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VALUE AND SYSTEM: NOTES TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF AGRI-CULTURE C. A. Hooker July 1991, revised August 1992, September 1993 Contents Part I: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Conflict and Agenda Introduction Values are Expressed as Systems Designs Example: Agriculture and Vulnerability for Sweden A Berry Agricultural Agenda System and Agenda, Changing Conceptions of Agricultural Systems Conflict and Agenda in Agricultural Practice and Professional Self-Conception

Part II: Analytical Framework 7. The Western Change Machine 8. Twentieth Century Watersheds 9. The Information Revolution 10. The Artifact/Design Transformation 11. Learning From Past to Future 12. Toward a Stable Self-Organising Future? Part III: Notes Toward the Definition of Agri-culture 13. The Transformation in Public Policy and Policy Methodology 14. The Role of Values in Policy Making Designs 15. Technology 16. Institution; Profession 17. Agri-culture 18. Agri-cultural Ethics References Endnotes Figures 1 -> 7 Tables 1 -> 3

Part I: Conflict and Agenda 1.

Introduction

agriculture the science and art of cultivating the soil; including the allied pursuits of gathering in the crops and rearing lifestock; tillage, husbandry, farming in the widest sense. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971) The roots of civilisation lie in a great system difference, occurring patchily across the planet and across the period from 20,000 BC on, which marks the distinction between huntergatherer and sedentary agricultural societies. The latter is characterised by the replacement of diverse natural ecologies with simpler ones containing a few selected plant and animal species as preferred sources of energy/negative entropy for the human sub-system. (We may think of life on earth, in a first approximation, as a dynamic system of many interconnected heat engines, a dissipative structure made up of many interconnected dissipative structures in the sense of Prigogine 1980 (cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1984, Depew et al. 1987, Odum 1971 etc.), driven by a solar energy/negative entropy flow fixed at the system boundary as plant and animal protein structure through photosynthetic conversion and thereafter passed with increasing entropy or degradation of order through the food chain to be finally re-radiated to space as low grade heat. From this conception we can derive immediately both the ecologist's biomass pyramid and Rachel Carsen's farmer-induced concentration of pesticides up food chains: roughly, total biomass decreases, and fat soluble poison densities increase, along food chains in inverse proportion to energy conversion efficiencies. The advantage of sedentary agriculture is equally obvious: by eliminating entropic/energy pathways that do not pass through the human sub-system it increases the total energy and negentropy available to humans, and can do this even if the overall ecological efficiency, and stability, declines. In creating these changes humans were only amplifying the ecological effects which hunting/gathering already had, because of its selection of seeds for size and edibility, use of fire, etc.; agriculture is an extension of the basic ecological selection action of any species, a technique/technology for amplifying energy/negentropy capture.) The agricultural revolution provided a large increase in ordered energy to the human subsystem, but it was achieved only through a massive reorganisation of human expectations, lifestyles, institutional arrangements and ultimately of human values and self-conception. The combination of increased ordered energy flow with the new organisational requirements to obtain it laid the foundations for the subsequent development of civilisation as we know it: the explosion in supportable population which led to the rise of cities and concomitant labour specialisation, the development of sophisticated arts and crafts and of urban/empire religions; the organisational needs in land measurement, planting times and the like which led to the development of astronomy (for the seasons) and geometry (for land mensuration); the increased internal organisation of, and external trade in, agricultural products which stimulated the development of writing, accounting and all the non-religious apparatus of state; and so on. (The earliest conception of writing itself comes from soil tillage; the Latin word for a written line is versus, cf. english verse, something "turned over", derived from that for scratching a line in the soil with a plow; that for the completion of a line, boustrophedon, means in Greek literally "oxen turning".1) Agriculture then is the material root of culture. It is entirely apt therefore that it is also the semantic root of that idea: culture the action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage, husbandry; the cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners, etc.), improvement or refinement by education and training. (Oxford English 1

See Thass-Thienemann 1973, p. 387, quoted in Schumacher 1989, p. 58. The latter is a fascinating source for pondering the profundity of practice for culture.

Dictionary, 1971) Agriculture as our forebears knew it was the art and science of taking an alien landscape, with its own interests, purposes and dynamics, and transforming it into an artificial condition where it yielded maximum value to the human sub-system. In similar fashion, the root of civilisation lay in the taking of natural wild humans and through patient, disciplined activities transforming them into smoothly integrated, valuably productive members of the human subsystem. (Culture is a technique/technology.) Both processes involve the idea of revealing potential order hidden beneath a wilder, so cruder and more chaotic, dynamics and doing so through amplifying the valuable properties characterising that order. Both the development of agriculture and urbanculture has been a long and arduous one, scarcely concluded, or even mature. After twenty millennia of agricultural practice we are on the one hand only just now on the brink of being able to transform nature into a wholly human artefact. On the other hand we find ourselves, as ever, teetering between a richly productive, sustainable system and degeneration into chaos. (Indeed, the same conditions of systems complexity support both.) And after twenty millennia we are only just now learning to understand those complex dynamical systems which form the whole framework for human life, including its agricultural base, namely our created social institutions and indeed ourselves; yet here too we find ourselves now teetering on the balance between an unlimited development of civilisation and a degeneration into a new social and personal chaos. The business of gaining the right conception of agriculture, therefore, stands at the centre of gaining a right conception of our whole civilisation, of our historical tenure of this planet and of our future potential as a species. More than for any other study we may see our little cosmos reflected in agriculture's grains of turned sand. Conversely, gaining a more adequate conception of ourselves in planetry context will lead to a deeper insight into our agriculture. In this paper I shall not be able to describe in full even our little cosmos -- and not only from want of space but from want of understanding, both mine personally and our species collectively. These limitations suit my task, for here I wish to focus just on a framework of ideas within which to think through values in agriculture. It is to this more modest aim that I now turn. 2.

Values are Expressed as Systems Designs

In our Western European liberal culture it is typical to think of values as abstract, private and subjective, contrasting these with facts which are concrete, public and objective. Science is to provide us with an account of what the facts are and it is the canons of scientific method itself which ensures the objectivity of facts. In this conception agriculture is a science, a joint application of the various natural sciences with economic science. So it too belongs to the concrete, public and objective side of this deep divide. It shares nothing in common with values. This view of things is simplistic and fallacious many times over.2 That life is more 2

This conclusion itself is a very old one, but has been re-discovered recently more or less simultaneously across the intellectual landscape from abstract theory of science, through the practice of applied science and technology to the sociology of knowledge and culture. However, I caution in advance against the equally popular move of leaping to the opposite extreme and concluding that all human knowledge and practice is privately and subjectively justified only, hence publicly arbitrary, a matter only for power politics. For this leap shares with its opposite the great divide itself as a presupposition. But it is just this which needs criticism. The literature on these contemporary grand movements is legion whether argued philosophically in the abstract general case or argued in the particular in every domain of knowledge and practice. Here I include only a very few selected works. For the great divide

complex than the simple dichotomy presented above is evident immediately upon reflection. Logic and mathematics, e.g., are highly abstract and in some sense clearly human creations, yet they are among our very strongest examples of bodies of knowledge which are public, objective and not at all subject to the arbitrary whims of individuals or powerful groups. Moreover they are not at all ethereal; the trains glide smoothly to a halt in Tokyo stations using computers run on a system of fuzzy logic, a system with significantly different properties to the classical Boolean logic running the standard computers which perform myriad daily concrete tasks. Transportation systems in the western world typically place an objective value on human life of somewhere around $400,000. This is arrived at by considering the increased risk of death which people regularly trade off against the convenience of travelling by private motor vehicle instead of by public transport.3 None of us, if consulted, would publicly agree that this was our private, subjective valuing of our lives. Yet all of us betray that private conviction with our public behaviour, and it is our public behaviour which ultimately counts when it comes to the practical consequences of values. So it is with agricultural practice also. The transport system does not come bearing road signs: 'Value of Human Life $400,000' or make any similar public declaration. Rather it has been our collective public choice to support the development of a transportation system with a factual design which manifests or realises that valuing for each one of us. The value is realised concretely in the design of the system: in the width of roads we have agreed to pay for, in regulations governing seatbelts, in steering wheel composition and behaviour under collision in the cars we agree to buy, and so on. Public values are realized in the designs of public systems, just as private values are realised in the designs of individual lives. It is exactly the same with public facts. Public facts, that is those factual claims intersubjectively endorsed by an appropriate community, are the products of a cooperative process and their design manifests or realises the value judgements which characterise that process. At the present time the most adequate known public processes for the creation of public facts are those collectively called the scientific method. The adequate community is the community of scientists and technologists whose institutionalised exchanges of information, criticism and technical practices constitute the conduct of that method. The values which that process manifests in its theoretical and practical laboratory products, more or less unobviously, are (ideally) the cognitive ones: empirical adequacy; explanatory depth, scope and precision; technological applicability and reliability; theoretical fecundity and so on. It would take me too far afield from the present topic to explore and defend this conception of science and the factual, but this is the balanced view which I believe emerges from the wave of anti-empiricist criticism of science over the past two decades and to which I alluded earlier as avoiding both the empiricist illusion that science is value-free and the opposite illusion that there is no distinctive knowledge process accessible to humans.4 between facts and values see e.g. Achinstein and Barker 1969, Unger 1975, Vickers 1968, 1983. For general arguments that science cannot be made value-free in this way, see e.g. Easlea 1973, Hooker 1987 (esp. chapter 7), Leach 1976. The leap into public arbitrariness (private justification only) and subjectivity is made, each in their own way, e.g. by sociologists of knowledge, many Marxists, anarchists such as Feyerabend 1978a, b (in one mode) and so on; for convenient reviews and (sometimes) critiques see Hooker 1987, 1989b, Rorty 1982, Trigg 1980. 3

One way to determine this value is to equate the income value of the time saved to the increased probability of being killed (which can be calculated per passenger kilometre from available statistics) multiplied by the value placed on one's life. Various other surrogates can be constructed for the value of switching to the private motor vehicle; they all arrive at roughly similar figures. 4

For a defence of this conception of science see e.g. Shapere 1984, Trigg 1980. For my own version of it, and its embedding in a wider conception of the biology of knowing, see

The lesson I want to draw here is that public facts and public values are intimately intertwined. Public facts are created through a public valuing process. Public values are manifested or realised in the public design facts of public systems. Indeed, facts and values are themselves best viewed, in my judgement, as the specialised outcomes of a more fundamental judgement process which precedes both. "The judgement is the basic entity; a factual judgement has a normative dimension, for every factual judgement involves a deliberate selection, a deliberate design of the observing instrumentation; conversely, a normative judgement has a factual dimension, for every normative judgement presumes an actual situation which structures the factors whaich are relevant and determines the terms in which the judgement is made.... The primary form learning takes is the evolution of an increasingly rich and differentiated framework - cognitive and/or affective." (Hooker 1987, p. 241). We shall only be able to deal adequately with human processes when we take a whole systems approach that is adequate to incorporate both factual and valuing aspects. This is dramatically clear in the case of contemporary agriculture which has transformed natural species and ecosystems into human designed species and ecosystems. An agricultural system is a human artifact, that is, an art-in-fact. It is the realisation of human value judgements in the design facts of the agricultural system. Like the transport system, the design of our agricultural system has arisen from a myriad public decisions by us all. It reflects in its design a myriad human values, including various cultural and economic values of foodstuffs; the various ethical and economic values of animal lives, including quality of life; social and cultural values attached to natural and artificial ecosystems, and to various rural lifestyles; the political and economic values of food security, diversity and medical safety; and so on. To understand the values in agricultural systems we must fasten our attention on the factual designs of those systems. Conversely, once we do so we understand that the manifestation of values in factual agricultural systems designs is the very root and foundation of understanding agricultural systems. What then of the notion that an agricultural system is what eventuates from the joint application of objective natural science and objective economic science and so is value-free? It is wrong twice over. But, contrary to currently popular radicalism, I do not resist this valuefreeness on the ground that science is filled with social and political value judgements. It is of course true that our scientific institutions are not in fact wholly or ideally devoted to cognitive ends, nor could they be since in practice their realisation is bound up with also realising public safety, wealth, foreign policy goals and a host of other operative socioeconomic ends; but this need not, and does not, disable science and is a separate issue from the present contention.5 I resist this conclusion first on the grounds that our natural and economic sciences themselves express fundamental value judgements qua sciences (see above). Secondly, and more importantly, agriculture is not a purely cognitive artifact. Agriculture is the result of applying natural and economic science to produce an artifact with much wider purposes than purely cognitive ones. The result of applying any science to produce a technological artifact of this kind carries many more value judgements than is manifested in the construction of the science itself. The science of chemistry has as a subbranch the science of combustion and this science may in turn be applied to develop explosives. The characters of those explosives (e.g. their reliability and controllability) will reflect those cognitive values which have contributed to our construction of the objective knowledge of combustion. But the actual explosives which we design when applying combustion science, ranging from useful diesel engines to deadly military weapons, also build in the socio-political value judgements which reflect our larger purposes in their use. Hooker 1987, 1993a, Hahlweg and Hooker 1989a. 5

Insofar as science pursues cognitive values alone, I propose not to quarrel with it here. (One can of course quarrel with the real social institutions of science, which are not wholly devoted to cognitive values.) But even here there is scope for careful enquiry into the constraints which we currently take those cognitive value judgements to impose, from sexist bias, see e.g. Keller 1985, to various forms of cultural bias, see e.g. Bohm 1980, Easlea 1973.

So it is with agriculture. The choice, e.g., to base one's agricultural design on certain kinds of economic principles, say market competition as opposed to socialist planning, and on these principles alone, represents a plethora of fundamental value judgements, e.g. that priority is to be determined by human use value expressed through human consumption demands. Again, one wont find this value explicitly or obviously written on some obvious design feature of our agriculture, it will implicitly manifest in the priority of production efficiency over ecological sustainability and other equally complex and indirect design features. But these are the crucial features. Therefore I offer a simple definition of the agricultural professional: A person who takes responsibility for the design and management of agricultural systems. From the point of view of understanding value analysis in agriculture it is the design component here which is prior and central, for management is management-true-to-design. And management practice itself has a design, a design which manifests basic process value judgements. Agricultural professionals are the designing supporters of designed artifacts, of art-in-facts. Those designs are nothing less than the cradle of human civilisation. The values realised in those designs are at the foundation of everything that we hold valuable in civilised human life. And those designs must be systems designs. 3.

Example: Agriculture and Vulnerability for Sweden

Sweden has a Secretariat for Futures Studies. Formed in 1972 its mandate is to discuss the longer-term future choices facing Swedish society. Their published studies have included an investigation of future energy options, of social trends and options in caring for children and the elderly, for the place of Sweden as a small nation in world society and studies on futures methodology generally. Among these studies is one on the vulnerability of Swedish agriculture. (See the summary report in English in Swedish Secretariat 1982.) It will serve to nicely illustrate the range of values which are involved in the design of agricultural systems. For the Swedish study vulnerability is a systems concept. A system is vulnerable to the extent that its functioning can be disturbed by external perturbations. Let us say that a society is socially vulnerable to the extent that its departures from current functioning represent important social costs (according to that society's value judgements). A system is vulnerable, then, to the extent that it is not autonomous, that is to the extent to which it depends upon particular external inputs from its environment for its present functioning.6 The Swedish vulnerability study includes not only the agricultural system, but also the information technology, ecological and the social welfare systems. A report on the study remarks Gains in social welfare [cf. agricultural production] have often been won at the expense of increased vulnerability. In striving for ever greater efficiency a number of stabilizing and self-regulatory functions in society have ceased to operate but have not been replaced by new ones. For instance, what used to be acts of 'neighbourly kindness' [cf. also land care, etc.] have been replaced by monetary allowances from central or local government, which cannot fulfil all the regulating functions that solidarity among a small group of people [cf. rural community] used to provide. The self-regulating function that internal control or informal control among people plays in the society is thus diminished. Other factors that weaken internal control are the hindrances to the emotionally-based social relations that modern society has brought. 6

This characterisation is technically loose; it does not distinguish e.g. between costs incurred while a stable system transitorily returns to its equilibrium values, when a metastable system shifts to a new equilibrium and when an unstable system shifts and must be exogenously stabilised. But while such distinctions are relevant for the distinction between chemically stabilised agriculture and certain organic agricultures, the discussion here can proceed happily at a general level.

Because children to a large extent create their own personalities by learning from models and identification, it is important for the vulnerability of society that their models, i.e. parents and other educators, be content with their own lives, feel secure and have self-esteem and a goal in life. If the parents lack self-esteem; if they are not firmly rooted in society (for instance by being torn from a familiar environment, by being unemployed or by being unable to meet the demands that are made on them), then the next generation will tend to be more vulnerable than the preceding one. Hundreds of thousands of people in Sweden in the last few decades have been forced to leave their homes and look for work in completely new surroundings. The modern residential areas in which these people usually land encourage a life-style that may make it impossible for any informal control to evolve. Society is then increasingly forced to rely on formal control, i.e. police, the courts, social welfare and penal institutions [cf. e.g. agricultural market signals, chemical advice]. This increased reliance on formal control risks further increases in the social vulnerability among broad strata of the population. When society's ability to solve its problems fails, the individual's resources are put to the test. Members of marginalized groups in society [cf. farmers] are the ones hardest hit; they have no reserves to rely on in a crisis. Increased vulnerability may thus be viewed as a side-effect in a society that has improved in various other respects. It can also be viewed as a change in vulnerability, as much of the driving force in the development of the society has been the wish to make people more secure and less vulnerable. The nature and degree of vulnerability that can be accepted is a political question. Which vulnerability should be exchanged for which? -- Just as the choice of the vulnerable unit to study is a political choice, so also are the threats that are accepted in order to reduce that vulnerability. If uranium is preferred to or used together with oil, it will cause new and multidimensional dependence and consequent vulnerability. If material vulnerability from technology is to be exchanged for an eventual social and ecological vulnerability stemming from the technological system, that too is a political decision. These considerations apply directly to Australia. The design changes of the past century, e.g., have seen a massive demographic shift from the countryside to the city, a shift which is currently being accelerated once again. But while rural communities have their advantages and disadvantages, their social closedness to match their social supportiveness, only recently some Australian social agencies have begun to recognise here and there the value of the social supportiveness to be found in rural communities. Recent programs for the location of single parent families, especially of socially isolated young mothers, to rural communities e.g. have had some significant successes. As a perspective on the current economically driven disruption of our rural economy and society the reader is invited to reread the above passage substituting 'agricultural production' for 'social welfare'; 'ecological care' for 'neighbourly kindness' and the like. The agricultural component of these studies focused on + stergB rda Farm, a small but productive mixed farming operation. The precise details don't really concern us here but Table 1 reproduces the study's analysis of + stergB rda Farm, completed in 1979-80. On the basis of this and allied studies the following trends were noted. (1) An increase in scale. + stergB rda Farm more than doubled its arable land, number of cattle and hogs. (2) An increase in agricultural productivity. Yields of milk per cow, crops per hectare, etc. all increased. (3) A decrease in labour input. (4) Increased usage of agricultural machinery. The number and cost of machines has increased more rapidly than the decline in labour. (5) Increase in energy intensiveness. The increased intensity of use of machinery, fertilizers and pesticides all contribute to increased energy intensiveness through the energy required both to produce them and to deliver their services. At the same time there is decreasing marginal return in farm output for increasing energy input. (6) Increased reliance on stable external energy supply. Power failures, e.g., would soon cause difficulties in the large poultry houses and in the fully mechanised piggeries, which rely on ventilation and heating, and mechanised

supply of water and food. (7) There is also an increased reliance on agricultural fertilisers and pesticides, particularly marked is the large increase in variety and quantity of pesticides 1958-78. (8) Increasing reliance on genetic services, both special breeds of crop plants and genetic shaping of livestock population through artificial insemination programs. In short, there is a widespread and fundamental redesign of the Swedish agricultural system under way, illustrated by the changes in + stergB rda Farm as a microcosm. insert table 1 about here The study goes on to note a variety of consequences to this system redesign. In this the study focuses on foreign dependency and hence vulnerability to foreign-initiated disruption beyond Sweden's control. It is noted, e.g., that in the drive for increased productivity, Sweden imported in 1980 about 350,000 tonnes of concentrated fodder (soymeal, cotton cakes, etc.), corresponding to approximately 400,000,000 kronor in external payments, primarily to the USA, Indonesia, the Philippines and various Latin American countries. About 50% of the machines on Swedish farms are imported; moreover, the proportion of imported parts in the Swedish-made machines has increased, coming typically from European countries. All pesticides are ultimately imported, whether as finished products or as component materials necessary for their manufacture. Like the capacity to produce specialised, imported agricultural machinery, a consequence here is that Sweden lacks both the specific industrial skills and industrial infrastructure to produce these commodities. The greater part of the raw materials for fertiliser are also imported. As the study remarks, all of these import dependencies make Swedish agriculture highly vulnerable to production and pricing changes in other countries, or to outright disruption in the event of hostilities or internal collapse in the exporting country. Claims are reported that the humic content of Swedish soils is declining, possibly because of elimination of soil species through pesticide use combined with intensive fertilisation and cultivation. Sweden imports rock phosphate from Morocco and the USA and the study notes that, because of its significant levels of cadmium, previous fertilisation has led to an increase of cadmium in Swedish soil 'the consequences of which ought to be observed in the long run.' The study goes on to note that the intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides threatens to degrade the Swedish ecology and thereby to produce internal disruptions of its own. Finally, the study notes that the increasing emphasis on genetic services leads to an increasing Swedish dependence on imported gene stock and vulnerability to competition from genetic improvements made in competitive countries. To these reflections I would add that the increased demand for energy, and in steady supply, places increasingly tight constraints on Swedish energy policy; the reduction in farm labour increases Swedish urban centralisation, increases the numbers of socially uprooted people and so on as spoken of in the earlier lengthy quote. The steady industrialisation of Swedish agriculture ramifies throughout Swedish society. It impacts on the ecology, on demography and lifestyle, on industrial structure and policy, on economic performance and on foreign policy. In permitting or encouraging those design changes to occur, therefore, Swedes have not only been affirming their valuing of the food products of + stergB rda Farm, they have, whether they like it or not, also been affirming the priority of agricultural price competitiveness over costs of social dislocation; de-valuing such future risks to future generations as may be posed by soil degradation against current benefits to themselves; affirming the greater value of Swedish engagement with the world economy over a policy of autonomous self-containment and so on. It is clear that these are all fundamental value judgements because they play a fundamental role in shaping the design of Swedish society. Ultimately, the quality of Swedish life will be determined by such design shaping decisions. To gain a sense for this, the reader is invited to reflect yet again on the lengthy passage concerning social care and welfare quoted above, once again with the agricultural parallel in mind. We should think then of Australian agriculture as a subsystem of the whole Australian system. We should think of the design of that subsystem not only in itself reflecting the full

plenum of societal values but as interacting with the design of the larger system of which it is a component, so that the importance of its design values ramifies throughout the society. (The same will be true of the designs of other subsystems, such as the transport system, education system, energy system and so on.) But of course agriculture has not always been approached in this larger system design and value context. 4.

