The Problem

The Problem

This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies, P. 1-7

By LIERRE KEITH

“Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: Life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective.”1
LEWIS MUMFORD

There is so little time and even less hope here, in the midst of ruin, at the end of the world. Every biome is in shreds. The green flesh of forests has been stripped to grim sand. The word water has been drained of meaning; the Athabascan River is essentially a planned toxic spill now, oozing from the open wound of the Alberta tar sands. When birds fly over it, they drop dead from the poison. No one believes us when we say that, but it’s true. The Appalachian Mountains are being blown to bits, their dense life of deciduous forests, including their human communities, reduced to a disposal problem called “overburden,” a word that should be considered hate speech: Living creatures—mountain laurels, wood thrush fledglings, somebody’s grandchildren—are not objects to be tossed into gullies. If there is no poetry after Auschwitz, there is no grammar after mountaintop removal. As above, so below. Coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. And the world’s grasslands have been sliced to ribbons, literally, with steel blades fed by fossil fuel. The hunger of those blades would be endless but for the fact that the planet is a bounded sphere: There are no continents left to eat. Every year the average American farm uses the energy equivalent of three to four tons of TNT per acre. And oil burns so easily, once every possibility for self-sustaining cultures has been destroyed. Even the memory of nature is gone, metaphrastic now, something between prehistory and a fairy tale. All that’s left is carbon, accruing into a nightmare from which dawn will not save us. Climate change slipped into climate chaos, which has become a whispered climate holocaust. At least the humans whisper. And the animals? During the 2011 Texas drought, deer abandoned their fawns for lack of milk. That is not a grief that whispers. For living beings like Labrador ducks, Javan rhinos, and Xerces blue butterflies, there is the long silence of extinction.

We have a lot of numbers. They keep us sane, providing a kind of gallows’ comfort against the intransigent sadism of power: We know the world is being murdered, despite the mass denial. The numbers are real. The numbers don’t lie. The species shrink, their extinctions swell, and all their names are other words for kin: bison, wolves, black-footed ferrets. Before me (Lierre) is the text of a talk I’ve given. The original version contains this sentence: “Another 120 species went extinct today.” The 120 is crossed clean through, with 150 written above it. But the 150 is also struck out, with 180 written above. The 180 in its turn has given way to 200. I stare at this progression with a sick sort of awe. How does my small, neat handwriting hold this horror? The numbers keep stacking up, I’m out of space in the margin, and life is running out of time.

Twelve thousand years ago, the war against the earth began. In nine places,2 people started to destroy the world by taking up agriculture. Understand what agriculture is: In blunt terms, you take a piece of land, clear every living thing off it—ultimately, down to the bacteria—and then plant it for human use. Make no mistake: Agriculture is biotic cleansing. That’s not agriculture on a bad day, or agriculture done poorly. That’s what agriculture actually is: the extirpation of living communities for a monocrop for and of humans. There were perhaps five million humans living on earth on the day this started—from this day to the ending of the world, indeed—and there are now well over seven billion. The end is written into the beginning. As earth and space sciences scholar David R. Montgomery points out, agricultural societies “last 800 to 2,000 years … until the soil gives out.”3 Fossil fuel has been a vast accelerant to both the extirpation and the monocrop—the human population has quadrupled under the swell of surplus created by the Green Revolution—but it can only be temporary. Finite quantities have a nasty habit of running out. The name for this diminishment is drawdown, and agriculture is in essence a slow bleed-out of soil, species, biomes, and ultimately the process of life itself. Vertebrate evolution has come to a halt for lack of habitat, with habitat taken by force and kept by force: Iowa alone uses the energy equivalent of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year. Agriculture is the original scorched-earth policy, which is why both author and permaculturist Toby Hemenway and environmental writer Richard Manning have written the same sentence: “Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.” To quote Manning at length: “No biologist, or anyone else for that matter, could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a mono- culture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies, because there is no other way to sustain it.”4

