Industrial or “Green Revolution” agriculture depends upon petroleum to manufacture and spread fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and to power irrigation systems that act upon crops selected to increase agricultural yield. It has been criticized on the grounds that it has favored mainly rich farmers and caused serious environmental pollution. Now a second “Green Revolution” is being proposed...

Ecological impacts of industrial agriculture include significant greenhouse gas emissions, loss of biodiversity, widespread pollution by fertilizers and pesticides, soil loss and degradation, declining pollinators, and human health risks, among many others. A rapidly growing body of scientific research, however, suggests that farming systems designed and managed according to ecological principl...

Systems thinking contributes to envisioning agricultural sustainability. However, it faces two dilemmas, recently highlighted by complexity theory: the problems of boundary and change. We propose that interpreting Koestler’s holon as an intentional entity embedded in an ecology of contexts provides an ontological construct which addresses both of these issues. The holon is in some ways a whole ...

Background: Conventional cattle ranching and agricultural practices have severely degraded and fragmented tropical forests in Latin America. This trend has resulted in the loss of a range of ecosystem services upon which humans depend, especially those that support agricultural production, such as biodiversity, the provision of water and soil fertility. Consequently, conventional cattle ranchin...