The land of the abused and the home of the misused

            “Fatal Harvest” is a collection of essays from prominent ecological thinkers and focuses on dispelling the disinformation that colossal “agribusiness” companies have fed the American public since the early 70s.  Unfortunately, it seems as though the mentality of the early American pioneers of the 1800s still exists in the contemporary world:  the idea of man the conquer of nature.  The environmental conservation movement did not begin in America until the early 20^th century, and was led by the renowned conservationists of the day:  John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold and many more.  Aldo Leopold revolutionized the way in which the average American viewed the environment through his book “A Sand County Almanac.”  Leopold was in many ways ahead of his time, and contemporary readers still cite his book when faced with the large amount of destruction made by Industrialized Agriculture.  For example, “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  However, industrialized agriculture has obviously not read his book and continue to muck up the environment as “man the conquer.”  They lace their good-intentioned goals with counterproductive measures that only serve to increase prices and scar the environment all so the maximum profit can be achieved. 

            One particular set of essays in “Fatal Harvest” tells of the “Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture,” and the fifth myth is that “Industrial food offers more choices.”  Although this is a tactic used by the gigantic “Agribusiness” in order to promote its agenda, this idea is simply a grand fabrication.  The truth of the matter is quite alarming because, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), “we have lost nearly 93 percent of lettuce, over 96 percent of sweet corn, about 95 percent of tomatoes, and almost 98 percent of asparagus varieties.”  From a biological standpoint, these numbers are horrifying.  The higher amount of given variation a population of organisms have (plants or animals), the better adapted that those organisms will be in the face of a new disease developing.  Periodically in history, certain biological events occur that favor a type of bacteria to explode in prevalence; the only manner in which the organisms on this planet are able to survive such catastrophic epidemics is through the complex machinery of our genetic diversity.  When the genetic diversity is decreased to such levels that have already happened then that is a recipe for disaster because all it would take for a mass crop failure to occur would be for a deadly bacterium to develop and mutate to the point to where we are unable to stop it before it completely decimates our food supply.  I feel as though so many people have tried to extract as much wealth as possible from the American system without regard for any of the negative ramifications that could follow and now we are spiraling out of control into a nosedive towards the ground.  Even as horrible as it is to say, I feel that the only way in which we will change our collective societal mind will be after a major catastrophe occurs; the type of tragedy that will be written in the history books as the day in which our ignorance of the environment finally came back to haunt us.  Mother Nature’s vengeance shall come back in full fury, and people of like mind to John Muir and Aldo Leopold will only be there to witness the destruction that they have foreseen for decades.  

Andrew Kimbrell (Ed.). Fatal Harvest:  The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Washington DC:  Island Press, 2002.