IS FOOD SUSTAINABILITY THE HOPE FOR OUR FUTURE?
Volume 15

The Industrial Revolution & Consciousness

Much of the awakening of our consciousness has to do with breaking out of a certain mold that humanity has been fixed in since the Industrial Revolution.

The values that are typical of this system include mass production, efficiency and hierarchical forms of control and management. This industrial model relates and is applied to almost all aspects of human affairs today from our personal health to spirituality.

What I want to focus on is how the industrial model has been applied to agriculture and our food system, what damage it has brought about, and how something called “permaculture” may be an answer.

The Industrial Revolution & Agriculture

Thousands of years ago, the first agricultural revolution took place when mankind made their first settlements and discovered subsistence agriculture.

Then in the mid-20th century, as a global hunger crisis was looming, a second agricultural revolution was started. This saw the use of chemically enhanced fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, which were used on the soil and harvest. Thanks to modern science, agricultural output increased dramatically, and a mass agriculture industry took off.

For decades, the methods of Big Farming were uncontested. But now, it has become clear that these methods, which came from the industry complex, have caused a great loss to the environment. Excessive use of agrochemicals, ploughing, overgrazing and monoculture farms have caused a massive degradation of perhaps the most precious ground resource of all: the top soil.

Life At The Top: The Story Of Soil

Our top soil is our source of food; it is our life support system. A rich soil system can provide generations of crops full of nutrition and should retain water well. On the other hand, a poor soil system, devoid of microorganisms and nutrients, will allow water to flow through as waste, and eventually becomes dust.

According to Professor John Crawford, Chair of Sustainable Agriculture, University of Sydney, some 40% of the present world’s top soil is already classified as degraded or severely degraded.

The present ways of agriculture end up depleting the soil at 10 to 40 times the rate at which it is replenished. Based on the current trajectory, as per Professor Crawford, we may only have 60 years’ worth of top soil left. Sadly, though, the loss of top soil hasn’t yet become headline news, despite the fact that without viable top soil, our entire food system and human survival may be at risk. This contrasts with the considerable attention given to oil supplies and prices in the media on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Permaculture – Hope For The Future

Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature… of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system. (Bill Mollison, “Father” of Permaculture.)

Permaculture is a sustainable design methodology which can be applied to farming sites in different climates. The basic foundation of permaculture is to design your sites in such a way so as to consume as little external resources as possible, and give back as much to the soil as you take away. Pioneered first in Australia in the 1970s, permaculture offers some solutions to the excesses of farming today.

Permaculture is founded on the 3 ethics of:

1. Earth care (treating the Earth with care as a living entity),
2. People care (meeting people’s needs in humane and concerned ways), and
3. Fair share (sharing abundance with others).

Permaculture employs a variety of principles and tools to shape the landscape and achieve yield from our farm systems without causing ecological damage. Permaculture is meant to work with Nature rather than rendering Nature as a mere object to be exploited for short-term gain, as was the industrial way of thinking.

The Industrial Revolution & Consciousness

Permaculture involves, amongst others, the following key practices:

• Permaculture places a huge importance on maintaining and replenishing soil. This is done through proper waste management, using a diversity of crops rather than monoculture, having a sustainable water supply and irrigation system, creating composting cycles, and avoiding agrochemicals.

• The issue of soil is especially urgent in tropical climates such as Malaysia where the top soil is quite thin and tends to wash off easily. The central idea is that your farm system should have a net gain in terms of soil and harvest rather than be in perpetual loss.

• Permaculture places a lot of emphasis on observation of patterns found in Nature and using biomimicry. Bio-habitats have evolved complex systems that humans can take inspiration from when they plan their design. A common example in permaculture is to look at the contours on a landscape and see how the overall design can be adapted to suit the present terrain.

Permaculture as a science is still in many ways in a growing phase and its full potential has yet to be explored. But I firmly believe that it sits in comfortably with the spirit of those seeking an alternative path to redress the excesses of current ways. Is permaculture the answer to sustainable food production? It just may be.