Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 7

of agriculture as two things: agri and cultura (the fields and the culture).
It is only very recently that we have filleted out the culture and replaced
it with commodity. 10
It is in China, though, that there is the greatest and most continuous
record of agriculture's fundamental ties to communities and culture. Li
Wenhua dates the earliest records of integrated crop, tree, livestock and
fish farming to the Shang-West Zhou Dynasties of 1600-800 BC. Later,
Mensius said in 400 BC:
If a family owns a certain piece of land with mulberry trees around it, a house for
breeding silkworms, domesticated animals raised in its yard for meat, and crop fields
cultivated and managed properly for cereals, it will be prosperous and will not suffer
starvation.
In one of the earliest recognitions of the need for the sustainable use of
natural resources, he also said:
If the forests are timely felled, then an abundant supply of timber and firewood is
ensured; if the fishing net with relatively big holes is timely cast into the pond, then
there will be no shortage of fish and turtle for use.
Still later, other treatises such as the collectively written Li Shi Chun Qiu
(239 BC) and the Qi Min Yao Shu by Jia Sixia (AD 600) celebrated the
fundamental value of agriculture to communities and economies, and
documented the best approaches for sustaining food production without
damage to the environment. These included rotation methods and green
manures for soil fertility, the rules and norms for collective management
of resources, the raising of fish in rice fields, and the use of manures. As
Li Wenhua says: 'these present a picture of a prosperous, diversified rural economy and
a vivid sketch of pastoral peace'. 11
But it was to be Cartesian reductionism and the enlightenment that
changed things many centuries later, largely casting aside the assumed
folklore and superstitions of age-old thinking. A revolution in science
occurred during the late 16th and 17th centuries, largely due to the
observations, theories and experiments of Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei,
René Descartes and Isaac Newton, which brought forth mechanistic
reductionism, experimental inquiry and positivist science. 12 These methods
brought great progress, and continue to be enormously important. But
an unfortunate side effect has been a sadly enduring split, in at least some
of our minds, between humans and the rest of nature.
As I discuss later, wilderness writers, landscape painters, ecologists and
farmers of the 19th and 20th centuries sought to reverse, or at least