University of Arizona Critique of Sustainable Agriculture Essay

University of Arizona Critique of Sustainable Agriculture Essay

Critique of Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food Clark Wolf The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics Edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett Print Publication Date: Mar 2018 Subject: Philosophy, Moral Philosophy Online Publication Date: Jan 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199372263.013.35 Abstract and Keywords The goal to make agriculture sustainable expresses an ideal to ensure that our present practices should not impose future disadvantages. “Sustainable agriculture” sometimes refers to agricultural practices that are believed to be “natural,” which do not employ modern technologies. Alternately, the term is sometimes used to refer to agricultural practices that avoid depleting resources or which can be expected to leave future genera­ tions as well off as the present generation or which will avoid diminishing future opportu­ nities or the ability of later generations to satisfy their needs. This chapter considers sev­ eral alternative conceptions of “sustainability” and different ways to understand and ar­ ticulate the concept of “sustainable agriculture.” Then it considers several specific agri­ cultural practices, evaluating what it would mean for them to be sustainable. Keywords: sustainability, justice, food justice, triple bottom line, agroecology, agricultural biotechnology, con­ sumption, ethics of consumption, food ethics Introduction: Eating Sustainably If our food is delicious and nutritious, why should we care how it was made or where it came from? Why concern ourselves with the question whether our food was produced hu­ manely or sustainably, as long as it keeps us healthy and satisfied? But many of us do care, and arguably we should care quite a lot. If our practices, institutions, or ways of life are unsustainable, then they cannot be perpetuated over time or continued on into the fu­ ture. If we value our way of life, we may want to pass that value on to our children and to later generations. If we care about environmental protection and preservation, we have reason to avoid practices that are unsustainable because they cause progressive environ­ mental damage. Beyond our parochial values, and our broader concern for the environ­ ment, there is another important moral reason to make our institutions sustainable: un­ sustainable practices, including food production practices, are unfair to our descendants (Wolf 2013), leaving them worse off than they might otherwise have been (Solow 1991; Fleurbaey 2015). It is unfair to organize our lives or societies in a way that would close Page 1 of 24 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Arizona Library; date: 13 April 2021 Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food off the possibility that future generations might live similarly good lives. If unsustainable practices deny to future generations resources that would otherwise have been available to them, it is worth asking whether we have wronged them, whether they will have a le­ gitimate complaint against us, and whether we have violated their rights (Wolf 2012). If our practices deprive them of something, was it something they had a claim to possess? The claim that is strongest when such behavior com­ promises resources people will need, and when the present benefits we gain from our (p. 30) unsustainable activities are less pressing and urgent. If we fail to leave future gen­ erations living soils and oceans, a breathable atmosphere, and the ability to meet their basic needs, then it would seem, at the very least, that they have the right to ask what could have justified us in using up resources on which their lives depend. Did we have a pressing, morally significant purpose that could justify the fact that we did something that denied them the things they need? While needs are among the most essential human requirements, even claims based on less pressing requirements can support the argu­ ment that our present resource use might be unfair. Even if our unsustainable practices do not deny to future generations what they need, they still raise questions of equity: Are we taking for ourselves resources that should have been shared more broadly by a larger group of people over a longer period of time? Did we enrich ourselves by using up renew­ able resources we might have passed on to our resource-poor descendants? If we leave future generations financially secure, have we adequately compensated them for the loss of resources we have used up? Can we compensate them by developing new technologies and intellectual resources they would not have had but for our efforts? Did we burn up, for trivial purposes, resources that they might otherwise have put to better, crucial uses? While all of our practices may raise these questions of sustainability and intergenera­ tional obligation, agricultural practices raise them with special urgency. Everyone needs to eat. While there are other urgent requirements—energy, for example—it is easier to imagine human life without energy infrastructure than to imagine life without food. “Sustainable agriculture” refers to a social and political movement, a scientific discipline, and for some people, a way of life. As a political and social movement, sustainable agricul­ ture is constituted by farmers, food activists, and rural-life activists who urge, among oth­ er things, that eating is both a moral and a political act. People who identify with this as­ pect of sustainable agriculture argue that our relationship with food expresses our values and involves engagement with the social and political institutions that shape the farms and industries that produce what we eat. As a scientific discipline, sustainable agriculture includes researchers in a variety of different fields from agronomy, biotechnology, and agricultural sciences, to sociology, rural studies, and economics. Researchers involved at this level