New Agrarianism as New Technology
15/05/09 15:52 Filed in: Democratic Theory
This was an essay I wrote in critique of a certain strand of New Agrarian, Sustainable Agricultural thought that sees technology as antithetical and destructive of the natural environment. While some of these arguments have salience, I see the central critique of technology as flawed in the extreme. New Agrarianism is itself a new technology. Technology -- properly used and incentivized in law -- is the salvation of this planetary society. The abuse of technology and legal systems that do not quantify or penalize the destructive effects of misused technology are the culprits, not the technology itself.
New Agrarianism As New Technology
In the time that truly matters to natural systems – geologic time – you, me, and all of us known as homo sapiens, have been on the planet for a mere moment. And within that mere moment, we have possessed what we call advanced machine technology for only a second or two of that geologic time. Humanity is in its technological infancy and that infancy is costing us; potentially killing the natural systems upon which we all depend.
The rapid destruction of the earth’s natural systems has awoken within the minds of some of us a response based in ecological thinking. New Agrarianism is the term used to identify this thinking. But it is not a cohesive philosophy, not a single set of ideas or prescriptions. It is, like nature, organic and diverse; encompassing whole systems analysis, no-growth economics, ecology, sustainability technologies like permaculture and bio-intensive agriculture, as well as political movements from communitarianism to ecological neo-liberalism. Put most simply, New Agrarianism is a multi-disciplinary approach to sustaining humanity within the limits of nature while enabling human progress (technologically, politically, socially, and morally). Part of this paper will argue that New Agrarianism is itself a new technology as well as an idea.
A sampling of New Agrarian scholarship, however, reveals a conflict that could potentially stifle its progress. This conflict may also provide the necessary weapons to interests, mostly corporate, that wish to undermine the technologies and philosophies of New Agrarianism. Many leading New Agrarian thinkers have created a dichotomy between the ideas of sustainability and technology. They see ecology, sustainability, and community on one side and technology, science, and economics on the other. This undercurrent in New Agrarian scholarship of sustainability versus technology is wrong and dangerous to the movement of New Agrarianism, sustainability, and the politics of active democracy.
Jerry Mander, in the Fatal Harvest Reader, calls man’s use of technology “machine logic” and makes no distinction between kinds of technology or methods of using it. When he says, “…our coevolution is with mechanical or electronic forms, while nonhuman nature is dropped from the equation, and from consideration, with already evident disastrous consequences,” he is making the implicit argument that technology is dehumanizing and environmentally destructive (Mander, 88). While his argument is compelling and often accurate, it is largely overstated and indicts technology wholly, rather than mankind’s use of it. Technology is not inherently bad; it is a tool like any other.
Wes Jackson, a leader in creating some of the newest, most innovative sustainable agricultural technologies, ironically adds to this conflict when he historically observed, “As the Romans learned a couple of millennia ago, human technical ingenuity is no match for nature’s laws” (Jackson, 70). As he recounts the history of agriculture, he points to tilling methods as technological failures that depleted the soils of Roman and Greek civilization (Jackson 66-68). Again, the implication is that technology is the culprit, nature the answer.
David Ehrenfeld even argues that science itself – the engine of technology – is like an addictive drug that humankind cannot seem to give up even as it eats away at us. “Generality confers power. Much of our control…over the external world is related in one way or another to our discovery of general laws and principles of physics, chemistry, and biology, an explosion of knowledge that is essentially modern. Our ability to manipulate the world…is new and addictive” (Ehrenfeld, 78).
These examples illustrate a thematic undercurrent within New Agrarianism that is anti-technological and, often, anti-science. Ironically, men like Wes Jackson use the very science they criticize in developing sustainable agriculture, itself a new technology. While it is likely that these men, like most other New Agrarians (Ehrenfeld, Berry, Nassauer, Briscoe, et. al. The Fatal Harvest Reader), are not fundamentally opposed to technology, the dichotomy that they create with these impolitic assertions against technology as it is currently used could easily be coopted to generate resistance to New Agrarianism generally.
Technology is not an evil. Quite the contrary, it has been the key to humankind’s survival and has enabled us to perfect civil society in ways that the ancients might not be able to imagine. It has also created problems for us. But New Agrarianism must abandon the semantic and intellectual tendency to attack technology, for it is a technology.
The more precise argument that New Agrarians should make is between the technologies of the ‘industrial mind’ and of the ‘ecological mind.’ The industrial mind uses science in a reductionist way that makes the parts more important than the whole. This has proven itself to be detrimental, which is argued powerfully by the New Agrarians. The ecological mind, by contrast, uses science to examine the particular in order to understand the whole. Framing the political, scientific, and ecological arguments of New Agrarianism as a new kind of technology and new way of using science will prevent it from being labled as a return to pre-industrial primitivism.
