Permaculture vs Industrial Agriculture

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With the exception of some indigenous cultures, agriculture has been our primary source of the production of food in the last thousand years or so. As time has gone by, humans have furthered and bettered the technology used in agriculture at a steady rate. This has resulted in a modern agriculture that seeks to ever increase the yields produced by their crops. However, while modern agriculture is becoming more focused on efficiently producing food, it is not focused on how it affects the environment and even the health of the human population. Since food production is in essence a natural process, it is dependent on the natural world and its systems. Thus, "Without agriculture there will be immediate mass starvation, but with agriculture there will be a continual eroding away of the productive basis of human livelihood." (Wes Jackson) As Jackson points out, an agricultural system that ignores the health of the environment is ignoring its very foundations. A vast majority of our current food needs are being met by the modern production-focused agricultural system, or “agribusiness”. However, the scientific community is hard at work finding new methods of agriculture that are being practiced and that focus equal attention to both environmental health and food production. One model, permaculture, is quickly attracting attention across the globe due to its proposal- that intelligent and ecologically sensitive designs of agricultural systems should be more efficient and productive than the ecologically destructive systems we conventionally use. There are many problems with conventional industrialized agriculture. Jackson feels that the geological impact of agriculture "surely stands as the most significant and explosive event on the face of the earth." He claims that though other geological processes have changed the physical qualities of the earth, the changes

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