Agricultural-ecology: Health, Sustainability and Religion

Lindsay Falvey[1]

Summary: The predominant human intervention in the terrestrial ecology is the creation and attempts to sustain agricultural-ecologies. By definition these are unnatural. Most societies have developed a reliance on such ecologies, although they impact on other ecological units, especially under intensive production systems or high population densities. Agricultural-ecologies can also impact on human health although their negative health impacts seem relatively minor compared to the ability of these systems to provide food for ever increasing populations. Sustaining these agricultural-ecologies has become a primary focus of management, which does well to consider poor-country small-holder practices that integrate natural ecologies with mixed agricultural-ecologies and their religious connections.

Introduction

The term agricultural-ecology is increasingly used to indicate the extensive land areas that have been modified to produce agricultural products, usually over a long period. These areas represent specific ‘ecologies’ in the same sense as any arbitrary unit is referred to as an ‘ecology’, and like them the ‘ecology’ is merely a convenience for study that forms part of ever larger ‘ecologies’ up to universality. Agricultural-ecology is, however, of special significance, because:

  • The creation and maintenance of an (unnatural) agricultural-ecology is the objective of agricultural science and farming
  • Agricultural-ecologies represent the largest area of human intervention in terrestrial nature
  • Ecological studies commonly omit study of agricultural-ecology per se when they consider the collateral effects of agriculture on other ‘ecologies’

In this paper, we first consider the products and science of agricultural-ecology.We then briefly examine aspects of health, from food contamination to pollution before addressing means of managing the unnatural ecology that is agriculture to ensure continued productivity, that is, sustainable agriculture. Then, because the majority of the world’s agriculture is in poor countries and integrally associated with beliefs, and because sustainability is often justified by apocalyptic fears, we also consider agricultural-ecology from a religious perspective.

Agricultural-ecology: Food and Environment

We begin by considering the agricultural sciences that serve agricultural-ecology.Agricultural science has long prided itself on its integration of disparate biological sciences, and of social sciences. Growing from that institutionalized integrative approach, a general appreciation of the inherent interrelatedness of biological systems has long been a hallmark of the profession. However, that has changed in recent decades with glamorous molecular techniques, for example, providing a more ready link between research investment and output.So, in some cases, agricultural science has become indistinguishable from the application of the specific reductionist sciences to agriculture. This is a separate subject from our present interest, but it has implications for interrelationship with health. The difference between the integrative and the specialist sciences may be easily appreciated in terms of the sympathy for connected matters such as healthin the conduct of research and production compared to isolated technological applications in agriculture that impact on health being regarded as a collateral problem that must be addressed by its own isolated research.

It was from the latter days of an integrative agricultural science that the Green Revolution sprang. One of the reasons for the Green Revolutionary success was that many of the technologies it introduced were known, and therefore needed only to be adapted to different ecological conditions. Of course, this produced the collateral ecological effects that have since entertained critics of the Green Revolution. But the aim was to feed people that would otherwise have starved, and it was successful.[2] Today when agricultural science seeks funding for research using its time-honoured arguments of feeding the world, it finds that its very success requires it to refer to malnutrition more than starvation, and use numbers (800,000 people without sufficient food at any one time)[3] rather than percentages. It seems that the Green Revolution raised the health status of 32 to 42 million preschool children and led to a major reduction in infant and child mortality in less-developed countries.[4]At the same time, the new agricultural-ecologies replaced those that had been used for millennia and were perhaps the closest to a sustainable production system extant.[5]

We can argue that the success of the Green Revolution only delayed the problem rather than solving it if we say that the averting of starvation from the 1960s has, in association with improved health, fueled the population growth that exerts pressure on natural ecologies today. And that then leads to predications of starvation in the future. It is an old argument between Malthusians and Boserupians and is largely pointless unless we value one human above another.

If we agree that both feeding people and preserving a particular environment are important, then the new agricultural-ecologies purported to offer both. The argument for extending of industrialized agriculture was that its higher productivitywould use less total land area for food production. It is a powerful argument, it is still used, and it deserves analysis when it assumes that the some 60 percent of the population that is engaged in agriculture in Thailand, for example, should be reduced towards the four percent in ‘efficient’ countries such as the USA.To urban migration created by such policies opens up social and economic issues that may be expressed in terms of health.And in many cases these farmers are or were practicing the older perhaps sustainable forms of agriculture.

