Deep Agroecology and the Homeric Epics

Global Cultural Reforms for a Natural-Systems Agriculture

John W. Head

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000286236
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Diritto
• Categoría: Diritto ambientale

Drawing on the Homeric epics, this multidisciplinary work reveals the cultural transformations which need to take place in order to transition from today's modern extractive agricultural system to a sustainable natural?systems agriculture.

In order to provide an imaginative foundation on which to build such a cultural transformation, the author draws on the oldest and most pervasive pair of literary works in the Western canon: the Iliad and the Odyssey. He uses themes from those foundational literary works to critique the concept of state sovereignty and to explain how innovative federalism structures around the world already show momentum building toward changes in global environmental governance. The book proposes a dramatic expansion on those innovations, to create eco?states responsible for agroecological management. Drawing from many years of experience in international institutions, the author proposes a system of coordination by which an international agroecology?focused organization would simultaneously (i) avoid the shortcomings of the world's current family of powerful global institutions and (ii) help create and implement a reformed system of local landscape?based agriculture wholly consistent with ecological principles. Acknowledging the difficulty of achieving reforms such as these, the author suggests that a new cultural?conceptual narrative can be constructed drawing on values set forth 2, 700 years ago in the Homeric epics. He explains how these values can be reimagined to drive forward our efforts in addressing today's the climate and agricultural crises in ways that reflect, not reject, the natural processes and relationships that make the Earth a living planet.

This book will be of great interest to students, academics and policymakers addressing issues of agrarian values, environmental and agricultural law, environmental restoration, agroecology, and global institutional reform.

1Orientation: the challenge and the project

A.About this book – third in a series

B.Cultural reform and “deep agroecology”

C.Using the Homeric epics

D.Structure and theme

A. About this book – third in a series

In writing this book I aim to help reform agriculture worldwide. Climate disruption and other factors will soon force revolutionary changes in the methods by which we produce much of our food, and particularly the grains and legumes that are so central to today’s human diet. I am eager to help facilitate those changes in ways that my own background allows: through examining certain legal and institutional questions that must be addressed in order to transform agriculture at a global scale.

This book is the third of three volumes to emerge from my work on this topic. The first volume, titled International Law and Agroecological Husbandry,¹ concentrates on issues of law and policy that arise within the context of the world’s legal frameworks as they exist today. The second volume, titled A Global Corporate Trust for Agroecological Integrity,² proposes new institutional structures at the global level based on a refashioned concept of sovereignty that gives special attention to a “pluralistic sovereignty” involving “eco-states”.

This third volume takes a different approach. As its title suggests, I draw here on the Homeric epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey – for values and strategies we can use as a species to address the two closely-linked crises of agricultural degradation and climate chaos. As I summarize at the end of Chapter 2, these “twin crises” confront us with immediacy and with existential significance: failing to address them appropriately within the next few years will place not only our own species but many others as well on a course of extinction. Reflecting central themes of the Homeric epics, and particularly those themes that align with 21st-century values, I propose in this book a cultural-conceptual framework for dealing with these two crises of agricultural degradation and climate chaos. Adopting such a new framework of values can enable us to transform our current form of agriculture to a revolutionary new form of agriculture that will reintegrate our production of food into the natural processes and relationships that make the Earth a living planet ... thereby helping address climate-chaos issues in the process.

Accomplishing this agricultural transformation will constitute both “our longest day of battle”, drawing from the narrative that runs from Book XI through the first half of Book XVIII of the Iliad, and “our final journey home”, drawing from the theme of nostos (“homecoming”) in the Odyssey. In legal and institutional terms, accomplishing this agricultural transformation – by adopting what I describe below as a “deep agroecology” – will require reforms at local, regional, and global levels.

I focus on the global level. Building on a framework explained in the first and second volumes in this three-book series, I describe here both (i) how a new form of sovereignty could work in practice in the regions of the world that I consider most important for food production and that have suffered the most severe degradation at the hands of agriculture³ and (ii) how a coordinating institution at the global level could ensure that food production becomes and remains wholly consistent with ecological realities, resilience, and restoration worldwide.