Ehrenfeld, cited above, is perhaps the best example of a New Agrarian who makes the intellectual journey from seeing current technology’s flaws to upcoming technology’s promise. After making the mistake of indicting science, he concludes with these hopeful words: “…I look forward to a world where the genius of a Gilbert White or a Linnaeus can thrive alongside the genius of a Watson and a Crick. It will demand of us one of the most creative advances of recent human history” (Ehrenfeld, 86).
It would be remiss not to point out that while Ehrenfeld attacks science and technology, he calls for a technological answer in his conclusion. You cannot have it both ways and this is the criticism that this paper directs at the heart of New Agrarianism’s thinkers. This double-standard and/or wholesale criticism of science and technology is the Achilles heel of the movement. It is a heel that must not be permitted to be used by the machine-minded industrial corporations that see science as the blunt instrument of profit.
A key concept of New Agrarian thinkers is systems analysis; that is, seeing the whole in its context. Yet this systems analysis approach has not been used when thinking about technology and humankind’s relationship to it. If New Agrarians would see technology as they see living things within the environmental system, they would understand humanity’s relationship to technology and that we have only just begun to use it. They rightly call for new ways of measuring the value of things – especially living things, new ways of relating economically, and new ways of manufacturing (Daly, 62). What they sometimes fail to see, however, is that they are also calling for new ways of using technology. New Agrarianism is a new way of using science and technology because it is itself new technology. New Agrarianism is new political science, new engineering science, new biological science, new chemical science, new economic science all under the governing principles of ecological sustainability. This is the technology of humanity’s teenage years, not the technology of our infancy.
The New Agrarian movement has done an excellent job of critiquing what is wrong with the present systems of agriculture, global trade, and ecological ethics (The Fatal Harvest Reader, The Essential Agrarian Reader). It has done an equally impressive job providing alternative technologies for food production and ecological living. However, it has done little systems analysis on the impact such a change would represent sociologically and politically to the world’s societies.
While New Agrarianism speaks lyrically about the way that sustainable agriculture would change the way we deal with our neighbors and the earth, would promote health and invigorate democracy, it does so without considering these changes in their social and historical context. This is the second, more minor, criticism of New Agrarianism.
New Agrarianism would do well to remember the lessons of history: few large scale changes in the way in which we live and organize our economies, philosophies, and self-governance have ever occurred without much bloodshed or violent resistance. In fact, the only one that comes to mind is the American Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which by the end of the twentieth had seen most of its achievements overturned by the forces of corporate power and globalization. Even the industrial revolution which many think of as a natural progression was marked by rioting throughout Europe and the United States. It was not an easy transition.
Seen through the lense of history, New Agrarianism appears to be an evolutionary step toward technological and ecological maturity, more than a wholesale change or return to ancient methodologies.
If New Agrarianism wishes to survive it must do a better job of analyzing and understanding the impacts of such a change on social organization, political organs of the state, and those who would seek to resist such changes. History is littered with the failed good ideas of forward thinking people. Men and women whose ideas were crushed by the powers at hand or whose very lives were taken to ensure the annihilation of such thinking in a desire to preserve the status quo. To assume that New Agrarianism is an idea that cannot be resisted or extinguished underestimates the tides of history and the irrational aspect of human nature that resists change even when it’s good for the species.
New Agrarianism must know the ways in which it can be undermined better than those who will seek to undermine it. New Agrarianism must know with detailed, machine-like precision, the ways in which it will both benefit and change the world better than those who will make arguments against it. New Agrarianism is a change in world-view, in the way we approach technology, and the ways in which we value things in all the academic disciplines. To make the change happen peacefully, positively, and in a way that advances humankind, not takes us back to a by-gone age we all would rather not return to, New Agrarianism must offer more than just a critique of the present system and the catch-word of sustainability.
New Agrarianism must offer a comprehensive vision that has hard scientific data to back it up. Data from multiple disciplines: systems analysis, psychology, political science, economics, biology, ecology, and all relevant disciplines. New Agrarianism must have a positive view of technology and science and offer its vision of eco-technology and whole systems science to a world public in need of its solutions. Such a comprehensive vision would not merely ensure the survival of a good idea whose time has come. Such a vision would convert the sceptical and weaken those who would undermine the salvation of the environment, cultures, and a human social organization based on community: New Agrarianism.
Works Cited
Daly, Herman E. “Sustainable Economic Development: Definitions, Principles, Policies.” The Essential Agrarian Reader. Ed. Norman Wirzba. Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003. 62-79.
Ehrenfeld, David. “Hard Times For Diversity.” The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Ed. Andrew Kimbrell. Washington: Island Press, 2002. 77-86.
