11
Agricultural Sustainability and Open-
Field Farming in England, c. 1650–1830
Michael Turner, John Beckett and Bethanie Afton
Introduction
Sustainability has become a key concept in the modern approach to development
studies. The guiding definition proposed in 1987 by the World Commission on
Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) emphasized that ‘Sus-
tainable development is that development that meets the needs of the present
generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their
own needs’ (World Commission, 1987, p144). To that extent sustainability was
regarded as something to be achieved in the future, which can in turn lead to a
view of the past in which everything had been sustainable, but this was a state of
affairs that had only recently changed or was in danger of changing. Thus Conway
and Pretty (1991, p1) invoke a distant past (or certainly the pre-1945 period), in
heralding the problems of the present or very recent past in agricultural develop-
ment:
... agriculture, for most of its history, has been environmentally benign. Even when
industrial technology began to have an impact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, agriculture continued to rely on natural ecological processes. Crop residues were
incorporated into the soil or fed to livestock, and the manure returned to the land in
amounts that could be absorbed and utilised. The traditional mixed farm was a closed,
stable and sustainable ecological system, generating few external impacts. Since the Sec-
ond World War this system had disintegrated. (Conway and Pretty, 1991, p1)This suggests that there are lessons for the future that might be drawn from the
past. In this sense Pretty’s (1991) summary of extension practices in the classical
British ‘Agricultural Revolution’ demonstrated the way the past has sometimes
prefigured the future.
Reprinted from Turner M, Beckett J and Afton B. 2003. Agricultural sustainability and open-field
farming in England, c. 1650–1830. Int J Agric Sust 1(2), pp124–140, Earthscan.