When
agriculture stops working: A guide to growing food in the age of
climate destabilization and civilization collapse
by
Dan Allen
26
January, 2013
This
is Part 1 of an essay in 2 parts. Part 1, below, outlines the issues.
Part 2, offers
'Ten Recommendations for Growing Food in the Anthropocene
“Well
it's hotter 'n blazes and all the long faces / there'll be no oasis
for a dry local grazier” – Tom Waits
“What
we’re seeing is stark evidence that the gradual temperature
increase is not the important story related to climate change; it’s
the rapid regional changes and increased frequency of extreme weather
that global warming is causing. As the Arctic warms at twice the
global rate, we expect an increased probability of extreme weather
events across the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere,
where billions of people live.” -- Jennifer Francis
“[W]hen
we learn that in the collapse now underway resides the seeds of a
different style of agriculture that does not carry all the historic
baggage that burdens us, we may, with good justification, rejoice.”
– Albert Bates
Summary:
As the toxic trappings of industrial civilization crumble
around us, agriculture is set to regain its place at the forefront of
our daily American lives. …And won’t we be surprised to
find out that it barely works anymore! Worsening climate
destabilization, combined with the legacy of industrial ecosystem
degradation and the loss of crucial pre-industrial agricultural
genetics and knowledge, will severely challenge our ability to feed
ourselves in the decades ahead. So perhaps it’s time we
re-think our modern food-acquisition strategies in the face of the
massive changes bearing down on us. …And I mean REALLY
re-think them.
References
Below
are some key resources to both back up the stuff I’m going to talk
about and help people move ahead with the good work we need to do.
I.
Ten Agricultural Premises
My
main goal in this essay is to outline a suite of agricultural or
food-acquisition strategies that might stand a chance in our
climate-destabilized, civilization-collapsing future – and how we
might go about laying the foundation for those strategies now.
But
before getting into the essay-proper, I think it’s a good idea to
lay out the basic agricultural premises that underlie these
recommendations. For example, if I tell you it’s a really
good idea to hone your hunting and gathering skills (as I will do),
an acceptance of that message will only take if you’re fully aware
of the reasoning that gave birth to such a wild suggestion (pun
intended). So here they are:
Premise
1: The Earth’s climate is destabilizing. Humans are forcing
an unprecedented destabilization of the global climate with fossil
fuel CO2 emissions. We are likely very close to (if not exactly
at, or even past) a positive-feedback tipping point, beyond which
most or all of the planet becomes uninhabitable to humans. Due
to inertia in the climate system, even if CO2 emissions stopped
tomorrow, the worst climatic disruptions are ahead of us and will
continue at least for many centuries.
Premise
2: Our agriculture is adapted to the stable Holocene climate.
Land-based human agriculture, the main source of bodily sustenance
for North Americans, is adapted only to the stable Holocene climate
of the past 10,000 years – the relatively predictable patterns (in
both magnitude and timing) of temperature, rainfall, snowmelt, storm
intensity, and pest densities in any given region.
Unfortunately, this is a climate our species will likely never see
again.
Premise
3: Climate destabilization will severely stress agriculture.
Climatic destabilization will severely stress the viability of human
agriculture via extremes in these traditional climatic patterns –
e.g., extremes in the magnitude and timing of temperature, rainfall,
snowmelt, storm intensity, and pests. Such stresses have indeed
already begun, and will intensify over the coming years, decades, and
centuries as the climate continues to destabilize
.
Premise
4: Collapse of industrial civilization will magnify the climatic
stresses. These already-severe agricultural stresses from a
destabilizing climate will be magnified by industrial depredations
(past, present, and future) and disruptions from the ongoing collapse
of industrial civilization. Specifically, these magnifying
factors include rapid disappearance of the fossil fuel platform for
current agricultural practices, loss of pre-industrial agricultural
technology and genetics, soil loss and degradation, bioaccumulation
of toxins (metals, organics, and nuclear), depletion of fossil
aquifers, as well as war and social strife. Post-industrial
deforestation and mounting ocean acidification will also have
deleterious indirect effects on terrestrial agriculture.