The human processes of food production are grossly misunderstood and are seldom clarified by those who benefit from promotion of images of food shortages on the one hand and idyllic peasants on the other. Agricultural trade and food shortages continue to be discussed as the major issues. But in fact: most food in the world is produced in Asia, not in the Western world; ninety percent of the world’s food is not traded internationally – rather, it is consumed in the country where it is produced; food is not in short supply, in fact current food production exceeds requirements for all six billion of us to eat well if we all had equal access to food, nor need there be future food shortages as known agricultural technologies can provide sufficient food for the projected future world population. When we argue against these facts, or when we consider the ecological degradation of modern agricultural land use to be intolerable, we might do well also to consider that we have a choice. We could feed ourselves from fermentation products that require minimal use of land. So if saving land from unnatural,or domesticated[6]ecologiesas agricultural-ecologies are variously described, is desired, we can easily reduce pesticide, fertilizer and irrigation inputs. But it seems likely that we consumers will continue to prefer food that we recognize for the foreseeable future and so the agricultural-ecology will continue to dominate the human-influenced landscape.

The Emergence of Agricultural-ecology

Agricultural science adopted the concept of ecology early. If we consider that the word ‘ecology’ derives from Haeckel in 1866[7]and by the 1890s consolidated to mean the interaction of organisms with each other and their environment, we can trace a continuum through the agricultural sciences to Bailey’s influence in the 1920s.[8]

By 1927, Elton[9] explained ecology in terms of the ‘food chain’ whichconfirmed our mundane role within nature. The term’s ‘ecosystem’ and ‘ecology’ was widely used by the 1930s to describe interdependent relationships between living organisms and non-living materials.[10] Whitehead provided a philosophical basis in his description of the continuous flux of all things at all times, which defined the purpose of each object to be fulfilment of its relationship to all others. His hope that this organic approach to science would lead to recognition of the intrinsic worth of every component of the environment[11] has yet to be realized in the agricultural sciences.

Around the same period, Schweitzer argued that our reverence for life should engender a responsible understanding of our influence on nature. Concerning our primary essential interaction with nature is agriculture, he noted:

the farmer who has mowed down a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side of the road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes the law of life without being under the pressure of necessity.[12]

The element of necessity accords with Eastern conceptions of not producing or acquiring above essential needs, and has spurred further thought around the rights of life forms to their place in an ecological cycle. Carson’s influential book of the 1980s, Silent Spring,[13] which warned of many ecological effects of agriculture, was dedicated to Schweitzer.

Even more influential, the works of Leopold re-introduced the agricultural sciences to an organic conception of nature with other species able to be considered essential to a well functioning ecology. He argued that land ownership should be abolished and provided a foundation for both a land ethic and a scientific rationale for an expanded environmental ethics in which the individual only exists as a member of a community of interdependent parts.[14] The poor or short-term management of privately owned land as a consumable commodity contrasted with communal associations of love and respect for land. This thought had hitherto been lost in mainstream Western agricultural writings.

As a biologist, Leopold understood the impossibility of avoiding human impact on the environment, and it was such practicality that fostered a wider understanding of the environmental ethic. However, his proposals were considered extreme in the post-depression 1940s of his USA. So mainstream ecology progressed through an alternative quantitative and reductionist approach, and adopted the methodologies of technological science. Agriculture adopted some of the approaches of ecology, such as the modelling of crop production systems, but largely omitted the evolving ethical aspects. Interdependence was thus limited to a mathematical task in service to cellular and molecular research in a combined quest for higher productivity.

Post-war scientific and technological expansion further separated such applied ecology from its ethical associations, which in turn sought refuge in the humanities, religions, and the alternative organizations emerging around ecological issues. In an age of increasing economic rationalism, Krutch[15]popularized the ideas of Leopold among philosophically oriented scientists and thus retained some linkage between the ethics and science of ecology. Subsequent thought recognized disease as part of a system rather than an enemy to be eradicated on all occasions, and heralded an ‘enlightened anthropocentrism’, a term which might also be applied to the works of Carson, in which she ultimately advocates a balance of nature which favours humans while minimizing the use of toxic chemicals.

However, behind Silent Spring, Carson’s personal ethics followed those of Schweitzer, and her life and other writing bring the rights of nature into sharper focus, particularly where they confronted agriculture. Agribusiness opposed Carson’s protection of insects and in their pique unwittingly amplified her voice to the public.