A Berry Agricultural Agenda

No one has more ably pointed this out than Berry in his pioneering classic The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977). Berry's book is a response to what he sees to be the major features of contemporary American agriculture, namely an exploitative approach, dominated by narrow economic considerations and characterised by uncaring, thoughtless, short-term thinking and an urban-oriented consumerist alienation from the land. Berry traces these attitudes back to roots which he finds buried deep in American history and culture. According to Berry, the European approach to the American continent has always been characterised by rootlessness, avarice and fantasy, typified in the Spanish conquests, the wild exploitation of the fur trade and the gold rushes. As Berry sees it, the development of American agriculture, industrial structure and the expansion of urban centres has been undertaken with essentially the same attitudes. As against this, Berry acknowledges that there has always been an undercurrent deriving from a different cultural and historical outlook, the local rural settlement culture of small farmers who knew their locality as their home and wished to settle there permanently, seeing it as an inheritance for their children and grandchildren. But according to Berry this strand has always been submerged beneath the exploitative strand, the settlers have always been uprooted by the rootless short-term 'developers'. And now today Berry sees the final industrial assault on the farming community, the agro-industrialisation of farming which will complete the century-long process of uprooting farmers from their communities, of transforming farms from places of cultivation (culture-ation) into places of industrial exploitation -- in short, the unsettling of America. As against this Berry wishes to place a cultural vision of small farmer settlers and the land and culture they cultivate. Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurterer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization: that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. (pp.7-8) Agriculture is dominated by the sensibilities, i.e. by the values and reinforcing perceptions, of exploiters. Berry predicts a nasty future: The cost of this corporate totalitarianism in energy, land, and social disruption will be enormous. It will lead to the exhaustion of farmland and farm culture. Husbandry will become an extractive industry; because maintenance will entirely give way to production, the fertility of the soil will become a limited, unrenewable resource like coal or oil. (p.10)

Meanwhile, the dust clouds rise again over Texas and Oklahoma. "Snirt" is falling in Kansas. Snow drifts in Iowa and the Dakatos are black with blown soil. The fields lose their humus and porosity, become less retentive of water, depend more on pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers. Bigger tractors become necessary because the compacted soils are harder to work -- and their greater weight further compacts the soil. More and better machines, more chemical and methodological shortcuts are needed because of the shortage of manpower on the farm -- and the problems of overcrowding and unemployment increase in the cities. It is estimated that it now costs (by erosion) two bushels of Iowa topsoil to grow one bushel of corn. It is variously estimated that from five to twelve calories of fossil fuel energy are required to produce one calorie of hybrid corn energy. An official of the National Farmers Union says that "a farmer who earns $10,000 to $12,000 a year typically leaves an estate valued at about $320,000' -- which means that when the farm is financed again, either by a purchaser or by an heir (to pay the inheritance taxes), it simply cannot support its new owner and pay for itself. And the Progressive Farmer predicts the disappearance of 200,000 to 400,000 farms each year during the next twenty years if the present trend continues. (pp.10-11) Berry wrote these words in 1976; fifteen years later we know that this dismal picture has proven roughly correct, especially in terms of farmer bankruptcies, and not just here but elsewhere as well, perhaps most poignantly in the agriculture-created desert which has appeared in southern Russia over the past twenty years and of course in our direct Australian experience of farming bankruptcies and soil degradation. This remains true despite, indeed in direct relation to, western economies currently being awash with farm surpluses. Like the current oil glut despite declining world reserves, this paradoxical coincidence only testifies to the well-known deficiencies of the market, e.g. its short-term, unecological or commodityfragmented outlook. With respect to the systemic economic transformations here, Berry quotes from Heady (1976): The input-processing industry now supplies many things that were once produced on the farm. Today tractors substitute for draft animals, fossil fuels for animal feeds, chemical fertilizers for manure and nitrogen-fixing crops. Such developments not only have shifted a greater proportion of the agricultural work force from the farms into the input-processing sector but also have increased the cash cost of farming .... The greater proportion of cash cost has made farm profits much more vulnerable to price fluctuations than they used to be. The food-processing sector has in recent years come to represent a larger proportion of the total agricultural industry than farming itself. In 1975, 42 cents of each consumer dollar spent for food at retail prices went to the farmer and 58 cents to the food processor. Even the typical commercial farm family now buys frozen, packaged and ready-to-serve foods from the supermarket rather than consuming products raised and prepared on the farm. (164-5) Here we find the positive feedback cycles which destabilise the 19th century settler-farmer rural structure. Industrial agricultural methods provide sufficient increase in farming productivity to keep farm produce cheap in relation to urban industrial products, on the one hand thereby generating surplus capital in industrial hands and subject to industrial agendas and on the other hand subjecting the farmer to increasing requirements for capital to purchase both farm inputs and his own consumer items. The net result is the steady industrialisation of agriculture with all of its attendant consequences. (Only in western Europe have these industrialisation trends been partially resisted, and only there at the enormous expense of billions of dollars in farm subsidies and international 'war' in subsidised farm products.) These economic systems dynamics will re-emerge in a developing nations setting at section 15 where we shall see that they were recognised years before by E.F. Schumacher.

For Berry the roots of this condition are spiritual and cultural, not merely economic: This gluttonous enterprise of ugliness, waste, and fraud thrives in the disastrous breach it has helped to make between our bodies and our souls. As a people, we have lost sight of the profound communion -- even the union -- of the inner with the outer life. Confucius said: "If a man have not order within him / He can not spread order about him ...." Surrounded as we are by evidence of the disorders of our souls and our world, we feel the strong truth is those words as well as the possibility of healing that is in them. We see the likelihood that our surroundings, from our clothes to our countryside, are the products of our inward life -- our spirit, our vision -- as much as they are products of nature and work. ... We have millions ... whose livelihoods, amusements, and comforts are all destructive, who nevertheless wish to live in a healthy environment; they want to run their recreational engines in clean, fresh air. There is now, in fact, no "benefit" that is not associated with disaster. That is because power can be disposed morally or harmlessly only by thoroughly unified characters and communities. (11-12) Berry's ideal of a whole, healthy community is, as he himself makes clear, derived from Jeffersonian notions of democracy, the ideal of robust, independent individuals who from their own farming-based autonomy intelligently and morally cooperate to form an enlightened, caring, democratic community. In a more industrial context than Jefferson knew, the vision reappears as that of a responsible consumer. A responsible consumer would be a critical consumer, would refuse to purchase the less good. And he would be a moderate consumer; he would know his needs and would not purchase what he did not need; he would sort among his needs and study to reduce them. These things, of course, have been often said, though in our time they have not been said very loudly and have not been much heeded. In our time the rule among consumers has been to spend money recklessly. People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is "attractively packaged." The advertising industry is founded upon this principle. What has not been often said, because it did not need to be said until fairly recent times, is that the responsible consumer must also be in some way a producer. Out of his own resources and skills, he must be equal to some of his own needs. The household that prepares its own meals in its own kitchen with some intelligent regard for nutritional value, and thus depends on the grocer only for selected raw materials, exercises an influence on the food industry that reaches from the store all the way back to the seedsman. The household that produces some or all of its own food will have a proportionately greater influence. The household that can provide some of its own pleasures will not be helplessly dependent on the entertainment industry, will influence it by not being helplessly dependent on it, and will not support it thoughtlessly out of boredom. The responsible consumer thus escapes the limits of his own dissatisfaction. He can choose, and exert the influence of his choosing, because he has given himself choices. He is not confined to the negativity of his complaint. He influences the market by his freedom. This is no specialized act, but an act that is substantial and complex, both practically and morally. By making himself responsibly free, a person changes both his life and his surroundings. It is possible, then, to perceive a critical difference between responsible consumers and consumers who are merely organized. The responsible consumer slips out of the consumer category altogether. He is a responsible consumer incidentally, almost

inadvertently; he is a responsible consumer because he lives a responsible life. (24-25) The responsible person will certainly wish to see selected wilderness areas preserved; Berry gives three reasons for doing so: (i) to preserve the memory of our biological and cultural roots in nature; (ii) as a permanent exercise of moral restraint in leaving some part of this planet deliberately alone, unmoulded by us; and (iii) to preserve a standard against which our own interventions can be assessed for their wisdom. But the responsible life must certainly face the necessity of intervening in nature on our own behalf. Here the key notion is that of "kindly use". But we cannot hope -- for reasons practical and human, we cannot even wish -- to preserve more than a small portion of the land in wilderness. Most of it we will have to use. The conservation mentality swings from self-righteous outrage to selfdeprecation because it has neglected this issue. Its self-contradictions can only be reconciled -- and the conservation impulse made to function as ubiquitously and variously as it needs to -- by understanding, imagining, and living out the possibility of "kindly use." Only that can dissolve the boundaries that divide people from the land and its care, which together are the source of human life. There are many kinds of land use, but the one that is most widespread and in need of consideration is that of agriculture. For us, the possibility of kindly use is weighted with problems. In the first place, this is not ultimately an organizational or institutional solution. Institutional solutions tend to narrow and simplify as they approach action. A large number of people can act together only by defining the point or the line on which their various interests converge. Organizations tend to move toward single objectives -- a ruling, a vote, a law -- and they find it relatively simple to cohere under acronyms and slogans. But kindly use is a concept that of necessity broadens, becoming more complex and diverse, as it approaches action. The land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment. The use of land cannot be both general and kindly -- just as the forms of good manners, generally applied (applied, that is, without consideration of differences), are experienced as indifference, bad manners. To treat every field, or every part of every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry. Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. As knowledge (hence, use) is generalized, essential values are destroyed. As the householder evolves into a consumer, the farm evolves into a factory -- with results that are potentially calamitous for both. (30-31) From there it is easy to see how economic considerations come to dominate agricultural rationality, how industrial categories come to dominate agricultural thinking. The ultimate cultural denouement of this approach is the description of 'agro-power' as a political tool, food as a weapon. In all of this Berry sees the unsettling not merely of the American land, but of the American culture, way of life and psyche itself. Berry himself advocates, as might be expected, a rejection of this process of industrialisation of agriculture. He wants a return to more 'organic' farming methods planned on a sustainable basis. In this he can be recognised as an ally of the contemporary Green movements. In the same spirit he is a clear advocate of the 'small is beautiful' philosophy and argues for a return to the small farming communities with their intimate knowledge of their own land and care for one another. Further still, as intimated earlier, Berry believes that this will enable a return to an ideal of democracy in which each individual family has a dignity and responsibility deriving from its direct farming-based autonomy. Only then, Berry believes, can America be socially and spiritually healed and whole. It is not my intention here to defend Berry's vision as the correct one. For a start it

would require reversing a migration from countryside to city which has been going on for more than a century and has still more complex causes than even Berry considers (e.g. wealth creation, variety and anonymity of cities). Reversing this process is not, perhaps, impossible, but it would not be easy - it would require modifying a core dynamic of economic markets (see section 15) with wholesale urban and agricultural re-design - and would come at a substantial cost (as is demonstrated by the current size of the European Economic Community agricultural subsidy for merely delaying the process). Moreover, people may often value family farms more as romantic cultural idealisations than for their agricultural reality; they often have not been the idyllic, environmentally enlightened places urban folk would like to imagine. (On all these considerations see also Comstock 1987, Galston 1985, Office of Technology Assessment 1986 and the discussion in Philosophy & Public Policy, 8, #3, 1988.) For what it's worth, my own view is that Berry's conception of wholeness and health and its presupposition of a responsible life is an essential part of the truth about us, but Berry's rejection of industrialisation is one-sided and even malicious (it neglects, e.g., the many benefits which industrialisation has also brought) and his Jeffersonian democratic ideal is both unworkable in our time and tinged with at least as much fantasy as ever the fur traders and gold rushers displayed. What we need is a more sophisticated, but not less penetrating and holistic conception of a viable post-20th century life which provides an appropriate sustainable role for our relationship to our land. The point of discussing Berry is precisely to support this claim because his study shows that, no matter how distant the 'country' seems from the city, agriculture and culture are intimately connected. Berry's analysis is deeper than merely pitting conservationist principles against agribusiness. Earlier in his book Berry notes that 'some of our largest and most respected conservation organisations own stock in the very corporations and industries that have been notorious for their destructiveness and for their indifference to the concerns of conservationists.' This included the Sierra Club which published Berry's own book. This kind of fragmentation, of policy schizophrenia, was possible, argues Berry, only because these organisations had unconsciously imbibed the fragmentation characterising the whole American community (see quotes above). The goals of sustainable development are no doubt laudatory and it is both easy and satisfying to become absorbed in arguing these goals against the current goals of agri-business. But in so doing we may be inadvertently promoting the very fragmentation and superficiality which will ultimately lead to their unsettling. Even so simple a move as an agreement to discuss the 'agricultural sector' already confines our conceptual categories to those which presuppose the fragmentation of our society into economic components. The notion of sustainability itself may unconsciously imbibe the simplified, short-term perspective of the industrial sector; after all, the evolutionary process of life on this planet is not sustainable in any sense of long-term staticness but shows the most bewildering dynamic complexity and just this may be essential for its viability. Berry's analysis provides us, if not the most suitable ideal, the intellectual standards for an adequate analysis of agriculture and values. We are enjoined to think through the entire structure of a meaningful life in all its dimensions and within that structure to find a proper and penetrating place for our relationship with natural ecosystems, a place that recognises the essential role of productivity in human responsibility and caring, ultimately a place that recognises the roots of our culture in our agriculture taken in its broadest sense. To this we may add the Swedish vulnerability study which teaches us the manifold interactions between agricultural practice and urban society, e.g. health impacts of fertiliser use, economic impacts of agricultural machinery use. Together these analyses add up to a thoroughgoing agenda for developing an understanding and practice for agriculture. 5.

System and Agenda: Changing Conceptions of Agricultural Systems

The agricultural agenda called for here clearly requires an adequate systems conception of agriculture, i.e. of agriculture as a complex set of interrelationships among soil and water, crops and livestock, 'non-economic' creatures (insects, birds, etc.), technologies and humans, with all of the practices which each of the living species brings. This whole

makes up a complex adaptive system yielding a characteristic dynamics and realising a characteristic set of values in its design. The dynamics and values are much more complex than any simplistic production/pest structure. It is instructive to look at the contents of a book like Squires and Tow (1992), Dryland Farming: A Systems Approach, which includes e.g. soil management, crop-pasture-livestock interrelations, systems sustainablity and goals analysis and systems modelling-monitoring-evaluation. If we think of agriculture too narrowly, e.g. simply as sellable food production, then it will not provide a suitable set of references within which to think about the expression of values in practice. In time past one may have thought of agriculture as simply farming or, more recently, perhaps as a specific kind of production technology. If this is done then the notion of agriculture will either be confined to some specific material practices in an assumed social setting (agriculture as farming) or equally confined to a collection of formally specified technological objects and procedures (agriculture as productive technology). In either case the conception will be too narrow to provide any adequate foundation for understanding the interrelations between our culture and our agriculture, or indeed for understanding the realisation of values in the design of agriculture at all. Instead, the temptation would be to consider agriculture as somehow a value-neutral collection of objects. The complement to this deficiency is an empirically inadequate understanding of agricultural behaviour itself. A farm viewed as a collection of products and constraints will permanently surprise because of the complexity of its responses. One thinks here, e.g., of the well-known surprises resulting from the application of pesticides in the same mental mode as one might intervene with a Meccano toy. (The classic is Rachel Carson's 1963 Silent Spring.) The side effect syndrome will reign supreme: each intervention being met by a stream of unlooked-for negative consequences surrounding the intended positive one, with attempts to correct them in turn generating a further situation of the same kind and the whole series typically continuing to oscillate or even grow disastrously rather than damp down over time, e.g. nutrient -> waterway -> algae bloom -> chemical suppressant -> plant, fish poisoning -> ..... However, there has in recent years been an increasingly widespread recognition of the need for a more complex empirical conception of agriculture. This has been a part of a much wider movement in science to recognise and attempt to understand what we could call organised complexity. Weaver (1948) has remarked that the science of the Enlightenment taught us how to deal with organised simplicity while nineteenth century science taught us how to deal with disorganised complexity (thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, etc.). The challenge for twentieth century science is to learn how to deal with organised complexity. And indeed all of the truly distinctive sciences of the 20th century are oriented around just this problem. While it is true that quantum mechanics and relativity theory, molecular biology and so on represent distinctive scientific theories of this century, the sciences of which they form a part have a much longer history. But the truly distinctive sciences of this century are these: information theory, cybernetics, operations research, decision theory, systems theory, hierarchy theory, control theory, bond-graph theory ... It is remarkable how a variety of branches of these theories have emerged almost simultaneously in many different disciplines (e.g. the concept of self-organising systems which has emerged almost simultaneously in engineering, biology, psychology, management and medicine).7 The common focus of all these theories is the understanding and control of organised complex systems. The emergence of these disciplines represents, I believe, a great cognitive ground7

A note of warning: systems theory is as yet in its infancy, basic concepts are still illunderstood, and much that is claimed for its present expositions is likely to prove unfounded. This is certainly so with the otherwise attractive notion of self-organisation; for an introduction see e.g. Allen 1983, Depew et al. 1987, Dress et al. 1986, Dyke 1988, Eigen 1981, Haken 1977, Nicolis 1986, Pagels 1988, Peacocke 1983, Pines 1988, Prigogine and Stengers 1984, Rosen 1985, Salthe 1985, 1989, Trappl 1986, Ulanowicz 1986, Ulrich and Probst 1984 and Winfree 1987.

