Abstract
Our knowledge is informed by both rationality including the technological understandings of science, and non-rational insights of spiritual masters. Limiting our consideration of sustainable agriculture to a modern technical paradigm has led us to a perpetually uncertain attempt to sustain outputs by constant technological innovation. This paper compares modern technological approaches with millennia-old insights, beginning from the Indian classical period. They appear to indicate that sustainable agriculture, like other human desires, produces outcomes according to the intentions and the wisdom of each act. For modern agriculture, this suggests that we may not approach sustainable agriculture where other, singular or multiple, motivations are paramount.
Our Current Knowledge
A philosophical approach to agricultural science provides a wider kit of tools for understanding nature and agriculture than is commonly considered adequate for technological innovation. However, the rational and rule-bound approaches of scientia common to technology generation seem to marginalise agricultural science from the greatest of human insights, which are generally thought to have been coincident with the first development of agriculture.
The two forms of understanding that arose with the emergence of agriculture may be expressed in Western (secular and theological) language as, one that we see acting in rational innovation applied to environmental modification – scientia, and the other, which we may call spiritual insight – sapientia (Cunningham, 1992).1 Before developing this distinction, it is first important to clarify confusion between ‘religion’ as a belief system and ‘spirituality’ as matters producing ‘wisdom’ from ‘insight’ or ‘enlightenment’.
Primitive man rationalised that there were fearsome spirits in the natural environment on whose favour depended such matters as a successful crop, and these evolved into rites that effectively protected sacred forests and engendered generosity through harvest festivals. Our technological manipulation has enabled the removal of many unknowns from the environment, such that we consider that we can potentially explain everything, and old spirits need not be feared.
Later, the civilisation enabled by settled agriculture provided societal support to deeper spiritual enquiry, a tradition readily studied from ancient India – but also from ancient Greece where it was once integral to the rational inquiry on which our society has singularly concentrated. Spiritual insight and practical teachings relevant to agricultural science remain linked in Indian traditions as a result of long-term society-wide acknowledgment of the cultivation of the spiritual dimension as the highest human aspiration. This period of widespread knowledge (sapientia) produced insights unrelated to the fears addressed by religion and evolved into an understanding of our nature and psychology as homo ‘sapiens’ (reminding us of this potential).
Ironically, science’s banishment of fears has its nemesis in a new fear that science may not be able to solve a new problem or even worse, that what has been achieved may be lost, and the system prove unsustainable. Such fear of loss of an object or idea to which we are attached has long been a focus of experiential (sapientia) research in the form of spiritual practices2 rather than the recent ‘systems thinking’ use of the term. It provides insights that can inform sustainable agriculture.
However, some commonality of interpretations of agricultural sustainability is first useful.
What is to be Sustained?
‘Agricultural sustainability’ is used variously to mean maintenance of profitability, income, or economically productive capacity, in what may be loosely termed financial sustainability; it is also used to describe technical, political, social, environmental and ecological sustainability within agriculture (Anderson, 1993). Technical sustainability usually refers to the durability of a proprietary agricultural technology or a process of ever-evolving existing or new technologies capable of delivering specific agricultural outputs. Political sustainability usually refers to maintenance of a stable situation through agricultural policies that, for example, reduce rural to urban migration, or balance security concerns with social equity, sometimes extending to intergenerational equity. Social sustainability may be part of political sustainability, or transcend formal political boundaries as it seeks to maintain cultural and traditional identities through continued practice of, for example, specific farming approaches.
Since the WCED 1983 ‘Our common future’ (also called the Brundtland report) there seems to be an emphasis on intergenerational sustainability, both in agriculture and in the ‘environment’ (what ever that is). Bolding’s (1968 John Hopkins U) ‘The economics of the coming spaceship earth’ is a nice picture for this idea; see also below.
‘Environmental sustainability’ is ambiguously used in agriculture to invoke an aura of environmental care or to describe the reduction of mechanical, chemical, and bio-technical inputs to levels that do not obviously affect the natural environment. It evokes an ideal for which criticism is presently unfashionable and may be seen as a higher moral order than other expressions of agricultural sustainability; yet as discussed below, it shares the common flaw of these conceptions of sustainability. ‘Ecologically sustainable agriculture’ is, as Fitzpatrick (2000) argues, a nonsense – unless it is somehow interpreted as the sustaining of the unnatural ecological environment in which agriculture is practiced, an approach that inadvertently assumes that agriculture is practiced in a fixed snapshot of an understood and balanced ecosystem, rather than the evolving set of unintelligible systems – influenced by innumerable variables, some as remote as distant space events. Moreover, both the environmental and ecological adjectival forms commonly study ecosystems as if humans are not within them.
