Gardening and Agriculture

Gardening and Agriculture

Gardening is the maintenance of plants. Agriculture is mass gardening. Both rely on plants. The sustainability of plants is a vast subject, much of it accrued by accidental knowledge and observation as opposed to targeted research. There are huge methodological holes in our knowledge seeking as regards plant life and its relationship to other life forms and the planet. One stark observation springs to mind. Plant life does not require humankind.

We survive at present with plants as that part of the biological wheel on our planet that we consume. Meat is not a requirement, it is a preference and not a necessity. There are arguments that animals are required as part of the good husbandry of land for other agricultural production. Even where this may be so, it is still not necessary to eat animals. Meat production is however a major factor in agriculture and anthropology.

Gardening is an excellent metaphor to use with and decode sustainability. By picking apart and labelling the factors involved, many aspects of sustainability become both revealed and tractable, albeit within the constraints and limitations of how the factors are defined and searched.

Plants survive within interlocking ranges of atmosphere, soil, temperature and humidity. They also have seasonal and diurnal aspects to their growth. Too much and not enough of a plant's needs at the wrong or right times will drastically affect their viability. These same considerations apply to the diseases and pests of plants. Plants have a life course, a way that they grow and there are requirements at each stage.

To grow plants sustainably generally means to grow them in a manner such that you can keep on growing them, not just the once. That in turn requires that the raw materials and conditions needed can be put in place to begin with, beforehand, and also that any by-products of the plant's production do not hinder or prevent growth in the future.

Where land has been extensively farm, especially when plant growth amplifiers such as so-called fertilisers have been used, it is inevitable that damage occurs to the basic viabilityu of that land as a growth medium. There are countless examples of this. Artificial soil damage ranges in size right up to sub-continental. Often desertification results, which can be an immense problem to population survival and have little chance of any kind of repair.

Seemingly Basic Aspects

Earth, seed, water, water: plant will grow. Straightaway we can pick this to pieces, for example, a plant can be often grown from a cutting. We can simplify so far, we can complicate wildly, but plants are live things, they grow and generally reproduce in such a way that a new generation of young plant-forming individuals is born. Those individuals have the magic property of life. We must not overlook this basic and deep-down hard to explain phenomenon.

Cunning Aspects, Necessary Conditions for Sustainability

Plants have evolved and are evolving. Previous generations of plants have succeeded and failed, what is left are said to have evolved. Looked at from one direction, it is almost as if plants have learned, aimed, designed themselves to grow in the situations they are often found. They haven't. The plants you find in a certain, unlikely or obvious patch are those that could survive there and if you can reproduce the conditions, they will very likely be able to grow there again.

Unseparability

Plants grow in sympathy with other biology around them. That is why many fruits have evolved a red colour when they ripen. You can see them more easily than when they are not ready to eat or if they had stayed a typical green colour. Those red fruits, get eaten, their seeds, perhaps historically nowadays, get processed through some gut, full of chemicals and nutrients, and then dumped out in a pile of pre-conditioned growing medium. An edge, an advantage to survival of the next generation in a competitive world. You have , by eating plant matter, become part of the mystery of the plant's existence.

Plants grow in sympathy with bacteria, with fungi, with viruses even. Plants cannot grow sustainably without the direct interlocking life force of these other forms of life. There is a mutual dependence for sustainability to happen.

Plants grow in sympathy with each other, positively and negatively. They have mechanisms to fight off and deter other plants or to help the nurturing and be nurtured by other plants. If you look under the canopies or ground cover of the branches of some trees you may see that most other plants have been kept at bay and this is not necessarily a matter of being shaded out by the branches. On the positive method side, companion planting of vegetables is an associated topic with much lore and practice. Keep marigolds around your tomato plants and the gases they give off will keep some insects away, especially insects you don't want spoiling the plant for you. 

Plant Communication

The sympathy plants share with each other is still largely undiscovered territory. They can, effectively, chemically communicate at speed. They reproduce reactions to conditions in nature that can also be artificially put to them. In forest-fire situations it has been found that specific gases exhaled by some trees put neighbouring trees into a state that prepares them towards survival of the fire. It is all marvellously cunning and detailed and far, far from obvious.

The speeds at which trees have been shown to effectively signal ahead to others in forest fires indicates that plant communication is so intrinsically hardwired that it is fundamental and likely one of the oldest forms of biological communication even though and in spite of so little yet being known in even general terms.

Plant communication is not a mainstream subject. It is not seen as being of commercial advantage. It is embarrassing that the communication methods of the sustenance source of humankind is held in such low esteem that it is usually parodied as an item of ridicule. It does raise the question of whether ignorance is sustainable.

The Pendulum of Life

The chemical nutrients formed of the rocks and the biological nutrients formed of previous generations of composted life are elements of sustainability. There is the inescapable idea that many gear wheels are connected in a planetary bio-mechanism.

Geological, hydrological and atmospheric conditions and events are aspects that can provide obvious and less obvious conditions for sustainability. The time course involved in each process, where their timing overlaps is another factor and can be critical.

We can view sustainability over the course of a single individual, but surely would that be better described as survival?

Altruism or Truism

We can view sustainability in the context of a biological lineage. That could be as a description for the sake of classifying or as a tool for predicting how to engineer conditions for the future. The game of genetic modification to suit conditions is as much a game as is designing armaments. It is not a game. It is a fierce, much moneyed, huge enterprise where altruism seems to have no place. Nations and corporations are very fierce and serious here. This importance is national? Not so, the importance is global. 

From the viewpoint of sustainability, the patenting of strains of genetic materials which all rely on the magic of life can only be viewed as fundamentally unacceptable and viscerally abhorrent. It is also an intrinsically ignorant practice. The keeping of seeds in a seed bank for the future seems to be the opposite, an altruistic deed. What both of these practices, the "preservation, for-free" and the "modification, for-power", do is to contribute acutely to the topic of biological sustainability. The industrial scalability of genetic interference makes them useful, but intrinsically, they are both inescapably dangerous.