Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 6

have close connections to nature. Yet, many of us in industrialized
countries do not have the time to realize it. In developing countries, many
are still closely connected, yet are tragically locked into poverty and hunger.
A connectedness to place is no kind of desirable life if it brings only a
single meal a day, or children unable to attend school for lack of food and
topics, or options for wage earning that are degrading and soul destroying.
For as long as people have managed natural resources, we have engaged
in forms of collective action. Farming households have collaborated on
water management, labour sharing and marketing; pastoralists have co-
managed grasslands; fishing families and their communities have jointly
managed aquatic resources. Such collaboration has been institutionalized
in many local associations, through clan or kin groups, water users' groups,
grazing management societies, women's self-help groups, youth clubs,
farmer experimentation groups, church groups, tree associations, and
labour-exchange societies.
Through such groups, constructive resource management rules and
norms have been embedded in many cultures - from collective water
management in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Indonesia to herders of the
Andes and dryland Africa; from water harvesting in Roman North Africa
and south-west North America to shifting agriculture systems of the
forests of Asia and Africa; and from common fields of Europe to the
iriaichi in Japan. It has been rare, prior to the last decade or so, for the
importance of these local institutions to be recognized in agricultural and
rural development. In both developing and industrialized countries, policy
and practice have tended to be preoccupied with changing the behaviour
of individuals rather than of groups or communities - or, indeed, with
changing property regimes - because traditional commons management
is seen as destructive. At the same time, modern agriculture has had an
increasingly destructive effect on both the environment and rural com-
munities. 9
A search through the writings of farmers and commentators, from
ancient to contemporary times, soon reveals a very strong sense of
connectedness between people and the land. The Roman writer Marcus
Cato, on the opening page of his topic Di Agri Cultura , written 2200 years
ago, celebrated the high regard in which farmers were held:
...when our ancestors . . . would praise a worthy man their praise took this form:
'good husbandman', 'good farmer'; one so praised was thought to have received the
greatest commendation.
He also said: 'a good piece of land will please you more at each visit' . It is revealing
that Roman agricultural writers such as Cato, Varro and Columella spoke