Rewilding Human Agriculture as a Boon to Nature

There has been a growing idea in my mind of late. It's an idea that's been seeded from multiple sources, including "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow, "Against the Grain" by James C Scott, various articles and videos*¹*²*³*⁴*⁵*⁶, but has most recently been further reified by "One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka. This is the idea that human agriculture should not be separated from nature or rewilding projects, and that in fact, pursuing this model increases biodiversity and strengthens biospheres.

Fukuoka started his life as an academic working in applied agriculture. Around the age of 23, he says he had a great epiphany: that he knew nothing at all. The logical step from here was to stop applying his knowledge in a lab, and start applying it directly in a farm setting. As he says

When the specialist decides to take his own advice, and begins to do as he says, he breaks down the walls of his specialization. We listen to him then as we could not before, because he speaks with authority—not out of knowledge only, but out of knowledge and experience together.

And for Fukuoka, this is a revolutionary step*⁷. What this step lead to for him was the development of an approach to farming that required very little energy or labour inputs, and instead, relied on fostering and accommodating biodiversity and natural synergies into his farming. In other words, to acknowledge and accommodate the "labour of nature", instead of take it for granted and destroy it for profit, as in extractive capitalism*⁸. Today, significant aspects of his "natural farming" have been adopted in Japan at large*⁹. I'll come back to this is a moment.

This is an idea that is extremely at odds with modern conservation and naturalist projects, which, have long placed a strict border down between agriculture and human intervention, and conservation and biodiversity. Part of this growing idea in my mind then is the corollary that this conventional approach is curiously synergistic with extractive capitalism.

Existing conservation efforts are indeed very well established, and so strong evidence needs to be provided to challenge them. Some of the previous cited sources give more indirect evidence, but I've recently come across recent research of a much more direct nature.

As promised, coming back to Japan, it should perhaps now come as no surprise that as rural areas of Japan have been depleted, and people move to the cities, there has been a corresponding decline in biodiversity of plants and animals*¹⁰. Further, it has recently been found that parts of Europe saw their peak biodiversity under a commons based approach to agriculture, where farming and wilderness were mixed with no clear borders*¹¹.

I think this growing body of evidence requires that we seriously begin to reconsider that, not only have we been doing agriculture wrong -- which is fairly obvious to many -- but more importantly, we've been doing conservation and rewilding wrong. And from this, a path towards not only understanding that we've been doing agriculture wrong, but how to do it right.

In "One Straw Revolution" Masanobu Fukuoka argues

that even "returning-to-nature" and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.

I think this idea needs to be taken very seriously. When you act purely in reaction to extractive capitalism, you get synergistic ideas like conventional conservation. As I've said before, direct competition is often a form of synergy. Moving beyond extractive capitalism requires more than that. I'm beginning to think it requires the growing of a fairly holistic ideology that generally attempts to break down the barrier between humanity and nature, and sees humans as part of the wilderness that needs protecting. Not merely in a superficial sense, but in a practical and applied sense. In this case, in the sense of treating human food production done right as a necessary part of healthy, and diverse biospheres.

It seems to me that the evidence is pointing to the notion that extractive capitalism has been resting on the laurels of an immense biodiversity engineered in part by humans over millennia. It follows then that it is simply not enough to end extractive capitalism. In order to save our biospheres, what is needed is the reintegration of humans and human needs as a beneficial part of those biospheres.