study agricultural systems and communities, and evaluate agricultural produc­ tion practices for their environmental impact and for their impact on producers and hu­ man communities. Some work to develop environmentally appropriate crops and crop­ ping systems or study ways to minimize the negative impacts of agricultural production. Those who regard sustainable agriculture as a way of life are mostly farmers and produc­ ers who strive to realize an ideal of sustainability in their daily practice. Members of this last group are varied, including organic producers, private farmers who run communityPage 2 of 24 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Arizona Library; date: 13 April 2021 Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food supported agriculture (CSA) farms, and still others who seek to adopt methods of agricul­ tural production that conform to their ideals. Behind these different conceptions of sustainable agriculture there may be some underly­ ing principles that adherents hold in common. It might be a useful task for a philosophi­ cal anthropologist to gather together the ideas of people who embrace these difference conceptions and to try to find a subset of ideas about agriculture that they all share. In one sense, the intersection of their beliefs about the subject might constitute a philoso­ phy of sustainable agriculture. What this essay will undertake to do (p. 31) here, however, is a little bit different. The next section briefly discusses the place of agriculture in con­ temporary philosophy. For the most part, agriculture has received less attention than oth­ er important social institutions, and philosophical treatments of agriculture have mostly been undertaken by philosophers who view themselves to be doing environmental ethics. Some philosophical treatments present agriculture and “nature” as essentially opposed forces, but the ideal of sustainability calls this view into question. The section on “Sus­ tainability Myths? Two Worldviews of Agricultural Production” discusses the role of ideol­ ogy in both conventional and sustainable agriculture. Ideologies are constituted by a com­ plex of beliefs and values that inform the choices people make. This section argues that our agricultural practices are importantly shaped by ideals and values. Because of this, philosophical analysis has an important function to play, helping us to articulate these be­ liefs and values in order to subject them to critical evaluation. “The Concept of Sustain­ ability” section more specifically addresses the concept of “sustainability” and various ways in which that concept has been used in political philosophy and economic theory. Moving from more general conceptions of sustainability, this section provides an interpre­ tation of the common view that agricultural practices must be “economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable” if they are to count as “sustainable” in the broader sense. “Comparing the Sustainability of Alternative Agricultural Practices” examines three dif­ ferent practical issues that should be addressed in a philosophical treatment of sustain­ able agriculture. In particular, this section considers the sustainability of animal agricul­ ture, the question of whether the use of biotech or genetically modified crops can count as sustainable, and the question of whether “eating locally” is an appropriate practice for consumers who want to consume a more sustainable diet. Finally, the last section briefly revisits the question of personal food consumption as an ethical and political activity. Agriculture and the Environment: Nature ver­ sus Culture? Environmental philosophers have not, for the most part, focused much on agriculture. For a long period of time, work in environmental ethics seemed fixated on a paradigm of wild­ ness as nature untouched and uninfluenced by human beings. As Paul Thompson (1995) documents, this has sometimes led to absurdities. In the abstract, it may be easy to sym­ pathize with the view that human beings are separate from nature, but in practice this view is both false and pernicious. It is false because human beings evolved as a product Page 3 of 24 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Arizona Library; date: 13 April 2021 Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food of natural forces, and for a long period of human history human communities were well integrated with the natural systems in which they lived. It is pernicious because the ideal that we must return “nature” to its original untouched condition has sometimes led to policies that are unjust and environmentally inappropriate. The ideal of nature as sepa­ rate from human communities led, in some instances, to policies that removed indigenous peoples from the land they and their communities had inhabited (p. 32) for millennia. In other contexts, this ideal presents an inappropriate ideal for environmental management in a world where there are no longer any major biotic systems that have not been deeply changed by human influence. Agriculture, however, may be a special case. Some critics see the advent of agriculture as the moment when our species left its natural environmental niche and started down a path to perdition (Diamond 1987). Others, including the great naturalist T. H. Huxley, have viewed agriculture as “artifice,” which he saw as essentially opposed to the forces of “nature.” Speaking of gardens, Huxley wrote: It will be admitted that the garden is as much a work of art, or artifice, as any­ thing that can be mentioned. The energy localized in certain human bodies, direct­ ed by similarly localized intellects, has produced a collection of other material bodies which could not be brought about in the state of nature. The same proposi­ tion is true of all the works of man’s hands, from a flint implement to a cathedral or a chronometer; and it is because it is true, that we call these things artificial, term them works of art, or artifice, by way of distinguishing them from the prod­ ucts of the cosmic