Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter
by Jason GodeskyA few years ago, my mother began gardening in her backyard. She grows tomatoes, zucchini, and other vegetables, as well as herbs and spices. She grows stevia, dill, aloe, and a host of other plants. She’s far outdone whatever meager knowledge I’ve scraped together as a gardener, and I could hardly be more proud. But she’s also heard more than a few of my rants about agriculture, and so when she started on this endeavor, she loved to tease me: “Want to see my farm?” She insisted on calling it her “farm,” and herself a “farmer,” mostly because my face turned such a lovely shade of red.
Of course, it was funny precisely because we all immediately recognize that there’s a very real difference between “farming” and “gardening.” The images the two words conjure in most of our minds could hardly be more different. What color is farming? Brown. Gardening? Green. What do you farm? Wheat. What do you garden? All kinds of things. Farming is back-breaking labor; gardening is recreational. We could go on, but the point is clear—the colloquial understanding of farming is very different from that of gardening.
And yet, the term “agriculture” is brandied about with such carelessness that it makes the more general term—cultivation—uselessly redundant. When we allow such an overblown definition of “agriculture” to take hold, it begins to make nonsense of our language. Horticulture becomes an agriculture; that is, gardening becomes a particular kind of farming. This is nonsense, in a historical context, and in the framework of general, colloquial understandings. Anthropologically, we know that horticulture—gardening—preceded agriculture.
Even in technical anthropological definitions, this cultural confusion sometimes persists; horticulture will sometimes be called “hoe agriculture” or “swidden agriculture,” depending on context. Etymologically, “agriculture” comes from the Latin ager, meaning “a field”, and cultura, meaning “cultivation” in the strict sense of tillage of the soil. A literal reading of the English word yields: tillage of the soil of a field. Thus, agriculture is a fairly specific (though extremely common) kind of cultivation; to refer to a type of agriculture that does not involve tilling is certainly taking liberties with the term, at least etymologically. More importantly, it is misleading; tillage is a critical component of the popular understanding of what a “farm” is. Without tilled fields, one can hardly speak of a farm. Indeed, some anthropologists have honed in on this as the defining distinction between horticulture and agriculture. Consider this definition of agriculture:
Domesticated food production involving minimally the cultivation of plants but usually also the raising of domesticated animals; more narrowly, plant domestication making use of the plow (versus horticulture). (Hunter and Whitten, 1982)
And the matching definition of horticulture:
The preparation of land for planting and the tending of crops using only the hoe or digging stick; characterized especially by the absence of use of the plow. (Hunter and Whitten, 1982)
Another practice sometimes considered crucial is fallowing:
A baseline distinction between agriculture and horticulture is that horticulture requires regular fallowing (length of which varies), whereas agriculture does not.1
This again defies our normal understanding of these terms. Medieval serfs used fallowing periods; were they not farmers? Fallowing is often used in very clearly agricultural contexts. It is for complications like these that most anthropologists have abandoned the use of this or that practice to distinguish agriculture and horticulture, and instead look at a “cultivation continuum” of intensity:
plant cultivation carried out with relatively simple tools and methods; nature is allowed to replace nutrients in the soil, in the absence of permanently cultivated fields. (Ember and Ember, 1999)
And:
Horticultural communities may be distinguished from agricultural ones by (1) the small scale of the cultivation, using small plots of mixed crops rather than large field of single crops (2) the use of a variety of crops, often including fruit trees (3) the encouragement of useful native plants alongside direct cultivation (4) continued use of other forms of livelihood.2
This begins to get us somewhere, but this view carries with it the bias of the agricultural society it came from. We are still looking at cultivation solely in terms of production; we may have widened our view to consider the energy invested in cultivation as well as the food energy such cultivation provides, but there is still lacking from this perspective any consideration of how cultivation relates to the ecology it is based on. In those terms, agriculture and horticulture do not exist on a continuum together, but rather, on opposite sides of a yawning chasm, much of it owing to the nature of the plants that agriculturalists farm.
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.3
| Agriculture | Horticulture | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship with Succession | Catastrophe | Promoter |
| Emulation of catastrophe (e.g., tilling, flooding, fire) |
Always | Rarely |
| Allowing succession (e.g., fallowing) |
Sometimes | Always |
| Monocropping | Always | Never |
| Crops | Small variety of early successional species | Wide variety of various successional species |
| Role of native plants | Death to Weeds! | Essential to garden health |
| Place in society | Sole (or nearly sole) food source | Mixed with various forms of foraging |
| Wilderness | Wasted cropland; home to vermin | Precious resource; valued hunting grounds |
Agriculture is cultivation by means of catastrophe.
Horticulture is cultivation by means of succession.
Cultivation is any animal’s conscious effort to promote the growth of particular plant species.
