4 Policies, Processes and Institutions
extension. At the same time, the environmental costs of transporting food are
increasing, and in some countries are greater than the costs arising from food pro-
duction on farms, suggesting that sustainability priorities need to be set for whole
food chains.
Part I: Ethics and Systems Thinking
Aldo Leopold was a conservation biologist made famous by both his writings in A
Sand County Almanac and his transformation of a farm at Baraboo by the Wiscon-
sin River. ‘The Land Ethic’ is a short essay from the late 1940s that sets out his
views on human relations with the land – which he takes to include the commu-
nity of soils, waters, plants and animals. In the face of damage to all of these caused
by human action, he sets out the need for a mode of guidance. ‘An ethic’, he says,
‘ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An
ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from antisocial conduct.’ This
antisocial conduct partly derives from the narrow way we tend to view the land
relation, namely a strictly economic one, ‘entailing privileges but not obligations’.
The language of the essay is at times stilted and dated, but the timing was impec-
cable. Ecological systems are so complex that their workings may never be fully
comprehended. Yet we often act as if we know enough. Leopold further explores
the dilemma of environmental education and the difficulty of changing mindsets.
The problem with formal education, he says is that ‘we have more education but
less soil, fewer healthy woods and as many floods’. The Land Ethic was visionary
and, with his other writings, Leopold was able to set out what needed to be done
to change the way we all think and act.
One of the world’s most notable and early thinkers on sustainability in agricul-
tural systems was Masanobu Fukuoka, who wrote the concise and thoughtful The
One-Straw Revolution in 1978. As a Japanese farmer himself, Fukuoka put into
practice his own principles for natural farming. His concerns were this as he looked
across to his neighbour’s field: ‘these rice fields, which have been found continu-
ously for over 1500 years, have now been laid waste by the exploitative farming
practices of a single generation’. This short chapter sets out Fukuoka’s four princi-
ples of natural farming: no cultivation of the soil, no chemical fertilizer or prepared
compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides and no dependence on chemical
intervention. The result is a permaculture of diverse crops, alongside dragonflies,
moths, bees, spiders, frogs, lizards and many other small animals. This for him is
the balanced rice field ecosystem.
Richard Bawden then develops the theme of knowing systems and the envi-
ronment in the third article. Once again, the problem lies in how we have come
to risk the world on the back of great recent achievements in economic and tech-
nological development. The chapter focuses on systems, both hard and soft, and
on coming to know. Our quest, says Bawden, in seeking to come to terms with