From ruderfer@dogwood.botany.uga.edu Wed Aug 23 15:45:21 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id PAA16240 for ; Wed, 23 Aug 2000 15:45:18 -0700 Received: from cro.ots.ac.cr ([207.1.115.99]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id PAA11001 for ; Wed, 23 Aug 2000 15:45:12 -0700 Received: from danuveo.ots.ac.cr (oxalis.ots.ac.cr [192.168.1.231]) by cro.ots.ac.cr (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA21176 for ; Wed, 23 Aug 2000 16:42:47 -0500 (CDT) From: "Isidor F. Ruderfer" To: Indigenous Knowledge Listserve Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 16:54:11 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: draft lttr to ed NYTimes - rice polyculture article Reply-to: "Isidor F. Ruderfer" Message-ID: <39A401B3.12164.17CEC1@localhost> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Hello again IndKnow-L denizens - My thanks to those who have sent encouragement! However, I have yet to receive any nice examples or other chunks of text to use in the letter to the editor. Perhaps a more fleshed out draft will make it easier for folks to make such contributions. You will find draft 0.1 below as well as some more well-defined requests for assistance. Please send me your comments, criticisms, and, preferably, usable chunks of text! I. Draft 0.1 (disclaimers/apology follow below) It is wonderful to see you report on the latest agricultural research demonstrating that planting different varieties of rice together drastically reduces the need for pesticides and produces much larger yields ("Simple Method Found to Vastly Increase Crop Yields", <> August 22, 2000). It is not often that the world is presented with such win-win situations, and the researchers involved should be greatly lauded for documenting this. One important aspect of this story seems to have been overlooked, though: The benefits of planting different crops or varieties together ("polyculture") are *not* the latest discovery of modern agronomy. Rather, this research may be the most *ironic* discovery in the history of agronomy. Polyculture is what pretty much all farmers practiced until recently. <> These complex, management-intensive systems have largely been replaced by more fragile, fossil-fuel-dependent monocultures thanks to the advances of agronomic science and its derived technologies, along with changing political and economic contexts. You have reported on the amazing story that some new way has been found to reduce environmental damage while still producing lots of food. But there is another amazing story to be told as well: that a group of scientists have done something incredibly subversive and extraordinary. They have shown that not all Progress is really progress. They have demonstrated with beautifully hard numbers that modern agronomy may have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way. They are reminding us that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past and from other less-industrialized cultures. It is rare to see such humility in today's Gilded Age buzz of "we won the Cold War" dot-com permanent-boom futurology. Indigenous farmers worldwide, and the ghosts of Mayan, <>, and countless other long-dead cultures, should salute these scientists for validating within academia something that they have known in practice all along. <> Sincerely <> <> II. Disclaimers/apology/questions I am trying to make the letter palatable and reasonable by: a) not attacking the reporter not attacking the researchers. I may not have succeeded in doing so. Suggestions on how to do so would be more than welcome. I praise the researchers for doing something that maybe they really aren't interested in doing: being "subversive". This may be a bad tactic? I tried to walk the fine line between dead academic prose on one side and romantic rebellious rabble-rousing on the other. I think I spent most of my time falling off the line to one side or the other. Please suggest where things should be livened up or toned down (and how to do it!). Does anybody have any comments on letter-to-the-editor appropriate style and grammar? (E.g., is it appropriate to refer to the editor(s) as "you" as I have done in the first sentence?) III. Specific requests for help Below I have listed the names of some profs and an institution. I suspect that these people might be interested in pursuing (or at least advising) this letter to the editor "project". If any of you know any of them and think it would be appropriate, would you be kind enough to pass along one/some of my messages with a brief explanation of what we are trying to do? I have met some of these people, but only briefly, so any message *I* send to them will have to spend a lot of my and their time explaining who I am and generally trying to evade their random-unsolicited-email filters. Nabhan, Gary Pimentel, David Posey, Darrell Salick, Jan Thurston, H. David Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor Nuffic - the Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education CIRAN - Centre for International Research and Advisory Networks ******************************** Thanks for your help! Isidor ================================================================= Isidor F. Ruderfer / Consrvtn.Ecology & Sustnbl.Devlpmnt.Prgrm Inst. of Ecol.; U.of Georgia / ***currently:Las Cruces Biological Station;Sn Vito;Coto Brus;COSTA RICA / phone:506.773.4004 fax:506.773.3665 / **Personal Fax --> email#: 815.377.3028 (USA) **Please reply to: ruderfer@iname.com ================================================================= "Igneous rocks + acid volatiles = sedimentary rocks + salty oceans" Siever 74 in Schlesinger 97 .