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Anecdotally, everywhere one seems to look, humans appear to have an irresistible urge to clean things up, make everything tidy, neat and uniform.

Anecdotes meet reality. This issue is supported by mountains of science and documentation: modern conventional corporate agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss for its preference of monocultures and deforestation, forestry is addicted to clear-cutting followed by monoculture and mass herbicide application, and we are even raising salmon in monoculture fish farms to the detriment of the environment surrounding them.

It wasn’t always this way.

For what that looks like that we can thank artists. Van Gogh alone has many beautiful depictions of biodiverse orchards dating back less than 200 years ago. There is a wide selection through art history showing various landscapes and crops in vivid detail how things used to be. Each brushstroke in a mosaic of a painting like a Van Gogh almost feel like an impressionistic representation of the diversity of life itself.

Flowering Orchards series by Van Gogh, 1888.

We must find our way back. Unprecedented anthropomorphic biodiversity loss is a major issue facing our so-called 21st century. Science and the philosophy of aesthetics can lead the way.

Studies like this one show time and again, that biodiversity leads to higher productivity and resilience. Biodiversity has synergistic outcomes…which is not surprising, as all systems evolved together. Nothing alive today has come into being independently. The whole of the sum of multi-species adaptations makes the system function.

Somewhere between Van Gogh and Andy Warhol we made a cultural choice to treat the natural world in oversimplified terms.

We can choose again to come back to highly productive, diverse, and beautiful natural systems, without sacrificing output. Science and documentation can lead the way. And as always, agriculture, will be at the forefront of yet another revolution.

Graham

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