1.2.3. Modern Farming Example

1. *Summary: The text discusses two approaches to understanding nature: a mechanistic approach focused on maximizing specific outputs, like in industrial agriculture, and a natural ecosystem approach that emphasizes development and life creation. The mechanistic approach, while initially successful in increasing yields, has led to significant environmental damage, such as soil depletion and toxicity. The text questions whether the scientific enterprise, which has been focused on control and manipulation, should shift towards a more holistic understanding of nature.*

Now switch from this natural ecosystem to an artificial ecosystem. So we talk about, let's say, industrial agriculture. Now here, the approach to study of nature is different because we begin -- we developed our knowledge of soil and planting from the point of view, okay, how we can, let's say, get the maximum yield of wheat, beans or so on. So we learned specifically kind of knowledge that will allow us to basically get the maximum benefit. So this kind of knowledge is very specialized for a certain period of time, it actually works. But as a result of this kind of, again, mechanistic approach, understanding of life, learning life from this mechanistic point of view, results in what we see right now today as a result of this industrial agriculture for about 50, 100 years, we did increase our agricultural yields. But the truth is that during the last 150 years, half of the world top soils is now gone, destroyed. And the remaining soil cannot retain water and is progressively more poor with nutrients and is highly toxic with the pesticides with the fertilizers. And pretty much the same applies to any natural ecosystem that we're trying to use, be it world fisheries, be it forests. So what we see here is two different approaches to trying to understand how nature works. In a more mechanistic understanding here, we identify basically pretty much a single, maybe a couple of processes we can learn how to manipulate it and we get the maximum benefit. But this specialized knowledge will be inevitably very limited. And because it's limited, it can be very dangerous. But if If you look at the natural ecosystem, you will see that it develops, it builds up, it creates life. So what happens then? If our whole scientific enterprise during the last 100, 150 years has been developed along the lines of control and manipulation.