Jackson, Wes. “Farming In Nature’s Image: Natural Systems Agriculture.” The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Ed. Andrew Kimbrell. Washington: Island Press, 2002. 65-75.
Mander, Jerry. “Machine Logic: Industrializing Nature and Agriculture.” The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Ed. Andrew Kimbrell. Washington: Island Press, 2002. 39-48.
In the time that truly matters to natural systems – geologic time – you, me, and all of us known as homo sapiens, have been on the planet for a mere moment. And within that mere moment, we have possessed what we call advanced machine technology for only a second or two of that geologic time. Humanity is in its technological infancy and that infancy is costing us; potentially killing the natural systems upon which we all depend.
The rapid destruction of the earth’s natural systems has awoken within the minds of some of us a response based in ecological thinking. New Agrarianism is the term used to identify this thinking. But it is not a cohesive philosophy, not a single set of ideas or prescriptions. It is, like nature, organic and diverse; encompassing whole systems analysis, no-growth economics, ecology, sustainability technologies like permaculture and bio-intensive agriculture, as well as political movements from communitarianism to ecological neo-liberalism. Put most simply, New Agrarianism is a multi-disciplinary approach to sustaining humanity within the limits of nature while enabling human progress (technologically, politically, socially, and morally). Part of this paper will argue that New Agrarianism is itself a new technology as well as an idea.
A sampling of New Agrarian scholarship, however, reveals a conflict that could potentially stifle its progress. This conflict may also provide the necessary weapons to interests, mostly corporate, that wish to undermine the technologies and philosophies of New Agrarianism. Many leading New Agrarian thinkers have created a dichotomy between the ideas of sustainability and technology. They see ecology, sustainability, and community on one side and technology, science, and economics on the other. This undercurrent in New Agrarian scholarship of sustainability versus technology is wrong and dangerous to the movement of New Agrarianism, sustainability, and the politics of active democracy.
Jerry Mander, in the Fatal Harvest Reader, calls man’s use of technology “machine logic” and makes no distinction between kinds of technology or methods of using it. When he says, “…our coevolution is with mechanical or electronic forms, while nonhuman nature is dropped from the equation, and from consideration, with already evident disastrous consequences,” he is making the implicit argument that technology is dehumanizing and environmentally destructive (Mander, 88). While his argument is compelling and often accurate, it is largely overstated and indicts technology wholly, rather than mankind’s use of it. Technology is not inherently bad; it is a tool like any other.
Wes Jackson, a leader in creating some of the newest, most innovative sustainable agricultural technologies, ironically adds to this conflict when he historically observed, “As the Romans learned a couple of millennia ago, human technical ingenuity is no match for nature’s laws” (Jackson, 70). As he recounts the history of agriculture, he points to tilling methods as technological failures that depleted the soils of Roman and Greek civilization (Jackson 66-68). Again, the implication is that technology is the culprit, nature the answer.
David Ehrenfeld even argues that science itself – the engine of technology – is like an addictive drug that humankind cannot seem to give up even as it eats away at us. “Generality confers power. Much of our control…over the external world is related in one way or another to our discovery of general laws and principles of physics, chemistry, and biology, an explosion of knowledge that is essentially modern. Our ability to manipulate the world…is new and addictive” (Ehrenfeld, 78).
These examples illustrate a thematic undercurrent within New Agrarianism that is anti-technological and, often, anti-science. Ironically, men like Wes Jackson use the very science they criticize in developing sustainable agriculture, itself a new technology. While it is likely that these men, like most other New Agrarians (Ehrenfeld, Berry, Nassauer, Briscoe, et. al. The Fatal Harvest Reader), are not fundamentally opposed to technology, the dichotomy that they create with these impolitic assertions against technology as it is currently used could easily be coopted to generate resistance to New Agrarianism generally.
Technology is not an evil. Quite the contrary, it has been the key to humankind’s survival and has enabled us to perfect civil society in ways that the ancients might not be able to imagine. It has also created problems for us. But New Agrarianism must abandon the semantic and intellectual tendency to attack technology, for it is a technology.
The more precise argument that New Agrarians should make is between the technologies of the ‘industrial mind’ and of the ‘ecological mind.’ The industrial mind uses science in a reductionist way that makes the parts more important than the whole. This has proven itself to be detrimental, which is argued powerfully by the New Agrarians. The ecological mind, by contrast, uses science to examine the particular in order to understand the whole. Framing the political, scientific, and ecological arguments of New Agrarianism as a new kind of technology and new way of using science will prevent it from being labled as a return to pre-industrial primitivism.
Ehrenfeld, cited above, is perhaps the best example of a New Agrarian who makes the intellectual journey from seeing current technology’s flaws to upcoming technology’s promise. After making the mistake of indicting science, he concludes with these hopeful words: “…I look forward to a world where the genius of a Gilbert White or a Linnaeus can thrive alongside the genius of a Watson and a Crick. It will demand of us one of the most creative advances of recent human history” (Ehrenfeld, 86).
