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This chapter discusses the limitations of natural selection, arguing that the overall organization of even ancient natural ecosystems may be relatively imperfect compared to individual adaptations that have been repeatedly tested through competition. After considering the near-perfection of natural ecosystems from the perspective of agroecology, the chapter explains how natural selection improves genes and individuals, rather than ecosystems. It then compares natural ecosystems with agricultural ecosystems designed by humans in terms of their ability to improve ecosystem-wide properties. It also examines whether we can harvest more food, sustainably, from human-managed ecosystems or from natural ones by focusing on two systems: human cultivation of wild rice without fertilizer, and human management of reindeer herds (domesticated caribou).

Despite some concern about the persistence of a wish to return to industrial agriculture among some producers, leaders of the urban agriculture movement in Cuba believe urban agriculture and agroecology are here to stay. The 2008 program of Suburban Agriculture had the goal of food sovereignty in each municipality of Cuba on the basis of agroecologically operated farms. Although there is increasing interest, agroecological urban agriculture has seen little development in the world, especially in Latin America. Still, concerns about the sustainability (and suitability) of industrial agriculture are leading to increasing advocacy of a new paradigm, and efforts in this direction (La Via Campesina) in both the First and Third Worlds. The Cuban example, even if not fully adoptable, provides significant lessons for these efforts.

This chapter starts with a brief discussion of the reasons for the turn to urban agriculture, as well as the enabling historical roots of this turn in human-resource formation and social organization, in Revolutionary Cuba. The terms “urban,” “sustainable,” and “agroecology” are introduced and defined. Major contrasting elements with urban agriculture elsewhere in the world are pointed out, especially the strong support provided by the Cuban government and the absence of massive rural–urban migration in Cuba. Next, the state of scholarly publications on urban agriculture in general and in Cuba is briefly reviewed. The introduction ends by outlining the topics to be covered in subsequent chapters and the main arguments to be developed.

After a brief discussion of the pre-Revolutionary historical context, and introducing the concepts of food security and food sovereignty, this chapter turns to the 30 years following the 1959 revolution: the Agrarian reforms, increasing hostility with the US, alignment with the Soviet Union, and COMECON. The resulting industrial agriculture system based on large State Farms, after experiencing increasing difficulties in the 1980s, became completely untenable in the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. After 1993, UBPCs were introduced into the institutional framework of agriculture, accompanied by a decisive move toward agroecological methods of production. These had already been championed by ACTAF and others in the 1980s, due to increasing dissatisfaction with industrial agriculture and concerns about national security. New technological innovations included the introduction of organopónicos into urban agriculture on a large scale.

This chapter demonstrates parallels between the pastoral paradigm of Vaishnava devotion and the neglect of agriculture in Western environmental thought. It explores how pastoralism and idealized landscapes can create an idyllic view of the natural world and obscures our debt to the earth for subsistence or our reciprocal obligations. For example, both the Braj pastoral and the trope of wilderness in environmental discourse in the United States romanticize the natural world and exclude the possibility of human intervention in the land. Vaishnava pastoralism and Western environmental thought both emphasize romanticized and urbanized views of the natural world that exclude labor, production, and violence. By exploring the role of agriculture in the context of religion, nature, and society, we can understand the persistence of certain stories.

This chapter describes different discourses of agricultural systems to help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community, including restoration agriculture and agroecology. Exploring the metaphors and narratives that underlie these agricultural practices enables us to trace the consequences of existing and alternative practices. Stories from farmers who have adopted these practices show how stories and metaphors provide alternate models for human–earth relations that then lead to changed practices.

The relationships between diversity, yield, and yield stability are much debated in ecology and agroecology. Modern industrial agriculture has reduced diversity to increase yields, while controlling instability by increased inputs (energy, pest protection, fertilizer, and irrigation). This lead to increased risk of system failure, illustrated by increased susceptibility of genetically uniform modern varieties to evolution of resistance in pests and pathogens. Instability also results from disruption in supply of required inputs. In traditional farming, polycultures of different varieties and species are common, with land equivalent ratios greater than monocultures. Sustainable agriculture seeks spatiotemporal niches where diversity, yield, and yield stability can coexist synergistically. This often combines components of traditional and modern agricultural knowledge and technology, illustrated by polyculture experiments in China.

