The Spirit of the Soil

Agriculture and Environmental Ethics

Paul B. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317196860
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this second edition of The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics, Paul B. Thompson reviews four worldviews that shape competing visions for agriculture. Productionists have sought increasing yields—to make two seeds grow where only one grew before—while traditional visions of good farming have stressed stewardship. These traditional visions have been challenged by two more worldviews: a call for a total cost accounting for farming and an advocacy for a holistic perspective. Thompson argues that an environmentally defensible systems approach must draw upon all four worldviews, recognizing their flaws and synthesizing their strengths in a new vision of sustainable agriculture. This classic 1995 study has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded in its second edition with up-to-date examples of agriculture's impact on the environment. These include extensive discussions of new pesticides and the effects of animal agriculture on climate and other areas of the environment. In addition, a new final chapter discusses sustainability, which has become a dominant idea within environmental studies and agrarian political philosophy.

1

The Ethics of Soil

In one sense, nothing could be more obvious than agriculture’s importance for environmental quality. Field crops and animal grazing—the key production activities of agriculture—are easily the most spatially extensive human activities on landmasses. The potential effects of agriculture on soil and water have been known for centuries and were certainly among the first environmental impacts to be recognized. The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s provided a vivid example of an agriculturally based environmental catastrophe, and it has been immortalized in literature, film, and folklore.¹ Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), often described as the book that sparked the environmental movement in North America, is a diatribe against chemicals used primarily for agriculture. The general public continues to associate agricultural chemicals with environmental impact and risk to human health.

The list of current environmental controversies involving agriculture cited in the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil began with the expansion of beef production in Central and South American rainforests. If figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the United Nations are used, an additional sixty million hectares of tropical forest have been lost since 1995 in Brazil alone. But that figure is matched by losses for crop production (especially palm oil) in Indonesia, Malaysia and a handful of African countries over the same interval.² The first edition noted that ranchers and environmentalists were locked in a battle over grazing on public lands and that wheat production in Washington State’s Paloose region has caused dramatic soil erosion. Conflicts between agricultural producers and environmental advocates continue.³ David Pimentel continues to argue that soil erosion is a significant threat to the well-being of future generations.⁴ Dams and levees constructed for Midwestern US crop production contributed to devastating floods in 1993. More recent European studies have demonstrated how farming practice affects flooding.⁵

Less visible environmental impacts from agriculture may be even more serious. Irrigation returns virtually the full volume of surface water into streams and rivers, but trace minerals are leached into water. When irrigation drain water cannot be disposed of properly, minerals concentrate and become toxic to humans and wildlife. The potential for selenium pollution from ordinary irrigation was realized at California’s Kesterson Reservoir.⁶ Nitrogen added to soils can pollute both ground and surface water. More generally, fertilizer runoff is causing “dead zones” in lakes and oceans on a worldwide basis.⁷ When water pollution of any form becomes concentrated in watersheds, the health and environmental consequences can be devastating. Yet the farming practices that lead to pollution are not always obvious.

The first edition of The Spirit of the Soil noted the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where large numbers of livestock are kept in relatively small spaces. Growth in the size of dairy operations was especially dramatic and occurred over a single decade. Where in the mid-1980s the largest dairy herds were between 500 and 800 cows and typical herds might have averaged 100 cows, by 1995 herd size had reached 10,000 to 20,000 cows at a single location. The growth of mega-dairies has continued. While the role of CAFOs in water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions has become widely appreciated (see Chapter 2), the underlying agro-ecology is not. The small dairy farmer spreads manure on fields that produce feed crops for the cows. Large dairies feed grain hauled in over hundreds of miles. The animal waste must then be impounded or trucked out, but it is never returned to the fields where the feed grain was grown. The nutrient cycle is broken and the rich dairy manure becomes a pollution problem.⁸ The expansion of dairy size was made possible by the introduction of information technologies that automated most of the record keeping in dairy production. Amazingly, this phenomenon (noted in the first edition) still has not been studied by agricultural economists or animal scientists, who tend to be fixated on technologies that impact biological yields.⁹