Historical perspectives that consider traditional agriculture as exemplifying the environmental sensitivity that leads to sustainable agriculture ignore the fact that many ancient agricultural systems as presented are myths, and that all relied on significant modification of the natural environment to create the agricultural ecosystems that supported civilisations. Where sustainable agriculture appears to have existed, integrated social, religious, and economic systems were critical to continuity – and individual motivations included some form of spiritual orientation. In contrast, our modern reaction to a system appearing to be unsustainable is to define it as a problem for research to solve.
The underlying motivation of our modern approach to sustainability is to ensure continued control and stability, which is reliant on continued human technological innovation. To understand more of the viability of sustainable agriculture, we must ask – are such motivations and approaches consistent with our wider knowledge of the natural world?
Insights into the Natural World
Conventional concepts of agricultural sustainability fit within a broad societal belief in science as a process that delivers technologies to meet human needs. We confirm this article of faith in scientia daily by our lifestyles. Less obviously, although no less logically, the experiential research (sapientia) of spiritual searchers over millennia, which has been translated into everyday language as teachings and moral guidelines, warrants similar belief.
In seeking to understand sustainable agriculture, this paper therefore accords sapientia, in the form of spiritual insight, credibility at least equal to that in scientia. The closer integration of such insights and daily life that has continued in Indian-derived traditions illustrates an understanding of the operation of the natural order. Failure to act in accord with the cycles of that order is one description of the central issue of Buddhism, the human condition of unsatisfactoriness – the source of which is unwholesome desire, such as for specific outcomes or unchanging conditions.
However, popular interpretations of such teachings as Dependent Origination3 can become little more than intellectual stances when environmental desires are projected onto a religion, whereas ‘meaningful change in our environmental practice can come about only as part of a more comprehensive program of developing higher states of meditative awareness, along with the increased ethical sensibility which this evolution of consciousness entails’ (Sponberg, 1997).
Dependent Origination may be explained as an instantaneous cycle of unenlightened minds; it begins at any point of the cycle, such as ignorance of the cycles and ‘laws’ of nature, allowing a mental formation such as sustainable agriculture to be conceived and to then engage mental and physical effort, sensory involvement, and a craving for the realisation of the concept. Identification with the idea leads to disappointment when it fails to achieve all that was imagined, until a new mental formation arises and a new cycle begins (Buddhadasa, 1992). We may conclude from such explanations that our secular life is often inconsistent with the natural order and, that such inconsistency always produces consequences or conditions that influence other outcomes. The essential question of agricultural sustainability could thus be articulated as, ‘is the action consistent with the natural order?’
I see the natural law as all living things seeking their place in the sun, usually at the cost of some other being. Integrated pest management, as much as DDT, is just seeking to maximise our share of the benefits at the expense of the insects. Thai rice farmers do the same but importantly ‘offer up’ or ‘leave a little to the spirits’: they are not ‘greedy’ and want to live with rather than dominate the system. No doubt there are some hard learned lessons behind this. What we see in the biosphere at any one time is the sum of these efforts. Under the Buddhist approach, this sum is more likely to be benign in impact compared with attempts at domination.
The natural state of the agricultural environment is one of pests, climatic and weather variations, and human actions. The last of these aims at sustainability but has also led deep ecologists (Naess, 1973), who are often interpreted as valuing ecological integrity above human aspirations, to be seen to claim that agriculture is an essentially negative environmental action. The logical outcome of such thought – that sustaining the environment may mean sacrificing humans – does not seem to occur in the ancient Indian or Greek texts, which generally accept the privileged position of humans among sentient beings. Their insights into the natural order, particularly those from India, produce the related teachings of non-violence, non-harming, non-aggression, compassion, broadmindedness, and kindness, as both enlightened action and as functional-actions for positive behavioural change. This is a nice functional use of religion.
