AGRICULTURE AND GLOBALIZATION: ECOLOGY AND THE BRINK OF EXISTENTIAL CRISIS Part 2

Ironically, the era of environmental awareness that began in the 1970’s ushered in the beginning of the greatest environmental breakdown. With the increase of production and in turn consumption, greater measures were taken to ensure that supply was keeping up with the growing demand. However, most of these measures were either not satisfactorily thought through or were treated with blatant negligence and like a moth eating away at the fibers of a cashmere sweater, the initial small unnoticeable holes have grown large enough where entire sections are starting to unravel. “The current stage of history can be characterized as structured by forces that systematically degrade and finally exceed the buffering capacity of nature with respect to human production, thereby setting into motion an unpredictable yet interacting and expanding set of ecosystem breakdowns.”(13)

The very earth itself is crying out to us and only now have we taken our earplugs out to hear it. Land degradation, due mainly to soil erosion, mineral depletion and urbanization is becoming a serious problem worldwide. The full extent of the problem is masked by the very methods that are inherently destroying it and the continued fattening of the land with artificial (fossil fuel based, I might add) fertilizers is setting farmland after farmland up for a total collapse of soil viability. “Since 1945, the total land degraded by soil depletion, desertification, and the destruction of tropical rainforests comes to more than 5 billion hectares, or greater than 43 percent of the Earth’s vegetated surface.” It takes 500 years for nature to replace 1 inch of topsoil and in the United States alone, the erosion of these vulnerable fields in areas such as the Great Plains is 30 times faster than the natural formation rate. China, for example, is losing topsoil at a rate of 40 tons per hectare per year, clearly an unsustainable decline for the amount of production that is required.(14)

In keeping with the trend of force-growing crops in less than desirable “natural” growing locations by pumping the soil full of false nutrients, the other element of the equation is the water that is required to nourish them. Modern agriculture consumes 85 percent of all of our freshwater resources. Irrigating fields, not to mention fields of corn in arid Arizona, takes an extraordinary amount of energy to fuel and is a huge contributor to the general degradation of our water supply through salinization and waterlogging. Agricultural runoff from giant growing fields happily transports all of the fertilizers and pesticides into the nearest waterway, be it a nearby stream, pond, or underwater aquifer. This increase in chemicals and dense nutrients encourages the growth of algae and mutations, culminating in dead zones that leave an eerie relic of the thriving ecosystem that was once present. The US EPA has found 98 different pesticides, including the infamous DDT, in groundwater in 40 states, which translates to contaminating the drinking water of over 10 million residents. Also, the increase in urban water use, especially in desert neighborhoods that insist on a lush green lawn is just as much a contributing factor as a sign of how far ecological awareness has yet to go.(15)

Other factors such as “Food Miles,” the distance that food travels from its source to its destination, must also be taken into consideration. Between 1968 and 1998, world food production increased 84 percent, the world population increased 91 percent, but the global food trade increased a whopping 184 percent. There is food criss-crossing all over the world, getting routed through hubs of distribution that generally only add to the miles it has to travel to get to its final destination. For example, pears and apples grown in Washington state have to travel through Los Angeles to go to Toronto, Canada. The carrots grown in California travel less miles than the produce right next to the border. Besides being slightly ridiculous, this entire system illustrates the careless consumption of fossil fuels, straining their supply and adding unnecessary pollutants into our planet. It undermines the capability to grow local food and to feed the local population by making everyone dependent on imported goods. This is not only a question of food security, but a concern of nation security. Imagine what would happen if the food deliveries from overseas stopped coming?(16)

The main mover behind all of this is the use of fossil fuel, but it’s not the fault of the resource, but the power that controls it: the voracious capitalist structure that shelters the very likes of Exploitation and Unsustainability under its wings. The very unbounded nature of the system allows anyone to exploit resources, human and natural, unchecked for the purpose of capital gain without being hindered by a built in moral or ethical code of conduct or consideration. As Kovel puts it plainly, “this damned capitalist system is wrecking nature,” and it is agriculture and the industry that surrounds it that seems to be the central cog in the operation.

The expansion of global farming has effectively revisited the situation when privatization displaced feudalism, creating a landless class of workers ripe for hours of labor in newly created factory settings. This trend is occurring again with the rise of giant farms and rising prices for everything from seeds to transport, rendering many farmers incapable of funding their livelihood, thus becoming landless wanderers, migrating to the newly formed megalopolises growing throughout the world. As some archetypal symbol of the tremendous disparities inherent in globalization, these mega-cities house the extremes of decadence and intolerable poverty, a hot bed of tensions and bizarre bedfellows. (17) The shanty towns that have built up within these super-cities are not only unsustainable, but they harbor the enormous potential for experiencing a megadisaster, seeing as how 40 our of 50 of such metropolises are near earthquake zones. (18) The continued addition of city dwellers to this swelling urban environment fundamentally puts additional strain on the environment, influencing rain fall, carbon process, pollutants in general with such a huge congregation of people and countless fossil fuel burning entities.(19) Global agriculture has been used as the incentive to incorporate countries into the fold of capitalism’s ideological mechanics, but, once in the system, they fall into the Monopoly game of bankruptcy and “get out of jail free,” perpetually at the mercy of the bankers and those that live on Park Place. The disproportionately poor in juxtaposition to the wealthy is case enough that the global agricultural regime is not working as once self-sustaining rural folk are going hungry.