It would be remiss not to point out that while Ehrenfeld attacks science and technology, he calls for a technological answer in his conclusion. You cannot have it both ways and this is the criticism that this paper directs at the heart of New Agrarianism’s thinkers. This double-standard and/or wholesale criticism of science and technology is the Achilles heel of the movement. It is a heel that must not be permitted to be used by the machine-minded industrial corporations that see science as the blunt instrument of profit.
A key concept of New Agrarian thinkers is systems analysis; that is, seeing the whole in its context. Yet this systems analysis approach has not been used when thinking about technology and humankind’s relationship to it. If New Agrarians would see technology as they see living things within the environmental system, they would understand humanity’s relationship to technology and that we have only just begun to use it. They rightly call for new ways of measuring the value of things – especially living things, new ways of relating economically, and new ways of manufacturing (Daly, 62). What they sometimes fail to see, however, is that they are also calling for new ways of using technology. New Agrarianism is a new way of using science and technology because it is itself new technology. New Agrarianism is new political science, new engineering science, new biological science, new chemical science, new economic science all under the governing principles of ecological sustainability. This is the technology of humanity’s teenage years, not the technology of our infancy.
The New Agrarian movement has done an excellent job of critiquing what is wrong with the present systems of agriculture, global trade, and ecological ethics (The Fatal Harvest Reader, The Essential Agrarian Reader). It has done an equally impressive job providing alternative technologies for food production and ecological living. However, it has done little systems analysis on the impact such a change would represent sociologically and politically to the world’s societies.
While New Agrarianism speaks lyrically about the way that sustainable agriculture would change the way we deal with our neighbors and the earth, would promote health and invigorate democracy, it does so without considering these changes in their social and historical context. This is the second, more minor, criticism of New Agrarianism.
New Agrarianism would do well to remember the lessons of history: few large scale changes in the way in which we live and organize our economies, philosophies, and self-governance have ever occurred without much bloodshed or violent resistance. In fact, the only one that comes to mind is the American Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which by the end of the twentieth had seen most of its achievements overturned by the forces of corporate power and globalization. Even the industrial revolution which many think of as a natural progression was marked by rioting throughout Europe and the United States. It was not an easy transition.
Seen through the lense of history, New Agrarianism appears to be an evolutionary step toward technological and ecological maturity, more than a wholesale change or return to ancient methodologies.
If New Agrarianism wishes to survive it must do a better job of analyzing and understanding the impacts of such a change on social organization, political organs of the state, and those who would seek to resist such changes. History is littered with the failed good ideas of forward thinking people. Men and women whose ideas were crushed by the powers at hand or whose very lives were taken to ensure the annihilation of such thinking in a desire to preserve the status quo. To assume that New Agrarianism is an idea that cannot be resisted or extinguished underestimates the tides of history and the irrational aspect of human nature that resists change even when it’s good for the species.
New Agrarianism must know the ways in which it can be undermined better than those who will seek to undermine it. New Agrarianism must know with detailed, machine-like precision, the ways in which it will both benefit and change the world better than those who will make arguments against it. New Agrarianism is a change in world-view, in the way we approach technology, and the ways in which we value things in all the academic disciplines. To make the change happen peacefully, positively, and in a way that advances humankind, not takes us back to a by-gone age we all would rather not return to, New Agrarianism must offer more than just a critique of the present system and the catch-word of sustainability.
New Agrarianism must offer a comprehensive vision that has hard scientific data to back it up. Data from multiple disciplines: systems analysis, psychology, political science, economics, biology, ecology, and all relevant disciplines. New Agrarianism must have a positive view of technology and science and offer its vision of eco-technology and whole systems science to a world public in need of its solutions. Such a comprehensive vision would not merely ensure the survival of a good idea whose time has come. Such a vision would convert the sceptical and weaken those who would undermine the salvation of the environment, cultures, and a human social organization based on community: New Agrarianism.
Works Cited
Daly, Herman E. “Sustainable Economic Development: Definitions, Principles, Policies.” The Essential Agrarian Reader. Ed. Norman Wirzba. Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003. 62-79.
Ehrenfeld, David. “Hard Times For Diversity.” The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Ed. Andrew Kimbrell. Washington: Island Press, 2002. 77-86.
Jackson, Wes. “Farming In Nature’s Image: Natural Systems Agriculture.” The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Ed. Andrew Kimbrell. Washington: Island Press, 2002. 65-75.
Mander, Jerry. “Machine Logic: Industrializing Nature and Agriculture.” The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Ed. Andrew Kimbrell. Washington: Island Press, 2002. 39-48.