There are some in the environmental movement who seem to think that the world would be better off without us.  The world would not survive without ants, they say, but it would be just fine without us.  Such misanthropic environmentalists seek population control and plead with us to reduce our impact upon the earth, as though that impact were purely and always negative.  They see people almost as not having come from the same chain of life as the ants and trees and everything else worth preserving. 

Since farming and the promotion of good farming is my primary mode of active environmental work, I have already thrown my hat in with a different group of environmentalists.  For lack of a better term, I will call them the humanists, following the meaning that word conveyed in the Renaissance, when the individual value and potential of human beings was being rediscovered. The vision of these humanistic environmentalists is summed up well in a quote I recently read. Michael Braungart, co-author of the book Cradle to Cradle, a critic of the whole notion of sustainability, writes: “But I can tell you sustainability is boring. It is just the minimum…Sustainability just keeps the same things over and over again. Instead we should celebrate being human beings and our creativity, which is far more important than sustainability.”

Braungart goes on to say that the mass of ants on the earth is far more than that of people, and that the difference between us and ants is that we leave waste. “They don’t need to minimize waste,” he writes. “They produce nutrients. Again it is a design question." 

What Braungart expresses—a concept at the heart of both humanistic environmentalism and ecological farming—is the idea that human beings aren’t in themselves the problem. The problem is the way we’re living and acting in the ecosystem. In other words, the problem isn’t that there are too many people, but that there is too little good design. 

What ecological agriculture seeks to do is to understand natural systems and grow food for people that works with, compliments, and augments those systems.  The same goal lies at the heart of all other humanistic design. 

So there are two paths we can take as people concerned with our future.  We can worry and fret about our very footprint upon the earth. Or we can see that some of our footprints are good, that we can heal the environment, and that all we need to do is set our vision on the right goal, celebrate and engage our creativity, and get to work. 

Posted by Ragan Sutterfield on Sep 4, 2008 at 3:42 PM
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