But it is always the utilitarian viewpoint that wins, which may be illustrated by Wilson’s[16] successful argument that loss of species may work against future human interests as they might have potential for food, medicines and other purposes. Such selfish reasoning is claimed to be the only practical means by which ethical action can be stimulated. As scientific disciplines broaden their philosophical orientation over time, individual species may eventually be ascribed an ‘existence value’ simply on the basis of their ecological presence. Favoured by those who advocate sustainability, the sophistication of recognizing the naturalness of the demise of some species can easily escape enthusiasts.

In practical terms, individual fieldsin a farm were designated as agro-ecologies in an attempt to be consistent with other such definitions as an individual forest catchment.[17]In agriculture this is often consonant with a FarmingSystemApproach which considers a farm as set of ‘ecologies’ including humans. But agricultural-ecologies differ from the natural ecology insofar as they; import energy in the form of fuel and labour to enhance productivity, deliberately limit species diversity to maximize yield, artificially breed both plants and animals, and are managed according to output goals rather than internally regulated by natural system feedback.

Creation of an agricultural-ecology can be described from the foregoing differences from natural systems. They rely on;(1) fertilizers and pesticides, (2) modification of genetic, land and water regimes, and (3) constant intervention to control natural self-correcting mechanisms. Like all systems designated as ecologies, agricultural-systems are open to exchange with other ecologies – only more so. For example, they deliberately export plant and animal products that remove nutrient from the system. Their dependence on human intervention has led them to be called artificial systems, and it these artificial systems that dominate most of the earth’s land – for example, three-quarters of the land area of the USA is so classified[18] and the USA while a large agricultural country, it is surpassed by both India and China in terms of essential food production. We can go so far as to describe the non-urban landscape that we inherit today as isolated natural ecologies in a landscape of agricultural-ecologies. With such a pervasive influence in ecological terms, it is natural that it has interactions with human health.

Agricultural-ecology and Health

So how does this unnatural ecologyaffect human health? Well, it feeds us, which seems to be a positive outcome – and it is apparently doing this with greater financial efficiency and possibly more healthily each year. Of course, definitions of financial efficiency do not include unvalued ecological costs, and claims about health of food are ultimately based on rising average longevity. Nevertheless, there are health concerns that arise from the agricultural-ecologyon which we have based much of the world’s future. Health concerns include: pesticides, fertilizers, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), food safety, diseases and secondary effects such as contributions to climate change, among others.

Pesticides used in the agricultural-ecology are of various types including: bird poisons, animal repellents; food storage fumigants; rodent poisons; insecticides; algaecides;plant hormones; fungicides; soil sterilants; herbicides, and wood preservatives. To meet today’s food demand without pesticides would require a revolutionary change in productions systems and consumer demand. But that may not be the point for the highest usage of pesticides is in fact herbicides that leave no measurable residues in food. Most residues are from post-harvest storage, many of which are removed by washing and pealing of fruit and vegetables.Nevertheless, the point is important in our considerations of small-holder agriculture in which storage does not require that same level of chemical intervention.

Use of chemical fertilizers may be associated with human health in terms of high concentrations of lead, arsenic and cadmium. The risk seems low, even among those handling the fertilizers regularly. The primary impact on health may in fact be via eutrophication of waterways and water supplies. Are organic fertilizers better? They are surely more natural and thus should produce more healthy food it is argued. But this can obscure the point that when nutrients are applied at levels that exceed the wider system’s buffering capacity, the chemicals spilling into other ecologies are essentially similar.

Probably the main health-related concern in agriculture, at least for this part of the world, is GMOs in terms of antibiotic resistance, the creation of new toxins, and unexpected allergic reactions. The concerns are largely speculative at this stage and monitoring of the impact of GMOs is sparse.[19] Nevertheless, influential views advocate caution in the absence of information; for example, the British Medical Association believes that insufficient care has been taken with regards to public health and the introduction of GM crops to the UK.[20] The technology offers, for plants alone, such beneficial novelties as:beta carotene enrichment (for vitamin A deficiency); improved nutritional value of oils, starches and proteins; improved fatty acid profiles; enhanced animal digestibility efficiencies; delayed over-ripening of fruits and vegetables; bacterial and fungal disease control; virus and insect resistance, and salt, aluminium and manganese tolerance. We do not know how safe the technology is, although its risks seem similar to other new technologies, but even if it proves unsafe, it is already being widely applied. So if we subscribe to Achilles’ Axiom that a technology once developed will always be employed,[21] we must expect some further fears and surprises. It is worth noting that most of the issues being addressed by the use of GMO technologies can be addressed by other technologies, some of which have other ecological and health implications.