The World is a Factory Farm
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#34 Richard Manning — How Agriculture Has Highjacked Civilization
In our latest podcast, we interviewed author, journalist, and hunter Richard Manning. Richard’s work is powerful, eyeing industrial civilization with skepticism and curiosity. He asks the questions we all ought to be asking: how did we get here? And why?
His book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Highjacked Civilization is a fantastic recounting of the history of agriculture and how it is being implemented today. We talk about the problems of agriculture broadly, including processed foods, CAFO meat farming, and the squandering of America's grasslands for biofuels, hunting, degrowth through regenerative food systems, the “re-wilding” of the self, and the problems of carbon fundamentalism.
When You See the World has Become a Factory Farm…
- An Update from Jake and Maren
When seen from a bird’s eye view, it’s plain that this culture has terraformed every inch of the Earth for our consumption. The industrialization of life is nearly complete – we are reaching the edge of what can be reduced, simplified, and churned into commodities.
We are incredibly fortunate to be able to travel the world and share these stories with you all. Traveling itself is a gift, and when there is a sincere mission behind it, everyday feels like reconnaissance: an exploration to discover what goes unseen, what is taken for granted.
This film has aimed to seek to understand the world around us to the best of our abilities and to analyze and ascertain the meaning behind what we generally conceive of as mundane. Whether this includes flying over eastern England and seeing nothing but agricultural fields for miles and miles…
… or going to the Europoort Rotterdam to see one of the largest industrial zones in the world, and certainly in Europe…
… or seeing entire cities that were built off the backs and blood of their conquered colonies…
…or driving through the world’s “greenest country,” you can begin to peer into the cavernous gears of the industrial Machine a bit deeper.
It is a bit painful to travel and look specifically for industry, destroyed landscapes, and buildings made from the blood of colonialism. We’ve spent the past two years stripping the idealistic neoliberal veneer off of our worldview, and sometimes it’s a bit heartbreaking to see things as they really are. Instead of assuming that the march of progress and all of its shiny promises are real, we are asking questions like, is farmed Norwegian salmon really a solution to overfishing? And as you can see, once that question is asked, it goes deeper than you might have originally thought.
You start to wonder, what happens when these 3 million fish aren’t allowed to participate in this particular ecosystem?
What happens is that the concentration of salmon is a perfect feeding ground for sea lice. Technologists and scientists breed the salmon to be resistant to sea lice through genetics and vaccinations, but the sea lice have proliferated and gotten used to this food source, so where do they go? To wild salmon. Salmon farming has been integral to damaging wild stocks of fish, which means that not only do these 3 million fish not contribute their miraculous, life-giving lifecycle to this ecosystem, the industrialization of their existence prevents the free fish from nourishing the fjords with their lives.
Salmon are a keystone species. They keep the forest alive. Disrupt the lifecycle of the salmon, you disrupt the functionality of the entire web of life around it. This moment from the film Artifishal describes the process beautifully, and we would recommend you watch the whole film as well to understand the depth of this problem.
Not to mention, their feed is shipped over 6,000 miles from soy farms in Brazil using cargo ships (some of which produce more GHGs than 50 million cars.) We don’t really love the metric of CO2 because it leaves so much pollution and destruction out, but for the purpose of illustration, the global fleet of around 5,500 cargo ships could equal the greenhouse gas emissions of more than 275 billion cars. Currently, there are only around 1.5 billion cars in the world. It’s a bit crazy to wrap your head around, no? But yeah, you’re the problem. Go buy a Tesla.
Not to mention the problem of bilge dumping which is the process of cargo ships illegally dumping toxic engine waste in the oceans, suffocating marine life on an incomprehensible scale. Check out this active map to see just how many of these vessels are in the oceans right now (they are in green). This video does an amazing job breaking down the problem of bilge dumping, and the fact that these estimates are conservative shows the scale of this largely unreported activity is:
Becoming disenchanted with the story of progress removes the obstructions from the path forward. You start to ask yourself, does it make sense for the Netherlands to cover 90 square miles of their land in greenhouses, mainly producing products for export like tomatoes and flowers?
When you see these old Dutch houses surrounded by endless white walls, you start to wonder, how did it feel to be swallowed up and encased by “progress” like this? How did it feel to watch those pastures disappear and turn into steel all around you? Rather than taking for granted what is, you start to wonder what was, and what could be.
Only until you see something in its wholeness can you unlock its potential. The industrialization of life is absolute, from destroying reindeer habitat to grow tree farms in Sweden to maintain the growth of the lumber industry to covering the earth in fertilizer-dependent industrial agriculture and everything in between.