Premise
5: Agriculture will unavoidably shrink in scale and technological
complexity. The combination of climatic destabilization,
past/residual industrial depredations, and collapse of industrial
civilization will unavoidably shrink the scale and technological
complexity of human agriculture. Agriculture will quickly
evolve from (1) today’s doomed, high-tech, huge-scale operations,
to (2) still-fragile, large-scale, mechanized operations, to (3) a
medium-scale, draft-animal-based agriculture, to (4) a small-scale,
‘primitive’ human-labor-based agriculture, to (5) increasing
reliance on managed hunting and gathering, and perhaps finally to (6)
regional extirpation. Different societies will differ in the
rate and ultimate level of agricultural simplification based on
geographical, ecological, and social factors -- but the general
trends will be near-universal and undoubtedly severe.
Premise
6: Ecological complexity in agriculture will necessarily
replace technological complexity. Challenged by (1) the
disappearance of essentially all industrial agricultural technology,
(2) the loss of much pre-industrial agricultural technology to
cultural erosion, (3) severely degraded agricultural ecosystems, and
(4) worsening climatic destabilization, successful human food
acquisition will necessarily rely increasingly on ecological
knowledge and assistance – what we can perhaps call ‘ecological
technology’. We will need to return humbly, thankfully, and
thoughtfully to ‘the tangled bank.’ And given the climatic,
ecological, and social challenges bearing down on us, such an
ecological awakening will not be optional for human survival.
Premise
7: A polyculture of perennial vegetation has the best chance of
providing food for humans in the future. In light of challenges
outlined above, a diverse polyculture of perennial vegetation has
many advantages over the largely-annual monocultures of traditional
human agriculture: more robust structural integrity, improved
soil-holding and building ability, superior nutrient and water
gathering efficiency, decreased annual labor inputs, more efficient
gathering of sunlight, longer annual period of active photosynthesis,
and less reliance on precise rainfall and temperature patterns.
As such, an agriculture based largely on a rich diversity of
ecologically-managed, food and fiber-producing perennials embedded
within diverse perennial-based wild ecosystems will exhibit maximum
resilience and stand the best chance of providing food in our
climate-destabilized, civilization-collapsing future.
Premise
8: Our current ‘leaders’ will not aid the necessary
transition to an ecologically-sound perennial agriculture – they
will hinder it. The crucial near-term response of the ‘powers
that be’ (corporations, national governments) to the gathering
existential agricultural emergencies will continue to be, perversely
and suicidally, their exacerbation – e.g., trying to maximize
carbon emissions (even as they fall), accelerating industrial
depredations, and a desperate inflating of the industrial bubble via
economic and public-relations chicanery, resulting in a more rapid
and destructive collapse when the bubble inevitably pops.
Lobbying of such ‘powers that be’ to change course has proven, at
best, largely ineffectual – and perhaps even counter-productive, as
it can perpetuate the illusion of ‘if only they understood’ and
distract from constructive efforts possible at the local level.
Premise
9: Local responses are possible, necessary, and should begin
ASAP. In this critical pre-collapse period, constructive
responses to both our agricultural and broader predicaments will only
be fashioned at the local and community level – a fact that is at
once frightening, sad, embarrassing, and empowering. These
responses involve efforts to learn, preserve, and disseminate (1) a
more resilient, ecologically-attuned agriculture, (2) hunting and
gathering skills, along with the accompanying ecological knowledge
and sensitivity, (3) craftsmanship and artistry in the manufacturing
of basic necessities (tools, shelter, water infrastructure,
medicines), and (4) key social skills, such as conflict-resolution,
cooperation, and collaboration, as well as the cultivation of beauty,
joyfulness, and thankfulness in our everyday lives.
Premise
10: We may not succeed, but we must try. Livable outcomes in
any given region are neither assured nor frankly probable at this
point, but we must try – we have a moral, biological, and spiritual
imperative to try. …Because what do you do when human
civilization gives you global catastrophe? You make
catastrophe-aid. J
…And
now for the essay-proper:
II.
