Jacob Dearing
September 2nd, 2015
Critical abstract #2
Article author: Robert Netting
Article title: Smallholders, householders
Robert Netting’s article describes the “increased capturing of energy” as the driving force behind energy innovation, energy production, and energy consumption as it concerns traditional cultivation and industrial cultivation practices. Western culture depends on the development of energy efficient technologies while traditional cultures maintain a level of subsistent cultivation that has lower levels of degradation on environmental resources. Netting provides a few definitions of sustainable agriculture gathered from separate sources that combine the ideas of “environmental parameters with economic and social characteristics in the context of changing interactions” as Netting describes it. These definitions are meant to articulate the “buzzwords” such as “sustainability” that are used to provoke emotion in western culture. The author then describes four dimensions of sustainability, “the physical, chemical, biological, and socioeconomic” factors that influence human-environmental relations in traditional and industrial cultivation.