•••
And how do we look at other atrocities? We don’t wring our hands and say that the Nazis committed genocide because they were too damn smart. The Catholic Church didn’t promulgate the Inquisition because of the intelligence of Popes Innocent or Gregory or Lucius. Whites didn’t enslave Africans because whites are smarter. Rapists don’t commit rape because they’re smarter than their victims. Why can’t we just acknowledge that atrocities are atrocities? Sure, every group that commits atrocities has already built up a philosophy to justify these atrocities. But atrocities are not tragedies, and the perpetrators of atrocities are not tragic heroes. They’re just people who, for this reason or that, have talked themselves into rationalizing and then committing atrocities, and then rationalizing them again and again as they continue to commit them.
Let’s not make the committing of atrocities into something it isn’t. With all the world at stake, let’s at least be that honest.
Chapter Fifteen
Agriculture
The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism [and the ecological destruction, and militarism], that curse our existence.
JARED DIAMOND
Noam Chomsky, who is, again, one of the most important public intellectuals of the late twentieth century, also says, about agriculture and energy, “If agriculture is inherently destructive, we might as well say good-bye to each other, because whatever we eat, it’s coming from agriculture, whether it’s meat or anything else, milk, whatever it is. There is no particular reason to believe that it’s inherently destructive. We do happen to have destructive forms of agriculture: high-energy inputs, high fertilizer inputs. . . . So are there other ways of developing agricultural systems which will be basically sustainable? It’s kind of like energy. There’s no known inherent reason why that’s impossible.”
Once again, he’s not alone. He has an entire culture for company. At this point, nearly all writers and historians and scientists share this worldview, even those who are revolutionary and/or radical in other ways. It’s depressing as hell.
I guess my question would be, if the entire history of agriculture—six thousand years of destroying every biome it has touched—doesn’t constitute “reason to believe” that agriculture is inherently destructive, what, precisely, would constitute evidence? What will be our threshold to finally acknowledge this? Seven thousand years? Eight thousand? The complete destruction of the biosphere? I doubt if even those will suffice.
Here’s a particular reason to believe in agriculture’s destructiveness: black-skinned, pink-tusked elephants in China.
You’ve never heard of these? That might be because they were exterminated by agriculture. Not modern agriculture. Agriculture.
Here’s another reason: Mesopotamian elephants.
You’ve never heard of these either? That might be because they, too, were exterminated by agriculture. Not modern agriculture. Agriculture.
Carolina parakeets. Prairie dogs. Bison. The (formerly) Fertile Crescent. Iowa, which was once one of the most biologically diverse places in North America. The Everglades. Monarch butterflies. All devastated by and for agriculture.
Dead zones in oceans.
The Mississippi River. The Colorado River. Every river on the planet who has significant agriculture within its watershed.
Every Indigenous nation on the planet decimated or exterminated by the conquest that necessarily accompanies agriculture and consequent overshoot and conquest.
How much evidence do we need?
Agriculture destroys more nonhuman habitat than any other human activity. This has been true from the beginnings of agriculture. This destruction of habitat is not a by-product of agriculture. It is the point of agriculture: to convert land specifically to human use, and then to impede succession, that is, to stop the land’s attempts to heal itself. And the fact that the central acts of agriculture—destroying habitat and disallowing it from healing—are harmful to the natural world is not a reason to believe that agriculture is necessarily destructive?
Agriculture destroys soil, the basis of terrestrial life. One way it kills soil is through causing erosion. It is the leading anthropogenic cause of erosion. What do you expect to happen when you remove from soil the protective covering of plants? The plants were there for a reason (oh, that’s right, I forgot, there is no purpose or reason or function or intelligence in nature). Removing groundcover, which is the function of the plow, one of this culture’s greatest achievements (and yes, plows have function while plants don’t), is the equivalent of flaying the biome who is being converted to cropland. Would anyone say there’s no reason to believe that flaying someone harms them?
Agriculture destroys water quality. Erosion hurts not only the land being eroded, but the waters choked by more sediment than they need or want. Of course irrigated farmland takes water, water that was, until it was removed from the river, lake, or ground, someone else’s home. Primarily because of agriculture, a full 25 percent of the world’s rivers no longer reach the ocean or sea. This includes such once-huge rivers as the Colorado, the Indus, the Amu Darya, the Syr Darya, the Rio Grande, the Yellow, the Teesta, the Murray, and so many others. The dewatering of these rivers destroys the rivers, the wetlands, the estuaries, the seas and oceans who need these waters. What percent of the world’s rivers would have to be murdered before we can consider this evidence of agriculture’s destructiveness? Forty percent? Sixty? All of them?
