Abstract
Comprising almost a third of greenhouse gas emissions and having an equally prominent role in pollution of soils, fresh water, coastal ecosystems, and food chains in general, agriculture is, alongside industry and electricity/heat production, one of the three biggest anthropogenic causes of breaching the planetary boundaries. Most of the problems in agriculture, like soil degradation and diminishing (necessary) biodiversity, are caused by unfit uses of existing technologies and approaches mimicking the agriculturally-relevant functioning natural ecosystems seem necessary for appropriate organization of our toxic and entropic agro-technologies. Our thesis is that eco-curative and sustainable uses of agro-technology require a paradigm shift from the chemical model of agro-systems to the ecological system-design model of agriculture. Particularly, following the new biomimetic paradigm of ecological innovation, we question in what sense can we mimic natural solutions in agriculture. We discern among Integrated agriculture and Permaculture, analyze their biomimetic status from the perspective of the philosophy of biomimicry, and argue that the former nature-mentored approach (contrary to the latter nature-modeled approach) is a more appropriate solution for sustainable broadscale agriculture necessary for the growing world. However, it is not clear how this agricultural bio-integration will interact with the predicted automatization of work, urban demographic momentum, and the Earth system instability, and can the Permaculture alternative emerge as a social safety-net for the anticipated technologically-redundant or economically or environmentally endangered workers. We argue both for the importance to understand Permaculture as a social safety-net and as experimental testing ground for cutting edge biomimetic technologies.
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Notes
Montgomery’s thesis is that many ancient civilizations were in fact not sustainable, and collapsed due to depletion of their economical basis—the fertility of their food producing soil. He sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.
A field full of grasshoppers (pests) is a field full of spiders (predators). Yet, as Fukuoka points out in his 1968 classic The One-Straw Revolution, after pesticides use (which kills both species of insect) pests always return, and quickly multiply since there are no predators—hence we need stronger and stronger biocides to eliminate the new population resistant to previous measures. An analogue pattern of one of the most pressing medical-science problems regarding antibiotics and evolving resistance of bacteria.
Whether PC approach actually work, that is produce the same amount of food as modern agriculture, is still a scientifically disputed question. We will return to this point later on.
It is, perhaps, important to have a sense of timescale of agro-technologies. We used in this place ‘contemporary’ with reference to the 20th (or parts of 19th) century, since earlier agriculture, due to the lack of technology, functioned without biocides, artificial fertilizers and almost all of modern machinery, excluding shallow plough. In a sense, both PC and IntAg are partially reverberating to pre-1900s techniques, especially regarding produced commodities diversification (Hendrickson et al. 2008, 266), what makes their knowledge-intensiveness even prominent.
However, the equation is not by Aristotelian standard of both being rooted in poesis (Blok and Gremmen 2016, 207], but on the basis that both life and technologies are sustainably participating in the biosphere. They are identified by their homeostatic function.
This naturalistic approach is constitutive of modern philosophy of science.
As Nancy Cartwright, Margaret Morrison and John Norton forcefully demonstrated at the end of the last century (and made it the mainstream of present-day philosophy of science), all our scientific representations (except, perhaps, a marginal minority from theoretical physics) are based on approximations and idealizations and don’t constitute descriptions of reality exact in detail.
Notably, to limit biocides, nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers, and fresh water use (Griggs et al. 2013, 307).
Aim of PC’s micro-management practices is to additionally biologically interlock the system and thereby diversify and enhance production, creating yields where conventional methods miss to do so (Mollison 1988, ch. 2).
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This work has been funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological development of the Government of Serbia.
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Stojanovic, M. Biomimicry in Agriculture: Is the Ecological System-Design Model the Future Agricultural Paradigm?. J Agric Environ Ethics 32, 789–804 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9702-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9702-7