Natural Harmony

"The United Nations now estimates that more than 20 per cent of the Earth’s cultivated soils have been significantly degraded, while in the United States, 28 per cent of cropland is eroding at an unsustainable rate. Research shows that of all human activities, agriculture is the biggest threat to biodiversity and ecosystems. Before humans invented agriculture, 95 per cent of the Earth’s ice-free surface was covered by diverse mixtures of perennial plants: forests, prairies, wetlands, et cetera. Today, nearly 40 per cent of that land is devoted to agriculture, most of it sown to uniform stands of annual crops that die each season after harvest and must be re-sown. That “clearcutting” at the soil surface and regular die-out of the roots below makes it impossible for healthy, durable, resilient ecosystems to become established either above or below the surface. Soil erosion, water contamination, and biodiversity loss are the inevitable result. Landscapes can be compelled to produce harvests of annual monocultures for years or decades, sometimes centuries, but it requires hauling in nutrients, churning the soil, killing weeds, battling pests, and in many places irrigating. And even those heroic efforts cannot sustain soils in the long term.

Eating well-produced food will improve our own health, but not necessarily the health of the Earth’s soils. On the 1.5 billion hectares of cropland around the globe where our staple foods are grown, the profits of agribusiness and the corporate food industry always get fed first. Those profits depend primarily on a flood of cheap grain, produce, meat, and milk made possible by the exploitation of soil and human labour. And in the past few decades, a variety of industries - heavy equipment, chemicals, food processing, packaging, transport, advertising, restaurant chains, and others - have grown as appendages on agriculture. In the United States, the dollar outputs of those food-related industries are expanding at two to four times the rate of farming's output. That is creating even more powerful constituencies for policies and practices that turn soil into profit.

We need to begin developing the methods of a new, more resilient agriculture by using the highly integrated diversity of natural ecosystems as a model. First, we will have to develop perennial grain crops through breeding. The annual grain crops that perennials will replace now occupy three-fourths of the world’s cropland. Consumer campaigns promoting more eco-friendly food tend to feature fresh produce, sometimes exclusively. That makes sense in a way. Corporate production of fruits and vegetables is especially hard on human workers, ecosystems, and the atmosphere. But those foods account for less than seven per cent of US cropland, and a similar share worldwide. Even if we all ate as much of those foods as we should, the bulk of agricultural soils would still be covered, as they are today, by crops of cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds, not carrots or cucumbers. To save those soils in the long term, we will need perennial counterparts to those staple crops. In the past few years, plant breeders, geneticists, ecologists, and agronomists in the United States, Canada, China, Nepal, and Australia have begun developing perennial versions of wheat, rice, sorghum, sunflower, and other major grain crops, along with ecologically sound, multispecies cropping systems in which to grow them. The goal is to replace annual grain monocultures worldwide with polycultures of perennial grains and other perennial species. That will require, as a first step, a rapid expansion of such breeding efforts.

The transformation of agriculture, therefore, will require two parallel efforts, one aimed at putting a halt to the ravages of industrial farming and the other at developing the perennial farm ecosystems of the future."

Stan Cox, scientist at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas writing in Al Jazeera

Marx's comments upon the environment is often over-looked and misinterpreted. For Marx and Engels, people and nature are not “two separate ‘things’”. Marx was deeply concerned with capitalism’s tendency toward “sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the labourer.” Marx’s projection of communal land does not connote a right of “owners” to unrestricted use based on “possession.” Rather, like all communal property, it confers the right to responsibly utilize the land as a condition of free human development. As Marx says, the association treats “the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.”

Engels envisions the future society as one in which people will “not only feel but also know their oneness with nature.” Marx defines communism as “the unity of being of man with nature.” Marx and Engels envision a “real human freedom” based on “an existence in harmony with the established laws of nature.”