Agriculture is what creates the human pattern called civilization. Civilization is not the same as culture—all humans create culture, which can be defined as the customs, beliefs, arts, cuisine, social organization, and ways of knowing and relating to each other, the land, and the divine within a specific group of people. Civilization is a specific way of life: people living in cities, with cities defined as people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources. What that means is that they need more than the land can give. Food, water, and energy have to come from somewhere else. From that point forward, it doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide because no one willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences. Over and over and over, the pattern is the same. There’s a bloated power center surrounded by conquered colonies, from which the center extracts what it wants, until eventually it collapses. The conjoined horrors of militarism and slavery begin with agriculture.

Agricultural societies end up militarized—and they always do—for three reasons. First, agriculture creates a surplus, and if it can be stored, it can be stolen, so, the surplus needs to be protected. The people who do that are called soldiers. Second, the drawdown inherent in this activity means that agriculturalists will always need more land, more soil, and more resources. They need an entire class of people whose job is war, whose job is taking land and resources by force—agriculture makes that possible as well as inevitable. Third, agriculture is backbreaking labor. For anyone to have leisure, they need slaves. By the year 1800, when the fossil fuel age began, three-quarters of the people on this planet were living in conditions of slavery, indenture, or serfdom.5 Force is the only way to get and keep that many people enslaved. We’ve largely forgotten this is because we’ve been using machines—which in turn use fossil fuel—to do that work for us instead of slaves. The symbiosis of technology and culture is what historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) called a technic. A social milieu creates specific technologies which in turn shape the culture. Mumford writes, “[A] new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control … gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization… The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics … created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts—the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable.”6

Technology is anything but neutral or passive in its effects: Ploughshares require armies of slaves to operate them and soldiers to protect them. The technic that is civilization has required weapons of conquest from the beginning. “Farming spread by genocide,” Richard Manning writes.7 The destruction of Cro-Magnon Europe—the culture that bequeathed us Lascaux, a collection of cave paintings in southwestern France—took farmer-soldiers from the Near East perhaps 300 years to accomplish. The only thing exchanged between the two cultures was violence. “All these artifacts are weapons,” writes archaeologist T. Douglas Price, with his colleagues, “and there is no reason to believe that they were exchanged in a nonviolent manner.”8

Weapons are tools that civilizations will make because civilization itself is a war. Its most basic material activity is a war against the living world, and as life is destroyed, the war must spread. The spread is not just geographic, though that is both inevitable and catastrophic, turning biotic communities into gutted colonies and sovereign people into slaves. Civilization penetrates the culture as well, because the weapons are not just a technology: no tool ever is. Technologies contain the transmutational force of a technic, creating a seamless suite of social institutions and corresponding ideologies. Those ideologies will either be authoritarian or democratic, hierarchical or egalitarian. Technics are never neutral. Or, as ecopsychology pioneer Chellis Glendinning writes with spare eloquence, “All technologies are political.”9

Sources:

  1. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter, 1964).
  2. There exists some debate as to how many places developed agriculture and civilizations. The best current guess seems to be nine: the Fertile Crescent; the Indian sub- continent; the Yangtze and Yellow River basins; the New Guinea Highlands; Central Mexico; Northern South America; sub-Saharan Africa; and eastern North America.
  3. David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 236.
  4. Richard Manning, Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 185.
  5. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Mariner Books, 2006), 2.
  6. Mumford op cit (Winter, 1964), 3.
  7. Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 45.
  8. T. Douglas Price, Anne Birgitte Gebauer, and Lawrence H. Keeley, “The Spread of Farming into Europe North of the Alps,” in Douglas T. Price and Anne Brigitte Gebauer, Last Hunters, First Farmers (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1995).
  9. Chellis Glendinning, “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” Utne Reader, March- April 1990, 50.
Suspension Of Farm Laws In India

Suspension Of Farm Laws In India

This news article describes the impact of corrupt legislation on ordinary working people. The organised protests and solidarity of the public with farmers is an excellent example of how coordinated resistance can enable change.

