National Geographic on Sustainable Agriculture
Gilbert W. Gillespie Jr. (gwg2@cornell.edu)
Fri, 1 Dec 1995 11:17:49 -0500
My reading of the article on sustainable agriculture in the December
1995 issue of National Geographic leads me to mixed conclusions. On one
hand, it covers efforts toward more sustainable agriculture with a positive
spin and includes discussion of many of the important issues and some of the
important actors. It does a good job of summarizing some complex issues for
a mass audience. It also reaches a very large audience through its
approximately 9 million subscribers. On the other hand, my sociological
background directs my attention to certain subtexts of the article which,
though not necessarily bad or avoidable, go unacknowledged. Like on CNN
where middle-of-the-road liberals are depicted as flaming radicals of the
left, the wing of the sustainable agriculture movement which is strongly
ecologically-oriented (e.g., the Land Institute) was largely missing.
Similarly, the frame of reference strikes me as that of urban,
"middle-class" people in the U.S. (not surprising given the intended
audience of the magazine) and the great photography may serve to reinforce
urban people's idyllic images of rural areas (in effect, perhaps, doing for
rural U.S. something like what National Geographic arguably did for Somoa
earlier in this century--see Alison Devine Nordstrom, "Wood Nymphs and
Patriots: Depictions of Samoans in the National Geographic Magazine," Visual
Sociology 7(2):49-59, 1992).
In summary, those of us interested in sustainable agriculture have
much to celebrate in having an article of this quality appear in a major
magazine, but we also need to think about some of the other, but less
obvious, messages that it contains.