Agricultural Sustainability: What It Is and What It Is Not 53means to be sustainable has multiplied since the early 1980s, when critics of conven-
tional agriculture began to claim that it was ‘unsustainable’. The debate is no longer
confined to agriculture. Others now want to talk about ‘sustainable development’,
‘sustainable land use’, and even ‘sustainable architecture’. Yet few that participate in
these debates have the time, inclination or skills to step back and analyse whether what
separates them is a difference in values and perspectives, or a simple verbal dispute.
Philosophy can at least help clarify what is being disputed, even if it cannot
resolve the dispute. It is possible that the philosopher’s task will end when the
terms of debate have been clarified. Yet I think that sustainability will turn out to
be a contested concept of more enduring and fundamental interest. In some cases,
our thinking and communication can be clarified simply by attending closely to a
specific definition. Other times we find that a particular concept is so important
to the way we understand ourselves and our world that we cannot gain mastery
over it simply by specifying a definition for a given context. Concepts like ‘truth’,
‘objectivity’, ‘causality’, and ‘justice’ have been contested throughout human his-
tory. Such concepts have resisted our attempts to specify them in any final sense,
yet it seems we must use these concepts to think at all. I believe that as we come to
think more deeply and carefully about the impact of human activity on the broader
environment and on the opportunities of future generations, we will find that our
conceptions of sustainability have a tremendous impact on the way that we frame
these problems. So philosophy encounters sustainable agriculture first by offering
tools to better understand disputed visions of what sustainable agriculture might
involve, and second because the debate over sustainable agriculture may well be
the opening to an important new area for environmental ethics.
Encountering Sustainability
Philosophers generally began to take an interest in the concept of sustainability in
the late 1980s, and I have been working on it myself for almost 20 years. My
thinking on sustainability has two main phases. From about 1988 until about
1994, I was fairly sceptical and even cynical about the idea of sustainability. This
is not to say that I was ever opposed to sustainable agriculture, for I was not. How-
ever, for about six years I believed that the debates over sustainable agriculture and
sustainable development were driven by different conceptions of social justice, at
best, and underlying economic interests at worst. Big fertilizer, seed and equip-
ment firms thought that sustainability meant continued profitability for big ferti-
lizer, seed and equipment firms, small farmers in Nebraska thought that
sustainability means being able to continue farming at a small scale in Nebraska,
advocates for Latin American peasants thought that sustainability meant social
justice for Latin American peasants etc. My writing from this period argued there
was little ethical significance to any claim putatively announcing that one type of
agriculture was sustainable or that another was not. It was, I believed, much better
to articulate the ethical claims that might be made on behalf of the environment,