Editor’s note: DGR strongly opposes the three new farm laws that have inspired the farmer’s protests in India. However, we do not necessarily agree with all of the demands of the protestors.


By Salonika/DGR Asia-Pacific

On 12th January, 2021, the Supreme Court of India suspended the ‘Three Contentious Farm Laws, amidst large scale protests from farmers in India. The three farm laws continue to be hailed by the ruling party as a means on giving farmers more autonomy over selling of their crops and will break big monopolies. Yet, it is the farmers who have mobilized and organized the mass-scale protests against the laws.

Resistance against the farm bills has been mainly organized by farmer’s unions, ongoing across different areas of the country, since the bills were first introduced. The protests intensified after the bills were passed by the parliament and signed by the President in late September. At the time of writing this, thousands of farmers are on the streets, demanding central government repeal the three acts.  In the past five months, about 70 protestors have lost their lives to heart attacks, cold, accidents and suicides.

What does the laws mean for the farmers?

State governments in three states of India – Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan – have established a marketing board (APMC). Under this system, the first sale of agricultural produce (i.e. from the farmer to the middlemen) could happen only in the mandis (market yards) of APMC. The mandis in turn operate under a Minimum Support Price (MSP) system that ensure certain crops are sold at a minimum price set by the government at the beginning of the season.

By ensuring a minimum price for their produce, The APMC and MSP system act as a safeguard for farmers, against unexpected price drops, as well as exploitation by large retailers or local moneylenders.

Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, one of the new laws, remove the APMC system, and allow for sale of agricultural produce to private buyers without any government oversight. While the ruling party claims that this would liberate the farmers to sell their produce to the highest bidder, the farmers fear otherwise.

The direct dealings of farmers with large retailers will put the farmers in a vulnerable position  No laws in India or any of the states consider the MSP system to be legally enforceable. The new laws also do not mention MSP in regards to direct dealings with retailers, and will likely dismantle the MSP system. Although the members of ruling party have verbally assured that the system will be intact, the farmers have demands a more formalized pledge to the continuity of MSP.

What if farmers are exploited?

On top of that, certain sections of the laws strip citizens’ right to legal recourse. One law grants complete immunity for any act performed in the process of implementation of the law as long as the act was performed in “good faith.” Another strips civil courts of jurisdiction over proceedings related to the laws. The judicial power is transferred to new institutions created by the laws, which will remain under the executive control.

In effect, anyone who can claim to be acting in “good faith” in their implementation of the rules could easily acquire legal immunity, with little to no consequences for their actions. A study of the impacts of deregulation policies across the world clearly demonstrate that it is the corporations who will enjoy this impunity, while the so-called beneficiaries of the policies (in this case, the farmers) will be further repressed under corporate control. It is clear for everyone to see that this ‘gift of legislation’ offers working people zero protection and could cause significant harm.

Responses to the protests

The protests have received overwhelming support from the public, celebrities, and even opposition parties. Whilst the motives behind the latter’s support are, of course, contentious, it is at this time welcome given what is at stake. Incredibly, approximately 250 million people participated in a nationwide general strike organized by farmer unions on November 26, 2020.

Unsurprisingly, from the governmental side, the peaceful protests have been met with water cannons, batons, tear gas, barricades and sand barriers to stop the protestors from crossing state borders. A youth who turned off a police water cannon, being used against the protestors, was later charged with attempted murder.

The members of the ruling party have used a number of tactics to discredit the organizers. Baseless accusations that the movement is led by “privileged” farmers, or secessionists, or even terrorists have been made and reported by the mainstream media.

Need for radical changes

The new laws will render the farmers vulnerable to big businesses. However, these are not the only problems that farmers in India have faced. It is estimated that ten farmers kill themselves everyday.

Majority of the problems that the farmers face can be traced back to the 1960s when India became an experimental ground for the Green Revolution, which introduced hybrid seeds, monoculture, chemical fertilizers and pesticides in India. The results of the experiments are horrifying.

