Editor’s Note: the following was originally posted as a comment on a recent article we shared entitled “Civilization Reduces Quality of Life.” We thought it was an insightful discussion of indigenous horticulture, and have received permission to republish it here. Image: Wild Rice by Hellebardius, CC BY NC SA 2.0.
By George Price
Ever since about the time of the advent of Daniel Quinn’s novel, “Ishmael” (back in the `90s), indigenous cultivators of food crops, such as myself, have had to contend with the allegation that the cultivation of food crops, no matter how sustainably practiced, was the beginning of the grand decline and fall of our species. I realize that not every fan of Quinn’s work or every anti-civilization activist thinks that way, but the problem occurs when people fail to adequately define “agriculture” and distinguish that from sustainable traditional indigenous cultivation practices.
I define “agriculture” as the cultivation of food crops for a market economy, or for money, which is coupled with the commodification of and disrespect for the natural world. That practice, along with the invention of money itself and the failure of some early societies to maintain population levels that were consistent with the carrying capacities of their homelands were the real culprits. Traditional first peoples would avoid over-population by several methods, including the prayerful dividing and relocation of bands within tribes in ways that would adjust for that, along with other population-regulating practices. Agriculture and money were the roots of empire and colonialism, and both were the result of unsustainable, disrespectful relationships with homeland, leading to dependence on trade and/or “conquest.”
Indigenous Horticulture
The traditional ways of indigenous cultivation more properly fit the definitions of the terms “horticulture,” “permaculture,” and “polyculture.” What those ways of cultivation have in common is that they were done for personal and community subsistence, only as needed, and in combination with sustainable practices of foraging. Whether foraging wild foods or cultivating foods that were originally found in the wild, those activities were/are done in a spiritual attitude of respect and thanksgiving toward the natural world (visible and invisible), and with a commitment to preserve natural ecological systems.
Our traditional practices involve working in sync with the natural world, helping to spread more of the wild-gathered foods into more of their traditional habitats. One example of that would be the Anishinabe practice of planting rice in new wetland areas created by beaver or, my people, the Wampanoags of Massachusetts, doing something very similar with wild cranberries. Corn was originally grown by many first peoples in habitats where corn’s wild grain cousins also occurred naturally. It should also be noted that many so-called “sedentary” or village-making tribes, should more accurately be defined as semi-sedentary, due to seasonal, cyclical movement of the people for the continuation of foraging practices
Other than the omission of those distinctions, I am in general agreement with your analysis of the plague called “civilization.” I am also very pleased to see somebody else cite and quote Richard Lee, Marshall Sahlins and Walter Ong.
About the author
George Price was born in 1951 and is descended from indigenous peoples of America (Wampanoag, Massachuset, and Choctaw), Africa (tribes unknown), Scotland, England, and France. He began organic gardening and learning about natural wild foods and medicines in 1970. He lives on five acres on the Flathead Indian Reservation, north of Missoula, Montana, and works as a teacher and historian.
Editor’s Note: DGR does not necessarily agree with all the opinions of the author. We find it very important though to raise a public discourse about big agriculture. (Monocultural) agriculture is the cradle of civilization and remains one of the most destructive practices of this culture. Continuing this practice will inevitably lead to collapse. DGR therefore strongly supports building small scale, local alternatives like permaculture/horticulture.
I find it strange Americans and, especially, scientists and politicians talk so little, if at all, about agriculture. And yet agriculture gives us food and, surreptitiously, threatens the future.
Vast number of Americans live in large cities like New York, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, San Francisco and Lost Angeles. These cities have great museums and, possibly, universities, but are agricultural deserts.
City merchants, grocers and government institutions buy most of the food they need for their large population from farmers or agribusiness, which grow food as far away from cities as they can.
The reason for the separation of the city from the country was the original sin of America: the savaging of the Native Americans and the outright theft of their land.
There was a second grabbing of land, what the British called enclosure. This time, during the twentieth century, large farmers and agribusiness put out of business small family farmers. This substantial amount of stolen land made agribusiness and large farmers kings in the countryside.
These agrarian monarchs remade rural America into toxic cornucopia gardens and feudal mills of animal feeding and slaughter, disease factories of pandemics.
Urban food deserts
This political economy employs millions of the most exploited Americans in our midst. This explains, to some degree, the illiteracy and apathy of urban people for what sustains life: food and drinking water.
Urban people don’t know how to grow food. As long as they have the money to go to the “super market,” they will continue to be divorced from life, to the point that, in fact, some have already reached, believing that bread and milk come from the refrigerator.
In other words, the scientific and political elites have signed off the end of civilization played out for millennia. They no longer worry about the quality of food and water and democracy that made civilization possible.
Political abyss
Trump was the hero of these elites. He read these sold-out Americans so clearly that he even had the audacity of launching an insurrection against the government of which he was the chief executive. This treasonous act failed, but not its underlying purpose, that billionaires own the country and its government.
These are delusions, though not to the more than seventy millions who voted for Trump. The billionaire propaganda has been so effective that these largely white Americans bought whole sale the lie of Trump that the Democrats stole the election.
The uneasy peace after the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters is unlikely to last for long. Biden’s reconciliation, his olive branch to the Republicans, will not bring Americans together.
Any rich madman becoming president or, quite possibly, ambitious military men or billionaires will come back to the Capitol with much better organized insurrections.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning, Wednesday, January 27, 2021, that the assault on the Capitol is inspiring more of the same attacks by “ideologically-motivated violent extremists” to “target elected officials and government facilities.”
Apparently, this leaves the Republican senators indifferent. Most of them are against putting Trump on trial. This nearly guarantees that the planned February 2021 Senate trial of Trump will declare him innocent of treason.
A result of this nature will forever be a stain on the history and reputation of this country. The United States will not be able to even pretend it’s a democracy. Moreover, it will inspire the next insurrectionists, unleashing conflicts resembling civil wars.
America is like the Roman Empire, which spent decades fighting civil wars as a prelude to actually becoming a monarchy. But, in contrast to the Roman army fighting with bows and arrows, the American army possesses nuclear weapons. This makes a real civil war unthinkable, thought the Republican politicians would love a civil war to kill the so-called leftists and socialists.
Big agriculture
This civil war-like atmosphere all but freezes agriculture to what it is: a giant extractive factory producing very large amounts of food for humans and food animals.
This factory is fueled by petroleum and petroleum-based pesticides, which wipe out honeybees, birds, and small animals, threatening and killing biodiversity, and wrecking ecosystems.
Pesticides, in addition, end up in the food people and food animals eat, thus spreading diseases like cancer and neurological disorders.
This anthropogenic toxic agriculture becomes almost science fiction and literally invisible in the animal enclosures holding about nine billion hogs, chicken, and cattle, all scheduled to be slaughtered for the satisfaction of the American palate.
However, in their short life of perpetual feeding, these animals are forced to conditions resembling those of an inferno of mountains of excrement, filth, brutality, and disease.
The 2020 coronavirus pestilence most likely escaped from these sardine can-like prisons of animals all over America and the so-called industrialized world.
The ag elephant in Biden’s oval office
I am not sure Biden is aware of this domestic agricultural nightmare. I sent him a letter outlining the emergency conditions that need remedy. Probably, he never saw my letter / article.
His climate change program promised to put America back to the Paris Agreement, revoking the license of the Keystone Canadian pipeline, and ending leasing federal land for the extraction of oil and gas.
Moreover, Biden’s executive orders on climate change promised the termination of government subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and tried weaving climate concerns throughout the federal government.
These are necessary but modest steps in the right direction. Biden is open to small changes in agriculture, feeding more children, even eliminating hunger, which in 2020 touched fifty million Americans.
But where are the drastic changes necessary to convert agriculture to a life-supporting biological, social, and economic activity?
Biden picked the Obama Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, for agriculture. This man, however, is an agent of big agriculture, not a friend of remaking rural America democratic or a supporter of small family farmer who grows food without pesticides, genetic engineering, sludge, or radiation.
Agriculture remains America’s invisible hope and threat.
Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of 6 books, including Poison Spring with Mckay Jenkings.
This is the first in a series of articles reflecting on a recent study which predicts collapse of industrial society within a few decades. By destroying the ecological foundation on which all life depends, civilization makes collapse inevitable. Max Wilbert describes the destruction caused by the industrial civilization, and what we can do for a just transition to a more sustainable way of life.
The report, published on May 6th by Dr. Gerardo Aquino, a research associate at the Alan Turing Institute in London, and Professor Mauro Bologna of the Depratment of Electronic Engineering at the University of Tarapacá in Chile, uses statistical and logistical modeling to look at destruction of the planet, and specifically focuses on deforestation and population growth.
By plugging in statistics and trends in resource consumption and running thousands of model-runs with different assumptions, Aquio and Bologna predict the most likely course of future human society.
The researchers conclude that civilization has a “very low probability, less than 10% in the optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse.”
On top of this, civilization (and it’s modern form, industrial civilization) is causing a global mass extinction event, changing the composition of the atmosphere and instigating global climate change, polluting the highest mountains and deepest ocean trenches with industrial chemicals and plastics, desertifying and eroding vast portions of the planet’s soils via agriculture, and fragmenting and shattering what habitat does remain intact via networks of roads and urbanization.
Most people perceive collapse as a terrible thing, and indeed a global collapse will result in a great deal of suffering, disease, and death. But the reality is, a vast amount of suffering is happening now, caused by the continued functioning of industrial civilization. A full forty percent of all human deaths are caused by air, water, and soil pollution according to Cornell research. The CoViD-19 pandemic is a direct result of civilization and the destruction of forests.
On top of this, collapse at this point may be inevitable. As the book Deep Green Resistance explains, “We are in overshoot as a species. A significant portion of the people now alive may have to die before we are back under carrying capacity, and that disparity is growing. Every day carrying capacity is driven down by hundreds of thousands of humans, and every day the human population increases by more than 200,000. The people added to the overshoot each day are needless, pointless deaths. Delaying collapse, they argue, is itself a form of mass murder.”
If you are concerned about this, as I am, as we all should be, you should be working to relocalize food production and smooth the transition away from industrial agriculture. Collapse has both positive aspects (declines in pollution, reduction in logging, end of international shipping, reduction in energy consumption, etc.) and negative aspects (collapse of social structures, medical systems, increased demands on local forests, etc.). These need to be managed and prepared for.
In the long-term, collapse will benefit both humans and nature by stopping industrial civilization and its pollution, global warming, desertification, and so on. Another physicist, Tim Garrett from the University of Utah, has conducted research into global warming and concluded that “only complete economic collapse will prevent runaway global climate change.”
There are over 400 oceanic dead zones created by fertilizer and nutrient runoff from industrial farms. Only one has recovered: the dead zone in the Black Sea, which healed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crash of industrial farming in the area. The area is now home to healthy wildlife and fish populations which support a stronger local economy.
Ultimately, our health and success as human beings is inseparable from the health of the planet. To destroy the Earth for temporary enrichment a slow form of suicide. But deeper than that, it is matricide, patricide, fratricide. It is the murder of one’s own family. We will only thrive when the natural world, our kin, are thriving as well. Human beings are not doomed to destroy the planet. We can live in other ways, and indeed, that is our only hope.
Featured image by the author.
Our next piece will discuss how a Dyson sphere (one of the proposed “solutions” in the original article) will not save us from a collapse.
In this lecture, we will cover a wide range of 10,000 years of agricultural history. Starting with the initial question “how old is human culture” we argue that humans have been living in a wide range of different cultures, long before some of them started applying agriculture about 10,000 years ago. We distinguish 5 different human cultures, according to the way they get their food and basic resources: Hunter/gatherers, horticulturists, pastoralists, agricultural, and finally industrial culture.
Agriculture of different character developed in some places in the world, and some forms are more destructive than others. The form of grain monoculture that developed about 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent has proven to be the most aggressive one, it is spreading very fast and with it the agricultural society, the people and their genes. It also causes the most devastating consequences for ecosystems. Europe was already ecologically badly damaged towards the end of the Middle Ages, by agriculture and the mining and extraction that was needed to fuel countless wars between European lords and kings.
The Issues with Agriculture
Environmental problems caused by agriculture are not a new phenomena. As a consequence, the European people had a large pressure to expand. The conquest of the Americas is the most recent disaster of this clash of cultures that has been going on for 10,000 years. The American Holocaust is the greatest mass murder in human history, the annihilation of at least 500 unique cultures, languages, peoples and world views that will never come back.
Since “unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture” (Robert Combs), and “Culture” means “enacting a story” (Daniel Quinn), we continue exploring some of the myths of agrarian culture. The question “why we are doing all of this” leads us back to biblical times and a spiral of violence that started with early agrarian empires and their efforts to conquer and colonize the middle east.
Following the development of apocalyptic thinking that originated in the ruined and deeply traumatized societies the empires and their wars left behind, we discover that “authoritarian religion and technocracy are not opposites, but part of a continuum” (Fabian Scheidler).
Transformation through Technology
Finally, we enter the 20th century. Central to apocalyptic thinking is the complete destruction of the old and the creation of a new, better state. To replace the heavenly state for the souls heard by the Last Judgment comes the belief in a transformation of the world through technology. Nature, which is perceived as brutal, raw, wild, imperfect is to be replaced by a better system, created by man.
This is what we are currently doing with our modern capitalist economy. In modern times, especially in the 20th century, the mega- machine, into which agricultural culture had evolved, once again gained enormous momentum through the input of the newly discovered energy sources fossil coal and oil. Also the destructiveness gained enormous momentum which we can see in climate change, ecocide, critical state of freshwater resources etc.
As we know, the 20th century brought new weapons and new wars. A particularly important man, who‘s inventions shaped our recent history, was Fritz Haber. He developed the process of ammonia synthesis in 1909. Ammonium nitrate is the basic material for explosives and also chemical fertilizers. The 20th century was marked by an explosion of human population that planet earth had never seen before. Fritz Haber inventions indeed broke the planetary boundaries by artificially producing more nitrogen than there would be naturally. This was the birth of modern industrial agriculture.
Ecological Restoration
After we have covered all these startling facts, we can finally start thinking about solutions. But we have to learn that “The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity. The major forces that shaped and shape our world –disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth– are all part of the culture agriculture evolved. (…) Just as surely, agriculture dug the tunnel of our vision.” (Richard Manning).
We‘ve probably understood during this lecture that the dominant culture, the civilization that is based on agriculture, inevitably leads to colonialism and conquest, and ultimately to the destruction of all life on this planet. That is the history, the present and that will be the future. But the future is ours, and we can change it. We can stop the destruction, and we can build alternative, life-centered cultures with structures and institutions that are based on cooperation, mutual understanding and respect. Whatever happens, the future must be an age of ecological restoration.
After millenia of agriculture, war, colonialism and suppression, all of us are, over generations, severely traumatized by all this violence. We went crazy and thought that we have to conquer and subdue nature and change the world fundamentally with our technology. All peoples who stood in the way of the expansion of agrarian culture were either destroyed or robbed of their land, their spirituality, their culture, and traumatized by violence and oppression, so that they became equally insane. (This is what Jack Forbes called Wétiko disease in his brilliant book Columbus and Other Cannibals.)
Why Permaculture?
I want permaculture to become a remedy that helps us to recover from this delusional state, so in the last part of this lecture we get to know permaculture, its founder Bill Mollison and its basic principles and ethics as a viable alternative. Coming to an end, I want to answer the initial question “Why do we need permaculture?”. Do we want an era of collapse, the apocalypse? Or do we want to take the chance and be protagonists of a new age of ecological restoration?
You may know the slogan swords to plowshares. It comes from the bible and has been used by movements for peace for a long time. But even they did obviously not understand that no lasting peace is possible within agricultural culture. Any peace movement that fails to recognize this must fail. Because whoever has plowshares will soon need swords. Actually, the plowshare itself is already a sword that injures the earth. It is the same analogy as explosives and chemical fertilizers, pesticides and chemical weapons. But we obviously had to break the planetary boundaries first to see these connections.
The more I think about it, the more permaculture becomes a new peace movement for me. So I would like to answer the question “Why do we need permaculture?” as follows: Agriculture is permanently at war (against nature and other people). Permaculture offers the chance for lasting peace.
Boris Forkel is a radical environmentalist, social rights activist and permaculturalist located in Germany. You can learn more about his work on his website BabylonApocalypse.org.
Editors Note: At Deep Green Resistance, we have a fundamental critique of agriculture, which is the most destructive activity human beings have ever done. However, horticulture, permaculture, and small-scale cultivation of biodiverse polycultures can be done in a sustainable way that enhances local ecology. This food source will be essential as industrial food systems collapse due to climate instability and human cultures are forced to adopt localized systems, and the generation and strengthening of these systems will give people more autonomy for resistance work.
Hou Xueying, a mother from Shanghai, was tired of food safety scares and of a city life disconnected from the land. So she moved her family to the country to learn about sustainable farming. Her parents disapproved; they had struggled to give her a comfortable life in the city — they could not understand why she would throw it away. When she got to the country, she found that the older generation of farmers could only tell her how to grow as they did, using chemical fertilizers, toxic insecticides.
