The Original Sin of Agriculture: Prehistory

The Story of B opened my eyes to a linguistic problem that reveals some truth about the way we read and perceive history. We tell the story of history beginning with the rise of agriculture. Everything before the rise of agriculture is referred to as “prehistory.” That can be taken to mean simply that this was a time before history was recorded or written down. In another more subtle way it belies the way we think about the kind of life and people that existed before agriculture. In a sense this was non-history, non-life and they are therefore non-people.

This was certainly part of what allowed colonizers and religious imperialists to conquer in the name of civilization. Savages and barbarians were not real people. Their ways of life, thinking and relating could not possibly be anything more than animalistic instincts and perhaps demonic deception. They were primitive people who had not yet been blessed by the advances of civilization, progress and technology. There was nothing to learn from these people and everything to teach them.

I don’t mean to romanticize tribal civilizations by any means. There are harsh realities that come with another vision for the way the world works. But this is exactly what they offer in response to the failures of our technocratic society, another vision of the world.

In this other vision of the world, human beings are subject to the same rules and limitations as the rest of creation. The way we order our lives is based on living in harmony with the natural rhythms of the world. This includes the natural process of life and death. We are not as much in control of nature as we are subject to it. As mentioned in the previous post, this means there are tradeoffs concerning the population that the planet can sustain and how we move away from our current destructive practices. What this other vision offers is a refocusing and reorientation of the way we think about the problems we face, their sources and causes.

I don’t know that hunter-gatherer societies offer a viable solution for the near future. What they do offer is an alternative vision and a challenge to the modern myth of progress that has brought us to the brink of disaster. Perhaps they can help us find a path forward, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

This is the continuation of a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

The Original Sin of Agriculture: Population Control Revisited

In the initial series I summarized the argument in Ishmael by saying

The expansion of agriculture to feed the population serves to enlarge the population necessitating the continued expansion of agriculture to feed an ever-growing population. The result of the ongoing “progression” and evolution of agriculture has not actually resulted in fewer people going hungry.

The Story of B goes further in exploring some of the implications of this idea. He uses the analogy of mice in a cage. If you feed the mice a certain amount of food they will reproduce and grow in population size as long as the amount of food is able to sustain the number of mice. If you then increase the amount of food the population will continue to increase. If you stop increasing the food the population will level off and remain basically static. If you incrementally decrease the ration of food the population will decrease. When that idea is translated to human beings it sounds very unnerving, callous and disturbing.

The productivists argue that agricultural production has continued to increase and keep pace with world population. There is no real conversation about the relationship or correlation between production and population. We know that the world hunger problem is not a production problem, but a distribution problem. The world now produces enough food for every human being on the planet to have 3,500 calories per day, which is more than the recommended amount. So, why do we continue to push for higher production and greater yield to solve the population problem? Are we in fact fueling the population crisis by continually increasing our production?

Some will question how this can be true when population growth is correlated to other factors like income or education. The character B’s response in the book is over and over again to ask what people are made of if they are not made of food. If the population continues to increase, then the larger population must sustain itself somehow and the only way that is possible is by eating something. That certainly doesn’t mean the larger population is eating well, but they are eating enough to survive.

Whether production increases or decreases, distribution is the real problem. Either way inequality will continue as long as food is not distributed equitably. The underlying question concerning population growth is whether we can actually deal with the problem if we are continuing to fuel it by producing more and more food. When I mention the possibility of decreasing production as a way of dealing with the population problem, it sounds like I’m recommending starving the marginal brown people of the world. As the system currently stands that would certainly be the case if we simply decreased production overall. A decrease in production would have to go hand in hand with an overhaul of how our food system functions. This is a long term problem that requires long term thinking and solutions.

The planet we live on has a limit to the amount of life it can sustain. Like an elevator or bridge that is only built to handle a certain weight, the earth has certain limits built into the ecosystems. We can push those boundaries with technology and science, but eventually they will break. For many in the world they have already broken, and they suffer the consequences of our over extension of the planet’s resources.