The list of environmental impacts from agriculture could continue (and more will be discussed in Chapter 2), but despite the evidence for agriculture’s harm to environmental quality, farming remains a source of metaphors for the correct relationship between humans and the wider natural world. Farmers are thought to have a right and proper affiliation with the land, in contrast to the venal and exploitative relationship used to tarnish the reputation of mine owners or urban developers. The farmer’s admiration for rich, fertile soil is thought proper, for example, rather than an instance of greed, as when the carnival barker eyes an approaching sucker. Indeed, the word “soil” is implicitly, spiritually, linked to farming and gardening by many people, so much so that it is almost inconceivable to think of the farmer qua farmer as anything less than a steward of the soil. Farming that abuses soil is bad farming, meaning not only that it degrades something of value, but that it is not consistent with the true spirit of farming itself. The contrast to mining, again, makes the implicit dimension more obvious: mining is mining and whether it is good or bad depends solely on the consequences. We do not think of mining as something that must be true to its essence.

One might say that farming’s essence lies in remaining true to the soil. In this, proper farming might be said to make concrete what is latent in humanity’s dependence upon the Earth. For the act of good farming simultaneously releases and replenishes the provisions for human sustenance. Farming is the activity that locates the human species most surely in the planetary ecosystem. It is on farming that we depend for our food and in farming that what we take from the soil is returned to it. This vague but symbolically powerful tie between farming and the Earth has been incorporated into religious celebrations of fertility since antiquity. On the one hand, fertility rites are simple expressions of human dependence on the Earth for daily food. They remind a people of their reliance on natural processes for sustenance through a ritual performance. On the other hand, the meanings of fertility multiply into subtle and complex cultural forms that open into ever-deepening mysteries. Fertility gods and “green men” abound in the folklore and religions of all human societies. These anthropomorphic figures, these spirits of the soil, are by turns deified and demonized, prefiguring a modern ambivalence toward dependency that is now taking shape through debates over the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture. As symbolically powerful images, our notions of land, fertility and food itself require thoughtful consideration lest their implicitness makes us forget their potency, as well as our material reliance on the realities that they represent. Yet celebration of farming falls too easily into a slavish defense of farming practices that may be far from justifiable.

Agriculture in Environmental Ethics

Despite the importance of examining the two-edged character of agriculture’s relation to the environment, environmental philosophers have devoted comparatively little attention to agriculture. The first edition of The Spirit of the Soil notes a 1994 anthology of readings on environmental ethics that was edited by Donald Van DeVeer and Christine Pierce. It was 649 pages long, but there was apparently not enough space to include even one bibliographical reference, much less a chapter or section, on agricultural ethics. Another book published at about the same time as the first edition was offered as a text for undergraduate classes in environmental ethics. It gets around to agriculture only as a side point to its discussion of the 1984 industrial accident at a Union Carbide agricultural chemical plant in Bhopal, India. The authors begin this three-page section of their 250-page book as follows:

Bhopal is not alone: The pesticide industry is global big business, worth billions of dollars per year, all aimed at killing insects, molds, weeds and rodents that compete with the crops for sun and water or compete with us to eat crops. Our own factory farms have become dependent on pesticides. In the Third World, pesticides are an essential part of the “green revolution” that was expected to feed the world.¹⁰

The book continues to discuss toxic effects of pesticides but never clearly separates point (e.g., industrial accident) from non-point (e.g., farmers’ fields) pollution effects. The authors end with what they must today regretfully regard as an unreflective call for biotechnology: “The obvious suggestion is to learn how plants defend themselves and figure out how to teach, or modify, our agricultural staples to do the same; then we would not have to use chemical pesticides at all.”¹¹