Still, she persisted, and today she runs a diversified organic farm that is, in her words, a “self-reliant ecosystem.” She raises a wide variety of animals and crops, making use of ingenious techniques — like allowing ducks into the rice paddies — to fertilize plants and eliminate pests without using chemicals. She’s also turned her farm into a place of learning, teaching children from the city where their food comes from. Through all of this, Hou Xueying has found a community that shares her values for the first time. She believes that the importance of the farming way of life extends far beyond putting good food on the table. As she explains in the short film, Farmed with Love, “Only conscious foodies can save the world.”
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Many of us have heard some version of this statistic: the average age of farmers worldwide hovers around sixty years old. In the U.S., farmers over sixty-five outnumber farmers under thirty-five by a margin of six to one. People like Hou Xueying are going against the tide which has been tugging young people from the land for a long time, leaving older people alone on farms, with no one to take their place once they’re gone (except, increasingly, robots). So truly, as this older generation of farmers retires — a generation that widely embraced large-scale industrial farming — the question grows more pressing: who will grow the food of the future and what will their farms look like?
Every person on earth needs food every day. Every day, food is tended, harvested, transported, stored, and served up on our tables. In a very real sense, food cannot be separated from life itself. And so it has been said that changing the way we grow and eat food is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our economies and society as a whole.
So when we ask: what will the farms of the future look like? We should really be asking — what do we want the future to look like? And then answers may begin to emerge.
Though many are enamored of technological solutions, others have pointed to tech’s inescapable environmental impacts, to the way it strengthens corporate monopolies, and to the already evident, and as yet unforeseen, effects that it has on society, including on human health and happiness. When I look at the young people I know, at the issues that concern them most, four points of focus rise to the surface. These can be rather broadly categorized as: climate and the environment, diversity in its myriad forms, economic inequality, and a lack of community, loneliness. Young people don’t want to work the land if that means working long hours for low pay, using dangerous chemicals, while the fruits of their labor are borne away to profit corporate executives they will never meet. But that doesn’t mean a future in which we don’t work the land at all. In fact, it means quite the opposite.
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Climate change and agriculture are inextricably intertwined.
As I’m sure many of us know by now, our globalized industrial food system is a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. The machinery and chemicals involved in industrial farming rely heavily on fossil fuels. So does packaging and refrigeration, not to mention the transport of food around the world by truck, ship, and plane. Many countries import and export nearly identical quantities of the same products. All of this creates economic activity, which adds to indicators of “progress” like GDP; not reflected in these numbers are the environmental costs of all the fossil fuels burned in the process.
At the same time, more and more of the forests, grasslands, and wetlands that helped maintain the nearly perfect balance of the carbon cycle until the start of the industrial revolution are being cleared to make way for livestock or annual crops, which do not play the same role in sequestering carbon. This wreaks more havoc with the earth’s natural climate-stabilizing systems.
On the other side of the coin, the changing climate is threatening agriculture as we know it. Increasingly extreme temperatures and weather events harm food crops. Studies show that the parts of the global South where people are already food insecure are being hit hardest. Many of these regions are less industrialized, less “developed” parts of the world, and so contributed little to the creation of this crisis — and yet, they are suffering the most.
In short, industrial monocultures — those big farms you see with acres and acres of corn or soy, not to mention those giant cattle feedlots — are systems that degenerate, they die,over time. They produce more carbon emissions than they sequester. Their pesticides kill insects, including pollinators, a trend which may soon initiate “the collapse of nature.”
Every year, they suck the nutrients from the soil, and replace them with toxic chemicals. They draw water from local watersheds, pollute it, and let it run off into gutters, or evaporate when hot weather comes, rather than employing management techniques that would allow it to sink back down to replenish local aquifers. Eventually, land treated this way becomes barren, eroding away to create dead zones in rivers and oceans or being lifted up by the wind to join the particulate matter in the air, poisoning the lungs of human beings (it’s telling that a recent report showed that Fresno and Bakersfield, in the heart of California’s industrial farm-filled Central Valley, have the worst particulate pollution in the USA). The air is truly brown in such places. The crops grown on these farms are sent off by truck or ship to factories where they’re processed and packaged — using more resources — and finally delivered to our homes, often in a form that’s as bad for our bodies as the dust is for our lungs.
This is what agriculture looks like in a globalized corporate economy, where, like the nutrients from the soil, the livelihood is sucked from farming communities and siphoned up into the coffers of a few giant corporations .
