Food and the Anthropocene: Fertilized plenitude and the need for limits

Man returning from the fields. Tangkou, Anhui, China. July 1980.

One of the principal missions of the anthropocenic venture has been the growing of food. For much of the past ten thousand years, agricultural activity, the cultivation of fields, did not cause catastrophic, irreversible damage on a large scale, although it did provide the economic basis for the emergence of socio-economic classes, and the accumulation of wealth and its concentration in the hands of a few. But, whether or not you take the view that the anthropocene starts with the Industrial Revolution, or the longer view that it begins with the advent of agriculture, we may agree that the overwhelming damage to the living world, the human and the nonhuman, dates back to the mass industrialization of agriculture, of what is now agribusiness. Only recently have we been experiencing the full effect, and then only a foretaste, of the impact of industrialization of the planet on our climate and on the production of food.
Food production, however, is not only hostage to the human-induced vagaries of the climate – such as too little water, or too much at the wrong time, it suffers from another industrialized practice which is the use of fertilizers that are derived from petroleum. Our ancestors would be stumped by the knowledge that modern agriculture is almost wholly dependent on petroleum-derived, non-organic fertilizers. Grain crops around the globe are now entirely depends on these chemicals. The rice in your bowl, the pasta on your plate, the bread in your hand for the vast majority of humanity is dependent on petroleum.
The current penury of petroleum and its derivatives has not only forced up prices for motorists and holiday-makers, it threatens to lead to starvation on a massive scale in the global South. The current crisis has exposed how the industrialization on a massive scale and the abandonment of hitherto conventional agricultural practices, especially in Asia, has left exposed new economic superpowers. It is the price to pay. Yet another impact of globalization on the twenty-first century world.
Should we be nostalgic for disappearing or already disappeared farming practices? Should we regret the "nightsoil" Asian framers spread on their crops? Should we retrospectively minimize the hard labour growing food has represented for many generations of peasants? Probably not, but that doesn't mean there were not other ways to meet the needs of humanity. I say needs rather than desires. And what I shall say next will underline that distinction.
Those in Europe who are now in their late 80s will still remember Second World War rationing. The rationing of meat and eggs and coffee and so on was detested, and yet despite black marketeering and corruption the system worked. It was a system incompatible with the consumer-driven economy we have all become used to. And yet, it is indeed what we need now. We need it to be sure that scarcity is spread more evenly, we need to prevent the over use of natural resources, we need to ultimately prevent starvation and to allow more food to remain where it is produced for local consumption. 
Rationing is part of the imposition of limits about which, following Jacques Ellul (1912-1914) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), I wrote about during the period of the coronavirus. "How can Ellul, Castoriadis and Rensi, together with Zhuangzi, whose philosophies proceed unwittingly in parallel like four ships in the night, help us to understand and imagine how we might retreat from, or even transcend, the cataclysmic moment that humanity is currently experiencing, a moment of which the coronavirus may be seen as a tragic epiphenomenon." 
You may remember that for a while the non-human living world had some respite. There was very little travel, the air was consequently cleaner, insects made a come back, birds were happier, and wild life in general flourished. But as soon as it was "safe to do so" we went back to our old habits with unconscionable abandon. I'll be writing more about the need for limits over the weeks to come. 

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