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

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rather, they would like to preserve forests subject to the unstated side condition that
the lumber industry and the real estate developers can still maximize their profits.
They wouldn’t mind our being healthy, subject to the profitability of the insurance
business and the pharmaceutical companies. They would like a healthy atmosphere
provided it doesn’t interfere with the energy companies. Thus in the long run our
efforts for an ecologically rational world require not just better arguments but political
struggle.
I had the privilege of being a participant/observer in environmental struggles in
three societies: U.S. metropolitan capitalism, Puerto Rican colonial capitalism, and
Cuban socialism. In all three the struggle is difficult and often frustrating, but there
are qualitative differences.
In all three places you can find aggressive ignorance, stubbornness, and stupidity.
But in the first two, where technologies are developed and sold in order to make
profit, scientific arguments are mobilized to defend narrow economic interests,
whereas in Cuba they are merely differences of opinion, so that in the long run we can
win the arguments. In the U.S. and Puerto Rico, efficiency is defined at the level of the
enterprise so that labor-saving technologies are preferred whenever profitable or
when they make it easier to control labor. “Downsizing,” that is, firing people, is
considered good practice and is generously rewarded. The consequences for people or
the environment are treated where possible as externalities that do not figure in the
bottom line.
In Cuba, when a program was initiated to reduce the sugar industry, displaced
workers were guaranteed either new jobs at at least the same salary, retraining for
other jobs, or continuing education with pay.
In Puerto Rico, the destruction of the environment is mostly a consequence of
foreign investors, so that the defense of the environment is also a struggle for national
autonomy and therefore has a broader base than in the U.S. Finally, in Cuba there is
a broad conceptualization of land use, so that ecological agriculture and the
preservation of biodiversity and of fragile habitats are seen as part of a general
environmental strategy rather than fragmented among different government
agencies. This allows for a coherent scheme of graded land uses, from fully protected
natural preserves through areas of restricted use to ecologically managed farmland.
In our country, a comprehensive perspective has to be imposed on the rulers from the
grassroots, and scientific argument is a weapon in the struggle for ecological
rationality and human rights.
The outstanding successes of modern science arose where the problems were conceptually
simple even if difficult to actually do, such as the identification of
pathogens. The failures arose where the problems were intrinsically complex, spreading
over disciplinary boundaries, involving reciprocal feedbacks rather than one-way
causation, and requiring a dynamic approach rather than seeing things as fixed and
given. These errors of approach arise in part from the long history of reductionism in
science, the belief that the smaller the part the more fundamental it is, and that when
you have answered the question “What is this made of?” you have also answered the
question “What is this?” It is important to note that reductionism as a philosophy is
yale school of forestry & environmental studies