swell response to the perception of the uniqueness of our species' threshold circumstances in the late 20th century; there is an emerging appreciation of the criticalness of understanding complex systems through their design (on which, see section 8 below). Let us agree that a suitable encompassing framework for them is to be found in some kind of general systems theory. Such theories are now widespread and exfoliating rapidly. Here I wish only to draw attention to their increasing role in agricultural theory and practice. Following Bawden, 1990, we may first distinguish a narrower, pragmatically focused position, which conceives of the farm itself as a purposive or goal-directed operational system and has as its primary objective increase in farm productivity in accordance with the largely economic objectives pursued. The primary goal is optimisation of production, typically through technological re-design, and the primary systems are those of the economically recognised farm inputs, including information and managerial procedures (see e.g. Dillon 1984, Shaner et. al. 1982). There is a mass of operational systems optimisation theory to call upon in pursuing this approach, e.g. through linearisable input-output models, and a wide variety of derived expert systems (see e.g. Jones 1989). Others have criticised the neglect of the wider ecology which is characteristic of this approach (see e.g. Brouwer and Jansen 1989, Holt and Schoorl 1985), opting instead for an agro-ecosystem analysis. Here the primary concept is that of a managed natural ecosystem (Lowrance et. al. 1984). There is a tendency here to suffer from the reverse problem of neglect of managerial and economic perspectives, and Bawden notes a tendency to make large claims about the systems dynamics character of both natural and designed agricultural systems (e.g. that they are self-organising, or stable). But insisting that the total ecological system be the ultimate framework from within which agriculture is understood provides a welcome expansion of perspective and with that a correlative expansion of procedural options for agriculture (e.g. the shift from chemical pesticides to biological control now underway). The increased conceptual systems richness available is reflected in the complexity of the resulting characterisation of agri-ecosystems, cf. e.g. the proposal by Conway (1985, 1987) that agri-ecosystems can only be effectively understood and evaluated against the systems properties of productivity, stability, sustainability and equitability and the addition of autonomy by Marten (1986). The introduction of equitability, a social notion, signals a complementary widening of the system to include the larger socio-economic system in which agriculture is embedded; this is necessary just on economic grounds (e.g. Timmer 1992) but also because, as Berry demonstrates, there are important non-economic values invested in agriculture, including those invested in their occupations by farmers (e.g. Gasson 1973) and because there are wider social factors (e.g. power) which play important roles in the structuring of agricultural systems (e.g. Holt and Schoorl 1985).8 These are indeed complex systems concepts, sufficiently complex to be multiply ambiguous. This is so for three reasons. First, complex adaptive systems show many complexly structured dynamical features. Consider e.g. stability, just mentioned: roughly, a system S in dynamical state D is stable against perturbations of kind P if after some characteristic time tS S returns to D without having departed more than dS from D. But then one has to distinguish all the various kinds of stabilities associated with differing P, including perturbations in inputs (e.g. energy flux), constraints (e.g. technological or territorial changes), initial conditions (e.g. soil moisture, cash available) and in internal conditions (e.g. population numbers or densities, parasite habits, genes). For instance (and very crudely), a system which has evolved in conditions of large constant input, e.g. a tropical ecology or city vis-a-vis energy input, tends to be unstable or fragile against perturbations in that input but stable or resilient against many internal perturbations because of the diversity of specialised species and their numbers, while an ecology which has evolved in uncertain input conditions (an input exhibits substantial and partly random fluctuation), e.g. a polar ecology or rural 8

On these matters see also e.g. Hare et al. 1990, Kingma 1985 and on method here see e.g. Checkland 1984, Hart 1982, Jackson 1982; for more general underpinnings see e.g. Espejo and Harndon 1989, Holling 1978, Levins 1968, cf. Hooker 1984.

community, tends to be made up of less specialised species with lower species numbers and so tends to be resilient to external perturbation but fragile to internal perturbation. If e.g. fuel or food supplies to our cities were cut off, or even seriously reduced, for a few days (fuel) or weeks (food) then they rapidly decay into disorder and this process is difficult to reverse since the inhabitants have no generalised survival skills, but our rural communities would fare much better. For all their impressiveness, our cities, like our tropical coral reefs and rainforests, are among our most fragile systems. But any system is fragile against a suitable perturbation, e.g. our farm systems against increases in capital intensity. (For a more detailed analysis of the systems ambiguity of stability see e.g. Pimm 1991.) Second, these valuable systems properties are ambiguous because of the variety of value judgements which underly them. Consider e.g. the differing valuations of 'noneconomic' species as between the differing systems conceptions of sustainability: sustained agricultural production, agricultural resiliency, economic production, economic resiliency, cultural/socio-economic resiliency, local ecological production, regional ecological resiliency ... With respect to sustained agricultural production, e.g., non-economic species will be valued instrumentally insofar as they contribute efficiently to production over the investment time horizon, for sustained agricultural resiliency they will be valued more intrinsically for their contribution to agricultural system stability but many of their wider biological roles may only be valued against the goal of regional ecological resiliency, while valuing resiliency of the evolutionary process itself may involve ultimately allowing the demise of some of these species. Human cultural resiliency may require us to recognise the healing value of natural environments and so intrinsically value non-economic species for the diversity of life autonomous from human design which they manifest. Further, each of these diverse valuings in turn comprises a bundle of more specific valuings; sustained agricultural production, e.g., involves valuings of specific human foodstuffs in proportion to their dietary significance and further with respect to current cultural practice vis-a-vis their health impacts, and perhaps also in proportion to their economic profitability.9 Third they are also ambiguous as they stand as between primary application to the natural ecology (e.g. sustainability) and primary application to the social ecology (e.g. equitability), there being many possible relations that can hold between these systems. Moreover, the individual concepts may be logically internally complex, even conflicted, in addition to the ambiguity of their systems definition. Consider e.g. equitability. There are two distinct foci to equitability notions, social systems input and output. Equitability at input concerns equality of access, e.g. to health care or to success in the market. Equitability at output concerns equality of distribution, e.g. equal health or wealth. In general one cannot pursue both of these valuable properties simultaneously (consider e.g. the opposite characters of capitalism - ostensible goal: input equity - and communism - ostensible goal: output equity). There is the further, distinct division between unqualified equity and equity in proportion to merit. Aristotle's dictum is to treat equally those of equal merit. Various notions of merit are in current use, e.g. criminality in respect of legal penalties, urgency of need in respect of surgical priority. And there is the additional complication that some of the most obvious forms of equity are actually impossible.10) Clearly, further analysis is required, but I 9

One can offer general characterisations of sustainability, e.g. maintaining agricultural production while increasing environmental and social capital, and these provide helpful orientation; but ultimately the multiple judgements hidden in "production", "capital" and the like must be unpacked. There is now a wealth of literature on sustainable development in general and sustainable agriculture in particular, of which I mention Commonwealth of Australia 1977 (cf. Hare et al. 1990), Cameron and Elix 1991, Meadows et al. 1992, Schmidheiny 1992, and their references. It is instructive to read these diverse sources with the foregoing systems distinctions in mind. 10

It follows, e.g. from elementary considerations of the scarcity and cost of information that strict political equality is never possible and from similar analyses of voting schemes that there is no democratic representation system which is simultaneously rational, decisive and

set that aside here. Bawden himself argues for widening the conception of systems still further so as to encompass the social and psychological processes through which humans come to learn about their agro-ecosystems, develop technologies for these systems and indeed learn about and come to embody their own cultures, develop perceptual orientations toward their environment, form goals directing their agricultural systems and so on. And Hill argues that only when the re-design of agriculture is seen as an integral part of a thorough psycho-social healing process for humanity as a whole, a re-design of self with system, will we be able to en-vision the required alternative holistic 'deep sustainability' designs (e.g. Hill 1990a, b, 1992, 1993a, b, cf. Hooker 1992a on love, environmental responsibility and deep versus shallow ecology). Though Bawden sometimes speaks as if this systems orientation were incompatible with, or in competition to, the before mentioned conceptions, they can be seen as largely complementary once one insists, as Bawden does, on including all the relevant or operative factors in the overall system. We have already seen that this must ultimately include the whole of human life in relations of greater and less directness. Certainly many of the attitudes and procedures which would be excluded from the farm perspective are important for the dynamics of agriculture, e.g. those economic market imperatives which have led to increasing agricultural industrialisation and the culturally reinforced perceptions of the farm as a separate technological device which support those procedures. However, the challenge of understanding organised complexity remains, namely how to reveal its order in sufficiently coherent but simple terms for us to understand and use. The value of contemporary complex systems theories have not been ony that they have forced us to acknowledge the complexity of the real systems within which we live and move and have our being, but that they have begun to provide us with tools with which we can artfully structure our interrelations with those systems so as to represent them in manageable ways while remaining more adequate to their coherent or organized complexities. As our access to energy and information increases, our impact on the design of the planet increases and the urgency of our coming to develop adequate ways to interact with that complex design increases. As Bawden notes, unless as agriculturalists we accept a shift in our thinking and practices of the magnitude of a new paradigm, agriculture and the environments in which it is practiced will be pulled into an ever-declining devolution with catastrophic effects on the well being of mankind and of the environments in which it lives.... The systemic paradigm calls for us to rethink our views of our world (and of the way its interrelated components are patterned) as well as our ways of going about the way we view our world.... In sum, we must be prepared to let go the old and embrace the new science and praxis of complexity. (Bawden, 1990) 6.

Conflict and Agenda in Agricultural Practice and Professional Self-Conception

The system-atic agenda for understanding agriculture which emerges from the analyses of the previous sections has not been the accepted one within the agricultural community. Agriculture was initially simply that set of socially inherited practices which succeeded in providing survival nutrition. More recently it has been understood as a set of productive technologies to be set alongside of other value-neutral technologies for meeting human wants profitably. The first of these understandings is antithetical by neglect, the second antithetical by conception, to the systematic relating of agriculture to value. But ironically it is the conflict with other values, those associated with health, lifestyle, security and caring, which has ultimately forced a reappraisal of this conception. So that there is now available a recognisable agenda for understanding value and system and hence for a new equalitarian, see respectively Downs 1957, Blair and Pollak 1983, cf. Brams 1977. On examination, our rational social notions turn out to be just as ambiguous and paradoxical as do our systems notions.

understanding of the role of the agricultural professional. That agenda was outlined at the close of section 5, and I repeat it here: We are enjoined to think through the entire structure of a meaningful life in all its dimensions and within that structure to find a proper and penetrating place for our relationship with natural ecosystems, a place that recognises the essential role of productivity in human responsibility and caring, ultimately a place that recognises the roots of our culture in our agriculture taken in its broadest sense. To this we may add the Swedish vulnerability study which teaches us the manifold interactions between agricultural practice and urban society, e.g. health impacts of fertiliser use, economic impacts of agricultural machinery use. In short, if we are to properly understand the role of values in relation to agriculture then two things must happen: (1) On the values side we must see agriculture as a manifestation in microcosm of the values which drive the design of the whole of our lives, agriculture as culture. (2) Since values are manifest as systems designs, we must develop an adequate systems conception of agriculture so as to understand its values as the designs of that system. The depths of the requirement of that agenda can only be appreciated through further analysis of our self-induced transformation of ourselves and our planet. Part II is devoted to providing that analytical framework. Part II: Analytical Framework 7.

The Western Change Machine

If we are to properly understand the nature and challenge of agricultural professionalism and policy making in the late 20th century, we must understand our times in their historical context. Traditional human cultures resist change; our western culture promotes change. Environmental change, with agricultural change at its centre, issues in manifold consequences. Science-technology is our newest, and also now our principal, tool for generating and exploiting change. Moreover, in developing that tool we have also changed the nature of science-technology itself and we have changed our own relationship to the future. In doing all this we have changed the fundamental nature of our professional and policy challenges. Unless we can grasp these matters our environmental/agricultural analyses will remain superficial and inept. Think of our society as a complex, dynamic system or, more crudely, as a gigantic machine. Part of this machine is devoted to the systematic creation of new information (science) and processes (technology). Another part is devoted to exploiting the new information and processes to bring about change which is perceived to be economically advantageous. This attitude to change -- that it is fundamentally advantageous and should be exploited -- has a particular importance in western culture. Every other human culture in the history of the planet, so far as I am aware, has resisted change, viewing it as threatening or at least unwise/ignoble, and usually with good reason. So then, if we are to understand the pivotal role which science-technology plays in our culture and the consequences which follow from that role, we shall do well to begin by understanding the place of change in our culture. The rise of western European society is marked by three great transitions in organisation. Each of these transitions concerns a shift from a communal or collective conception of society to an individualist conception, from a fixed or closed normative vision of society to an open, more non-committal one. (1) There was an economic shift from a traditional hierarchical economy to a market economy. The traditional economy of medieval Europe (and before that of the feudal system) was essentially one of tithes and taxes to support the hierarchy of church and nobility, together with local barter. It was dominated by inherited land tenure and agricultural

production distributed vertically through the hierarchy. The market system is dominated by money-based exchange at prices determined by supply and demand. Its social structure derives from competitively acquired capital and private ownership. (2) There was a political transition from the inherited power structure of archbishop and king to that of representative democracy. The inherited power structure was determined by two hierarchical communal institutions, the inherited nobility, based on the inherited ownership of land, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, based on the authority of church procedure (and, in social and economic practice, also on the ownership of land). Representative democracy, by contrast, essentially consists in a parliamentary mini-market in votes. Decisions are reached on essentially the same kinds of calculations of interest as are reached in the economic market, but with each vote representing the interests of the relevant electors. (3) There was a transformation from the traditional communal Catholic Church to the Protestant churches and a significantly 'Protestantised' Catholic Church. The traditional Catholic Church spoke for, and made authoritative decisions for, the community as a whole and the community led its communal life within its framework. Individuals elect to join a Protestant church, following the convictions of their conscience. Protestant churches are formed by groups of such individuals congregating to do so. These three transformations are only very crudely schematised here. Moreover, they took centuries to mature and work their way through the societal system -- even today we carry forward many vestiges of our medieval and even feudal history. Nonetheless, they provide a sufficient caricature of the last four centuries for our purposes here. Each of these changes marks a significant move away from communalism to individualism11, placing a certain kind of individual opportunism or initiative at the forefront of successful life. Economically, those individuals who are able to take advantage of momentary opportunity in the market are the ones who succeed. Politically, those who succeed in acquiring the momentary voting allegiance of others thereby acquire opportunistic political power; they retain that power only by taking the opportunity to continue to acquire voting allegiance through the shifting policies which they adopt. And the religious individual must (perhaps Calvinist predestination aside) take the opportunity to repent and acknowledge a personal relationship to God and, further, show the reality of that relationship through individual initiative in social conduct. A society of the kind which emerged from the Renaissance, then, is ready to see change in a positive light, to see it as advantageous and indeed as an expression of the deeper nature of human life. But it will be little use welcoming change as positive if societal institutions continue to resist it. So it is significant that when these three transformations are united there arises a socio-cultural framework which is peculiarly open to change. It is of the essence of the economic market that it espouses no particular set of values, no particular social or political normative vision of life, no particular set of societal goals to 11

Briefly: Feudal/medieval communal individuals are ciphers for the fixed economic production roles into which they are born, while market individuals act in their own individual interests in the marketplace, buying and selling and offering individual skills for sale as labour, according as it is momentarily advantageous to them. The communal individual played a political role in the process of state only if born into that role (or perhaps able to usurp it with force), while the democratic individual has a nominally equal say with everyone else in the affairs of state and registers that say as a vote in his/her own interest. (This may include a component social and political interest shared in common.) And the communal Catholic whose relationship to God was mediated by the Catholic Church is replaced by the Protestant individual who has a direct personal relationship with God and who follows the dictates of his/her own conscience in consequence. On these matters see e.g. Polanyi 1968, Tawney 1962, among many others.

constrain the opportunistic exploitation of change. The market as a whole does whatever the aggregate of its individuals find advantageous to do, no more. From the market point of view the future remains completely open. This is in striking contrast to traditional societies which have very powerful conceptions of what is acceptable socially and culturally. Similarly, representative democracy shares no constraining goals and ideals comparable to those of a society of the traditional sort. It is of course true that democracy does have its ideals, but all of these promote the individualist foundation. Thus there are the ideals of equality before the law, freedom of speech, universal education and so on, but all of these are aimed at freeing individuals to pursue the conduct of their individual lives, they are not in themselves committed to any particular conception of the society which will then emerge. They are, if you wish, process ideals rather than end-product ideals. Even the shift from communal Catholicism to Protestantism is a shift in this same direction, despite the clear involvement of religion with particular ideals and outcomes. For the Protestant individual is no longer called upon to support a community of a certain kind, rather he/she is simply called upon to express in the momentary circumstances of the day the rule and love of God. This is clearly a much more flexible approach to circumstances than the rigid Catholic communalism preceding it. All told, then, western societal institutions show a peculiar disinterest in constraining change. We have tried to construct a society and culture which is non-committal about the particular form and substance which it should have, which is committal (when it is at all) only about the character of the process. The net result is a huge societal change machine which has been running and building since the Renaissance. This process is summarised in the top half of figure 1. insert Figure 1: 'The Change Machine' about here Science-technology plays a special role in relation to the change machine. It is no accident that before the Renaissance the conduct of science and technology was not central and largely kept confined within the cultural conceptions of the community. Yet by the 1600's there had been spawned the technological and institutional foundations of the Industrial Revolution. Within a century that revolution had begun the social and political transformation of the face of Europe. Two centuries further and the Industrial Revolution was firmly established as the dominant economic, social and political structure on the face of the earth, creating vast empires and refashioning European environments and societies. Within this time span technology had developed to build the great industrial systems, the factory became the revolutionary institutional and technological invention to drive this process forward, science and technology were united into a more systematic process for applying scientific information to technological improvement and the doing of science itself had spread to a communicating network of hundreds, and shortly thereafter thousands, of scientists across the European nations. As little as a century ago science and technology still had to fight bitterly to be admitted to Oxford and Cambridge Universities as legitimate subjects. Nowadays, in a total reversal of attitude, it is commonplace for all governments to assert that the future of their countries depends on their scientific and technological efforts. An important reason for this massive explosion in systematic science and technology, quite unique in the history of the world, is that science-technology is the great generator of change which the societal change machine can utilise. Indeed, science-technology is itself a change machine, an internally organised process which reinforces its own dynamic development. This is summarised on the bottom half of figure 1. Theory provides the framework for developing new experiments, whose outcomes in turn provide information to develop better theory. At the same time, applied theory provides the basis for better technologies, in turn providing both new technologies for new experiments (so to new theories) and providing new bases for the creation of wealth. Increasing wealth in turn provides increasing resources both for technology and for the conduct of experimental science

itself, thus reinforcing the whole process. Let us call this dynamic system the sciencetechnology machine or ST machine. This change machine is then connected into the societal change machine through each of its major institutions, but especially through the generation of advantageous economic change (cf. dotted arrows in Figure 1). Thus the picture of society which I am offering is this: the modern western world is marked by the creation of two interlocked change machines, the societal change machine focused around the exploitation of economic advantage and the science-technology change machine focused around the exploitation of information advantage. These two machines are intimately interlocked, the one providing information to the other and receiving resource support in return. These two great machines have been revving up and expanding in size since the Renaissance. Our current situation is their current outcome. Technologies are amplifier-transformerss. Agricultural technologies, e.g., are designed to amplify certain kinds of productive, i.e. transformative, processes. Our institutions are also technologies in this sense, social technologies. They transform information, from body language to electronic data, into other information and co-ordinated social action. In so doing they have been amplifying our information acquiring, environment transforming, industrial product producing, lifestyle transforming processes. Of course what an amplifier amplifies depends not only on its nature but also on the nature of the system into which it is inserted. Agricultural production technologies have also amplified processes of soil and habitat loss, of rural community transformation and much more.12 It must be the design of the entire system that now concerns us if we are to have intelligent technologies, agricultural and institutional technologies among them. The peculiar character of our society has quite profound implications for the planet, as we shall see. Here is one example. Traditional tribal cultures are quite properly focused around maintaining stability. With little access to energy and information (read technology and science) they have no choice but to adapt to an environment which runs independently of them. They develop cultures which reinforce practices that work. European societies, with their change-oriented institutions, destroy these traditional human cultures wherever they come in contact with them. Traditional cultures are defenceless against the sudden changes introduced by us, whereas we are positively focused on change. (This destructive process is accelerated by greed and other vices in westerners and by the desire for technological products by traditional peoples, but would occur anyway.) Today that process is nearing completion, with virtually the entire planet's human cultures transformed, or being transformed, into versions of the European change machine. (The real tragedy of native peoples, including our Aboriginal peoples, lies in this process; they cannot even create institutions to keep us at arm's length without de-stabilising their own cultures.) There are deep biological roots to these penetrating dynamical difference between stability-oriented and change-oriented systems. These derive from the difference between selection in a variegated environment, i.e. one changing across space and/or through time, and selection in an invariant or unchanging environment. The latter reinforces finesse of adaptation, the former increased adaptability. The effective expression of adaptability for creatures with finite resources requires exploration and learning, typically involving 12

There are, e.g., technologies that produce growth in employment and economic activity (hence GNP etc.) whilst actually producing a decrease in wealth, from an external point of view: motor vehicles, urban design producing declining neighbourhood and family structure. The former creates employment by being bad engineering design (it breaks down so often). The latter creates employment by being bad social design (it causes people breakdown so often). In both cases the employment created doesn't generate any new wealth at all, it only distributes wealth from the people who were involved in the breakdowns (car owners, family members) to those who helped to repair them. Might it not be possible to amplify technologies of these kinds so that our society had a continuous history of increasing GNP -until the moment it stopped functioning altogether?

disturbing the environment to learn the variations which are possible, where finesse of adaptation can be accomplished by physiology and reflex since only the invariant actual is relevant. Thus adaptable creatures may introduce still greater variation in their environment and so set up a positive feedback between increased adaptability and increased environmental variability. Adaptability requires control structures, of which the primary natural versions are central nervous systems. The behavioural adaptability which these support is immense, increasing up the mammalian line to humans who so vividly demonstrate the positive feedback between increased learning and increased pace of change.13 We will only understand the nature of science and technology in the late 20th Century if we insert them into this dynamic context. For example, it should already be clear that there is no sharp distinction to be made between science and technology. They are both necessary and intimate parts of a single dynamic process. This connection has only been thoroughly forged in the last century. Prior to that time, technology was primarily centred in the practical arts and crafts while the sciences were primarily centred in natural philosophy. It is one example of the profound change in the nature of science and technology which has occurred over the course of history. I also suggest that this perspective provides a still deeper understanding of the nature of western culture than Berry's well-founded charges of fragmentation, rootlessness, avarice and fantasy. Berry senses the depth of the change process in our cultural design but cannot conceptualise it any more deeply than some kind of moral failing. But change is buried far more deeply in the systems design of western societies than that. Any analysis which does not understand this will not be able to meet the challenge of the agricultural agenda which Berry himself promotes. There are two other lessons of this kind which I believe it is important to understand as the proper context for focusing on our current professional and policy challenges. The first of these concerns the transformation of the planet's dynamic systems which we are currently undergoing and the challenges they pose. The second lesson -- more subtle and less obvious -- concerns the profound transformation in our relationship to the future, and hence in our policy making and professional tasks. The next two sections of the paper are devoted to these two issues in turn. Twentieth Century Watersheds14

8.

