The Problem of Agriculture

The industrial economy treats the world as either a mine from which we extract what we need or a landfill into which we dump our waste. While there’s no telling whether perennial polycultures are going to be the key to sustainable agriculture, it’s clear that intensifying the industrialization of agriculture is a losing bet. The modern worldview ignores the fact that everything that supports life on the planet operates in cycles.

 

[Wes] Jackson offers a powerful image of what has gone wrong: The best symbol for nature is a circle; agriculture is a human attempt to square the circle; industrial agriculture flattens the circle into a straight line on the model of a factory’s mass production.

 

– Robert Jensen, The Problem of Agriculture. Originally published at Resilience.org:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-10-07/the-problem-of-agriculture