In Punjab (ground zero of the Green Revolution in India), pesticide residues were found in a quarter of breast milk samples in 2014. “Cancer trains” carry pesticide related cancer victims from Punjab to Rajasthan. Farmers’ suicides (considered a national catastrophe) is a result of the increasing spiral of debt that the farmers cannot escape from. Testimonies of a few of the protesting farmers shows that a majority of their expenses is spent on pesticides and fertilizers.

The movement against the new farm laws are a significant blow to the exploitative and oppressive system. The farmers can build on this movement to reverse the devastating effects of the Green Revolution.

The food sector of India (as it is now) serves no one in the longer term. The food producers are trapped in inescapable spirals of debt. The consumers are ingesting toxins in their bodies. The landbase upon which we depend is getting poisoned by chemical toxins. Aquifers have started drying out. The diversity of crops and plants in India have been lost

This should be replaced by a system that serves both the ecology and the local communities should be established, through reindigenization of agriculture practices` and localization of food production.

For more information on the protests, check out the official website of Ail India Kisan Sabha, and this open letter of solidarity` for the farmers.


Salonika is an organizer at DGR Asia Pacific and is based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.

Featured image: Ted Eytan

Green Revolution: A Misnomer

Green Revolution: A Misnomer

By Salonika

The Green Revolution is a misnomer: it sounds like a radical environmental movement when it’s the exact opposite of that. It is a movement led by corporations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) to further reinforce the class-based heierarchy, while spreading an ecocidal practice across the world.

The Green Revolution has promoted the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; hybridized seeds and high yielding crop varieties; expansion of irrigation infrastructure, and modernization of management techniques. It started in late 1950s and has been credited as the movement that saved the world from mass starvation. (The mass starvation seemed imminent due to the human population overshoot. The population was 3 billion at the time and since then has increased by more than 5 billion – an almost threefold increase!) Norman Borlaug, the father of Green Revolution, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for saving a billion people from starvation.

Currently a second wave of Green Revolution is on the way. Influential people like Bill Gates are pushing the use of Genetically Modified Crops (GMOs) in countries of Africa as a new solution to the upcoming starvation.

This is the dominant narrative regarding the Green Revolution. There are some important points missing from this perfect little story.

Lets delve into the history of the agricorporations first.

The agricultural corporations have an intertwined history history with the wars. During World War II, the agricultural corporations (then chemical corporations) produced explosives and poisons. Monsanto operation the Dayton Project and the Mound Laboratories, and was involved in the development of the first nuclear weapons. During the Vietnam War, Monsanto also poisoned Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with Agent Orange. The effects on human health and ecology can be felt to this day.

The war legacy of these corporations extends beyond this. According to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals, Bayer had purchased 150 healthy women from the Auswitch concentration camp for experiments with sleep-inducing drugs. All of these women died during the experiments.

It is hard to believe that the companies that had no qualms in actively profiteering from wars, conducting war crimes, or purchasing humans, would simultaneously be sensitive to the sufferings of humanity. These corporations have proven time and again that they are willing to poison and exploit the oppressed (the poor, the women, those from the Global South) in pursuit of profit. It is ironical that proponents of GMOs use images of starving children in Africa to build a case in favor of these corporations.

Lets take a case of the state of Punjab in India.

The Green Revolution was introduced in Punjab in 1965. It has been credited for pulling India out of starvation.

In reality, there was no starvation in India in 1965.* A nationwide drought had increased the food prices, creating a need to import food grains. However, the US government and the World Band imposed a condition on the import of food grains and forced synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically redesigned crops to the farmers of Punjab. These synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were produced using the same chemicals that had been used to produce poisons and explosives during the Second World War. Native crops all over rejected these chemicals. So, the agriculture corporations genetically altered crops so that they would accept (and be dependent on) the synthetic chemicals. These crops later became known as the high yielding varieties and the hybridized seeds.

