Dave Henson • Presented at the Ecological Farming Conference, February 2, 2012

On February 2, 2012, Dave Henson gave a plenary talk to 1,500 farmers, gardeners, researchers and activists at the 32nd annual Ecological Farming Conference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California. The plenary was titled “Organic Agriculture as a Strategic Tool for Global Change”. (Note this text was written as notes for a talk, as opposed to a more traditional essay format).   

Every year, this conference is populated by idea-visionaries, practical problem solvers, and a beautiful community of people who love life, land, farming, food and each other. Collectively, we are about as hopeful and hard working community as any. 

Working for environmental and social justice, I’ve spent most of my professional life asking these questions:

• What is the problem?
• What is the best solution to the problem, and what are the best strategies to get there?
• How much time do we have to solve this problem  – or what’s going to happen?
• And, can we solve this problem in time?

The Latin root of the word “Agriculture” – agricultūra – means “to cultivate a field.” So what’s the problem with all of this “field cultivation?”

I think there is, among honest and thoughtful people, a clear sense of the problem in the arena of food and agriculture. In a phrase, that problem might be “long term viability.” Given a few more words, I would sum up the problems as those of sustainability, of economy and governance, and of collapse. Let me take them up in turn.

The problem of sustainability means, of course, that as we “cultivate fields” over many generations, how do we sustain soil health, water quality and quantity, robust and locally-adapted genetics, biodiversity in the agricultural landscape, and a healthful human culture to coexist with all these inputs. 

As for solutions to the problem of sustainability, we know how to produce food and fiber over generations of cultivating fields in a way that: 

• increases, not depletes, healthy soil;  
• sequesters and cleans, not squanders and poisons, surface and ground water;  
• develops and conserves, not eliminates and pollutes, locally-adapted genetics; and
• restores and enhances, not eradicates, on-farm biological diversity.

Called organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture, agro-ecology, farming with the wild, or ecological agriculture, decades of hard work by farmers and researchers around the world have demonstrated that the problem of sustainability in agriculture is not mainly one of knowledge, tools or technique, but a problem of economy and governance.

How about this second problem of economy and governance?  

• From the Greek, “economy” means “management of home”
• “Governance” is about “who decides”

In agriculture, the governance question is “who decides which approaches to ‘managing our home’ will be subsidized, or taxed, or disallowed?”  This is really a problem of who governs, which, in turn, is the problem of corporate rule versus democracy.

We who are working in organic food and sustainable agriculture know this problem well. 

Most federal, state and local agricultural subsidies and tax structures – of every sort – enable wrong action over right action, favoring giant scale, industrial-agriculture over appropriate-scale ecological agriculture.

Why? Because this country is governed to support a resource-exhausting, labor -exploitative, and short-term profit-taking economy – instead of supporting a resource sustainable and restorative, labor equitable, and long-term wealth-building economy. This is true in the energy sector, the industrial and product manufacturing sector, and it is true in the food and agriculture sector.

It’s not that smart people don’t understand that our economy is “destroying our home,” it is that the governance structures have been hijacked by corporate capital to serve the interests of corporate capital. This has been made all the more concrete with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United ruling – which allows unlimited wealth from corporations and elites to control our national and state elections, thus deciding who governs with what agenda.

My argument is that if we don’t address – straight-on and immediately – the problem of governance, then the sustainable agriculture solution we have worked so hard to develop will never become mainstream, and the sustainable agriculture solution will not be able to make the critically-important contribution it is poised to make – to turn what might be “catastrophic collapse” into “difficult, but hopeful transition.”

Which brings us to the third problem, the problem of collapse

That would be the problem of “peak everything” – peak fossil fuel, peak fresh water, peak ocean biodiversity, toxicity, carbon dioxide, ozone, human population, etc. This is the elephant in the room; the alcoholic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner; the approaching asteroid. But most of us eventually say, “seems really important to deal with, but it’s all too much and too depressing. And I’ve got to get back to my farm, my family, my immediate life.”

Well, let’s take a canopy view of the problem of collapse – a vantage point from which we might appreciate a time-frame beyond our own life-span for analyzing this problem, approaches towards solutions.

The problem of “peak everything” and collapse seem to have began with our ascent – or decent – into the Anthropocene – the widely adopted new name for our current geological epoch. The Anthropocene is defined by the domination of one species – that would be us – reshaping the biological world in ways few other single species have done in the roughly four-billion-year history of life on Earth. Our method of bio-domination has been agriculture, and the civilization that agriculture creates, including the imposition of property, militarization, religion and patriarchy. And we did it with mind-boggling speed: just some 10,000 or 12,000 years since the beginning of agriculture.

