In popular literature, sustainable agriculture generally is presented as a new phenomenon. Wes Jackson
is credited with the first publication of the expression in his New Roots for Agriculture (1980), and the
term didn't emerge in popular usage until the late 1980s.
But if sustainable agriculture is defined as the ability to maintain productivity, one can find hints of
attempts at "sustaining" agriculture since its inception some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In fact one
could contend, as some do, that since we have ably maintained productivity, agriculture as we know it is
sustainable. The real question is whether current agricultural practices can be sustained much longer.
That question turns us to some fundamentals of ecology and evolutionary biology. From an ecological
perspective, sustaining any activity on our planet into the future always involves two requirements -