31. Cereal Grains and Chemical Warfare: A Brief History of the Green Revolution with Sam Sycamore
Agriculture is one of the primary drivers of of overpopulation, deforestation, erosion, pollution of soil, water, and air, habitat loss, biodiversity loss, and global climate disruption. We know this.
How did we get here? And has it always been this way?
Is agriculture to blame for the problems of modern civilization? Is modern civilization to blame for the ecological suicide course of modern agriculture?
Is it possible, as many would have you believe, for us to use more agriculture to repair the health of our bodies and our ecosystems?
To get to the bottom of these questions, we’ll have to take a deep hard look at the origins of agriculture, and how it relates to our modern food system and the relationship we’ve inherited with nature.
In the latest episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast — no. 31 — we will unpack some of the inherent flaws of agriculture, and connect the dots through to our modern-day paradigm of chemical and genetic warfare being waged across hundreds of millions of acres of land around the world.
We’ll also talk about the potential alternatives to our massive, globalized, monopolized, mono-cropped agriculture, and how we might be able to move forward at the individual and community level to rise above the status quo.
(I’ve got some pretty exciting personal news to share on the “moving forward” front, by the way!)
The picture is bleak today, my friends, and you should not expect me to sugar-coat it. With that said, if we have any hope of averting global ecological catastrophe, we need to understand why our brittle globalized systems are now on the brink of collapse.
I hope that this podcast helps you to better understand the sheer magnitude of the problem at hand, and hopefully encourages you to think and work harder to derive solutions — whatever form they might take.
Stream and download above, or listen through iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play.
Related Links and Further Resources:
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane - DDT (Wikipedia)
Operation Ranch Hand (Wikipedia)
Agent Orange (Wikipedia)
Agent Orange: Background on Monsanto's Involvement (get a load of this bullshit)
Glyphosate (Wikipedia)
We've Missed the Entire Point About GMO Food - A Farmer Explains Why by Forrest Pritchard (Huffington Post)
Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues by Chris Arsenault (Scientific American)
