Synopsis The term “agroecology” was proposed in the 1930s and has been in use of quite sometime. It became a discipline in its own right in the 1980s. Of course, the roots of an ecological approach to agriculture go back to the dawn of the agricultural revolution, when early farmers could contend with the elements only by understanding the ecological forces that could be wielded to design an agroecosystem. Recently, as traditional agronomic approaches have faced various economic and societal pressures, agroecology has been seen as a serious alternative and is now being introduced as a course of even a department at numerous colleges and universities. The idea of this book is to aid this process by incorporating contributors from researchers who have been working in agroecology for some time with that of other people making headway in the area (some of whom may not even consider themselves as “Agroecolosists”). The overall theme being developed is that ecological approaches offer numerous new dimensions to help meet the challenges of agriculture (or “the problem of agriculture” as Wes Jackson likes to put it.) Agroecology strives to bridge two fields, agronomy and ecology, and thus to bring holism to agriculture. This stretching of perspective is evident throughout this book, be it stretching from the field level to the landscape level, or from the level of bioengineering a gene to incorporating that gene within a complex ecological system –the agroecosystem.