KICK IT OVER fall 1994
scanned article
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Agriculture is a form of culture. The cultivation of food is a social and
cultural phenomenon unique to humanity. Among animals, anything that
could re motely be described as food cultivation appear ephemerally, if
at all; and even among humans, agriculture developed little more than
ten thousand years ago. Yet, in an epoch when food cultivation is
reduced to a mere indus trial technique, it becomes especially important
to dwell on the cultural implications of "modern" agriculture-to indi
cate their impact not only on public health, but also on hu manity's
relationship to nature and the relationship of hu man to human.
The contrast between early and modern agricultural practices is dramatic.
Indeed, it would be very difficult to understand the one through the
vision of the other, to rec ognize that they are united by any kind of
cultural continuity. Nor can we ascribe this contrast merely to
differences in technology. Our agricultural epoch-a distinctly capitalistic
one-envisions food cultivation as a business enterprise to be operated
strictly for the purpose of generating profit in a market economy. From
this standpoint, land is an alienable commodity called "real estate," soil a
"natural resource," and food an exchange value that is bought and sold
impersonally through a medium called "money." Agriculture, in effect,
differs no more from any branch of industry than does steelmaking or
automobile production. In fact, to the degree that food cultivation is
affected by non-industrial factors such as climatic and seasonal changes,
it lacks the exactness that marks a truly "rational" and scientifically
managed operation. And, lest these natural factors elude bourgeois
manipulation, they too are the objects of speculation in future markets
and between middlemen in the circuit from farm to retail outlet.
In this impersonal domain of food production, it is not surprising to find
that a "farmer" often turns out to be an airplane pilot who dusts crops
with pesticides, a chemist who treats soil as a lifeless repository for
inorganic compounds, an operator of immense agricultural machines
who is more familiar with engines than botany, and perhaps most
decisively, a financier whose knowledge of land may be less than that of
an urban cab driver. Food, in turn, reaches the consumer in containers
and in forms so highly modified and denatured as to bear scant
resemblance to the original. In the modern, glistening supermarket, the
buyer walks dreamily through a spectacle of packaged materials in which
the pictures of plants, meat, and dairy foods replace the life forms from
which they are derived. The fetish assumes the form of the real
phenomenon. Here, the individual's relationship to one of the most
intimate of natural experiences-the nutriments indispensable to life-is
divorced from its roots in the totality of nature. Vegetables, fruit,
cereals, dairy foods and meat lose their identity as organic realities and
often acquire the name of the corporate enterprise that produces them.
The "Big Mac" and the "Swift Sausage" no longer convey even the
faintest notion that a living creature was painfully butchered to provide
the consumer with that food.
This denatured outlook stands sharply at odds with an earlier animistic
sensibility that viewed land as an inalienable, almost sacred domain,
food cultivation as a spiritual activity, and food consumption as a
hallowed social ritual. The Cayuses of the Northwest were not unique in
listening to the ground, for the "Great Spirit," in the words of a Cayuse
chief, "Appointed the roots to feed the Indians on."l The ground lived,
and its voice had to be heeded. Indeed, this vision may have been a
cultural obstacle to the spread of food cultivation; there are few
statements of the hunter against agriculture that are more moving than
Smohalla's memorable remarks: "You ask me to plough the ground.
Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? Then when I die she will
not take me to her bosom to rest."2
When agriculture did emerge, it clearly perpetuated the hunter's
animistic sensibility. The wealth of mythic narrative that surrounds food
cultivation is testimony to an enchanted world brimming with life,
purpose and spirituality. Ludwig Feuerbach's notion of God as the
projection of man omits the extent to which early man is stamped by the
imprint of the natural world and, in this sense, is an extension or
projection of it. To say that early humanity lived in "partnership" with
this world tends to understate the case; humanity lived as part of this
world-not beside it or above it.
Because the soil was alive, indeed the mother of life, to cultivate it was a
sacred act that required invocatory and appeasing rituals. Virtually every
aspect of the agricultural procedure had its sanctifying dimension, from
preparing a tilth to harvesting a crop. The harvest itself was blessed, and
to "break bread" was at once a domestic ritual that daily affirmed the
solidarity of kinfolk as well as an act of hospitable pacification between
the stranger and the community. We still seal a bargain with a drink or
celebrate an important event with a feast. To fell a tree or kill an animal
required appeasing rites, which acknowledged that life inhered in these
beings and that this life partook of a sacred constellation of phenomena.