But as I’m sure many of us know by now, this is not what agriculture has to look like, by any means. Farms can be regenerative, living systems, that produce a bounty but no waste. They can supply the needs of a local community — if that community is willing embrace the idea of eating a mostly seasonal, locally adapted diet — with no need for long-distance transport by trucks, ships, or planes. Farms do not have to be net carbon emitters — plants absorb CO2 when they photosynthesize, and only emit it very slowly, through respiration and decomposition; studies show that, if managed correctly, farms, orchards, and even animal grazing systems can become places that sink and sequester CO2.
Not only that, but these are the same kinds of diversified farming systems that make people most resilient in the face of climate change. If we grow one kind of bean, for example, as a cash crop, and then the summer is too hot for that variety, we lose absolutely everything — all of our profits, which we would have used to buy food throughout the year. If we grow a diverse variety of crops, however, all with slightly different climactic limitations, then not only will a heat wave fail to do us in, but we can feed ourselves, right from our own backyards, no matter what happens. In fact, there are many points in favor of small diversified farms. Even minimal diversification has been shown to increase crop yields, while intensive permaculture systems — which have only recently been recognized by science — have the potential to completely transform our concept of productivity, and of what a “farm” is.
But that’s only the beginning.
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When we talk about “diversified farms,” we usually mean crop diversity. But there is also wild biodiversity, human diversity, cultural diversity, language diversity, diversity in ways of thinking and being — all of which oppose the corporate consumer human monoculture which is so swiftly, insidiously spreading. Researchers have correlated biodiversity with language diversity, while others have found that certain regions function as “bio-cultural refugia,” harboring “place specific social memories related to food security and stewardship of biodiversity.” It’s easy to see these ideas brought to life in the context of a local food culture — crop varieties, local species and geography, language, and other aspects of culture like food preparation, celebrations, ways of passing knowledge on to the next generation, are all intimately connected. Lose any one element and the whole system is threatened.
Colonizers have long removed Indigenous people from their land knowing that this in turn will deprive them of their food culture, and so make them dependent on the colonizer’s economy — creating widening ripples of destruction.
In the same way that a colonizing culture hopes to put the world to work for a single purpose (usually, creating wealth for a specific set of colonizing elites) vast industrial farms destroy diverse ecosystems and replace them with a single species, like corn. This has been a driving force behind the sixth mass extinction which is urgently threatening all life on earth. But human beings are animal species too, after all, who could be playing supportive roles in diverse ecosystems, rather than acting as agents of destruction. In fact, corn now has a bad reputation in many parts of the world, but the corn, and the humans who first helped it to evolve thousands of years ago, are not to blame. There are few things more beautiful than the gemlike kernels of the heirloom corn varieties which long provided the basis of a healthy, vibrant, balanced diet for people throughout what is now Mexico and the United States — and which still does so for some today. These varieties are adapted to be drought-resistant, to withstand extremes of heat or cold, and are integral to many aspects of the cultures that rely upon them for survival.
This brings us back to the idea of a changing climate, of extremes. Over all the years that people have been planting seeds, they have been participating in a process of evolutionary adaptation: they’ve been selecting the seeds that thrived in their particular soil, with their particular weather conditions, their particular light. Seeds banks are great — especially those that save only Indigenous, non-corporate patented varieties; but they are not enough. We need living seed banks, seeds planted every year — eased into an uncertain future — if we want a real hope for survival.
Not only that, but farmers who grow a single crop for export instead of growing for their local community are at the mercy of another force as volatile the weather: the global economy. Many of us remember The Grapes of Wrath, the image of men dousing oranges with kerosene, throwing potatoes into the river and guarding them with guns, while the children of the migrant laborers looked on, starving. Modern versions of this still happen. Millions of people are hungry, and yet the amount of food we waste every day is absolutely staggering.
As John Steinbeck wrote, back in 1939, in a passage that still captures the essence of the global food system today:
“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.”
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Of course, the global economy in general is vastly unequal. This relates to the food system in different ways in different parts of the world. In wealthy, industrially developed countries, fresh, local, organic foods are generally thought of as being accessible only to high-income people (and to a great extent this is true), while organic farming is thought of as an occupation accessible only to people with privilege (also true, in some cases). Meanwhile, in the less “developed” world, locally grown and adapted foods, along with farming, are often stigmatized as backward, while the fat and sugar-filled processed foods that have wreaked havoc with the health of the developed world are held up as symbols of the future.
