ABSTRACT
Biodiversity changes in response to agricultural intensification. Framing the idea as a deterministic relationship between agricultural intensification and biodiversity, wherein each point on the x-axis (agricultural intensification) produces the corresponding biodiversity on the function that relates the independent variable to the dependent variable. Historical changes in agriculture qualitatively follow as if they were a function of the conditions, herein taken to be approximated by the degree of deviation from Chayanovian balances, under which management decisions are made. This chapter expresses that a framework can be used to form an approximate scale, ranging from a pure Chayanovian peasant system to a pure modern, industrial/commercial agricultural system, with "modern peasants" or small-scale farmers as intermediate stages. In particular, the idea of critical transitions, where various ecological regimes can be understood as flipping from one to another, can be thought of as corresponding to the general theory of critical transitions, a theory which is essentially equivalent to the mathematical theory of catastrophes.