The Green Revolution has had serious implications in Punjab. The native biodiversity has been destroyed. Once, Punjab used to produce 41 varieties of wheat and 37 varieties of rice. Since the Green Revolution, all of this has been replaced by monocultures of imported crops.

These crops require further use of chemicals. It has toxified the entire ecology. A 2014 study found pesticide residue in 25% of breast milk sample collected from Punjab. In a culture where breast milk stands for purity and love of a mother for her child, a quarter of mothers cannot express this love toward their infants without simultaneously poisoning them.

The number cancer cases are so high in Punjab that a special train carries people suffering from pesticide-related cancer to Rajasthan (another state in India). This train is called the “cancer train.”

Technology transfer or wealth transfer?

The Green Revolution has been credited for technology transfer from the corporations to the farmers. In fact, it has resulted in a massive wealth transfer from farmers to corporations. The farmers in India are dying from an inability to pay the massive loans they have accrued. Since the 1990s, farmers suicide has been a national catastrophe in India. It is estimated that more than 10 farmers commit suicide every day. Ironically, or perhaps symbolically, most kill themselves on their fields by drinking pesticides.

I was once asked why the movement is called the Green Revolution. I said, “Because poison-your-land movement would have sounded less appealing.” It would definitely have been more accurate though!

The Farms of the Future


The Farms of the Future


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.

by Isabel Marlens / Image: Association for Temperate Agroforestry

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.”

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.”

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.


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.

Resistance Radio: Lierre Keith on Agriculture, Part 2

Resistance Radio: Lierre Keith on Agriculture, Part 2

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith.  You can read Part 1 here.

Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
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Jensen:  Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?

Keith: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.

You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.

That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.

The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.

It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.

J: It’s a functional problem.

K: That’s why it always ends up militarized. That’s one big reason. Another reason is, as you mentioned, human slavery. This is backbreaking labor. Hunter-gatherers tend to work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week to provide for their basic resources, and the rest of the time they do spiritual activities, art, naps apparently are very important, and also gossip. So that’s what they love to do, and they’ve got a lot of free time to do it.

You can contrast that with farmers: it’s just neverending, from dawn to dusk. For anyone to have leisure time in an agricultural society, they have to have slaves. To put a real number on it, by the year 1800—a lot of people demarcate that as the beginning of the fossil fuel age—fully three-quarters of the human beings alive on this planet, three-quarters of them, were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom. That’s what it requires.

J: It was mainly agricultural, right?

K: Yes. We’ve forgotten how much work is involved because we’ve been using machines now to do that work. I can guarantee that when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly what kind of work this is.

Once you have that number of the population living in slavery, you need someone to keep them there, and those people are called soldiers. When they go out into the hinterlands, into the colonies, to get those resources that everybody now needs, one of those resources is always going to be other human beings.

We talk about Athens, the great birthplace of modern democracy. Ninety percent of the population of Athens were slaves. That carries through until the year 1800. So that’s number two, slavery.

The other problem with agriculture is it creates a surplus. That’s how the whole thing keeps going. You have to make enough so that you have some surplus. Hunter-gatherers can just move on a little bit and there’s more food to eat, but with the agriculturalists, of course, starvation is always one season away, so there’s always this surplus. The thing is, if you can store it, you can steal it, so you always have to have somebody to guard the food stores. And again, those people are called soldiers.

J: In the first cities—I learned this from Lewis Mumford—the first cities did not have walls around the outside to protect them from so-called raiders. They actually had walls around the granary to make sure that the king was able to keep control of the food supplies because it was only through keeping control of the food supplies that he was able to keep control of the labor force.

K: Yes, so you see this makes a really vicious little circle. Another point to keep in mind is if you can picture one of those great big naval ships that the British Navy or whoever used to conquer various colonies, it can take 600 old-growth trees just to make one of those ships.

War is really resource-intensive. And it ends. A lot of things you might produce create value in this society, and the value can keep either building or at least transferring, but with things that revolve around war, it just dead-ends right there because it’s only got one purpose. And when it’s over, everybody’s dead and that’s sort of the end of it.

