A FALSE HYPOTHESIS? IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURE AND CULTURE IF TRUE

The Hypothesis: Beginning with agriculture, humans have produced no technological product or process without drawing down the earth’s capital stock. By stock, I mean that which is necessary for the planet to capture carbon using contemporary sunlight.

From the beginning of cellular life and later among all other hierarchical levels of structure: tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms, ecosystems and the ecosphere itself: life has had to operate within the constraints of the entropy law. Darwinian selection operates up and down that hierarchy and efficiencies have been derived through integration. Stated otherwise, selection pressure is on the entire system, with all of its subsystems, including infrastructure we have yet to comprehend and, more importantly, infrastructure we will never comprehend. Implied in the hypothesis is the assumption that ecosystems featuring minimal human impact are our best safe candidate as standards wherever they may be found across the planet’s ecological mosaic.

Agriculture ultimately has ecology and evolutionary biology standing behind it, in spite of the fact that it is heavily industrialized at present. Since the industrial or materials sector has no time-honored discipline to draw on, it seems fair to assume that if we do not get sustainability in agriculture first, it is not going to happen.

This “utterly dismal hypothesis” is being offered to encourage our thinking about an ecological rather than technological baseline for “sustainability.” Aldo Leopold’s writings provide starting points for this journey into humanity’s most important paradigm to date. Moreover, since nature’s economy features material recycling and mostly runs on contemporary sunlight, perhaps insights for a new economic order are embedded where agriculture and ecology meet.