Post B8V3qpehtgY5PcSSrQ by earthworm@kolektiva.social
 (DIR) More posts by earthworm@kolektiva.social
 (DIR) Post #B8V3p8WalsfVM2r08O by idzie@kolektiva.social
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       In a recent thread @CedarTea touched on frustration with a certain type of utilitarian environmentalist city-dweller, and I immediately thought of a YouTube video I saw recently where someone confidently stated that people SHOULDN'T grow their own food. People should live in high-rises and leave food-growing to the professionals, who can do it more efficiently. And I just had to sit with that for a second, and wonder at people who think the only benefit in engaging with growing or gathering food is producing as much as possible, and if the "as much as possible" isn't good enough then you shouldn't do it. This isn't a knock on city-dwellers or high-rises, or a disagreement that there are reductions in individual CO2 emissions from people living in densely populated areas. But I do feel a great deal of sadness, and feel that people are wildly missing the point of it all, when they decide that engaging with the rest of the living world in a variety of ways, gaining greater understanding of agriculture and ecology, seeing and feeling yourself as an integral part of life, just doesn't really matter very much. Efficiency rules all!
       
 (DIR) Post #B8V3qp6fwDKJi4XHoe by amenonsen@flipping.rocks
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       @idzie @CedarTea (Without having seen the original thread) I also wonder which professionals one is supposed to leave the food growing to, because in my experience, small-scale farming can be a frustrating process with highly variable outputs. So maybe it's only corporate megafarms that we should depend on for agricultural efficiency?
       
 (DIR) Post #B8V3qpP6pg4WdFA0Y4 by violetmadder@kolektiva.social
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       @amenonsen @idzie @CedarTeaAnd all the talk of "efficiency" is honestly batshit when we're talking about disastrously unsustainable farming methods that are wrecking the soil and driving vast amounts of desertification all over the world-- oh, and all while relying on precarious global supply chains consuming staggering amounts of fossil fuels and keeping everybody dependent on shit that comes from places like the Strait of fucked up Hormuz. The gains of the so-called Green Revolution were very temporary. Concentrated fertilizer salts and tilling do nothing to replenish the humus or maintain healthy soil structure, leading to incredible waste, pollution, and erosion.Efficient, my ass.
       
 (DIR) Post #B8V3qpehtgY5PcSSrQ by earthworm@kolektiva.social
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       @violetmadder @amenonsen @idzie @CedarTea These wise words should hang in lecture halls at the agricultural universities! :ecoanarchism_heart:
       
 (DIR) Post #B8V3qpsB5bKA5OlDrE by violetmadder@kolektiva.social
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       @earthworm @amenonsen @idzie @CedarTea One of the first things I learned when I started looking up permaculture videos, is that even in the biggest agricultural schools, soil science is a shockingly neglected afterthought. Hardly anyone is bothering to study it in any serious way. Next to hundreds of agriculture majors with other focuses there might be 20 students majoring in soil. The big corporations fixate on the short-term gains made by the chemicals and machines they sell, and that's it. How the complex ecosystems actually work, the long-term viability of it and so on, is just not relevant to how they think. If there's a deficiency or whatever they think they can just throw some other potion in there and fix it with simplistic blunt force. It's completely bonkers, because soil is the foundation of ALL LIFE on Earth that's above water. And then we also have situations where, for instance, a UofO student whose thesis project found that the timber companies' replanting methods were doing more harm than good, gets KICKED OUT of the university because Weyerhauser is one of the school's biggest investors and doesn't want the bad press. That kind of shit. They just try to erase the evidence of their mistakes so they can keep on fucking up no matter what it means for the longevity of their own industry much less humanity in general.