Quale agricoltura per un futuro sostenibile?

This is what agriculture is: you take a piece of land and you clear every living thing off it, down to the bacteria. Then you plant it to human use with a tiny handful of species, often endless miles of a single plant like corn, soy, wheat. The animals are killed, often into extinction. They simply have nowhere to go. There were somewhere between 60 and 100 million bison in the United States in 1491. Now there are 350,000 bison, and only 12 to 15,000 of those are pure bison that were not crossbred with domestic cattle. The land held between 425,000 and a million wolves; only 10,000 now remain. Some species of ground-dwelling birds were wiped out before they even had names (European names, that is; I’m sure the indigenous peoples knew what to call them). The North American prairie has been reduced to 2 percent of its original size and the topsoil, once twelve feet deep, can now only be measured in inches. Agriculture is based on annual monocrops, the precise opposite of perennial polycultures, and it does the opposite of what nature does: it destroys topsoil. “The deterioration of the soil is the inescapable injury of agriculture to the environment,” writes Steven Stoll. Or as Tom Paulison puts it, “The planet is getting skinned.” Agriculture is a catastrophe that never allows the land to heal.  And keeping the ground bare involves enormous effort.  Because life wants to live.  The trees keep trying to make a forest, the grasses want their prairie, and the waters ache for a wetland.  Abandon cleared land in New England, and you’ll get pokeberry and brambles, then sumac and birch, then maples and oaks and pines. In five years it’ll be covered in saplings; in ten years they’re too big to cut with a handsaw. This is the earth protecting itself, covering its body in a living armor of green. But its armor isn’t thick enough, not when the assailants are humans. Agriculture is more like a war than anything else, an all-out attack on the processes that make life possible. And agriculture isn’t quite a war because the forests and wetlands and prairies, the rain, the soil, the air, can’t fight back. Agriculture is really more like ethnic cleansing, wiping out the indigenous dwellers so the invaders can take the land. It’s biotic cleansing, biocide. “In the history of civilization … the plowshare has been far more destructive than the sword.” It is not non-violent. It is not sustainable.  And every bite of its food is laden with death.