Dr. Jonathan Foley is a leading environmental scientist, speaker, writer and Project Drawdown’s Executive Director. In a recent TED Talk, he suggests a term that he has coined ‘Terraculture’ – or farming for the whole planet. It is a potential combination of many answers but, at its heart it requires a global conversation and ensuing international understanding and consideration for what he calls the “other inconvenient truth”. This means conversations on both the grass- roots local level and the international business level.
Terraculture would not just seek to balance the impact of agriculture on our planet, but also improve farming methods in conjunction with indigenous needs and knowledge so as to ensure a constant food source for centuries to come.
In a utopian version of our world where altruism reigned this could work, and yet there are so many challenges involved. These challenges include balancing short-term business outcomes with short and long-term humanitarian and environmental outcomes, communicating one integrated message to all those involved in agriculture across the globe and having it resonate, and involving people or groups with varying priorities, be that because they are living at different ends of the poverty spectrum, or are operating within differing value systems.
The world, for example, is littered with the skeletons of development projects gone wrong that didn’t take into account varying cognitive models or different ways of approaching life, where increasing yield may be the ultimate goal for one, while
less time working in the fields and more time to rest and spend with family for the same yield may be the ultimate goal of another.
For organizations such as Project Drawdown, getting this Terraculture message Across, therefore, will be no mean feat. In fact, getting any message of global partnership in the fight against environmental degradation or social injustice is going to be a challenge, just because of the fact that we are all different and perceive the world from different angles.
But perhaps, in this age of heightened global awareness about the state of the environment, there may be an opening. And perhaps there may be a realization that so little is ever achieved in opposition to, and yet so much in cooperation with…
As Japan’s natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka said in his seminal work, The One-Straw Revolution: “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” In the same way then, it seems the only way forward will be a coming together of forces, peoples and priorities to find a common ground to heal our ground, together.
