A recent article in The Economist provides an interesting CV for the crop known as King Cotton: highlights include its role in beginning the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1750 to 1820); forming the economic basis for slavery and the Civil War in the United States (ca. 1840-1865); destroying the Aral Sea and surrounding areas (ca. 1960’s to present); and fueling the failure of international trade negotiations in Cancun (2003). (See “A Great Yarn,” The Economist, Dec. 20, 2003, pp. 43-46.)

An impressive bio indeed. But it also leads to more general observations in an era when biomass is touted as an “environmentally friendly” solution to carbon sequestration, energy production, and a non-fossil source of plastics and other materials. The next two columns will explore some of these.

Let us begin with the obvious. As the Aral Sea environmental disaster illustrates -- much of the flow of the two major rivers feeding it was diverted by the Stalinist Soviet Union to grow cotton -- agriculture has long been perhaps the major human activity through which human and natural systems became integrated. Indeed, the need to establish and manage large hydrological engineering systems for agriculture has been identified by historians as a major factor in the rise of many civilizations. (China is a prime example of such a “hydrologic civilization.”) And global climate change resulting from increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began with the deforestation of Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia a millennium ago as agriculture spread, not just with modern technology (although the magnitude of that has increased recently).

Conversely, for some environmentalists, the “fall” of the human species occurred precisely at that point where society evolved from hunter-gather “natural” patterns to “unnatural” agricultural systems. If there is one activity that can be identified as a crucial factor in the evolution of our planet into what Nature calls the “anthropocene,” it is agriculture.

The current tendency to idolize biomass as an “environmentally friendly” feedstock for energy and material production is thus somewhat oxymoronic. It reflects naiveté about the systemic effects of agriculture: many programs to enhance production of biomass fail to consider effects on coupled systems such as local and regional hydrologic and carbon cycles, much less the more esoteric nitrogen and phosphorous cycles.

It also, however, reflects something deeper. Agriculture is associated with food production, and few things are as surrounded with taboos, rules, cultural practices, and ideology as food. Moreover, agricultural activity, and concomitant cultural patterns, are a critical connection of many modern peoples to a (largely imaginary) past. Americans, British, French, and Germans: all to some extent still romanticize an idyllic time of small farms and agrarian yeoman.

This is no passing fancy: the Romans valued the farmer-citizen of the Republic over the decadent urban dweller of the Empire, and the modern quasi-Utopianism of many sustainability activists mirrors such an agrarian teleology. It is not just raw economics that keeps agricultural subsidies so high and inflicts inequities on developing countries trying to compete in global biomass markets -- it is a powerful, often implicit, cultural yearning for the simplicity of an agricultural Golden Age. Mythical, to be sure, but still a powerful vision. The lesson from King Cotton is not just “Fear me, I am economically powerful,” but “Fear me, for I am culturally potent as well.”

Thus agriculture, like other great technological systems, functions not merely as a means of production. Rather, it illustrates the complexity of such systems in the real world: integration of natural and human systems at all scales; the interplay of powerful and unconscious cultural archetypes with short-term policies and political posturing; and the creation of cultural constructs of “nature” and “environment” through the lens of technological systems and social values (e.g., organic farming as “natural” and, therefore, “good”).

Indeed, in scale and impact, agriculture can justly claim to be the first and most powerful example of earth systems engineering and management. But this still begs a critical question: What form of agriculture is “best,” or “sustainable”? It is to this question we turn in the next column.

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Brad Allenby is Environment, Health, and Safety VP for AT&T, an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia’s Engineering School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School. The views expressed herein are those of the author, and not any institution with which he is associated.