Those ships—entire forests of the world were pulled down to make ships just for war. And this is true everywhere. It’s not just the British Navy. It’s all of them. That’s what was required to build those great big fighting vessels.

So you’ve destroyed your forest to live in this energy-intensive way, and you’ve poured a whole bunch of resources particularly into your military, not in defeating people but into the military, and now around again in the vicious circle, you have to go out and conquer the people living in the region next to you so you can take their forest to make more ships to conquer more people.

This is the temporary advantage that agricultural societies have. Because they’re willing to destroy their forests, they can build these great big ships. They can do all this smelting of iron and make these incredible weapons, which are a lot harder than just wooden spears. So they’ve got this superior military force because it’s all draw-down.

Then you’re stuck in this position where you then have to conquer. You have to use that military to go out and get more resources because you’ve used up yours. But it gives you that temporary advantage over the people who aren’t willing to destroy their forests.

If you’re the people who aren’t willing, now you’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either become militaristic and devote your forest to making an army—you kill your land—or you stand on principle and you’re killed and they take it. This is why war spreads. The gentle, peaceful matrilineal people that we all love to romanticize, and in our dreams that’s where we go, this is what happens. This is what they’re up against every time.

It’s a double bind. There’s not really any way out, and that’s why we’re in the state we’re in.

J: Since the problems are functional, as opposed to just something we can change by being nicer people, why are you telling us this? That’s one question. Another question is what do you want people to do with this information?

K: The reason I’m telling everybody is because I want to be hated. [Pause.] That’s supposed to be a joke.

The reason I’m telling everybody is because I feel like the people who care the most—and by that I mean radical environmentalists, radical feminists, people who are profoundly committed to the planet, to justice, to a better way—by and large do not understand the depth of the problem. And if we don’t address the actual problem, we’re never going to come up with solutions. That seems kind of obvious.

Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to these issues don’t understand that it all goes back to agriculture, that that’s the original activity that started us down this path of destruction. That’s the primary destruction. Eventually, global warming will outweigh that, but to date, it’s still the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Because that’s what it is. It’s not like agriculture on a bad day, agriculture done really badly. No, this is what it is. You pull down the forest. You rip up the prairie. You destroy those biotic communities, and you replace them with this monocrop for humans, for as long as it will last. That’s the problem.

Then once you start doing that, you’re stuck with this militaristic cycle because you’ve got to keep doing it again and again. When you’ve destroyed your own, you have to go out and get someone else’s. Militarism isn’t just, “Oh gosh, we happen to be warlike. We have a bad story in a book we consider holy. We’d better tell new stories.” I’m a writer. I’m all for new stories, but that’s not going to change this.

The problem is we have a way of life based on draw-down. Materially speaking, we’ve used it all up. And we need to face that. That’s why I’m trying to get people to understand this. It’s not because I actually want them to hate me although a lot of them end up hating me. I guess that’s just the way it goes when you go up against people’s beliefs.

We really have to get the basic wound that’s been done, the basic damage. This has got to be at the forefront of our consciousness as activists and environmentalists and feminists. We’re never going to be able to face it otherwise.

J: I want to comment on the whole hating you thing. What you’re saying is not actually new. Basically, every generation, there have been a number of people who say agriculture is destructive—can you just list a few of the people who have talked about this? There’s Jared Diamond and Richard Manning with Against the Grain, and how about Edward Hyams? Talk about a few of those precedents.

K: What you’re saying is absolutely right. Every generation there’s somebody who says the same thing, and you can go all the way back to ancient Greece to some of the earliest written texts that we have anywhere in the world, and you’ve got Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all mentioning the fact that the world was being destroyed, that the rivers were being flooded with this mud and silt, and so there were no more fish, and all the soil was washing down off the mountains.

