When it comes to our ethical obligation to take care and protect nature, soil is a large part of that obligation. In the reading this week, "The Soil and Health" by Wendell Berry, it talks about how if our agriculture is not analogous with nature, then it is not ethically right. He stated, "... the process of agriculture, if they are to endure, have to be analogous to the processes of nature. If one is farming in a place previously forested, then the farm must be systematic analogue of the forest, and the farmer must be a student of the forest". This is saying how we are ethically obligated to essentially model nature as the best form of farming so that the nature can continue as well as our agriculture. Farming in recent centuries has been very damaging to the environment. A common practice would be to clear cut a forest and then monocrop the land until all of the nutrients have been depleted (before fertilizers, which s another problem) leaving an empty and barren field. Nature on the other hand has natural processes in which it ensures that its future seedlings have nutrients for the future. This can be related to us and our ethical obligation to soil and its nutrients. We need to make sure that we coincide our soil and agricultural practices so that our future can be secured.
Hi Caleb, I really like this obligation that you took from the reading. I have a few questions about what this would look like. First, would we still be able to mass produce crops like we currently do? And Second, what would we do with these open fields? Add trees and plants to return the area to what it looked like before our deforestation or leave it as is and use it for crops?
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