The Anthropocene is marked by environmental destruction. A key quality of this time is the unnerving awareness that our behavior as a creature may lead us to our own demise, whether through runaway climate change, toxic pollution, resource depletion, geopolitical conflicts, or even the fall of our global civilization.
But how did we get from the first nomadic Homo sapiens who expanded out of Africa to this modern creature that finds itself tangled in such an interwoven, complex mess of its own making?
Industrial agriculture today is being wedded to the internet, big data, AI; it is being consolidated by corporations and power brokers; it is spreading across the landscape to fuel our highly competitive, consumption-based global trade apparatus, swallowing up sustainable subsistence farms; it is destroying local lifeways; it is homogenizing land, plants, and animals — simplifying the living world and destroying biodiversity. It is the foundation of a global, capitalist civilization, and our apparent ability to “control” nature underlies the myth of modernity, and the myth of the Machine.
Using the myth of the story of Man’s Fall — humanity’s expulsion from Eden — this video aims to explore the cost of the change that agriculture catalyzed in the human animal.
Director, Writer, Cinematographer, Producer, Editor: Jake Marquez
Assistant Director, Writer, Producer, Assistant Editor: Maren Morgan
Executive Producers: James Connolly, Jake Marquez, & Maren Morgan
Motion Graphics: Jake Marquez
Prop Design: Jake Marquez and Maren Morgan
Additional Prop Design: Christian Morgan & Jay Marquez
Featuring: Paul Kingsnorth & Lierre Kieth
Featured assets:
The How and Why Wonder Book of Basic Inventions, Leonard Vosburgh
National Geographic Magazine, February, 1970 Issue, Melville Bell Grosvenor
Thank you for being a paid supporter of Death in The Garden. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll prepare an exclusive behind-the-scenes video to show you all how we made this video, as well as our script (with relevant references), and a book list.
Note about the credits: if your name is incorrect or missing, please let me know and we’ll fix it for the YouTube release. We really want to credit anyone who has ever donated to the project, because we couldn’t have done it without you. Alternatively, if you’d like your name removed from the credits, please also let us know.
Note on this video:
Human to human, we’ve had a pretty rough time the past six months. Housesitting full-time has proven to be extremely mentally and emotionally taxing on top of struggling so much financially. We don’t say this for pity, but just for a bit context as to why this video isn’t as amazing as we had hoped it would be.1 Burnout and scarcity have a sinister way of zapping all creativity, and we reached a point where we just decided we needed to finish this video so we could move on to the next one. This is by no means the only video we’ll make about agriculture (especially given that we didn’t even touch on anything to do with regenerative agriculture, subsistence agriculture, or holistic management) — this was truly meant to add a mythic valance to the story of agriculture’s emergence into the world and how that catalyzed tremendous change in the human animal and its relation to the biosphere.
There are limitations to this format which have become apparent in the process of creation, and one of those is the problem of adding a level of nuance and explanation to videos that are centered on big ideas. Due to this, the next few videos will be much more contained in scope. We plan to make vignettes to show more on-the-ground examples of what we’re hinting at in these first two videos as a way to really highlight the people who we’ve learned from, but also give us a break from some of the larger, more philosophical topics we’d like to cover.2 As our friend Alex Leff described it: there are videos that we plan to make that will be the Big End of the Wedge, encompassing the great complexity that exists within the world and attempting to weave it all together, and some that will be more focused and specific, the Little End of the Wedge. Industrial Agriculture & The Myth of the Fall is a Big End of the Wedge video — each topic mentioned in this video could be its own mini-doc explainer.3 Moving forward, our goal make both kinds of videos, giving us the opportunity to deep dive into subjects as well as explore broad philosophical quandaries.
Thank you again to all of you for helping us keep this project going. We hope to continue improving with this craft and create even better works from here on out. Thank you again for your support. It means the world to us.
We say this not as an excuse, but as a way to give ourselves a bit of grace and acknowledge we really did the best we could given the circumstances.
Next in the docket we have Humans are a Keystone Species, and The Death Video
What is the cold chain? What is comparative advantage? How do ultra-processed foods addict us? What are the causes of food waste? How does imperialism effect us today? How toxic are pesticides? What is precision agriculture? (I could keep going!)
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