This chapter discusses ecological intensification, which involves the use of ecological processes more intensively and in a sustainable manner. The aim is to use land, water, biodiversity, and nutrients ecologically efficiently and in ways that minimize negative environmental impacts. Such systems can conserve and utilize natural capital, thus improving the quality and quantity of food production. Conservation agriculture is one such integrated system of soil, water, and biological resource management, combined with carefully selected external inputs. This and similar systems can reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Biodiversity is a key factor in maintaining stable, resilient agroecosystems. Included in conservation agriculture are various forms of intercropping that utilize the mutually beneficial ecological relationships arising when two or more crops are grown in association, either as mixtures or rotations. Organic farming also aims to mimic nature by making use of natural ecological processes and resources. The potential increase in yields and farmers' incomes sustainably is considerable in developing countries, especially in those areas faced with degraded soils, lack of capital, and low product prices. But care needs to be taken in determining where organic agriculture can contribute to sustainability and productivity and where it might have the reverse effect.

Agriculture is experiencing radical changes. Farmers are learning to produce crops without tilling the soil, robots are becoming farmhands, and companies are raising crops without sunlight or soil. Though these changes are revolutionary, some believe we have not gone far enough. While pesticides allow farmers to prevent soil erosion, some argue agroecological methods can prevent erosion without pesticides, through the use of polycultures, green manures, and other techniques used in organic agriculture. Livestock agriculture is also being challenged on animal welfare and environmental grounds, so much so that some individuals conduct undercover investigations of livestock farms, and companies are investing large amounts of money to create meat substitutes. The possibilities afforded by genetic engineering are enormous, and while some see the technology as a key component of sustainability, others see it as a threat. While individuals may share similar goals for improving the food system, their preferred methods often differ.

Movimiento sin Tierra's (MST) idea of food sovereignty and agroecology is deeply embedded in collaborative or collective forms of production. In order to build small-scale agricultural communes, members rely upon a mixture of reciprocity and economic exchanges for survival. This chapter discusses MST's attempts to reconfigure the agricultural model of agrarian citizenship to expand agribusiness in Bolivia. In looking for alternative socioeconomic and productive models to guarantee food sovereignty, it examines the ways in which the ayllu practices of democracy and agroecology can ensure food security for people and sustainable lifestyles for future generations.

This chpater presents a case study focusing on the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), an organization started by the United States and Mesoamerica’s activists, whose effort is to create an alternative trade and knowledge network. The basic aim behind CAN is to benefit conservation and social development efforts by linking producers, consumers, and producer organizations. CAN is a response to the problems arising out of the dominance of certification processes in Fair Trade and organic coffee networks, and the chapter discusses the organization’s main goals of intercommunity relationship development, direct coffee marketing, and ecological sustainability. It moots a comparison between alternative agro-food networks and CAN on the grounds of biodiversity conservation, empowerment, and enhanced livelihoods.

Cultural ecology in the 1990s was a highly productive and rapidly growing specialty group within geography. The group’s scholarship has contributed to a number of core themes and concepts in geography and in related fields within the social and biogeophysical sciences and humanities (Butzer 1989, 1990a; Porter 1991; B. L. Turner 1997a; Zimmerer 1996c). This review evaluates the central research contributions—findings, themes, concepts, methods—of North American geographical cultural ecology over this decade (1990–9). The evaluation is based on the clustering of the contributions of the 1990s into eight main areas: long-term cultural ecology; resource management; local knowledge; pastoralism; environmental politics; protected areas; gender ecology; and environmental discourses (Figs 8.1 and 8.2). Notable accomplishments and characteristic approaches are reviewed in each area. Emphasis is placed on the continued evolution of the common ground of cultural ecology and its most prominent offshoot, political ecology. A nature-culture or nature-society core is central to advances of the 1990s. This core is made up of interacting dialectical processes of culture-and-consciousness and domestic-and-political economy, on the one hand, and non-human nature, on the other hand (Zimmerer and Young 1998: 5). Increased awareness of this recursive interaction has led to a historical perspective that is common to much work in cultural and political ecology during the past decade (Figs 8.1 and 8.2). Culture and society in environmental interactions are considered with new importance granted to the multiple forms and contingencies of spatial scale, from the local to the global, as well as varied temporal frames. Culture and society are conceptualized in new ways while, at the same time, the biogeophysical environments themselves are thought of as increasingly complex and less spatially and temporally predictable than was previously presumed.

