A. About this book â 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 todayâs 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 worldâs 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 âpluralistic sovereigntyâ involving âeco-statesâ.
This third volume takes a different approach. As its title suggests, I draw here on the Homeric epics â the Iliad and the Odyssey â 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 âtwin crisesâ 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 âour longest day of battleâ, drawing from the narrative that runs from Book XI through the first half of Book XVIII of the Iliad, and âour final journey homeâ, drawing from the theme of nostos (âhomecomingâ) in the Odyssey. In legal and institutional terms, accomplishing this agricultural transformation â by adopting what I describe below as a âdeep agroecologyâ â 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 ânatural-systems agricultureâ movement, aim at improving sustainability, soil health, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and food security.
One particular innovation holds special promise for fundamentally changing humanityâs 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 worldâs 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 â both at the level of national governments and at the global level â to reform food production in ways that respond to the urgency of our planetâs 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 âdeep agroecologyâ
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 todayâs 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 â mainly from Mesopotamia and China, but with references also to Egypt and Africa â 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 todayâs global society that it offers the richest resources â especially literary resources â 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 âdeep agroecologyâ that I refer to in the title of this book.
Briefly, what does that term mean? The meaning I ascribe to âdeep agroecologyâ emerges more fully below, especially in Chapters 1 and 3. For the moment, I offer a multiple-element definition â an âarticulated definitionâ â giving extra emphasis to its most central features. In my view, âdeep agroecologyâ refers to:
âąâŠ the embrace of ethical, legal, and institutional innovations
âąâŠ 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)
âąâŠ that gives highest and non-negotiable priority to ecological realities and restoration,
âąâŠ so that the foodcrops we produce â with special attention to grains and legumes, which are so important to todayâs human diet â are drawn from and are complementary to the Earthâs natural ecosystems rather than working in opposition to such ecosystems
âąâŠ with the consequence of dramatically reducing agricultureâs 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 âdeep agroecologyâ 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 McFaddenâs contributions.
A second explanatory observation: As revealed in the first element of my âarticulated definitionâ above, I regard âdeep agroecologyâ 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 speciesâ 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 âdeepâ. Why do I use the term âdeep agroecologyâ? Because it echoes the term âdeep ecologyâ, 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: