지속가능성

Editor's note: This is the first in a weekly installment of images from Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton's Lexicon of Sustainability. We'll be running one image every Friday this winter, so stay tuned. There's more where this came from!

Industrial agriculture = monoculture.
Small farms = biodiversity.

Small, organic farms like Rick Knoll's are able to eliminate their reliance on petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides. The results are fewer pollutants, less environmental degradation, and cleaner air. And by using cover cropping and other soil fertilization principles they are able to sequester carbon and keep topsoil -- which is carbon heavy -- from being lost into the atmosphere (the latter also contributes to climate change).

Biodiversity

Weeds + trees + crops + critters + soil = An integrated food web allowing biota to self-regulate = A self-regulating, multi-layered farm that requires little maintenance and no pesticides.

Additional text taken from the photograph:

The conventional farmer next door¹ calls Rick's organic methods "dirty farming" (they're "clean"). Each winter their fields sit idle for months at a time. Since no cover crop is planted (a process that returns nutrients to the soil and increases fertility), the soil remains exposed to the elements. Wind erosion will carry some of this precious top soil away and, in so doing, release carbon back into the atmosphere.

About Rick Knoll

Rick Knoll is an organic farmer who has been practicing biodynamic farming for 32 years. He owns Knoll Farms in Brentwood, Calif., and holds a Ph.D in Organic Chemistry from UC Irvine. He has also studied Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz. Learn more on the Knoll Farms website.

This image was made possible with generous funding from Google.

The Lexicon of Sustainability Project is based on a simple premise: people can’t be expected to live more sustainable lives if they don’t even know the most basic terms and principles that define sustainability. For the past three years Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton have crisscrossed the USA to learn this new language of sustainability from over one hundred of its foremost practitioners in food and farming -- from Alice Waters, to Wes Jackson, Joel Salatin, Vandana Shiva, and Will Allen. These insights have been translated into large format “information art” photo collages and a series of short films. Study guides, a book, a traveling show, installations, and lastly a website where people can dig deeper into these terms (and even add to our ever-evolving lexicon) are also under development. If you have your own sustainability terms, you can add them yourself to the Lexicon of Sustainability.