Ethics in the Organic Movement - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 23

The change from a humus based cropping system fundamentally endangered
soils. Because fodder legumes were no longer needed for crop rotation, the other
contributions of legumes to the soil disappeared, including the production of humus
through high amounts of carbon from root biomass, and the capacity to protect and
to store nutrients and water. Instead of being fed through a diversity of plants and
microorganisms, as well as green manure and compost from animals, feeding the
soil became dependent on industrial produced nitrogen.
The human-nature relationship was moving towards a new paradigm. This
marked the beginning of thinking about farming with more industrial-type language
and images: ideas related increasingly to economic oriented input-output regimes
(cf. Ropohl 1978 ) and a shift in thinking about the relationship between the farm
and its environment.
The extensive production and dissemination of industrially produced mineral
fertilizer started after World War II (Charles 2005 ). These industrialization pro-
cesses also came to symbolize the societal division of labor between farms and
industries. This phase marked a turning point from a holistic religious-oriented
understanding of agriculture and nature toward an anthropocentric and egocentric
business-oriented organization of farming.
To summarize: before the beginning of the use of industrially produced fertilizer,
farmers applied a fairly holistic-theocentric, closed, site-specific practice. This new
type tend to ignore the need to invest in the sustainable production of soil fertility.
More broadly, through this process, the farmer became less responsible for the
sustainable production of food from the farm's internal resources. From an ethical
perspective, it might be said that more anthropocentric oriented values replaced a
holistic and religious orientation. Some nineteenth century elements and ethics of
agriculture survived until the 1950s, for example, as documented in Jean Gionos
novel “Harvest” (Giono 1978 ). This type of farming is still found among small farms
in mountainous or abandoned regions in Eastern European countries and in religious
movements all around the world.

2.3.2 Pioneers of the Organic Movement

The organic movement developed in the early 1900s during a period of politically
oriented counter-movements in both the German and English speaking world. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, the German Ewald Könemanns (1899-1976)
established the natural farming ( Natürlicher Landbau )or“ back to nature ” move-
ment that emerged from the life-reform movement. The educated middle class,
laborers and artists shared in the counter-movement and partly supported these new
lifestyles. 20
This back to nature movement was composed mainly of vegetarians who
believed in agriculture without animals and a self-subsistence form of gardening