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"A False Hypothesis? Implications for Agriculture and Culture If True"

Wes Jackson President,The Land Institute Location: Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum 2430 N. Cannon Drive Chicago, IL Date: October 2, 2003 Time: 7:00 PM

The Hypothesis: Beginning with agriculture, humans have produced no technological product or process without drawing down the earth's capital stock. By stock, I mean that which is necessary for the planet to capture carbon using contemporary sunlight. From the beginning of cellular life and later among all other hierarchical levels of structure* tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms, ecosystems and the ecosphere itself* life has had to operate within the constraints of the entropy law. Darwinian selection operates up and down that hierarchy and efficiencies have been derived through integration. Stated otherwise, selection pressure is on the entire system, with all of its subsystems, including infrastructure we have yet to comprehend and, more importantly, infrastructure we will never comprehend. Implied in the hypothesis is the assumption that ecosystems featuring minimal human impact are our best safe candidate as standards wherever they may be found across the planet's ecological mosaic. Agriculture ultimately has ecology and evolutionary biology standing behind it, in spite of the fact that it is heavily industrialized at present. Since the industrial or materials sector has no time-honored discipline to draw on, it seems fair to assume that if we do not get sustainability in agriculture first, it is not going to happen. This "utterly dismal hypothesis" is being offered to encourage our thinking about an ecological rather than technological baseline for "sustainability." Aldo Leopold's writings provide starting points for this journey into humanity's most important paradigm to date. Moreover, since nature's economy features material recycling and mostly runs on contemporary sunlight, perhaps insights for a new economic order are embedded where agriculture and ecology meet.

Wes Jackson, President of The Land Institute (founded in 1976), was born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. After attending Kansas Wesleyan (B.A Biology, 1958), he studied botany (M.A. University of Kansas, 1960) and genetics (Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 1967). He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established the Environmental Studies program at California State University, Sacramento, where he became a tenured full professor. He resigned that position in 1976. Dr. Jackson's writings include both papers and books. His most recent work, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, co-edited with William Vitek, was released by Yale University Press in 1996. Becoming Native to This Place was published in 1994 and sketches his vision for the resettlement of America's rural communities. Altars of Unhewn Stone appeared in 1987 and Meeting the Expectations of the Land, edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman, was published in 1984. New Roots for Agriculture, 1980, outlines the basis for the agricultural research at The Land Institute. The work of The Land Institute has been featured extensively in the popular media including The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Life magazine named Wes Jackson as one of 18 individuals they predict will be among the 100 "important Americans of the 20th century." He is a recipient of the Pew Conservation Scholars award (1990), a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and Right Livelihood Award (2000).