Book Review
The quest for sustainable agriculture and land use
Brian R Roberts
ISBN: 978-0-868403-74-8 1995 245 pages UNSW Press, Kensington (Sydney, NSW)
Frank Vanclay
Rural Sociology, Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research, University of Tasmania, TAS
Stewart Lockie
Professor of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra
Brian Roberts is the author of eight books on land use including The Landcare Manual (UNSWP 1992). He is described by some as the father of Landcare, being facilitative in promoting government acceptance of the NFF/ACF proposal. He has served on the Federal Soil Conservation Advisory Committee, and was the inaugural President of the Soil and Water Conservation Association of Australia. The book is described as 'a text book for environmental studies, resource management, agriculture, forestry, land use and land economics . . . with relevance to tourism management, mining, rural sociology and politics'. These are substantial claims. It would be wise, I think, to be a little more circumspect about who the book targets and what it is really about.
Rural sociological content, for example, is negligible, and what does exist is devoid of background or substantiation. The chapter on 'Rural Women: Nurturing the Land' lacks any reference to key literature in this area, and consequently gives a facile treatment. The chapter briefly and uncritically introduces ecofeminism, and then goes on to discuss how Landcare allows opportunities for women's participation. Roberts' well intentioned, but patriarchal, attitude predominates, and is epitomised by his comment that 'the hand that rocked the cradle' is already rocking some traditional strongholds of the economic rationalists'. The discussion then focuses on women and Landcare committee work, and concludes with a short statement about female values.
The same problem confronts many other chapters. The chapter entitled 'Land and Society: Global Relations' makes no reference to Australia's leading political economist of agriculture, Geoffrey Lawrence, whose 1987 Capitalism and Countryside is essential reading on this topic. More recent work by Lawrence and others may have appeared after this book was drafted, but clearly Capitalism and Countryside ought to have been accessed.
The whole book implicitly promotes Roberts' concern for a land ethic, and material is only included that supports this concept. There is no discussion of the now well established counter view - widely promoted by Vanclay, Barr and Cary, Reeve and Black, and many others - that there is nothing wrong with farmers' attitudes; that the alleged lack of action by farmers relates to other factors such as structural processes and uncertainty, and that non-adoption may be rational from a farmer's perspective.
Consequently, I can only describe the book as uncritical, unresearched, and self-indulgent. I cannot recommend it. Nevertheless, some aspects of the book do provide opportunity for positive comment. Some of the more technical chapters would are concise and, as far as I can tell, adequate. The language is accessible, and would appear to aim at a secondary school audience. The book is very much written as a text book, no doubt for one of the external courses the University of Southern Queensland is famous for. I would suggest though that the book needs to be more focussed, and claims about the book reconsidered.
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