Multiple Perspectives in this Course

As you can probably tell from the material presented thus far the topic of environment-food systems must bring together the insights of different perspectives. In this section, we briefly describe these perspectives in order to provide some general background to the modules that follow. By describing these perspectives, one of the main points of this section is to state explicitly that all the perspectives are highly important in reaching the central goal of this course: to understand better the ongoing dynamics, past legacies, and future trajectories of environment-food systems and their sustainability.

One group of perspectives featured in this course are those of geosystems and agroecology applied to environment-food systems. As seen in the course outline these perspectives are applied to the topics of soils and the cycling of nutrients in soil-plant systems (Module 3); water in environment-food systems (Module 4); the agroecology of crops (Module 5); the geosystems perspective on climate change and food (Module 6); agroecological interactions with climate change (Module 7); and integrated pest management (Module 8). Overall this group of modules (Modules 3-8) is focused principally on environmental systems. In other words, the perspectives of geosystems, agroecology, and the combination of both are used to focus on a range of important topics involving the environmental systems that are integral to food production.

The second principal group of perspectives featured in this course is ones that place a significant emphasis on the human systems interacting with the environmental dimension of food. Here the course contains certain focus areas that are crucial to understanding human dimensions and interactions with environment-food systems. One is the topic of how environmental interactions are integral to food systems the world over, which is covered through the use of examples in the next part of this module (Module 1.2) the beginnings and the history of environment-food interactions seen from a perspective that includes consideration of human activities and belief systems (Module 2.1 and 2.1). A focus on food systems and their environmental interactions is developed as the basis of Module 9.

The combination of food plants and livestock-raising is contained in a variety of these food systems, ranging from the cattle- and goat-herding of Africa, for example (Figure 2A), to the medium-scale dairy and livestock operations of Pennsylvania and other states in the Northeast and Midwest of the United States and adjoining areas of Canada (Figure 2).

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Figure 2A. A goat herd near a water source in Africa. Animal-raising is integral to many African food systems. These herders and their herds inevitably interact with food-growing agriculturalists and their lands, so the livestock-raising must be seen as an important complement to cropping and other plant use in these food systems.
Credit: livestockcrsp on Flickr by 198_kenya_Nanyingi (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Figure 2B. A medium-scale dairy farm in Pennsylvania. It shows the integration of livestock (foreground) and cropping (background). Depending on transportation and market linkages the milk from these herds may be locally consumed or may become a part of the regional or national food supply.
Credit: WallacesFarmer

The topic of human-environment interactions is the topic of Module 10. It includes the increasingly widespread use of the concepts of resilience, adaptation, and vulnerability. These concepts, as explained, offer integrative frameworks that can be used to understand environment-food systems and the growing efforts to enhance sustainability as well as to respond to risks and problems such as malnutrition, famine, and the impacts of climate change. Module 11 incorporates an emphasis on human diet, nutrition, and health as they relate to the dynamics of past, present, and future environment-food systems. Module 12 is the capstone project for the course. It too includes a focus on the human systems of environment-food interactions.

The integration of multiple perspectives is an important part of the design of this course. That the course applies two groups of perspectives to the understanding of environment-food interactions (the environmental systems and the human systems mentioned in the preceding paragraphs) should be helpful to have in mind from the outset. It should be helpful also to plant the seed of an idea on how to think about the multiple perspectives of this course in relation to the fields of study of majors, degree programs, and disciplines. This course blends together many fields of study. It includes elements of agroecology, anthropology, food science, geography, geosciences, and rural sociology. The idea we would like the student see his or her field of study as the home base. The multiple perspectives integrated into this course metaphorically represent a kind of travel away from the home base of a single main perspective or field of study. It's vital, as we all know, to have a home to function as our base. The metaphor contained in our idea is that one's field of study or discipline serves the function of being the home. Travel is similarly vital, both for its own sake and to understand better one's home. Our course is therefore much like travel insofar as it integrates multiple perspectives while it recognizes the value and crucial contributions of the individual fields of study.