Although this textbook does not mention it, plants that had been modified to defend themselves were well underway in the mid-1990s. The Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a soil bacterium that produces over 200 different types toxin that are all fatal to Lepidoptera (e.g., butterflies and moths), but so far as we know cause no harm in vertebrate animals. Since the larval stage of many species of Lepidoptera cause significant damage to crops, Bt sprays are used widely by organic farmers. A gene sequence capable of producing the Bt toxin was first incorporated into tobacco plants (Vaeck and coauthors, 1987) and commercial varieties of tobacco, corn, cotton, and soybeans began to be introduced in 1996. Although philosophers were generally incognizant of agriculture prior to the advent of these genetically modified (GM) crops, debates over biotechnology did spark a significant amount of interest among environmental philosophers. A discussion of early debates over genetically engineered ice-nucleating bacteria (an idea that did not pan out) was included in the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil. Indeed, agricultural biotechnology has enjoyed significant attention by philosophers since 1995.¹²

If it is no longer correct to say that environmental philosophers have ignored agriculture, there is still a gap between the topics explored in the first edition of The Spirit of the Soil and work that is considered to be of mainstream importance in environmental philosophy today. There is a profound sense in which environmental ethics continues to be dogged by an unexamined assumption that agriculture simply is not even part of the environment. This view was stated explicitly by Laura Westra, who argues that agriculture should be seen as a “buffer zone” that helps to shield natural ecosystems possessing integrity from urban centers and the industrial activities of manufacturing.¹³ For most practitioners of environmental philosophy, the thing that separates agriculture from the core issues of their field is largely unspoken. One would have difficulty finding places where environmental philosophers have stated that farming, ranching and other forms of food and fiber production are uninteresting or unimportant, but their practice often testifies to a prejudice that also continues to plague ecologists. It is pristine and untrammeled nature that is interesting and worth preserving. Farms are something else.

The situation that predominates among philosophers is not characteristic of environmental studies in general. Scholars in other fields of the environmental humanities have undertaken numerous studies of agriculture. Indeed, environmental history is widely recognized as the intellectual successor to what was once thought of as agricultural history. By 1995 Donald Worster, arguably the dean of environmental history, had written two books on agriculture (Dust Bowl and Rivers of Empire). William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis—in many respects the paradigm example of environmental history—contains extensive discussion of the way that Chicago linked western grain farmers and the livestock industry to markets in the East. While historians have traced the environmental impact of agricultural settlement patterns and cultural practices, environmental ethicists have been preoccupied with the extension of moral concepts to animals and to the environment. They have debated non-anthropocentric, holistic, pluralistic, and deep ecological theories for valuing nature and defining the moral imperatives of environmentalism. Some of these topics are relevant to an environmental philosophy of agriculture, but they are sufficiently disengaged from agricultural problems that their applicability is far from obvious.

Why do environmental ethicists continue to show so little interest in agriculture beyond the GM crop debates? Aside from sharing the old-school ecologist’s preference for the pristine, the mere fact that farming practices are causing environmental insults is not enough of a reason for motivating philosophical interest in agriculture’s environmental impact. By analogy, a gangland shooting may be morally reprehensible, but that doesn’t mean that it poses interesting philosophical questions about the ethics of homicide. A general account of why murder is ethically wrong is going to cover the gangland shooting. Similarly general accounts of why pollution or biodiversity loss are wrong will apply equally to mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Philosophers do not develop extended treatises on gangland shootings; they do devote attention to problem cases such as abortion, euthanasia and the taking of life in times of war. Perhaps agriculture’s impacts on the environment are just not philosophically interesting.

This speculation can be generalized. If an ethical theory of the environment is sufficiently powerful, it will provide guidance over many environmental problems that are never discussed by philosophers. Environmental ethics is actually quite like any branch of science in this respect. The generality of the theory covers applications to specific instances. It might not be necessary to explain why it is wrong to kill endangered species (or to disrupt their habitat) in order to have a tasty dinner if the theory has already articulated the reasons for preserving endangered species tout court. The unwanted environmental impacts of agriculture may just be examples of harms to nature and ecosystems that are already adequately covered by arguments tha...