Paul B. Thompson

_The Spirit of the Soil_ challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

How do human interventions into the environment motivated by different aims transform agriculture in ways that create new causal relationships between organisms above and below ground? We provide a conceptual framework for a philosophical and sociological approach to agricultural biotechnology and its multiple impacts on agricultural systems. We begin with a brief account of the history of the philosophy of the agricultural sciences and the early reluctance of philosophers of science to engage in the philosophy of the applied sciences. Applied sciences in general and the agricultural sciences in particular rely on contingencies in social practice. Here, one would expect diversity among different disciplines and goals. Instead of the basic sciences’ aim of discovering a univocal reality, applied sciences were reconciled to the possibility of incompatible prescriptions. Following this, we introduce some concepts and approaches central to discussions of agricultural biotechnologies including social epistemology and social ontology. Our coinage, engineered agricultural ecologies is meant to echo debate over novel ecosystems in conservation biology, where attempts to intervene in ecosystems damaged by species loss and climate change are advocated by some, opposed by others. By insisting that farms are engineered ecologies we hope to stimulate some crosstalk with environmental philosophers and conservation ecology.

Gene editing enables insertion of DNA sequences (e.g. coding and regulatory genetic constructs) at precise locations in the genome of modified organisms. In the case of livestock species, especially, the additional precision may or may not provide a basis for reevaluating the ethical significance of specific genetic modifications. This paper applies a risk-based ethics to determine when gene editing has ethical significance beyond that of modification using earlier methods utilizing recombinant DNA (e.g. GMOs). Ethical concerns about any form of genetic modification, from conventional breeding to gene editing, can be classified into the categories of environmental hazards, socio-economic consequences, food safety and animal welfare. The chapter describes risk-based ethics and discusses the significance of gene editing for each of these categories. Gene editing of agricultural species is ethically significant to the extent that greater precision reduces the probability for realization of specific hazards in one or more of these categories is either increased or lessened. This effect is primarily meaningful in the context of food safety and animal welfare because the potential for unintended and unnoticed disruptions of genetic functionality has bearing on these hazards, and the precision afforded by gene editing is expected to have meaningful impact on the opportunity for such disruption. Gene editing may also have social consequences for the traceability of certain types of genetic modification. In other areas where the ethics of genetically engineered livestock has been debated, gene editing has little material effect when compared to earlier applications of gene technology in agriculture.

This open access collection of new interdisciplinary essays discusses philosophical and social implications of new biotechnologies, methods, and tools used in agriculture from a multispecies perspective. Contributors employ philosophy, sociology, and history of agriculture; agricultural ethics; philosophy of science; and science and technology studies to investigate agricultural research, farming practice, and agricultural policy. Chapters explore and critically discuss how mechanical, chemical, and genetic interventions reshape ecological relationships and agricultural knowledge by relying on case studies of interspecies interactions across different agriculturalized landscapes. These include careful examinations of the nature of dynamic causal relationships across microbial, macrobial, megaflora and faunal organismal communities; exploration of specific coevolved species of pollinators and field crops; and analyses of the epistemic and normative commitments that guide crop management decisions and shape methodological choices leading to the reengineering of land use. These analyses and case studies are intended to provide readers with a variety of conceptual tools through which the use of agricultural technologies might possibly be understood and debated.

Consumer response to genetically altered foods has been mixed in the United States. While transgenic crops have entered the food supply with little comment, other foods, such as the bioengineered tomato, have caused considerable controversy. Objections to genetically engineered food are varied, ranging from the religious to the aesthetic. One need not endorse these concerns to conclude that food biotechnology violates procedural protections of consumer sovereignty and religious liberty. Consumer sovereignty, a principle especially valued in this country, requires that information be made available so each individual or group may make food choices based on their own values. And as yet, there is no policy provision for informing consumers about the degree to which food has been genetically engineered.

Jeffrey Brown, Greg Hoskins and Elizabeth Sperry pose questions about three different policy questions that are discussed in From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone: policy interventions to address obesity, welfare guidelines for egg production, and the safety of genetically engineered foods. However all three critiques turn on the question of what we can expect a non-specialist to know, and how much information they can be expected to process in making an ethical decision about what to eat. My response situates each question within literature on so-called “fast” and “slow” thinking. I argue that while ethical theories appear to have supposed that people are slow thinkers who can be expected to process a great deal of complexity, food ethics must be founded on principles that respect the habitual and heuristic basis of much eating behavior.

