Agriculture Was a Dick Move

But we can do better

An irrigated field of Alfalfa in the desert of the Imperial Valley in southern California. This was formerly wildlife habitat. Now it’s devoted to producing food for captive domesticated animals. A real dick move.

Given the state of the US these days, it can be easy for people to be cynical. Our culture is driven by greed and domination, resulting in profound economic inequality and horrific environmental destruction. The lives of most of us citizens are defined by struggle and anxiety when it comes to providing necessities for ourselves. In the natural world, wildlife habitat is shrinking and species are going extinct. Our politics are corrupt, our media is vapid, and social polarization is seemingly widening. An increasingly chaotic climate is stressing our systems and pushing the limits of adaptability for many plants and animals.

Some people assume that it’s “human nature” to be destructive, both to ourselves and others. Some welcome the prospect of human extinction or even wish for it. “Humans suck,” they conclude.

I am not so cynical, which in the eyes of some might make me “naive” or a partaker of “hopium.” These folks can believe what they want and give me any name they’d like. If they are so convinced that we as a species are nothing more than a blight on the planet, then I leave them to it. I know there’s no point in arguing with beliefs.

Yes, “beliefs” is what I would call them: ideas that are held not because they are unequivocally provable—they are not—but because, for whatever reason, they provide comfort, even though they are so despairing. And here I must quote Gandalf, who (in the books) said: “Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible things our culture does and has done to the world. From Bronze Age deforestation in West Asia and the Mediterranean (for agriculture, metal-working and shipbuilding), to slavery, war and genocide in the millennia that followed, to industrialism’s rape of the planet in the last couple centuries, to today’s widespread toxic pollution. There’s also the splitting of the atom, which may lead to our demise.

It’s not that I don’t know these things. I daresay I know more than most, in fact, having studied these topics. It’s that I know that these things are not all there is, either in the present, or in history, or in the possibilities of our future. This is not a belief. I also have beliefs: in things including reincarnation, plant consciousness, and the existence of non-material planes of existence that can be visited via various means, and these things are not unequivocally provable, and I won’t address any of them here today. We’re sticking to facts backed by evidence here, relating to one subject.

That subject is agriculture, which some—including myself—consider a great wrong turn of human history.

The species Homo sapiens goes back at least 200,000 years, some say 300,000. For most of that time, up ‘til the Agriculture Revolution, aka the Neolithic Revolution, our footprint was much lighter, and not just because there were fewer of us. Our relating to life was different. I am not claiming a conformity across all gathering/hunting cultures, which were diverse in their lifestyles and approaches (largely due to the differing conditions where they lived, with varying climates and assemblages of more-than-human life). We all lived local then, though we were not isolated. We also traveled and traded, and the story of this mixing and migration can be found in our DNA, and in what we call the “native ranges” of plants, which we expanded both purposely and accidentally. When we were gathering/hunting we were not merely acquisitive, just picking berries and shooting animals. We propagated plants. We altered entire regions, especially with the intentional use of fire. Despite popular belief and media representations, in a multitude of significant ways, life was easier, and certainly less damaging.

Agriculture brought declines to our quality of life in three broad areas: our individual health, our cultural structures, and the environment.

Individual health:

According to evidence from fossils and the few gatherer/hunter societies that still exist, once we turned to agriculture, we experienced more famine, our stature decreased, our bones became weaker, we were sick more often, we got more cavities, our gut micobiota became less diverse, our mortality rates rose, and we were assailed by zoonotic diseases we acquired from the domesticated animals we were now keeping. Regarding that last item, the survivors gained immunity, but millennia later the diseases they brought to the Western Hemisphere wiped out much of the indigenous population, who lacked the immunity. An utterly tragic chapter in human history.

Cultural structures:

Scholar Rian Eisler contrasts our earlier “partnership societies” with the “dominator societies” that emerged with the plow, and which we are still saddled with today. “Saddled” is an apropos descriptor because domestication was one of the prime drivers of the transition from egalitarianism to patriarchy: the domestication of plants, animals, and—crucially—ourselves. Agriculture brought private property, chattel slavery, rigid hierarchy, ranked divisions of labor, dualism (including the work/play dichotomy), and monotheistic religion, which enforced all of the above as god-given. Living was marked less by autonomy and more by drudgery.

The environment:

As sanctified by novel worldviews such as the “dominion over all living things” declared in the book of Genesis, the planet ceased to be a place full of more-than-human creatures who are our siblings and elders and was wrung into one of mastery and oppression. Driven by such heresies, we adopted methodologies that wipe out wildlife habitat, deplete the soil, and destroy riparian systems. In recent times, we have added pesticide use and genetic modification to our arsenal of degradation. Currently, agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change both through land alteration and carbon emissions. An excessive animal agriculture sector plays a major role in all these problems.

