The paper mentioned by John Mayne is truly EXCEPTIONAL. I highly
recommend it!
FRED
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Fred Magdoff
Northeast Region SARE Program
Hills Building
University of Vermont
Burlington, VT 05405
tel:802-656-0472
fax:802-656-4656
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On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, John C. Mayne wrote:
>
> W. J. (Joe) Lewis, et al. have published a very good paper in the
> November 1997 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol.
> 94, pp.12243-12248). Entitled "A Total System Approach to
> Sustainable Pest Management" if offers another way to look at
> agricultural production; one that utilizes ecosystem attributes that
> exist in the field and have been largely ignored or fought against.
>
> Most of the authors are entomologists and they take an ecological
> approach to agricultural production.
>
> I recommend that anyone interested in agriculture read this paper.
> There are few wasted words and it is well worth the time invested
> to read it. For those of us who are not entomologists I have
> written a short glossary that can be found with the paper on Joe
> Lewis' web page.
>
> The paper can be found on the web at
>
> http://sacs.cpes.peachnet.edu/lewis/pnas.htm
>
> We have a link to the paper on the Southern SARE web page
>
> http://www.griffin.peachnet.edu/sare/ then scroll down and click on
> Other Sust. Ag. Publications
>
> Joe has gotten tremendous positive feedback on his ideas from growers,
> folks who work with growers and from land grant university
> researchers. Take a look at this paper.
>
> The abstract is below.
>
> A fundamental shift to a total system approach for crop protection is
> urgently needed to resolve escalating economic and environmental
> consequences of combating agricultural pests. Pest management
> strategies have long been dominated by quests for "silver bullet"
> products to control pest outbreaks. However, managing undesired
> variables in ecosystems is similar to that for other systems,
> including the human body and social orders. Experience in these fields
> substantiates the fact that therapeutic interventions into any system
> are effective only for short term relief because these externalities
> are soon "neutralized" by countermoves within the system. Long term
> resolutions can be achieved only by restructuring and managing these
> systems in ways that maximize the array of "built-in" preventive
> strengths, with therapeutic tactics serving strictly as backups to
> these natural regulators. To date, we have failed to incorporate this
> basic principle into the mainstream of pest management science and
> continue to regress into a foot race with nature. In this report, we
> establish why a total system approach is essential as the guiding
> premise of pest management and provide arguments as to how earlier
> attempts for change and current mainstream initiatives generally fail
> to follow this principle. We then draw on emerging knowledge about
> multitrophic level interactions and other specific findings about
> management of ecosystems to propose a pivotal redirection of pest
> management strategies that would honor this principle and, thus, be
> sustainable. Finally, we discuss the potential immense benefits of
> such a central shift in pest management philosophy.
>
> John C. Mayne, Ph.D.
> Southern SARE Program
> 1109 Experiment Street
> Griffin, GA 30223
> PH: (770) 229-3350
> FX: (770) 412-4789
>
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