We don’t like to think that we are responsible or in control of other people dying. The truth is we already are responsible for that. Our (American) culture has an uneasy and unnatural relationship with death. Death is a natural part of life. Decreasing food production (in concert with reorganizing our food system) may in fact be the most ethical and just choice given the trajectory of human society. This would, of course, be a long gradual process in which the reduction of food production and slowing of population growth would happen naturally over many decades, if not centuries.

Please share your thoughts and objections. I know this probably sounds scary and crazy to some, but a lot of it makes sense to me. I would appreciate thinking it through more thoroughly with your help.

This is the continuation of a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The Story of B

I just finished The Story of B the sequel to Ishmael, which inspired The Original Sin of Agriculture series. The second book has more of a plot, but less in the way of new ideas. What it does is spin out the ideas in Ishmael. The further exploration is certainly worth the read. I’m still processing it.

Initially, I didn’t want to start another series on the ideas and implications of this book. However, it has stuck in my mental craw. It is haunting me wherever I go and posing questions to other ideas I hear (See Religion, Violence and Agriculture?). So, it appears that an old school Holy Ghost revival of the Original Sin of Agriculture series is imminent.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but here’s a sneak preview of what I’d like to think more about:

The Story of B covers more in depth the ideas that were most controversial last time around concerning population control and the relationship between increasing production and increasing population. The deeper explanation was helpfully thinking through the implications, objections and possible solutions to the relationship between production and population.

While Ishmael pointed out a lot of our modern assumptions, The Story of B sometimes sought to go behind those assumptions and ask what people were like before agriculture, their religion and their relationship to the earth and each other. If everything before the rise of agriculture is “prehistory,” then it is a vast unknown territory where people that we can barely understand live. Trying to understand them may help us overcome ourselves.

Finally, I’m fascinated with the sequel’s take on religion, because I both agree and disagree with it. I think the author vastly oversimplifies things and ends up dismissing the world religions entirely. At the same time I agree wholeheartedly with the critique of my own religion, Christianity. I just think that Christianity holds the possibility of embracing the truth that Quinn reveals in his book.

So… here we go again…

Food in the Bible: Exodus 23:10-13

Exodus 23:10-13 For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; ¹¹but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.

12 For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. ¹³Be attentive to all that I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips.

This is the commandment for the Sabbatical Year. It is followed by a list of the annual festivals to be observed and then a promise that if the Israelites followed the commandments that YHWH would conquer Canaan for them, the Promised Land. It’s important to recognize that this covenant is conditional, “But if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes” (Ex 23:22). So the giving of the land to the Israelites is contingent on them following particular agricultural practices.

I don’t know what the agricultural practices of their neighbors in the Ancient Near East were (Philistines, Egyptians, Assyrians or Babylonians). It would be interesting to study that and compare it to the biblical commands. We do know that the recommendation to let fields lie fallow for one year out of seven is better for the land than the intensive production schedules of industrial agriculture today.

As I mentioned in my sermon, the Sabbath commands often combine the ecological and the economic. Let the land lie fallow (good agricultural practice) so that the poor will be taken care of (just economic practice). We have done everything we can to create a division between the economic and the ecological. No matter how hard we try, it appears that this is impossible. Since economics is the way that we order our lives together, it follows that it must involve the ecological. Our lives cannot be ordered together without affecting and connecting to the earth. If we choose to order our lives in such a way that we ignore the ecological, it follows that there will be consequences in both the economic and ecological realm. And that seems to be the case today.

I included the last verse of this passage on purpose, because this is another area that we tried to make into a separate sphere of life. The last verse connects the ecological and economic to idolatry. Augustine talked about the right ordering of love. The problem was not that material things were evil. The problem was that we put them in the place of God. All love properly ordered finds its ultimate place in love for God. Idolatry is not about choosing the wrong religion or worshipping too many gods (though that might be part of it). Ultimately idolatry is about misplacing our allegiances and putting things out of order.

