Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Section IV
The Transition to Sustainability
The appearance of the so-called Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987) in the late 1980s marked the emergence of sustain-
ability as an issue of central concern in agriculture, rural development, natural resource use, and indeed every human
endeavor. Since that time, a growing community of researchers and practitioners has made significant progress in
developing useful systems for implementing and measuring sustainability, particularly in agriculture.
Although it has effectively lead the effort, the scientific community must still develop a much better under-
standing of what sustainability actually entails, so that the agenda for change is clear and actionable. A new field
known as “sustainability science” has emerged that may help us meet this challenge (Kates et al., 2001; Turner
et al., 2003).
From the perspective of sustainability science, food systems are so complex that many fields of inquiry must
come together in understanding how to push their interdependent components toward more sustainable results.
Understanding this complexity — and using it as the basis for change — is the goal of the sequence of chapters that
make up Section IV.
Chapter 20 begins at a practical level, examining the issues surrounding the conversion to more-sustainable
practices, and Chapter 21 follows with a focus on the indicators of sustainability. Chapter 22 describes how creating
sustainable agroecosystems can aid in conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services, and vice-versa. Chapter 23
looks at food consumption and the necessity of reconstituting the economy and culture of food on a more local
basis. With these building blocks in place, Chapter 24 broadens the agenda of sustainability to include the whole
food system, which means integrating human society with knowledge of ecological sustainability. This brings us
back to the understanding that agroecosystems are, after all, a product of the co-evolution between cultures and
their environments. In this balance between social needs and ecological health lies true sustainability.
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