APW: Ecology, Technology and Resilience

Humanity’s heavy footprint has been treading across the globe at an unprecedented rate, evidenced by increasing loss of wilderness and geographically isolated nations’ increasing familiarity with western industry.   Leaps in human evolution, due to agricultural settlements, have led to advances in medicine, science, technology and industry.   However, many production systems have been designed with linear thinking and have had devastating consequences.  Current food production and distribution have created great inequality, exploiting both environmental and human rights.  While modern technology has contributed to humanity’s disconnect with nature, it may also provide appropriate tools to unite us towards regenerating our landscape into a more livable planet.

 The human responsibility can be understood by examining the past to find the appropriate path to the future.  Our impact has changed the conditions of the environment more drastically in the last 200 years than the previous 100,000 years. We also depend on a resource base that is finite.  A shift in our social habits and energy dependence from fossil fuel to solar energy is necessary to promulgate and sustain our food systems.  Utilizing technology and a modern understanding of interdisciplinary environmental sciences, we must create resilient agricultural systems that absorb disturbance (i.e. extreme temperature changes, floods, droughts, and human development).  Some adaptive practices include crop rotations, planting cover crops, cycling nutrients on the farm, and increasing biodiversity to strengthen resilience and produce a consistent yield.

Merging these modern schools with knowledge developed by traditional cultures can allow us to grow regenerative ecosystems, balance human culture, and create socio-economically productive and ecologically responsible food systems.  To support this growth, we would have to reach a groundbreaking level of local and global cooperation, which can be achieved through fostering social media’s ability to create better connections between consumers and local farms. 

A whole system makeover, from production to direct marketing to distribution, is necessary.  Shifts in methodology and culture would include the following:

1)     Reduce food waste produced in America from 35% to below 10%. 

2)     Install perennial polycultures that yield more calories per acre than monocropped fields. 

3)      Educate consumers about how, where and who is growing their daily sustenance and nutrition. 

4)     Affect small shifts in policy, such as allowing cafeterias to serve food grown in school gardens.

5)       Train farmers in majority (known to some as developing) nations to build resilient Agroecosystems. Teach them how to build their soil, not deplete the foundation of their nourishment by exporting our toxic, unsustainable fossil fuel dependent technologies.

Multiple emerging technologies will help transition current practices to organic operations. These technologies and modern scientific understanding of ecology enable us to model food production systems based on nature’s low input design. Social media offer the ability to enact significant change on a relatively small timeframe and share an immense amount of knowledge to the public.  A few future long term goals include: 

1)       Team up with engineers to develop equipment that can harvest multi-layer cropping systems.

2)       Merge traditional knowledge with modern research to create closed loop cycles.

3)       Research and develop educational growing sites that produce high yielding nutritious crops in biodiverse systems resilient to climate change.

The time is ripe for change, and during this formative time period of the planet, humans (a key species in the ecological food web) are opening themselves up to alternative solutions.  While the powers at play are strong and often opposing each other, many brilliant examples of flourishing integrated systems have been sprouting up throughout the world, and the longer they are existence, the stronger they grow.  "Think Globally, Act Locally," has been catching like fire, as it presents a long term solution.  Meanwhile, certain tech companies promote the philosophy, "Go Global or Die Local." Though this has provided a higher quality of life and opportunity for some, it also has devastated the environment and created an enormous amount of social and international inequality.  Will we continue to be the herd of buffalo being driven off of a cliff or will we reroute our path towards one of cooperation, physical and spiritual growth, preparing ourselves for the uncharted territories that lay ahead?