This talk is drawn from research that seeks to explore how human societies can transition towards biosensitivity – being in tune with, sensitive to, and respectful of the life processes that underpin our existence. Such life processes include those of the ‘natural world’ as well as those particular to human health and wellbeing, both biophysical and psychosocial.
The research uses food system examples at local and regional scales to develop an understanding of the diversity of motivations for, and impacts of, participating in food systems with a greater degree of biosensitivity than mainstream industrialised food systems.
The research adopts a Human Ecological System Dynamics approach, following Dyball and Newell (2015), which integrates a holistic view of the relationships between four main sub-systems present in any human-ecological system:
- the state of the environment;
- the state of human health and wellbeing;
- the state of institutions and societal arrangements that mediate individual and collective human action; and
- the state of human cultural paradigms, worldviews, values and discourses that mediate decisions about human action and adaptation.
This framework has been used to scaffold a mixed-methods study that includes, among others, a survey of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, conducted in late 2018 via an online questionnaire that covered quantitative and qualitative aspects of farm characteristics, as well as farmers’ attitudes towards the impact of their CSA on various aspects of their farm, livelihood, and sense of belonging to groups within the community.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results from the survey of CSA farmers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (n=28, 78% response rate) indicate that all respondents use farming methods that seek to be biosensitive, describing their methods with at least one of the following terms: regenerative, organic, agroecological, and permaculture. The vast majority of respondents, 96%, were satisfied or very satisfied with their ability to maintain or improve soil quality, and 62% said that CSA improved or greatly improved their ability to maintain or improve soil quality. A majority of respondents also believed that CSA improved or greatly improved farmer quality of life (81%), community involvement (77%), and ability to adapt to climate change (65%).
While this project is ongoing, with in-depth interviews with farmers and consumers in progress and biophysical data to be collected, preliminary results indicate the Human Ecological System Dynamics approach is a useful framework for scaffolding holistic inquiry into complex human-ecological systems.