AGRICULTURE AND GLOBALIZATION: ECOLOGY AND THE BRINK OF EXISTENTIAL CRISIS part 1

Our present ecological crisis is due primarily to a fractured worldview, a worldview that drastically separates mind and body, subject and object, culture and nature, thoughts and things, values and facts, spirit and matter, human and nonhuman; a worldview that is dualistic, mechanistic, atomistic, anthropocentric, and pathologically hierarchical – a worldview that, in short, erroneously separates humans from, and often unnecessarily elevates humans above, the rest of the fabric of reality, a broken worldview that alienates men and women from the intricate web of patterns and relationships that constitute the very nature of life and Earth and cosmos.
Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995)(1)

Humankind has forever been inextricably linked with the Earth we cohabitate with the innumerable species of flora and fauna that walk along besides us on this stretch of the evolutionary path. Whether or not distinct societies of humankind have felt this inextricable link is a whole other matter. The human species has always been both afraid and in awe of Nature, looking at the many seeming incomprehensible mysteries our world can produce as a constant reminder of mankind’s frailty. Two main ideologies had taken root over time in the psyche: one where people can coexist with these mysteries and inherently accept their role as a key player within them, and the second, where man must dominate, tame and then demystify at all cost what they don’t understand. It is somewhat of an unfortunate matter that the powers that be in Western culture have predominantly subscribed to the latter ideology and despite the complex frameworks that have been constructed around it over the centuries, much of society’s actions today still carry those motivations deep at their core.

Yet, society and nature are not independent entities circling around each other like planets in the solar system, but are a part of an interconnected whole. The ever more apparent crisis that we are currently participating in is therefore not an “environmental” crisis outside of ourselves, but instead the “evolution, accelerating with sickening velocity, of an ancient lesion in humanity’s relation to nature.” Once we begin to see this relation, we must inevitably view the larger picture, the relation wholeness of the system. Thinking this way is more of an ecological understanding, a view of the societal, cultural, and planetary ecosystems that interplay and influence each other. Therefore, we do not in fact have an environmental crisis, but an “ecological crisis, in the course of which our bodies, our selves, and the whole of external nature are undergoing severe perturbations.” (2)

The harbinger of our particular predicament is the colonial wolf under the sheepskin of globalization, the continuing capitalist propaganda machine that has infiltrated every aspect of our reality. Intrinsically at the center of this rotating wheel of fortune is agriculture, which, by its very essence, inevitably shares an inextricable history with mankind’s relationship to the natural world around us. Historically, under the guise of “necessity,” colonial conquest and subsequent trade structures relied on agricultural expansion while currently it is decisively the battleground for neoliberal globalization.(3) I will take it one step further and say that it is in fact the singular most important element in our ecological crisis as it is the bond that holds together the many symptomatic and dizzying interrelated factors that characterize our current global condition.

Agriculture, the culture of cultivating resources, the relationship between mankind and the act of production through manipulations of available raw materials, has not always been the way humanity has functioned. There was a tremendous moment somewhere 10,000 years ago where the Gods, or creative human ingenuity, helped humankind realize that seeds could be cultivated and planted in a more organized fashion than what was growing in abundance naturally. From that time on, various cultures and societies have based their agricultural mythologies much in the same categories as their relationship to the Earth and to Nature itself mentioned above and have founded methods of farming rooted in those belief systems.

Regardless, however of the basic ideological fundamentals at the root of the practice, early farming required an intrinsic understanding and relationship with the forces of the environmental elements that pervaded the local geographical climate. Whether a farmer was in Peru, Africa, or England, each had specific climate, soil, and geographical knowledge that had to be learned in order to successfully coax the crop to yield in bounty. One could argue there was a certain level of agro-shamanism at play with the keen affinity that the farmer had with their surroundings, no matter what religion was actually practiced. For the farmer, the land, the relationship to the land and the crop, took on a level of identity in a dualistically practical and mystical interdependence that grew to define an entire class of people around the globe. This essential earth knowledge of the intimate exchange between geographical conditions, climate and growing has been passed on for countless generations and has been the accepted way of doing things for just about as long.

Along with the phenomenon of agriculture came a much different development of culture than had previously been experienced. Without the need to nomadically follow food, roots could be established, relative permanence could become a reality and the beginnings of a society in the modern sense of the term became a glimmer on the historical horizon. This settlement had an untold and profound affect on social structure that would completely shape human social evolution from that point forward.
Agricultural advancement in parts of the globe, namely but not exclusively the Eurasian continent, had a distinct sense of privatization as its right hand man. The co-evolution of social structure, agriculture, commerce, language, and cultural identity developed into specific hierarchical modes of operation and networks that came to define civilization and carried history in every element from culture to politics for thousands of years.

By the time the feudal era had crystallized in Medieval Europe, land ownership was in the hands of the lord who oversaw the peasantry on his grounds. Being an essentially decentralized sociopolitical schematic, the networking relations between the various hierarchies depended on the balance of cooperation and independence. While the peasantry worked the farmlands for the lords and the lords provided nominal protection and services in return, there was a codependence within the system that allowed for this exchange while simultaneously leaving room for the co-creation of common lands that in fact were vital to the survival of the entire structure. There was a sense of openness and commonality to the land even among the ruling class’ fields where fences and other types of enclosures were not employed.(4) An interesting thing to note, is that larger settlements, the “cities” where trade and markets were centralized, had been using fortressing enclosure techniques for hundreds of years. There was a distinct ideological difference in the approach of enclosure of the commercial hub and to the relative open homogeneity of the farms and the wilds.

All this would change as that very concept of enclosure began to be applied to the common lands and in a brief span of a couple hundred years, roughly between 1600 and 1800, the previous social order had given way to privatized ownership, completely changing not only the literal now fenced-in landscape, but planting the seeds for the utilization of relationships between agriculture and emerging modernity. Expropriated from their lands, farmers either turned into wageworkers or paupers, becoming the landless workforce that would manually power the Industrial Revolution. According to the Marxist tradition, it is exactly this process of Enclosures that ushered in the capitalist society, the forced accumulation and subsequent exploitation of labor and resources.(5) More than ever, the accumulation of capital was seen as harvesting Nature, not so simply as agricultural output which fed the community, but more heavily focusing on natural resources, the land itself as resource, and larger scale farming both for export profits as well as food fuel for the newly created landless working class. The ideals of capitalism were firmly taking root in a society eager to increase and accumulate, grow and conquer, fulfill a perceived manifest destiny to the fullest extent of the phrase.(6)

Agriculture had moved from being a central focus in communal activity, a space which it had happily occupied in countless forms for thousands of years, to becoming a centrally essential cog in a much larger and growing machine, subject now to the same expansion and exploitation, over production and exhaustion as the very laborers that worked the fields and the Earth itself that kept offering up its lands. It became the intrinsic tool for unchecked continual growth, fueling global trade with the likes of sugar cane and cotton, increasing production and output with more farms created throughout the newly acquired lands. It also increased the food supply to the growing numbers of factory workers in the home nations, the landless peasants that were displaced from their own farms, and become a central tool for both privatization and continued enclosures. Like a giant ouroboros devouring its tail, the cyclical relationship between imperialist colonialism, displacement and migration, conquest, urban growth, industrial growth, commerce and trade politics shaped the working ideology of capitalism and applied a practical ruthlessness in its self-justified means to an end.

Essentially, the Industrial Revolutions could not have occurred without the agricultural boom happening along side of it, literally fueling the mechanics of the ever more global operation. At its center, capitalism is an “ecological regime,” accumulating and influencing as it dualistically creates great abundance while destroying so much in its wake.(7) Agriculture and resource farming in this sense harkens back to the initial category mentioned earlier of fearing the natural and the wish to tame and exploit its potentials thereby creating an “other,” a separate entity that can be dealt with.
This mental construct creates another enclosure, this time a deep-rooted symbolic one that barricades in our sense of self internally and keeps the external safely at the gates. The notion of creating an “other” builds an alienation, a perceived fundamental separation, between subject and object, which allows a mental hierarchy to formulate the basic ground for countless justifications of that “other’s” exploitation. Yet, “we have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out,” Raymond Williams argued.(8) The very notion that “we” are the ones to leave a footprint on the earth continues this inherent separation philosophy.

What “we” need to understand is that both humankind and the earth are part of a greater whole and the forces we act upon Nature. Capitalism’s insatiable hunger for accumulation and resources, along with the forces Nature acts upon us, namely larger and larger climate related catastrophes are all interwoven in an intricate system we are just barely beginning to comprehend. We are a part of the biosphere, an active participant in the ecology of the planet through not only our actions, but our very being and existence in relation to the vast nature/society mosaic.(9) Society can no longer believe that mankind is fulfilling a manifest destiny of unending bounty where there is no consequence or relative reciprocation. Capitalism’s monster of Frankenstein is globalization, and with it there has immerged a complex global society as piecemeal and hacked together as the aforementioned product of good intentions gone bad. “Humanity has made this crisis happen out of its folly, and our survival is at stake in its resolution, along with that of countless innocent creatures.”(10) The odds we are up against, however, is a multi-dimensional problem with undercurrents everywhere we turn, reaching far into social construction, environmental depravity and existential awareness of the true nature of the beast before us.

Under the altruistic guise of elevating the poor of the world and helping to bring “third world” countries into the modern marketplace, global capitalistic endeavors were given carte blanche to essentially do what they pleased without really answering to anyone. It seems somewhat unclear if anyone really knew what they were really doing at all. The American government along with other international powers kindly cleared the way with several legislations to allocate more power to what became multi-national mega-corporations, pan-global giants that have resumed the role of agri-colonialists, recreating many of history’s foibles in larger and larger playing fields.

Hailed as the “Green Revolution” at the dawn of the 1950’s, the agricultural sector was industrialized, overhauling methods and technologies deemed obsolete to make room for better, faster, and stronger mechanizations and more resilient food crops. This resulted in a tremendous increase in the amount of food available to people worldwide, transforming everything from how the food was produced to the very food itself that was consumed. The energy that made all of this bounty possible was fossil fuels: fuels used in powering the new machines; fuels used in producing fertilizers and pesticides; hydrocarbon fueled irrigation systems and fuel that powered the transportation methods that carried the forced abundance all over the globe. Touted in the 50’s and 60’s as the solution to world hunger, the utopian vision of the plentiful cornucopia was not to be the case.(11)

In this way and in a very real sense, we have not only been fed by fossil fuels, we are also eating them, incorporating them into our diet just as we’ve accepted them into our lives. In the middle of the last century, fossil fuels seemed to be the solution for everything, used not only as fuel itself, but manufactured into almost everything thinkable that could be made from them. Definitely an example yet again of human ingenuity, mankind had found a Pandora’s box and unabashedly flung it open. Yet despite the diversity and accelerated consumption this created, there is inevitably a loss between the input and output of energy. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased fourfold, while the crop yield output only increased threefold. It is around then it became apparent that indeed there was real trouble brewing, trouble that could not be ignored for another 20 years in hopes it would go away: the cornucopia was visibly becoming scarce; Mother Nature’s resource bank was going bankrupt. (12)