The conference on Agriculture and the Environment is taking place at the
Sheman Building on the Iowa State Campus. This report is of the first
address given today.
Peggy Murdock
Protecting Water Quality or Redesigning the System
Fred Kirschemann
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
Fred Kirschemann is the head of organic farm in North Dakota which is now
being run by younger members of his family. He has served on the US
Organic Standards Council Board and co authored books on Ethics and
Agriculture. He currently heads the Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture.
Dr Kirshemann began his talk with a story about a discussion of homeland
security. After a number of men had been discussing the subject for awhile
he turned to the only woman among them and asked for her opinion. She
replied, "If you are concerned about spousal abuse you can do one of two
things . You can buy yourself a bullet proof vest and a gun and stay
awake 24 hours a day to protect yourself, or you can do something about
your relationship."
We have to move beyond protection and begin thinking about
relationships. He listed the efforts that have been made in Iowa, manure
management, waste management, buffer strips, volunteer monitoring,
watershed area projects. He said that buffers strips on ten miles of
stream banks can reduce nitrogen and phosphorus in runoff by eighty percent
and remove up to ninety percent of the nitrogen in the groundwater. The
Leopold Center has engaged in vegetative filter strips demonstrations,
manure management education, integrated pest management, reduced tillage,
hoop house hog production, water monitoring and pesticide effects. The
results are that half of Iowa public beaches are closed each summer. 157
Iowa lakes and stretches of water are considered by the EPA to be
impaired. This January nitrate levels on the Raccoon River reached record
highs. Despite all of Iowa's efforts, the problem has not been solved.
People want clean drinking water, but 40% of nearly 20,000 private water
supply samples show unsafe levels of bacteria. Fifteen to twenty percent
of them exceed the nitrate standard.
Water is the "canary in the mine".
We face a future of water shortages. Seventy percent of water consumed
worldwide is for irrigation, two percent industry and ten percent for
residential purposes. The ice caps are melting, sea levels rising, rivers
running dry, and falling water tables all point to dramatic changes in the
structure of water systems. They are all indicators of a "human-dominated
planet." We need to think about our relationship to the planet.
Mars at one time had more water than the earth. This is a warning that
there can be dramatic changes even without human intervention. Public
tolerance is reaching its limit and recent newspaper articles are an
indicator of that. He mentioned the Des Moines Register and New York Times
articles about nitrate in the Raccoon River. It doesn't do any good to
shoot the messenger.
The Iowa map touts good thing all over the state, but the daily newspaper
reports in the same areas that are lauded for their good programs
contradict what the map presents. We are running out of fingers to stick in
the dike and there are still more holes to plug. Our efforts have not been
successful in alleviating the problem although they may have prevented it
from worsening.
Fall applications on fields may be at fault in the case of high nitrate
levels in water, but the farmer will apply in the fall because he may not
be able to do it in the spring because of the weather. The farmer is
caught in the commodity treadmill. We should not punish or blame
producers. We need to develop new social economic and production systems
that recognize the need to protect the biotic community.
Farmers have been expected to produce as much bulk commodities with as
little labor as possible. If we want farmers to do something different we
have to rethink our social and economic systems to make that happen. The
only thing a farmer can do to increase his income is to increase his
yield. Cutting nitrogen will cut his yield.
We have participated in developing an industrial system that demands cheap
production and short term profits without regard to long term impacts on
our ecological and social neighborhoods. Unless we deal with both the
economic and social costs of our policies we will not get to the
solutions. The solutions can only be found within communities.
He gave two quotes from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac - "A land
ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community
to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow
members and also respect for the community as such."
"A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience,
and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the
health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self
renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity."
The health of the land is the ability of the land to renew
itself. Leopold's land ethic suggests a new way to think about systems
design. Instead of imposing new systems on the landscape we need to listen
to the system that is already there and design solutions that are
consistent with the existing ecological and cultural landscapes.
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and
beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Aldo
Leopold.
He had another series of quotes from a Donna M?
"Listen to the wisdom of the system, aid and encourage the forces and
structures that help the system run itself. Don't be an unthinking
intervener and destroy the system's own self maintenance capacities.
Go for the good of the whole. As you thing about a system, spend part of
your time from a vantage point that lets you see the whole system, not just
the problem that may have drawn you to focus on the system to begin with.
Celebrate complexity Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is
nonlinear, turbulent and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in
transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat
equilibira, It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not
uniformity, that's what makes the work interesting, that's what makes it
beautiful and that's what makes it work."
He talked about a Japanese farmer, Takao Furuno who spoke here in Ames. He
grows rice on 5 acres. He began to put ducks into his rice patties, and
found that they ate the insects and red snails that eat rice. He added
fish and planted fruit trees around the area. The system is self regulating
and enormously productive. Fish and ducks eat azola, a weed he formerly
had to eradicate. He has a higher income off of his six acres than a Texas
producer on 600 acres.
The first step is to the identify indigenous vigor of the biotic community
in which we live - what gives it its vitality - both social and
natural. What would make it most self-sufficient - run on its own without
outside inputs or regulations.
Bill McDonough, an architect, said, "The best way to avoid regulation is
not to have any thing coming out of the pipe to regulate." He designs his
buildings that way and finds that it is no more expensive than any other
kind of design.
The second step is to decide what you want your biotic community to look
like 25 years from now within the boundaries of the community's indigenous
vigor.
The third step is to determine how the community can work together to
achieve that vision and put adaptive management strategies in place to
monitor progress.
We presently use control management strategies with a very narrow analysis
and they don't work very well. After we stop monitoring, the problem comes
back in a new form.
Revisioning our future:
First we need to rethink the economy - move from an extractive economy to
an eco-economy. If we continue our present activities for twenty five
years we will double the nitrogen on the planet and no one thinks we can
manage that.
We need to rethink energy - to move from extractive energy to conservation
and renewable energy. In Iowa we could produce wind and also create demand
for crops that can be rotated with corn and soybeans that will change the
amount of nitrogen in the system.
We need to rethinking shelter, moving from industrial structures to
eco-architecture.
We need to rethink technology, moving from mechanized industrial
technologies to bio-mimicry. We are going beyond the industrial area,
moving through informational area into the biological area.
Asking the question how do I solve the problem (get rid of the pest) means
you think of an external solution rather than asking why the problem is a
problem. Asking why the problem is a problem forces us to think about the
whole system and ways to redesign it.
Every time you bring in an external solution you haven't solved the source
of the problem and you set yourself up for more interventions later on.
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