From the canopy view, we notice that 13,000 years ago, the last glaciation event of the most recent ice age receded very rapidly and left the Earth’s climate and terrestrial landscape ready for the Anthropocene’s thriving agriculture and civilization.

Like so many of you, I have been trying to take in this “peak everything” situation, and figure out – “Is there anything I can do?” I believe our goal is to do all we can, most strategically at the local-regional scale, to turn what is otherwise certainly “collapse” into a socially just, ecologically sustainable transition. I’ll break down my solution suggestions into those dealing with “peak everything” or  “collapse,” and those dealing with “economy and governance.”

Dealing with Collapse:

In the field of dealing with the effects of climate change, people talk about mitigation and they talk about adaptation. Organic and sustainable agriculture has something to offer both:

On mitigation to climate change, organic and sustainable agriculture offer practical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – mostly through sequestering carbon in soils – when compared with industrial monoculture agriculture. The California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN) (www.calclimateag.org) is at forefront, advocating for policies in California that will support the transition to sustainable agriculture through, including:

• First, going organic, which offers many the climate benefits, including eliminating synthetic pesticides and herbicides,
• Using compost and other organic amendments,
• Using low or no-till farming,
• Using winter cover crops or green manures,
• Using more perennial crops, and
• Using higher residue yielding crops (for both above and below ground residue).

On adaptation, on-farm ecological restoration (a hallmark of good organic and sustainable agriculture) offers the benefits to food production and food security of being more resilient to a the weather impacts from a changing climate. On-farm ecological restoration includes the outcomes of:

• Building soil humus,
• Sequestering and cleaning water, 
• Increasing flood and drought resistance, and
• Increasing biodiversity, and natural gaining allies in the biological control of agricultural pests.

To avert collapse and build a socially just and ecologically restorative transition in the sector or agriculture and food, I think we must:

• Focus on regional resiliency! 
• This is where the change will be made – at the “foodshed” scale or regional food systems. 
• We will need to re-create “tradesheds”, where ecologically appropriate trade can help build equitable and prosperous relationships with other regions. 
• We need to rescind all the ecologically and socially “unfree trade agreements”. Protectionism is “right action” when it is a mechanism for supporting ecologically restorative and regionally appropriate food systems.

Develop new political movements!

• We need new urban/rural alliances. 
• As we in agriculture seek common cause with organized urban communities, we need to ask them “how can we help?” as much as we as “here is how you can help us”. Successful political alliances must be reciprocal.
• Remember how the populist movement of the turn of the last century was led by rural agriculture – then it came into cities!

Save the parts – biological and cultural diversity!

• During this condensed era of collapse/transition, the most important collective act is to insure that we save the parts. The long term recovery of the planet – and our species – of the effects of climate change will be best mitigated by our insuring the preservation of the most intact ecosystems, keystone species and biodiversity that we can save.
• Likewise, to insure the best future for our species, we are called to conserve and protect cultural diversity – languages, peoples, places.

Dealing with Economy and Governance:

• At the core of righting a wrong food and agricultural system is to internalize externalize costs. This is “full-cost pricing”, and when in place, will shift the levers of tax and subsidy from unsustainable to sustainable food systems.
• Focus our political activism on regional governance! This is where the change will be made
• But we need to fight in the national and international arenas too… 
• Fight to win a complete re-write of the Farm Bill, but be clear that – with the national political arena controlled by elite capital and a right-wing Supreme Court, let’s not be deluded in thinking this is winnable political space right now.
• As the reliance on cheap liquid fuel and ecocidal extraction and production processes lessens the power of trade agreements and nation states, so will their authority recede in their of influence on regional governance. We need to prepare to govern in our own bioregions. 
• And to ever have a chance again at democratic self-governance within the current constitutional framework, we must abolish the notion of corporate personhood, and provide fundamental rights and privileges not only to all people, but to natural systems as well.

What can I do? Here is what I tell myself, and I’ll offer to you:

1. Study and engage – increase your agricultural, ecological and economic literacy.
2. Practice “the canopy view” – holding awareness of the extremely limited time frame that our species has inhabited the space of ‘civilization’. That can supply us with much needed humility.
3. Face up to seriousness of the problem! Don’t be too optimistic!
4. Have hope! Don’t be too pessimistic!
5. Ask yourself: “What are design solutions to MY situation?”
6. Practice locally;  organize regionally;  collaborate translocally. We must conspire – that is “to breath together”!
7. Expand our search for solutions to include the diverse experiences of other peoples, in other nations.
8. Fight hard against ignorance, selfishness and the death-wish economics of corporate capitalism. This is not a time to hold your tongue!
9. Enjoy this beautiful earth! Celebrate diversity and health! 
10. And let’s keep putting the “culture” back into “agriculture”

Dave Henson is a founder and the Executive Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.

www.oaec.org • dhenson@oaec.org