378 Ecological Restoration and Design
positive examples rather than problems, and we wanted to keep our standards
rigorous. Two years, 21 states and two countries later, we present what we hope is
a unique yet inspiring view of the American landscape.
Industrial agriculture and the biodiversity crisis
At first glance, the phrase ‘farming with the wild’ may seem contradictory. Agricul-
ture, by its very nature, has been and remains the relentless process of selection and
minimization, one that now blankets billions of the Earth’s acres with a mere hand-
ful of crops. Farming and ranching activities are consistently identified as the pri-
mary cause of habitat loss, the arch foe of the biodiversity crisis. Some 10,000 years
ago, out of the cereal-bearing grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, out of the apple
forested mountains of Kazakstan, out of the planet’s 200,000-plus wild plant species
and nearly 150 large wild mammalian terrestrial herbivores and omnivores – slowly
and yet almost all of a sudden – there emerged the beginnings of what we now
know of as the domestic (Diamond, 1997, p132). Ever since, agriculturalists have
been diminishing native biodiversity in order to repopulate landscapes with utili-
tarian or desirable species. Size, sweetness, oiliness, fibre length, ease of cultivation,
hardiness and vigour, self-pollination, yield, taste, nutrition, perishability, healing
and recreational properties, colour: these were many of the lures for early agricul-
turalists as they developed place-based cropping systems. Throughout the millen-
nia, agricultural domestication has largely been a dance of co-evolution, with
humankind playing a leading role as artificial selector and steward, among a full
cast of essential and cooperative participants (including birds, insects, fellow mam-
mals, grasses, pulses, food and fibre plants and natural systems).
Many reaches we tend to imagine as wilderness – self-regulating and self-suffi-
cient natural areas – may in fact have never been as completely free of human
influence as we might think. First American societies were intensively managing
some, but certainly not all, areas of the native landscape, using fire, for example, as
a primary tool in maintaining open and vital grasslands. Yet through the conquest
of the native landscape, the continental domination of European agriculture, and
the rise of the global-industrial economy, never have the distances between farm-
ing and wildness been so vast or the human impacts on biodiversity so damaging.
As Michael Pollan states solemnly in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the
World: ‘Even the dream of such a space has become hard to sustain in a time of
global warming, ozone holes, and technologies that allow us to modify life at the
genetic level – one of the wild’s last redoubts. Partly by default, partly by design,
all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated – of coming, or finding
itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization. Indeed, even the wild now
depends on civilization for its survival’ (Pollan, 2001, pxxiii). This is a chilling
realization and a far remove from Henry David Thoreau’s edict that ‘in wildness is
the preservation of the world’.
At one time, thousands of plants were used for human food and agriculture.
Today, no more than 120 plants provide 90 per cent of plant-supplied human