Naive as the myths and many of these practices may seem to the modern
mind, they reflect a truth about the agricultural situation. After having
lost contact with this "prescientific" sensibility-at great cost to the
fertility of the land and to its ecological balance-we now know that soil
is very much alive; that it has its health, its dynamic equilibrium, and a
complexity comparable to that of any living community. Not that the
details that enter into this knowledge ?re new; rather, we are aware of
them in a new and holistic way. As recently as the early 1 960s,
American agronomy generally viewed soil as a medium in which living
organisms were largely extraneous to the chemical management of food
cultivation. Having saturated the soil with nitrates, insecticides,
herbicides, and an appalling variety of toxic compounds, we have
become the victims of a new type of pollution that could well be called
"soil pollution." These toxins are the hidden additives to the dinner table,
the unseen spectres that return to us as the residual products of our
exploitative attitude toward the natural world. No less significantly, we
have gravely damaged soil in vast areas of the earth and reduced it to the
simplified image of the modern scientific viewpoint. The animal and
plant life so essential to the development of a nutritive, friable soil is
diminished, and in many places approaches the sterility of impoverished,
desert-like sand.
By contrast, early agriculture, despite its imaginary aspects, defined
humanity's relationship to nature within sound ecological parameters. As
Edward Hyams observes, the attitude of people and their culture is as
much a part of their technical equipment as are the implements they
employ. If the "axe was only the physical tool which ancient man used to
cut down trees" and the "intellectual tool enabled him to swing his axe"
effectively, "what of the spiritual tool?" This "tool" is the "member of
the trinity of tools which enables people to control and check their
actions by reference to the 'feeling' which they possess for the
consequences of the changes they make in their environments."
Accordingly, tree-felling would have been limited by their state of mind
as early people "believed that trees had souls and were worshipful, and
they associated certain gods with certain trees. Osiris with acacia; Apollo
with oak and apple. The temples of many primitive peoples were
groves...." If the mythical aspects of this mentality are evident enough,
the fact remains that the mentality as such '"was immensely valuable to
the soil community and therefore, in the long run, to man. It meant that
no trees would be wantonly felled, but only when it was absolutely
necessary, and then to the accompaniment of propritiatory rites which it-
they did nothing else, served constantly to remind tree-fellers that they
were doing dangerous and important work...."3 One may add that, if
culture be regarded as a "tool," a mere shift in emphasis would easily
make it-possible to regard tools as of culture. This different emphasis
comes closer to what Hyams is trying to say than does his own
formulation. In fact, what uniquely marks the bourgeois mentality is the
debasement of art, values, and rationality to mere tools-a mentality that
has even infiltrated the radical critique of capitalism if one is to judge
from the tenor of the Marxian literature that abounds today.
A radical approach to agriculture seeks to transcend the prevailing
instrumentalist approach that views food cultivation merely as a "human
technique" opposed to "natural resources." This radical approach is
literally ecological, in the strict sense that the land is viewed as an oikos
- a home. Land is neither a "resource" nor a "tool," but the oikos of
myriad kinds of bacteria, fungi, insects, earthworms, and small
mammals. If hunting leaves this oikos essentially undisturbed,
agriculture by contrast affects it profoundly and makes humanity an
integral part of it. Human beings no longer indirectly affect the soil; they
intervene into its food webs and biogeochemical cycles directly and
immediately.
Conversely, it becomes very difficult to understand human social
institutions without referring to the prevailing agricultural practices of a
historical period and, ultimately, to the soil situation to which they
apply. Hyams's description of every human community as a "soil
community" is unerring; historically, soil types and agrarian
technological changes played a major, often decisive, role in determining
whether the land would be worked cooperadvely or individualistically -
whether in a conciliatory manner or an exploitative one - and this, in
turn, profoundly affected the prevailing system of social relations. The
highly centralized empires of the ancient world were clearly fostered by
the irrigation works required for arid regions of the Near East; the co-
operative medieval village, by the openfield strip system and the
moldboard plough. Lynn White, Jr., in fact, roots the Western coercive
attitude- towards nature as far back as Carolingian times, with the
ascendancy of the heavy European plough and the consequent tendency
to allot land to peasants not according to their family subsistence needs
but "in proportion to their contribution to the ploughteam."4 He finds
this changing attitude reflected in Charlemagne's efforts to rename the
months according to labour responsibilities, thereby revealing an
emphasis on work rather than on nature or deities. "The old Roman
calendars had occasionally shown genre scenes in human activity, but the
dominant tradition (which continued in Byzantium) was to depict the
months as passive personifications bearing symbols of attributes. The
new Carolingian calendars, which set the pattern for the Middle Ages,
are very different: they show a coercive attitude towards natural
resources. They are definitely northern in origin; for the olive, which
loomed so large in the Roman cycles, has now vanished. The pictures
change to scenes of ploughing, harvesting, wood-chopping, people
knocking down acorns for the pigs, pig-slaughtering. Man and nature are
now two things, and man is master."5
Yet not until we come to the modern capitalist era do humanity and
nature separate as almost complete foes, and the "mastery" by human
over the natural world assumes the form of harsh domination, not
merely hierarchical classification. The rupture of the most vestigial
corporate ties that once united clansfolk, guild-members, and the
community of the polis into a nexus of mutual aid; the reduction of
everyone to an antagonistic buyer or seller- the rule of competition and
egotism in every arena of economic and social life -all of this completely
dissolves any sense of community whether with nature or in society. The
traditional assumption that community is the authentic locus of life
fades so completely from human consciousness that it ceases to exercise
any relevance to the human condition. The new starting point for
forming a conception of society or of the psyche is the isolated,
atomized person fending for him- or herself in a competitive jungle. The
disastrous consequences of this outlook toward nature and society are
evident enough in a world burdened by explosive social antagonisms,
ecological simplification, and widespread pollution.