What divides agriculture and horticulture is less a question of a particular technique or even the intensity of investment, but rather, the ecological effect of their strategies. Horticulturalists in the New World created the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains.4 By the same token, the first farmers laid waste to the cedar forest that once covered the Middle East and turned the Fertile Crescent into a wasteland. So here we have a workable definition: agriculture is cultivation by means of catastrophe. Tillage emulates catastrophe, and the plow is a catastrophe-emulating machine. By contrast, horticulture is cultivation by means of succession. Fallowing allows succession to advance; the lack of tillage and the plow is merely the lack of artificially-induced catastrophe to set back succession.
Both of these, then, can be seen simply in terms of biological succession—the process by which ecological communities achieve maximal complexity and diversity, and then establish a sustainable, “old-growth” character. Agriculture is cultivation that relies on suppressing succession. Weeds, “vermin,” and constant tilling—the back-breaking work we intuitively associate farming with—is the constant labor necessary to keep succession from taking over. Horticulture, on the other hand, works with succession and helps succession along, though it channels succession into specifically human-adapted paths, favoring plants and animals that humans favor. Nonetheless, horticulture, to one degree or another, depends on succession taking place, while agriculture is a constant fight against succession.
As ecosystems mature, biomass and complexity increase. Ecologist Ramon Margalef, in his landmark 1963 paper, “On Certain Unifying Principles in Ecology” (American Naturalist 97:357-374), suggests we think of biomass as “a keeper of organization, something that is proportional to the influence that an actual ecosystem can exert on future events.” In other words, we can think of biomass, complexity, and the other indicators of maturity as measures not only of the resilience of a system, but as a form of wisdom. That’s because as ecosystems mature, the aftermath of environmental tumult such as storm or drought depends more on the richness of the ecosystem than on the nature of the disturbance. A drought that withers a weedlot doesn’t faze an old-growth forest—the forest has learned what to do with drought. It has grown structures, cycles, and patterns that convert nearly any outside influence into more forest, and that protect key cycles during bad times. It has become wise.5
From this perspective, we can see that “sustainable agriculture” is an oxymoron.6 It also suggests a very different interpretation of passages like that found in Isaiah 2:4: “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” As Daniel Quinn has suggested, agriculture is not an alternative to war, but simply an alternative war.
This is a great and famous image of people turning from war to peace—unless you happen to be in the habit of following my rule. If you turn this lined paper sideways, what you see in this business of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks is not people turning from war to peace but rather people turning from one war to another war—from an inTRAspecies war to an inTERspecies war. From the conquest of nations to the conquest of nature—the mythological war that the people of our particular culture have been waging here for the past ten thousand years.
The plowshare has always been understood by the people of our culture as the sword they follow across the face of the earth. They followed it out of the Fertile Crescent eastward to India and China, they followed it northward into Europe, and finally they followed it westward into the New World.7
But neither does this indict all types of cultivation, because cultivation does not need to be a literal world-wide catastrophe; it can also be a pro-active human involvement in succession, and can allow us to take some part in rewilding the species we’ve domesticated and healing some of the ecological damage we’ve caused. This brings us to the question of permaculture, originally conceived of as “permanent agriculture” with the same, hyper-extended sense of the term that eliminates the word “cultivation” entirely. Later, it was revised as “permanent culture.” One of the movement’s two founders, David Holmgren, put it thus:
‘The word permaculture was coined by Bill Mollison and myself in the mid-1970s to describe an “integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man”. A more current definition of permaculture, which reflects the expansion of focus implicit in Permaculture One, is “Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs”. People, their buildings and the ways they organise themselves are central to permaculture. Thus the permaculture vision of permanent (sustainable) agriculture has evolved into one of permanent (sustainable) culture.
Bill Mollison offers a definition, as well:
The aim is to create systems that are ecologically-sound and economically viable, which provide for their own needs, do not exploit or pollute, and are therefore sustainable in the long term.
Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
The fact that so many favorite permacultural techniques—enhancing edge, intercropping, guilds, and even many of Fukoka’s techniques like seedballs—are to be found among horticultural cultures around the world, is certainly instructive. Is there anything that can distinguish permaculture from horticulture? To date, I have been unable to find anything, leading me to the conclusion that permaculture is largely re-inventing the horticulturalist wheel. To what extent modern permaculturalists learn from primitive examples, the fusion of modern ecological principles with indigenous knowledge could produce precisely the kind of syncretic practices that we so desperately need in the shadow of agriculture’s global catastrophe.
Such potential is enormous; in her powerful article, “Ecological Collapse, Trauma and Permaculture,” trauma survivor Lisa Raynor outlines the striking similarities between the trauma of ecological collapse, and the personal collapse involved in trauma, as well as the ecopsychological connections between the two. She also details the similarities between permaculture and trauma therapy, and the potential for permaculture for healing the trauma of agricultural catastrophe.
While the so-called “cultivation continuum” between agriculture and horticulture is problematized by opposing relationships with succession that mark a clear ecological distinction between the two, there is a smooth continuum from horticulture/permaculture and hunter-gatherers. The world has never seen a “pure” hunter-gatherer society that never uses any kind of cultivation techniques. Some come much closer than others, but even the most extreme will scatter seeds or leave more of one plant behind than another so that there will be more of it the next year. Hunter-gatherers have typically used fire to reshape ecologies on a large scale, for instance, or cultivated vast “food forests” in which they foraged.