Growing Food in a Funhouse
In
that heady time before every American youth was enslaved by their
portable electronics to the cold realm of cyberspace, end-of-summer
fairs were the place to be. The gaudy lights, the blaring tinny
music, the hormone-addled teens, the strung-out carnies, the
crumbling nuclear families with double-wide strollers, the
way-too-made-up tweens, the ever-changing ribbons of smells pummeling
your nostrils: cotton candy, cigarette smoke, fried dough, cheap
perfume, diesel fumes, oily dust, italian ice…
Ahhh...the
(cough) memories!
Flemington
Fair, NJ, circa 1978.
But
more than anything, I remember a haunting, fair-themed nightmare I
had around the time I was ten: My friends and I were exploring
a funhouse, but the place kept taking on a progressively more
menacing vibe. The normal funhouse elements -- the amusing
surprises, the pleasant distortions of normality, the benign
helplessness – were becoming less amusing, pleasant, and benign by
the second. At some point, after realizing that the funhouse
was actually trying to kill us rather than fun us, I found myself
alone in a barren field outside the funhouse, pock-marked with what
appeared to be deep bomb craters. Descending into one such
water-filled crater, an alien (?!) reached out of the water, grabbed
my leg, and pulled me under. …And then I woke up. (cold
shiver)
Psychoanalyze
away, but that dream still haunts me to this day. I can still
see it, still feel it. It still scares the hell out of me.
In fact, it’s starting to scare me more than ever these days.
…Because
it’s coming true.
Earth’s
climate, a key leg of the three-legged agro-ecological stool
(climate, soil & ecosystem health, genetics), is taking on all
the elements of that menacing funhouse from my nightmare – the
increasingly-unpleasant surprises, the ominous distortions of
normality, the growing feelings of helplessness among its victims.
…It’s all coming true.
As
David Korowicz warns of our collapsing civilization: we are going
someplace we have never been before. This is true economically,
socially, and politically – but, most frighteningly, it is also
true climatically. We are in the process of forcing the climate
into a state unlike anything our species, much less agriculture, has
ever experienced. Given that, is it really wise to expect our
Holocene-adapted agriculture to function adequately in this new
‘evil-funhouse’ climate we’re making? I would argue no.
So
perhaps then we need to rethink our modern food-acquiring strategies
in the face of the massive changes now bearing down upon us, with all
their challenges and inherent uncertainties.
…And
maybe we better start soon, no?
III.
The Making of a Funhouse Climate
Let
me be blunt here: We are wrecking the climate. Or I should say,
we have
wrecked the climate. Because by increasing the atmospheric CO2
from 280ppm to over 390ppm over the few hundred years of our
industrial experiment, we have already
wrenched the climate out of the relatively stable Holocene climate
that gave birth to human agriculture. And we have likely even
wrenched the climate out of its million year long
glacial-interglacial dance (to a 100K year beat!) during which our
species developed.
As
UCLA climatologist Aradhna Tripati reported in Science in 2009, “The
last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are
today…and were sustained at those levels…global temperatures were
5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level
was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no
permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica
and Greenland.”
…And
that was 15 million years ago, by the way – well before our species
existed.
We
are stumbling suicidally into uncharted waters. The arctic,
warming at over twice the global average, is melting rapidly.
Summer arctic sea ice will likely be gone just a few years from now.
(See Figure 1, below.) And with it will go the reflective
albedo buffer to further rapid warming, as well as the regular
weather patterns we count on for temperate Northern hemisphere
agriculture.
Figure
1. Arctic sea ice collapse. Late summer sea ice volume
has dropped over 80% in just the past 33 years. The arctic will
likely be ice-free in summer in a few years, resulting in even more
rapid warming. Source:
thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/14/1594211/death-spiral-bombshell-cryosat-2-confirms-arctic-sea-ice-volume-has-collapsed/
But
how exactly do warmer temperatures disrupt regular weather patterns?
