Kansas law professor calls for cultural shifts to address environmental crises
University of Kansas law professor John Head spent most of his career working in international law. Today, he studies environmental and agricultural reform throughout the world, and he sees a need for a cultural shift in the way humans think about their place in the world. (Morgan Chilson/Kansas Reflector)
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas professor and attorney John Head grinned wryly as he summarized the possibility of agricultural and environmental reforms.
“It’s not pretty from my perspective, but it is promising,” he said on the Kansas Reflector podcast.
Head’s background growing up on a farm in northeast Missouri underpins the way he approaches research on legal aspects of the international environmental crisis.
He also spent decades working in international business law. Before entering the academic world, Head worked on treaties, human rights and international economic affairs through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
In the past 15 years, he turned to studying international environmental law.
“What I have seen is that although there have been increasing crop yields and more precision farming, more sophistication technologically and all of that, there’s also been a departure from a kind of natural systems approach to farming,” Head said.
That is where he sees the promise — research today that supports a return to natural systems approaches, which include reducing inputs and shifting from annual to perennial crops, he said.
The “not pretty” part of what is happening today, he said, is continuing environmental degradation.
“There is a soils (degradation) crisis. There are also other crises, environmental crises, that I think contemporary conventional agriculture contributes to, and those are the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis,” Head said. “All of those have trajectories that are — well, to say they’re troubling would be a gentle and deep understatement.”
Although researchers worldwide are looking at agricultural reform, the lack of desire to tackle environmental protections makes change difficult, partly because of economic considerations, Head said.
“But also political changes are not very amenable to the types of agricultural reform that I think are promising and possible,” he said.
Ultimately, people need to reconsider their place in nature and let go of beliefs that they are dominant over the natural world, Head said.
In an article recently published as part of a University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review symposium, Head dove into the topic of global environmental crises.
“I explain in the following pages why I believe that in facing global environmental crises, our species should reconceptualize its place in nature,” he said in the article. “Specifically, we should reject, or at least radically modify, a cluster of closely-held beliefs and world-views, including the anthropocentric perspective that regards humans as outside of nature or in control of nature.”
Redefining how we, as humans, think of nature is necessary, he said.
“The main point there, and it’s not original, of course, with me … is to try to make a shift away from having humans consider themselves dominant in nature and somehow entitled to be dominant in nature, with very little attention to the needs of not only other species, but the whole systems, the natural systems that create the home, that create Earth as a living planet,” Head said.
Much has been written in international law about intergenerational equity, Head said, related to the concept common in many Indigenous cultures that one should plan or look forward for seven generations.
An example would be when Wes Jackson, co-founder of the Land Institute in Salina, and environmental activist Wendell Berry put forward the idea of creating a 50-year farm bill in an opinion article in 2009 in the New York Times.
“There is no way that under the political system or the political environment in which Wes and Wendell were writing or the political environment today that that sort of forward planning would be taken up and dealt with, but I think the forward planning is necessary nonetheless,” Head said.
Such a dramatic cultural shift is possible, although the likelihood of such change is a different topic, he said. He pointed to precedents of major cultural changes, often made in the face of great trauma or during emergencies.
“In climate literature, for instance, there’s an analogy often drawn to World War II and the mobilization of economic power, of personal sacrifice in the United States and other places, as well, which were invaded, such as Great Britain, in order to rise to the occasion,” he said.
After the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, an editorial in Le Monde, a French newspaper, said “we are all Americans today,” Head said.
That recognition of interconnectedness, however, does not seem likely with the current state of the world, he said.
“But the problem, it seems to me, and the reason that certainly in this country, in this year, the likelihood is small for having a cultural change be triggered and implemented, is that there’s not the recognition,” Head said. “And in fact, there is an anti-recognition, if that can be a word, because we see in the federal government, in many aspects, a sort of a closing down of information, removal of website information, dismantling of weather service personnel, and a change in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in terms of assistance for farmers.”
The refusal to recognize the crises that are occurring in the environment doesn’t mean the world shouldn’t be preparing, Head said. Systems can be planned and research continued on ways to introduce natural farming practices, and when the political winds shift, new approaches can be ready to go, he said.
“This is a globalized world,” he said. “There’s no denying that now. So if you have a global crisis — climate crisis, soils crisis, biodiversity crisis — it’s impossible, in my view, to deal with that other than in a global fashion, with international multilateral efforts.”