The Dual Role of Culture in Evolutionary Play: Anthropogenic Expansion vs. Destruction of Biodiversity

A large number of Green discourses blame the human species for the current ecological crisis. However, this description of humanity as the ecocidal culprit serves to conceal the role of humans, in both past and contemporary pre-industrial societies, as custodians of biodiversity. Indigenous societies are known to have conserved their natural resource base for posterity by instituting cultural norms and institutions against exhaustive resource use. In addition, pre-industrial societies also increased biodiversity on taxic and genetic levels by domestication of many wild biota, and on the ecosystem level with agroforestry. While Darwin gave much importance to the process of domestication of plants and animals by means of artificial selection, modern science and agriculture curricula tend to neglect this aspect of the history of human civilization. The novel taxa created in the process of domestication are characterised by many morphological and behavioural traits never found in the wild progenitor species. Further selection of favourable traits of the new species created an abundance of distinctive crop landraces and animal breeds. The increment in diversity at the ecosystem, taxic, and genetic levels by the process of domestication and in ancient agroforestry systems began to reverse with industrial development over the past two centuries. Indeed, industrial development has been the chief driver of the continuing process of biodiversity erosion and habitat loss worldwide. Industrial agricultural systems, signposted by the Green Revolution (GR), have severely truncated the on-farm crop species and genetic diversity that characterised traditional multi-crop farming and agroforestry systems in native agrarian cultures. Over the past six decades, the continual replacement of hundreds of landraces with a handful of GR cultivars, combined with institutional apathy toward in situ landrace conservation efforts, has led to the disappearance of the importance of genetic purity of landraces from breeding programs and heirloom crop conservation discourse. Most modern farmers, predominantly dependent on the industrial supply of crop seeds, have forgotten the methods of genetic purity maintenance, resulting in the rapid loss of the hundreds of crop landraces with distinctive properties, which were selected centuries ago for diverse agronomic, gustatory, and aesthetic qualities. A recognition of the value of the custodian role of ecosystem people in creating and conserving biodiversity, vis-a-vis the current industrial decimation of biodiversity on all levels, will likely promote a biodiversity conservation ethos in modern societies and the value of genetic purity of the extant crop landraces.