2 - The Meaning of Agriculture and Agroecology

Summary

One aspect of the dialectical approach is historicity. To fully understand a subject, we need to know its history – not only the history of the subject itself, but the history of how scientists and analysts have been thinking about that subject. The fact that humans have been “engineering” their ecosystems for thousands of years is explored with the idea that agriculture is usefully interpreted as simply an extreme form of ecosystem engineering. A framing in modern terms is introduced through the work of various thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to Elinor Ostrom, ending with a critical description of the modern industrial agriculture system.