Once patronized primarily by the counterculture and the health food
establishment, the organic food industry today is a
multi-billion-dollar business driven by ever-growing consumer
demand for safe food and greater public awareness of ecological
issues. Assumed by many to be a recent phenomenon, that industry
owes much to agricultural innovations that go back to the Dust Bowl
era.
This book explores the roots and branches of alternative
agricultural ideas in twentieth-century America, showing how
ecological thought has challenged and changed agricultural theory,
practice, and policy from the 1930s to the present. It introduces
us to the people and institutions who forged alternatives to
industrialized agriculture through a deep concern for the enduring
fertility of the soil, a passionate commitment to human health, and
a strong advocacy of economic justice for farmers.
Randal Beeman and James Pritchard show that agricultural issues
were central to the rise of the environmental movement in the
United States. As family farms failed during the Depression, a new
kind of agriculture was championed based on the holistic approach
taught by the emerging science of ecology. Ecology influenced the
"permanent agriculture" movement that advocated such radical
concepts as long-term land use planning, comprehensive soil
conservation, and organic farming. Then in the 1970s, "sustainable
agriculture" combined many of these ideas with new concerns about
misguided technology and an over-consumptive culture to preach a
more sensible approach to farming.
In chronicling the overlooked history of alternative
agriculture, A Green and Permanent Land records the significant
contributions of individuals like Rex Tugwell, Hugh Bennett, Louis
Bromfield, Edward Faulkner, Russell and Kate Lord, Scott and Helen
Nearing, Robert Rodale, Wes Jackson, and groups like Friends of the
Land and the Practical Farmers of Iowa. And by demonstrating how
agriculture also remains central to the public interest--especially
in the face of climatic crises, genetically altered crops, and
questionable uses of pesticides--this book puts these issues in
historical perspective and offers readers considerable food for
thought.
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