Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Kirschenmann: On 'Being There'

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By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

Just as intimacy is necessary if we are going to forge close bonds with friends and lovers, it is also necessary if we hope to bond with nature and our place.

As I have grown more intimate with my place I have learned that I am not apart from the land, but that I am instead a part of it.   -  Tom Wessels, British conservation biologist

Ecologists often remind us that the only way to manage any landscape sustainably is by living in it long enough and intimately enough to learn how to manage it well.  This is not a conclusion drawn from some romantic presupposition, but from practical experience.  What ecologists have learned is that nature is extremely complex and constantly evolving.

Consequently, if one does not live in close conversation with nature, one will inevitably make huge mistakes that will be harmful both to one’s self and one’s place.  Since farms are ultimately biological organisms, this principle holds true for managing agricultural landscapes as well as wild lands.

Every farmer ultimately knows that good management requires intimacy.  Like all living organisms, farms constantly change and therefore close involvement with the plants, animals and soils of the farm is essential to skillful farming.  With the onset of climate change, such intimacy predictably will become even more important for successful farming.

Unfortunately, current market infrastructures have pressured farmers to ignore fundamental principles of good management.  Farmers have been pushed to adopt a singular industrial management goal – maximum, efficient production for short-term economic return.  As with all industrial economies, that goal requires farmers to specialize, simplify their management and achieve economies of scale. It is a management strategy that forces farmers to view their farms as something apart, which they must dominate, rather than something of which they are a part.

This disconnect between ourselves and the rest of the biotic community is deeply rooted in our culture. Three centuries ago René Descartes reminded us that we were “separate” from nature and that it was our obligation to “become the masters and possessors” of nature.  

Fortunately, a new culture now beginning to appear encourages a very different, and more practical, vision – the growing bioregional movement.  As Robert Thayer reminds us in his delightful book, Lifeplace, the transformation of “becoming native to one’s place” is “taking place in the hearts of millions of people nationwide” and that “it is a fundamental and growing movement of considerable social importance, as groups strive to become one with the nature of a place.”  (Thayer, 2003)  This same sense of intimacy is evolving now among a new generation of beginning farmers.

The importance of paying attention to natural ecosystems in agriculture also is taking hold among a new school of agricultural researchers.  The excellent collection of essays in Agriculture as a Mimic of Natural Ecosystems serves as a prime example (E.C. Lefroy et. al., 1999).

The important role that such intimacies play is gaining attention in the business world.  Several years ago business innovator and design specialist John Thackara published a book, In the Bubble, in which he stressed that there is no substitute for “being there.”  For all the benefits that our digital world may provide to a business, there is no way of escaping the fact that “when we persist in trying to substitute virtual experiences for embodied ones, we end up with the worst of both worlds. Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” (Thackara, 2006)  And that is not good for business.

So ultimately there is no substitute for “being there” – on our farms, our businesses or our communities.

Being “a part of” our world instead of “apart from it” will be critical to any sustainable future.

References

T. Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape, Woodstock , VT, Countryman Press.  2010

R. Thayer Jr., LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, Berkeley, CA,  University of California Press. 2003.

E.C. Lefroy (ed.), Agriculture as a Mimic of Natural Ecosystems, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1999. 

J. Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. 2006
 

 

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