Sunday, November 13, 2011

Get sustainable or get out

Keller and Brummer bring up the production paradigm and how little it accounts for the ecological and aesthetic values of agriculture and the agroecosystem. As of now the only main concern is for the "greatest possible quantity of agricultural product." They call for a postmechanistic framework for a more sustainable agriculture. This method includes five principles, one of which describes the fact that we must begin to adopt a "plurality of methods,"rather than a single farming system. It is necessary to incorporate many systems, each adapted to its own region, to particular farmers and their regions as well. The point here is that postmechanism involves the non-economic values in land.

I'd like to call attention to another idea that Keller and Brummer bring up at the beginning, but perhaps leave out at the end. That is, the 'fact-value gap,' which explains that when we assert that a thing has "value," we are judging it based off of our own emotions, not of fact. We need to target this emotion factor (a very human factor) if we are to start using these "plurality of methods" in order to be more sustainable.
We live by emotions daily, why not use them more in the agroecosystem.

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