Of course, agriculture—with its draws on natural resources and beggar-thy-neighbor economics—is the fundamental and primarily important complexity of human existence, entwined with water and air to our continued habitation on earth.
As Savory illustrates, the solutions to thorny and wicked problems first require all parties to realize their common interests. Once a baseline of consensus has been established, a practical roadmap to approach and overcome our challenges can be worked out. But without context, without self-identification in your opposition, the debate is all sound and fury.
No industrial and cultural issue in America today has more idiotic ranting and needs context as much as agriculture. The current debate in farming prefers to fixate on means rather than goals—GMO versus organic, for example. Advocates, who are generally not farmers themselves, would rather stand in their corners and accuse each other of poisoning the earth or living in agrarian fantasies. In truth, each side would do good to take a long, hard look in the mirror, tone down the rhetoric and see how a little humility fits. Ancient wisdom tells us only fools believe they’re absolutely right. We’ve tried segregating ourselves before, and we know that doesn’t work.
The context for farmers—for all human beings, really—is that we must develop more resilient, renewable and ultimately sustainable agricultural systems in order for the species to flourish on this earth. To say it should enable mere survival is a failure of our own expectations. To flourish should mean nothing less than our farms produce an abundant and nutritious food supply, create vibrant rural towns and economies, preserve clean water, and live within a thriving terrestrial fabric of marsh, coast and forest.
There’s not much to argue with here. Savory might add an item to the list. But who can say he or she really wants farms that do any less? Who wants a world where the water has been made undrinkable and the forest empty for the purpose of growing food, one that sucks the oxygen out of the Gulf of Mexico while it encourages the burning of the Amazon?
