Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Wes Jackson

American Biologist, Founder and President of The Land Institute promoting the Sustainable Agriculture Movement, Awarded Pew Conservation Scholars Award and Right Livelihood Award

"Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole."

"A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth."

"As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture."

"Bad times are coming."

"By beginning to make agriculture sustainable we will have taken the first step forward for humanity to begin to measure progress by its independence from the extractive economy."

"Ecosystem agriculturalists will take advantage of huge chunks of what works. They will be taking advantage of the natural integrities of ecosystems worked out over the millennia."

"I am not optimistic but I am hopeful."

"I began thinking along this line some fifteen years ago when it became clear that on sloping ground, regardless of terraces and grass waterways, soil would erode on wheat fields, corn fields, soybean fields, sorgham fields--wherever annual monocultures were planted. On the other hand, it was also clear that soil would more or less stay put in perennial pastures, in native prairie grassland, and in forests, independent of human action. But there was more, for to those annual monocultures came pesticides, commercial fertilizer, and a need for fossil fuel for traction. The prairie, on the other hand, counted on species diversity and genetic diversity within species, to avoid epidemics of insects and pathogens. The prairie maintains its own fertility, runs on sunlight, and actually accumulates ecological capital--accumulates soil."

"It is possible to love a small acreage in Kansas as much as John Muir loved the Sierra Nevada. This is fortunate, for the wilderness of the Sierra will disappear unless little pieces of the nonwilderness become intensely loved by lots of people. In other words, Harlem and East Saint Louis and Iowa and Kansa and the rest of the world where wilderness has been destroyed must come to be loved by enough of us, or wilderness too is doomed."

"If we don't get sustainability in agriculture first, sustainability will not happen."

"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough."

"Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow family values arguments."

"Lysenko was an aberrant power-hungry nut in a context that brought him to power. Nevertheless, he existed within a philosophical frame we need. For example, the Lysenkoists emphasized traditional, cultural, peasant intelligence as important for agriculture. They made such a fetish of this emphasis that they carried it too far, ultimately suppressing the scientific view held by Vavilov. In our country among our scientists today, it is the other way around, except for the miniature low input sustainable agriculture (LISA) effort and the acknowledged need to develop on-farm research. One could, of course, go overboard in the direction of tradition only. I see it as I travel to various sustainable agriculture gatherings. It is actually a rumble that makes me uneasy. The noise is often from a hard put-down of modern science. When I listen to such put-downs, I remember that in the USSR overemphasis on tradition and cultural wisdom shoved out some good Western science."

"Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native."

"Observing this years ago I formulated a question? Is it possible to build an agriculture based on the prairie as standard or model? I saw a sharp contrast between the major features of the wheat field and the major features of the prairie. The wheat field features annuals in monoculture; the prairie features perennials in polyculture, or mixtures. Because all of our high-yielding crops are annuals or are treated as such, crucial questions must be answered. Can perennialism and high yield go together? If so, can a polyculture of perennials outyield a monoculture of perennials? Can such an ecosystem sponsor its own fertility? Is it realistic to think we can manage such complexity adequately to avoid the problem of pests outcompeting us?"

"Soil is more important than oil and is as much a nonrenewable resource."

"Save the soils as we save our souls."

"The agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem, feature material recycling and run on the contemporary sunlight of our star."

"The forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run."

"The dialectical or ecological approach asserts that creating the world is involved in our every act. It is impossible for us to operate in our daily lives and not create the world that everyone must live in. What we desire arranges the genetic code in all of our major crops and livestock. We cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate."

"The plough destroyed more options for future generations than the automobile."

"The Soviets wanted heavy doses of philosophy in science. Too many of our scientists assume that philosophy can be and should be excluded from science. But, though some Lysenkoist ideas were absurd, that does not mean that philosophy as such should or can be kept out of science. The philosophical view the Lysenkoists were struggling to foster was more on target than the simple reductionism that still dominates Western science. Our placement of priority on the parts over the whole denies the importance of emergent properties, or qualities, the things that pile up as we go up the level of organization from small to large. Even systems theory is a form of reductionism, for the intersecting variables on the computer do not predict emergent qualities. (Take the two gasses hydrogen and oxygen, which combined at a given temperature and pressure give us wetness.) Moreover, when scale is a factor, emergent qualities appear that reflect mere increases in size."

"The 'natural systems' approach could be transferable worldwide, as long as adequate research is devoted to developing species and mixtures of species appropriate to specific environments. We believe that an agriculture is well within reach that is resilient, economical, ecologically responsible and socially just."

"We need to be saying, 'Listen folks, capitalism is inherently destructive.' How do we get from where we are to where we need to be... We have got to get rid of capitalism."

"What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes."

"We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish me, me, me culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground."

"When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are exploited. By consulting Nature as the source and measure of that membership, The Land Institute seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a community life at once prosperous and enduring."

"You can tell a professor is getting old when the anecdotal ratio is getting bigger than the analytical."

"If you're working on something that you can finish in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough."