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AGRICULTURE

ARTICLES Society Against the State - Pierre Clastres The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - Jared Diamond Farmageddon! - Do or Die Theories on the Origins of Agriculture - Lecture Notes The Oil We Eat - Richard Manning The Origins of Agriculture - Primalseeds The Consequences of Domestication and Sedentism - Shultz & Lavenda The Origins of Agriculture - A Biological Perspective and a New Hypothesis - Wadley & Martin BOOKS Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond Fatal Harvest - Andrew Kimbrell Against the Grain - Richard Manning Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser The Consequences of Domestication and Sedentism - Shultz & Lavenda Beyond Agriculture  (available from our distro) ONLINE www.permaculture.net www.permaculture.org www.permacultureactivist.net www.foraging.com www.seedballs.com www.nativeseeds.com

Civilization has been physically marked in history by the creation of agriculture, which occurred 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.  Before that time, we lived as gatherer-hunters (foragers), close to the earth, in small egalitarian communities.

With agriculture comes the division of labor.  Naturally, every member of a tribe is capable of surviving alone and is knowledgeable of all the aspects of tribal living, but with agriculture comes specialization.  The tasks of living are divided up.  As societies and civilization develops the division of labor increases.  Hierarchy and separate classes are created with the special needs of the agricultural lifestyle.  Armies are needed to protect the land and food, leaders to run the armies, officials to distribute and store food and decide the functions of society, and religious leaders to pacify the lower classes.  This new ruling class is not a part of actual food production, so a lower class of peasants and slaves is needed to work the fields to feed the armies, rulers, priests, and officials.  With this new excess of food and the sedentary lifestyle comes and explosion of population.  Forests are cleared for crops and grazing to feed the expanding population.  Nature based people are killed as new land is cleared for crops.

The diets of agricultural people become dependent on two or three staple crops.  If these crops fail there is a famine and many people die.  On the other hand, foragers have a varied diet of hundreds of different species of plants.  A drought that would cause a famine for agriculturalists would have only a minimum effect on foragers.  Also a diet based on hundreds of different plants is far more nutritious than a diet based on a few crops.

With agriculture comes the need to dominate and objectify.  Crops are planted in rows with fences.  Food becomes a number: so many pounds of rice or wheat.  The production of food has replaced food as sustenance.  Land is divided up into plots for different uses.  Everything is thought of for its use and value.  Humans are turned to laborers, trees to wood, animals to meat and labor, land to crops, women to sexual objects and beasts of burden.  With this trend for domination and objectification, the growing population's and agriculture's susceptibility to famine brings scarcity.  Among all this, competition develops along with the concept of private property.  "Everyman for himself" (women are now viewed as property) becomes the reaction to scarcity.  The totality of it all is overwhelming.  Every aspect of agricultural life is unhealthy.  Wars are wages for "resources".  Hierarchy develops more and more...and its all downhill from there.

Agriculture takes more organic matter out of the soil than it puts back, and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals.  Regarding the latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state is totally dependent on agriculture for existence, is especially bad.  J. Russel Smith called it "the killer of continents...and one of the worst enemies of the human future".  The erosion cost of one bushel of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general large scale monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no application of manure or humus, obviously raising soil deterioration and soil loss to much higher levels.

The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose overriding goal is to maximize production.  Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this outlook eliminate the need for complex life of the soil and indeed convert it into a mere instrument of production.  The promise of technology is total control, a completely contrived environment that simply supercedes the natural balance of the biosphere.

But more and more energy is expended to purchase great monoculture yields that are beginning to decline, never mink the toxic contamination of the soil, ground water and food.  The US Department of Agriculture says that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two billion tons of soil a year.  The National Academy of Sciences estimates that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever.  The ecological imbalance caused by monocropping and synthetic fertilizers causes enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop loss due to insects has actually doubled.  Technology responds, of course, with spiraling applications of more synthetic fertilizers, and "pest" killers, accelerating the crime against nature.

Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been steadily increasing.  Each year, a total area equivalent to two Belgiums is being converted into desert worldwide.  The fate of the world's tropical rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this desiccation: half of them have been erased in the past thirty years.  In Botswana, the last wilderness region of Africa has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle and almost half of the rainforests in Central America, primarily to raise cattle for the hamburger markets in the US and Europe.  The few areas safe from deforestation is where agriculture doesn't want to go.  The destruction of the land is proceeding in the US over a greater land area than was encompassed by the original thirteen colonies, just as it was at the heart of the severe African famine of the mid 1970s, and the extinction of one species of wild animal and plant after another.

Physiologist Jared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture "a catastrophe from which we have never recovered".  Agriculture has been and remains a "catastrophe" at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us.  Liberation is impossible without its dissolution.