But Clark has a Ph.D. in systems analysis and economics. She is part of a growing movement that regards our relationship to food as an eloquent illustration of how healthy or unhealthy is our relationship to our world. Although alarm bells about pesticides and herbicides have been sounding for half a century, the movement toward sustainable agriculture and organic farming movement is still struggling to make headway against the huge agribusiness operators that currently produce more than 90 percent of what we consume. Despite the long-term impacts on soil fertility and human health resulting from it, agribusiness is big business, and big business is a formidable force in contemporary America. The sustainable agriculture movement, on the other hand, is being pioneered almost entirely at the grassroots level, and initiatives like CSAs, small farmer cooperatives, and urban gardens are usually where one usually finds a vital and flourishing relationship between community health and people's awareness of their food.
Community is about cooperation, corporatism is about competition.
There are different types of relationships in nature, but competition is not the most beneficial. A mature and healthy ecosystem doesn't thrive on competition, but on cooperation. We actually have the technical ability to develop complex systems that take cultural, social, environmental and economic benefits into consideration. This type of systems approach based on organic models is slowly making the crossover from academia to farmers and consumers, says Clark, and this ultimately will be the agent of change, if it comes. Clark is one such bridge.