Conclusion

The new agriculture of the prairie will take some time to develop, longer than most people have the capacity to cope with or conceive of. Without visionaries, the future is much less rich and optimism much more remote. Our concept of sustainability will always be different, depending upon how far into the future we are prepared to look. Wes Jackson and his colleagues have adopted the longest term view they can in their research.

Like Copernicus or Galileo, they do not expect all the sceptics to queue to look through the telescope. Just as we rely on the brave imagination of the frontiersmen of the past, so the earth citizens of the future may depend upon the vision of the researchers of The Land Institute.