2 Sustainable Agriculture and Food
their practices. Rational solutions are proposed, and technologies developed. These
technologies, known to work in a research station or other controlled environ-
ments, are assumed to work elsewhere. They are then passed to the mass of rural
people and farmers, and the benefits awaited.
It was Cartesian reductionism and the enlightenment that set the scene for this
approach, largely casting aside the assumed folklore and superstitions of age-old
thinking. A revolution in science occurred in the late 16th and 17th centuries,
largely due to the observations, theories and experiments of Bacon, Galileo, Des-
cartes and Newton, which brought forth mechanistic reductionism, experimental
inquiry and positivist science. These methods brought great progress, and con-
tinue to be enormously important. But one unfortunate side effect has been an
enduring separation of humans from the rest of nature. In the 19th and 20th cen-
turies, wilderness writers, landscape painters, ecologists and farmers sought to
reverse, or at least temper, the dominance of this new thinking. It is, though, in the
indigenous groups of the world that we find surviving examples of close nature–
people connectivity. One of the most comprehensive collections on the diversity of
human cultures and their connectedness with nature and the land is Darrell Posey’s
Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity (1999). Containing contributions
from nearly three hundred authors from across the world, these highlight ‘the cen-
tral importance of cultural and spiritual values in an appreciation and preservation
of all life’. These voices of the earth demonstrate the widespread intimate connec-
tivity that people have with nature, whether as hunter-gatherers or agricultural-
ists.
Johan Mathis Turi of the Saami reflects on the mutual shaping in the Norwe-
gian arctic: ‘The reindeer is the centre of nature as a whole and I feel I hunt what-
ever nature gives. Our lives have remained around the reindeer and this is how we
have managed the new times so well. It is difficult for me to pick out specific
details or particular incidences as explanations for what has happened because my
daily life, my nature, is so comprehensive. It includes everything. We say “lotwan-
tua”, which means everything is included.’ A similar perspective is put by Gamail-
lie Kilukishah, an Inuit from northern Canada who in translation by Meeka Mike
says, ‘You must be in constant contact with the land and the animals and the
plants... When Gamaillie was growing up, he was taught to respect animals in such
a way as to survive from them. At the same time, he was taught to treat them as
kindly as you would another fellow person.’
Pera of the Bakalaharil tribe in Botswana points to their attitudes in using and
sustaining wild resources: ‘Some of our food is from the wild – like fruits and some
of our meat... We are happy to conserve, but some conservationists come and say
that preservation means that we cannot use the animals at all. To us, preservation
means to use, but with love, so that you can use again tomorrow and the following
year.’ Says Cristina Gualinga of the Quicha, ‘Nature, what you call biodiversity, is
the primary thing that is in the jungle, in the river, everywhere. It is part of human
life. Nature helps us to be free, but if we trouble it, nature becomes angry. All living
things are equal parts of nature and we have to care for each other.’ Finally, in