This book, like each of the two volumes referred to above, draws attention to some crucial scientific innovations already underway to revolutionize agriculture. These scientific strides, comprising part of a “natural-systems agriculture” movement, aim at improving sustainability, soil health, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and food security.

One particular innovation holds special promise for fundamentally changing humanity’s relationship to the rest of the ecosphere in which we exist. That innovation involves perennial polyculture foodcrops. That is, it centers on developing perennial grains grown in polycultures (more than one species in a field), instead of annual grains grown in monocultures (only one species in a field). This and other complementary developments hold the prospect of bringing us the technological capacity to reorient food production in ways that will help address the world’s food crisis, global climate disruption, and the profound environmental degradation that has resulted from modern extractive agriculture and the worldview on which it rests.

However, technological prowess alone will fall short. A reorientation of agriculture cannot occur unless we build the necessary legal and institutional capacity worldwide – both at the level of national governments and at the global level – to reform food production in ways that respond to the urgency of our planet’s ecological crises, especially those of soil degradation and climate disruption. We have little time, and we cannot rely on purely local or regional models to make the necessary changes.

B. Cultural reform and “deep agroecology”

In writing this book I have drawn on roughly 35 years of international experience and scholarship concentrating on law, institutions, governance, culture, European and Chinese history, environmental protection, and economic development. In directing my attention to how these matters bear specifically on agriculture, my professional background merges with my personal background: I grew up on a grain-and-livestock farm in northeast Missouri that has been in my family for well over a century.

In drawing from this range of experience, as well as from many years of studying and teaching international law and governance, I offer in this book both (i) a critique of the conceptual and institutional foundations that govern how we practice agriculture and (ii) a set of recommendations for change. The reforms I propose are legal, institutional, and cultural.

The cultural reforms pose perhaps the greatest challenge of all. Hence my decision to look to the Homeric epics. They lie at the very foundation of Western civilization and reveal universal themes and insights on what it means to be human. I hasten to add an essential disclaimer: the Homeric epics also reflect some values that 21st-century humans emphatically reject, or at least should reject. For reasons that I summarize briefly at the end of this chapter and then explore more fully in Chapter 9, I engage in selective interpretation of the Iliad and the Odyssey for purposes of this book. For instance, I insist that the Iliad can and should be read not as a story celebrating war and gore, but rather as one affirming the values of home that Hektor and Andromache reveal in their relationship.

Here is another disclaimer: the Homeric epics obviously have no monopoly on sweeping cultural narratives reflecting important systems of values that we can draw on for inspiration in addressing today’s global crises. Eastern teachings, indigenous cultures, and other traditions can provide guidance as well. Indeed, I devote an entire chapter in this book (Chapter 9) to some other narratives and value systems – mainly from Mesopotamia and China, but with references also to Egypt and Africa – that might provide solid foundations on which to construct a new cultural narrative for those of us alive today to grapple with the global existential problems of this era. In the end, though, for better or for worse, Western civilization still plays such a pervasive role in today’s global society that it offers the richest resources – especially literary resources – for addressing those problems, which themselves are mostly attributable to the West anyway. Hence, I believe that the themes and insights woven into the Homeric epics can help us to chart a way toward the “deep agroecology” that I refer to in the title of this book.

Briefly, what does that term mean? The meaning I ascribe to “deep agroecology” emerges more fully below, especially in Chapters 1 and 3. For the moment, I offer a multiple-element definition – an “articulated definition” – giving extra emphasis to its most central features. In my view, “deep agroecology” refers to:

•… the embrace of ethical, legal, and institutional innovations

•… that will result in a system of producing food for humans (as well as feed and fiber, the other usual outputs attributable to agriculture more generally)

•… that gives highest and non-negotiable priority to ecological realities and restoration,

•… so that the foodcrops we produce – with special attention to grains and legumes, which are so important to today’s human diet – are drawn from and are complementary to the Earth’s natural ecosystems rather than working in opposition to such ecosystems

•… with the consequence of dramatically reducing agriculture’s contribution to climate disruption and simultaneously helping our system of food production to brace itself against the severe ecological perturbations that have already begun, and that we know will inevitably accelerate with global climate change.