Until the late 20th century, western anthropologists studying both ancient and current tropical cultures viewed equatorial agriculture as primitive and inefficient. Archeologists thought the methods were incapable of supporting many people, and so believed Central and South America before Columbus—outside of the major civilizations like the Aztec, Maya, and Inca—held only small, scattered villages. Modern anthropologists scouted tropical settlements for crop fields—the supposed hallmark of a sophisticated culture—and, noting them largely absent, pronounced the societies “hunter gatherer, with primitive agriculture.” How ironic that these scientists were making their disdainful judgements while shaded by brilliantly complex food forests crammed with several hundred carefully tended species of multifunctional plants, a system perfectly adapted to permanent settlement in the tropics. It just looks like jungle to the naive eye.8
The farm is a unit of human food production. If some plant finds its way into it, it is a “weed”; if some animal, “vermin.” “Weeds” and “vermin” must at all costs be eradicated, because cultivation by means of catastrophe creates a situation of constant scarcity and deprivation. Historically, the world’s “famine centers” have always been its agricultural centers (Manning, 2005). By contrast, horticulture/permaculture routinely creates rich habitat for other species, and even enourages it, in large part because, unlike agriculture, horticulture is not self-sufficient.
Just as no hunter-gatherer goes through life without some kind of cultivation, it is also true that no horticulturalist culture gets by without some measure of hunting and gathering. Even the most intensive horticulturalists rely on hunting for supplemental protein and gather wild-grown plants to supplement their diet. What permaculture establishes as a “good idea” or ethical imperative in “zone 5,” horticulture demands as an economic necessity for rich hunting grounds.
Where this system breaks down—for instance, in New Guinea, where domesticated pigs eliminate some of the need for hunting—we see the border-line cases of where agriculture develops. Alongside this, we also see the phenomenon of the Melanesian “Big Man” and the breakdown of the egalitarian societies that inhabit the hunter-gatherer/horticulturalist continuum, from simple band societies at the hunter-gatherer extreme, to more complex tribal societies at the horticultural end. Where reliance on wild foods ends, cultivation tips from horticulture to agriculture, societies tip from egalitarian to hierarchical, and ecological impact tips from beneficial to disastrous. These are all deeply related phenomena.
The distinction of “agriculture” from “permaculture” may seem quibbling or even pedantic, but it strikes directly to the heart of this phenomenon, the most important change in human history. As members of a culture on one side of that historical divide, we are naturally inclined to see our way as the only way, even though it is the novel, untested way. To call horticulture or permaculture a subspecies of agriculture is one symptom of this, a semantically Freudian slip that evinces and reinforces a much deeper cultural conviction, and a much deeper cultural narrative. By transforming the living world into nothing more than a unit of production, agriculture trains us to see all cultivation not in terms of ecological relationship, but as an economic equation of energy in and energy out. It makes our scale one of how much we modify the ecology, rather than the kind of modifications we make. Intrinsic to this view is our mythology of humans vs. nature, reflected most recently in the Romantic view of “wilderness,”9 but stretching back even further, to be found in the struggles of “human vs. nature” set up in Antigone with Antigone and Creon, and before that, in the Platonic dualism of the world of Forms, a mythic narrative of the literate mind.10 That is to say, what compels us to see horticulture as a kind of agriculture is precisely the underlying problems that define agriculture itself. Stepping beyond that gets us past clumsy phrases like Quinn’s “totalitarian agriculture,” aligns us with our colloquial understanding of the differences between “farm” and “garden,” and sets us in a point of view that immediately highlights the most fundamental crisis of our time: the catastrophic nature of agriculture, and the hope we still have in horticulture.
Works Cited
- Ember, C.R. and Ember, M. (1999). Anthropology, ninth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.
- Hunter, D.E.K. and Whitten, P. (1982). Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Little, Brown.
- Manning, R. (2005). Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press.
Hey –
Good stuff, J. Maybe (okay probably not, but…
) this will help to settle this recurring debate, or at least give you a short hand response when it does come up. You pull the argument together really tightly and simply at the same time. Sweet!
Janene
Comment by janene — 13 June 2007 @ 11:00 AM
Thanks.
That was precisely the goal—at least I can make a link from now on, rather than repeat myself all the time!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 June 2007 @ 11:11 AM
Some of you may remember a while back when we had to ban Taylor (at his own request). I won’t lift that, but I did get a comment from him in the filter which was reasonable enough, and others might be asking similar things, so I’ll answer it here. He quoted me in the article above:
And asked:
I don’t imagine you have; as I argued in the article, this is a somewhat different perspective. Even permaculturalists and those interested in “sustainable agriculture” tend to see the problem as one of resources, rather than relationships: how to consume resources sustainably, how to cause a level of damage equal to or lower than the ecology’s capacity to regenerate, and so on. I’m taking a different perspective altogether, one that emphasizes ecological relationship, and thus, one that steps out of the agricultural mindset and into the horticultural/hunter-gatherer mindset, what we might also call the animist mindset.
