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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