Planetary philosophy: Agriculture | Julian Stdd learning blog

Today, I share a fragment of new scriptures of the Planetary philosophy book. It is not refined, but is in a sequence of sections that explore our development and our dissociation of nature.

In 2019, I wrote a book on Apollo Space program. I really liked to write it, because it gave me a good excuse to read interesting books and draw an image of rockets. I learned a lot, but the thing that surprised me the most had nothing to do with the moon.

It was something that concerned the earth.

Since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have set foot on the Moon, the population of our house (and only) planet has more than doubled.

I guess I noticed the proliferation of new areas of housing and the way roads have become, pressure on health services and concerns about immigration. But I had never really had this visceral sense of the scale and rhythm of our human population, and the concomitant pressures that we put on our environment. And it is rarely more relevant than in our need to eat.

As a big fingers, large brain primates, we have excelled in Hunter Gathering: Twist and Fruit and Nut tries, digging for the roots, coordinating the hunts and making nets to fish. Thanks to a succession of ages, defined by our mastery of materials, we have improved our capacities and slowly acquired a deep competitive advantage. Recently, this included the ability to chase our predators to extinction, then, through science, to acquire an understanding and a mastery of what our ancestors had been celestial burns.

The industrialization of agriculture has been both rapid and dramatic. Industrial age, in particular the invention of steam and subsequent internal combustion engines, has provided an amplification of the effect, parallel to our emerging understanding of the science of evolution, and an increased capacity to influence, evolve and improve the very DNA of our cultures and creatures.

The proliferation of cheap and easily available food has been a boon, parallel to the industrialization of food supplies, the aggregation of disparate local stores in global supermarket chains and the technological revolutions of demand management, just in the supply of time and refrigerated transport, all food for diversity and safety of food in many in the developed world.

The modes and modes include our food, and the industrialization of the supply saw in parallel the erosion of seasonal effects, to the point where many of us could not honestly say that we know when the Blueberries flourish or that the bananas are in season. We have for acquired the availability of grenades, pasta and pistachios on demand, and tend to be completely divorced in various costs – in terms of use of water, labor rights, antibacterial and exploitation crises – of our evening meal. We have little sense in the way in which almond cultures are thirsty are or the conditions under which the battery hens are kept.

The miracle of food science, agriculture on the scale and the technology of food production rises alongside our dissociation and our disconnection of the act of gathering and growth. We were released from the effort of food – even the efforts of the kitchen – but this wonder of the workforce also degraded our link with the place.

The farm and the act of agriculture have become politicized, separated, abstract and abolished.

The farm has become the place of our food. Not where we come from. It was agriculture that set the nomad. Agriculture was identity. The culture of cultures and domestic animals was our being.

To date, we see conflicts between the traveling communities and the paradigm of the colony. The two are diametrically opposed, because the trip is intrusion into a world codified in structural and domestic power.

A planetary philosophy can include a philosophy of the farm, of our food, because we cannot dissociate the acts of growth, distribution and sale of food from community structures and belonging. The army walks on its stomach, and the rest of us is not so different.

Our agricultural revolution has lacked lasting foundations, and therefore stripped and drained our landscapes, and now the explosion of the population traps us in demand cycles, as a risk of famine, and under the increasing pressure of climate change and the resulting food security problems.

To consider questions of citizenship, belonging, organization and identity cannot take place without understanding the costs and consequences of our separation from our agricultural roots, and both the advantages and constraints inherent in change.