Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons and care. This redesign should be supported by coordinated education and research efforts that do not simply replicate dominant discourses on food system sustainability but point towards a post-growth world in which agroecological life processes support healthy communities rather than serving as inputs for the relentless pursuit of economic growth.

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This chapter explores the contemporary significance of agricultural heritage, a concept in which the largely cultural and societal concerns for heritage preservation are shuffled into those related to nature conservation and the development of agriculture. Both heritage preservation and nature conservation cast mutually constitutive and relatively fixed ideas of past nature and culture into present and future. Agriculture, too, arrives heavily burdened with inherited meaning, as historically and materially it is “Exhibit A” in the powerful modern narrative of “Culture” gradually rising over “Nature.” In this context, agricultural heritage is almost automatically cast as a relic of the past ways of traditional peoples and their less efficient, less useful, pre-Modern natures. This chapter suggests instead that agricultural heritage represents one of humankind’s richest bodies of environmental experience and most successful manners of conveying knowledge through time, providing material examples of alternative knowledge of nature itself.