Partnership Nature and Human Beings
Are our food stocks sustainable? Are they healthy for the environment and for the workers who produce them? Will control of our food continue to remain concentrated in the hands of a few powerful companies? Or will we be able to find another model based on collaboration with nature rather than its domination?
In the past, people formed a partnership with plants and animals. We selected the ones that met our needs and helped them reproduce and spread. We crossed different varieties to produce new ones with the characteristics we needed. It has been a fruitful partnership both for us and for the plants.
But we should now ask ourselves whether that partnership has broken down. We are changing the true nature of the plants we are in society with, treating them more as raw material than as living things. We behave as if the balance between human beings and the environment can be ignored. After all, if we can rewrite DNA, why can't we rewrite the rules of nature? Or, perhaps, simply ignore them. But history has taught us that nature cannot be controlled in that way, that it cannot bend to the will of man. If we disturb the balance of nature too much, we and our members will both suffer.
There is a growing global movement for justice and equity in our food system tied to all of our other concerns about the environment, especially climate change. We hope that this movement will restore some of that balance and put our long and fruitful partnership with plants back on the track of collaboration and symbiosis: different species in a mutually beneficial relationship.
The environment is not simply a source of raw materials that we can use and throw away. The land of a farm is a rich and luxuriant ecosystem, a network of relationships between all forms of life, relationships that we do not always fully understand. When we ignore them and try to reshape the natural world to fit our needs, acting as if we control everything, we end up destroying that delicate web of life.
The results of that way of acting are evident everywhere today, from the gigantic mountain of plastic floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to the sterile monoculture of industrial agriculture, to the climate change crisis. We humans must learn that we are not separate from the natural world, but that we are part of it. We must learn to work with it, to be partners in it, instead of trying to use it and command it.
We need to protect the diversity of nature, not only in seed banks but in nature reserves around the planet. And like good farmers do, we must accept that our attempts to control nature from above are doomed to fail. We must learn that we too, after all, are part of nature. Any action we take in the natural world will also affect ourselves.
We will, of course, continue to sow our gardens and fields. We will continue to find new ways to take everything that plants offer us, whether it's control, sweetness, beauty, or energy. And as a result, we will continue to plant the plants, just as they will continue to change us. It's a story that's been going on for millennia. There's nothing wrong with using new tools to do this, whether it's engineered genes or technologies that haven't yet been invented, as long as you use them wisely.
We need to be aware that the entire living ecosystem is like a single, interconnected web of life.
Are our food stocks sustainable? Are they healthy for the environment and for the workers who produce them? Will control of our food continue to remain concentrated in the hands of a few powerful companies? Or will we be able to find another model based on collaboration with nature rather than its domination?
In the past, people formed a partnership with plants and animals. We selected the ones that met our needs and helped them reproduce and spread. We crossed different varieties to produce new ones with the characteristics we needed. It has been a fruitful partnership both for us and for the plants.
But we should now ask ourselves whether that partnership has broken down. We are changing the true nature of the plants we are in society with, treating them more as raw material than as living things. We behave as if the balance between human beings and the environment can be ignored. After all, if we can rewrite DNA, why can't we rewrite the rules of nature? Or, perhaps, simply ignore them. But history has taught us that nature cannot be controlled in that way, that it cannot bend to the will of man. If we disturb the balance of nature too much, we and our members will both suffer.
There is a growing global movement for justice and equity in our food system tied to all of our other concerns about the environment, especially climate change. We hope that this movement will restore some of that balance and put our long and fruitful partnership with plants back on the track of collaboration and symbiosis: different species in a mutually beneficial relationship.
The environment is not simply a source of raw materials that we can use and throw away. The land of a farm is a rich and luxuriant ecosystem, a network of relationships between all forms of life, relationships that we do not always fully understand. When we ignore them and try to reshape the natural world to fit our needs, acting as if we control everything, we end up destroying that delicate web of life.
The results of that way of acting are evident everywhere today, from the gigantic mountain of plastic floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to the sterile monoculture of industrial agriculture, to the climate change crisis. We humans must learn that we are not separate from the natural world, but that we are part of it. We must learn to work with it, to be partners in it, instead of trying to use it and command it.
We need to protect the diversity of nature, not only in seed banks but in nature reserves around the planet. And like good farmers do, we must accept that our attempts to control nature from above are doomed to fail. We must learn that we too, after all, are part of nature. Any action we take in the natural world will also affect ourselves.
We will, of course, continue to sow our gardens and fields. We will continue to find new ways to take everything that plants offer us, whether it's control, sweetness, beauty, or energy. And as a result, we will continue to plant the plants, just as they will continue to change us. It's a story that's been going on for millennia. There's nothing wrong with using new tools to do this, whether it's engineered genes or technologies that haven't yet been invented, as long as you use them wisely.
We need to be aware that the entire living ecosystem is like a single, interconnected web of life.
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