Daniela Ghringhello Sakamoto & José Fernando dos Santos Rebello

(presentation by Ernst Götsch bellow)

Preface by the authors

So we heard…

We first met Ernst Götsch in 1995, when we were still students of agronomy. His lecture at the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) was so impactful that it changed the course of our lives.

His knowledge of how nature works is so profound that, even today, whenever we meet him, we have the feeling that we are still in the first class. This book, based entirely on the teachings of Ernst Götsch, was written by people infatuated with nature, infatuated with planet Earth, people who believe that it is worthwhile doing your best to take care of it. There is an urgent need to disseminate a production system that, at the same time as producing tons of healthy and tasty food, recovers degraded areas, returns water to lost springs, and brings back our forests, which pushed us into this endeavor. The book, however, is far from being a definitive guide to syntropic agriculture, since knowledge about it is as dynamic as the agroecosystems created by Ernst Götsch. We understand that the paper should not freeze the concepts, since, each day, its creator refines the methods and interpretation of how nature works.

Knowledge, just as life, carries this impermanence, so we have to be with the mind always open and disarmed in order to understand the constant movement of both. True hearing requires an enormous concentration, something that, we confess, we do not always achieve. If we got it right, the credit goes without a doubt to Ernst Götsch; if we got it wrong in the interpretation of the concepts, that is how we understood them. All the images, graphs, and drawings in this book are copies of the original drawings proposed by Ernst Götsch in many of the classes we have attended over the last 27 years, and which are constantly changing, in a continuous improvement in the art of harvesting the Sun.

If humanity succeeds in creating truly sustainable food production systems, overcoming the obstacles created by itself, we have no doubt that this path will at some point encounter the syntropic agriculture created by Ernst Götsch.

Presentation by Ernst Götsch

This book wants to walk alongside the reader on this path, telling where we are at and where we have come to in the interpretation of a much greater work, infinite in its facets, in its diversity, dimension, and depth: the book of life on our planet.

As we try to read this magnificent book, each time that we rejoice, sure that we have grasped the content of a small paragraph, more questions spring up and bloom, and what we thought we knew gets smaller and smaller in the face of what we still don’t know. But it is precisely this that allows a new horizon to be revealed to us little by little, taking us far beyond what we expected when we started reading. Then, we discover that the key to knowledge cannot lie in the intention to manipulate or command the universe. And yet, we Farm only realize this after we have made so many attempts to cheat the system of life and after all of them, in such a short time, have proved to be a mistake, if not a catastrophe. After all, what we have achieved with seventy years of the so-called Green Revolution is to bring ecosystems, one after another, to the brink of collapse, exterminating at least one species every two minutes. So we ask ourselves: have we made so many mistakes because we approached the subject in the wrong way? Following Descartes’ well-known maxim cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), we have believed, in the last few centuries, to be above nature, defining ourselves, the human beings, as the only intelligent beings.

From this belief that we are superiors and, therefore, separate from the natural world, stems our desire to dominate it – a path that, as we know each time better, is the wrong one. It is time to radically change this conception, to critically expand Descartes’ maxim towards an ergo somos, which allows us to consider ourselves as part of an intelligent system, in which all beings that compose it have this same characteristic, all equipped and able to communicate with each other, forming, collectively, a large and unique macro-organism. In it, the principle of “shrewdness” does not prevail, whereby each one must grab as much as possible for itself; in it, rivalry and cold competition do not prevail, simply because each organ and each cell of this macro-organism knows that this would be the path to its own suicide and the death of all. Therefore, so that the whole can prosper, each one of us needs to embrace the question that seems to underlie the interactions that have been taking place on this planet since before we existed: how can I interact with the other members so that my participation becomes a beneficial event for everyone? Our cultural/philosophical world, however, imposes all sorts of barriers for anyone who dares to abandon the anthropocentric vision, which is clearly obsolete, and even a little ridiculous, and instead start adopting a biophilic perspective, that is, one of friendship and love for nature.

Yet, from the moment we come down from the “pedestal of the intelligent,” artificially erected by ourselves, we will remove the biggest obstacle we have created to learn, understand, and speak the language common to all beings. Everything will become easier: we will perceive that we should not divide the world into “good and evil”. Each species that exists here fulfills its function, acting in its “department” for the common good of all, that is, for the optimization of the functioning of life processes and the macro-organism Earth.

I hope that this book will lead its readers to try to access the real internet, the common network that all beings – with the exception of the great majority of our species – use to communicate. This network is of free access, is not censored, and functions by the mere use of the senses we received at birth and that we have in common with all the other members of the globe. If this little book by Daniela Sakamoto and José Fernando Rebello manages to open at least one window to glimpse all this, their immense work will be gratified.

Ernst Götsch – Olhos D’Água Farm, Spring 2020.