Yet, despite the idea that the more people there are, the more farm land is needed to feed them, it doesn’t appear that over population is a valid reason for the current food crisis.(20) The Malthusian argument that the poor just keep on breeding doesn’t hold water when you look at the current food output in relation to the world population. Everyone in the world could have a daily intake of 2,720 kilocalories (1 kilocalorie = 1000 calories) if food was distributed evenly.(21) Clearly, it is not people’s reproductive habits that are the problem, but contradictions and motives of capitalist development that chooses who gets access to the food in the first place.(22) Ending world hunger isn’t the pipe dream of the Green Revolution, which caused far more damage than good, it is the essential reevaluation of policy, counter-acting the imbedded ideologies with social and agrarian reforms, finding what it truly means to be democratic with the basic understanding that everyone on this planet deserves a subsistence diet and should have the means to acquire it. (23)

We are in a state of decay. The fibers of our world are becoming more and more unraveled as each year passes to the next. We are living in the Oil Age, a resource that has not only created the way we live, but has embedded itself into our psyche as a right or standard living that it can provide. Yet we are now faced with this seemingly endless facet of our lives running out. M. King Hubbert was once ridiculed for his bell curve predictions of peak oil, the rise and fall of the supply buried hidden underground. In this day and age, it doesn’t seem so far from incorrect as it once did. Natural gas deposits are also running low and whether we like it or not, these issues will have to be dealt with. (24)

Yet with seemingly so much against us, with so much already gone wrong, how do we cope? How does humanity regain a path once it went so horribly astray? It is our thinking that we must change first, before we set about making more policies and more reforms. We must integrate ourselves into the ecosystem we intrinsically belong to. We must look at society as its own ecosystem, functioning as a part of the greater whole and it is all of the interacting societies of the world that interrelate to form a grander Ecosphere, which in turn functions as a part of the overarching Biosphere of our planet Earth.(25) It is a change in the way we think of ourselves in relation to our world that must change first and foremost if true change is going to occur.
Humankind’s cultivation of the natural world has evolved from a deep interconnection based on the necessity to survive to an anxiety driven pathological separation mythology. It seems as though the joke is on us as we strive for a more global and integrated world and our main ideology for accomplishing this does nothing more than create larger and larger enclosures that keep everyone apart. As the veil is lifted onto globalization’s debacle, it is becoming apparent not only that things must change, but that society must take responsibility for the wrongs already committed preferably before the megalopolis archetypal python bursts at the seems from over-feeding. There is something essential in the relationship between the land, cultivation of this land, and humanity, a simple profundity that should require no words to express it. As a co-creating member of this planet, the human species is now faced with the responsibility of not destroying it, of reigning in our insatiable appetites for accumulation and finding a way to turn our current destructive ecological regime into something beneficial to not only society, but for the life-giving earth itself.

References
1. Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, (Shambhala Publications, Inc; Boston, Massachusetts; 2000). 12.
2. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? (Zed Books; London; 2007). 14-15.
3. Jason Moore, “Ecological Crises and the Agrarian Question in World-Historical Perspective,” Monthly Review, November, 2008. 54.
4. David McNally, Another World Is Possible, (Arbeiter Ring Publishing; Manitoba, Canada; 2006). 91.
5. Midnight Notes, “Introduction to the New Enclosures,” (Midnight Notes; issue 10; 1990). 1. http://www.midnightnotes.org/pdfnewenc1.pdf
6. David McNally, Another World Is Possible, (Arbeiter Ring Publishing; Manitoba, Canada; 2006). 91-92.
7. Jason Moore, “Ecological Crises and the Agrarian Question in World-Historical Perspective,” Monthly Review, November, 2008. 59.
8. Jason Moore, Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, (Distinguished Lecture Series on Political Economy, Modernity, and Ecological Crisis at Cornell University; and as keynote address to the conference, Crisis & Capital, Lund University, July 2009). 1
9. idib. 3.
10. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? (Zed Books; London; 2007). 16.
11. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, (New Society Publishers; Canada; 2006). 7-9.
12. ibid. 9.
13. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? (Zed Books; London; 2007). 3, 23.
14. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, (New Society Publishers; Canada; 2006). 11-13.
15. ibid. 15-18.
16. ibid. 24-25.
17. David McNally, Another World Is Possible, (Arbeiter Ring Publishing; Manitoba, Canada; 2006). 99.
18. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? (Zed Books; London; 2007). 13.
19. B.L. Lampey, E.J. Barron, D. Pollard, Global and Planetary Change, (Volume 49; Issue 3; December 2005). 203-221.
20. . Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? (Zed Books; London; 2007). 40.
21. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, (New Society Publishers; Canada; 2006). 10.
22. Eric B. Ross, The Malthus Factor, (July, 2000). 1-2.
23. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, (New Society Publishers; Canada; 2006). 10.
24. ibid. 29-38.
25. . Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world? (Zed Books; London; 2007). 22-23.