As the natural order is often invisible in worldly life, moral guidelines linked to examination of our motivation in an act or thought provide the fulcrum on which a discussion of true agricultural sustainability must balance. If our motivation in seeking to sustain an agricultural system is selfish in any form, from personal gain to seeking advantage over others in a competitive arena, our actions will tip the balance toward unforeseen outcomes, including human pain. On the other hand, motives to work within the natural order appear to allow the concept of sustainable agriculture to exist.
Of course, this insight of a natural order may be challenged in terms of our relative position in nature. As part of the natural world, it might be argued that human acts are ipso facto natural. Indian traditions accept this logic and simply use it to illustrate that consequences are also part of the natural order. We differ from other beings primarily in terms of our superior consciousness, which allows us to understand more of the natural order, which incidentally means that we are probably the only beings subject to the ‘suffering of change’ – and our desire for sustainability may be an attempt to escape this suffering.
You might be asking for some new ‘nemes’ (cf Dawkins) or viruses of the mind (cf Burroughs). The point here is that religion provides ‘values’ that inform our actions in a more fundamental way than mere calculation, but these might be provided in other ways.
So, if the prospect of agricultural sustainability exists, the question becomes: ‘can our institutional approaches to sustainable agriculture be consistent with natural order?’
Sustainable Agriculture in the Natural Order
As the desire for sustainable agriculture seems to emanate partly from reactions to visible environmental degradation associated with technological agriculture, we might be informed from consideration of both our modern interpretations of perceived sustainable agricultural practices, and their compatibility with the natural order. In terms of the former, the maintenance of the natural resource base by reduction of pollution, erosion, or over-use of any resource are laudable actions, but in terms of the latter consideration, their relevance to sustainable agriculture within the natural order pivots on our motivation for protecting the resource base. This does not mean that reduction of agricultural pollution, for example, is not beneficial, but that our attempts to reduce pollution may be confounded by conflicting objectives, such as market protection, profit maximisation or maintenance of inequitable labour rates across borders – now all factors of global agriculture.
To conduct agriculture within the natural order appears to mean that we must acknowledge the implications of such environmental modifications as glasshouses, irrigation, ploughing, weeding and the like, which contribute to both production increases and that important element of sustainability – predictability. How would we be sure that modifications are compatible with the natural order of things? The answer seems to be – ‘with the insight of wisdom’. This seems to be the reason for the ancient and repeatedly confirmed conclusion that personal spiritual development should be widely encouraged. The alternative is actions conducted without wisdom to foresee and balance possible outcomes. Considered from this perspective, there is no need for any Luddite abandonment of technology or even to argue for a return to some golden age of supposedly sustainable agriculture. Rather, there is a need to develop and use technology wisely in more than a worldly sense. The recent emergence in mainstream agricultural science of ‘whole-of-system’ approaches that consider interdependencies across social, environmental and economic factors may be a small step toward such ‘wisdom’.
Modern education might be seen to have substituted for the mental niche that wise advisors recommended for spiritual development. In rational terms, this might seem to be rectifiable by the introduction of compassion, kindness, morality, and philosophical input to technical courses, but in the absence of real insights, these would likely be overpowered by emphases on the competitive, individualistic, profit-oriented model, which defines sustainable agriculture in materialistic terms (Fitzpatrick, 2000). So, while technological agriculture may be potentially compatible with the natural order, one might well ask – ‘is it at all likely that modern agriculture would adopt these preconditions of sustainability?’
Is Sustainable Agriculture Likely?
Trends of private capture of natural resources imply a response to this question. While technology is linked to motivations inconsistent with the natural order and to self-serving definitions of sustainability, no sustainable agriculture is likely to exist. In this circumstance, our attempts at agricultural sustainability are likely to follow the current unsustainable approach – a technological orientation to production and profits with a subordinate consideration of technological means to mollify the contingent environmental effects of that primary focus.
The Academy’s 1999 conference opened with Nicklin’s (2000) argument that economic sustainability needs no specific focus by government, as the model within which society operates ensures that this is ever sought. Rather, the need lies in sustaining environments where no widespread interest can be privately captured, and using such tools as market incentives to engender public actions that benefit the public. Taking a wider perspective and considering the element of real intent, we would see that the creation of market incentives for ‘sustainable’ actions cannot be the ultimate answer, as that would appear to be a commoditisation of the natural world. Such is the limitation of the ‘enlightened self-interest’ model.
