A Doubly Green Revolution: ecology and food production

Ecology has informed and underpinned agricultural production since the first faltering steps in domestication and cultivation. When someone (probably a woman) living in the Fertile Crescent carried seeds of wild wheats and barleys from the great natural cereal stands of the region and sowed them near her house she initiated the process of domestication. She also began the process of crop cultivation, creating what were to become ecologically complex, home gardens. Similarly swidden agriculture was based on imitations of ecological processes that would create a sustainable form of agriculture. The first articulation of this concept was not for many thousands of years later. The great Roman writer and agriculturalist of the first century bc, Marcus Terentius Varro, wrote as follows (Hooper and Ash, 1935) : . . . Agri cultura est ‘Non modo est ars, sed etiam necessaria ac magna; eaque est scientia, quae sint in quoque agro serenda ac facienda, quo terra maximos perpetuo reddat fructus’ . . . Agriculture is ‘not only an art but an important and noble art. It is, as well, a science, which teaches us what crops are to be planted in each kind of soil, and what operations are to be carried on, in order that the land may regularly produce the largest crops.’ (Varro, Rerum Rusticarum I, III) Not only does Varro place crops in their environment but the phrase quo terra maximos perpetuo reddat fructus (which can be translated as ‘that the land yields the highest in perpetuity’) struck me, when I first came upon it in one of the little red Loeb Classical Library translations, as an extraordinarily clear, elegant, and concise definition of sustainability. In this chapter I want to illustrate how ecological concepts illuminate the building blocks of agriculture—gardens, swiddens, pastures, orchards, and fields—and provide a basis for the continuing challenge of feeding everyone in an increasing population. The transformation of an ecosystem into an agroecosystem involves a number of significant changes. The system itself becomes more clearly defined, at least in terms of its biological and physico-chemical boundaries. These become sharper and less permeable, the linkages with other systems being limited and channeled.