Earth at Risk by Derrick Jensen

Author:Derrick Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Lierre Keith

“The ruling religion of this planet is called patriarchy. We will not save life on earth until we dismantle masculinity.”

Derrick Jensen: Lierre Keith is a writer and radical feminist activist. She’s the author of two novels as well as The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called the most important ecological book of this generation. She is coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.

Lierre, what is the problem with civilization?

Lierre Keith: Civilization depends on agriculture. So first, you have to understand what agriculture is. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and I mean down to the bacteria, and then you plant it to human use. So agriculture is biotic cleansing.

There are two problems with this. The first one is that it lets the human population grow to really big numbers, because instead of sharing that land with millions of other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. The second problem is that it destroys the soil. And soil is the basis of life; well, land life anyway. We owe our entire existence to six inches of soil and the fact that it rains. So except for the last forty-six remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race has now made itself dependent on an activity that is destroying the planet. This is not a plan with a future. It’s drawdown. And what’s being drawn down is fossil soil, fossil water, and species. Entire ecosystems are being drawn down. But the soil is the point here.

In one season of planting a basic row crop—rice or corn or wheat—you can run through two thousand years of soil. On the first day of the Dust Bowl, there were farms that lost all of their topsoil in one day. So this is drawdown in a huge way. Think of Iraq—this is the very first place that agriculture started. I don’t think anyone in their right mind could call it the Fertile Crescent anymore. Or think of Iran: 94 percent of the land has been degraded. Or China: the dust storms from China are so bad now that they are creating asthma in children in Denver, Colorado. The dust comes across the Pacific, hits the mountains, and comes down. That’s how much dust.

Again, when you destroy soil, you’re destroying the basis of life. And Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer Prize, said that agriculture was the biggest mistake the human race has ever made. Toby Hemenway calls sustainable agriculture an oxymoron, and Richard Manning uses exactly the same sentence. Manning is worth quoting. He writes, “No biologist, or anyone else for that matter, could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies, because there is no other way to sustain it.

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