The change machine has now assumed planetary proportions. We are all made aware each day by the public media of some of the consequent changes, e.g. in global climate (greenhouse effect, ozone layer hole). What I want to emphasise here is the importance of thinking of the planet as a dynamic system, a system into which we have inserted our own change machine. The result is that, as we gear the size of our change machine up, we are slowly altering the dynamics of the planetary system itself. This would be important even if the dynamic changes were slow. The agricultural revolution between five thousand and ten thousand years ago, for example, represented a massive shift in human organisation and often in ecological organisation on a regional scale as well. But this change took several thousand years to propagate across a small fraction of the planetary ecology. Even so, it caused widespread devastation which resulted from human ignorance about the nature of the change which had been instituted. Virtually every major desert area on this planet is associated with a major earlier empire. Today however we face a far more profound challenge. The second half of the twentieth century marks a radical transformation in the 13

See further e.g. Hahlweg and Hooker 1989a, Hooker 1993a and references.

14

Material in the next two sections is discussed in Hooker 1983, 1984 and 1987.

conditions of humankind's existence on the planet. As best I can judge, is that over the next fifty years or so we are going to subject ourselves and the planet to a dozen or more major changes in basic structure and function. By the close of this period, the human species will have crossed, or begun to cross, a number of critical thresholds, or watersheds, in the organisation or regulatory development of life on the planet. In crossing these watersheds we face, as a species, fundamental challenges to our survival, yet crossing them successfully also opens up the profoundest opportunities for our future. The changes I have in mind are not the superficial dramas with which we are usually presented in the public media, but the underlying organisational changes. The difference in perspective is nicely illustrated with the case of warfare and nuclear weapons. It is not the quantitative destructiveness of nuclear weapons, great though it is, that is of systems importance, or even unique to them (think of sowing Carthage with salt, or the Dresden fire bombing); it is their delivery. When I was young it took on the order of twenty-four hours or more to deliver a major international military strike, even in Europe. By the time I was a teenager, it took eight or nine hours. That is when the hotline went in between Washington and Moscow. Now the recycling time of the human biochemical system is an hour or more; for example, it takes an hour or more before calm returns after anger and higher rational and emotional appreciation processes can be engaged to genuinely see the other person's point of view. In this time frame the hotline makes good sense. When the Pershing II missiles went into Germany, the nuclear strike time was reduced to a few minutes. In that time no human can make an informed decision at all, let alone adjust to the hormonal recycling time. We are down to the reptilian flight/fight reactions, only these are now disasterously inept. What consequence is to be emphasised here? Not that we were then in increasing danger of nuclear destruction, though that is true. What I want to draw to your attention is the shift in decision making orientation from the past to the future. Over the past hundred thousand years whenever humans fought they took a single human, a commander, whose brain integrated all the relevant factors and put him (almost always him) on a battlefield and he took a look and made a decision. But when you have only a few minutes to make a decision you don't have time to integrate in reaction to events, or to move anyone anywhere. The hotline is irrelevant. Instead, you have no choice but to try to anticipate conflict situations years in advance, analyse the possibilities and then design responses accordingly. And of course this can only be done fast enough because now we can pass this process over to a fast machine to make the decision, a computer. In other words, war has switched from being a reactive subject, not based on theory but on human intuition, to an anticipative futures subject, based on theory built into a computer. Now, that is a massive switch in the way human beings do things, relying on their machine-organised, theoretical knowledge of possibilities for their very survival. And that, I argue, is the key shift that applies across the board. What I would want to do if space permitted is to lead you behind each one of the transformations I foresee occurring and show that this massive switch from past to future orientation, from reaction to anticipation, from deed to design, is going on right across the planet. Though I cannot do that here, I am now in a position to briefly generalise to other watershed transformations. Many of these watersheds are to do with our relation to the biosphere. .

Population size - (threshold) ó planetary-scale demands for space, food and waste disposal cause massive ecological change.

.

Industrial capacity - (threshold) ó planetary-scale resource and waste disposal demands alter biochemical and ecological life conditions.

.

Planetary ecologies (rainforests, ocean fisheries) now radically altered within one

generation. .

Planetary resources (oil, phosphate, platinum) substantially consumed within one generation.

.

Agricultural activity (threshold) ó planetary scale organisation dominating natural ecologies, industrial re-organisation of insect populations etc., reduction in genetic variety.

.

Economic activity (threshold) ó planetary-scale demands for fresh water, air traffic space and like factors.

Some of these problems have appeared in microcosm in the past -- one thinks again of the deserts typically left behind by empires of bygone ages. What is unique to our time is the planetary scale, the rapid time scale and, most importantly, the organisational depth ofthe changes involved. Now, in a relatively short space of time historically the species has been thrust into a series of unique relationships on a scale in space, time and complexity to which its past experience is wholly foreign. But many of the watersheds our species now faces press still more closely upon its intrinsic organisation. .

Possession of the means of destruction on a global scale at short notice: ballistic nuclear weapons.

.

Global constraints imply current open-ended development is not possible for all; planetary economic dynamics is driving the gulf between developed and underdeveloped regions ever larger.

.

Recent powerful techniques for intervening in the biophysical and psychological structures of persons are transforming conceptions of death, responsibility, individuality.

Unhappily, these recently acquired capacities are evolving in a conceptual and institutional milieu which looks back to its primitive origins rather than forward to its now unavoidable future. Indeed, it is clear that .

Humans have only recently expanded into the domain of properly planetary institutions.

.

Institutional complexity - (threshold) ó institutions beyond the ability of any one individual to grasp their functions and possibilities.

.

Correlatively, we have this century generated information densities and flow patterns far beyond individual comprehension.

.

We have just begun the construction of seriously intelligent machines, and of selforganising, self-designing machines.

.

With these new technological and institutional capacities, we are transforming, and often eliminating, human cultures planet-wide at an unprecedented rate.

.

The species is at the threshold of leaving the confines of the biosphere altogether, expanding into the solar system where conditions and constraints are utterly transformed.

The human species, indeed the biosphere, has never confronted these transformations before, not even in microcosm. They bite far more deeply into our evolutionary origins in

small group, tool-using hunting and gathering, than do even the first group of watersheds. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, profound transformations have taken place in this century in the role and structure of cognition, in particular in the form of scientific knowledge and consciousness. .

There has been a massive increase in the internal complexity and self-consciousness of theoretical thought.

.

There has been a corresponding increase in the complexity and comprehensiveness of the external institutional organisation of scientific processes.

.

There has been a massive increase in the scope and radicalness of the planetary organisation of scientific knowledge.

The thousands of ways in which science and technology are now harnessed to technological and social change are all more or less part of our general background knowledge nowadays, what is perhaps less obvious to people is the manner in which sciencetechnology has organised to transform itself and its own support framework. There is in fact a dual transformation in process here, in both the character and organisation of sciencetechnology, that is worth some little further exploration. To this I now turn. 9. The Information Revolution Current discussion of the so-called information revolution is dominated by the quantities of information now processed and/or its economic value. This is, I suggest, like confusing termite mounds with termite colonies. The quantity of information we currently use and the economic value we attach to it are indeed evidence of growing sophistication, especially of growing economic complexity.15 But it is the internal organisational transformation that made such uses both possible and often necessary that is the important systems dynamic foundation of this trend. Without that foundation, widespread economic use of computers and information would have no more significance for us than had the spread of termite mound technology for animal urban architecture. The fact is, however, that science-technology have been undergoing a profound, importantly self-organising transormation, schematised in Figure 2. Insert Figure 2 about here We have just noted how the science-technology machine contributes to altering the societal and ecological environment. These are the T1 transformations of Figure 2. And we have already noted how this in turn feeds back to altered resources for the science-technology machine (cf. Figure 1). That is the T3 transformation. But then the science-technology machine is also studying and transforming itself - the T2 transformation. Studies encompass philosophy, methodology and sociology of knowledge and technological roles, economics of technological research and development, national science and technology policy and a dozen other cognate studies. Through the development of such specialised expertises the relevant scientists themselves are increasingly making recommendations about the structural transformations of scientific research institutions and methods, the public funding of science and technology, technology development strategies and so on. So the science-technology machine is transforming science-technology policy. More widely, it is transforming the nature of public policy generally, from local, simple decisions to national and planetry planning with implications stretching far into the future - the first of the T4 transformations. And beyond all this we are now reflecting upon this entire process, trying to understand our own historical 15

See in this respect the seminal but unorthodox book by Warsh 1984 and on non-linear irreversible models of economics generally see e.g. Blatt 1983, Foster 1987.

processes and improve them. (This very paper is a small example.) This is the second T4 process. Correlative with this systems dynamics has been a transformation in the epistemic conception of science over the past two decades, roughly from empiricism toward increasing naturalism and/or cultural embedding. Empiricist accounts aim to represent science as determined solely by observation and logic. All methodology is to be justified by, in fact essentially reduced to, these logical relations and is thereby shown to be rational. There are philosophical and scientific objections to this model of science at every point of its characterisation, all of them well known; I shall take them as read here.16 The objection I note explicitly here is that this conception of science is made obsolete by our own scientific and economic development, it belongs to a condition of little access to energy and information when our basic option was to attempt to observe and predict a nature that ran its course independently of us - no more today. (See Hooker 1987, chapter 7; more on this in section 11 below.) The formal objections to empiricism were complemented by various attempts to produce alternative, improved accounts in the same general spirit, e.g. that by Karl Popper, but they too have their well known difficulties which I shall avoid repeating here (see note 16 references). The net result of the intense critical scrutiny of science over the past century has been to emphasise the complexity of scientific procedure, the historical development not only of science but also of scientific method, and the ubiquity of human judgement throughout it. Many theorists, having noticed the historical dynamism and dependency of scientific procedure on community decision making, leapt to the conclusion that science cannot be a rational process, or is at most a very limited rational process. Many have leapt to the conclusion that science is to be understood not on the basis of reason at all, but on the basis of those social forces which causally shape it.17 These are both theoretically and practically risky responses for they counsel the abandonment of reason at the very time when we might begin to understand it, and most need to use and respect it. The current crisis in our understanding of the nature of science, I suggest, is itself part of our newly acquired awareness of complex, self-organising systems and the inadequacy of our past methods in relation to them, in this case rational and philosophic methods. In another context I, in company with many others, have initiated several lines of research into more adequate systemic notions of rationality and of science and these show considerable promise.18 But the point to be emphasised here is the linkage between the two 16

The standard empiricist view and its difficulties are discussed at length, e.g., in NewtonSmith 1981, Suppe 1974. A still wider range of objections is much more briefly summarised and discussed in Hooker 1987, chapter 6. See also the references of note 4. These sources contain extended bibliographies for pursuit by the interested reader. Empiricists subscribe to a strict fact/value dichotomy and much of the discussion in these references is closely related to that of note 2. 17

There are various variants of this position depending on whether one does one's sociology from a structuralist, Marxist, etc., point of view. For a review and references see e.g. Trigg 1980 and note 4 references. For a historical, anarchist approach see Feyerabend 1987, cf. Hooker 1989b. 18

To summarise for the interested reader: My overall aim over the past two decades has been to look for a more general account of reason with which to replace the formal, logical account, with formal reason seen as a special case. (See also Brown 1988.) The earliest line of approach was to assert naturalism (reason is a natural property of systems) and propose that the basic form for a theory of reason should not be that of formal rules, specifically logic, but that of economic efficiency, from which it follows that: 'Method describes a sequence of actions which constitute the most efficient strategy to achieve a given goal; methodology

transformations, to see them both as complementary aspects of the development of the science-technology machine. 10.

The Artifact/Design Transformation

The direct consequence of the profound changes in the character and role of organised knowledge is that the future must now be regarded as increasingly a human artifact. The future can no longer be regarded as a natural object, a fact already there or objectively determined by present trends. Rather, it must be chosen. Artifacts are the realisation of human value judgements in facts, in the concrete design of our world. Artifacts are experiments, experiments first with what is possible and then with what is preferable. They are designs, chosen from among possible designs, because of the values they realise in the designs. A little reflection reveals that we are intimately immersed in artifacts, in chosen designs demonstrating the possible and the preferable. We are surrounded by our technologies, and by the environmental artifacts which they create (roads, cities, airplanes, etc.). Our agriculture is dominated by plant and animal species that are now largely human describes the theory of such sequences' (Hooker 1987, p.139). At the same time science displays a diversity of epistemic values and that these typically conflict or compete with one another, so that method (like any other practical action) is an exceptionally complex affair being fitted both to the nature of the phenomena under investigation and to the particular compromise among pursuit of the many valid epistemic values which yields greatest overall gain in value in the circumstances. This conception can directly incorporate risk taking and it finds a natural and central place for the institutional structure of science; indeed, it makes the design of epistemic institutions a central issue. While both of these features are essential to understanding science as a functional cognitive system, they have no natural place within science conceived in terms of a purely formal conception of reason. On this line of argument see e.g. Hooker 1987, especially chapter 7, 1989b, 1993a. Even so, this aproach is still radically underdeveloped and with many unsolved problems; for a brief, partial review see Hooker 1987, p.287. At the same time I have begun to explore a complementary model of intelligent systems, that of control systems. The basic idea is this: rational human minds and epistemic institutions so regulate or control their interactions within themselves and with the world as to preferentially and systematically accumulate valuable information, within systemic limits, about their environment and their own natures. Reason describes the theory of the design of these control or regulatory processes. Reason 'grades up' with increasing central nervous system complexity from its roots in biological adaptability, see note 13 and text. Moreover, whilst the standard approach to machine intelligence has been the programming model, which is tacitly formalist, there has recently developed a paradigm for control theory which is not intrinsically formalist and which encourages the view that control systems theory may provide a wider setting from within which to explore the implementation of non-formal reason. See Hooker et al. 1992a, Hooker 1993b. Finally, I have provided a preliminary exploration of the idea that scientific procedures might be seen as the exercise of a control system, that epistemic institutions might in effect be usefully viewed as realising control processes for the accumulation of valuable information. We might think of the sciences as like a hierarchy of homeostats, each of which searches for and locks onto an invariance by achieving equilibrium in a process of multiple feedback, see Hooker 1989a. This conception of distributed scientific intelligence has a close relationship to the cybernetic conception of human neuropsychological function in the cybernetic tradition deriving from Ashby, see e.g. Conant 1981. A later version is explored in Hooker et.al. 1992b. It also best leaves efficiency considerations as only a component of the overall process, thus (tentatively) the control model of reason subsumes the economic model of reason, see Hooker 1993a.

artifacts, and will become increasingly so in the future under genetic engineering. Indeed, even the atmosphere of the planet is becoming a noticeably human artifact -- unintentionally, and with very dubious benefits. Even more pervasively, social institutions and the cultures they support are artifacts, experiments carried on (sometimes over millennia) in what it is to be human. As the world is transformed into a human artifact it becomes less and less possible to escape from the normative dimensions. (The secret of wilderness is that it is an environment still exhibiting no human norms in its designs. But the city is norm-saturated.) The whole world is shifting from reacting to what has happened, to designing what will happen, using knowledge and technology to design, and using knowledge to design the knowledge designing processes. For the first time in human history we are designing the designers. That is the true significance of our times. The human species has no historical precedent for these transformations in the nature and role of its own cognitive processes and structures. I believe the human species has now entered a critical planetary phase in which it is rapidly crystallising itself around concentration of its own knowledge increasing (science) and knowledge applying (technology) processes to create an artifactual future. All these transformations point, I suggest, to one immediate conclusion: the primacy of design. As the impacts of our cognitive understandings on our selves and our environment increase in intensity, scale and complexity, it becomes increasingly urgent that we understand the designs of the complex systems which we are and in which we live, so that our actions may be appropriately related to the dynamics of those systems. (And the designs of environmental systems are far more subtly complex, their equilibria and dynamic shifts far more counter-intuitive, than in our naivete we had at first imagined. The same is glaringly obvious of our economic systems and of ourselves -- biologically and psycho-socially.) There has in recent times been a remarkable surge in our species' consciousness of itself and of its total planetary environment. This surge in consciousness, I believe, is directly attributable to a growing awareness, often dim or sub-conscious, of the approach of the three groups of threshold transitions discussed above. We humans can now conceive of the planet as Spaceship Earth, we have some appreciation of the total dynamics of the biosphere and our place in it. This sense of our place in space, in time and in ecological dynamics is wholly unprecedented for our species. We have at the same time become acutely aware of the future as a human artifact organised through and around our scientific and technological capacities. Futures research has undergone an explosion in quantity and sophistication and achieved international recognition all in a single generation. And, as noted in section 5, the distinctive sciences of this century focus on the understanding and management of complex systems. Quite remarkably, we humans are undertaking all of these great transitions virtually contemporaneously. Each one of them is fraught with frightening dangers, though often holding great promise. To approach them all in the same period of history adds immeasurably to the complexity and significance of the historical period, intensifying the dangers and the promises far beyond their individual scopes.19 The appreciation of our unique historical circumstances has bred two divergent 19

For an application of this perspective to the future of professions see Hooker 1984. The literature on the various watersheds I have cited is immense and it is not appropriate to attempt to cite it at length here. Most of the works which could be cited describe a particular problem or transition and review conventional wisdom on its 'solution'. However, I include a miscellany of works which take a less conventional, more regulatory design approach to understanding our contemporary circumstances, in the hope that the reader might find them useful: Beer 1974, 1975, 1979; Bochner 1969; Boulding 1965; Chardin 1961; Cornish 1977; Emery 1974, 1975; Emery/Trist 1975; Harmon 1979; Hahlweg/Hooker 1989a; Hooker 1987; Jackson 1979; Jantsch 1975; Nelson 1976; Polak 1971; Robertson 1979; Somit 1974; Theobald 1972a, b; Toffler 1975, 1980; Tugwell 1975; Watt 1974.

images of the future, the future as nightmare and the future as happy dream. The negative image dominates (significantly, we have no single word for the happy dream). What these two views of the future share in common, however, is the underlying perception of the future as an unprecedentedly radical transition in the regulatory structure of our life conditions and experience. Even more pointedly, they signal a new relation to the future into which we must now enter, a relation illustrated in the discussion of modern weapons and thrust upon us by the changes induced by our science-technology. 11.

