Wes Jackson
"Going Native: Natural Systems Agriculture"
Saturday, April 20, 2002, 12:30 PM
Dr. Wes Jackson - The Land Institute
The Great Plains could return to prairie and support more biomass than current industrial farmlands, according to Dr. Wes Jackson’s theory of Natural Systems Agriculture. The author of several books including New Roots for Agriculture and Becoming Native to This Place, Dr. Jackson is a leader in the international movement for a more sustainable agriculture. He was a 1990 Pew Conservation Scholar and a 1992 MacArthur Fellow, and is President and founder of The Land Institute.
LECTURE SUMMARY
It must be exhilarating –but challenging- for the ideas that inhabit Wes Jackson’s head. So many ideas, so densely connected. Wes founded and is President of the Land Institute, a modest organization with an audacious goal: re-invent agriculture.
Here’s the problem: agriculture and civilization have been eroding natural capital for 10,000 years. The difference between current and historical agricultural practices is that we’re doing it faster now.
Wes began by asking for one good example of sustainability. Better yet, how about a definition of justice and one example?
He’s been searching for this for thirty years, and the frustration he feels at times can be summed up in three t-shirts he’d like to have printed up for the Land Institute:
“If we have to walk the talk we’ll never get there.”
“We’ve got to stop meeting people where they are.”
“We need to spend more time preaching to the choir.”
A couple of observations:
Soil is as much a non-renewable resource as oil.
Current agriculture is built on fossil fuels rather than contemporary sunlight.
Of 105 elements in the periodic table, 18 make up life by combining into complex reagents. In contrast, we make simple reagents out of many elements, resulting in reagents we, and the rest of the biosphere did not evolve with. We need to consider these reagents guilty until proven innocent, and we need to develop a green chemistry based on nature.
One third of humanity wouldn’t be here without the early 20th century invention of the Hopper-Bosch process, which extracts nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas. We spend nearly twice the energy on artificial Nitrogen production as we do on “traction.”
We need to rethink the idea that humans are clever enough to do better than nature, and let this realization inform our way of living and a different economic order.
Sure, we innovate faster than nature, but look at the results. Prairie ecosystems hang onto soil and nutrients. Wheat fields require 150 pounds of artificial nitrogen and send 103 pounds down the Mississippi to a nitrogen dead zone in the Mississippi delta.
The problems with humanity’s troubled relationship with nature are legion. What can one little organization do about it? The Land Institute’s focus could revolutionize agriculture: perennialize annual crops to mitigate the problems of monoculture and tilling. They’ve got perennialized wheat in the nursery right now, but they’ll need another 25 years to make this perennial system viable for agriculture.
Three questions have dominated our search for meaning, and we have answers for two of them:
Where did we come from? We’re stardust.
What are we? We’re primates.
What’s to become of us? Hmm…
It’s difficult to envision a sustainable future with all the forces arrayed against us. Wes ended by comparing our situation with that of the founders of the United States, whose prospects seemed far more uncertain at the time. In the face of the world’s late 18th century superpower, they signed their names to a treasonous document. Failure didn’t just mean the continuation of an unworkable, unjust system. It meant death. John Adams wrote words to the effect that we may not be able win our freedom, but we must act as if we deserve it. So, too, with an ecologically sane future.
Jackson's books include:
Becoming Native to the Place (1994)
"From our first arrival [Mr. Jackson] says, 'most of us have behaved as though nature must be either subdued or ignored.'...this often subconscious mindset has helped alienate us from nature and led to many of our current problems with agriculture and resource management. Becoming Native to This Place is a small book rich in ideas." Source: New York Times Book Review, by Marcy Houle.
Altars of Unhewn Stone (1987)
"Science in modern times is increasingly becoming an esoteric enclave for a select few. In Altars of Unhewn Stone, Wes Jackson restores the critical link between science and cultural wisdom, showing that recent findings support traditional attitudes about farming, land and resource use, and the interrelations of cultural and biological communities." - Amazon Books
New Roots for Agriculture (1980)
Wendell Berry: "New Roots for Agriculture is a landmark. It offers a sound, thoroughly documented criticism of the assumptions and the effects of industrial agriculture; for that alone the book would be valuable. But it goes beyond criticism to propose practical remedies"
Meeting the Expectations of the Land (1984)
with Bruce Coleman & Wendell Berry
Rooted in the Land: Essay on Community and Place (1996)
edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson
"Although contemporary society seems to promote the values of individualism and mobility, this engrossing book is dedicated to the notion that human lives are enriched by participation in a social community that is integrated into the natrual landscape of a particular place. The 34 contributors -who include David Ehrenfeld, Lynn R. Miller, Wendell Berry, Deborah Tall, David Orr, Robert Swann, and Susan Witt, as well as other philosophers, scientists, activists, economists, historians, farmers and ranchers, sociologists, theologians, and political scientists- offer an array of social and ecological perspectives on the nature of 'community.'" - Yale Press
In Context interviews with Wes Jackson:
'The Genius of Place'
'Mainstreaming Sustainable Agriculture'