“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Agrilogistics: Quick and Dirty

Someone wanted a brief-ish, simpl-ish explanation. The trouble with listening to explanations in talks is that it's hard to hold on to the concepts as they flit past. And in particular I tend to machine gun them out like some kind of mad scholar version of LTJ Bukem.

So:

An agricultural program so successful that it now dominates agricultural techniques planet-wide. It arose in the Fertile Crescent 12 000 years ago. Toxic from the beginning to humans and other lifeforms, and now responsible for a huge amount of global warming. It led to industry, the other huge global warming factor. Though toxic, it has been wildly successful, because the program is even more compelling than Candy Crush. It operates blindly, just like a computer program. It promises to eliminate anxiety and contradiction--social, physical and ontological--by establishing thin rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds, and by reducing existence to sheer quantity. Agrilogistics is the smoking gun behind the (literally) smoking gun responsible for the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.

I'm sure I will explain it better in Dark Ecology : )

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