Learning From Past to Future

The age-old method of learning has been to observe passively -- so as not to disturb nature -- and to generalise from what was observed. We still find such activities today in areas where we have relatively little information, e.g. in some biological classification, and/or little energy, e.g. astronomy. This is the first method of Figure 3. insert Figure 3 about here Alongside passive observation there has been the equally ancient method of probing to disturb nature and learning from her reaction. This method, the second in Figure 3, was only given prominence and systematic application with the Galilean revolution in science at the Renaissance. The secret of its increased epistemological power over passive observation is the ability to create both controlled conditions, and conditions that would not normally appear (like near-frictionless motion). Controlled disturbance, i.e., experimentation, alone proved adequate to develop the technological knowledge required for the industrial revolution. Yet its maturing is remarkably recent. It was not really until James Watt's application of experimental scientific investigation to the improvement of Newcomen's engine a century ago that we began to have the systematic alliance of science and technology that is now so rapidly transforming the world. (Bolton's enterprise with which he worked also provided the first engineering factory.) One of the consequences of this combination of two powerful tools - science and technology - has been to develop a third, still more powerful, method: the method of possibility and design. This is the third method in Figure 3. The method of possibility and design works like this. When you have enough information about a field and sufficient depth of theoretical understanding of it, then you know much more than what happens in fact to currently be the case, you know what its possibilities are. Simple illustration: Newton's laws of motion tell us not only why as a matter of fact some particular projectile fell where it did, but they also tell us all the possible trajectories which projectiles can have. This is made dramatically obvious by human space travel: there were no facts of humans in space to observe objectively in advance, there were no tentative probings of ways of travelling to the moon to learn from disturbing them, rather we needed to understand in advance all that was possible for us, so that we could do it right the first time. But once we have a theoretical representation of the possibilities, then the problem of the future becomes: which one of these possibilities shall we make actual? In other words, the future must be designed. We anticipate the future and shape it by design. The shift from facts to possibilities, from reaction to anticipative design, is all around us. It is most dramatic in the shift from traditional zoology to genetic engineering -- to the anticipative design of new creatures. But for sheer scale of impact it is the spread of genetically engineered plant species across the world's agricultures that dwarfs most other biological changes. Our communications systems no longer react to the occasional discovery of a new technology but deliberately set out to create new information processing designs. Our creation of new plastics and new metals is the deliberate consequence of our increasing understanding of the possibilities of molecular structure. And so on. Everywhere the future belongs to those who have been able to grasp the shift from the past (observation, reaction) to

the future (possibility and design). We must use our scientific knowledge to understand the possibilities for our environment and so to design a quality environmental future. We must use our understanding of the possibilities inherent in our new technologies -- indeed, in the new scientific method itself -- and design a viable economic structure for our future. We must understand the possibilities inherent in our multiculturalism and social institutions and design a viable societal future for ourselves. Our world is increasingly complex and the consequences of action are increasingly large, whether for good or ill. If we cannot as a species master the process of transforming complexity into possibility, from there to design a viable future, then we shall simply be overwhelmed by it. Those who cannot master the possibility/design approach will never be able to understand and anticipate change. They will constantly defeat themselves through the unexpected consequences of their interventions, and will be constantly defeated by others who can master this method. If this analysis is correct it has immediate implications for science and technology teaching. First, we still tend to carry at best a 19th century image of what scientific method is. Children certainly still need to learn the disciplines of observation and experimental method, there is no short cut around them for building scientific knowledge. They may even need to learn all three methods in the same order in which the human race has learned them historically (though this is much less obvious to me). But if we fail to bring them through to an understanding of the possibility/design method we will have failed to have them understand even contemporary experimental method. For today we do not experiment blindly, rather we use our existing theories of what is possible to design deliberate probes that will reveal key information that will allow us to extend the possibility structure. (The truth of this is made dramatically obvious by reflecting on how much scientific knowledge is required in order to understand the design of scientific measuring instruments and the procedural designs of experiments, even for most experiments used in any high school laboratory.) In the world of the future, the people who survive will be the people who are able to develop new workable designs. We have to re-orient our education from the past to the future. In our 19th century colonial past we have had a school system oriented to the past. We taught the traditions of empire, the trades and trade practices, including farming, of the steam age. As a result we have inherited an economy focused on the supply of resources to the industrial empires, business managers unwilling and unable to innovate and export, obsolete and obstructive trade unions and a steadily eroding agricultural and ecological base. Instead we must aim to teach children to design their future, and to do it well enough to survive in this tough world. (This precisely does not mean that history is out - exactly the reverse, "those who are ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it." But history must be taught so as to create understanding of dynamic processes.) 12.

Toward a Stable Self-Organising Future?

Our planet is certainly not stable across a cosmic time scale and very likely not stable in any obvious biological respect across biological time scales. It is also likely selforganising, in some sense of that as yet novel concept, only within decided limits and probably only across periods relatively short on a geological time scale. We shall likely find ecological stability, if at all, only on much shorter time scales still. Moreover, and recalling the discussion of ambiguity in section 5, stability and self-organisation may well prove to be at least partially incompatible systems properties, since self-organisation may lead to continual change that eventually undermines any specific extant homeostasis. Such considerations show, incidentally, the multiple ambiguity and even narrowness of any strict conception of conservation, = maintaining invariant or homeostatic; contrast the conditions for conserving e.g. the extant regional values of species biomass, species kinds, bio-diversity, ecological succession, gene pool, evolutionary processes, or any of these vis-a-vis preserving historical ecological resiliency or long-term evolutionary process. (For further analysis see e.g. Pimm 1991.) Pursuit of any of these conservation goals may, typically does, at least

partially exclude pursuing the others, e.g. preserving present species biomass will typically interfere with regional ecological succession. Each of these goals has value in a complex adaptive system, but some (preservation of long-term adaptabilities) are additionally recommended by the principle of cautionary care when we are so ignorant (as we are) of biodynamics. It is into this complex and delicately balanced system that we have self-organised our change machine whose design crudity is currently transforming the living system in ways which we find both uncertain and damaging to ourselves and the life around us. In fact, we humans are in a race against time. According to a fundamental theory of cybernetics (see Conant/Ashby 1970, cf. Conant 1981, Espejo and Harndon 1989) a controller for a system must have access to at least as many states as does the system it is to control. That means, roughly, that if we are to control our own living planetary system we shall have to have a representation of it at least as complex in the relevant respects as the reality itself. As our capacity to intervene in the system grows our need for such representations also grows. Indeed, it will generally grow much faster since, thanks to the non-linearity and interconnectedness of living systems, a simple quantitative increase in intervention capacity will lead to disproportionately larger alterations in systems dynamics. But to obtain and utilise those representations we need correlative methodologies which are equally systems appropriate. So we are in a race to acquire scientific knowledge and operational procedures faster than we are able to intervene in our living systems in disastrously simplifying ways. In the past, human access to information and energy has in general been on much smaller scales than the living systems within which they have intervened. In these circumstances we were both ignorant of the need for systems representations and methods and, fortunately, could largely survive that ignorance. At the present time, however, we have in a relatively short historic time thrust ourselves into a position where all this is no longer true. If we are to survive at all happily as a species we must therefore begin a 'steep learning curve'. And this means that our own institutional and cultural systems will have to forego whatever stability they have in their present mode of operation if our supporting ecological systems are to retain whatever resiliency and productivity they had. The challenge then is whether our own systems have sufficient cognitive resiliency, whether we humans can be sufficiently deeply self-organising to be able to consciously avoid the consequences of our hitherto unconscious self-organising of the change machine. Part III: Notes Toward the Definition of AgriCulture The remarks about the ambiguity and multi-valuedness of systems properties made in section 5, e.g. sustainability, serves to focus a quite general point: the analysis of Part II has revealed a need to re-think the fundamental terms within which our methodologies and policies are specified. If we do indeed live in a world of highly interactive, non-linear dynamic systems, then we need to think in these terms. But historically our fundamental thought processes have not been in these terms. Rather, we have been inward looking, preoccupied with what we are doing within our human cultures understood in terms fixed internally to them. Here we have fostered the illusion that we can construct everything in the way we can build simple objects and that the dynamics of our world is as simple as that of the simple, apparently controllable institutionalised processes to which we try to confine ourselves. In consequence, e.g., we think of technologies as collections of simple bits, gears, tubes, measuring devices, when it would be more accurate to conceive them as amplifiertransformers inserted into complex circuits with widespread and often surprising consequences across the whole system. (Think, e.g., of the largely unanticipated social and urban design consequences of the motor car.) We think of economic markets as simple equilibrium devices determining prices and allocating wealth when in fact they are change amplifiers, with a powerful non-equilibrium dynamics which re-structures technologies, landscapes and indeed societies and cultures (see also section 15 below). There has been no more sign of western market equilibrium over the last 400 years than there is of evolutionary equilibrium over the last 400 million years, and indeed the systems dynamics have important similarities (see e.g. Foster 1987, cf. Warsh 1984). And we have thought of agriculture as a collection of discrete, self-contained farm factories which we insert into the landscape at the

socio-economically efficient places for the purpose of economic commodity production, when it would be more accurate to conceive them as sub-systems of a complex bio-socioeconomic ecology with multi-facted dynamics and widespread ramifications. In a world where our human systems are altering, disturbing and re-shaping, all the rest, where there is increasingly little room to manoeuvre because of the increasing scale of the consequences, and where there is a rapidly escalating requirement for information and control in order to operate effectively, in such a world we need not only to re-think the concepts of technology, economy etc. in dynamic systems terms but even the very idea of a culture itself, and of agriculture in particular. For the moment let us understand culture as a complete characterisation of a society, its institutions, technologies and ways of life, its values and conceptions of the world. It is our cultures that we need to re-think. An institution is not, as in the old conception, a discrete, self-contained unit which we simply assemble out of people and insert into the economy at socio-economically efficient places for the purpose of economic commodity production or political control, a social farm unit as it were. An institution is instead a dynamic self-organising sub-system of the complex institutional ecology with modes of operation and goals of its own as well as strong interactions with its institutional environment, positively amplifying some sensitivities, some information processing and operational capacities, and negatively amplifying (depressing) others, a social technology in the systems re-conception of that term. And we can no longer afford to conceive of and produce professionals as persons who are experts on these discrete, assembled objects, factories, farms, banks etc., with techniques and responsibilities narrowly focussed on these bits of our world. Rather professionals will have to take responsibility for the design and dynamic development of coherent sub-systems of our world, sub-systems which contribute to our resiliency and sustainable productivity. And our values, our professional aims, will have to be re-formulated in turn around these valuable (but complex) properties of our dynamic systems, from agricultural production to global security. This is a cultural revolution indeed, and one that includes a re-conception of agriculture as a fundamental microcosm of the whole. In what follows I can only sketch in some of the component re-conceptions along the way to a re-definition of culture and agriculture. But I trust that enough can be said to see how to carry the project forward. 13.

The Transformation in Public Policy and Policy Methodology

The condition of the planet exposed in Part II poses deep challenges to a theory of public policy making. The conditions of public policy making have been radically transformed since parliaments of people's representatives discussed alternatives on a commonsense basis, let alone since dictators shouted their orders or gatherings of elders rehearsed rituals for generating tribal consensus. (Yet we may learn something valuable from these earlier public policy making institutions). What has changed so radically are (what we might call) the qualitative dimensions of public policy making. Agriculture provides a ready example. The increasingly industrialised monocultures require fertilisers and pesticides which have ramifications far beyond the farm gate both in the economic and ecological systems. Moreover, the increasing substitution of machine for human labour has meant that agricultural net energy yield is falling as the proportion of fossil to solar energy increases, again with widespread ramifications (e.g. for resource security, mining). Concomitantly, this change has shifted dramatically agricultural financial and employment structures, with huge ramifications for urban form (the largest population migration in human history) and agricultural form (the growth of world agribusiness). And there are other, subtler changes. As noted in the Swedish vulnerability study, the agricultural system has become increasingly complex and tightly interconnected, and fragile. Should the international grain market collapse because of the obscure machinations of the commodities futures market, or should the price of fuel rise steeply (as it has done), or should there be any major loss of sperm from gene banks or a new disease virus appear (cf. phylloxera and viticulture a century ago), or should a new technical innovation alter sharply the economies of scale (as the combine harvester once did), then major sections

of existing agriculture could be de-stabilised, to the tune of billions of dollars). A mere centruy ago the vast majority of agriculture was almost 'de-coupled' from the remainder of society; the urban areas of the earth could have disappeared without much disturbing agricultural life. Similarly, farming communities were largely independent of each other. Today the situation is utterly different. A Wyoming farmer may rely on California and Latin America for fruit, on Ontario for early hatchlings to raise, on New Mexico for cattle sperm, on Saudi Arabia for gasoline and on a Minneapolis corporation for marketing; all of these connections and more depend critically on the functioning of the entire urban-agricultural system, and even on arcane science and international diplomacy. To summarise, using also energy policy for illustration: The spatial scale of agriculture and energy decisions has each increased rapidly until now they span the globe (e.g. world trade in specialised crops, livestock and/or their genes, altering the biomes of many regions simultaneously). Their time scale has increased from years to a century or more (e.g. for developing, or relinquishing, nuclear power generation, or changing dryland farming economy and ecology). The resource scale of agriculture and energy decisions is now critical; for the first time in human history resources on a planetary scale are being exploited in a single lifetime (e.g. oil and rainforest timbers). The social and intellectual intricacy of these decisions is increasing rapidly. Whether certain energy policy options, e.g. fuel-cell, photovoltaic and fusion energies, will be available four decades hence will depend critically on the research effort funded now, the development of technological infrastructure in a decade, the evolution of appropriate legal frameworks, urban and support infrastructure at the time, and so on. The same applies to genetically engineered crop and livestock species and to biological pest/disease controls. (Cf. the T4 transformation of Figure 2.) These four features to agriculture and energy policies are all essentially unique to the twentieth century and they give these policies a special urgency and complexity. They are not, however, unique to agriculture and energy policies. All other public policy areas of any general structural importance, for example communications, transportation, education and health, display the same features. This is what lends a sense of urgency and importance to developing a general approach to public policy making for the era in which we live. The situation is summarised in Figure 4. insert Figure 4 about here In virtue of the transformations brought about by the change machine, our species now has no choice but to choose a future. Even the pretence not to act is in effect to choose that future which is an extrapolation of the present processes, the status quo. Moreover, our species has no choice but to invent futures for itself, for our future will be an artifact whatever we do. Moreover, the present range of artifactual futures available to us are far from attractive; we need to choose others. Finally, the process of invention itself must be adequate to the regulatory complexity of the planet under the human species, i.e. it must be capable of truly providing us with a future (rather than a rushing into the future looking into a rear-view mirror). It should arm us with an adequate grasp of the method of possibility and design (section 11). There is such a method and it is my purpose to outline it here. There are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the future. (It's because we have not grasped this fact that we are inclined not to understand the relevance of futures studies to our educational curricula.) The usual way we approach the future is forecasting: Start from where you are now and consider a small change in the next little while predicted from past trends; next make the most efficient response to that small change; now go on from there. For example, Australia's oil production and soil productivity are declining in fairly predictable ways (Cameron and Elix 1991, Eckersley 1989). Based on past trends the federal government may predict that they are each going to decline say eight percent in the current year. Economists then come up with the most efficient response, on some criterion of efficiency. Then in the subsequent year they each decline say another nine percent and economists again give an efficient response to that. And for the following year the exercise is repeated again. Etc. With prediction you inch your way into the future being optimally

efficient at each little change. Forecasting has the advantage of flexibility. Suppose, e.g., that someone were to invent a cheap synthetic replacement for oil after two years. Having made only two small changes, we breathe a big sigh of relief and say, 'Thank God. We switch over to that,' and away we go with our same old motor vehicle technologies. Cf. here the invention of synthetic soil, or large-scale economical hydroponics vis-a-vis declining soil productivity. But forecasting also has three serious disadvantages. First, it will inch its way optimally to destruction, just as well as to success. Think of Australia's looming oil import bill (guesstimated to be near $7 billion in a few years), or the cost of rectifying the roughly 100% decline in its soil productivity since European settlement ($1 billion? see Cameron and Elix 1991, Eckersley 1989 and references), vis-a-vis its economic health, military autonomy, or environmental safety. We have to understand the possibilities inherent in the entire system before we can assess what real efficiency is. Second, even supposing an improvement is involved, short-term efficiency won't distinguish whether you're going uphill to the local maximum of small value or to the mountain of large improvements. What if you must first go down (be inefficient at something) to eventually climb high? Suppose, e.g., that several years of investment in wind electrical generators showing little return to investment would then provide a profitable small electric motor export sector? Or many years of research on sustainable dryland agriculture later provide profitable export markets in products and technologies, a viable rural community, environmental protection and greater national autonomy? You can't justify either investment on short-term efficiency grounds, a longer view is needed. The point genralises: Many of the states of a dynamical system will only be accessible under particular constraint and initial conditions, so if some class of states is desirable then the aim of policy should be to bring about the relevant access conditions. But what these conditions are, much of the costs involved in bringing them about, and the timescales over which investment and return occur, are determined by the system dynamics and only partially amenable to human control. Third, the forecasting approach projects present trends, assuming that these are acceptable or anyway fixed. All it does is change the present a little bit. But what if the present is unacceptable? In the cases of the new dryland farm crops and small electric motors there aren't past trends to extrapolate into the future. Serious economic leadership typically involves going against past trends. The alternative is permanent obsolescence. Again, what if the present builds in an unacceptable set of value judgements? The forecasting approach will never challenge those defects seriously, instead it will tend to project them. Even an inefficient industry or institution will be cheaper to support in the short term rather than enter the initial cost to change it. Prediction looks back to past trends in order to assess at best a short term future; if those trends fail us, then prediction fails us. But history teaches us that sooner or later most trends fail as change bites more deeply. Indeed, non-linear selforganising adaptive systems show a historical irreversibility which is often incompatible with the existence of any simple trends, one has instead to understand the unique dynamics characteristiising the system. By contrast, the method of possibility and design is in the business of deliberately discarding past trends wherever discarding is appropriate. Let us take the earlier mountainclimbing analogy further. Suppose you wanted to get to the top of Everest. Would you start from Kathmandu and simply say, 'We'll go one step at a time and, within constraints, each should always be the steepest upwards'? Not if you're serious. Neither is there point in saying 'Let's take the shortest route to the top' because the shortest route to the top may involve crossing a ravine which you can't manage. No, what a mountain climber does, as knowledge permits, is say, 'Start (in imagination) from on top of Everest and let's think our way back down. What are the alternative routes up that last face? And to get to that stage, is the western approach more manageable than the eastern slopes? What kind of equipment will we need? When will we need to go downhill in order to make it up in the long run?' That's how a sensible climber plans the future. And now we have in hand a second method for approaching the future: Backcasting or retrospective path analysis. The contrast is drawn in

Figure 5. insert figure 5 about here First you put yourself in the future; then you think imaginatively about what your alternatives situations are there, what the possibilities are, what designs could be brought about. This simple step in itself opens up a whole range of fundamental changes which will look inefficient from a forecasting point of view in the short term. In this way we widen the horizons about what is possible for a nation, or a person. (Important changes have typically been produced by people who were rejected at first. But they had a future design in mind in which they could see the potential, a design which required change that people couldn't understand. If you do not permit that kind of imagination, you do not go anywhere as a nation.) Having explored the possibilities, you then ask yourself what alternatives are really open to you. This means acting within reasonable constraints, for example on arable land, capital accumulation or rates of educational change, and within trends you can't alter, for example, the trend towards more capable computers. Second, for each alternative future you seriously wish to explore, you work your way backwards from the future towards the present in stages. At the beginning of each stage you ask: 'What must now be done so that by the end of this stage I shall have the desired situation in hand?' Why take the stages in reverse order, why work backwards? Well, suppose you're climbing Everest. You start at the summit, your destination, and you say 'Well, if I am to reach here the last ascent is best via the west wall, and if I am to reach the base of the west wall then I should cross the intervening creek up high where it's narrow and we don't need to build a bridge, and ...' You can't work forwards because a decision about a later stage, nearer the goal, may significantly change your earlier strategy. Third, after having evaluated the most interesting alternative future designs for their feasibility, costs and benefits, you choose the most valuable one. And then you can work your way forwards in time to realise that design, being efficient at each step along the way, just as for forecasting -- but now you know where you're going.20 Fourth, in order not to be dogmatic (we are going to make mistakes), we need to periodically revise our plan. We must check regularly that the world hasn't changed under our feet in ways we hadn't anticipated. When it has we need to go back and re-do this process, rethink what kind of future design we want. This four-step method is backcasting. There's nothing new in it. It's what sensible mountain climbers do. It's what sensible business executives do when thinking about company strategy and what sensible politicians do when thinking about national strategy. It's how we think about our own personal future (so long as we are not so hemmed in that we can only predict it!): 'I'd like to be a class A mechanic. What do I have to do to be a mechanic?' Step back five years: 'I've got to have a certificate. What do I do to get that?' Step back five years: 'I'd best get a high school pass with physics and technical studies included.' And so on. 'But then again, suppose I wanted to try for a commercial pilot instead? ...' This approach has important advantages if taken seriously. Consider our energy future. Not so long ago our energy problem was relatively simple: Make full use of what was most readily available. But today, as already noted, our energy problems are much more complex and much more grave. There is no automatic energy future. What is even possible for our energy future depends on a large number of technical, economic and even social decisions that we will make along the way, and these decisions in turn depend upon how imaginative we have been in applying our existing knowledge of 20

For backcasting, = retrospective path analysis, in energy policy, the locus of some of its most sophisticated applications to date, see Bott et. al. 1984, Crossley/Hooker 1987, Midttun/Baumgartner 1987, Robinson 1982. For the broader context see Hooker et. al. 1980.

