With Ernst’s kind permission, I have been allowed to translate and make available his editorial to the book Agricultura Sintropica Segundo Ernst Götsch.
In this clear and illustrative book, José Fernando dos Santos Rebello and Daniela G. Sakamoto have attempted to describe the strategies and main techniques used in the syntropic agriculture developed by Ernst Götsch.
“… we find, then, that the key to knowledge cannot be the intention to manipulate or control the universe. And yet we only realize this after we have made so many attempts to circumvent the system of life, and only when these attempts are very soon revealed to be a mistake, if not a disaster. What we have finally achieved in the seventy years of the so-called Green Revolution is that we have brought ecosystems, one by one, to the brink of collapse, causing the extinction of at least one species every two minutes. So we ask ourselves: have we made so many mistakes because we are approaching the subject in the wrong way? According to Descartes’ famous principle Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), we have believed in recent centuries that we are “above” nature, considering ourselves, human beings, as the only intelligent creatures.
From this way of perceiving that we are better than, and therefore separate from, the natural world stems our desire to dominate it, a way which, as we may increasingly realise, is wrong. It is time to radically change this conception and critically extend Descartes’ maxim towards the “therefore I am”, which will allow us to consider ourselves as part of an intelligent system in which all the beings that are part of it share the common characteristic of being endowed with the ability to communicate with each other and co-create one large and unique macroorganism. But in it the principle of “smartness” does not prevail, according to which everyone must grab the maximum possible for himself; competition and cold competitiveness do not prevail, simply because every organ and every cell of this macroorganism knows that this would be the path to its suicide and the extinction of all the others. So for the whole to thrive, each of us would need to ask the question that seems to lie behind the interactions that have occurred on this planet since before we existed: how can I interact with the other members in such a way that my participation becomes an act that benefits all? However, our cultural/philosophical world puts all kinds of obstacles in the way of anyone perhaps daring to abandon the anthropocentric perspective, visibly outdated and even a bit ridiculous, and in its place adopt a biophilic perspective, that is, one of friendship and love of nature.
But the moment we descend from the “pedestal of the intelligent” to which we have artificially elevated ourselves, we will remove the greatest obstacle we have created to learning, understanding, and speaking the language common to all beings. Everything will be simpler: we will see that we should not divide the world between “good and evil”. Each existing species fulfills its functions here, acting in its “separation” for the common good of all, that is, so as to contribute to the optimization of the functioning of the life processes and the macroorganism of the Earth.
I hope this book will lead its readers to try to access the real Internet, the network common to all beings – except for the vast majority of our species – let’s use it to communicate.
This network has free access, is not censored, and operates using only the senses we acquire at birth and share with all other members of the globe…”
The book is available in Portuguese on Amazon or as a free download on
(The translation of the whole book into Czech is still waiting for its sponsor 😉
