Ethics and Sustainable Agriculture

Fabio Caporali is 77 years old. He graduated in Agricultural Sciences at the University of Pisa and retired as Full Professor of Agricultural Ecology at the University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy. He still cooperates with DAFNE (Department of Agricultural Sciences and Forestry, University of Tuscia) in local institutions (bio-districts and eco-regions) for sustainable land use. He has more than 45 year experience in teaching and research both in Ecology and Agroecology, earlier at the University of Pisa and then at the University of Tuscia. His scientific and cultural activity is documented in more than one hundred papers published in national and international journals. He is author or co-author of University textbooks for both Ecology and Agroecology. He was both local and national coordinator of agroecological research projects in the Internationalization Programme of Italian Universities funded by the Ministry of University and Research, such as “Indicators of Agroecosystem Sustainability” and “Potential use of self-reseeding annual legumes in Mediterranean cropping systems”, in which several Italian Universities were engaged with other European Universities.  He was Institutional Coordinator of the University of Tuscia for the European Socrates Programme for 15 years. He coordinated teacher and student mobility in Europe and was actively involved as curriculum developer in several partnerships among European Universities concerning Agroecology at undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels. He was for 5 years the local coordinator of the Degree Course in “Agroecology” (Msc level) shared with other European Universities. His activities concerning university partnership extended to Italian-Russian Universities within the “Italian-Russian Institute for Ecological Research and Teaching”, a project still alive with rotational summer Intensive Programme Courses on selected topics. Even his current activity provides relevant occasions for international collaboration, such as that carried out in organic farms of the Biodistrict “Via Amerina e delle Forre” within the FAO’s project TAPE (Tools for Agroecology Performance Evaluation). He is currently a member of the executive Board of IN.N.E.R (International Network of Eco-Regions).

• Preface.- Introduction.- Ethics structure and goals.- The emergence of ecological awareness.- Development of ecological awareness.- The emergence of ecosystem theory.- The ecosystem concept.- The establishment of the ecosystem theory.- Research and education.- International policy and ecological economics.- Ethics of sustainable development.- Natural capital, ecosystem services and ecological footprint.- The role of education.- Agriculture and sustainable development.- Agroecosystem epistemology and ontology.- Energetics.- Matter cycling.- Biodiversity.- Sustainable agriculture.- Site-specificity and tradition.- Domestication and adaptation.- Terracing for ecosystem domestication.- Sustainable agriculture as a turning point of the human predicament.- Agroecology as a transdisciplinary field of cooperation.- Ecological intensification principles and practices.- Ecological intensification through planned biodiversity.- Ecological intensification: the role of hedgerows.- Valuing the performances of agroecosystem ecological intensification.- Institutional patterns of agriculture ecological intensification in Europe: the role of Universities.- Indicators of ecological intensification in contrasting farming systems.- Ecological intensification in animal husbandry.- Ecological intensification of human diet.- Ecological intensification in theology of creation and food ethics.- Conclusions.- References.- Index.