At the height of the slave trade in 1785, an English divinity student, Thomas Clarkson, won a Latin essay contest considering the question, “Is it lawful to enslave the un-consenting?”
Few read it. Fewer took it seriously. But Clarkson, along with a small band of similarly inspired people, went to work, designing and executing a set of coordinated tactics to reveal the atrocities of legal slavery in the systems that brought sugar to British tables.
Wherever he went, Clarkson carried a wooden box filled with the slaver’s tools – iron handcuffs, shackles, thumb-screws, branding irons, and instruments for forcing open slaves’ jaws. Clarkson’s moment of grace changed his course. Clarkson’s box showed consumers the intolerable violence in their sugar bowls.
The violence that we do to our planet’s soils, while by no means a crime comparable to the brutality of chattel slavery, is inseparably tied to our modern economic system, just as slavery was. And the mounting evidence of the violence we are doing to our soils is as obvious as the shackles in Thomas Clarkson’s box.
The extractive farming methods that have been used since World War II to drive massive increases in agricultural yields and human population have brought our species and planet […]
The soil depletion mentioned in the article has been caused by our efforts to increase agricultural yields with the use of chemicals. The “Green Revolution” began in the 1930s, and at that time no one foresaw the consequences. At this point the consequences are well documented, but corporate profits depend on continued use of these chemicals. And with their soil destroyed, farmers face a years-long process of weaning themselves off those chemicals and back to profitability. Like it or not, this can and must come to pass; the Green Revolution, like any other technology or business cycle, has a bell curve and is now well past its apex. Many (likely most) industrial agricultural chemicals are fossil fuel based (e.g nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides) and with the fossil fuel industry in decline the ag chemical industry – and thus our entire food chain – faces challenging times ahead.
Secondly, Clarkson saw horrors in the modern agriculture trade of his day and asked “Is it lawful to enslave the un-consenting?” 230 years later, the modern agriculture trade of our day is still enslaving the unconsenting. Many workers, though no longer in chains, toil in conditions that most of us would not tolerate. And let’s not forget the tens of millions on factory farms who are still in chains today: the pigs, cows, and others, all of them thinking beings with personalities like our family cats or dogs. The sugar that people bought in 1785 felt somehow separate from the horrors witnessed by Clarkson, and the hamburger we buy in 2017 feels somehow separate from the modern animal agriculture horrors witnessed by very few. 230 years later this slave trade is still largely hidden, and the influential industry has ensured that it is actually illegal to witness them: their properties may not be trespassed upon by the public, and employees may not film them at work (“ag-gag” whistleblower laws).
Modern animal agriculture is also highly dependent on fossil fuels at nearly every step of its model, from the grain used to feed animals to the plastic used to package meat products. This means that as fossil fuels sunset, the way we grow all foods must change. The SAD (Standard American Diet), and the soil upon which we grow our food, will finally evolve.
If you can afford to buy organic-do it. If you can eat less meat, give it a try.
We’re not all farmers, but we can all help.