possibilities to understand the alternative futures open to us (cf. e.g. fuel cells and nuclear fusion). The same applies to our agricultural future - cf. e.g. crop types, farming technologies and practices and land ownership patterns as between sustainable and minimal-output-cost farming 50 years hence. This interaction between realistic alternative futures and decisions along the way reveals the power of the backcasting approach to uncover our real democratic opportunity for participation in our own future and a subtle limitation of the forecasting approach which I had earlier ignored. Backcasting invites us to explore our alternative futures using its methodology, by focusing on six questions. (1) What can we do to open up our future agricultural options and, conversely, what current decisions would close them down? For example, developing more nitrogen-fixing crops through genetic engineering and more effective biological pest controls through new economic crop combinations might increase future options, commitment to a national policy of bulk agricultural exports through largescale monoculture would decrease them. (For energy cf. developing decentralised solar technologies with commitment to a national coal/nuclear powered electricity grid.) (2) Through what kinds of decisions is the future shaped? Agricultural demand is influenced e.g. by population growth and culture (e.g. the recent demand for ethnic cuisines and the supply of the corresponding vegetables), by transport costs and capacities (e.g. the recent sharp rise in inter-state and international supply of seasonal foods), and agricultural capacity is further influenced by regional and national interest (e.g. the subsidising of a regional wine industry to provide employment or of a grain exporting industry to earn foreign exchange), by urban encroachment on class A agricultural land, and so on. In short, there is a wide range of decisions which will affect future agricultural demand and practice. (Similarly, energy demand depends on our kind of transportation - cf. road versus rail freight incentives, the designs of our cities and the buildings within them and, as already noted, a wide range of technical and economic decisions will affect availability of future energy technologies.) (3) Under what constraints must we operate? These have to do e.g. with land area and distribution of soil types and climate (cf. sources of energy and their abundance), as well as the diversity requirements of sustainable agriculture, availability of capital, a realistic turnover rate for agricultural machinery and so on. (4) On what sets of value judgements do our decisions rest? The relevant value judgements range widely and include the value placed on food relative to other expenditures, and on health vis-a-vis other cultural features of diet, environmental values, the value of rural versus urban community life (and not only as lifestyle, but e.g. as a rehabilitation environment), economic values ('wealth versus health', spread of agricultural investment across kinds of agriculture and across the community, etc.), foreign policy values (e.g. national autonomy) and so on. (Values in the case of energy include many of the same general categories, e.g. those of environmental and economic values, and also include distinctive issues, such as that of acceptable risk - cf. nuclear versus solar energy.) (5) Which realistic future alternatives can be open to us? Here we can contrast, e.g., specialised flooring and furniture timbers with mass construction softwood plantations, niche export markets for cheeses and wild rice with bulk grains etc., contrast battery livestock (hens and pigs 4 cages deep stabilised by antibiotics etc.) versus free range livestock and prairie grass fed buffalo with corn fed feedlot cattle (or kangeroos versus cattle in Australia), etc. and contrast a food processing/marketing industrial structure focussed on spatially specialised monocultures, preservation and long-distance haulage with one focussed on local diversity and freshness (cf. differences between Europe and North America here), etc. (For energy consider cf. e.g. solar and biomass industrial structures with a coal-fired electric future.) Of course these are not the only relevant factors - hydroponics, genetic engineering, urban/rural integration and a host of other factors need also to be entered - nor are the particular contrasts chosen the only alternatives to be considered, the discussion is only intended to point the way toward judiciously chosen future scenarios to consider.

(6) How do we go about making a choice of energy path wisely? Here we are concerned with the democratic process: which institutions should be responsible for agricultural (energy) planning, e.g. government department, quasi-independent planning authority, private market place, land and environment court, ...? (Cf. government department versus electricity commission etc. for energy planning.) How do we balance the role of technical experts and the participation of various sections of public interest? What roles should dynamic systems modelling play in the process? (See here e.g. the experiment by the Finish Parliament with energy policy, Hamalainan 1988.) And so on. Following these questions through will force a systematic exploration of the range of agricultural systems designs. And similarly for energy and other policy areas since each of these questions has an obvious enough parallel for each other policy area. And note that the content of backcasting studies is not restricted to scientific and technological areas. It would be useful in exploring topics of broad social concern -- feminist issues might be examined, for instance, say women's future roles. Here not only economic and technological issues are relevant but the broader study of women's futures must also include cultural values, social roles and lifestyles, parenting-family issues and the like. Women's issues can be approached constructively through asking such questions as: 'What are the possibilities, what alternative kinds of societal roles for women are open/ to be opened for choice?', 'What constrains choice of economic, reproductive/nurturing and other roles for women and men?', 'What values lie behind current female roles and what alternative values and roles may be adopted?' 'How can changes in women's roles be best chosen to achieve a future humane and multi-cultural society?' Pursued through the construction and exploration of alternative future Australian societies, these questions can provide the framework for a valuable learning experience and provide a framework for policy action. Thus backcasting has a suitable richness to it, but its full potential has not yet been brought out. In developing this methodology we must insert it into the context of our dynamics adaptive systems. In the policy sciences literature the concept of policy has many differing characterisations, e.g. 'standing decision', specific public action, government prescription; what all these characterisations have in common is the assumed background of a world that can be put together piece by piece by human decision. In a world of dynamic adaptive systems the objectives of policy will need to be reformulated accordingly. As noted earlier, it is not possible to design coherent public policies predictively, since without a knowledge of possibilities, of the alternative paths (sequences of dynamical states) down which the system may branch, one cannot evaluate the alternative initial and boundary conditions and constraints that might be relevant but which do not correspond to any extrapolation from the present values for these. And because of the irreversible, historical character of most non-linear dynamic systems, especially the adaptive, self-organising systems, it is essential to work the analysis of actions in these respects backwards in time to avoid costly, or even impossible, reversals of earlier dis-valuable system development (e.g. that exhibiting soil erosion, species loss). So as a further augmentation we may say that only backcasting methodology, where scenarios employ whole-systems structure, provides an adequate framework for policy analysis. Further, one cannot in general impose detailed outcomes on dynamic systems. The first reason is epistemological, their sheer complexity defeats the attempt (recall the Conant/Ashby theorem). The second reason is causal, system self-organisation to provide reactive adaptation will often defeat the effort, which is inevitably limited and partial, often producing counter-productive and counter-inuitive outcomes. Rather policy will need to concern itself with the design and dynamics of the (sub-)system concerned. Working with the dynamics of a complex adaptive system so as to capitalise on its particular structure, organisation, and dynamics is a more appropriate strategy than attempting to dominate it. So then, to have a public policy is to specify the design of a co-ordinated set of constraints for some appropriate sub-system of the planet's system, which provide for a (sub-)systems dynamics whose subsequent dynamical states express the desired valuable systems properties. An agricultural policy, e.g., will specify a set of regulatory restraints and incentives, concerned with land ownership and use, disease and weed control, marketing,

health regulations for food processing, etc. etc. - i.e. place a co-ordinated set of constraints on the structure and processes of the agricultural system - such that the agricultural (sub-)system will develop, say, productivity, stability, sustainability, equitability and autonomy. But it will not try to specify in detail agricultural outcomes, rather these will emerge from the unfolding system dynamics. This means shifting the focus in the construction of whole-system scenarios from the detailed parameter values to those systems processes and properties involved which are important to the realisation of the values sought. This shift, combined with public participation in the construction and choice of scenarios and actions to realise them and regular resubmission of backcasting analyses to public re-evaluation, is what jointly ensures that backcasting remains supportive of democracy and accountable to the public. Enacted in an authoritarian manner, backcasting can serve the planning process of a centralised authoritarian state. But if there is vigorous public participation in the formulation and choice of scenarios, and in the regular reevaluation of those choices, then the process actually serves to strengthen democratic process because people are able to participate meaningfully in the very construction of their future. (See also Hooker et al. 1980.) This choice is more meaningful, e.g., than accepting existing trends as 'natural' or 'god-given' and working only within them. And if at the same time policy is concerned with direction and process and with wisely chosen valuable features then individuals and groups are freed to work out their unique paths, more freed e.g. by the resilience and productivity of the resulting system design than they would be by the attempt to bring about some detailed end result. The resulting designs, like that of the human brain and of resilient productive ecologies, should be a system-atic departure from the complex incoherence of the unfettered and imperfect market on the one side and the inoperative simplistic coherence of a centralised authoritarianism (right or left) on the other. Indeed, the major advantages to the backcasting methodology are these: (1) Values explicitness. Backcasting brings to the surface the values that are inherent in every choice. In this scheme you work with alternative systems designs for the future and the contrasts between the alternatives are first and foremost contrasts in values. (2) Fact/value integration. Every design, every choice among future alternatives, is an integrated choice of a set of values realised as particular facts, as actual features of our future world. When the world is an artifact made by us the separation of fact and value is no longer possible and we must teach ourselves to think through both together. (3) Discipline integration. As the Swedish vulnerability study showed, it is necessary to consider agriculture, technology, energy and social policies in an integrated manner to create sensible agricultural futures. You must get to grips with the cross-disciplinary impacts. In fact, I would go further: There is no single human problem worth solving which belongs to any one discipline. Think e.g. of the interactions between culture, economics, law, environmnental science, etc. that are involved in creating a viable industrial structure. (4) Discriminating. Backcasting hones the capacity to critically extract information. We are swamped with information, most of it trivial, while much of the really important information remains hidden from us. Concentrating on systems designs provides a selective focus for acquiring information. We need people with the ability to know what is relevant and where to extract it and, still more important, the ability to apply what is known already to learn more, and more deeply. (5) Empowering. Backcasting offers the opportunity to learn how to participate in serious sifting of future alternatives and in responsible debate about them, giving people a sense that they can participate in the making of their own future. As we all know from our own lives, no sense of participation, no sense of ownership for the outcome of a decision, also means no responsibility taken for the decision either. Participation in backcasting motivates people. It is understandably difficult for people to be realistic and to accept discipline in the service of distant goals; backcasting helps. Socially, it empowers participation by providing a basic understanding of technological change and its implications. Most people think of all technological change as like a change from copper wiring to aluminium wiring, but that is just its surface. The real change is in changing organisation -- and of everything, of information flow and use (instant world currency markets, phone banking, etc.), of machines and factories (robots, just-in-time

stock control), of services (supermarkets, futures markets), of warfare ('smart' missiles, Star Wars) and so on. We need to be prepared to take our place in this kind of dynamic world. Backcasting both helps to do this also provides the opportunity to explore an integrated picture of our society's institutions, to achieve 'institutional literacy'. The more we shift away from 19th century fixed institutions into a world which is geared around technologicallyinduced re-organisation, and the more our world becomes a multi-cultural world, the more we need re-designed adaptable institutions and the more urgently we all need a solid framework of how our society functions and what it is about. 13.

The Role of Values in Policy Making Designs

Backcasting gives a systematic role to value judgements in the designs of public policies. This role is frequently dismissed as irrelevant to 'objective' policy, assumed to be merely political, or otherwise misunderstood. In forecasting it is suppressed, hidden within the assumption that past trends are merely facts rather than value-expressing designs and that these designs are to be extrapolated essentially unaltered into the future. In order to ensure against this, and to understand the unique role of value judgements in backcasting policy analysis, it is necessary to focus on the structure of the future scenario from which the policy analysis begins. The construction of an energy policy scenario, e.g., proceeds in the manner given in figure 6A. From an energy policy making perspective, the analysis begins at the tertiary level where the actual goods and services which a society desires are decided. No one wants energy in itself. Rather, people want warm homes in winter, toasted bread, washed clothes, etc., and each of these requires a certain amount of energy. These together make up the tertiary energy demand. These commodities and must be delivered by particular devices (e.g. toasters) using particular kinds of energy fuels (e.g. electricity). These fuels and associated devices belong to the secondary energy level. They are chosen in the light of the actual demands for goods and services which we make and the constraints which we may place on the choice of these devices and their fuels. We may place safety constraints, e.g., on washing machines and toasters; we may prefer electrical devices to gasoline devices on pollution grounds; and so on. The total fuels required forms the secondary energy fuels demand. Combined with a national analysis of which primary sources of energy are available, it in turn determines the primary energy technologies which will be chosen. These choices will again be subject to constraints imposed on grounds of environmental integrity, safety, foreign policy implications and so on. The total demand for raw energy in the form of naturally occuring oil, wood etc. is the primary energy demand. insert figures 6A, B about here Agricultural policy scenarios have a parallel structure, given in figure 6B. Policy analysis begins at the tertiary level where the actual goods and services which a society desires are decided. No one wants wheat plants, cattle etc. and few want a pine plantation or vineyard; rather, people want breakfast cereal, clothing, flooring and the like, and each of these requires a certain amount of agriculture. These desired commodities form the tertiary agricultural demand, and must be produced from particular kinds of stuffs: foodstuffs, organic building and decorating materials and so on, manufactured in particular technical processes using particular devices. These stuffs and their associated processes and devices belong to the secondary level. They are chosen in the light of the actual demands for goods and services which we make and the constraints which we may place on the choice of these processes and devices, e.g. hygene constraints on food bottling, environmental constraints on paper manufacture. The demand for stuffs is the secondary agricultural demand and, combined with a national analysis of which primary sources of agricultural stuffs are produceable, it in turn determines the primary agricultural technologies and practices which will be chosen. These choices will again be subject to constraints imposed on grounds of environmental integrity, safety, foreign policy implications and so on. The total demand for raw agricultural product (megalitres of water, tonnes of seed wheat or tree seedlings, piglets or pigeons, gallons of gasoline, etc.) is the primary agricultural demand.

Even the cursory discussion here of constraints at the secondary and primary levels, not to mention the original societal choices of tertiary goods and services, makes it clear that all of these choices are based on value judgements. And of course, the environmental impact of the goods and services which we choose, and of the secondary and primary technologies which they subsequently require, will be among the most important value judgements which enter our choices. Thus attention focuses on the role of the normative blueprints in figures 6A and B. It is here that we make explicit and systematise these value judgements. The basic idea behind a normative blueprint is to present a set of societal value judgements, taken at some point in the future, in sufficient detail to permit meaningful physical and social conditions to be formulated for their achievement. The normative blueprint contains all of the levels of normative value judgement from the most detailed (e.g. that certain minimum pesticide concentration or ventilation standards should apply) to the most general (e.g. asserting that the preservation of the economic market takes precedence over the social choice of cost-risk profiles for technologies and processes). In principle, all of the societal consequences of pursuing a given goal must be covered. Although actual physical goals come most readily to mind, the Swedish vulnerability study should have made us aware that goals like community peace and mental health should also be included, e.g., as well as the set of valued institutional structures and processes which achieving all of these other goals assumes (e.g. effective planning authorities, independent judiciary). There are many competing normative blueprints for agriculture and energy and the merits of various fragments of them are now being hotly debated -- though we are rarely offered a full normative blueprint. One such blueprint, 'business-as-usual', might e.g. in part specify the dominant social values as security of agricultural stuffs and energy provision and economic efficiency, followed by safety, that market-optimal processes for determining agriculture and energy consumption are more valuable than alternatives, that the environment has value only in so far as it participates in the market, and so on. There would need to be many more details, but the general idea is clear enough. On the basis of demographic projections and the like a future state of the nation would be singled out as most appropriate to realising this scenario. In this case it would largely agree with market-based extrapolations; in the case of agriculture large-scale monoculture farming would dominate and for energy fossil fuels and centralised-grid electricity will dominate, in both cases controlled by large, centralised institutions; there will be self-reinforcing development of energy-capital-technology-intensive industry and the environment will be re-arranged to suit. Retrospective analysis would then yield the key steps, predominantly economic and legislative, which would need to be taken to reach that state. Here there is plenty of scope for use of the traditional technical tools of policy analysts (cross-impact matrices, Delphi, costbenefit-risk, etc.) More detail needs to be supplied (see e.g. Crossley/Hooker 1987, Hooker 1989c, Hooker et al. 1980) but the general approach should be clear enough. Given this normative blueprint, say for 50 years in the future, and a corresponding path analysis, one can now ask meaningfully about cumulative consumption of fertilizers and pesticide chemicals and the like and the need for new technologies (e.g. machine harvestable tomatoes and other crops, automatic grapevine pruners or berry harvesters) - or, for energy, the cumulative consumption of oil and uranium over the intervening period etc. and the need for new technologies (e.g. fast breeder reactors or deep sea oil exploration rigs) - and in both cases the social means required to see that the research is done and the technologies developed until independently viable, the timing of various legislative moves and so on. It is nowadays obvious that there is a collection of alternative normative blueprints focusing around environmental protection and sustainable economic activity and dominated by such values as stewardship, modesty, community and equality. These values are typically held to be best realised through locally diverse organic farming, renewable solar-flow energy

technologies and de-centralised institutions.21 At this point I only note that not all of these positions are value-identical - e.g. how sustainability is related to social equality can make a huge environmental difference -- and that the values themselves may often conflict, e.g. there must always be some tension between community leadership and social equality. Explicit blueprints help to bring these often-suppressed issues into the open for democratic discussion and community learning. The point of the normative blueprint is to systematise and make explicit the value judgements which enter actual technological and organisational designs at the secondary and primary energy levels, not merely the value judgements which underlie our stated preferences for goods and services. Recall that the most important value judgements a society makes are literally, concretely, realised in the public designs of the society itself. Within a pluralistic society there will be many different normative blueprints supported, but before we come to that we have to deal with the fact that even within a single blueprint, as I have specified it so far, there will be conflicts among values. These will have to be resolved by compromise, by trading off values against each other. It would be nice, e.g. to have a safe road transportation system and to have it cheaply so as to afford more health care for the aged, but it is not possible. It would be nice to have plentiful electricity but no miners' black lung or radiation risk, but it is not possible. So we need a further set of values, those values specifying which of our more immediate values are relatively more important, and why. Now these trade-off values raise some complex and subtle issues. Most societies are evidently happy to pay the present death rate price for current motor vehicle transportation, but they might not be so happy to fix that price publicly, say in legislation. On occasion this might involve more than simple inconsistency, e.g. it might involve the cyclic affirmation of a group of values which tend to mutually exclude one another, in the manner already noticed for valuable systems properties.22 But I shall set these complications aside here and simply say that in the normative blueprint we want to record the entire hierarchy of these value judgements so that we know clearly what we aim to do in the design of a system. 15.

On the Nature of Appropriate Technology

Our value-expressing designs are constituted by technologies and technical practices. It is this conception which provides a framework for re-thinking what is technically appropriate in a dynamic systems setting. The analysis turns out to bear a special relationship to agricultural design. The analysis most appropriately begins with the notion of an intermediate technology developed by E. F. Schumacher and expounded in his important book, Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1975). Quite profound forces shape the development of structure in complex systems, none more so than in human socio-economic systems. E. F. Schumacher was deeply concerned about the structuring and concomitant destructuring which he saw at work in colonial economies. He was quick to see that the same processes were at work inside developed European economies, and that they had important implications for agriculture. It was essentially in response to these forces and their consequences that Schumacher developed the idea of an intermediate technology. 21

Good expositions of this position are given by Berry 1977, Hooker et al. 1980, Lovins and Price 1975, Pausacker and Andrews 1981, Schumacher 1975. The literature, however, is now huge - see e.g. the large biblography on energy to 1980 in Hooker et al. 1980. 22

For an insightful study of these circumstances consult Calebresi/Bobbitt 1978. To cope with this and other conditions societies regularly affirm values publicly which they permit violated in actual, unpublicised practice, and not all of whom can be consistently simultaneously affirmed. Consider, e.g., the social practices of prostitution, and medical termination of life vis-a-vis their moral and legal status. Their evident imperfections should not debar these situations from being judged to be of social value under relevant conditions. See in this connection note 10.

