We just had our annual research symposium of the Faculty. And the theme was the same as the title of this blog post. It is of course an area that is quite near to my heart and I was keen to hear the different talks. I am not sure if I now know what sustainable agriculture means and therefore I thought I should spend a blog post on this topic with my random thoughts.
One of the things that seemed to be reinforced in the discussions and presentations is that sustainability is very much a human construct. The Bruntland definition focuses on human needs, now and into the future. This is not directly a negative judgement (i.e. that it focuses on humans), because if there were no humans than sustainability would not be an issue for us. This means that in fact everything in the end will have to be sustainable if humans want to survive on the planet.
One approach might that we say: Oh, that is great, so we don’t need to worry, Gaia will in the end sort us out. This means we will reach some kind of equilibrium sustainability, but the question there is: for how many people? If we are positive thinkers, and believe in our human technological and scientific capabilities, than this could be sustainability for the projected 9 billion people.
I am a bit more worried. Yes, I think we still have some time to experiment, but the clock is ticking. I wish I knew what time it was …. We have some estimates about what CO2 levels in the atmosphere might be survivable, but the current financial crisis has probably thrown out the projections a bit.
There are however many things that we still don’t know and those are the things I would like to research and am working towards. We really do not know how far we have to go until parts of the ecosystem collapse. We do not know how many species can go extinct before affecting the overall planet in a major way. Or in my case, what is the balance between vegetation, climate and landscape. Clearing vegetation leads to reduced evaporation and thus reduced moisture feedback. In the worst case, it leads to erosion and degradation. Reduced moisture feedback probably does not mean that there is less moisture in the air, it just does not generate rainfall and goes elsewhere.
In the end, this comes back to research into thresholds and resilience and that is what our current global carbon experiment is about: how far can we push the CO2 levels on the globe before the whole ecosystem collapses. Some would like this experiment to continue as they think it will never collapse. I would like at least to first find out whether we can reverse the impact.
I think the key thing that needs agreeing on is that sustainability is not the same as zero impact. This is because, as I argued during the debate, sustainability has a space and time dimension. So we can have some significant impact as long as this impact is alleviated in a different time and space, again this relates to resilience.
Overall sustainability remains tricky and seems to mean different things for different people. The debate will continue for a while.