Ecological conservation, biodiversity, and agricultural education as integrated approaches for envisioning the future of sustainable agriculture in North America

ABSTRACT In the ancestral heritage, mankind was in mutual interdependence with nature through hunting of animals, gathering of plant materials, and animal and plant domestication. However, agricultural advancements detached mankind from that heritage. In U.S. Midwest, it is evident that technological advancements over the past half-century have threatened man’s survival for centuries to come. Midwest is the prime agricultural land area in North America whose recent glaciation, deep-rooted prairie vegetation, and moderate precipitation favored the development of highly productive rain-fed farming systems. Evolution of productionist paradigm in Midwest focused on crop and livestock output but also resulted in numerous environmental externalities. Massive use of agrochemicals, for instance, resulted in pollution of Mississippi River watershed from upperstream to downstream creating a hypoxic zone in Gulf of Mexico. In this situation, it is appropriate to ask what best alternatives for mankind could be to reconnect with nature to achieve sustainability. The study explored three approaches including ecological conservation, biodiversity, and agricultural education. Conservation requires the passion of humanity to reconnect with ecological community and become part of it rather than to manipulate and seek control over it to reap ecosystem services. In creating interrelated diversity through domestication of culturally important wild species, agroforestry, horticulture, animal husbandry, and inclusion of relevant language and culture we can define a sustainable world. Agricultural education brings in three tenets of teaching/learning, research/discovery, and extension/engagement to provide, create, and apply knowledge, respectively, which are important in communicating the science of sustainability.