Sublime

James Drake and Stuart Pimm of the University of Tennessee study what it takes to arrive at an assembly of species that remain in equilibrium, a condition farmers would obvously want for their domestic prairie. Unlike The Land staff, they do their experiments with ecosystems in a computer (artificial life) and with aquatic organisms in glass tanks

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.

Malheureusement, « l’environnement », c’est aussi l’éléphantiasis et les vers de Guinée (mieux vaut ne pas savoir de quoi il s’agit), les moustiques anophèles et la malaria, les grandes sécheresses, le sida et la peste.

I asked him what was on his bookshelf. J. I. Rodale. Sir Albert Howard. Aldo Leopold. Wes Jackson. Wendell Berry. Louis Bromfield. The classic texts of organic agriculture and American agrarianism.