on totalitarian agriculture

"When I said that people should pay for air," my brother once remarked, "you shot me down before I could explain what I meant."

So yes, I've been talking to my brother a great deal over the last six months or so about environmental sustainability. And when we first started this ongoing discussion, I'm fairly certain I ran for the moral high ground and closed my ears at the first sign of 'pay for air'. But the more we get to talking, the more I realise we're not entirely holding opposite manifestos.

"You seem to think," he wrote once, "that there's some kind of fundamental right of an organism, particularly a human, to food, air and water, even shelter I guess. Someone or something has to PROVIDE these things though! I mean, for all of our history we've taken natural resources for granted (think of the tragedy of the commons) and now we're beginning to destroy them."

At the time, my lefty pinko bleeding heart side came out all incensed, but...if there's anything I've learnt from sharing my thoughts with my brother, it's that he might seem at the beginning of any new idea to have a completely outrageous take on things, but if you stay that course and listen, you can be pleasantly surprised by what actually rests at the heart of his words.

"All I am saying," my brother asked, "is that it takes energy and resources to create oxygen and to fix atmospheric carbon into macromolecules, and that someone has to pick up the bill for that energy and those resources.The reason why we've let the atmosphere become so polluted is because no one owns it. I don't consider the tragedy of the commons to be an argument for population control, as you'd been saying, even though it's probably a very good one. I consider it an argument for the privatisation of public resources. Think about it...if you owned the air, you wouldn't let people pollute it, unless those people pay you however much it costs to remove that pollution.The cost of carbon fixing and oxygen releasing should be worked into the cost of everything we consume, including, yes, our children, whom are essentially consumer goods. If making x object releases y amount of greenhouse gases, x object should cost the original price + however much it costs to turn y gases back into macromolecules. That's what I was trying to say."

And you know, I actually do see what he was saying. On the surface, you could think it's excessively laissez faire. But really, we're essentially arguing for the same issue, with different approaches. And maybe, he really has a good point. In our post-industrial societies, a sense of ownership (and therefore user-pays) is the only thing which might appeal to our culture and allay environmental damage. We are certainly, as he points out, taking and not picking up the bill. And in our culture, that means we don't have a proper sense of ownership over the commons (or if we do, it has for too long been a one-sided and thieving sense of ownership that is unsustainable and ethically abhorrent). Environmental damage is pretty much the equivalent of shitting on our investment; thinking only of short-term gains and never fully paying back the overheads. It's a fraudulent, Ponzi scheme way of engaging with the ecologies that keep us -- and everything else -- alive. And remaining alive within ecologies means behaving in accordance with the contract of life, including all its checks and balances.

There's one problem with my brother's idea though, and it comes from that pesky dust of Enlightenment thinking that still hangs over this Occidental world: Assuming the 'specialness' of humanity. Big assumption, which dies hard. Real hard.

Using this notion of ownership still assumes that humans are at the apex of life on earth, that the earth is here to carry us mostly (everything else is either our food, a threat, or a nice attraction -- there is no diversity of interdependence written into that kind of thinking). There remains the assumption that humans 'own' everything here, that the world is for us and belongs to us, rather than that we, like everything else, belong to the world.

A single species controlling a planet-wide ecology is evolutionarily unstable. Life does not flourish through monocultures; it flourishes through interdependence, limited competition, variation and diversity.Our history since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago has, to paraphrase author Daniel Quinn, been to convert the biological carrying capacity of much of the earth into human carrying capacity (violently converting vast tracts of biodiverse, intricately interdependent land into narrow systems consisting of our food, the food of our food, our waste, and what parasites we allow or cannot entirely eradicate -- by doing this, we have waged war on biodiversity and on the diversity of human cultures, effectively breaking the contract of life. Biodiversity is needed for any ecosystem on earth to remain sustainable. Species which do not follow this; which do not engage in competition with limits (as opposed to our aggressive competition 'at all costs'), will eventually endanger themselves and the ecosystems in which they operate).

It is in our interest as a species (not to mention the interests of life on earth, generally) that we change our approach to competition and work towards sustainability (even if that means paying a certain price for that in the medium term i.e. populations and lifestyles WILL change, and not many people will be happy with this, but it's called being responsible and accountable). Limited competition in nature means, as Daniel Quinn argues in his book 'Ishmael': Species "may compete to [their] best ability, but [they] may not go beyond that;  [they] may not reduce the natural ability of [their] competitors to compete. The outcome of the law is enhancement of diversity." This means, effectively, that species:

* May not eradicate competitive species
* May not destroy their food sources
* May not prevent them access to food sources (to the point of
eradication)

In other words, we can compete as best we can (as evolution and adaptation have equipped us) but we cannot wage outright war or the equivalent of genocide on competitive species. That means we must regulate our ways of interacting with the world by placing limits on the extent to which we convert the world to human carrying capacity (and we have achieved this relentless process of conversion and environmental depletion primarily through mass agriculture). Always, as you say, every species should pay the price for what it uses (with humans being no exception). But also, every species benefits from engaging with the basic contract of life; every species benefits from maintaining biodiversity.

* * *

Daniel Quinn's work has been figuring a lot in my thinking about the world lately, as has this outstanding article by Richard Manning. I often get to wondering why I should bother (for instance, with my PhD thesis on youth homelessness) thinking of ways of 'working through' and ameliorating social and environmental issues (through my firm grounding in notions of social justice and the like), when nothing anyone could ever suggest within 'our culture' -- no matter how seemingly progressive -- would do much at all to address the root causes of these issues: namely, 'totalitarian agriculture'. Without acknowledging that we are living in a 'Taker' culture, and that this culture is an unsustainable one, at odds with biodiversity and the diversity of human cultures, I don't believe we can ever really begin to address the whole raft of social, political and environmental problems we are faced with. Anything else is like placing a band-aid on a fatal wound.

For a while, it seemed to me outrageously reductionist to think that issues as diverse and widespread as imperialism, environmental degradation, mass extinctions, pollution, Indigenous dispossession, Marxist concepts of alienation and working class oppression, assimilationist policies, genocide, poverty, and famine might be traced back to... just one common denominator: catastrophic agricultural practices (and the culture which has arisen around them). I mean, isn't this just as bad as Marx theorising his structuralist meta-narrative (that everything is about work and who owns capital?). But I have to admit, in weighing the theory, history, anthropological perspectives, archaelogical evidence and ecological science supporting this notion, I've begun to be somewhat convinced. Don't get me wrong, I don't necesarily think that puts me in the ranks of radical neo-tribalists. I'm only just getting on to discovering what 'alternatives' there might be to our currently unsustainable path, and how I and those close to me (assuming I could ever fully convince anyone to think beyond the limits of our culture) might live in accordance with the basic tenets of life.

Call me crazy, but there have to be better, more sustainable ways to live. And it's crucial that we find them, in as many diverse, adaptive and locally meaningful ways as we can. I'll leave this thought for the moment in the hands of someone who's already been there:

"Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a *bad* way but rather that they're all living the *same* way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate *all* of us living that way...Though it's a good and necessary start, being less harmful is *not* enough. We're in the midst of a food race that is more deadly to us and to the world around us than the Cold War arms race was. This is a race between food production and population growth. ... [We] fail to see that, just as every American "win" stimulated an answering Soviet "win," every win in food production stimulates an answering "win" in population growth."  - Daniel Quinn, "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" (pp.97, 111)