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.

Presents a collection of essays written over a period of 15 years by agricultural ethicist Paul B. Thompson. The essays address the practical application of ethics to agriculture in a world faced with issues of increased yield, threatened environment, and the disappearance of the family farm.

Risk communication poses a challenge to ordinary norms of truth-telling because it can easily mislead. Analyzing this challenge in terms of a systematic divergence between expertise and public attitudes fails to recognize how two specific features of the concept of risk play a role in managing daily affairs. First, evaluating risk always incorporates an estimate of the reliability of information. Since risk communication is an effort at providing information, audiences will naturally and appropriately incorporate their assessment of the reliability of (...) the risk communicator into their assessment of the risk as such. Second, one conceptual and grammatical feature of the concept of risk is to categorize experience as non-routine and demanding further deliberation. That is, the whole point of calling something a risk can be to distinguish it from activities or phenomena that need no further attention. Risk communications that stress relative comparisons of measured probabilities and expected utilities can be inconsistent with both features of our concept of risk. At best they mislead; at worst they undermine our society’s capacity to cope with risk. While there are no simple answers to these two conundrums, technical experts should bear them in mind when communicating with the broader public. (shrink)

For more than a quarter of a century, academics at Hawkesbury Agricultural College have been committed to the development of a public discourse about the nature and scope of the development of rural Australia, and of the sustainability of the role of agriculture within that. In their work they have explicitly privileged systems theories and practices and experiential pedagogies, while embracing the notion of development through participation within an ethos of deliberative democracy. There are lessons to be learned from the (...) Hawkesbury experience with respect to the role of the agora in global transformation writ large. (shrink)

A short time ago the idea of sustainable agriculture was accepted only at the extreme margins of the U. S. agricultural systems. Although sustainability has now become a major theme of many U. S. agricultural groups, there remains much under-explored terrain in the meaning of sustainable agriculture. A thorough examination of who and what we want to sustain and how we can sustain them is critical if sustainable agriculture is to be a practical improvement over conventional agriculture. In order to (...) begin this effort, this article analyzes contemporary sustainable agriculture discourse and suggests alternatives for reconceptualizing sustainable agriculture. In particular we look at three arenas of sustainable discourse-family farm/rural community preservation, food safety, and agricultural science-and address issues of class, race/ethnicity, and gender found in current sustainability positions. We find that while advocates of sustainability have succeeded in pushing agricultural researchers and policy makers to address environmental issues, we need to go much farther both in theory and practice in order to deal with equally important issues of social equity. © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. (shrink)