We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

Reflecting on the whole book, we begin with a standard call for change, but emphasize the problems of seeking positive change while ignoring the root of the problem. As an inspirational example for the ultimate goal, we use the recent emergence of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, specifying how its philosophy can be felt in progressive movements from Detroit to Puerto Rico. We end with an admonition that our four pillars of agroecology are intimately intersectional and that it would be an error to treat them as independent units.

We explore and document the joint evolution of domesticated cereal production and highly hierarchical social structures in deep history and then trace the similar structures thorough to the plantation system. All of this history points to the gradual evolution of the monocultural system, today very prevalent but highly criticized on both social and ecological grounds. This is followed by a detailed examination of what it means to convert from the monocultural ideology to a polycultural system and all the details that emerge from such a move. We note that agriculture did not start with the idea of monoculture, the latter situated in particular historical moments, but that early agriculture and today’s more advanced agroecological systems are more accurately characterized as diversified farming systems.

Heterogeneity and integrative levels are other aspects of the dialectical approach. In this chapter we elaborate our fundamental argument concerning the landscape nature of biodiversity conservation, emphasizing the role of agroecosystems in evaluating the biodiversity effects of various landscape forms. The fragmentation of natural habitats leads to a heterogeneous landscape where biodiversity conservation depends on how those patches are interconnected at various spatial and temporal scales. We emphasize the ecological nature of the project (e.g., the need to preserve metapopulation structures) and the sociopolitical aspects (small farmer perspectives on nature and biodiversity). We introduce here some more advanced ecological topics such as ephemeral sources and propagating sinks, and note that the recent emphasis on novel ecosystems fits snugly within the agroecological framing of biodiversity conservation.

We introduce the subjects beginning with the early works of Hegel, followed by a description of the emphases provided by Levins and Lewontin in their volume. Then we elaborate on the particularities that become involved in the application to the issues of food and agriculture more generally, and specifically to agroecology. We end the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of agroecology as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a platform for political action.

Beginning with a brief introduction to the evolution of modern ideas of pest control, we document the idea of the “pesticide treadmill.” Countering the pesticide paradigm, biological control is noted as a simple ecological fact, best thought of in agroecology as autonomous pest control, as popularized in the so-called Morales effect. We then present a detailed example emerging from our ecological work in Mexico. We end the chapter with an analysis of the need for action with limited knowledge, always a problem when attempting to apply ecological knowledge (which is itself invariably limited, an acknowledgment of the dialectical approach). The necessity of applying rules of thumb is thus acknowledged.

One aspect of the dialectical approach is historicity. To fully understand a subject, we need to know its history – not only the history of the subject itself, but the history of how scientists and analysts have been thinking about that subject. The fact that humans have been “engineering” their ecosystems for thousands of years is explored with the idea that agriculture is usefully interpreted as simply an extreme form of ecosystem engineering. A framing in modern terms is introduced through the work of various thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to Elinor Ostrom, ending with a critical description of the modern industrial agriculture system.

In this chapter we use the historical example of the coffee leaf rust pathogen to illustrate various issues of agroecology, emphasizing the ecological concepts of critical transitions, hysteresis, and ecological regime change – an example from basic ecology of the dialectical principle of transition from the quantitative to the qualitative. Beginning with the plantation system and its social and ecological importance, we review the basic ecology of the coffee rust disease and show how the sociopolitical arrangement of the plantation system interpenetrates the biological realities of the pathogen to create conditions for the critical transition.

Beginning with some historical issues associated with knowledge and its relationship to the food system, we engage in a discussion of traditional versus scientific knowledge, exploring how each is envisioned and their interpenetration, and arguing that both, as currently generally used, are legitimate and should be part of a dialog of knowledges (dialogo de saberes).