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Re: prevention?
Bill L. I'd like to put your question in a larger context, thinking
back to a book chapter by Barry Commoner in some long forgotten book
published in the mid 70's. The book detailed, in chapter after
chapter, a litany of painstakingly recounted mistakes in agriculture
leading to ecological disaster(s) of all kinds, in all parts of the
world. In a supremely statesmanlike manner (as I recall it, keeping
in mind that I was at that impressionable undergraduate stage in
life), he distilled the preceeding chapters into a cogent,
articulate, and farsighted synthesis. He said (paraphrasing now)
that if all the foregoing were just the kind of chance mistakes that
are bound to happen whenever complex technologies are put into
practice, then it would be "graceless" (I love that word) to continue
to harp on about it. But, he said, they are not just mishaps but
rather, a reflection of a fundamental problem in modern agriculture
(N.B. one could say, in modern technology as a whole).
The analogy he developed revolved around building a car - breaking it
down into its component parts/processes and then building it up in
stepwise fashion. He noted that this process worked fine so long as
the car stayed within the confines of the factory walls. The
problems arose (e.g. smog, global warming, ozone layers etc.) when
the car left the factory, because the "whole is the sum of its parts"
logic that pertained within the factory was unable to cope with the
reality that the whole is *more* than the sum of its parts when one
introduces the car to all the checks and balances of nature.
In less colorful parlance, we have used the terms holistic vs. linear
thinking to try to encourage both agricultural research and
on-farm practice which explicitly acknowledges that any given
intervention - whether it be applying compost or chemical fertilizer,
or applying grazing pressure or an herbicide - has not just one
effect (the intended one) but many effects. The ecological
resilience of nature, of necessity, causes changes to any part of the
system to ramify and manifest themselves in other parts of the system.
This also means that any "problem", such as a given weed, is in fact
a symptom of a system malfunction - not a problem in itself. The
solution to the system problem involves changes to the system -
addressing the cause rather than the symptom. This reality is, in
effect, the essence of organic farming, or holistic farming in
general.
Now, getting back to your point, the issue it seems to me is not
simply "prevention" but rather, a very fundamental and basic
acknowledgement that every action/intervention/mgt decision will have
side effects. Interventions should be chosen, to the best of our
ability, as being effective while having the least likelihood of
engendering untoward side-effects. How does one make such a choice?
As many have said before me, the farther away one gets from natural
processes and cycles, the more one "fights" with nature rather than
working within nature, the greater the likelihood of nature fighting
back. The more we stretch the forgiveness limits of nature, the
greater the likelihood of catastrophe - like the BSE debacle, the DDT
debacle, the DES debacle, the dioxin debacle, the....... Ann
ACLARK@crop.uoguelph.ca
Dr. E. Ann Clark
Associate Professor
Crop Science
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Phone: 519-824-4120 Ext. 2508
FAX: 519 763-8933