Ecology of Contexts - Environmental Ecology

Environmental Ecology

An agroecosystem exists amid contexts including climate, soil, plant genetics, government policies, and the personal beliefs and predilections of the agriculturalist. Not only are these contexts too numerous to list in their entirety for any agroecosystem, but their interactions are so complex it is impossible to perfectly characterize a system, let alone predict the effect a given perturbation will have on the whole. At the same time, all of these contexts are dynamic, albeit at wildly diverging time scales, so the ecology of contexts for an agroecosystem is fundamentally mutable. An awareness of the ecology of contexts is helpful for agroecologists, as the nearly axiomatic acceptance dynamic, and thereby unperfectable, nature of agroecosystems precludes the often damaging notion of a best or ideal approach to agroecosystem management as well as an awareness of the complexity of the response that can result from any perturbation of the system.

This concept of the ecology of contexts provides a useful epistemological device for understanding agroecosystems.