204 Agroecology and Sustainability
Hay meadows and pastures with wildflowers and grassland birds are few and far
between, and many streams running through fields have been cleared of trees and
wildlife. If a family cannot earn a living on the land, and it is not a beautiful or
healthful place to live, they might as well move to town. The land serves utilitarian
purposes only, sacrificing natural values that once made it a home, not only for
humans, but also for all kinds of creatures.
The disappearance of diversity in farming country has occurred steadily, mostly
without notice or comment. Politicians and policy makers, the US Department of
Agriculture, land grant universities, and many farmers and rural people accept the
loss of biological diversity on the land as a necessary cost of efficient high produc-
tion. There is some nostalgia in older people for a favourite fishing or swimming
hole on the creek of the farm on which they grew up, but farming is a business and
you cannot be sentimental about it. Most travellers are not aware that many of the
monotonous fields they see along the highways harboured wildlife in prairie pas-
tures and hayfields as recently as the 1960s. They only know that if they want to
see woods and prairies and wildlife, they must head for a publicly owned park or
wildlife area where agriculture is not practised.
Aldo Leopold and a Different Vision for Agriculture
Aldo Leopold, the Midwest’s most famous conservationist, disapproved of the
separation of natural areas from farming. To him it did not make sense to protect
forests in a special area and accept the absence of trees on agricultural land, when
the farm was then left without the conservation benefit of erosion control and
windbreaks. ‘Doesn’t conservation imply a certain interspersion of land uses, a
certain pepper-and-salt pattern in the warp and woof of the land use fabric?’ he
asked (Leopold, 1991). Leopold believed that conservation efforts on certain parts
of the land would fail if other parts were ruthlessly exploited. He wrote in the essay
‘Round River’:
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the
things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you
cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game
and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot
build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. (Leopold, 1966)Although Leopold knew that agriculture was becoming more industrialized and
wrote about the dangers of a farm becoming a factory, he could not have imagined
the enormous livestock factories in production today. The transformation of so many
meadows, prairies and wetlands into corn, beans and hogs in Iowa, the state of his
birth, and conversion of family-sized dairy farms into milk factories and corn fields
in his adopted state of Wisconsin would astonish and grieve him. However, if