The Fragile Foundation of Our Civilization

On Totalitarian Agriculture and Our Perilous Dependency

This essay was going to be the script for our next video, but we realized that it wouldn’t translate well to film, and wouldn’t do a good job of showing our own journey and experience with the topic. This piece was also adapted from a much less concise essay I wrote a while back. While we’re working on the video, other pieces, and secret projects, here’s an essay we hope is valuable.

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Wheat harvesting by Jake Marquez

“From the beginning, from the time when humans first tamed fire to the time they started growing grain, from the wings of Icarus to the artificial heart, humans have sought endlessly to cross nature’s boundaries, to break its limits, to make themselves more comfortable, more healthy, more powerful than nature alone could. This interplay between human aspiration and natural bounds has its own literature (from the myth of Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to superhero comic books and mad-doctor movies) and its own field of play. I would call that field of play —the place in which humans can test their natural limits and often break them— science.” - Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air

Introduction

Humans have spread to every corner of the globe, supported by an ever increasingly complicated system of export and import, trade and cultivation, production and industry. Our lives are only possible through a vast network of interconnected parts. The global economy runs on machines making machines that make the machines to make the proverbial McDonald’s toys, which are then shipped all around the world, eventually making their way to landfills — and on and on the story goes. During each moment of every day, each of us are touching objects that were produced all over the world, with component parts that were also produced all over the world and aggregated into one product; passing through hundreds of human and robotic hands; to eventually sail, drive, and fly thousands of miles to reach us. Each object was produced in some sort of factory or plant in some far off region of the world that we likely have never heard of with raw materials from equally alien places. Each object required resources which were mined, farmed, harvested, and sucked out of the Earth. And all of it is impossible without global civilization.

But how did we get from the first nomadic Homo sapiens who expanded out of Africa to this creature that is so technological, interconnected, and almost entirely dependent upon civilization? 

There are many, many answers to this question, and all are woven in upon one another. But, fundamentally, one cannot understand our global civilization without first understanding the role of agriculture. 

A Brief History of Agriculture

What is agriculture? Etymologically, agriculture means the “cultivation of fields” – it is a behavior that began in the Neolithic period when human beings started to plant seeds, tend fields, and domesticate animals as their main source of subsistence rather than hunting and gathering.

The advent of agriculture was not a watershed moment, so the concept of “The Agricultural Revolution” is a bit of a misnomer. As Sheldon Solomon told us, “It couldn't have been that we were hunter-gatherers and someone's like, ‘This is fucking tiresome. Let's just sit here and grow a fucking potato’ — as if you would know how to do that.”

Or how Charles Eisenstein put it:

“Maybe first, they're just following the herds, and over time they come to start protect the herds. First, they're just going to where the green is plentiful at a certain time of year, and over time, they start to take care of that green. And eventually they become farmers over 20 generations.”

Agriculture is something that gradually took hold, popping up in all corners of the world at around the same time, invariably leading to civilization building. There seems to be something inevitable about it, though many peoples, a few still living today, reject the premise whole-cloth. 

Illustration by Simeon Netchev (Source: World History Encyclopedia)

In any case, once we started agriculture, we kept it up. The wild animals we herded started to see a benefit in being in our company, and gradually became dependent upon us. The same goes for the plants, which needed us to remove competitors or help sow their seeds in landscapes which we would till to create fertile grounds for their growth. A relationship between man and nature formed that was different with the emergence of agriculture, but it wouldn’t be until later that agriculture would lead to things like statecraft, rising populations, city centers, and the like, allowing the distance between man and nature to widen. 

It’s well known that the human population exploded when we started deliberately cultivating food. At a certain point, it would be apparent that, save a calamity like a fallen civilization which would invariably lead to a loss in population, people would not be able to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and support the population at its new size. So, as populations grew, the only choice was to expand agriculture further and further afield. Over time, it would make sense to consolidate populations in a city center, and create new systems of labor to keep those people productive and fed. Writing would be invented with the express purpose of cataloging grain and animal stores. Along with writing would come the rise of a new class of people – a military class with the sole purpose of protecting the food stores and fields, while a managerial class would arise in order to account for what was produced, tax it, and divy it up to the people who weren’t peasants. A natural hierarchy emerged.

As Lierre Keith explained: “There's an entire class of people who can devote themselves to war and they can do this because at the bottom of the pyramid are the slaves, and they are the ones doing the backbreaking labor of agriculture, and they create a surplus. And that surplus means that the soldiers don't have to make food. They can just eat and go out and fight. So you have a professional class that's about war and about conquering. And they go out and they get the food and they bring it back into the power center.”

In another word, civilization arose following agriculture. These two things are inextricably entwined, even, and especially today. 

Keith went on:

“So people take up agriculture and an entirely new way of life begins that, that we call civilization. So what is civilization mean? Well, it's people living in densities that require the importation of resources… So the food, the water, the energy have got to come from somewhere else because the city has destroyed its own and built on it. Right? At that point, you're going to have to go out and get that stuff and bring it back in, and that's called imperialism. You're going to have to conquer your neighbors to get it because nobody willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees, their fish — whatever. You're going to have to take it from them, and that is the pattern of civilization… Every single civilization that has existed has done exactly this once they've used up their own stuff —they've destroyed their forest, they've destroyed their soil, they've destroyed their waterways, they've destroyed their coastline. They take it all and then they go and they conquer their neighbors.”

Agriculture led to sedentarization and a concentration of people in one spot, which was a completely novel experiment at the time. Populations rose, and resources became more scarce — fighting ensued, disease spread, and people became more malnourished than they ever had been before. Their diets simplified to a degree that the human body isn’t equipped for — specifically an over-reliance on annual grains, our first cultivars. But the main thing that really started during this time is something which has plagued us ever since — a dark specter that haunts us even in our highly technological agriculture of today: famine.

Famine, widespread disease, and militarism rose with civilization, and what marks the earliest civilizations is their propensity to fall, in many cases from overuse of their soils. 

“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

With the advent of agriculture, humans started to realize the extent to which they could alter their environment. We began to till the soil, and for the first time, we started releasing carbon into the atmosphere in this particular way — a residue from our need to produce. As we became dependent on agriculture, infrequent or unpredictable rains were not going to suffice. Man quickly learned how to create irrigation technology to control water, which we still require today in our modern, conventional agriculture systems.

As time went on, agriculturists spread, conquering the pastoral nomads that lived in the hinterlands around their cities. As they spread, so did their control over the landscape. 

Overtime, agricultural humans would create more and more technology to help them grow more food, always expanding their capacity for production. By the Age of Exploration, a new form of agriculture emerged: monoculture agriculture and plantation agriculture — a totalitarian form of agriculture that persists to this day.  

This form of agriculture was an extension of the imperialist agriculture of the past, this time all across the world in colonies, with the Age of Enlightenment thinking “rationalizing” the entire project. Slavery and indentured servitude was part and parcel of this new agricultural system, which primarily focused on cash crops in the regions in which they grew best. These corporate empires would soon yield new technology such as the cotton gin to be able to increase their efficiency. Science and rationalism directed the creation of  “comparative advantage” meaning that countries started specializing in specific monocultures specifically for trade. Rather than indigenous subsistence agriculture, landscapes were converted into palm plantations or tobacco plantations or corn plantations. The idea was that it was more efficient for countries to specialize in creating a single product that was most suitable for their environment, and then trade it. This allowed for the globalized food system to develop, which promoted collaboration and competition through trade, while depleting the soil, destroying indigenous lifeways, and terraforming the landscape to a degree that had not yet been seen.