Dr Ulrich Loening

Ulrich Loening is a molecular biologist, long retired from what was the Dept of Botany and then of Zoology. He then became interested in the Centre for Human Ecology founded by Waddington in 1972 and became its Director from 1984 to 1995. He continues to study and lecture on ecological and some agricultural matters. He is currently a Fellow of the now independent Centre for Human Ecology, whose MSc course is in the University of Strathclyde.

The two sciences, conventional and convivial

The differences between two approaches to applied science is highlighted by the two histories of agricultural science: one stemming from Liebig (1840) through Rothamsted Experimental Station and the other from Franciszek Kamienski (1882) through numerous soil and soil micro-organism studies. The first leads to conventional farming and depends on how plants can take up nutrients when offered, the second rests on how plants actually do take up nutrients in nature. Both are equally thorough rigourous sciences, but only the first has been extensively and successfully applied to what we now call conventional farming; the second leads to applications that attempt to use rather than to over-ride or short- circuit, natural processes and leads to what we now call organic farming. The two are incompatible, both technically, (nutrients etc inhibit mycorrhiza) and philosophically, (to control and to observe ). There are many other examples of similar differences in medicine and other applied biologies, but probably not in physics or chemistry in which applications do not change the fundamental processes. I suggest that different names are needed for these two approaches, and suggest "conventional" and "convivial."