So this command, which tells the Israelites how they need to rightly order their agricultural practices and their social relationships, puts both things under the umbrella of rightly ordering their allegiances. I often hear people say that you should, “Put God first.” This notion puts God somehow in a category that is abstracted and detached from the reality of the world we live in. Here we see that putting God first clearly involves ecological and economic action and right relationships. God does not simply appear at the top of our checklist. Our allegiance to God orders the way we eat, the way we shop, the way we talk, the way we answer the phone, the way we do our job, the way we live our lives and the way treat others.

Farm and Food Session 7

This session was a panel on Climate Change and Agriculture. The panel included:

Malcom Beck, author and founder of Garden-ville
Leighton Steward, author of Fire, Ice and Paradise
Andy Wilson from Public Citizen

Another good session on a very controversial topic. Malcom Beck, the king of compost, may be my new hero. I’m becoming somewhat obsessed with compost, as you can tell. He pointed out that carbon is one of the important things that plants need. The difference between organic fertilizers and conventional is the higher carbon content in organic fertilizers. Leighton Steward in his presentation said that CO2 is not a pollutant. I agree that it is important to recognize the role that CO2 naturally plays in the ecosystem. The goal certainly should not be to get rid of CO2. The question is the role of CO2 in the ecosystem, how much is acceptable in the atmosphere and where this CO2 might be coming from.

Leighton Steward had an excellent presentation with lots of colorful graphs and statistics. His basic thesis is one you may have heard before, that CO2 is a lagging indicator. CO2 levels rise only after temperatures rise and sometimes hundreds of years later. The indicator that he says does track with the changes in temperature is solar radiation.

Andy Wilson from Public Citizen did respond that there was significant debate in the scientific community on this issue. He also pointed out that the majority of climatologists working on climate change that were published have reached consensus about human activity as a cause of climate change. The majority of his time was spent on impending legislation and changes regulating CO2 emissions and the impact of things like cap and trade on both agribusiness and small sustainable farmers.

Here are some of my overall thoughts on a very complicated topic.

I’ll be honest, I generally stay out of the debate on climate change because I don’t base what I believe we should be doing on whether or not climate change is anthropogenic (caused by human activity). I know that there is another side to the debate that would have rebuttals for Leighton Steward’s claims. It’s a good debate when it is based more on science. Unfortunately it seems too often to devolve into politics on both sides. One side says the IPCC scientists are not real scientists, but politically motivated and manipulated. The other side makes the same claim about some of the scientists who discount human activity as a cause of climate change. If it’s possible to keep the debate scientific it’s a good conversation. At this point it seems impossible to keep politics out of the conversation.

I also feel manipulated anytime someone throws too many statistics, charts and graphs at me. Data is never objective. First of all the collection of the data always happens by human beings who use a process to decided what’s important and what’s not. That is the way it has to be, but is important to recognize that it is the case. After the data is gathered selectively it has to also be interpreted. What does this collection of numbers mean? Time and again you see different people look at the same set of data and make wildly different conclusions depending on their assumptions or interpretation of what the data says. So, someone’s charts, graphs and stats sometimes tells me more about their assumptions than any objective facts.

I do agree that CO2 is not a pollutant. However, doesn’t it matter what kind of CO2 or where it comes from? Isn’t there a difference between the CO2 that mammals exhale and the CO2 coming from factories, cars, etc.? I would be interested to hear more about comparing CO2 from different sources and used in different ways. My hunch is that the concentration of CO2 in factory farms, factories and urban centers would be different than the CO2 occurring naturally in the ecosystem.

At one point Mr. Wilson said that the goal was for sustainable agriculture to compete with industrial agriculture and that cap and trade (if done right) has the potential to do that. Is that the goal of sustainable agriculture? What would we sacrifice to “compete” with Big Ag? It seems counterproductive to me for that to be the goal. Part of the reason we have industrial agriculture is because the Secretary of Agriculture in the 70s said “Get big or get out!” What happens if we say the same to small-scale sustainable farms?

One of my favorite statistics was that Texas is #7 in the world in greenhouse gas emissions… in the WORLD! That’s just crazy!

Thoughts?