The Spirit of the Soil : Agriculture and Environmental Ethics

The Spirit of the Soil helped launch agricultural ethics as a field more than 20 years ago. It challenged readers to think deeply about agriculture’s impact on the environment, including the use of pesticides and new biotechnologies, and compared four "worldviews"—productionism, stewardship, economics, and holism—and their different ethical interpretations. This 2nd Edition incorporates recent empirical research in agricultural science, covers the impact of climate change, adds information on alternative food systems (organic farming and locavorism), and augments the author’s increased support for a "systems perspective" when thinking about agriculture and implementing policy.

In this second edition of The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics, Paul B. Thompson reviews four worldviews that shape competing visions for agriculture. Productionists have sought increasing yields—to make two seeds grow where only one grew before—while traditional visions of good farming have stressed stewardship. These traditional visions have been challenged by two more worldviews: a call for a total cost accounting for farming and an advocacy for a holistic perspective. Thompson argues that an environmentally defensible systems approach must draw upon all four worldviews, recognizing their flaws and synthesizing their strengths in a new vision of sustainable agriculture. This classic 1995 study has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded in its second edition with up-to-date examples of agriculture’s impact on the environment. These include extensive discussions of new pesticides and the effects of animal agriculture on climate and other areas of the environment. In addition, a new final chapter discusses sustainability, which has become a dominant idea within environmental studies and agrarian political philosophy.