by John Kurmann
Our culture (see below), like all cultures, gives rise to and then enacts, over time, its own mythologies, its own explanations for the workings and purpose of the world. Mythologies take many forms, both from one culture to the next and within each individual culture.
Although people today tend to think of them this way, myths are by no means the equivalent of lies, or even fictional stories (though some myths continue to exist despite much evidence to invalidate them). It’s probably safe to say that all myths have some measure of truth, or some sort of logic, to them. We think of the Roman pantheon of goddesses and gods as mythology, and most people look on such beliefs as foolish and simple–minded, but Christianity and Buddhism are as mythological in their own ways as Roman pantheism is.
Mythologies aren’t restricted to dealing with what people normally think of as religious matters (divine doings, prescriptions for living, prophecies, that sort of thing), either. For example, economic theory is a mythology of its own sort, which explains the world in its own way based on its own assumptions about the basic nature of the world and of people.
The particular mythology of our culture that I want to illuminate in this article is our mythology of food. I’m interested in this food mythology because its effects have been and continue to be so destructive. Because of this mythology, we are driving untold numbers of species to extinction, fundamentally altering the planet’s life support systems, and thundering along a path that can only end in the collapse of the biosphere. We are, to put it bluntly, devouring the world.
How do we do this? For some ten thousand years, since the beginning of our agricultural revolution, the people of our culture have been on a mission to increase food production every year. We tell ourselves that we do this for the best of reasons—that we have to do this to “keep up with” population growth, and to “end world hunger.” We believe that our population will keep growing, like an irresistible force, whatever we do, so our only choices are to grow more food every year or see famine sweep the world.
Our cultural mythology argues that this race between population and food can be won, and must be. We tell ourselves that if only we eke enough additional food out of the soil, no one will go hungry. Somehow, though, the hungry don’t get fed, there’s no finish line to this race in sight, and utopia remains ever out of reach.
So we’re not getting what we say we’re after. What are we getting instead? The ABCs of ecology tell us what happens when a population’s food supply increases: the population increases in response. This has been clearly observed with many species, but few have risked making the observation that humans are not an exception (though we are a more complicated example). Does our history bear this out?
It’s estimated that, at the time of our agricultural revolution, there were about ten million humans total as part of earth, a tiny percentage of whom were our cultural ancestors, the first revolutionaries of our agricultural revolution. Taking into consideration that the human genus evolved into existence some 3–5 million years earlier, we can see that population growth had been proceeding very slowly.
When Columbus initiated the European invasion of these lands on 1492, there are estimated to have been some 500 million humans alive. It took millions of years to reach a population of ten million, yet only about another 9,500 to multiply that by fifty. This awesome spurt of growth, however, was only foreplay. There were two more revolutions to come.
Our culture’s industrial revolution is usually said to have begun about 1760. It led to many things, but the most important consequence has been its impact on food production. The new energy sources and technological innovations in agricultural machinery it produced dramatically increased the food supply yet again. Unsurprisingly, our population growth illustrates the consequences.
The world’s human population is estimated to have reached one billion in the early 1800s, having taken a bit over three centuries to double. It doubled again in just over a century, reaching two billion around 1930. See the acceleration in process?
As the population was on its way to doubling again, another revolution, commonly called the “green” revolution, began in the 1940s. It introduced synthetic fertilizers and biocides (things which kill life, including insecticides, herbicides and fungicides), greatly expanded irrigation, and developed higher–yielding, hybrid varieties of the world’s major food crops.
And the population? In 1960, we reached three billion, just some three decades after the second billion. Fourteen years later, in 1974, we reached 4 billion. Thirteen years later, in 1987, we hit 5 billion. It’s estimated that we reached the six billion mark in October of last year, after just twelve years. Most importantly, there is no end to this growth in sight.
I want to leave you with an indelible image of what this growth has meant to the world. The biosphere can only support so much biomass, or living matter. Ten thousand years ago, prior to our agricultural revolution, the percentage of the world’s biomass that existed as humans was small. The following millennia of population growth, however, have been a period of rapid and violent conversion, turning biomass that once was uncountable other plants and animals into humans and driving many species to extinction.
Put simply, as ever more of the world’s biomass becomes humans (plus our food and other biomass–derived resources), ever less of it can be anything else. Inevitably, then, our population growth is a direct attack on the diversity of life. We are literally devouring the incredible biodiversity of the world, which took billions of years to evolve.
This process cannot continue, though. The diversity of life that is the world doesn’t exist because it’s interesting, or nice to look at. It exists because it works for the whole, because diversity in the community of life helps the entire community to survive. If any one species monopolizes too much of the world’s biomass, the well being of the whole community is threatened.
Our culture’s lifestyle is founded on growth—growth of our population, our agriculture, and our economy. Yet the biosphere is undeniably a finite system, capable of supporting only so much biomass, and requiring biodiversity to function in a way that supports human life. We literally cannot live without it.
If we want to continue to live, we must abandon our mythology of food, must finally understand that we aren’t racing to grow enough food to keep up with population growth but that our drive to grow more food every year fuels our population growth. People are made from food, so you can’t have more people if you don’t first have more food to make them.
We must walk away from the race between population and food, recognizing that it can never be won, and abandon growth as a survival strategy. We must, in other words, transform our culture into a fundamentally different beast before we devour the world and ourselves.
"Culture" is an extremely flexible word, able to be stretched to encompass many different kinds of human groups both large and small. In this context, I’m grouping the folks I refer to as “our culture” together because of their common lifestyle based on growth, farming, and settlement. Another characteristic the people of our culture share is that they behave, by and large, as though the world was made for humans, and humans were made to conquer and rule (or “steward”) it (although more and more people seem to be having misgivings about this behavior). Our culture also has a long, dark history of destroying other cultures, a history that is being added to as I type.
To be sure, many other customs and practices differ among the people I’ve grouped together, but these common characteristics unite them and differentiate them from the remaining other cultures. Though our culture has grown (through its own population increase and assimilation) to include well over 99% of the present world population, there still are people who live outside it. This proves that it’s possible to live other ways, ways that don’t devour the world, and that literal living proof means there ís hope for the future.
For more information:
Phone: (816)753–6081
Email: dsdnt@kctera.net
PO Box 45798, Kansas City MO 64171
or pick up a copy of Ishmael or The Story of B by teacher/author Daniel Quinn