In fact, some of the ports of the ancient Roman Empire had to be moved ten kilometers—ten kilometers—because so much silt ran off the mountains and clogged the harbors that they kept having to move, just literally move the cities, to a new spot where the ships could actually dock. This was all commented on. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that nobody knew how to stop it.

Then you have people like George Hill in the nineteenth century, then Edward Hyams in 1930, 1940, and more recently, you have David Montgomery and his book Soil, which is absolutely fabulous. Jared Diamond basically won a Pulitzer Prize for saying more or less the same thing. Richard Manning has this great quote that I love. I’d like to read this. It’s just a few sentences:

“No biologist or anyone else for that matter could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it.”

That’s it right there. It’s a war against the natural world.

No, I have nothing to say that’s particularly original. I think I put it together in my own way, but none of this is new information. It’s not getting to the people who care the most, and that’s why I feel impassioned about this.

J: So what do you want people to do on two levels, both the personal level and the social level?

K: I think that the social level is heads and shoulders, far and way above, way more important than anything that anybody can do in their personal lives. And I really want to emphasize that, because there are no personal solutions to political problems, and we should know that.

The problem is that a lot of the environmental movement—we’ve kind of been sold this idea that if we just make different consumer choices, we can somehow buy our way out of these massive, global political problems. We can’t. There’s no set of things you can buy that’s going to make a damn bit of difference on any of this. This is not a problem that you can address in your personal life and really have that make anything but a nano-difference. These are really just horrendous systems of power that we are going to have to challenge.

J: Can you say what you were going to say, but in addition can you give a three-minute liberal/radical distinction? Is that possible?

K: There are two main differences between liberals and radicals. The first is that liberals are idealist, and what that means is that liberals tend to think that social reality is an idea. It’s a mental event. And therefore, the way to make social change is education. You change people’s minds. And social change happens because people have some kind of consciousness transformation, or a personal epiphany, or even a spiritual revelation, but that’s how social change happens. It’s one by one and it’s through education or rational argument because it’s a rational problem, right? It’s just a mental event.

J: If we recognize that agriculture is destructive, then we’ll stop it.

K: Yes. Somehow if we just get the information to people, it will somehow just happen. It’s very different on the radical side because radicals think that material conditions are primary, that society is not made up of ideas, it’s made up of material conditions and material institutions that create those conditions. The way you change things is by taking power away from the powerful and redistributing that to the dispossessed. That involves struggle.

Down the line, you have to make decisions how you’re going to wage such struggle, whether it’s violent or nonviolent. All that is really important, and often very ethically grueling to come to grips with, but that’s a much later discussion.

The thing to recognize is this requires force. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s not a mistake. The powerful aren’t there because the rest of us aren’t educated. They’re there because they have power, and they’re not going to give it up willingly.

You need to use some level of force, whether that’s nonviolent, whether it’s boycotts, whether it’s sit-ins—there are plenty of nonviolent ways that have worked, so it’s not about violence and nonviolence.

It’s simply to recognize that this is not a mistake or a misunderstanding because it’s not a mental event. It’s about material systems of power that have got to be changed, that have to be confronted and brought down. That’s idealism versus materialism.

The other big difference between liberals and radicals is the basic social unit. For liberals it’s always the individual. The individual is sacrosanct. It’s always the individual against society. And again, this leaves you with a strategy of sort of one on one. You’re going to change people one by one, and that’s how you change society.

For radicals, again, this is totally different. We understand that society is actually made of groups of people—so it’s always a class condition, whether it’s economic class, whether it’s a sex caste system of gender, whether it’s a racial caste system. These are groups of people, and some of those groups have power over other groups.

So it’s not about you as an individual. The bad things that happen to me aren’t because my name is Lierre and I have blue eyes and I like reading. The bad things that happen to me are because I’m a woman, because of the different class positions that I hold. Those are the things that happen to people who are in my position. Nothing to do with me as an individual.

Social change happens when the dispossessed come together and make common cause. The solution is really written into the problem. Groups of people have power, but the dispossessed can come together and fight for themselves to change that. There’s always hope in that condition.

