But that invitation was only a start. There's a community of ecologists and soil scientists who oppose the current drift in agriculture, who think we're putting too much emphasis on bending nature to our will and too little effort in simply understanding it. But you rarely see these scientific camps together. Perhaps they'd only argue and call each other names. But it seems worth trying to patch things up.
Agriculture is the science that started civilization.
The desire to improve agriculture was the impulse that led to the founding of our great public universities more than a century ago. Today there is a scientific schism among academics over how we should be doing agricultural research at public universities. Last's week's meeting at UC Davis should be only a warm-up for a more ambitious meeting of the minds.