Witness the ‘new, improved’ jet stream! The Northern
hemisphere jet stream, that bringer of crop-friendly weather systems
to US agriculture, is having some problems. Even the relatively
meager warming to date of the arctic relative to the temperate
latitudes appears to have already
caused both a slowing and a more extreme meandering of the
west-to-east winds of the jet stream. (See Figure 2, below.)
Figure
2. Extreme jet stream! This figure shows
abnormally-meandering path of the jet stream on March 21, 2012 – an
increasingly common occurrence as the arctic warms and the
temperature differential between the arctic and temperate regions
decrease. Source:
thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/04/457823/arctic-warming-extreme-weather-events-drought-flooding-cold-spells-and-heat-waves/
And
a slower, more randomly-meandering jet stream brings with it some
weird, unpleasant weather to the agricultural bread-baskets of the
world. Larger-amplitude meanderings bring more extremes in hot
and cold, often at rather odd times relative to what our crops and
agricultural practices are adapted to. And the slower movement
of the jet stream means that these wacky weather systems stick around
longer. Often way
too long. (See short video embedded in link for Figure 2.)
Think of the brutal heat and dryness in the US 2011-12, Russia 2010,
and France 2003.
Indeed,
the relatively modest warming of land and ocean temperatures
experienced so far has already
resulted in a noticeable increase in extreme temperature and rainfall
events. James Hansen has recently documented an alarming and
steady shift in summer temperature extremes well beyond anything
experienced even in recent times. (See Figure 3, below.)
And similar upticks in frequencies of severe droughts and massive
rainfall events have also been documented. (Follow all the
action at Joe Romm’s
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/?mobile=nc.)
Figure
3. Shift in Northern hemisphere summer temperature extremes in
recent decades. The bottom axis is in standard deviations (σ)
above or below the 1951-1980 average summer temperature. Note
the alarming increase in extreme temperature events in the
maroon-colored +3σ to +5σ range -- crop-killing events with a
vanishingly small probability prior to recent decades. Source:
thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/09/666601/james-hansen-on-the-new-climate-dice-and-public-perception-of-climate-change/
Oh,
and did someone say ‘massively destructive storms’? Because
as temperatures increase, so also do the strength of storms, with
their eroding deluges, vast flooding, violent winds, and deadly storm
surges. ‘Frankenstorms’ are indeed an apt term for these
part-natural/part-human-caused monstrosities. Higher ocean,
land, and air temperatures mean more water vapor pumped more rapidly
into an atmosphere that can now hold that extra water. In turn,
the extra water vapor in the atmosphere (+4-5%) provides both higher
rainfall potential and more stored energy (‘latent heat’) to
power the destructive winds. (See
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/28/1101241/cnn-bans-term-frankenstorm-but-its-a-good-metaphor-for-warming-driven-monster-largest-hurricane-in-atlantic-history/)
And
bear in mind that, due to inertia in the climate system, even if we
stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, there is still more destabilization in
the pipeline – warming and its resulting ‘wacky weather’ that
will persist for centuries and even millennia. That means
significantly more
arctic melting, more
sea-level rise, more
jet stream convulsions, more
extreme weather events – the heat-waves, the droughts, the deluges,
the hurricanes, the derechos.
…And
all the while, arctic methane feedbacks loom. If you have the
stomach for it, watch this 20min video about the dire situation
unfolding up North:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSsPHytEnJM.
We are children with hammers, banging on armed thermonuclear
warheads. Clink. Clink. Clink-clink. Clunk…uh
oh.
In
short, our sputtering fossil-fuel orgy is in the process of turning
the stable Holocene into an ‘evil funhouse’ climate straight out
of a nightmare – one where horrifying surprises pop up ever more
frequently, where normal weather patterns are grotesquely and
dangerously distorted, where we are increasingly helpless in our
efforts to ‘adapt’ to a climate that appears more and more like
it’s trying to kill us.