That said, take a look at horticultural practice worldwide. In contrast to the agricultural attitudes towards “weeds” and “vermin” (see, for instance, the video, “Death to Weeds!“), horticulturalists created the Amazon (see Charles Mann’s 1491), the most vibrant, diverse ecology on the planet. Surviving horticulturalists tend to live in the tropics, where agriculture has failed most spectacularly. As mentioned in the passage quoted from Toby Hemenway’s article above, these jungles are generally “food forests” cultivated by horticulturalists.
Now, I did distinguish agriculture and horticulture in terms of their relationships to succession, so some might argue, “Hey, don’t most horticulturalists also emulate catastrophe, particularly with the use of fire?” That is true; in my more poetic moments, I sometimes also think of the difference between agriculture and horticulture as the difference between making beautiful love and rape, or between a vicious beat-down and a waltz. Making love or dancing both involve some give-and-take, and likewise, horticulture sometimes involves setting succession back. There’s still a crucial difference, in that horticulture always sets succession back in one area to increase edge, increase diversity, increase ecological health, and eventually to let succession go through again. This is vastly different from agriculture’s obsession with constantly repressing succession. Horticulturalists don’t weed, or fence off their crops, or open up the same catastrophe year after year in the same place. Their success depends on succession taking place and new plants filling in the holes they make. When that same process happens to a farm, the farm is considered abandon and unusable. So yes, it’s true that horticulturalists do occasionally set back succession, but that’s one thing they do—it’s not the only thing they do. And that’s why the long-term impact of horticulture is the Amazon rainforest, while the long-term impact of agriculture is the desert of Iraq.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 June 2007 @ 12:03 PM
Further Musings on the Global and the Personal
This rather feeds into what we were discussing in the Neocolonialism thread about how personal and global issues feed into one another. In my case, glomming onto radical leftist ideology in order to convince society to work the way it supposedly should, is somewhat analogous to civilization itself resorting to contrivances such as industrialism and neocolonialism to make its way of doing things work. Both of these situations are also similar in that the proposed solution doesn’t really work and may in fact make problems even worse. Granted, undergraduate college-campus leftists may not have had the ability to change anything in the larger society, but you can see the fact that they don’t really have any solutions in the fact that the scene attracts troubled individuals, and the troubled nature of such people (yes, this included myself, big time) shows up in the way they behave in a manner difficult not to notice.
Another analogy I could apply to my own life experience is in the difference between agriculture and horticulture. The agriculturist imposes his will upon the natural envrionment in an extremely heavy-handed way, and the results are always ultimately disastrous. The horticulturalist works with existing patterns in order to create something beneficial to both the natural environment and her human community because she recognizes that latter is not separate from the former.
In my own life, I’ve noticed that whenever I try to make something happen in my life by going out and chasing after it the way the cultural mavens say I’m supposed to, it will simply not work out at all if I’m lucky. If I’m less lucky, this approach will be an unmitigated disaster. That’s kind of like how the farmer rips out the existing ecosystem and imposes monocropping and wages war against natural successoin reasserting itself. Both of these things are examples of trying to impose your ego’s will on the world outside your narrow, limited definition of yourself.
The things in my life that have worked the best have been things that simply materialized as a natural outgrowth of the spiritual path I was on at the moment. That’s kind of like how a horticulturalists relies on “Zone 5″, the part of the cultivated area closest to its default natural state, for the health of her garden. (My analogy may be flawed owing to the fact that all I know about permaculture pretty much comes from reading stuff here, and while that’s a very good start, I really should know more.)
A Type A person who vindicates his life with how big his bank account is and how far he has climbed up the corporate ladder would say that’s because I’m a fuck-up who is not really good for anything. (I also note how many of such people are “mature” and “rational” scientific skeptics who worship at the altar of “progress”.) My explanation is that if you’re more aligned with the realities of the spiritual world rather than aligned with the realities of the physical world, approaching things in a way that doesn’t have a solid spiritual foundation will be a lot less likely to work for you. To be sure, Mr. Type A “Science-Is-God-And-Technology-Will-Save-Us” has more tangible things to show for his endeavors, but he pays a high price in terms of the sort of person he has become and how much he has contributed to the world’s problems.
So if your life is spiritually sound (I wish I could lay claim to truly being this sort of person, but I don’t think I really can), you’ll be like the horticulturist who has enough for herself and her community and has also enhanced the natural environment, but if you’re like Mr. Type A, you’ll have more material abundance in your grain silo in the short term, but the damage you’ve done to the natural environment when that cosmic bill comes to will make you realize that it wasn’t worth it. You will also realize that the conqueror’s arrogance that has taken over your personality has made you into a vicious, intolerant, and unpleasant person to be around.
BTW, I’ve certainly noticed The New Look. Any particular reason for switching from red to blue?
Comment by venuspluto67 — 13 June 2007 @ 2:05 PM
BTW, I think the permalinks to your two most recent blog articles need a bit of fixing.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 13 June 2007 @ 2:21 PM
You were experiencing some technical difficulties, Venus. They’re fixed now, so everything should be back to normal.
