Conservation and Agriculture

Today I listened to a talk by Glen Chown, U of M grad and director of the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy (GTRLC), an NGO based in northwestern MI. Glen is visiting Costa Rica to learn and share experiences regarding his work. Having conserved a large amount of land in the form of national parks, Costa Rica and northern MI are suprisingly similar.

However, what makes the GTRLC unique is its independent status as an NGO, which allows it to move quickly in acquiring land, without bearoucratic barriers often encountered when working through the government. The GTRLC is about 15 years old and has grown tremendously from its small idealistic start. With the simple goal of "Protecting significant natural, scenic, and farm lands—now and for all future generations", it took some time for the organization to mature and gain credibility but today the GTRLC is a powerful force in environmental work.

Recently, the GTRLC was able to save around 6,000 acres (including miles of Lake Michigan shoreline) from being developed by a nuclear power company. Much of this land includes active farms, something which sets the GTRLC apart from other conservation organizations. Rather than drawing a sharp distinction between untouched, primary forest and settled farmland, the GTRLC views these farms as a significant part of Michigan's landscape, culture, and economy, and therefore worth the effort of preserving. To protect these farms, the GTRLC buys developement rights to the land, ensuring the continued production of food while saving the farmer from pressure to sell land to developement companies. Though the farmers are free to practice agriculture as they please (within the limits of the non-developement, conservational contract), many are starting to shift towards organic and more sustainable methods

Glen and the GTRLC are very concerned with the consideration of both agriculture and ecology as inseperable components of our environment, economy, and the existence of the human species. This mentality is part of a recent and important trend in these fields towards the study of agroecology, which has helped promote environmentally viable models of agriculture such as intercropping, organic practices, and permaculture, a more extreme example. Where traditional agronomists seek to maximize the intensity of agriculture (largely at the expense of the broader environment), the traditional environmentalist seeks total preservation to the point of viewing agricultural land as beyond the point of saving. The GTRLC has even recieved criticism from parts of the environmentalist community who hold this more traditional perspective.

University of Michigan Professors John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto are also active in the field of agroecology and recently wrote this letter to Science explaining the need to reevaluate our perception of the environment. I am looking forward to working with John in June and July in an investigation of the interactions between several insect species on a coffee farm in Chiapas, Mexico.