As I read Schumacher, the central idea is that of a contrast between a centre and a hinterland. This relationship is simultaneously a spatial, an economic and a socio-cultural one. In Figure 7 I have tried to provide an elementary overview of Schumacher's basic ideas. insert figure 7 about here If we think of a developing or Third World country, then the centre is represented by the one or two large cities. These act as the import/export gateway, the location of international business activity, of almost all high tech industries and of the use of European urban technologies. Economically they are the seat of the western 'fringe' economy (as Schumacher called it), with many interacting markets, vigorous competition and 'outwardsupward' orientation. Socio-culturally they are the focus of western attitudes, lifestyles and institutions. Thus they might well be thought to represent the cutting edge of development in their country, and thus they have typically been viewed. But they are also typically surrounded by a wide ring of desperately rural poor, clutching to their outskirts in shanty towns of a primitiveness that would often shame the rural villages from which they came. (In India these immigrants live in the doorways and other crannies of the cities' buildings, but the effect is the same.) Schumacher set out to understand and alleviate this condition. The countryside beyond the city, occupying the vast bulk of the nation's land, is typically characterised by a much more traditional society, with a much more traditional, village-based, agricultural economy and non-market processes of economic exchange and social security. Population densities are low, or at least much lower than the city's, transportation and communication are at a correspondingly lower level. Traditional cultural values and institutions predominate. Affluence and health may be substantially less than in the cities but, depending on the country concerned, social security and emotional well-being may well be at higher levels. There tends to be a stable, productive relationship with the environment. The dynamic characteristics of city and rural countryside in these circumstances lie in marked contrast to one another. The European fringe economy is focused around increasing scale of development, increasing diversity of technological products and of institutionalised roles, an ever-increasing pace of change in these respects, all of this driven by the amassing of capital. The city environment is an artificial construct of convenience. The rural countryside, by contrast, has a way of life focused on stability: the preservation of traditional values and lifestyles, adaptation to the ecology with its changing seasons and perhaps multi-year cycles, the reinforcement of village inter-personal obligations, extended family structures, and so on. It is clear that this difference in dynamics provides the basis for an asymmetrical relationship: the city dynamics may destabilise the rural structures yet continue itself to flourish; the reverse is not true. And according to Schumacher this is precisely what happens. The effects as Schumacher sees them can be described by a 'figure 8' feed-back structure driven by the mass production effect indicated as 'I' in Figure 7. Briefly, western technology enables mass production which in turn reduces unit costs. Lower cost items then drive out traditional rural employment which had served local groups of villages. Schumacher, e.g., refers to the traditional manufacture of leather sandals from local products and for local sale being driven out by cheaper plastic sandals manufactured in the cities. The net effect is increasing technological application and (to a lesser extent) employment in the cities with a concomitant increase in unemployment and poverty in the countryside. This in turn places pressure on the countryside to search for raw resources which it may provide to city-based manufacturing or export. In turn, city-based capital moves into the countryside to establish these resource-supplying enterprises, in the process intruding city-based technologies and economic scales in order to provide them more efficiently. At the same time city environmental attitudes dominate the re-shaping of the rural landscape - in the manner so passionately described by Berry (1977). Thus while the city does not change its basic socio-economic character in this process, the rural countryside becomes successively transformed. Its traditional structure is

successively dismantled and replaced by a much simpler - organisationally, not technically, simpler - structure oriented around the mass provision of raw resources to the cities. It is this process of de-structuring and re-structuring in a more elementary form that constitutes the rural countryside as a hinterland. As it removes extended family village structures, non-market economic exchanges and the like, the de-structuring of the hinterland removes the social security for many while at the same time increasing rural unemployment through the elimination of traditional crafts. The net result is an increasing social polarisation in the hinterland, a widening gap between those few who share in the wealth of the agricultural and resource industries set up to supply the centres and the many who are increasingly excluded from the formal economy. In consequence there is a massive migration to the cities, the centres, which are the perceived sources of employment and wealth. But the rural poor have no skills to offer the city industries and they are culturally ill-adapted to city life. Moreover, the city fringe economy is itself but a small part in a larger global hinterland and has only a small capacity to create new employment. The result is increasing social polarisation in the cities with deep poverty and unemployment among the rural immigrants and increasing services and welfare costs for the city economy. The net effect is a hinterland with increasing social polarisation and poverty combined with a centre which also shows increasing social polarisation and poverty. This dismally negative consequence flows, paradoxically, from the economic development of the centres. It was to moderate this dismal dynamics that Schumacher developed a concept of intermediate technologies and of intermediate social or community institutions. The notion is straightforward, it was to place back in the countryside technologies and institutions of an intermediate scale, recognisably part of modern economic development yet small enough to be owned and controlled by local rural groups and on a sufficiently small scale to be environmentally compatible. In this way Schumacher hoped to develop a multitude of smaller foci of economic activity to counterbalance the massive focus at the centre, thence develop a more decentralised economy which would provide higher levels of employment, a more even distribution of wealth in all its forms, and an opportunity to transform traditional culture slowly, preserving its strengths and environmental integrity in the process. Schumacher's analysis applies equally well to western societies. The demographic shift of peoples in western societies from the countryside to the cities has been massive and almost total. Nowadays a few percent of the population occupies the countryside and provides sufficient food for the urbanised 90+%. Moreover, the countryside has been almost wholly structured around industrialised agriculture and minerals extraction industries, i.e. so as to provide raw products to cities, with all the concomitant environmental consequences. In Australia it is manifested not only in our high degree of urbanisation, but e.g. in the relative poverty of Tasmania vis-a-vis the mainland. And the same analysis applies internationally. For nearly all its short national life Canada, e.g., has been acutely aware that its culture and economy are dominated by that of the USA against whose border it huddles in a 5000 kilometre east-west strip. Canadians refer to themselves as a 'branch plant economy' and a 'branch plant culture'. In short, the whole of Canadian society, with perhaps the exception of two cities, Montreal and Toronto, acts as a vast hinterland to the major American cities, a hinterland not easily distinguished in function from the American countryside itself. Essentially, Canada exports raw resources to the US and imports finished products. Over the past three decades Canadian prices for its resource exports have fallen behind the costs of finished-product imports by 50% or more. I.e. Canadians must now export somewhere around 50% more resources simply to pay for the same quantity of imports as they did two decades ago. The primary factors at work here seem to be (i) the price of mineral and agricultural exports is a function of world supplies; these prices by and large have not increased significantly and in many cases even declined, and (ii) the price of finished products is a reflection of the cost structure of the centre economy and continues to rise due to the effects of competition for resources and capital in the centres, together with centre inflation. And the same dynamics applies internally, as e.g. the eastern

Maritime provinces struggle to hold jobs and people against the pull of the Toronto-Montreal axis (+ the neighbouring US cities). Canada has discovered over the last two decades, what every Third World country knows, that this dynamics tends to make the centres richer and the hinterland both poorer and of more elementary economic structure. This happens even when that hinterland is itself an industrially advanced economy. It is precisely the dynamic Australia faces to-day, isolated by culture and oceans from any large trading bloc. This dynamic -- labelled "II" in Figure 7 -- completes the elementary or first-order dynamics of centre-hinterland. Schumacher then faced a design problem. Find technologies which, when inserted into a rural Third World system, have the following design features: 1. Result in a systems design which was stable under normal inputs and outputs, moderately resilient to shocks and adaptable. 2. Produce a system that was controllable by humans, with distributed controlling power. 3. Produce a system which is more valuable (where principal values are, in order of importance: employment, autonomy, environment, wealth). Technological designs which achieve this Schumacher labelled intermediate technologies because they were intermediate in capital intensity, technological sophistication and size (of employment). Subsequently, Schumacher's notion was shifted across to a First World context where the protest and environmental movements adapted it to their own immediate concerns, namely, environmental conservation, social distribution of wealth and power, and anti-nuclear protest. The net result of this kind of process was a series of distinctions: appropriate/inappropriate, high/low and hard/soft technologies. These distinctions don't coincide, and there is a need for systematic analysis. At present they tend to be used vaguely with reference to a shopping list of characteristics which label the two sides. A good example is Henderson's list (Henderson 1978). On examination, these shopping lists of characteristics are shown (a) to be in tension with one another down the list, (b) to be ambiguous (e.g. political centralisation versus technical design centralisation), (c) to have specific technologies shift from one side of the division to the other depending on the larger circumstances in which they are inserted (e.g. increasing technical knowledge shifts technology from high to low, or different systems of social power-sharing shifts the technology from hard to soft). The shifting to a mere list of qualities ignores the original systems dynamic conception of technology which was employed in the Schumacher analysis. Moral: There is only one adequate definition of appropriate technology and that is essentially the definition given for Schumacher's intermediate technology. This discussion recalls my earlier, and perhaps unusual, definition of a technology: a technology is a selective amplifier-transformer. What it amplifies is a function of its own nature and design (and sometimes a function of the system into which it is inserted, e.g. for adaptive filtering). What effects the amplification has depends on the system into which it is inserted. A human-technology system is a mutually adaptive one, evolving a set of lifestyles and technological designs in successive interactions. In consequence, what actual shopping list of properties appropriate technologies will characterise depends on the specific historical circumstances of the human society into which they are inserted, including the ecological and economic dynamics, its social and political control systems and the panoply of ordered values which its culture exhibits (cf. e.g. Dickson 1974, Elliott and Elliott 1976, Teich 1977). Given this analysis, we are now in a position to return to the relationship between appropriate technology and values. Technologies are properly described as appropriate because they realise certain values through their designs. Schumacher e.g. held that regional brick works were more desirable than the national companies displacing them at the time he wrote Small is Beautiful. He held this because the former were on a smaller scale, which in turn permitted easier worker identification and participation, greater opportunities for variety and creativity in the work roles, greater responsiveness to local needs, less environmental stress from pollution, road works and large factory buildings, and possibly greater inputoutput efficiency. In short, scale is not held to be good or bad in itself, but particular scales are held to be valuable because they promote other human values in the social lifestyles that result.

Similarly, Schumacher held his alternative paper pulp technology in Africa to be appropriate because it is employment-intensive, can be constructed within the capital resources of a poor nation; operated with the technical expertise resources of a poor nation and is not wasteful in the provision of its product. Why were these characteristics held valuable? Because Schumacher valued providing everyone with employment, disvalued the economic and social distortions introduced to a poor country by large influxes of foreign capital and technologists, and valued environmental integrity. And why disvalue the effects of foreign capital/expertise? Presumably because it leads to a failure of a people to be autonomous, and to the economy not wholly serving the people's interests, and the reverses of these things are valuable in themselves. Thus in each case in which a technology is distinguished as appropriate it is because it ultimately serves to realise a collection of goals asserted to be valuable in themselves, presumably serving those ends more effectively than available alternatives. More precisely, it does this because, as an amplifier-transformer, its insertion into the dynamic system so alters its design that its subsequent dynamics more fully realises the chosen goals, = expresses the chosen values. Whence the technology appropriate to one set of circumstances may not be appropriate to another. Despite the context of opposition to current development patterns in which the concept of appropriate technology developed, foreign investment may not always be a bad thing, properly controlled it may serve to boost economic development; employment intensive technology may not be in the best interests of a technically advanced egalitarian society, it may be better to provide more creative employment. And choosing appropriate technological designs will be subject to all the complexities of value choice in a dynamic systems setting. (One should bear in mind here the deep tensions to which Schumacher's divergent problems call attention, see Schumacher 1977, cf. Hooker 1987, chapter 8, section 4.3.3; these are directly related to the systems ambiguities noted in sections 5 and 12.) What is important is the underlying set of values or human ends which motivate the development of technologies and ultimately justify particular technological designs. Basic values/ends remain through shifting technological, ecological and economic conditions. In this sense, commitment to a suite of technologies and practices, e.g. those for primary and secondary agriculture, is not politically neutral since it strives to bring about one sort of society rather than another. Schumacher e.g. wanted a humane, participatory community, one permitting responsibility, creativity and personal development in a rich and stable environment. Appropriate technologies are those designs which realise whichever fundamental values are chosen in the techno-economic circumstances of the day. 16. Institution; Profession Institutions, recall, are every bit as much technologies as are tools and technical procedures, they are social technologies (section 7): they transform information, from body language to electronic data, into other information and co-ordinated social action and in so doing they have been amplifying our information acquiring, environment transforming, industrial product producing, lifestyle transforming processes. Bitter historical experience shows that without an adequate grasp of appropriate institutional structure and functioning, even the best and brightest ideas and designs can produce chaotic or negative effects. (One has only to contemplate the history of Europe this century to see this truth - and these institutional dynamics have vast environmental ramifications.) Despite this, it is this question which I find largely undiscussed. Here a few brief remarks must suffice. Clearly, it is crucial how we institutionalise the processes of public policy formation. For most of human development we have not consciously designed institutions at all and in the short span of history where designs have been growing slowly more conscious the designs have been exceptionally crude, essentially simple variations on two extreme models, that of the linear authoritarian hierarchy (monarchies, armies, industries, etc.) and that of the random access/relaxation-to-equilibrium free market. Here we face a set of conflicting constraints. The linear hierarchy is quickly choked by its constricted information flows and constrained in intelligence by its lack of feedback and the few at the top. The free market is constrained by its imperfections - for agriculture and environment especially mis-allocation to public goods

and to correct externalities - and its lack of foresight (cf. trend extrapolation). In practice we have tended to combine the worst features of both designs in our public institutions, suffering monolithic bureaucracies, each concerned only for its own policy outcome, typically understood as focused on a single economic commodity category (e.g. grain), working only toward a narrowly economically efficient technology for the category. In the recent past, for example, nations have had, or had fragments of, an oil policy, a gas policy, a wheat policy, a fisheries policy, a forestry policy and so on, the lines of division following commodities in the market. Ecological, energy and nutritional policies were, and largely still are, absent. Both designs are constrained by their inability to represent within their workings a systematically coherent, interconnected world. Public policy processes precisely require such a capacity. They also need to be institutionalised so as to reinforce the capacity for participative democracy. Rather than these simple-minded extremes, future, effective public policy formulating institutions will need to be significantly decentralised, participation and consensus oriented. Perhaps resilient ecosystems, or our own brains, might form useful models for them? However, investigating these issues for institutional design is a problem far beyond the scope of this paper. Further discussion here is not possible and in lieu of a theory of institutional designs I refer the reader to selected literature.23 There is a corresponding transformation required in our conception of professional roles. In the past professionals simply carried out some local skilled task as requested, e.g. building a bridge, suturing a wound, or increasing a crop yield. Now they must take responsibility for designing a complex, dynamic system, or for contributing their expertise to its co-operative design. This transformation is already happening. From the medical profession we increasingly demand public health, healthy cities and preventative medecine, not just cures after the event. We increasingly demand of our engineers that they design waste disposal systems for whole cities, water management for whole watersheds, not just install tanks and manufacture pipes (cf. Hooker 1984, 1989c). And from our agriculturalists we should demand that they design agricultures with something like the properties discussed in section 5: productivity, stability, sustainability, equitability and autonomy. I say "something like" these properties, for we can usefully expand this list to those of Table 2. Recalling the discussion of sections 5 and 14, we note that we cannot rest content with offering a simple list of this kind because of systems and referential ambiguities and because these properties will be partially mutually exclusive, constraints will prevent their full joint realisation, in turn requiring further value judgements to tradeoff among them. These are complex matters which can only be indicated here. insert table 2 about here We may now summarise the general conception of an agricultural professional ion the form set out in Table 3. A full analysis of the notion of an agricultural professional requires a detailed examination of these issues. insert table 3 about here 17. Agri-Culture Culture is a complex notion perhaps most often associated with the 'high arts': music 23

Of the fragment of the literature on institutions with which I am familiar, I have found little of real use. The reader might like to consult Beer 1979, Espejo and Harndon 1989, Vickers 1968, 1980, 1983, because of its cybernetic design emphasis, but read in the light of note 22. There are also insights to be extracted from the actor-system dynamics approach, e.g. Baumgartner et al. 1986, and from institutional economics, e.g. Langlois 1986.

and mathematics, painting and poetry, theatre and theology. But a little reflection reveals a much wider use of the notion; there is a wide difference in workplace culture between the steelworker and the farmhand, or even between the nurseryman, dairyman and cattleman; and an equally wide difference between the sporting cultures of football and horseracing, between the domestic cultures of Edna Average from the outer suburbs and I. B. M. Yuppie from Downtown Towers. If we look to find culture in specific items -- a painting, a musical performance, a jillaroo's hat -- or if we look for culture only in the 'high arts' then we shall have foregone any opportunity to construct an adequate notion. Rather we shall need both a more embracing conception of culture than this, and also a more penetrating one. A group of individuals may do many things without possessing a culture, as some groups of prisoners, schoolchildren and even nations demonstrate. On the other hand animal societies as well as human possess cultures, or the rudiments of cultures, and we need to understand the roots of our own cultures in them. In a book from which the title of this paper was drawn, T. S. Eliot Notes towards the Definition of Culture (Eliot, 1948), a wide notion of culture is understood as including 'all the characteristic activities and interests of a people' and Eliot's exemplar list includes both the Henley Regatta and boiled cabbage cut into sections (p.31). Eliot goes on to argue for three preconditions for culture: the first is that of a growing, developing structure which will foster the hereditary transmission of culture within the culture, the second is that a culture should have detailed regional variations which fit it intimately to local conditions and the third is that its major institutions should show a richness of diversity within unity.24 These may seem peculiar requirements for Eliot, since he otherwise seems to think of culture in terms of the 'refined tastes' of the European gentleman.25 Yet these requirements seem to me to move in exactly the right direction. For, in another language, they all contribute to a sense of the coherence, complexity and dynamics of the cultured society. For a group of people to have a culture in Eliot's sense, they must form a certain kind of coherent unity, the kind of coherent unity which is locally well adapted and self-reproducing, of sufficient internal diversity to provide niches for its diverse individuals together and with sufficient coherence to provide the resources for continued adaptation, to show sufficient adaptability to be able to self-organise itself into more complex forms. In short, it links culture to a systems dynamics of a particularly biological kind (recall section 7). It would be instructive to compare Eliot's conception of culture with those of the current brash evolutionary epistemology and sociobiology

24

I have generalised the last of these requirements, Eliot mentions only religion, he requires a 'universality of doctrine with particularity of cult devotion' (p.15); but while I can accept the implication that there is no culture in the absence of basic categories of value judgement, religion in any reasonably delineated sense seems neither necessary nor sufficient to capture the range of these value judgements. 25

It is notable that Eliot in fact nowhere offers a definition of culture but he does add at another place that 'culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living' (p.27). The mention of boiled cabbage earlier may serve to remind us that this last judgement is dubious unless it be intended as an internal value judgement ('worth living as they saw it'). It is not clear to me that Eliot did so intend his remark; one has the feeling that in his view cultured British, perhaps cultured European, gentlemen were able to make absolute value judgements about the worth of both their own and other cultures. There are various British upperclass prejudices of this kind which appear more or less subtly through Eliot's work. Rather than criticise them, I simply do my best to avoid them by taking only very selectively from Eliot's ideas. This is difficult territory; I am happy to concede that my own remarks in this paper may reveal assumptions which can be constructively criticised. But deconstructionism of this kind so often and easily leads to mere relativism, and relativism I judge to be both a theoretical and practical disaster.

approaches.26 To properly understand the complexity of the real systems with which we are dealing here - as contrasted e.g. with the often narrow focus on 'information' in the preceding literature - one can complement these considerations with the health-oriented but broad approaches of Boyden 1987, 1992 and Geist 1978. In any event it is to this as yet uncompleted biology based, complex systems dynamics approach to culture that I believe we should turn. From this perspective to have a culture is, roughly, for a group of people in an identifiable environment to have a collection of beliefs, values and cognitive and emotional attitudes and processes; a collection of technologies of all kinds across the categories of tools, systematic practices and institutional arrangements; and lifestyles (including 'all the characteristic activities and interests of a people' across work, recreation, eating, worship, etc.) such that the resulting system of people plus environment possesses sufficient stability for its individuals to adapt (to become acculturated), sufficient richness to support individuality and creative variation and adaptation to local conditions, sufficient adaptability to accommodate environmental and internally generated change, and sufficient selforganisation to continue to develop in complexity. This notion of culture is certainly rough and crude; it is ambiguous until its basic notions (stability, adaptability, self-organisation) are clarified, vague until 'sufficient' is specified, uncertain until the incompatibility among its basic notions and the inevitable incompatibilities among the basic values found in any rich culture are given further analysis. It is also incomplete, e.g. the definition does not include a notion of equity. Yet the concept is already sufficient for many purposes, e.g. to make it clear that neither a group of prisoners working together under external direction nor a group of nations interacting through confined economic and military means form or possess a culture. And now we have a natural understanding of institutions, conceived themselves as systemic amplifier-transformers, as comprising the organised sub-systems of a culture, as providing the structure of social-relational constraints within which cultural dynamics are played out. And the institutionalising of backcasting policy processes will provide the kind of regulatory structure which grounds the culture's capacities for adaptability and self-organisation. This in turn allows us to place the notion of a professional as value-expressing systems designer in its full systemic-cultural context. According to this conception the western democratic liberal society of the change machine has a culture just as do the Australian Awabakal aborigines. But here one of the characteristic ambiguities of the notion is evident, for the culture of the change machine is focused on process not product while the culture of the Awabakal (in common with all other human cultures) is focused primarily on product not process. For us in the west there is far more private diversity than there is public agreement and what public agreement there is is focused primarily on processes for the resolution of conflict because of private diversity. For all traditional cultures there is a predominant focus on publicly agreed products, on artifacts, practices and ceremonies in keeping with the primary orientation toward achieving ecological stability. And so here is revealed too the incipient tension within the conception of culture between stability on the one side and adaptability on the other (cf. Johnson 1988). Indeed, it is not yet obvious that change machine societies do possess a viable culture, for they may yet produce a rate and pattern of change which undermines all stability and ultimately the foundation for adaptability and self-organisation as well. If this does prove to be the case -- and it is far from excluded at this time -- then it would be worthwhile enquiring (now!) whether this was due to a failure of the sufficiency requirement or to some deeper sense in which the change machine fails to support a culture at all. We shall only gain some real grasp of both biological and cultural systems when we can understand whether and how the self-organising properties of those systems manage to hold a viable balance between 26

See e.g. the discussions in Boyd and Richerson 1986, Callebaugh and Pinxten 1986, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Hahlweg and Hooker 1989b, Lumsden and Wilson 1981 and Plotkin 1982 -- especially the critical discussions by Baldus and Munz in Hahlweg/Hooker 1989b.

stability and adaptability. Agri-culture. It is possible to have agriculture without agri-culture. This is, I think, at bottom what Berry was most afraid of and most opposed to. He did not believe that there could be an urban-based agri-culture of agri-business, I think, because he did not believe that there could be a viable urban culture of the technical, exploitive kind at all. Thus he saw the environmental exploitation of the agri-business sector as a kind of mindless group activity which had none of the stability, adaptability and self-organisation that would be required for a viable agricultural system. I do not wish to pursue here any particular normative vision, certainly not Berry's Jeffersonian idyll, but to establish the end point of our long enquiry: It is not possible to have a viable agriculture without a viable agri-culture. And we are now in a position to give some content to that term. To have an agri-culture is, roughly, for a society to have a viable culture (in the sense of section 16). A viable culture is one whose expressed values in the designs of its institutions and material practices generates a biologically productive practice which is a dynamical microcosm of its culture, i.e. which exhibits the same properties of stability, adaptability and self-organisation in relation to their ecological environment. Further, the values of a valuable culture are all manifested as systems designs; so we can say that having a valuable agri-culture is manifesting a set of system-atic designs such that our ecological practices form an integral part of a viable cultural system manifesting value. For these requirements to be met, I suggest, our agricultural practices will have to exhibit a certain complex kind of conservation and organicness; enough has been said to indicate how to begin developing this notion. I would also value a culture according to the degree it manifested the values of liberty, equality, communality, spirituality, self-awareness and wisdom. Let us say that we have a valuable culture when some such list of values are realised within it. Perhaps ultimately the most viable culture is also the most valuable one ('the meek shall inherit the earth'); but perhaps not. Understanding these matters too will prove a long and complex study; but at least the foregoing analysis is intended to provide a framework within which to begin. 18.