…And
all of this, of course, does not bode well for human agriculture.
IV.
The Coming Failure of Holocene-adapted Agriculture
Let
me tell you a secret: Human agriculture is no longer a given.
This is, of course, only a ‘secret’ because so many people these
days have so little knowledge of agriculture, climate, or ecology.
…But it’s true: the 10,000 year-old agricultural experiment
may soon be coming to an end.
Human
agriculture is, despite our culture’s unthinking faith in its
inevitability, an exceedingly-fragile, three-legged stool resting on
the shaky legs of (1) Holocene-like climate stability, (2)
culturally-preserved genetics and agricultural knowledge, and (3) the
health of the soil and surrounding ecosystems. Knock out any
one of those and the stool comes a-tumblin’ down. And a
culture blinks out.
Because,
contrary to popular opinion here in the spastic endgame of our
death-dealing civilization, agriculture doesn’t
come from shiny tractor dealerships, sacks of genetically-engineered
‘miracle’ seeds, heaping piles of fertilizer, tanks of [insert
organism]icide, irrigation pipes, six-figure bank loans, and an
‘essentially-infinite’ torrent of fossil fuels. No -- it
comes from the Earth, from the skies, from our bodies, and from a
complex (and often heartbreakingly destructive) culture passed down
from generation to generation .
...And
without any thought to the consequences or to developing
alternatives, we’re doing our damndest to snuff it out.
Indeed, a lethal one-two-three punch of climate destabilization,
accumulated/ongoing industrial depredations, and the chaos unleashed
by a collapsing civilization will very likely bring human agriculture
to its knees – possibly within the next few decades, and almost
certainly within this century.
So
here’s a quick anatomy of our agricultural train-wreck, already in
progress:
1.
Climatic Destabilization:
The
climatic requirement for agricultural viability represents a
relatively narrow range – in both magnitude and timing – of a
number of key variables: temperature, water (in the form of both
rainfall and snowmelt), wind, and climate-influenced pest/disease
densities.
Unfortunately,
crops born of Holocene-era climate stability and further embrittled
by industrial, fossil-fueled coddling and yield-maximization are
sitting ducks for the kind of wacky, extreme weather they will
increasingly face. Decade-long crippling droughts, weeks of
ultra-extreme high temperatures, surprise late-Spring freezes from a
tortured jet stream, erosive levee-bursting deluges, salinization of
delta farmland from increasingly-common and severe coastal storm
surges, brutal outbreaks of weather-influenced pests and disease, and
violent storms with crop-flattening winds – these are the kinds of
things we’ll be dealing with. And not once a decade, but
likely every
year
– several times
a year!
That’s
the climate we’re making -- and it’s simply not the one Holocene
agriculture signed up for. And note again that this climate
destabilization is not academic speculation or merely a reading of
the climate-model tea leaves – it’s what we’re already
seeing. It’s already
bad and already
worsening exponentially. (See
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/21/1278861/climate-story-of-the-year-extreme-weather-from-superstorms-to-drought-emerges-as-political-scientific-gamechanger/,
as well as the climate references above.)
2.
Loss
of Agricultural Genetics, Technology, and Knowledge:
The
second key requirement for human agricultural is the suite of
culturally-preserved genetics (plant & animal) and accumulated
agricultural technology/knowledge available to farmers.
I
think it scarcely needs to be said here that virtually the entire
toolkit of industrial agricultural technology -- the fossil-fuel
powered machines, the industrial chemical-dependent crop varieties
and animal breeds, and the knowledge of how to manage such
technologies -- will be next to useless without fossil fuels.
And sometime soon, we just won’t have fossil fuels to kick around
anymore. Why not? Because the remaining ‘difficult
half’ of fossil fuels – tricky enough to access with the
industrial machine still humming along – will certainly remain in
their dark geologic tombs once the economic wheels come off.
(And just in case, it will be up to the post-collapse ‘monkey-wrench
gangs’ to ensure they do. Long live Edward Abbey! Long
live Derrick Jensen! Long live…you?)