I believe that it’s generally wrong to tell anyone what they should or should not be eating, but it is important to question these kinds of assumptions. At the moment, high quality, local, organic food is a symbol of privilege in developed countries. But this is due to a rigged economic system — in which tax laws, trade agreements, government subsidies, and absolutely outrageous advertising budgets for things like sugary drinks and processed foods, systematically bolster multinational corporations — and not because of any quality inherent to the food itself. Once, not so long ago, it was the less economically privileged people who grew fresh, heirloom organic produce — of a quality that many of us can only dream about today — in backyards, on farms, in empty lots. Today, we think of processed and fast foods as being the cheapest options. But this, again, is because governments are doling out subsidies to corn and soy farmers, raising insurance and loan rates on fruit and veggie farmers, and handing ever more power to big business. We think of growing one’s own food as something that is only accessible to those with privilege, and to a great extent this is true as well. Land is prohibitively expensive, and time, under capitalism, is the most scarce, the most precious resource of all. The typical CEO is paid 162 times what his low-level employees make per year, and so many must work multiple jobs and eighty-hour weeks if they want to feed their families. Of course, the poor quality of affordable foods contributes to health problems that take up more time and increase financial burdens.
These are horrible structural injustices, and the structures that perpetrate them have to be dismantled. Yet, while the food system is a great place to start, we must not forget that many of the people who have been responsible for growing food over the last several hundred years have done so in the context of slavery, or of exploitative tenant or migrant farming, leaving legacies of trauma connected to land and food that cannot, and should not, be easily forgotten.
However, despite these absolutely undeniable wrongs, many are beginning to agree that without food sovereignty (defined here as,“The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems,”) we cannot have meaningful control over our lives, or our futures. As Leah Penniman, of Soul Fire Farm in Albany, New York, points out, there is a lot of racism built into the food system — food apartheid, as she describes it — and the separation of certain people from land and good food has not been an accident. She is one of many at the forefront of a movement that is reconnecting systemically marginalized people to land and to food.
This can be as simple as growing fresh food in vacant lots, on rooftops, on the grounds of community buildings like libraries, schools, churches. “Crop swaps,” or movements like #FoodIsFree — ways of trading produce for low or no cost — are amazing solutions that not only equalize the local food game, but also bring people together, building real community.
Meanwhile, in the global South, some are rejecting the idea that leaving the land for polluted, overpopulated cities is a sign of progress. One’s income might be higher working in an urban sweatshop than it would be in a rural village. But that increased income does not necessarily reflect an increased quality of life. In villages where people own their own land and live as they have for generations — using clean water, eating local foods, making clothes and other goods from locally sourced materials, relying on community support for things like child care — a comfortable life can cost almost nothing. (This is why corporate land grabs, for purposes like mining, logging, oil drilling and factory farming, are among the most pressing human rights issues of our time.) In confirmation of this, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN has declared that small family farming is the only way to feed a growing population, while the economic powers that be have confirmed it by creating a climate in which those who fight for land rights must fear for their lives.
In the end, you could say it comes down to this: if we all divest our time, energy and money from the corporations that fill megastores and supermarkets, and invest instead in ourselves, in local farmers and small local businesses, then we can keep money and precious resources circulating in our communities. When we do so, the creation of local food economies can play a meaningful role in equalizing society as a whole. And there are added benefits. When people and local governments reclaim their resources, it weakens the economic power of corporations, and strengthens democracy. Not only that, but societies that don’t leave people desperate are societies where people are less likely to turn against each other. There is the potential for a decline in xenophobia and conflict, and for diverse communities to unite, instead, against the real enemies: those who profit enormously off a system of gross injustice, and inequality.
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Nashira is an urban ecovillage near the Colombian city of Cali. It is run entirely by women, most from low-income families, and many of whom were left as single mothers by decades of civil conflict. Other women living at Nashira are survivors of domestic or sexual abuse. All are looking for a safe place to raise children, and a way to put food on the table.
Nashira can provide them with both — and more. It is a self-sustaining ecovillage, with a matriarchal democratic system of governance, that is built and operates on strict ecological principles. The fact that Nashira residents grow their own food as a community, as well as producing and selling sustainable food for income, has given a lot of these women and their families true safety, freedom, and stability for the first time in their lives.
Around the world, ecovillages more or less like Nashira are emerging. They are home to every kind of person, and yet they tend to share one thing in common: a focus on the importance of growing food as a community for sustainability, economic independence, health, and happiness.
