Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

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agroecology and the struggle for food sovereignty
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Why are things the way they are instead of a little bit different?
● Why are things the way they are instead of very different?
The first is the question of homeostasis, self-regulation. How is it that although
phenomena are continually buffeted by internal and external perturbations, they
remain for a while recognizably what they are? We take the perspective of a network
of interacting variables. Any impact on this system percolates through the whole network
and is damped along some pathways, amplified along others, and possibly even
reversed along some – so that the response of the network as a whole is not always
what common sense would suggest. The network includes natural variables such as
composition of soil or abundance of insects, but also social ones including the availability
of labor, the prices of inputs and crops, the political clout of the various actors.
The decision rules that farmers use are themselves informed by the long-term parameters.
Sometimes the networks have more than one possible equilibrium state,
depending on where they start from, so that the same external conditions can give rise
to alternative combinations of activity and the response of the crops that Vandermeer
labeled “syndromes of production.” The feedbacks between production and prices
can even give rise to unstable behavior as farmers track the conditions of production
that they themselves change. Generally, we do not have precise equations for the relations
among these variables, but the knowledge of the direction of direct effects of
one on another can give us a lot of understanding of the behavior of the whole.
The second question is that of evolution, development, or history according to the
objects of interest. These processes are usually weaker than those of homeostasis but
are more directional and therefore in the long run prevail. Furthermore, they alter the
homeostatic processes. When indigenous communities are impacted by capitalist
globalization, their homeostatic capacities are undermined so that they can no longer
respond to even the familiar perturbations of production, let alone the new ones.
Thus in order to confront the complexity of the ecosocial, we have to prepare ourselves
to think more broadly, more dynamically, more dialectically. This can be done,
but the economics of research, the institutional separation of subject matter into
departments with their own economic urgencies, even the conversion of academia
into a business, all act in favor of narrow definitions of problems as defined by the
funders and the urgency to publish specialized papers or to finish a degree in a hurry
while student debt accumulates – and this discourages the wide-ranging analysis we
need. Thus it is necessary to democratize our science, to have one foot outside the
university among farmers or peasant movements as a source of knowledge, ideas, and
commitment. At least we can prevent the boundaries of our jobs from becoming the
boundaries of our minds and our actions.
But this is far from enough. Remember that since at least 500 B.C.E. people have
been aware of deforestation. That Plato warned of the deforestation of the hills
around Athens to build the navy; in China around the same time, Mencius lamented
the loss of forests on Ox Mountain. Knowledge is not enough.
The second major reason why it is difficult to carry out programs of ecological
rationality on the land is that it was never really the goal of those who hold power. Or
yale school of forestry & environmental studies