So
where does that leave us? It leaves us depending on
agricultural genetics, technology, and knowledge that served us in
pre-industrial times. And unfortunately for human agriculture,
a massive and mostly-unacknowledged loss of these resources has been
occurring during the industrial era – a loss that has rapidly
accelerated in recent decades. (Now, I fully realize the
destructiveness of many pre-industrial annuals-based agricultural
practices -- and one could well argue ‘good-riddance’ -- but I’ll
address that later in the essay when I discuss recommendations for
the future.)
Diverse
place-adapted pre-industrial varieties of crops and breeds of
domesticated animals, each with their special attributes, have been
increasingly sacrificed to a relative small number of industrial
varieties and breeds with the narrowest of attributes: yield
maximization in a high-input, fossil-fuel-drenched system. This
is unfortunate, of course, because a wide genetic variety will be
needed to handle the challenging, unpredictable, low-input conditions
that Anthropocene (Funhousocene?) agriculture will certainly face.
Need
a chicken that doesn’t keel over in two weeks of 115 oF
heat? Oh sorry, that breed was lost. Need a
deeply-rooted, sprawling apple tree that can withstand 100 mph
winds…twice a year? Sorry. Re-breeding will, of
course, be possible and necessary (more on that later), but for some
crops suffering significant genetic losses, breeding the required
genetic varieties from the pathetically narrow set of genetics that
ultimately squeeze through the bottleneck may be very slow. And
in some cases, the genetic losses will be so extreme that re-breeding
will be effectively impossible – like trying to re-breed a
passenger pigeon.
Likewise,
pre-industrial agriculture technology and knowledge have also been
hemorrhaging, especially since the industrial war machine turned its
cold, metallic eyes towards agriculture after WWII. It’s a
familiar story: old-time farmer with place-based knowledge dies, kids
in city sell farm to industrial farmer, old-time technology rusts
away beside the collapsing barn, many kinds of crucial knowledge
blink out.
How
many people will remember how
to grow, harvest, and process our crops without fossil fuels?
How many people will remember how to propagate and breed all the new
plant or animal varieties we’ll need? How many people will
remember how to preserve and store the harvest for the lean
early-Spring months? (How many people remember that there even
are
lean months of the year?) And how will we disperse our
remaining fragmented knowledge and technology at a time when
long-distance travel and communication for the spreading of these
agricultural necessities will likely be close to nil?
And
then there’s the whole war thing. Namely, that the
already-severe loss of the pre-industrial genetics, technology, and
knowledge will be further exacerbated by the social strife, war, and
population dislocations that will certainly accompany the unraveling
of the industrial fabric and the climate catastrophes-to-come.
Varieties, breeds, technology, and knowledge that have been carefully
safeguarded from the industrial shredder for generations in back-yard
gardens, small farms, and seed-banks can and will be lost in just a
single ‘unfortunate incident’. …And there will certainly
be no shortage of ‘unfortunate incidents’ to choose from as we
careen onward and downward from here.
So
now close your eyes and mentally layer these lost genetics,
technologies, and knowledge onto the toxic disruptions from climate
destabilization. What do you get? Well, you get an
agriculture that barely works. Hmmm…can’t wait! But,
of course, we’re not even done yet:
3.
Ecosystem degradation:
The
third ‘key requirement’ for the viability of human agriculture is
adequate health of the soil and surrounding ecosystems.
Try
this: Look around you. Marvel at the deep rich topsoil
outside your door – fertile topsoil that runs deep right up to the
top of the nearby mountain. And at the foot of the mountain,
refresh yourself from the cold, gushing spring that pours out from
beneath the boulder. And now follow the stream down to the
crystal-clear river under the cool shade of the huge old-growth trees
– now walk across. That’s right, walk across on the backs
of the fish, so thick in the water that the surface boils.