Notice that Type A personalities also have a lot of self-loathing, and generally die young from stress-related heart diseases. I wouldn’t draw the line between “spiritual” and “physical,” either, as that’s precisely the kind of dualism that agriculture’s suggested to us. Oh, it’s very difficult to break these “monocultures of the mind,” this human dimension of domestication. It’s beyond any of our capacities to do it in just one lifetime, but we can do most of it, and pass on something far milder to our children. Getting rid of the last vestiges will take quite some time, however. Breaking the dualistic mold is a key starting point, though. I think that if you sat back and thought about it a little more, you’d see that what you’re calling the “physical world” approach has more to do with treating the universe as a collection of objects, and what you’re calling the “spiritual world” has a lot more to do with treating the universe as a collection of relationships. Of course, to deem the one “physical” and the other “spiritual” is to concede that agriculture’s logic is correct, and the universe we percieve is a dead, clockwork world, and we’re just being tricked into percieving it as alive. There’s the root of so much of this. You need to have the confidence to trust yourself and believe in your own perception of the world, that it really is every bit as alive as your senses tell you it is, and thus, that the whole thing’s all about relationship.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 June 2007 @ 2:44 PM
I was going to say something to that effect, but I decided against because I’m trying to do what I can to make my essential point while at the same time containing the length of my posts. For pity’s sake, my four- or five-line sentences probably make my comments difficult enough to read as it is. (I’m trying to work on that one too. It’s just that it’s so much easier, at least for me, to say what I have to say more precisely by cramming a great deal into a single sentence.)
Comment by venuspluto67 — 13 June 2007 @ 2:56 PM
Work, perceived “ease”, precision cramming, words and more words…
Great (unintended) example of the depth of our agricultural framework and “monoculture of the mind”.
(No worries, VP, it just jumped out at me…)
Comment by JCamasto — 13 June 2007 @ 5:33 PM
I write blog posts that need a “Works Cited” list at the end. Obviously, I’m no more feral yet myself.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 June 2007 @ 5:38 PM
It comes as no surprise. The values of the agriculturalist are the same values one needs to cope and function in the context of holding down a job in industrial civilization, whether you work in an office cubicle or at the grocery store as I do.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 13 June 2007 @ 7:43 PM
I don’t see how this can have any positive impact on the future direction of society? Out here in the wider world agriculture does not bear the narrow definition you’ve assigned to it, and nor does horticulture carry the meanings you’ve ascribed. The trouble with the future is that it’s built on the efforts of the people of the present, and attempting to re-educate them all on history, etymology and anthropology as a way to the future is probably not productive.
The people you designate as understanding agriculture to be purely monocultural cropping are also the same ones who see horticulture as orchards and vineyards, sweeping lawns and profuse colour coordinated border plantings. When you speak of horticulture in the sense you use, you are only ever going to influence those willing to wade through and understand where your mark lies. Unfortunately the majority of people willing to do this are not the ones who currently hold and manage the land, and therefore they are not the ones well placed to begin making the changes that will help us in the future.
If your target market is fellow anthropologists then your definition of agriculture is suitable for them perhaps, but for the rest of us, common usage actually reveals a broader and more rich understanding of the term, one that is eminently suitable to form the basis of something we can build upon for the future. As a pertinent aside, cultivation is actually derived from “colere”, “to till, to worship”, it is “culture” that is derived from “cultura”, at least according to my dictionary, which admittedly predates the internet. Cultivation, in addition to carrying the meaning “to till” is more suitably associated with “to civilise, to refine” and “to devote attention to”, even though such application may not suit the direction of your arguments.
We see the idealised “wild land” and refine and civilise it through the devotion of attention, we worship it as a means of producing food. Utilising this meaning allows agriculture to neatly contain all of the things you assign to horticulture, even when horticulture reaches beyond the modern meaning and covers the scattering of seed and weeding out of invasive species that would threaten the succession of a “wild food garden” that is the subject of your horticulture. If we were looking for an oxymoron getting wild food from a garden would seem to be higher on the list than “sustainable agriculture”. Something cannot be wild and yet cultivated at the same time, yet your statement: “Where reliance on wild foods ends, cultivation tips from horticulture to agriculture,” seems to indicate this is possible.
Where we have a wider population that can comfortably comprehend the terms “sustainable agriculture”, “permanent agriculture”, “organic agriculture”, and “broadacre agriculture” as all pointing to varied forms of food production methodology then we are best served to utilise that understanding, however errant in anthropological terms, in order to direct them to the future. Sure, you have your beef against agriculture as a cause of destruction, and it’s a valid beef, but trying to redefine people’s understanding is not going to readily facilitate change.
It would be far better to embrace “agriculture”, to join the dark side so to speak, and work from within. By allowing people to keep their preconceived notions and expand upon them, rather than asking them to scrap their worldview and start with a clean slate you can actually achieve something other than a whole lot of confusion.
