of the environment, but that should not be our only strategy for attempting to deal with food insecurity.
So we are stuck with the need to increase food production, or at the very least have the capacity to increase food production if need be, while minimizing environmental degradation to agriculture and preserving biodiversity. Sparing land for the sake of biodiversity has been found to be preferable to any other form of agriculture, which points to the need for sustainable or agroecological intensification. This sort of intensification would involve the increase of yields while simultaneously eliminating any deleterious effects on the environment, something far easier said than done.
Unfortunately, that land sparing approach still reinforces the dichotomy between man and nature. In this light, agriculture is still discussed as if it were a serpent tempting us to throw away what remains of our little garden. Jackson contends that we might instead imagine “conservation as a consequence of production.” That is, agriculture and biodiversity conservation might be in a way tightly intertwined. The agroecologists contend that agriculture stands to benefit from ecosystem services conferred by biodiversity, such as pest control, pollination and soil fertility.
Similarly, diversity of the crops themselves, known as agrobiodiversity, might grant the agroecosystem the ability to recover from disturbance, just as biodiversity might grant any ecosystem a sense of resilience. Agroecological methods that emphasize the need for diversity have been found to increase yields as compared to conventional agriculture, a phenomenon known as the ‘paradox of the scale.’ From this perspective, biodiversity is not preserved despite agriculture, but in its best interest. Conservation results because it is a necessary part of sustainable intensification.
In that way, agroecology helps to facilitate the marriage of ecology and agriculture and the elimination of the dualism between humanity and nature.
Austin Miles is a senior studying biology. Have you heard of Wes Jackson? Email him at am343011@ohio.edu.