Right now 115 percent of the water in the Colorado River is allocated for “beneficial use,” primarily agriculture. Yes, 115 percent. And governments are building more pipelines to take yet more water.
Would allocating more water from a river than the river carries, and then building more pipelines to carry away even more water, be considered a sign of intelligence?
Because of agricultural runoff, there are more than 450 dead zones in the oceans. Dead zones. Devoid of aerobic life. How many must there be before we can conclude that agriculture is inherently destructive?
And do we really need to talk about the unsustainability of so-called pesticides, and the relative intelligence of putting poison on your own food, in fact covering the planet in poisons? And pesticides raise another issue about the inherent unsustainability of agriculture. In order to make their food species easier to control, agriculturalists reduce or eliminate the natural defenses of the target species. This has often been done through breeding programs, selectively breeding for docile plants who devote their energies to making themselves nutritious and tasty instead of making themselves toxic or unpalatable, and selectively breeding for docile animals who are more likely to put on meat than to fight or run. But now, since these plants and animals have fewer defenses, the agriculturalists step in to kill those who would eat these now-relatively-defenseless plants and animals.
We could talk extensively about the tremendous harm all of this has done and must do to the real world—including the toxification of the total environment—but my point here is that all of this is not only functionally unsustainable on a physical level, but it creates an unsustainable mindset, for many reasons. One is that because we have formed or deformed these other beings—plants, animals, and others—to suit our needs, we can come to believe that we and not the planet are their creators. We can come to believe that we and not the planet are the creators of life. We can come to believe that we are smarter than we are (and smarter than they are, no matter who “they” are). Because we can “make” Cornish X chickens—it’s actually the hens who make the babies, but you know what I mean—with so much breast meat they suffocate if you allow them to grow up; and because we can “make” dogs—same caveat applies—small enough to fit in a person’s pocket, this then causes too many of us to believe we can
(and should) make the entire world do what we want. We can make it jump through hoops on command. In the words of Charles Mann, “Anything goes.”
Another is that because these domesticated plants and animals are reliant upon us for their survival, and because keeping these scarred and domesticated landscapes scarred and domesticated requires we constantly fight to keep nature from reclaiming (i.e., healing) these lands, we can come to believe that our position as wards of the pig sty—that is, sty-wards—qualifies us to be “stewards” of the entire planet. I know this sounds like a ridiculous jump—from being kind of in charge of a small piece of land and a few animals (and importing resources and externalizing harm to do it); to trying to manage (and steal from) incomprehensibly complex webs of interspecies communal relationships without terminally fucking them up—but more or less all of this human supremacist and nature-hating culture has made it, from the right-wing Christians and capitalists who believe we’re supposed to subdue the planet, to the lefty Christians and capitalists who believe we’re supposed to be stewards, to the loggers whose mud-splattered 4x4s sport the bumper sticker “Healthy forests need loggers,” to the anti-environmentalists-pretending-to-be-environmentalists who believe the entire world is a rambunctious garden for us to control. As human supremacist and anti-enviromental author Emma Marris puts it, “We are already running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not.” Emma, the word you are looking for is not running, it’s ruining. This insane—and maybe just the teensiest bit narcissistic—belief that the entire world is ours to “run” comes to be one of those assumptions we must never question.
And since the natural world is always trying to reclaim (i.e., heal) the land you’ve converted solely to human use, it can be remarkably easy to start to believe that the source of the necessities of your life is your own creations, and that nature is not only not the source of the necessities of your life but rather the enemy of all that is the source of the necessities of your life, the enemy of your creations, the enemy of you. This can lead to a perception of the necessity of a perpetual war against nature. As we see.
This is a big problem.
They say that one sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. This pattern of overshoot, habitat destruction, destruction of topsoils, destruction of rivers, wetlands, estuaries, oceans, destruction of the lifeways of the Indigenous humans and nonhumans who live in these places, has been happening since the beginning of agriculture, and continues not only unabated but accelerated to this day. Yet, still, so many members of the self-declared most intelligent species on the planet fail (or refuse) to see this pattern. Perhaps when there are no elephants, perhaps when there is no topsoil, perhaps when no rivers reach their destinations, perhaps when the oceans are one big dead zone, maybe then a few of us will acknowledge that agriculture is inherently destructive.
Don’t count on it. We’re not that smart.
•••
Or maybe we’re just way too smart for the planet’s good, lethally smart, so smart that we, like the humans who regularly lose to imprisoned chimpanzees in games that require we pay attention to what someone else is doing, are overthinking it, and we need a simpler model.
•••
Nah. It’s more likely that we’re just not that smart.