There has been a lot of discussion about how best to name our time in history — the “Technological Age,” perhaps? — but George Monbiot has declared that it can most accurately be described as “The Age of Loneliness.” Our mental health statistics are grim — including, notably, the suicide statistics for farmers struggling in the industrial food system (here are some from the USA and India). We work long hours and are dependent on a few corporations for all of our basic needs (looking at you, Amazon), while technology is allowing for ever fewer human interactions (many people I know have their groceries delivered while they’re at work, and never see the inside of a store at all). While online communities have emerged that do serve beneficial purposes, it’s simply not enough. Human beings are social animals. We’re evolved to rely upon each other — for everything. We’re calmed by interdependent, mutually beneficial relationships, by support and sharing. We’re also calmed, strengthened, and satisfied by working with living plants and animals, especially when, by doing so, we’re securely able to feed our families. Around the world, growing food has proven beneficial for prisoners, school children, youth in foster care,unhoused peoples and trauma survivors.
And of course, we all know that there’s nothing better than food for bringing people together. Whether it’s organizing a work party to pick berries, planning produce-trading parties, preparing potlucks for celebration, or simply running into friends at a local market during daily shopping, the interactions we have in the context of a local food culture make the world a less lonely place.
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Ok, so the farms of the future should be regenerative, diverse, accessible, community-oriented, places of celebration. But for many of us — in particular those who are interested in actually becoming farmers — there are still a lot of barriers in the way of getting started.
The cost of land is the biggest. In the USA, between 1992 and 2012, three acres of farmland were lost to development every minute. Particularly near urban centers — where organic farmers find their largest markets — real estate developers are able to pay so much more than farmers can afford (banks are nervous about lending to farmers under the best of circumstances, and for young farmers starting out with student debt the prospects are even worse). At the moment, with real estate developers making bank on new developments, GDP rising when food is transported across national borders, and the fossil fuel industry still benefiting from long distances between growers and consumers — as bizarre as that sounds in our burning world — there remains little incentive for those in power to change this system. Fortunately, a number of organizations and local governments have taken on the difficult work of exploring alternative models of land ownership, setting up farmland trusts, and giving low or no interest loans to beginning farmers. Models like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), in which community members pay for food shares at the start of a growing season, provide farmers with critical financial safety nets that help them stay afloat.
Gaining rights to water and finding land not contaminated by industry can present further obstacles. So can overcoming expectations like, “I’m entitled to eat fresh strawberries in winter no matter where I live” — when in fact, eating seasonal, locally adapted produce is likely to lead to a higher quality overall diet, especially for those willing to take it on as a creative challenge. The same goes for countering statements like “organic agriculture is less productive,” or “small farms cannot feed the world.” While the first may sometimes appear to be true if you’re comparing organic versus conventional large scale production of the same crop, the statistics are usually cherry-picked to support corporate interests, and the whole conversation shifts if you expand your discussion to include different agricultural models — like highly diversified, integrated systems. When it comes to comparing large versus small farms, a lot of data is already in: small or medium family farms produce over 80% of the world’s food, using only 12% of the agricultural land. A huge problem lies in the fact that, to a very alarming extent, big agribusiness funds agricultural research in universities.
Then there are the challenges of obtaining local farming knowledge, particularly in regions where most people left the land long ago. Finally, there is the difficulty of overcoming stigmas, as Hou Xueying had to do, against working the land — fighting the idea that a farming life is “backward” and not modern — following these ideas to their source and cutting them off at the roots. We can only hope that as new food cultures take shape, and old ones evolve the world over, this process is able to spread and grow of its own accord.
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Fortunately, this growth has already begun.
People around the world are hard at work creating diverse, living versions of the farms of the future. As a way of life, it would be nice to think that it could really catch on, and one day be accessible to most of us. We’ll just need to continue fighting for access, giving one another support, unearthing the solid, tangible proof that a local food future is real, and not some fantasy we’ll soon abandon, a vague dream of what might have been, that we talk about in bitter tones while the robots get on with the planting.
For more local food inspiration, see Local Futures’ curated collection of short films on food and farming.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Isabel Marlens is a Special Projects Coordinator for Local Futures. She studied Ecology and English Literature at Bennington College, has a Permaculture Design Certificate from Quail Springs Permaculture, and has done native plant conservation and education, forest ecology research, and research and writing for various documentary films and online publications in the areas of social and environmental justice.
George Price was born in 1951 and is descended from indigenous peoples of America (Wampanoag, Massachuset, and Choctaw), Africa (tribes unknown), Scotland, England, and France. He began organic gardening and learning about natural wild foods and medicines in 1970. He lives on five acres on the Flathead Indian Reservation, north of Missoula, Montana, and works as a teacher and historian.
