At Professor Andre Kessler’s talk today, I discovered an extremely interesting perspective of the politics of conservation. Thou off-topic, Professor Kessler explained that while he grew up in Eastern Germany, he witnessed a concept of East German politics that warranted the critique of Capitalist society. The conservation efforts of forestry and non-consumer agriculture in the Communist east was significantly more prevalent than that of the Capitalist West. He noted this as a major flaw in the free market nature that the United States’ is based in that the government’s unused landholdings in a Communist state allow for conservation. Professor Kessler also noted that the government was able to preserve a percentage of this untouched land in the east when Germany reunited by the transitional provincial government’s motion to establish a national park system.
While it was an extremely fascinating viewpoint, I gathered a slight notion of sympathy for the Communist system from this explanation. While extremely effective in deterring self-interest in deforesting land, Communism has a bevy of unintended consequences that left many of those living under it without basic human rights and ability to provide for their families. However, the way Professor Kessler talked about the future of sustainable agriculture in terms that did not attack the sentiment of a governing system but talked about the redefinition of the way they thought about unhealthy and unnatural practices such as using pesticides. Instead, he talked about the idea of using a “push and pull” system which elated me for the future of our agricultural system, as a means of “pushing” the herbivores off plants with natural resistant plants next to the crops and “pulling” the herbivores to natural attractor crops.
Wow — I never knew that conservation efforts in East Germany were more prevalent than in the West, and it’s a relief that they were able to maintain a portion of this unused land for national parks after reunification. Although communism has its flaws without a doubt, it can also be harmful to see capitalism as “the only way” to run a society because of its focus on making money, often at the cost of destroying natural resources — I appreciate that your post takes this alternative viewpoint of communism and capitalism than what is typically seen in America. Perhaps we could learn something, not even from communism specifically, but from a system that does not value money above all. I would also be fascinated to see what a “push and pull” system would mean for the future of agriculture in the United States — it seems more sustainable to provide the herbivores with more plants that can be eaten to replace the plants in their diet that were taken out by organized agriculture.