That’s the difference between liberals and radicals, and the problem with a lot of the environmentalists of course is that they’ve completely taken up this liberalism. So it’s only going to change by education, and you’re only going to do it one on one. What has dropped out completely from of the conversation is that there are people in power, they’re making money, they control armies, and they’re in control of things like Exxon/Mobil. They are gutting the planet for their personal profit. They’ve got names and addresses, as Utah Phillips very famously said. We know where they live, and we can see how their power is organized.

Our job is to take that apart. It’s to take down those institutions in whatever way we can and redistribute the power so that we all have some say in the material conditions of our lives.

What do I want people to do? In really broad strokes I actually think that there’s still a lot of hope because the things that we need to do to solve these problems are actually things that we should be doing anyway if we care about justice. To get justice for people is also the only way we’re going to save this planet. It’s not human race vs. planet. I think it gets set up that way in people’s minds. It’s not. It’s actually quite the opposite.

So, to get down to brass tacks, the number one thing you can do to drop the birth rate is teach a girl to read. That’s a really profound statement. When women have even that much more power over their lives, it means they have a little more control over the uses to which men put our bodies, and that’s sexually, reproductively, economically. The number one thing that drops the birth rate across the globe is teaching a girl to read. And we should care about that because we care about girls.

As it turns out, it’s one of the main things we’re going to have to do to save the planet. Right now somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of all children that are born are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give women control over their bodies and the birth rate drops. That’s happened in 32 countries. We now have negative or zero population growth in 32 countries. This is not the human rights horrors of China or places like that where they’ve instituted these draconian and misogynist laws. This is simply giving women power over their lives. And that’s what happens when women have a little education and a little bit of power, over and over.

The number one thing that we have to do is empower girls, and that means confronting a system of power that’s called patriarchy. We’re all going to have to be feminists. Gosh, what a shame.

The other thing that drops the birth rate is when you increase people’s standard of living. People end up having lots of children when they’re very, very poor. So if you raise the standard of living, the birth rate drops, very quickly in fact. Often in a generation you can see this happen.

The reason that people are poor is not because they’re stupid. It’s because the rich are stealing from them. And that is a global system called capitalism. So we’re going to have to be against capitalism, and we’re going to have to do something about patriarchy. That is the only way that we’re going to save this planet.

Again, it’s not humans vs. planet earth. If you care about human rights, that is the only thing that’s really going to save this situation.

My goal is, over the next two or three generations, we could very easily, by simply caring about women and girls and giving them some rights over their lives, some decision-making power, we could drop the birth rate dramatically and then we could let the planet repair. We could be part of that repair. It’s actually not that hard, because the grasses and the forests want to come back. If we simply get out of the way, they will.

I’ll end with one final bit of information, and that’s really about grasslands. If we were to take 80 percent of the trashed out grasslands around the planet, which have been destroyed by agriculture and return them to the grasslands that they would like to be, within 15 years we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We could stop global warming in its tracks.

Grasslands of the Flint Hills in Kansas. ©Jim Richardson

Because it’s not us doing it. It’s the plants that are doing it. It’s those incredible grasses that would do it for us. Because life wants to live. And they will do that. The one thing they are really good at is building soil. That’s what prairies do. The basic component of soil is carbon, so they’ll suck it out of the air and they’ll store it once more in the ground, and that could be the end of global warming.

But we’ve got to stop being these monsters and destroyers. A lot of times people make this argument that this is human nature. My response is that it’s not. We were on this planet for over two million years and we didn’t destroy anything. In fact, you can look at the first art that we ever made, and to me it’s a celebration. You have the mega-fauna and the mega-females. Those were our first art projects, these giant animals and these giant women. To me that says that in our bodies, in our brains, in our bones, we have that awe and that thanksgiving, that we were trying to say thank you for our lives and for our homes, and so that was what we celebrated.

I don’t think it’s that far from us still. I think we could repair this planet and remember how to participate rather than dominate.