作为学科与专业的“农学”之历史反思与体系再构——以农业生态学作为新农学的核心理论科目

Historical review of Agronomy both as a discipline and a specialty and its reframing: Taking Agroecology as its core theoretical subject

  • 摘要: 现代农学学科的形成源于欧洲工业革命主导的实验科学归纳论思维, 取得农业产量巨增的同时, 却破坏了农业可持续性赖以维持的自然基础。随着农业可持续发展战略目标的日益清晰, 农学学科及其教育体系的重构也日益迫切。联姻生态学, 建立以“农业生态学”为核心科目的新农学理论体系, 并据此调整和拓宽“作物栽培学”、“耕作学”、“作物遗传育种学”等农学分支学科的研究领域; 建立以“农业生态系统管理”为核心的新农学应用体系, 以融合现代生物工程、生态工程、信息工程和材料工程技术; 也意味着我国“古代”演绎论和西方“近代”归纳论携手为实现“现代”可持续农业(低碳农业)提供一条可行的途径。

     

    Abstract: Modern agronomy (initiated by experimental sciences of reductionism thinking and motivated by industrialized European revolution) had led to astronomical increase in agricultural production, but at a huge cost of destroying the natural base of agricultural sustainability. The prevalence of reductionism thinking disassembled agronomy into smaller disciplines in university education system across the globe. This led to the so-called “Therapeutic Intervention” in applied fields of agriculture, which in turn posed current problems in modern agricultural systems. Such problems included soil degradation, loss of agro-biodiversity and food safety due mainly to over-use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Using crop cultivation/farming systems and plant genetics/breeding, the second-grade disciplines of agronomy as examples, the focus of the former was under community scale and that of the latter was under population scale, in terms of ecology. Comparative review showed that most of the problems of modern agriculture occurred beyond ecosystem scale. It was therefore imperative to gradually reframe agronomy and its educational systems with the goal of developing sustainable agricultural production strategies. In this paper, the author proposed bridging agronomy with ecology. This posed agroecology as a core discipline, upon which crop cultivation, cropping system and crop genetics/breeding research was regulated and broadened. These sub-disciplines of agronomy used agro-ecosystem management as a core applied system that integrates modern biological, ecological, information and material engineering. Methodologically, it paved a practical path to sustainable modern agriculture by integrating China's archaic deductivism thinking with western neoteric reductionism thinking.

     

/

返回文章
返回