process, working outside man, which we call natural, or works of nature. (Huxley 1894, 10‒11) Huxley viewed gardens and agriculture in general as “both useful and justifiable,” but others are less optimistic. A more recent writer, Lierre Keith, sees agriculture and nature as inexorably opposed forces. On her view, agriculture constitutes a genocidal war against “nature”: The ‘nature of nature’ and the ‘nature of agriculture’ are completely at odds: one is a war against the other. You have to understand what agriculture is: you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, even down to the bacteria, and you plant it to human use. It’s biotic cleansing. This lets the human population grow to gigantic proportions, because instead of sharing that land with millions of other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. (Keith 2009a) Keith’s view is extreme—surely not all agricultural practices fit this dire description. But is it entirely wrong? Modern industrial agriculture does clear away the native biodiversity and replaces it with monoculture. According to Keith, we need a revolution to overthrow the entire system, so that we can move back to a more sanguine relationship between hu­ Page 4 of 24 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Arizona Library; date: 13 April 2021 Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food man beings and the biotic systems on which we depend. We might reasonably doubt that it is necessary for agriculture to be “at war” with the natural world, rather than suppos­ ing that this is merely a contingent feature of agriculture as it is practiced in the modern industrialized world. Certainly many forms of agriculture are much less invasive than Keith’s description would imply. The possibility that agriculture might be, or might be­ come sustainable would constitute a response to the view that agriculture is a war against the natural world. Another important reservation involves the concept of “nature” itself. Some uses of this term, especially when “nature” is contrasted with “culture,” appear to exclude human be­ ings and human society from the start. This can have practical consequences, (p. 33) for example, when indigenous peoples are evicted from land their communities have relied on for centuries, following the creation of a wildlife preserve. In a world where few if any environmental systems have been untouched or unchanged by human influence, it is of­ ten difficult to separate the natural from the cultural. For example, if native peoples burned off the prairies in the central United States, should we judge that this makes them agricultural lands, or that it renders them a product of culture rather than nature? Should we consequently value human-impacted prairies differently from the way we value forest lands? Some writers urge that the concept of “nature” is so ambiguous or so deeply prob­ lematic that we should avoid using it carelessly, or perhaps abjure its use altogether (Mill [1874] 1998; Purdy 2015). For our purposes here, it is enough to note that “nature” is conceptually complex. Any effort to distinguish nature and culture (thereby implying that culture is unnatural) will be unavoidably controversial. Sustainability Myths? Two Worldviews of Agri­ cultural Production Sustainable agriculture holds up an ideal that agricultural production might avoid envi­ ronmental damage, or perhaps that agricultural production processes might work with environmental and biotic systems rather than against them. This ideal animates many of the people who pursue research on sustainable agriculture and those who seek to farm sustainably. When actions are informed by ideals, we might regard them as “ideological,” in a certain sense, but both conventional and sustainable agricultural ideals involve ideo­ logical commitments. To say that agricultural production systems are ideologically in­ formed is to say that their structure reflects underlying ideas and values—the ideologies —of the people who create them. Like other ideologically informed social institutions, the structure of agricultural production systems may come to seem inevitable to those who act within them. “Sustainable agriculture” is often contrasted with “conventional agricul­ ture.” In this case, “conventional” simply means agriculture the way most people in indus­ trialized countries do it. Many farmers engaged in conventional agricultural production see the choices they make as the only reasonable or rational choices to make, under the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is worth considering the extent to which this perception is a function of ideology, and the extent to which it reflects an appropriate Page 5 of 24 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Arizona Library; date: 13 April 2021 Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food and objective grasp of the material circumstances of modern agricultural production. One goal of philosophical critique of agriculture—a goal of philosophical critique of any hu­ man institution or endeavor—must be to articulate and critically evaluate the ideologies that lead people to make the choices they make. Contrasted with conventional agricultural production, the ideal of sustainable agriculture may seem to its advocates to be a revolutionary anti-ideological ideal. But revolutionary goals are also embedded in a rich nest of ideas and values. Just as a philosophical under­ standing of agriculture requires an understanding of the ideology of (p. 34) conventional production, it equally requires a critical understanding of the values and ideas that in­ form the development of alternative and potentially sustainable modes of agricultural pro­ duction. Can we characterize the worldviews or ideologies of conventional agriculture or the vari­ ous alternatives that are believed by their advocates to be sustainable? The plural and heterogeneous character of sustainable agriculture makes this difficult. As a field of study and practice, sustainable agriculture includes researchers wor…