382 Ecological Restoration and Design
broader culture. Henry David Thoreau’s On Walden Pond, John Muir’s Mountains
of California, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, spring readily to mind among the
hundreds of works of extraordinary vision and insight. Within the sustainable
agriculture movement itself, the idea that farms must be managed as natural sys-
tems gained considerable currency throughout the 20th century under a variety of
names. The organic pioneer Sir Albert Howard insisted upon ‘farming in Nature’s
image’ after years of studying traditional agriculture in India. Rudolf Steiner re-
envisioned the farm as a ‘biodynamic’ organism with its own self-sustaining ani-
mal-based fertilizers and cyclical patterns of planting, crop rotation and holistic
management. US Department of Agriculture programmes of the 1930s were
proactive and as concerned about sustainable agriculture as many present-day non-
governmental efforts. J. I. Rodale popularized healthful eating and growing of
organic foods and his son Robert advanced the practices and theories behind
regenerative, organic agriculture. Aldo Leopold was and remains perhaps the coun-
try’s, if not the world’s, most eloquent advocate for the marriage of agriculture and
conservation through a new ‘land ethic’. Geneticist Wes Jackson’s ‘perennial poly-
culture’ – an attempt to breed harvestable prairies that would be self-sufficient in
fertilizer, weed and pest control – derived its design inspiration from the tallgrass
prairie ecosystem. Today a number of terms and their movements describe the
move away from monoculture toward polyculture, from an emphasis on annuals
to geographically appropriate perennial cropping systems: agroecology, regenera-
tive agriculture, natural systems agriculture, grass farming, succession farming,
permaculture, ecoagriculture and farming with the wild.
Since the 1970s, organic farmers have been at the forefront of pioneering
research in managing the farm as a natural system, demonstrating that nearly all
crops can be grown without chemical inputs and successfully marketed on a vari-
ety of scales. Through the establishment of local marketing efforts and massive
public education campaigns, the organic movement placed food and fibre produc-
tion front and centre as a major public issue, and succeeded in linking a farmer and
a face with the fruits and vegetables at the nation’s tables. With growth rates of 20
per cent per year throughout the 1990s, organics has also become the fastest grow-
ing sector of the food industry. Willingly or unwillingly, the organic movement has
been assimilated into the national and global economy, and at the turn of the 21st
century, a proverbial Berlin Wall has begun to crumble. By 2008, the global organic
industry is predicted to reach $80 billion with European Union governments dic-
tating ambitious targets of the amount of arable land they want converted to
organic production: Germany, 20 per cent; Belgium, The Netherlands and Wales,
10 per cent each (Baker, 2002). Despite the value of these successes, however, the
emphasis of the organic movement has not been on managing farms at the water-
shed or ecosystem level in ways that complement and enhance the values and
services provided by other landscape units such as large, strictly protected and
interconnected ecological reserves. Such direct on-farm services of healthy ecosys-
tems include pollination, biological insect and rodent control, nutrient cycling,