This specific language is what is most important – industrialization. Humans consuming what the landscape offers is not inherently a problem, just as it isn’t a problem for a beaver to dam a river. What has led us to this perilous edge is the idea that the living world is ours to control, rather than to be in relationship with. The insatiable growth of the industrial economy, the interconnectedness of our food systems and resource bases have all caused a phantom carrying capacity. The same economy that conscripts indentured servants around the world to keep it running enslaves us all to some extent— we are all cogs in the industrial machine.
We’re all part of the same, massive factory farm.
Every landscape we’ve visited has more than enough space to fend for itself, feed itself, clothe and house itself, but GDP and allure of growth keeps everyone producing and consuming ad infinitum.
Far in the north, it’s easy to see that this land is different, that a clash of cultures is present. The tundra has not been conquered, at least not completely. The indigenous Sámi are still here, even though this culture has tried to push them out through assimilation and denial of their way of life. The reindeer and their herders are still here, but their way of life is being threatened as well — a conversation for another time.
Despite this, most of the food available in restaurants up here is obviously not from this landscape. Reindeer, salmon, and moose are from this landscape, but finding these foods is far more challenging than buying chicken, beef, bread, or vegetables that surely weren’t grown here, especially at a time when the ground is still covered in snow. Why?
The entire world has bought into this globalized food system and with it, a notion that it’s every country’s responsibility to “feed the world” as a way to masquerade good intentions while growing markets. With such good intentions, we’ll justify the destruction of the fjords. We’ll justify the endless greenhouses. We’ll justify turning England’s grasslands into wheat and corn fields.
We’ll justify turning the world into a factory farm.
We never ask ourselves, is it working? Is Norwegian salmon really “feeding the world”? Does the world need to eat Norwegian salmon, or should people eat what their landscape can provide them? Does the world need tomatoes from Holland produced in energy intensive vertical farms and greenhouses, or can people grow them on their porch? Does the world need to be fed by England, or can England just feed itself?
We know that “feeding the world” is a marketing scheme, because the countries around the world that are supposedly being “fed” by the West are exporting their crops to “feed the world” as well. The difference is, many of them are starving. Like everything in an industrial wasteland, it’s about money. The good intentions are a smoke-screen for the fact that people still go hungry and landscapes are still destroyed.
If we don’t ask what underpins the assumption that we need to “feed the world” we also won’t ask other questions. Like, why is it “unsustainable” and “releasing too much carbon” for Liberians to burn trees for cooking and warming their homes, but when Berlin imports their trees to burn in biomass facilities, it’s “renewable energy”?
Again, it’s money. Liberian trees represent “income generation” for the people, even though these people are underpaid and exploited for the West to maintain its consumption, and for Germany to keep itself at the top of the “green” hierarchy. So goes the story of civilization. The perversion of this story as part of a “sustainable” future is just the next round of cons to distract us from solutions or conscript us into the global, colonial enterprise. It’s also a latent (and racist) belief that so-called “civilized” behavior is better than so-called “primitive” behavior, regardless of how horrifically destructive that “civilized” behavior is.
As explained in this article about Liberian trees being exported to Germany, instead of Liberia having the sovereignty to decide their own path forward into sustainability:
“… the pretext of the energy crisis and climate change are being used to allow corporations to gain greater control over land, water, biodiversity, agriculture… and life.”
We were recently interviewed by our friend, Derrick Weston, for his wonderful podcast, Food and Faith Podcast. It can be found on Podbean or Apple Podcasts. We were so grateful to have this discussion with Derrick, talking about death, spirituality, belonging, and so many other incredibly personal and deep topics. We look forward to interviewing Derrick in the near future as well!
Also, the Savory Institute released the short film we made for their Sweden Hub, Fjällbete. As you’ll see, this landscape and its abundance is magical. There is so much potential in regenerating the Earth, communities, and ourselves. In a time when the world has become a factory farm, we hope you’ll see this and know that it’s not too late. We don’t have to settle for this factory civilization. You can see the full video here:
As always, if you like what we are doing, please share this post with your friends and help us get the word out about this project! If you would like to support the project financially and join our Patreon community, please become a patron! You can join our Discord community for as little as $1 a month and meet so many like-minded people who care about these topics as much as we do.
Grim, but undeniable. Thanks for the writing.
Hey y’all, thanks for putting this out here. It’s helpful to see this process of disenchantment from another perspective, especially in a culture that suppresses it. I’m still trying to figure out what the “path forward”, which you write about, looks like. I’m not sure how, but many of our lives need changed greatly if we’re to re-wild ourselves. Cheers to another week. Best!