•••
Emma Marris says we’re “running the whole Earth,” and she acts as though this is a good thing, or at least a fact of life we need to accept. But look around. Us “running the whole Earth” is killing it. How completely unintelligent would a person have to be—would a culture have to be—to not have learned, after 6,000 years of ruining every place we attempt to run—and this is true of every civilization that has ever existed—that “running the whole Earth” is a complete fucking disaster?
Every single biome on the planet whom human supremacists have tried to manage has been dramatically harmed. Every single one. There has been not a single success, in terms of biotic health. How fucking arrogant, and how fucking stupid, do you have to be to not be able to discern the pattern in this?
Further, and this is the real point, how much intelligence does it take to cut through the rhetoric and see that “agriculture” and “running the whole Earth” are euphemisms for “stealing”? Converting the entire landbase to human use is certainly stealing from the nonhumans who live there, and it is stealing from the humans living with those nonhumans, and it is stealing from those who would have lived in the future. “Running the whole Earth,” likewise, is just another way to say “taking whatever we want and fuck everyone else.” I hate to break the news, but while using a euphemism may salve your conscience, and in the case of “running the whole Earth,” may make you feel superior, it doesn’t change material reality. And I really hate to break the news on this one, too, but material reality is more important than the words we use to describe it. Reality is also more important than our perceptions of it or our beliefs about it.
The only way that anyone can say that agriculture—and other forms of “running the whole Earth”—aren’t inherently destructive is by ignoring the costs to all of those who are not in the supremacist class, from the soils to the plants to the oceans to the animals (human and otherwise) to the bacteria to everyone else.
It’s just the Doughnut Supreme model all over again.
Human supremacists have one trick, and they do it very well: take from everyone else, and ignore the consequences.
•••
We can, of course, perform this same exercise for energy usage by this culture, which is functionally just as unsustainable, and so can never be sustainable. We can look at the long and painful history of what energy extraction has done to the planet, and to the Indigenous humans and nonhumans who have been or are unfortunate enough to live near extractable energy. Right now the Maasai, who have been living more or less sustainably in place for at least the last 500 years, are being driven off their land so Kenya can get at the geothermal energy sources beneath.117 So, and this is something we see time and again, whether it is Indigenous peoples in South America or Asia or India or anywhere else being driven off their land for dams or any other form of industrial energy production, people living sustainably are being driven off the land in the name of “sustainable energy production.”
Tell me again, who are the ones who are cooperative? Who are the ones who are intelligent? Who are the ones who are superior?
•••
Because we’re talking about some of the unquestioned beliefs that are the real authorities of this culture, I need to be as clear as possible. Agriculture—by which I don’t mean hunting and gathering, or horticulture, or pastoralism, but agriculture—leads to overshoot. That’s what happens when you convert the land solely to human use. Converting land solely to human use is by definition inherently destructive to all others who live there. I am consistently stunned at the number of people who have convinced themselves that taking from others does not harm those from whom one is stealing.
And agriculture is not and can never be sustainable. Permaculturalist and author Toby Hemenway wrote a brilliant essay entitled, “Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?” It begins, “Jared Diamond calls it ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race.’ Bill Mollison says that it can ‘destroy whole landscapes.’ Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies and the police state.”118
Further, since overshoot is by definition not sustainable (or else it wouldn’t be overshoot), and since humans (especially industrial humans) have already far exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth, there are, once again by definitio
n, no sustainable ways to support this number of (especially industrial) humans. For the third time, that’s the definition of overshoot. In overshoot, sustainability is by definition not possible. So even if agriculture had ever been sustainable, that implausible possibility has been foreclosed.
And if you don’t think that (especially industrial) humans have overshot carrying capacity, then I’m afraid we don’t have a lot to say to each other; I prefer my conversations to be based on physical reality, and if you can’t hear the 200 species extirpated per day and the acidifying oceans and forests and wetlands and prairies reduced to less than 2 percent of what they used to be all screaming “overshoot,” then you ain’t listenin’.
Of course, acknowledging that agriculture is inherently destructive doesn’t mean we should kiss each other goodbye. It just means that if we want to stop this culture from killing the rest of the planet, we should start by being honest about the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
That’s not so hard, is it?
•••
Any form of sustainable food procurement (I don’t want to say food production, since the Tolowa didn’t produce salmon, but caught and ate them) will have to not be human supremacist. Human supremacism is unsustainable.
•••
Here’s the real reason I brought all this up. Even faced with the murder of the planet, most people who have been inculcated into this culture refuse to question human supremacism and human empire. They would sacrifice life on this entire planet rather than question whether we really are more intelligent than anyone else; they will blame what they call intelligence rather than question the unquestioned beliefs that motivate this culture. They are already sacrificing life on the planet rather than questioning their assumptions.
The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 28