The literary tradition of pastoral promotes a common misconception that the countryside is a land of vitality and plenty, a place of easy leisure unsullied by the filth and corruption of the city.
It’s a myth that has been progated since the time of the Greek rhapsodes. It’s central to the Christian tradition with its imagery of god as good shepherd. Nowadays we find versions of it in the friendly farmyard animals that populate children’s picture books and scenes of bucolic rural whimsy that dominate Sunday afternoon TV.
For George Monbiot, in his new book Regenesis, the myth is so ancient and engrained in our culture that we are barely conscious of how it shapes our perception of the world. It blinds us to the reality of modern food production, which he convincingly argues is “the world’s major cause of ecological destruction”. So for decades big landlords and Big Agriculture have carried out their civilisation-destroying work with barely a murmur of political opposition.
Monbiot demonstrates how capitalism has developed an astonishingly destructive and insecure food system, dominated by a handful of big landlords and multinationals. Large scale agriculture accounts for two-thirds of food production and runs according to one model: highly-mechanised, high-input, high-waste monocultures of the “Global Standard Farm”.
Agriculture has always involved acts of destruction to other forms of life. The removal of previous ecosystems to grow selected crops for human consumption has always involves some reduction in biodiversity, a bending of the natural world to human will. The Global Standard Farm takes that tendency to a frenzied extreme.
Taking 40% of Earth’s land surface (6% for human-consumed crops, 6% for animal feed and biofuels, 28% for grazing), agriculture is the main driver of habitat destruction. The expansion of livestock farming is responsible for 70% of deforestation.
92% of the worlds grasslands have already been occupied by livestock or crops so most of the current expansion is at the expense of tropical rainforest. If current trends continue “meat production could swallow three million square kilometres of the worlds most biodiverse places in just 35 years”. As biologist E O Wilson once said, the logic here is equivalent to “burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal”.
Biodiverse ecosystems are destroyed in favour of monocultures secured and maintained by the generous and escalating deployment of biocidal agents (chainsaws, guns, drones, pesticides). Large species go extinct as their habitats are destroyed and through bioaccumulation of pesticides. Modern agriculture’s fertilisers, pesticides and prophylactic medicines also destroy the microorganisms and soil creatures that are the basis for all terrestrial life.
The Global Standard Farm creates deserts that require greater and greater applications of the chemicals to maintain yields. For Monbiot: “The implicit belief that this complex and scarely understood system [the soil] can withstand all that we throw at it and continue to support us could be the most dangerous of all the assumptions about the global food system.”
Beyond its assault on the living world, the Global Standard Farm drives a range of other ecological catastrophes. Our methods of food and textile production are draining the world’s rivers and aquifers.
The draining of the Aral Sea, mostly to irrigate water-intensive cotton crops in the arid plains of Central Asia, has been dubbed the greatest ecological catastrophe in human history. The surviving residents live on a land poisoned by salt and toxic dust where average life expectancy is just 51 years old and most babies are born with birth defects. Most of the world’s major aquifers are being drained faster than they can be replenished.
Agriculture both through habitat destruction and factory farming is also the main driver of pandemics. The industrial use of antibiotics (75% of antibiotics in the EU and USA are used on livestock) speeds the evolution of antibiotic resistance, which can undermine the efficacy of modern medicine.
• More on Monbiot’s book next week
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