Is ecological civilization possible in the modern world?

The natural world is also under tragic upheaval: the extinction of countless species of plants and animals, the threat and poisoning of wildlife, the damming of wild rivers, the logging of the forests, the decimation of fish and the acidification of the oceans.

Staggering amounts of poisons and toxic wastes defile our environment (land, air, seas, rivers, lakes). I agonize to find a satisfactory answer why modern people, including Americans, trash the natural world, which, for the Greeks was a source of life and divine cosmos.

The Greeks were primarily peasants. Those peasants, not philosophers, invented democracy. Agriculture for the Greeks was civilization.

As long as the Greeks were free, small farms made their civilization possible. But the Romans ended Greek democracy and freedom in the second century BCE. The Romans thought of themselves as born rulers of others. They embraced empire and, with that, they favored plantations.

The imperial Roman legacy of large farms triumphed all the way to our times. Large farms corrupted the world, including agricultural universities and international organizations.

Mechanized farms did more than emptying the countryside of small farms. They also sparked our ecological crisis. They have been spreading death to nature and disease and death to farmers and non-farmers all over the world. Farmers' poisons make the Earth warmer. Something like 18 to 51 percent of all greenhouse gases originates from the fields and animal factories of industrialized farmers. Toxic farm sprays even contaminate mothers' breast milk.

The peasant / small farmer alternatives to industrialized farming are forms of applied biology that have nature as their primary model. Add ecological science to the peasant practices and you have ecology and prosperity.

About eighty percent of world food comes from peasant farms. Peasants / small farmers achieve this great production from the cultivation of no more than a quarter of all farmland.

Agricultural ecologists, better known as agroecologists, are becoming instrumental in the ecological changes taking place in the tiny farms of small farmers all over the world. The result is more healthy and empowered peasant communities producing more food outside the industrial agricultural empire.

This peasant-agroecological paradigm simply nullifies the conventional propaganda that industrialized farming is the sole path to food security. Acre for acre, the peasant grows a variety of crops and more food than the conventional one-crop farmer. This businessman is producing commodities. He relies on expensive and toxic "inputs": pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and machines.

Peasants and traditional small farmers have science on their side as well. Agroecology simply brings that to light. Agroecology also designs resilient agroecosystems capable of resisting climate change.

China is so large and has such large population that it has the opportunity to shape the future of the world. It can push the non-polluting agroecological paradigm to its logical conclusion: make it global.

China can do that by mixing its agrarian culture with agroecology for the promise of food self-sufficiency and the dream of ecological civilization. Such choice will also help the rest of the world find its way back to Mother Earth.