This chapter sets out some key features of an agriculturally based environmental utopia. In such a world, the production of food and fiber would be wholly consonant with resilient ecosystems, but the idea of a utopia implies more. Specifying the requirements for utopia is an inherently philosophical task, so criteria that emphasize resilient ecosystems may suggest a different utopia than criteria of food security, let alone food sovereignty. Furthermore, a full appreciation of the tensions implied by these different value orientations requires more than simply spelling out the alternative ways to specify the desirable traits of a utopian society. I will illustrate these tensions by drawing upon the contrast between industrial and agrarian philosophies of agriculture, as outlined in my book, The Agrarian Vision. I will then explore how agrarian philosophical commitments would dictate criteria for a green utopia.

Through socio-cultural analysis of the discourse of bullying, the present article aims to show that moral learning is less about teaching children the difference between right and wrong and more about making available to them what Tappan and Wertsch describe as the mediational means to engage in their own moral learning. Bullying is explained in Bakhtinian terms as a form of ‘authoritative discourse’. Both moral education and manipulative adolescent bullying are presented as, in a broad sense, forms of political practice. The same 13-year-old girl was recorded as she talked with peer ‘counsellors’ about her own bullying and then a fortnight later in the course of directing and featuring in a tutor-group video which aimed to introduce younger pupils to their new school. Through the inter-animation of social voices, new moral ideas are appropriated by the participants. In a succession of ‘zones of proximal development’, students support and ‘scaffold’ each other’s thinking in their progression towards changed levels of moral awareness.

In this _Second Edition_ of _The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics_, Paul B. Thompson reviews four worldviews that shape competing visions for agriculture. Productionists have sought increasing yields--to make two seeds grow where only one grew before--while traditional visions of good farming have stressed stewardship. These traditional visions have been challenged by two more worldviews: a call for a total cost-accounting for farming, and an advocacy for a holistic perspective. Thompson argues that an environmentally defensible systems approach must draw upon all four worldviews, recognizing their flaws and synthesizing their strengths in a new vision of sustainable agriculture. This classic 1995 study has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded in its _Second Edition_ with up-to-date examples of agriculture’s impact on the environment. These include extensive discussions of new pesticides and the effects of animal agriculture on climate and other areas of the environment. In addition, a new final chapter discusses sustainability, which has become a dominant idea within environmental studies, and agrarian political philosophy.

_The Spirit of the Soil_ challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

Environmental philosophers in Europe and North America have gravitated toward an approach that emphasizes the scarcity of resources and the encroachment of civilization on spectacular natural landscapes. As a result, they have neglected philosophical sources within the European tradition that would start with agriculture as a locus for building conceptualizations of humanity’s proper relationship to the natural world. Some of these sources are reviewed briefly, and they are put forward as a possible bridge for creating new conversations among philosophers representing Western and East Asian philosophical traditions.

Bryan Norton takes the debate over weak and strong sustainability to characterize the key conceptual disagreement among attempts to elaborate a theoretical approach to sustainability. In contrast, I argue that this debate is mired within assumptions of economic development theory that fail to recognize how elements of fragility, stability, resilience and adaptive capability within system design or organization have been material to the way that sustainability has been conceptualized in many domains. Two paradigmatic conceptualizations of sustainability compete within the scholarly literature, one stressing the availability of key resource stocks, the other stressing the robustness and resilience of system organization. A better approach would move beyond weak and strong sustainability to acknowledge a deeper and more philosophically potent set of paradigmatic features within sustainability scholarship.

This article explores how time-related metaphors frame advanced cryopreservation technologies in environmental conservation. Cryopreservation “stops” or “freezes” biological time and “buys time” desperately needed to preserve species and ecosystems. We advance a framing of these technologies as logistical, highlighting how they create opportunities to shift materials, knowledge, and decision-making power through space and time. As logistical technologies, advanced cryopreservation techniques require active planning in the present rather than deferring responsibility and accountability to the future.

Biomedical research on advanced cryopreservation has spillover effects on innovation in the food and agricultural sector. Advanced biopreservation technology has three key domains of impact in the food system: (1) improving efficiencies in storage and utilization of gametes and organoids for plant and animal breeding; (2) isochoric methods for preservation of fresh food products; and (3) in biorepositories for storage of genetic resources for agriculturally significant plants and livestock species.