Ethics

First let us distinguish all those aspects of life which have these two features: (i) they arise from what we deeply value and (ii) they are intended to transcend merely individual points of view, interests and imperfections (such as bias, carelessness, egocentrism, anthropomorphism). Plato held that all our specific values were focussed on three ideals: goodness, truth and beauty, and that their pursuit in a way which transcended our egocentric imperfections was the mark of the life of reason which issued, respectively, in ethics, sciences and aesthetics. For the purposes of our discussion here I shall take ethics to be the reasoned pursuit of goodness realised through the nurturing of its component specific values in a way which transcends indivdual interests and human imperfections.1 Agricultural professionals are responsible for systems design, for the system's design; they are husbanders proper, the bringers into being of the anticipated future. This is far more intelligent and demanding systems design than other natural systems display. The ethics of the professional are the ethics of the design + the nurturing of good design, in a valuable agriculture. This is a subtler affair than provided by either of the conventional ethics, utilitarianism and deontology. Utilitarian ethics holds that the ethical action is that which yields the greatest good to the greatest number, a generalisation of the market economic notion of contribution to net social welfare, and satisfied by self-interested action in a perfect market; there need be no explicit accounting for system designs and their manifested values. Deontological ethics holds that the ethical action is that which respects a set of rules of conduct; their formal universality gives them an inflexibility and independence of context which means that there once again need be no explicit accounting for system designs and their manifested values. We shall have to look beyond traditional conceptions of ethics for a suitable framework for systems designing.

An obvious place to look is at the ethical literature of the environmental movement, since that is likely to at least emphasise the systemic nature of the environment. And there is an ecologically oriented ethics under development, growing out of both the animal rights movement and the various green communalist movements which are replacing communism as the focus for emphasising communal values. To set up the relevant alternatives distinguish between the classes of individuals or systems which have features making them worthy of ethical consideration and the class of individuals or systems on which the ethical principles focus. Then we find the array of positions sketched in figure 8: insert figure 8 about here What features make something worthy of ethical consideration? At one extreme one may hold the view that it is only those features which contribute to something's being an individual agent, like a human being, that are relevant for ethical consideration.27 At the opposite extreme are those who hold that the features which give primary ethical value to something are whole system features such as the justice of a society or the complexity of an ecosystem. They would count individual features of less importance in ethical consideration than these larger characteristics. Similarly, it is possible to hold ethical principles focused wholly on obligations or responsibilities to individuals and expressing responsibilities for individuals. On the other hand it is possible to insist that ethical principles should focus primarily on obligations and responsibilities to, and for, systems as a whole, whether societies or ecosystems. The traditional ethical stance focuses on individuals ('thou shalt not kill (an individual)', maximise welfare (across individuals) and counts only humans as having specifically ethical value. The environment is of only indirect interest. Hence the term 'shallow' applied by some. The animal rights movement wishes to extend ethical consideration to other creatures, thus enlarging our circle of ethical concern, but leaving the focus of ethical principles on the individual, and on rights. (Thus, continue to maximise welfare across individuals, e.g., but now include the welfare of individual animals as well, or constrain action by accepting rights for animals as well as humans; see e.g. Singer 1975, Regan and Singer 1976.) This is a limited development - if the pursuit of individual rights in isolation, e.g., serves only to stimulate aggression and litigation then widening the circle of rights will only amplify this outcome - but nonetheless an important one. In the past, and alas still to-day, biological humans beyond one's own cultural group were not treated as truly worthy of ethical concern; but we are slowing expanding our circle of ethical concern to all irrespective of race, religion, gender, etc. So, it is argued, we should expand it further to include all sufficiently sentient creatures. (See especially Singer 1981.) Note that this is not a proposal to treat animals as moral agents, only as the object of our ethical concern. There is controversy about what should count as sufficient sentience for inclusion, but that should not detract from the main push towards an ecologically inclusive ethical concern. This position has an intrinsic interest for agriculture because of its widespread consequences for agricultural practices, e.g. reversing the present trend to an increasingly 'industrialised' treatment of livestock. Despite its enlarging our circle of ethical concern, the animal rights movement continues to focus on individuals. By contrast, communalist traditions emphasise the priority and importance of the community over the individual. While Marxism e.g. has no special regard for the environment - humans remain central - it emphasises obligations to the community rather than to individuals. Similarly, the Christian stewardship and creator traditions belong to a communalist strand of Christian thought and under-write a shift toward 27

There is a finer distinction here between those who would exclude any non-human creatures and those that would include all creatures which are relevantly like human persons and there is a converse issue of how many of these features a human individual can lack while continuing to be worthy of full ethical consideration (eg. how mentally deficient); but I shall set these finenesses of distinction aside here for the moment. Frankena's discussion in Goodpaster/Sayre 1979, e.g., contains these and other helpful distinctions.

primary communal ethical obligations, though with humans still the focus of ethical concern. These and like traditions, here labelled 'Pastoralist', also push for a more inclusive ethical concern, but of a different type from that presented in the animal rights argument; where the latter focused on concern for more individuals, the former focus on concern for more inclusive systems properties. Again, these movements have significance for agriculture; the idea of an agricultural community, a community of humans, plants and animals, whose communal form is more important than individuals, is what motivates Berry (1977) e.g. and is an established agricultural theme; it would e.g. oppose the 'industrialising' of the agricultural landscape solely in market economic interest (though the market cost may be high, as witness current European Community agricultural subsidies). Besides their common push to enlarge our ethical concerns, what these two otherwise diverse movements possess in common is the continued emphasis on the centrality of humans in ethics; it is our values, our spiritual condition which is the ultimate reference point, no matter how encompassing our ethical concern. There are those who argue against this as chauvinism, e.g. Routley/Routley 1979, 1980. What is now known as deep ecology represents those who wish to combine the enlargening of the circle of included individuals with a communalist orientation to obligations in a non-chauvinist way. There are many variants within this tradition, but its movement away from both individual and human centredness is its core.2 From a dynamic systems perspective these developments provide an important corrective to traditional ethics, but in order to be properly integrated into that perspective it is essential to also reformulate their concepts and precepts in systems form, following the treatment of the concepts of policy, technology, etc. above. This re-formulation ought to relate their concerns to one another through systems properties, instead of each submovement unconditionally asserting its particular approach. Individuals, e.g., are subsystems, their flourishing is necessary for system flourishing, but not sufficient, and conversely; neither whole nor part can be neglected and the importance of each aspect varies from context to context in a way determined by systems dynamics. According to the analysis presented here, professionals will be responsible designers in the sense of Berry (1977) and Vickers (1980). They aim to bring into being systems that manifest the values of a valuable culture, its agriculture in particular. Part of this responsibility, we have seen, is traditional enough, to support the capacity for people to develop their individuality, and so support the value of the individual, and to support those qualities which correspond to a flourishing community of such individuals, e.g. justice, peace, tolerance. (We can argue elsewhere the traditional question of how to theorise these complex activities in terms of traditional ethics.) Part is not traditional, that having to do with emphasising the fundamentalness of expressing values in terms of systems design and introducing systems values. Key values are, e.g., resilience, creativity and self-organisation. These do not reduce to traditional moral virtues in any simple way, but they are connected e.g. to Davison's 'Possibilities Ethic' (the obligation to act so as to increase future possibilities for the system, not reduce them - Davison 1977). To this may be added those aspects of the ecological ethics/deep ecology movement which have been noted above. But we have yet to properly synthesise these strands within an adequate systems framework. In doing so we shall have to also confront the diversity of ethical considerations. These are set out schematically in figure 9. Insert figure 9 about here Briefly, the central idea of justice is fairness, equality of treatment of some kind. Equality divides between process and product, there can be equal opportunity for X (process) and there can be equal outcomes for X (product). Crudely, the economic market aims at equal opportunity for wealth, communism aims more at equal wealth. A similar contrast applies to access to the law versus legal judgements. As these examples suggest, these two forms of justice tend to conflict with one another, though both are valuable. Rights refers to those

conditions and actions to which their holders ought to have access if they so choose, e.g. the right to be free of externally inflicted pain. Rights may be assigned both to individuals and to groups (e.g. nations). Assignments of rights often mutually conflict, as when a right to free assembly exercised by several removes someone else's right to peace or conflicts with a national right to restrict entry. (For some appreciation of the complexity of this and the other notions discussed here see for example the relevant entries in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, MacMillan/Free Press, New York, 1967 - although it deals with only a very narrow notion of responsibility.). Deontological and utilitarian ethics have already been outlined above, a situational ethical system avoids general rules entirely but aims at promoting the flourishing of each unique individual in each specific setting. Of course the welfare-maximising action may well be one forbidden by the deontological rules (e.g. murdering a violent dictator) and in conflict with promoting the flourishing of the individuals concerned (both the dictator and the murderer suffer), so that these approaches diverge. We have already seen something of the complexity of values. Certainly values may conflict among themselves (e.g. freedom of speech versus public peace). Finally the meta- category concerns the normative judgements which necessarily underlie our choices among and within these categories, either in assigning precedence among them for the purpose of conflict resolution (see below), or when designing the institutions and technologies which shape the structure of conflicts as well as the resolution processes.28 The important point to grasp about these components to ethics is their potential diversity. As noted above, within each component there are conflicting attractive options. And components also conflict among themselves across figure 9. Thus the right to free assembly may lead to an ecology being trampled (rights versus values), maximising aggregate (or even mean) welfare might leave some very poor (justice versus utilitarian ethics), valuing loving leads beyond what justice requires (Passmore 1974), and so on. We should then abandon the idea that ethics consists in searching for a single correct response to a given situation which would somehow satisfy simultaneously all of the attractive values and principles. To the contrary it will be of the essence of responsible ethical judgment (at least in this finite life) to know how to compromise values and principles against one another intelligently. To have a coherent position regarding ethically based agricultural responsibility requires at least selecting one of the alternatives presented in figure 8 together with a consistent set of instances from all the categories of figure 9 such that these selections mutually cohere to form a workable body of theoretical concepts and principles which can be integrated into a systems design framework to lead to a systems-coherent moral practice. There are as many alternative positions available here as there are coherent combinations of doctrines. I have tried to sketch the variety and complexity of theories of ethical design responsibility because in the literature only particular fragments are usually discussed, e.g. some principle of justice vis-a-vis future generations; while this is valuable, one is left in the dark as to precisely where any one fragment might fit in an overall position. The ethics of responsible systems design is a subject yet to be developed. But there is an ethical concept we have for the activity, which is sufficiently rich and encompassing to be worked through our expanding understanding of complex systems: love. I mean not eros or egoic need-love but agape or gift-love.29 Ethical responsibilities based on prudential 28

These latter include the choice of decision methodologies, e.g. cost-benefit analysis, as well as the measurable surrogates, e.g. for environmental values, which those methods demand. On cost-benefit analysis, e.g., see Hooker 1984b. 29

Both are constructive, but eros is the narrower. Eros is the expression of the creaturely self, the need both for recognition, acceptance and pleasure and the need to reciprocally give these to others to express self-integrity. Agape is the freely cherishing of another life for its own sake. For humans, the development of eros is essential to the formation of a healthy personality, and to the capacity for agape, but it is agape which crowns personal or spiritual,

considerations stem ultimately from eros. (So might that based on religion if it is driven primarily by fear of punishment or desire of reward.) But agape is required to support larger ethical concerns since agape-love (simply love hereafter) involves clear understanding, openness and nurturing of the fullest development. In systems terms, love is the selforganising principle under which systems become increasingly open yet with increasing resiliency to their adaptability and increasing stability for their adapting processes, in short achieve autonomy and identity. I suggest the following propositions for your assent: Love is the ultimate ground for all ethical considerations. Love moves us to actions beyond those which any impartial rules enjoin. Indeed, to become loving is the fundamental personal way through which goodess is pursued. Responsible agri-culturalists must ultimately be moved by a reasonable love for the land, the ecology, their culture, the planet, and design it accordingly so as to nurture its complex presence and potential.30 The generalities of this essay will ultimately have to find expression in detailed analyses and practices, but behind this development there must ultimately be reason as opposed to thoughtlessness and love as opposed to fear.

and so moral, development. On the agape/eros distinction see Nygren 1953. Agape is the near equivalent of joy in the Eastern traditions. On personal development from the agape perspective see, from amongst a large literature, e.g. Wilbur 1981; cf. Erikson 1963. 30

This raises a delicate tension. The lover longs to become one with the loved, to be 'lost' in the beloved. (This appears in every religion's enlightenment; and also more mundanely when two lovers work to create over time two mature selves, each a complementary part of a richer union.) It is this drive which is, I suggest, behind the deep ecology movement. But to love the world already distinguishes the lover and the loved. The very consciousness which makes possible the life-project of learning to love also distinguishes us from our environment, and raises the question of whether our goals coincide with any particular process in nature. Note that the same conclusion issues from our capacities as creators, since what is created is our making and not simply nature's product. (Every species transforms its habitat, but our creativity does so on a grand scale. That evolution has given rise to just this capacity gives rise in turn to a special complication to understanding what is natural, and a special importance to design.) Furthermore, any actual life lived in love equally fails to express love in many other ways. Albert Schweitzer, e.g., gave up European careers in medecine and music to run a bush hospital in Africa out of love for all life, yet he cured humans rather than animals and killed untold bacteria in the process, denied us his research brilliance in medicine, and so on. These tensions express the finitary predicament. Every aspect of life is replete with tensions. Ethics, e.g., is replete with tensions, as the discussion of diagram 3 revealed. These are directly related to the tensions among publicly affirmed values discussed at notes 10 and 22. All of these tensions are manifest in the domain of agricultural responsibility. Thus, e.g., granting rights to animals of kind A will on many occasions conflict with (i) granting rights to ecologies (whenever specific animals would disrupt an ecology, etc.), (ii) with human rights (e.g. of free assembly in, or purchase and other use of, a feeding area for A's), (iii) with providing justice for both humans and animals of other kinds (e.g. when some group of them must be denied equal treatment in some respect in order to respect A's rights), (iv) with maximising human welfare and/or the welfare of other animals, and so on. The same applies to any other ethical claim here, e.g. granting rights to, or moral value to, ecologies. And what ecological features shall we value among complexity, stability, adaptability, etc.? These systems ambiguities themselves represent tensions among valuable systems features. Tensions cannot be resolved or dissolved, as other problems can. In this finite life we can only respond by choosing what we judge to be the momemtarily best compromise. Wisdom in these choices is a necessary foundation of sound ethical practice.

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A: Dynamic values STABILITY - bounded responses to perturbations, internal and external ADAPTATION - stability against small behavioural variations ADAPTABILITY - capacity to change adaptation with varying ecological conditions RESILIENCE - adaptability to surprise perturbations CREATIVITY - capacity to search adaptive design space SELF-ORGANISATION - capacity to improve each/all preceding properties B: Structural values ETHICALNESS EQUITY AUTONOMY INTEGRATION OPENNESS

- respect and care for integrity and sanctity of sub-systems - fair treatment of all living sub-systems - internal stability across environments - synergy, internal and socio-economic - dynamic interaction with world system

C: Output values PRODUCTIVITY - maximal aggregate system usefulness QUALITY - maximal intrinsic usefulness per unit SAFETY - minimal negative health impacts EFFICIENCY - productivity with minimum economic waste SUSTAINABILITY - output stability Table 2

AGRICULTURAL PROFESSIONAL: a person who is skilled for, and takes responsibility for, instituting and managing agricultural systems designs that realise maximum value. Systems:

knowledge of dynamic systems integrated systems concept of agriculture systems management skills

Design:

understands global design vis-a-vis local optimisation understands system dynamics vis-a-vis system outputs practical design expertise

Value: knowledge of values as systems designs understands structure of dynamic, structural and output agricultural values practical wisdom in trade-offs among values for optimisation Table 3

1958

1978

1998

_____________________________________________________________________ _______________________ Farm size Area 20 ha arable land 12 ha pasture 6 ha woodland Crops 15 ha grain 3 ha ley 2 ha sugar-beets Lifestock 12 beef cattle 150 hogs/year

48 ha arable land 12 ha pasture 11 ha woodland 25 ha grain 14 ha ley 5 ha sugar beets 4 ha horse beans 8 dairy cattle 40 beef cattle 1,200 hogs/year

unchanged or larger new crops rich in protein or energy may alter crop distribution

5,000 hours

unchanged or less

25-30 dairy cattle

Farm inputs Labour input 5-6,000 hours Agricultural machinery 1 tractor self-binder

Fuel

2,000 litres starting petrol and paraffin

Pesticides 1-2 kinds

3 tractors further development combine harvester of machinery twice as many kinds of machinery as in 1958 5,000 litres

10-15 kinds decreased usage 150-200 litres 2-3 times the 1958 quantity

Fertilizers 70 kg nitrogen per ha 85 kg nitrogen per ha Fodder less fodder consumption per kg milk and per kg meat a greater quantity of imported high protein fodder per animal in 1958 Transportation of goods to and from the farm milk transported in cans to A " ngelholm

Yields Crops, area and yields

diesel oil possibly from the farm's energy crops

increased usage of nitrogen producing crops

a greater quantity of domestic high protein fodder per animal in 1998

the transport of goods increases; the farm's location becomes significant the dairy in A " ngelholmthe slaughterhouse in A " ngelholm has been closed down; has perhaps been closed down; milk is now transported the animals will be transported to Helsingborg in a to Kavlinge or Halmstad tanker increases

increases

Milk

4,000 kg/cow

7,000 kg/cow

8-9,000 kg/cow

Table 1 1. Even for this specific formulation the account of ideals and supporting values is rather more complex than indicated but it would be too distracting to pursue the matter; for more detail (as I would tell this controversial story) see Hooker 1993a, from which some material has also been extracted for use here. Of course, even the general approach to ethics I have offered is not the only one, though I judge that it is adequate for my purposes here and none of the important specific claims I make about design ethics are much affected by the more general philosophical disputes; the reader will find sufficient references to the literature in what follows to explore alternatives and judge the adequacy of my presentation here. 2. Besides Routley/Routley, see also e.g. Hill as discussed in section 5, the 'land ethic' of Leopold 1949, and Devall and Sessions 1985, Evernden 1985, Tobias 1985.