Crossing the Internal Frontiers - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 175

wolves. Cultural traditions still persist in a modern world, the landscape
is patchy and diverse, and nature coexists with people. But most people
are still very poor, and so the core question is whether there can be
sustainable economic and social development without throwing away all
that is culturally valuable and distinctive. Will Romanians tread the same
path that is followed over much of the industrialized world? 9 I am not
suggesting that all landscapes should look like the Carpathians, or that
substantial tracts of agricultural land should be converted to forests or
set aside for nature conservation. I do believe, though, that it is possible
to have food-producing systems that complement and enhance nature.
Nature, after all, still exists on farms and in fields. Today, there is growing
confidence that we can, indeed, make the transition directly to sustainable
and productive agricultural and food systems that protect and use nature.
This is such a significant break from the recent past that the movement
may become another agricultural revolution.
Thinking Like a Wolf
Our old thinking has lamentably failed the rest of nature, and it is in
danger of failing us, too. Today, one in four mammals and one in eight
bird species face a high risk of extinction. Some 9 per cent of the world's
trees, 8700 hundred species, and 12 per cent of all plants, 34,000 species,
are threatened. Species are disappearing at a rate 100-1000 times faster
than before humans diverged from apes. 10 Each year, the world is losing
at least 1000 species. The wolf has gone, ecosystems are disturbed, and
now the mountain is slipping away, with soils clogging rivers and damaging
distant ecologies. We are in desperate need of a new way of thinking that
reintegrates people and nature. Conservation biologist David Orr of
Ohio's Oberlin College put it this way:
Now we have to learn entirely new things, not because we have failed in the narrow
sense of the word, but because we succeeded too well. . . What must we learn? We
must learn that we are inescapably part of what Leopold called 'the soil-plant-
animal-man food chain' . . .which is to say we must embrace a higher and more
inclusive level of ethics. 11
Thinking like a wolf and a mountain implies a great change to both
practice and ethics.
We have to ask - could we make a difference if we change the way we
think and act? It is not enough to count and catalogue the richness of the
world's biodiversity, while at the same time watching its inexorable