To this articulated definition I add at this point only three explanatory observations. First, I should note that although I arrived at the term “deep agroecology” on my own, I have very recently learned to my delight that the term also is used by other writers and activists. In November 2019, independent journalist Steven McFadden released his book Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future.⁴ His work, both in that book and in other publications, encompasses a range of topics, including philosophy, native knowledge, agricultural reform, and social change. In the last stages of completing my three-book series, I have drawn somewhat from McFadden’s contributions.

A second explanatory observation: As revealed in the first element of my “articulated definition” above, I regard “deep agroecology” as requiring at least as much attention to a change in ethics as it requires a change in farming systems. Such a change in ethics encompasses values, attitudes, and worldviews as well as far-reaching legal and institutional innovations that will flow from those new ethics. Indeed, if transforming agriculture required only technological advances in crop science or in our understanding of nitrogen cycles or evolutionary biology, I would have no significant role to play in such a transformation, and hence no book to write, as those technological topics lie well beyond my expertise. But an agricultural revolution of the scale I envision will also require shifts in attitudes and ethics, which explains why I draw on such foundational texts as the Iliad and the Odyssey for guidance. Those epics have endured not because they report on ancient battles or Aegean island adventures, but rather because they reveal, at least from a Western perspective, our species’ deepest layers of values and ethics. Such an agricultural revolution will also require legal and institutional changes, which I hope my professional experience will help me to design.

A third observation focuses especially on the word “deep”. Why do I use the term “deep agroecology”? Because it echoes the term “deep ecology”, which dates back nearly a half-century. An article featured on the website of the Foundation for Deep Ecology offers this explanation of the term:

In 1973, Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess introduced the phrase “deep ecology” to environmental literature. Environmentalism had emerged as a popular grassroots political movement in the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Those already involved in conservation and preservation efforts were now joined by many others concerned about the detrimental environmental effects of modern industrial technology. The longer-range, older originators of the movement included writers and activists like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold; more mainstream awareness was closer to the “wise-use” conservation philosophy pioneered by Gifford Pinchot.

... Both historically and in the contemporary movement, Naess saw two different forms of environmentalism, not necessarily incompatible with each other. One he called the “long-range deep ecology movement” and the other, the “shallow ecology movement.” The word “deep” in part referred to the level of questioning of our purposes and values when arguing in environmental conflicts. The “deep” movement involves deep questioning, right down to fundamental root causes. The short-term, shallow approach stops before the ultimate level of fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g. recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of the industrial economy. The long-range deep approach involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems.

The distinguishing and original characteristics of the deep ecology movement were its recognition of the inherent value of all living beings and the use of this view in shaping environmental policies. Those who work for social changes based on this recognition are motivated by love of nature as well as for humans. They recognize that we cannot go on with industrialism’s “business as usual.” Without changes in basic values and practices...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the author
• Foreword
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Glossary of selected Greek terms
• 1 Orientation: the challenge and the project
• 2 The Iliad, the Odyssey, agriculture, and climate change
• 3 Achilles: mênis, kleos, and aristeia
• 4 Agroecological husbandry: new roots for agriculture
• 5 Homo sapiens nobilis: trustees for the athanatoi
• 6 Eco-states and anthro-states: new roots for sovereignty
• 7 Odysseus: mêtis, nostos, and polútropos
• 8 Gaia, gods, governance, and xenia: creating a new epic
• 9 Detour: Beyond the Greeks, beyond the West
• 10 Moira: What is the (agroecological) fate of our godlike species?
• Appendices
• Selected bibliography
• Index