Notes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 197

Many of the most famous images of Japan come from the Edo period, such as
Hokusai's images of Mount Fuji painted in the 1830s. For more on the Japanese
commons, see McKean, 1985, 1992. For more on cultures and land, see Suzuki
and Oiwa, 1996. For a comprehensive review of Mansanobu Fukuoka's invention
of natural farming, see Fukuoka (1985) The Natural Way of Farming .
47 See Newby, 1988. For a discussion of landscape ecology and the value
of patchiness, see Selman, 1993. For a review of the value of diversity in agro-
ecosystems and in landscapes, see Swift et al, 1996. For a review of mosaic
landscapes, see Ryszkowski, 1995; Klijn and Vos, 2000.
48 The post-modern, according to architect Charles Jenks, has five elements.
It works on several levels at once; it is a hybrid drawing on many traditions; it
is rich in language, particularly metaphor; it is new and enduring; and it responds
to the multiplicity of a particular place. All of these features apply directly to
agricultural systems. For an excellent discussion of the authoritarian high-
modernism of Le Corbusier, see Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State , Chapters 3-4,
pp87-146.
49 In most industrialized countries, there is yet to emerge the idea that nature
and food production can come from the same process. In farmers' and policy-
makers' minds, these areas are separate. It is fine to 'green the edge' of farming,
but not yet acceptable to 'green the middle'. In Australia, according to Ruth
Beilin, this means that the last decade's extraordinary Landcare movement of rural
social organization 'is doomed to act within the existing paradigm of productive landscapes,
with conservation zones created on the edges' . Government money furthers this process
of keeping conservation outside of productive agriculture. In Europe, government
programmes have supported agri-environmental programmes to create patches
of wildlife and non-farmed habitat precisely in those areas that not highly
productive. See Beilin, 2000, p5.
50 For quotes, see Thoreau' s Walden , pp100, 164-180, 362.
51 See Lopez, 1986, pxxii.
52 Quoted in Arnold, 1996.
53 For a summary of recent landscape ecology and science, see Klijn and Vos,
2000.
54 For a discussion of the agricultural expansion in El Péten, see Katz, 2000.
Chapter 3 Reality Cheques
1 On the cheapness of food, Donald Worster recognized this about a
decade ago:
The farm experts merely assume, on the basis of marketplace behaviour, that the public wants
cheapness above all else. Cheapness, of course, is supposed to require abundance, and abundance
is supposed to come from greater economies of scale, more concentrated economic organization,
and more industrialized methods. The entire basis for that assumption collapses if the marketplace
is a poor or imperfect reflector of what people want ( Worster, 1993, The Wealth of Nature ,
p87).