Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

Agroecology is yet another integrated way of looking at the Ecological dimension of
ecovillage design. In this essay, Brasilian ecologist Diogo Alvim, after introducing the basic
principles, defines agroecology as ‘the investigation of the complex web of ecological
interactions in any agricultural system, including those interactions between its economic,
socio-political and cultural dimensions’. Once again, we witness that integrated ecological
design is necessarily trans-disciplinary; the essence of ecovillage design itself is a strident
moving-away from the reductionist paradigm. After reading this article, I’m sure you’ll
agree that Diogo’s Terra Una project is an evolutionary interface between planned
ecological diversity and spontaneous cultural regeneration.
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Presentation
Agroecology and Ecovillages
Diogo Alvim – Terra Una, Brasil
In this article, we intend to reflect on what could be called the ‘ecology
of agriculture’ and its relationship to an ecovillage approach to food
production. The purpose of using ecology as the basis of agriculture is to
demonstrate clearly that the process of food production and consumption
is fundamentally an interface between species and their surrounding
environment; or, in the case of the ecovillage, an interface between culture
and nature.
The point here is to recollect that from a long-term evolutionary
perspective, the process of producing and consuming food has always
considered the necessary balance between energy stored and energy spent;
not only that, each species has developed its own interface contact strategy
for the purposes of maintaining life – and agriculture is one of our species’
strategies for doing so.
From that perspective, we could say that each interface contact strategy is
species-dependent, but that’s not enough: No individual species can survive
in isolation – its success ultimately depends on the beneficial interconnections
it can make with other species. When we begin to understand the absolute
necessity of these beneficial interconnections, then we start seeing the Web.
We are invited to realise that this Web is a pattern that supports life
cycles, and energy cycling is a method that the evolutionary process has
found to maintain itself and its constituent populations over time. That
maintenance is a dynamic process; there are fluctuations, pulsing, ebbs
and flows, discontinuous leaps, etc. However, just by the act of living, each
individual of a species is taking part in the maintenance of the system as a
whole – they cannot be considered in isolation. That is the Web we were
born into, and these are the conditions where we experience being most alive.