Chapter 6 analyzes the MST’s engagement with public schools in Ceará in the late 2000s, in a very different context, when the movement’s educational initiatives are already recognized nationally. During this period, MST activists in Ceará win access to four high schools in their settlements, specifically designated as escolas do campo (school of the countryside). Chapter 6 shows how the national context, while not determining of regional trajectories, directly influences local relations between movement activists and local state officials. More specifically, a conservative government in Ceará agrees to work with the MST due to increasing external pressure. In contrast, São Paulo was able to deflect this national advocacy, illustrating that high-capacity states can still override the influence of national trends. This chapter also shows the evolution of the MST’s pedagogical practices and what the MST’s contentious co-governance of public education looks like in the contemporary context.

The agroecology transition from intensive agriculture to more sustainable systems has prompted a vigorous debate on the role of biodiversity in agricultural systems. The functional approach to diversity allows us to better understand the functioning of these systems, to develop new management tools, and to construct innovative cropping and grazing systems. The functioning of permanent grasslands is dependent on environmental gradients related to the practices of defoliation and fertilization. The functional structure of grasslands, based on distribution of response traits related to resource use, morphology, growth form, and regeneration allow for predicting agricultural value and associated services related to quantity and quality of biomass at peak production. Management tools designed to be used by farmers have been developed on the basis of these results, by regrouping species on the basis of phenology and functional strategies. The functional approach also allows identification of the responses of crop weeds to cropping practices and/or their effects on the crop, and their positive environmental effects. Based on the hypothesis that the crop is a particular environmental filter, this approach requires comparison of the environmental gradients generated by cropping practices, and identification of the response traits linked with these gradients and those effect traits having an effect on the functioning of the agro-ecosystem. The functional approach can be used to develop innovative agricultural systems by identifying effect traits influencing the provision of agricultural products, and response traits to local environmental conditions that are modified by agricultural practices and constrained by the socio-economic context.

What are the perspectives for research in the field of functional diversity? A theoretical framework linking quantitatively organism functioning, functional structure and dynamics of communities, and ecosystem properties is still lacking and needs to be developed. Key points also concern whether and when (1) traits or the whole phenotype should be considered in the functional approach to diversity, and (2) the intraspecific variability of traits needs to be taken into account. Developing an integrated vision of plant functioning is necessary, and understanding how traits relate to population demographic parameters constitutes a major challenge. Improving the quantification of relevant environmental factors is also essential. For organisms other than plants, the trait-based approach will achieve its full potential when the principal functions of interest and a consensual baseline list of associated traits are established. Understanding how biotic and abiotic factors shape the functional structure of communities, and identifying the traits which play essential roles for ecosystem properties and services, will require combining theoretical and experimental approaches as well as modelling. The potential for applications in agroecology is wide ranging and remains largely unexplored. Improving the management of functional diversity data is a key issue, and should be made possible by the development of the emerging field of ecoinformatics. These various directions should allow us to understand the causes of variation in the degree of expression of organism functions and their consequences at the different levels of organization of the living world, in the current context of global change induced by human activities.

This chapter highlights how explicit or implicit values can influence how research on a particular topic is pursued. First, the chapter shows how scientists can pursue different methods or strategies for agricultural research (e.g., focusing more heavily on agroecology or genetic engineering or social scientific investigations), depending on the values they aim to support. Second, it examines the value-laden assumptions involved in studying environmental pollution and highlights how citizen science and community-based participatory research can highlight implicit values and alter those assumptions. Third, it shows how the questions that are asked in medical research, especially on topics such as depression, can reflect implicit values that steer research in some directions rather than others.

The third chapter focuses on an example of radical sustainability in the Cuban context. Cuba’s history with resource scarcity exemplifies the myriad struggles that will continue to spread the world over. Cubans were able to transcend their worst problems through top-down government initiatives that then decentralized and subsidized urban agricultural food production. At a Cuban urban farmworkers’ cooperative, farmers are residents of the local community who sell their produce at low costs on site to their neighbors and passersby. By resisting neocolonial forces, Cuba is one of the few countries in the world to obtain high human development and consume a fair share of environmental resources, maintaining a small ecological footprint. Personal experiences of working on one such farm and living with a nearby family for several months are described, and the Cuban program’s successes as well as the social environmental stumbling blocks it still faces are discussed.