Blainey had an interesting book called The Great Seesaw about the changes in western perception of the environment as an enemy to be feared and conquered, or a friendly thing to be joined with. He said, for example, that we got all those national parks here and in the US in the 1890s as a result of a ‘let’s be friends with nature’ period that was in reaction to the excesses of the industrial revolution ‘let’s conquer nature’ period.
If the only viable agricultural sustainability is that which is consistent with the natural order – as perceived by rare, insightful, and wise persons – then one can argue that it may only be likely to occur where close involvement of an individual with nature is practiced, such as in small-scale agriculture. Where profit is the prime motivator, our materialist definition of ‘sustained agriculture’ seems to be but a ‘sustained technological research’ cycle to solve production and environmental ‘problems’ as they impinge on future ‘sustained’ output, supported by a faith that we can ultimately control all such matters. This self-inflicted cycle of disappointment where each ‘sustained’ scenario encounters ‘problems’ which the continuing ‘technological research’ effort must solve in its constant search for a ‘sustainable’ scenario, is an example of that described as the psychological insight of Dependent Origination introduced above.
It is possible to conceive a large-scale responsible agricultural activity that genuinely seeks to work within the natural order and selects its associates and employees for their orientation to what is usually translated as ‘right livelihood’ – but such enterprises are likely to be very rare.
It may be argued that I have artificially conflated ultimate and relative truth, or even that an insightful person of the Indian traditions might say that there is no sustainability just as there is no agriculture, no religion, no nations – no duality. However, in the absence of deep insights of natural order, we are reduced to this relativistic language, which would logically cause those genuinely concerned with sustainable agriculture to act in accordance with the precepts derived from insights for everyday life. Thoughtful application of such simple precepts can clarify, for example, complex environmental and animal welfare issues in agriculture. Institutions and businesses established to serve other objectives may then be seen to be unrealistic in their claims of sustainable agriculture, even though individuals within them may attempt to serve such an end. For this reason, we might better perceive agriculture as either primarily lifestyle- or profit-oriented and thus unsustainable, or small-scale, which means often ecologically sensitive and occasionally enlightened.
I think we are saying that we need new ways (through education or renewed faith) to bring attention to the idea that we should live within our biosphere systems rather than try to dominate them, since domination is bound to fail (some would say through lack of knowledge). In my way of thinking, belief is a fine way to transmit and indeed gradually build understanding of how to live and prosper (since religious beliefs also change). For many, this medium has lost its force and I am not sure how one can re-establish it, possibly new ones will emerge. As I see things, as populations level off the imperative to growth will falter and this will force attitudinal change, as it did on the aborigines once the climate turned against them. A deflationary depression is how it will begin if not through war.
My conclusion is that we should sleep on this a bit longer and think about the audience in this secular age and the words they might understand and accept to take in what we want say.
The theme is expanded in a recent book (Falvey, 2004).
References
Anderson, J. (1993) Does Sustainability Make Economic Sense? International Symposium on Trade and the Environment, Minnesota Bar Association, Minnesota, November 10-12.
Buddhadasa Bhikku. (1992) Paticcasamuppada: Practical Dependent Origination. Suan Mokkhabalarama, Chaiya, Thailand, pp116.
Cunningham, L. (1992) Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, Paulist Press, New York, pp 361.
Falvey (2004) Sustainability Elusive or Illusory: Wise Environmental Intervention. Institute for International Development, Adelaide, pp240. ISBN 0-9751000-1-7
Fitzpatrick, N. (2000) Ecologically Sustainable Development or Sustainable Development. ATSE Focus 114
Naess, A. (1973). The Shadow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement, Inquiry 16:95-100.
Nicklin, D. (2000) Sustainability The Issues and the Obligations, ATSE Symposium, Brisbane, November 21-22.
Sponberg, A. (1997) Green Buddhism and the Hierarchy of Compassion. In ‘Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds’, edited by Mary Tucker and Duncan Williams, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp467.
Footnotes
- The distinction between scientia and sapientia is used by, among others, by Thomas Merton to distinguish the different routes taken to knowledge in universities and monasteries. Western writings on Buddhism translate a similar concept as relative and ultimate truth.
- Mental training for spiritual development from which insights gained from personal experience (elsewhere termed sapientia) forms a critical component of the Buddhist scriptures.
- In Pali, paticca samuppada, a teaching that explains all processes including the psychological ones that allow and support the illusory states of the everyday mind.
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