Abstract

Randal Beeman and James Pritchard offer us three reasons why we should care deeply about agriculture: we all require food and even in the seeming cornucopia of American farmland we have the ever‐present danger of food shortages, the health of our families is intimately tied to the quality of our food supply, and farming and farm families are an important and inspirational part of American society. This book attempts to “foster a better understanding of the centrality of food production in the history of American civilization” by exploring the intersection of ecology and agriculture. The premise of this book is that ecological ideas have provided the scientific guidelines and philosophical animus for a different kind of farming that is gentler on the land and people than is traditional agriculture. Accounts of the intersection of ecology and agriculture have been scarce, and so the premise is appealing.Beeman and Pritchard support their thesis by exploring the development of two extraordinary agrarian reform movements in American history. The short‐lived permanent agriculture movement starting in the late nineteenth century gained momentum with the crises of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. It promoted soil conservation and planning as an alternative to traditional farming practices. Similarly, the sustainable agriculture movement today, though subdivided into agroecology, organic farming, permaculture, and polyculture, can share underlying ethical principles that recognize the fragility and interconnectedness of living systems. It was spurred in part by rapidly expanding pesticide use and economic upheaval. Agrarian reform, promoted by charismatic individuals such as Edward Faulkner, Hugh Bennett, Louis Bromfield, Paul Sears, and Wes Jackson, called for nothing short of revolution in farming. Proponents were just as much concerned with preserving social resources as with natural resources because a crisis of human spirit mirrored the crisis of the soil. The authors argue that both permanent and sustainable agriculture were founded on ecological principles and a reaction to what was perceived as a failure of traditional farming practices to provide quality farm products, healthy soils, and desirable livelihoods.Beeman and Pritchard subtitle their book “Ecology and Agriculture” in part because for Sears and Faulkner “permanent agriculture was far more than conservation, requiring an ecological worldview that required reverence for life and respect for nature” . Nevertheless, this book would be better subtitled “Conservation and Agriculture” because little of the intellectual content of the science of ecology appears in it and even less of its application to agriculture. The work of Alfred Lotka, Vito Volterra, Georgii Gause, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Robert MacArthur, and Carl Huffaker certainly influenced traditional agriculture, but their connection to alternative agriculture is unclear. Although Beeman and Pritchard describe some early ecological models of vegetation change in both theoretical and philosophical terms, they provide little evidence of farmers actually using the science of ecology as it was used in range science. They write of agrarian reformers using ecological holism and techniques to create a new environmental ethics and a “new devotion to ecological stewardship and responsibility” . In effect they conflate environmental and ecological tenets, equating ecology with ethical and spiritual outlooks on nature because “ecology based itself on then‐prevailing currents such as interdependence, balance, and harmony” . They suggest that the eclipse of permanent agriculture was due in part to “divisions within the guiding force of ecology” , though they do not say what that guiding force was or who represented it. Because they never clearly lay out when they are using “ecology” to refer to a budding science or when they are borrowing a layman's use of “ecology” that refers to the interconnectedness of all organisms and a sense of holism, they obscure their very important treatment of agrarian reform movements.This book is less a history of the impact of ecological science on agriculture and agrarian reform than it is an analysis of the role of environmental philosophy in spurring changes in farming practices. Nevertheless, it is a valuable account of extraordinary events in the history of American farming. Beeman and Pritchard present fascinating stories of agricultural visionaries striving to better the world around them. This combination of environmental history and prescriptive remedy for our agricultural ills provides thought‐provoking reading