It is far easier to introduce permanent trees to a field as an adjunct to a cropping or pastoral operation than it is to ask a farmer to dump the crops that feed people today (and make him or her an income) in the hope that planting the entire lot to forest will feed some people down the track. Asking them to adopt “sustainable agriculture” is not such a quantum leap as asking them to accept some anthropologically correct primitivist “horticulture” that looks nothing like any horticulture any farmer has seen in the last few millenia. Only by allowing people a foundation in their current worldview can they build upward. This essay, on the contrary, paints them all as demons, and gives them no way forward, which is, of course, the easiest way to create resistance.
Comment by Geoff — 13 June 2007 @ 10:18 PM
I’m not sure how you view the local food movement, but bringing agriculture back home could redress many of the ills of the current food production system. There is a commercial backyard farming system called SPIN-Farming which provides a process for making an income from farming on sub-acre land bases, and incorporates agriculture into the built environment. You can see SPIN in action at http://www.spinfarming.com. I am wondering if you see what SPIN is enabling as a positive development.
Comment by Roxanne — 14 June 2007 @ 8:42 AM
Roxanne, local food is a great start, but it’s nowhere near enough. Like “organic agriculture,” local food is basically just the way things were done before the Green Revolution. Local food stripped the cedar forests of Iraq and turned the Fertile Crescent into the desert you see today. Local food would be a great first step, but it’s nowhere even close to enough. Once you have local food, you can start changing the way you grow that food locally, morph it into permaculture. Then your community can pare itself down to something around 150 people, and you can cluster into a village around your field. Your religion will slowly morph into more and more animistic beliefs, your culture will be increasingly informed by the ambient sound of your ecology, and you’ll dispense with your various social hierarchies because, really, who has the time? Little Randy’s going to call himself “Mayor”? That’s cute, but it’s Lil’ Randy! Does he really expect anyone to take that seriously?
At that point, you’ll be close to sustainable.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 June 2007 @ 11:58 AM
Geoff, you’re a farmer, aren’t you? I can tell because these words all mean something very different to you than they do to most people. Like your popular conception of “horticulture.” 9 times out of 10, when I say “horticulture,” it doesn’t evoke anything in people’s minds—I get a blank stare until I say “gardening,” and then they say, “Ohhh,” and picture a well-landscaped area full of different plants growing together. Still not quite the same as what an anthropologist means by the term, but it’s a lot closer than if I were to tell them it was a kind of farming—and still a far cry from the “orchards and vineyards, sweeping lawns and profuse colour coordinated border plantings” you describe. No, my mother’s backyard garden isn’t the same as the horticulture you’ll find in the Amazon, but it’s a whole lot closer to a food forest than those corn fields.
But more importantly, this isn’t “the narrow definition {I’ve} assigned to it.” That much should be obvious from all of those precise, technical definitions I cited and discussed. Look at what they keep bringing up: intensity, tillage, the plow, etc. They’re certainly all pointing in a similar direction, and a direction that actually does align with the popular conception of the farmer plowing his fields into neat rows of a single species of crop.
I could hardly disagree more. I cannot tell you how much confusion, muddled thinking and failed experiments I’ve encountered over the years simply because so many people take the word “agriculture” to cover any kind of cultivation, regardless of its nature. When you understand the difference between agriculture and horticulture, the vague, ill-defined boundary between sustainable and unsustainable societies melts away, and you suddenly have the ability to check your ideas against the accumulated wisdom of the human species. Try looking up “non-totalitarian agriculture” in the Ethnographic Atlas. Now try “horticulture,” and tell me that it doesn’t make any difference. The only way forward is to learn from the past, and you can’t do that if you strip a word like “agriculture” of all meaning by making it a synonym of cultivation. We already have a word for cultivation—cultivation. I can understand why our culture pushes us towards this end, of course. It makes any other kind of cultivation unthinkable, like Newspeak in 1984. It makes it impossible to speak of a very specific kind of cultivation marked by tilling, monocropping and ecological devastation—agriculture—with precison. Instead, we get endlessly sidetracked into discussions about “sustainable agriculture,” which to you or I might mean something no one would recognize as farming, but because we use the word “agriculture,” and the popular image of the farmer is so entrenched, so many others will pursue as nothing more than monocropped, tilled, plowed fields of wheat. Maybe without Haber-Bosch fertilizer or chemical pesticides. A “garden,” on the other hand, is something very different, and everyone knows it.
The wide usage of agriculture is mostly found among farmers. In the rest of the world, a “farm” is a world away from a “garden,” and my mother’s joke is just silly for that reason. Furthermore, correct usage emphasizes the ecological relationship of each strategy, maintains the etymological integrity of the terms, embraces their precise usage, and most importantly, aligns better with both popular and professional uses of the terms, allowing you to be better understood by laypeople, and to more easily look up references in an index.
