Subject: Re: Ethics in Agriculture (fwd)...Drucker (fwd)
From: [email-masked] (Larry London)
Date: 3 Jun 1994 13:36:40 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 3 Jun 94 11:02:00 EDT
From: JONATHAN HASKETT <[email-masked]>
To: sustag <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Ethics in Agriculture (fwd)...Drucker (fwd)

>Drucker would agree and *emphasize* the need for a moral /ethical outlook,
but that it is useless if it contradicts or refuses to deal realistically
with large scale social realities...<

This is exactly reversed, as ethical people we need to analyze the large
scale social realities in ethical terms and make decisions in relation
to them based on our moral principles. We are not absolved of this
responsibility just because these realities occur on a large scale.
Quite the reverse it is precisely the large scale realities which have
the most impact and therefore require a large share of our ethical
attention. The civil rights movement is an example of the ethical
application of action to a large scale social reality which had at its
core massive injustice. The moral outlook flatly contradicted the
reality of segregation and looking at America in 1946 the realistic
way to deal with it would have been to accept it. But driven by an
ethical imperative people like Rosa Parks refused to be "realistic".
Similarly the people of Cezchoslovakia like Vaklav Havel chose the
ethical response to the large scale social reality of  totalitarian
communism which contradicted communism, while most of his acquantiances
chose the "realistic" way of dealing with it which was aquescence. Meanwhile
Havel took the utterly unrealistic step of writing critical plays. Ultimately
the large scale social reality collpased in large part because it was
morally bankrupt and people knew it. I therefore reject the idea tha
ethics are supposed to conform to expediency in the face of large scale
social realities.

>Do you suppose the Dust Bowl occurred because of sloppy practises, or
from the boom-bust cycle fostered by U.S. Government encouraging
high food prices to ramp up production during WWI and in its immediate
aftermath, followed by a drop-dead Federal ag policy when Europe's
ag sector made a miraculously fast recovery in the '20s?<

Actually if you examine the historical record of agriculture in Kansas
from the time of European settlement in the mid 19th century to the
1930s, as well as that of the other dustbowl states like Oklahoma, you
will find that droughts and blowing dust were a feature of that area.

Early settlers describe dust-storms which blackened the sky and required
them to stay in door trying to seal out the blowing dust. These storms
were a function of soil type, climate and the removal of the native
prarie grass cover. They were occurring long before "the boom-bust
cycle fostered by U.S. Government..." It was the attempt to bring this
area under row-crop agriculture with little understanding of erosive
process which caused the dust-storms. The storms themselves spaned
the period until the adoption of anti-erosive land use practices
as part of the SCS effort of the New Deal (BTW what does Drucker
think of the New Deal?) . For a good reference on this which was
written *during the era* see "To Hold This Soil" by Russell Lord
1938, Soil Conservation Service, Miscellaneous Publicatin No. 321 USDA.

>Due to the magnitude of today's world population, ag production can
*only* be industrial in construction; and solutions to whatever we may
perceive as the negative side effects can either be "scientific" or
hysterical, according to how ready we are to precipitate world scale
societal disintegration.<

The industrial model of food production is not necessarily the *only*
way to feed the worlds population. In fact in some instances the application
of industrial methods to agriculture has undercut the productive base
of agriculture leading to famine. In both China and the Soviet Union
made large scale effort to shift argiculture to an explicitly industrial
model, with disasterous results. In fisheries and in timber production
the application of the industrial model has often led to over exploitation
and the collapse of the resource base. The increasing specialization and
industrialization of our own agriculture has increased the requirements
of transportation and production level fossil fuel consumption. To the
extent that our food system requires these fossil fuels it is vulnerable
and not sustainable. It is therefore simplistic to put forward the
industrialization of agriculture as a panacea.

Jonathan Haskett
[email-masked]