…Now
snap out of it. …Sorry about that. It hurts, doesn’t
it? As the great tracker/teacher Jon Young has said, “We have
lost so
much.” It breaks your heart. But even beyond the
deflating spiritual implications, all our ecosystem degradations are
certainly going to come back to bite us physically, as we stumble
into the gathering train-wreck of Anthropocene agriculture.
…And they will
bite us hard.
Why?
Because as the fossil fuel platform of industrial agriculture blinks
out, we’ll need to rely on these ecosystems more than ever (the
soil nutrients and communities, the groundwater, the streams and
rivers, the pollinators and the other ‘beneficial’ insects,
birds, and amphibians, etc.) to furnish all the agricultural services
that fossil fuels once myopically provided for us. And
perversely, these are the very treasures that fossil-fueled
agriculture was so good at destroying – to the point that many
currently-‘productive’ agricultural regions are so
ecologically-denuded that we’re in for a very rude awakening once
the fossil fuel spigot runs dry and we try in vain to coax food from
them.
For
example, take the Central Valley, California, post-collapse:
Soil fertility? Gone. Soil communities? Gone.
Aquifers and springs? Gone. Pollinators? Gone.
Mountain snowmelt? Gone. Rainfall? Wacky.
Agricultural potential? Gone. …Now try this exercise in
the long-abused-but-now-fossil-fuel-deprived heartlands of Texas,
Illinois, etc. Now try it at home. Fun!
And
don’t forget to layer on that additional legacy of our modern
insanity: the persistent toxins that lie as industrial booby traps
all over this great land of ours – in the aging nuclear reactors,
in the brimming industrial ‘retention’ ponds, in the soils, the
water, the animals, our bodies. Think of the bio-accumulating
heavy metals, the PCBs, the radioactive ‘hot particles’ –
health-compromising poisons that are both already present in
excessive amounts and ready to flood over our communities en masse
from their temporary repositories once the feeble industrial
safeguards melt away with collapse. …So like the present-day
farmers of Fukushima, many of us will indeed be raising radioactive
cesium from the soil along with our post-collapse fruits, nuts, and
veggies. Yum. ...Hey, what’s this lump?
So
we are about to ‘discover’ (surprise!) that human agriculture
indeed has an ecological foundation – and that this foundation is
either severely eroded, toxic, or just plain gone. …All of
which sort of sucks if your goal is to feed yourself, your family,
and your community.
…But
hey, no worries – human agriculture’s a given, right?
V.
The Hazy Future of Human Food
Now,
I find no joy in being a ‘Danny Downer’ here, but there just
seems to be an awful lot conspiring against our ability to grow food
in the decades ahead. And I do
realize I have no divine knowledge; I fully understand that these are
complex systems interlinked in complex ways, resulting in an awful
lot of possible futures. But when you start to weight those
futures based on the apparent biophysical trajectories of
all-things-agricultural (climate change, loss of genetics, soil
degradation, economic collapse, etc.), it just doesn’t look too
promising.
So
as a way to visualize where we may be headed, I made a little chart
plotting the possible climate destabilization versus the possible
loss of agricultural genetics/technology/knowledge. I’m
holding the degree of ecosystem degradation as a constant here – an
approximation, of course, since it is
linked to the other variables. I do this because I suspect that
such degradation is (sadly) the most predictable of the three key
factors discussed in the last section.
Figure
4. Human food-acquisition in the Anthropocene. Different food
acquisition strategies will be possible based on different
(as-yet-to-be-determined) degrees of climate destabilization and loss
of agricultural genetics/technology/knowledge. Both scale and
technological complexity decrease upwards and to the right – as
each of the variables becomes more degraded.
So
how do we interpret this graph? Different regions of the graph
correspond to different food acquisition strategies that may be
possible under various (as-yet-to-be-determined…but looking worse
every day) combinations of climate destabilization and
genetics/technology/knowledge-losses.