*Radical agriculture seeks to restore humanity's sense of community:
first, @y giving full recognition to the soil as an ecosystem, a biotic
community; and second, by viewing agriculture as the activity of a
natural human community, a rural society and culture*. Indeed,
agriculture becomes the practical, day-to-day interface of soil and human
communities, the means by which both meet and blend. Such a meeting
and blending involves several key presuppositions. The most obvious of
these is that humanity is part of the natural world, not above it as
"master" or "lord." Undeniably, human consciousness is unique in its
scope and insight, but uniqueness is no warrant for domination and
exploitation. Radical agriculture, in this respect, accepts the ecological
precept that variety does not have to be structured along hierarchical
lines as we tend to do under the influence of hierarchical society. Things
and relations that patently benefit the biosphere must be valued for
patently benefit the biosphere must be valued for their own sake, each
unique in its own way and contributory to the whole-not one above or
below the other and fair game for domination.
Variety, in both society and agriculture, far from being constrained, must
be promoted as a positive value. We are now only too familiar with the
fact that the more simplified an ecosystem-and, in agriculture, the more
limited the variety of domesticated stocks involved- the more likely is
the ecosystem to break down. The more complex the food webs, the
more stable the biotic structure. This insight, which we have gained at so
costly an expense to the biosphere and to ourselves, merely reflects the
age-old thrust of evolution. The advance of the biotic world consists
primarily of the differentiation, colonization and growing web of
interdependence of life-forms on an inorganic planet-a
long process that has remade the atmosphere and landscape along lines
that are hospitable for complex and increasingly intelligent organisms.
The most disastrous aspect of prevailing agricultural methodologies,
with their emphasis on monoculture, crop hybrids, and chemicals, has
been the simplification they have introduced into food cultivation-a
simplification that occurs on such a global scale that it may well throw
back the planet to an evolutionary stage where it could support only
simpler forms of life.
Radical agriculture's respect for variety implies a respect for the
complexity of a balanced agricultural situation: the innumerable factors
that influence plant nutrition and well-being; the diversified soil
relations that exist from area to area- the complex interplay between
climatic, geological and biotic factors that make for the differences
between one tract of land and another; and the variety of ways in which
human cultures react to these differences. Accordingly, the radical
agriculturist sees agriculture not only as science but also as art. The food
cultivator must live on intimate terms with a given area of land and
develop a sensitivity for its special needs-needs that no textbook
approach can possibly encompass. The food cultivator must be part of a
"soil community" in the very meaningful sense that she or he belongs to
a unique biotic system, as well as to a given social system.
Yet to deal with these issues merely in terms of technique would be a
scant improvement over the approach that prevails today in agriculture.
To be a technical connoisseur of an "organic" approach to agriculture is
no better than to be a mere practitioner of a chemical approach. We do
not become "organic farmers" merely by culling the latest magazines and
manuals in this area, any more than we become healthy by consuming
"organic" foods acquired from the newest suburban supermarket. What
basically separates the organic approach from the synthetic is the overall
attitude and praxis the food cultivator brings to the natural world as a
whole. At a time when organic foods and environmentalism have
become highly fashionable, it may be well to distinguish the ecological
outlook of radical agriculture from the crude "environmentalism" that is
currently so widespread. Environmentalism sees the natural world
merely as a habitat that must be engineered with minimal pollution to
suit society's "needs," however irrational or synthetic these needs may be.
A truly ecological outlook, by contrast, sees the biotic world as a
holistic unity of which humanity is a part. Accordingly, in this world,
human needs must be integrated with those of the biosphere if the human
species is to survive. This integration, as we have already seen, involves
a profound respect for natural variety, for the complexity of natural
processes and relations, and for the cultivation of a mutualistic attitude
toward the biosphere. Radical agriculture, in short, implies not merely
new techniques in food cultivation, but a new non-Promethean
sensibility toward land and society as a whole.
FREEDOM PRESS
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