These three areas are very briefly summarized here. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, I devote a chapter each to all three in my book, The Failures of Farming & the Necessity of Wildtending, which is available in paperback and as a digital download. (Paying subscribers to this Substack get a digital download for free.)

Why did we make the switch from a life that was mostly blessed to one that was mostly cursed? This is a mystery that has never been solved, and may never be unless we discover a means of time travel. Many theories have been proposed and discarded. Anyone who claims to have “the” answer to this question is overly-confident. Though the beginnings of the Neolithic Revolution in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent in western Asia corresponds with the dramatic climate shifts of an event known as the “Younger Dryas,” 12,900 to 11,700 years ago, when the northern hemisphere cooled significantly—an event that definitely affected plant life and may have led to the annualization of formerly perennial grain-bearing plants—agriculture was not taken up in other parts of the world until later, so can’t be explained that way. Farming was established in China 9000-8000 years ago, in the New Guinea Highlands 9000-6000 years ago, Central Mexico 5750-4000 years ago, Sub-Saharan Africa 5000-4000 years ago, and eastern North America 5250-3000 years ago. So there are multiple mysteries.

With agriculture, we objectified more-than-human life. We reduced plants, animals, etc., to things to control, and divided them into “good” and “evil.” (The Garden of Eden narrative tries to pawn off this dualism as inherent in the world with its “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”) This is expressed in the contrast between “crops” and “weeds,” where the former is to be endlessly manipulated and the latter to be viciously eradicated. (The current narrative about “invasive plants” is nothing more than the latest gloss on this Bronze Age trope.) The objectification gave us permission to kill thoughtlessly and the dualism provided a blunt instrument for choosing targets.

The gulf between our current agricultural society and those of our historical gathering/hunting ancestors is vast and virtually unimaginable. To pull a quote from The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending:

The plain truth is that we have no freaking idea what it was like to live on this planet before agriculture. By that, I don't mean that we don't have plausible scenarios of diet, housing or lifestyle based on archaeological evidence, because obviously we do. What I mean is that we ourselves, immersed in our contemporary lifestyles, have no idea what it felt like. No light but fire and heavenly bodies (and the occasional luminescent insect or tide). No sounds except the elements and the animals (and at some point, drums). Never smelling exhaust, never hearing an airplane, never feeling the vibration of an engine, never tasting plastic and almost never seeing right angles. Everything manufactured with technology invented in the last 10,000 years is absent; all the ideas that emerged in the same time frame—property, money, nations—are unconceived; and the despairing philosophies of modernity, in which the self is isolated, on a lonely journey, struggling in competition against nature... all of this is not only unimagined but unimaginable. The mental space that humans inhabited then was truly alien from our own, incredibly so. If we're going to be honest with ourselves, we must concede: far be it from us to know their thoughts, let alone their desires.

That is, no, what we’re doing now isn’t “human nature.” It’s the behavior of animals in captivity, gnawing off our own limbs and wasting away in anguish, while filling our cage with filth.

Yet if there is any chance of living on this planet in a way that is truly sustainable again, we must try to return, not just in action but in mind and in spirit. Of course there’s no “going back” and what lies ahead will not be identical to what we left behind, but we must change. Individually, we must examine our desires. Collectively, we must interrogate our priorities. Environmentally, we must step down from the pedestal where we lord over all other life, and reintegrate our consciences with our more-than-human family—flora, fauna and fungi. It was always a delusion that we were separate from nature. We are as materially connected as we have always been; agriculture just conned us into thinking we could do what we wanted “to it” with no consequence. Regardless, we are still Homo sapiens, the 200-300,000 old species who is capable of living otherwise, as proven by history and the extant gatherer/hunter cultures still living on the planet.

But I myself am involved in farming, so what gives? Yes. Because we have to engage with it. We are currently dependent on it, and the way past it (I believe) is through it. For some starting points, see my previous essay, “Six Things We Must Do So That Farming Is No Longer Massive Ecocide.” “Rewilding” provides a useful framework, and for more on that, check out the work of Peter Michael Bauer, who teaches, writes and podcasts.

Agriculture was a dick move. We have many potentialities, to nurture or to abuse, and agriculture pulls heavily from the latter. It’s a machine we have to dismantle before it crashes the planet and takes down everyone—human and more-than-human alike—with it.

[Note: I started writing this on my birthday, June 6, while camping near a stream in a forest in Mendocino County. For the first time in years, I did it old school with a notebook and a pen. A fountain pen, in fact! Here’s a photo of the first page.]