ABSTRACT
A transition from modern extractive agriculture to agroecological husbandry – as urged in Chapter 1 – requires not only rigorous scientific research; it also presents a cluster of serious legal challenges. To meet those challenges, long-range legal reforms are needed at the national level (especially in the USA as the principal “engine” of modern extractive agriculture, but also elsewhere in the world as well). Such reforms would reorient agricultural subsidies, adopt the Precautionary Principle, stiffen agriculture-specific anti-pollution protections, and boost education and research aimed at facilitating the transition to agroecological husbandry (with special attention to the development of perennial grains grown in polyculture settings) and the adoption of a “land ethic” of the sort urged by Aldo Leopold. Simultaneously, at the international level, a global treaty on agroecology should be broadly adopted to emphasize (i) the need for a reintegration of humans with the rest of the natural world, (ii) the responsibility that humans have to restore the Earth’s ecological integrity, (iii) the urgency of making a transition away from modern extractive agriculture and toward a natural-systems form of food production, and (iv) the special urgency of global climate change and its relationship with agriculture.
