These impacts are like wakes rippling outward across the planet. But every product has a wake. The next book I'm working on, coauthored with John Ryan, research director at Northwest Environment Watch, describes the ecological wakes of a dozen everyday things. It also offers help in leaving a smaller wake. The Secret Lives of Everyday Things.
Sustainable agriculture is, of course, a minority practice.
But it is a growing minority. All over the region, farmers are substituting biological methods of pest control for chemical ones. They are boosting irrigation efficiency with new technologies and new crops. They are protecting soil with new crop rotations. And some of them are leaping boldly to organic production.