PARAMETERS FOR SUSTAINABLE LAND USE.
CHANGES IN AGRICULTURE AND LAND USE ARE LONG OVERDUE

 

Many of the ways in which we use the land are hundreds of years old. Some of our ways of using land are no longer thought to be sustainable.

The Black Forest in central Germany is dying because it is pine monoculture which has brought with it a decline in the bio-diversity of the soil. This has resulted in the forest's inability to overcome recent environmental stresses.

Grazing animals in places with poor soils and variable (uncertain) rainfall has stripped vast areas of the world of its bio-diversity. It has created many growing modern deserts.

Chemical farming, ignores the complexity of the webs of biological life on our planet. It yields 'quick results' which often require increasing inputs to maintain outputs. Few consider this approach sustainable.


WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED?

How have we got ourselves caught in this trap? How is it possible that we have come to degrade huge areas of our planet and poison whole landscapes ... and seemingly not realise what we are doing?

The problem rests with the way science works.

Science is a world view, a way of looking at the things around us. It gives us our ways of agriculture and land use. Science's little brother "technology" has made the machines that make it possible to farm in highly productive ways.

THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE.

Science came into being in Europe about 400 years ago. The invention of printing made it possible because it allowed people to share ideas across the world. (Now-a-days, the web, email, radio, TV, video, photography can all do more at far less cost)

Printing allowed ideas to become books on a shelf. Magazines and journals let people exchange and discuss ideas before the days of telephones and email.

Printing gave the world a building block approach to knowledge. An area of interest, a discipline, became established - say biology (the study of growing things) or hydrology (the study of water movements) - and in time the experts in the discipline agree what is to be studied within its walls.

So slowly, a discipline's structure and shape becomes established. Books line shelves, journals are circulated and students are taught the 'correct' way to see, understand and write about the material in the discipline.

The structure needs to be stable. There is not much point in going to a hydrologist and saying, "Our town needs water" and getting a reply, "Gee, I don't know, there are many water theories and today I can't decide which is the best." Rather one expects the hydrologist to say, "You have lots of rain, a dam upstream from the town. That's the only way to go."

This need for stability means ideas get locked in and become hard to change. The greater the number of books, journals, magazines, research papers, students and conferences the more stable the discipline becomes. This means that new ways of looking at the world are not easily accepted.
SUSTAINABILITY, IS A NEW IDEAS THAT IS HELPING

Sustainability is becoming an idea that is being used to judge how people farm and use our planet. Sustainability is a new way of judging agriculture and is growing in importance. What the idea has brought to our understanding is pretty frightening - we are in the process of harming huge amounts of agricultural land. And more is rapidly on the way to being lost.

This web site is about the assumptions, the parameters, the ideas that are in the books, in the journals and the minds of students and researchers who are looking at the way we far and use the land.

Many of the ideas in the books on the shelf are as old and cannot be used to create a sustainable way to continue our ways of using the land.

We now realise that there are limited numbers of whales on the planet and that tigers need their skins more than maharajas. But we still are only beginning to understand that forests need soil bio-diversity if they are to continue growing for the next 200 years.

THERE IS LOTS OF GOOD NEWS TOO.

Technology has opened up many new ways of how we can think about the land and has also given us tools to farm in new, better sustainable ways.

Aerial mapping for radiations from satellites have given us ways to find underground water, predict trends in future salinity, locate soil types, find specific micro climates, and many more things. Satellite images when coupled to the computers ability to process and connect separate ideas onto practical maps has revolutionised the possibilities for devising new, sustainable land use systems.

Our ability to drill deep into the earth to reach water is matched by new and effective ways to pump deep water sources. Techniques for dating the age of water give us a way to judge how underground water systems recharge themselves.

Concepts

like paragmatratism in the soil

Soil biota. Fungus, microbes, ....

Effective soil microbial additives

plant breeding

animal breeding

hybridisation

genetic crop modification

improvements in farm machinery

insect control with predator species

new chemicals for fertility and insect control