We think we’ve been earnestly increasing our crop yields using industrialized agriculture in order to feed our burgeoning human population. Daniel Quinn says it’s the other way around.
Populations grow because we produce more food. And yet the starving around the world are still starving. We’re growing the starving population also. That’s how badly human civilization has misinterpreted its survival requirements.
All of these assertions require citations to sources of course. I’ll get them here for you eventually, not today.
For now I’ll just add that we’ve developed a relentless agri-business machine that only knows how to follow the industrial model of continually increased production.
Never mind that yields are falling, our inherited soil-nutrient base is depleted, our seed archive is precarious, and the fossil fuels that drive it all are becoming unaffordable.
Never mind that it’s all for nothing, that this whole unsustainable machine doesn’t reach to the starving, that it externalizes our biofuel costs to cause famine in the third world, while the hungry die from complete lack of nutrition, and the well-fed, by the greatest irony of all, get sick and die of chronic illness brought about by today’s civilized form of malnutrition.