My
(not-exactly-earth-shattering) thesis here is that increased climate
destabilization and increased genetics/technology/knowledge-losses
will necessarily reduce both the scale and technological complexity
of human agriculture. They will simply reduce what is
possible. First fossil fuel agriculture blinks out. Then
progressively simpler forms of agriculture blink out. And at
some point, any
form of agriculture becomes non-viable as a sole provider of food and
must be supplemented with hunting and gathering. Beyond that,
only hunting and gathering become viable. And beyond that, no
food acquisition strategies are effective, and the population blinks
out.
What
I think is
vital about the graph is that it’s a conversation we are not
having -- and one that we really need to start
having.
We need to stop pretending human agriculture is a given – and
especially to stop pretending that we will be able to feed ourselves
using the same fragile, annuals-based, fossil-energy-dependent
agriculture we now employ. …Because we certainly won’t.
And heck, we might not be able to employ any agriculture at
all
– at least not as it’s now recognized.
And
beyond that, we need to start saying that, yea, the stakes of our
industrial depredations are rising so
high that we actually need to invoke the dreaded “E” words here –
extirpation and extinction. We need to stop telling ourselves
that, by continuing our wicked industrial ways, we’re only
endangering ‘the economy’ or ‘growth’ or ‘prosperity’ or
‘our standing as a nation.’ Fuck
that. …We’re endangering our lives.
We’re endangering the lives of our children.
We’re endangering the lives of every living being
on the planet. Those
are the stakes here, and if we’re hell-bent on offing ourselves for
the sake of double-caramel lattes, we should at least have the
pseudo-dignity to acknowledge it and maybe sort of apologize to
everything we’re taking down with us.
(deep
breath)
So
there. And aside from just being kind of scary (or inspiring, I
suppose, if you rejoice at the demise of ecosystem-degrading human
agriculture), the graph above does have practical implications, which
I’ll discuss in the next section.
References:
Here
are some key resources to both back up the stuff I’m going to talk
about and help people move ahead with the good work we need to do.
A.
Climate
Joe
Romm:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/14/1009121/science-of-global-warming-impacts-guide/
Guy
McPherson:
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/;
http://guymcpherson.com/2012/11/speaking-in-louisville-and-a-couple-essays/
B.
Collapse
Richard
Heinberg: The
End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
(2011); plus the three-part 2012 update,
Chris
Martenson: The
Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and
Environment
(2011); http://www.peakprosperity.com/
David
Korowicz:
http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Trade-Off1.pdf
(2012),
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-05-27/world-limits-growth
(2011), http://www.theoildrum.com/files/Tipping%20Point.pdf
(2010), and
http://www.feasta.org/2009/06/11/david-korowicz-complexity-economy-civilisation-collapse/
(2009 video).
C.
Agriculture
Mark
Shepard: Restoration
Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers
(2013) …VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Dave
Jacke & Eric Toensmeier: Edible
Forest Gardens
(2005)
Bill
Mollison: Permaculture:
A Designer’s Manual
(1988)
David
Holmgren: Permaculture:
Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
(2002)
Permaculture
videos:
http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1470432-7-food-forests-in-7-minutes
and
http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1527704-kramerterhof-a-tour-of-sepp-holzer-s
Eric
Toensmeier: Perennial
Vegetables
(2007)
Joseph
Jenkins: The
Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
(2005)
P.A.
Yeomans: Water
For Every Farm: Yeoman’s Keyline Plan
(2008)
Janisse
Ray: The
Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
(2012)
Carol
Deppe: The
Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain
Times
(2010)
Sandor
Katz: The
Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts
and Processes from Around the World
(2012)
Mike
& Nancy Bubel: Root
Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables
(1991)
D.
Hunting and Gathering
Samuel
Thayer: Natures
Garden: A guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Wild Plants
(2010); The
Forager’s Harvest: A guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and
Preparing Wild Plants
(2006)
Richo
Cech: Making
Plant Medicine
(2000)
Jon
Young: Animal
Tracking Basics
(2007); What
the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World
(2012)
Paul
Rezendes: Tracking
and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign
(1999)
Tom
Brown: Tom
Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival
(1987); Grandfather:
A Native American’s Lifelong Search for Truth and Harmony with
Nature
(2001)
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