By the same token, expanding “agriculture” to mean “cultivation” limits the capacity of language to communicate by eliminating a term for a very specific phenomenon and instead giving us two words for the same thing (and thus obscuring the fact that this very specific phenomenon exists, instead conflating it as the “default” or “normal” mode, with all other modes of cultivation as mere varieties of it), frustrates the popular conception (who now have to trace the distant relationship between a food forest and a cornfield), defies all the precise definitions, necessitates nonsense phrases like “totalitarian agriculture” to fill the gap previously filled simply by “agriculture,” and eliminates the possibility of comparing present techniques with past experiences.
Words matter. Good words allow communication to be more clear, precise and direct. Unfortunately, there are plenty of cultural forces that work at odds with clear, precise, direct communication, and they push towards an obfuscation of the issue, with this usage of “agriculture” so broad that it reminds me of the effect of Newspeak in 1984. This is something that must be resisted. It took me a long time to pin down what Daniel Quinn was talking about so I could find ethnographic examples, simply because he used the broadest definition of “agriculture.” Those are the kinds of setbacks that such imprecise language entails.
Again, it’s not my mark. Look at the definitions above. When horticulture is understood at all, it’s routinely simply, “gardening,” just like “agriculture” is “farming.” These aren’t definitions I pulled out of my own ass; you can read the definitions above. Those are quite typical, and they match precisely what I’m driving at. All somebody needs to get from “horticulture” to understand me is “gardening,” and I’ll just as often simply say, “gardening.” Compare that to the broad usage—a food forest as a kind of agriculture. The gap betweeen a food forest and a cornfield is much wider.
The ones who currently hold and manage the land are mostly ConAgra, Monsanto, and the other big agribusiness monoliths. Less than 2% of the U.S. population is currently involved in food production. The vast majority of the people we need to reach might have had a flower bed or a backyard garden, but that’s prboably the extent of their cultivation experience. Most farmers I know will continue plowing till they keel over dead, plowing dead dust; sure, some of them might be willing to try permaculture, but that can’t be the target audience or we’ll all be dead.
Cultura is, admittedly, a fairly complex Latin word, and very tightly bound into Roman conceptions of agriculture, civilization, pietas and progress, so those meanings all appear in Latin at some point, though the earliest meaning specifically referred to tilling soil. Later, this was used to suggest tilling soil for civilization and culture in a person, the same way the soil is tilled for wheat; later still, worship itself became a kind of ideological tilling. They’re all correct meanings, and all reveal the mythic framework of the Romans, who saw imperium, pietas and their glorious, totalitarian regime as the logical culmination of cultura.
Exactly. That’s precisely the problem. The “idealised ‘wild land’” is something Other. Thus, the moment a human enters it, it ceases to be “wilderenss.” Its humans vs. nature, and thus, humans have no place in nature, humans are the opposite of nature. If a human is in it, it ceases to be nature; it’s “artificial” instead. Ergo, what happens to nature is almost by definition completely disconnected from what happens to humans.
But agriculture allows us to take wilderness and turn it into a unit of food production. The refinement and attention is to make it something human, to rescue it from nature. It is not an ecology one relates to, but a unit of production. It did not have value as a living landscape; only human attention and refinement could give it value, and now its value is solely its productive capacity as a source of human food.
That’s precisely the mindset that agriculture engenders, and strikes very much to the heart of what makes “sustainable agriculture” an oxymoron.
Again, it isn’t mine; it’s the technical definition, the popular understanding of a “garden,” the term you’ll need to look up examples in an ethnography, and the word you’ll have to use if you want to be understood by someone else. The only people I’ve ever met who had differing opinions were people involved, in one way or another, in the “sustainable agriculture” movement, and I’ve been continually frustrated by how that term alone creates a nearly unbreakable mold in most people’s mind of trying to tweak a cornfield to make the weeding, plowing, tilling and monocropping a little nicer for the environment.
At any rate, I think the above shows that this could hardly be further from the truth. That meaning really underlines the problems with agriculture. It’s very much the same problem that divides the animist mindset shared by hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, from the dualistic mindset found in agricultural societies. Is humanity part of the world, or exiled from it? Is the world around us Paradise, or cursed for our sake? Is the world around us something we relate to, or a unit of production? Do we inhabit a universe of relationships, or objects? When you look at a photograph, what do you see first—the people in it, or the action?
If these seem equivalent to you, then you very much missed the underlying point that some precise terminology reveals—the vast divide between a sustainable relationship with a living landscape where humans and other species coexist, versus the unsustainable usage of land as a unit of production.
Really? You never had any weeds in a garden? What are weeds if not wild food growing in your garden?
Before that, I’d also said that horticulture is not self-sufficient. It can provide a lot of your diet, but in no case has horticulture ever provided for a human’s complete dietary needs. It always needs to be supplemented, usually by hunting, and sometimes by gathering wild plants that are too hard to cultivate. In every case where this reliance on wild foods to supplement even a predominantly cultivated diet has been eliminated, it has happened by jumping that divide from horticulture into agriculture, by relying on catastrophe and suppressing succession. Only then can you provide a complete human diet solely on what you cultivate.
