Our culture*, like all cultures, gives rise to and then
enacts, over time, its own mythologies, its own explanations for the
workings and purpose of the world. Mythologies take many forms, both
from one culture to the next and within each individual culture.
Although people today tend to think of them this way, myths are by
no means the equivalent of lies, or even fictional stories (some
myths even continue to exist despite much evidence to invalidate
them). It's probably safe to say that all myths have some measure of
truth, or some sort of logic, to them. We think of the Roman
pantheon of goddesses and gods as mythology, and most people look on
such beliefs as foolish and simpleminded, but Christianity and
Buddhism are as mythological in their own ways as Roman pantheism
is.
Mythologies aren't restricted to dealing with what people normally
think of as religious matters (divine doings, prescriptions for
living, prophecies, that sort of thing), either. For example,
economic theory is a mythology of its own sort, which explains the
world in its own way based on its own assumptions about the basic
nature of the world and of people.
The particular mythology of our culture that I want to illuminate in
this article is our mythology of food. I'm interested in this food
mythology because its effects have been and continue to be so
destructive. Because of this mythology, we are driving untold
numbers of species to extinction, fundamentally altering the
planet's life support systems, and thundering along a path that can
only end in the collapse of the biosphere. We are, to put it
bluntly, devouring the world.
How do we do this? For some 10,000 years, since the beginning of our
agricultural revolution, the people of our culture have been on a
mission to increase food production every year. We tell ourselves
that we do this for the best of reasons - that we have to do this to
"keep up with" population growth, and to "end world
hunger." We believe that our population will keep growing, like
an irresistible force, whatever we do, so our only choices are to
grow more food every year or see famine sweep the world.
Our cultural mythology argues that this race between population and
food can be won, and must be. We tell ourselves that
if only we eke enough additional food out of the soil, no one will
go hungry. Somehow, though, the hungry don't get fed, there's no
finish line to this race in sight, and utopia remains ever out of
reach.
So we're not getting what we say we're after. What are we getting
instead? The ABCs of ecology tell us what happens when a
population's food supply increases: the population increases in
response. This has been clearly observed with many species, but few
have risked making the observation that humans are not an exception
(though we are a more complicated example). Does our history bear
this out?
It's estimated that, at the time of our agricultural revolution
(again, roughly 10,000 years ago), there were about ten million
humans on Earth, a tiny percentage of whom were our cultural
ancestors, the first revolutionaries of our agricultural revolution.
Taking into consideration that the human genus evolved into
existence some 3-5 million years earlier, we can see that population
growth had been proceeding very slowly.
When Columbus initiated the European invasion of these lands (1492,
Gregorian-Christian Calendar), there are estimated to have been some
500 million humans alive. It took millions of years to reach a
population of 10 million, yet only about another 9,500 to multiply
that by 50. This awesome spurt of growth, however, was only
foreplay. There were two more revolutions to come.
Our culture's industrial revolution is usually said to have begun
about 1760. It led to many things, but the most important
consequence has been its impact on food production. The new energy
sources and technological innovations in agricultural machinery it
produced dramatically increased the food supply yet again.
Unsurprisingly, our population growth illustrates the consequences.
The world's human population is estimated to have reached one
billion in the early 1800s, having taken a bit over three centuries
to double. It doubled again in just over a century, reaching two
billion around 1930. See the acceleration in process?
As the population was on its way to doubling again, another
revolution, commonly called the "green" revolution, began
in the 1940s. It introduced synthetic fertilizers and biocides
(things which kill life, including insecticides, herbicides and
fungicides), greatly expanded irrigation, and developed
higher-yielding, hybrid varieties of the world's major food crops.
And the population? In 1960, we reached three billion, just some
three decades after the second billion. Fourteen years later, in
1974, we reached 4 billion. Thirteen years later, in 1987, we hit 5
billion. It's estimated that we reached the six billion mark in
October of last year, after just 12 years. Most importantly, there
is no end to this growth in sight.
I want to leave you with an indelible image of what this growth has
meant to the world. The biosphere can only support so much biomass,
or living matter. Ten thousand years ago, prior to our agricultural
revolution, the percentage of the world's biomass that existed as
humans was small. The following millennia of population growth,
however, have been a period of rapid and violent conversion, turning
biomass that once was uncountable plants and animals into humans,
and driving many species to extinction.
Put simply, as ever more of the world's biomass becomes humans (plus
our food and other biomass-derived resources), ever less of it can
be anything else. Inevitably, then, our population growth is a
direct attack on the diversity of life. We are literally devouring
the incredible biodiversity of the world, which took billions of
years to evolve.
This process cannot continue, though. The diversity of life that is
the world doesn't exist because it's interesting, or nice to look
at. It exists because it works for the whole, because diversity in
the community of life helps the entire community to survive. If any
one species monopolizes too much of the world's biomass, the
well-being of the whole community is threatened.
Our culture's lifestyle is founded on growth - growth of our
population, our agriculture and our economy. Yet the biosphere is
undeniably a finite system, capable of supporting only so much
biomass and requiring biodiversity to function in a way that
supports human life. We literally cannot live without it.
If we want to continue to live, we must abandon our mythology of
food, must finally understand that we aren't racing to grow enough
food to keep up with population growth but that our drive to grow
more food every year fuels our population growth. People
are made from food, so you can't have more people if you don't
first have more food to make them.
We must walk away from the race between population and food,
recognizing that it can never be won, and abandon growth as a
survival strategy. We must, in other words, transform our culture
into a fundamentally different beast before we devour the world and
ourselves.
*Culture is an extremely flexible word, able to be
stretched to encompass many different kinds of human groups both
large and small. In this context, I’m grouping the folks I refer
to as “our culture” together because of their common lifestyle
based on growth, farming and settlement. Another characteristic the
people of our culture share is that they behave, by and large, as
though the world was made for humans, and humans were made to
conquer and rule - or “steward” - it (although more and more
people seem to be having misgivings about this behavior). Our
culture also has a long, dark history of destroying other cultures,
a history that is being added to as I type.
To be sure, many other customs and practices differ among the people
I’ve grouped together, but these common characteristics unite them
and differentiate them from the remaining other cultures. Though our
culture has grown (through its own population increase and
assimilation) to include well over 99% of the present world
population, there still are people who live outside it. This proves
that it’s possible to live other ways, ways that don’t
devour the world, and that literal living proof means there’s hope
for the future.
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