Week 10 - Amanda Wong

Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems (SAFS) would benefit greatly from including spirit realm into the curriculum. It seems like this would be fairly easy to interweave the studies of the spirit realm into the existing curriculum. This is because the major is already so multidisciplinary. At the core of sustainable agriculture it encompasses a holistic view of the earth, attracting very open minded individuals. The whole SAFS culture brings a lot of spirituality to the table to create what sustainable agriculture and food systems should look like. Much of what sustainable agriculture is today comes from the philosophy for Rudolf Steiner and Alan Chadwick. Rudolf Steiner attempted to connect science and spirituality by answering spiritual questions with Western thought processes. Steiner established biodynamic agriculture, which is a bases for practices of sustainable agriculture. It puts emphasis on a spiritual, holistic perspective to work with the earth rather than continue to take from it. Alan Chadwick brought the ideas of bio intensive gardening practices to the United States. This expands further into biodynamic agriculture but on a small scale which can be used to bring food access to underserved urban communities. My major is mindful of the community and the world overall, this is one of the few whose views already benefit from spirit realm studies. However, it does not make spirituality more than what it is. Spirituality is simply just the way things should be. It makes more sense in practice, it is what is sustainable. The reason that this defies the status quo of conventional agriculture is because it is not the most lucrative option and it takes a lot of time and money to revert to this practice. So, while SAFS benefits from including the spirit realm it is larger society that needs to learn to accept the changes that will come. 

Question: Is there hope for larger society to accept spirituality? 

Image: http://www.alan-chadwick.org/html%20pages/techniques/garden_plants/veg_photos%203.html