Making Change: Power, Politics, and Environmental Problems - Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power - page 143

6 Making Change: Power, Politics, and Environmental
Problems
The Paradox of Repairing Environmental Problems
Agriculture is an environmental problem. This is a straightforward claim,
but with many possible and interrelated interpretations. The fi rst, and
broadest, way of interpreting this statement returns to my conception of
agriculture as a system of interdependent sociomaterial elements, where
growers, farmworkers, scientists, and others work to manage the character
and control the outcome of this interaction. In this way, the environmen-
tal problem at the heart of agriculture is inherent in the very idea itself—
there is no way to avoid the fact that farming shapes and changes its local
ecology in order to master it.
In contemporary usage, applying the term environmental problem to agri-
culture often carries a different but related meaning: a problem of conse-
quence, where farming leads to negative impacts on the health and quality
of its environs. At the start of the twenty-fi rst century, growers and agri-
cultural scientists face a paradox, a dilemma arising from these two ways
of framing environmental problems in agriculture: the very practices and
techniques that have allowed modern agriculture to take control of farming
environments (the fi rst set of environmental problems) have also created
a range of destructive, largely unintended effects (the second). As just one
example, the development and widespread use of pesticides and synthetic
fertilizers was one of the most important agricultural innovations of the
early twentieth century, allowing ever fewer growers to produce ever more
food. At the same time, however, these technologies have been implicated
in water pollution on a nationwide, even global, scale. 1 Growers and agri-
cultural scientists now fi nd themselves in a strange position: how can they