Even I’ve never heard of “broadacre agriculture” before. As for the rest, they’re all incredibly vague. “Organic agriculture,” for instance. Does that mean the USDA’s definition of “organic agriculture”? Most “organic agriculture” isn’t even much different from industrialized agriculture. Even where it is, it usually just means the same kind of agriculture that was practiced before the Green Revolution—the agriculture that helped spread deserts from Africa’s Atlantic coast, clear to the Great Wall of China and whipped up the Dust Bowl in North America. Industrialized agriculture may have intensified the pre-existing trends, but it by no means created them. Even after 50 years of industrial agriculture, most of agriculture’s historic devastation has been wrought by what we today call “organic agriculture.”
And “sustainable agriculture”? Give me 10 people who practice it and I’ll give you 10 different definitions for it. “Sustainable” has a fairly precise meaning, too, but practices like “sustainable agriculture” routinely suppress or ignore inputs to balance their ecological impact on paper, leading so many people to the conclusion that “sustainability” is a meaningless, vague term.
If you happen to be dealing with people who understand these terms (and remember, they are a distinct minority), then by all means, engage your audience with where they’re at. But even in these cases, I think you get further by exploring the problems with these concepts, because the reasons they don’t make much sense overlay precisely the major crises we need to address. The confusion of “organic agriculture,” for instance, gets us right into why agriculture was destroying so much of the world long before the Industrial Revolution. The vagaries of “sustainable agriculture” get right to the heart of externalities and ignored costs. These are some of the biggest problems we have to face. The complications in terms like these try to brush them under the rug of an awkward term, but by exploring the failings of those terms, we can come face to face with these problems, and why continuing our way of life requires us to try to ignore them as much as we can. And that will lead us to the really important conclusion: we cannot continue to live the way we have.
Just as importantly, we’re going to need to learn from other cultures that haven’t destroyed the world, and that’s going to require the ability to map our practices to anthropological terms, so we can compare what we’re doing to what other cultures have done. On that level, too, precise terminology gives us a very significant advantage.
But it’s not a redefinition. It’s right there in the popular and precise meanings we already have. It just takes a bit of thought to follow the implications of what we all agree, professional and layperson alike, what these terms mean, and to try to understand them in terms of ecological relationship. I didn’t redefine anything. I worked from the popular image, the etymological history, and a whole collection of precise definitions, and from there, I just followed the implications.
And yet so far, the only result I’ve seen from those who’ve embraced that approach has been a whole lot of confusion. I can talk to ordinary people about “farming” vs. “gardening,” and they immediately get what I’m saying. The only people who’ve ever been confused about this have been the people with heavy investments in the “sustainable agriculture” movement.
Working from within this notion of “agriculture” normalizes monocropping, tilling, and the viewpoint of land not as a living body of relationships, but as a unit of production. It means that every other kind of cultivation is merely an elaboration on that. The minute I use the word “agriculture” or “farm,” the other 98% of the people out there who aren’t farmers immediately think of rows of corn. We already have far too many people expecting to just set up a post-peak homestead and farm themselves some wheat out of the soil their grandfathers discovered couldn’t grow anything more, and that’s why they took up the Green Revolution. Trying to explain that when you say “farm,” you actually mean something that has nothing in common with what they’re thinking of, and it’s actually more like what they mean by “garden,” then you’ve just done them a grave disservice. They may never fully understand what a sustainable cultivation looks like, all because you used the word “farm,” rather than “garden.” To say nothing of the fact that they’ll never be able to cross this information against actual ethnographic data. They’ll never be able to compare it against others who’ve tried or lived that way. Instead, they’ll only be able to compare against the experiments tried by a few tinkerers in our own culture.
I don’t know too many farmers who’d even be willing to plant some trees. Less than 2% of the U.S. population is involved in food production. It’s the other 98% that need to start embracing permaculture and horticulture. It’s community food gardens in the inner city that will do the most to prevent massive die-off, or small groups using permaculture to help rewild the forests. I don’t worry too much about farmers; they’re far too committed to civilization, and far too small a minority in the West, to ever mean much to any kind of change. If farmers are the primary audience, then it’s already over.
Asking either is asking more than any farmer I know would ever be willing to accept. But the time’s not far off when farmers won’t be able to feed the other 98% of the country. It’s the people who are dependent on civilization now that need to know where to go, with no background in any kind of cultivation whatsoever. They need models of other cultures that have made it work; not just their cultivation schemes, but how that affected their social organization, and how they got along with each other, adn how that shaped their religion and their outlook, and how it created their whole culture. That’s the challenge that lies ahead. Ultimately, who cares what the farmers do? Farmers farm, and it’s precisely that scale that’s causing the problem. To ask a farmer to grow their food sustainably is to ask him to give up everything that makes him a farmer. Farmers aren’t going to have much impact on the future, I don’t think. It’s the people willing and looking for a whole different culture that are going to create those cultures that will survive.
From my experience, they’re already resistant, always have been and always will be. But in the end, there can’t be any kind of “reformed agriculture.” What it will take to survive the downslope will be a whole different culture—a different way of cultivating, yes, but a whole different worldview and a whole different economy and a whole different approach. In the end, you’re going to have to ask anyone wh