Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 3

England and Wales, there are still more than 8000 commons, covering
0.5 million hectares , each embodying permanence in the landscape and
continuity over generations. Most are archaic reminders of another age
in an increasingly industrialized landscape.
Recent thinking and policy has separated food and farming from
nature, and then accelerated the disconnectedness. At the same time as real
commons have been appropriated, by enclosures or prairie expansion, the
metaphorical food commons have also been stolen away. Food now largely
comes from dysfunctional production systems that harm environments,
economies and societies; and yet we seem not to know, or even to care
overmuch. The environmental and health costs of losing touch are
enormous. The consequences of food systems producing anonymous and
homogeneous food are obesity and diet-related diseases for about one
tenth of the world's people, and persistent poverty and hunger for another
seventh.
So, does sustainability thinking and practice have anything to offer?
Can it help to reverse the loss of trust so commonly felt about food
systems, and prevent the disappearance of landscapes of importance and
beauty? Can it help to put nature and culture back into farming? Can it
help to produce safe and abundant food? These are some of the questions
addressed in this topic, which I believe concern agriculture's most
significant revolution. Several themes will reoccur. One is that accumulated
and traditional knowledge of landscapes and nature is intimate, insightful
and grounded in specific circumstances. Communities sharing such
knowledge and working together are likely to engage in sustainable
practices that build local renewable assets. Yet, industrialized agriculture,
also called modernist in this topic because it is single coded, inflexible and
monocultural, has destroyed much place-located knowledge. In treating
food simply as a commodity, it threatens to extinguish associated com-
munities and cultures altogether by conceiving of nature as existing
separately from humans. Natural landscapes and sustainable food pro-
duction systems will only be recreated if we can create new knowledge and
understanding, and develop better connections between people and nature.
The World Food Problem
But why should this idea of putting nature and culture back into agri-
culture matter? Surely we already know how to increase food production?
In developing countries, there have been startling increases in food
production since the beginning of the 1960s, a short way into the most
recent agricultural revolution in industrialized countries, and just prior