Crimes against humanity
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
The original template for capitalism is sugar plantations in Brazil. The recipe is this. Occupy an area of land by force. Kill off anyone who happens to live there. Wipe out all the trees and plants to create bare soil. Import some slaves from Africa, keep them isolated so they have nowhere to run to. Plant sugar cane and harvest for as long as the soil still works for you. Export the sugar to wreck peoples’ health elsewhere. If you were a Portuguese gentleman with some spare cash, you could invest it in such an enterprise and never know the misery that allowed your investment to grow. You didn’t need to know anything other than you were not cheated in the returns. Capitalism in the raw.
When we speak of crimes against humanity we generally think of naked aggression: Cortes in Mexico, Stalin and Mao, Apartheid, the Holocaust. Here, we pay more attention to misinformation about the health effects of tobacco, corruption of climate science by the oil majors, killing people with processed food. These are closer to the raw capitalist model: just make sure your investors don’t know and don’t care — killing millions of people is OK, it is just business. And very respectable, caring, liberal-minded people don’t even notice; the officially sanctioned history doesn’t get written. Yet?
I want to add one to the list that I was not properly aware of until my studies this week. In two hundred years Australia was turned from a green and pleasant land into largely a desert and desertifying hell of 50 degrees centigrade. And that change is so significant that it tilts the warming and aridification of the whole world. How many people does that kill? I don’t mean to suggest that the enormity of a crime is measured by the number of dead bodies: but I do want to rescue our imagination from the immediacy of death camps to the long slow impoverishment and starvation of masses of people. We have written before about slow violence. The rehearsal of the true history is immensely important, vital even.
Colonial attitudes
How many buffalo used to roam the Great Plains in the US? They were wantonly and wastefully gunned down until there were almost none left. There is an attitude in this microstory. I rock up at some frontier and what is there is at my disposal. There are no consequences. This is a nowhere place and it will remain unimportant in the scheme of things. My actions are of no importance to anyone.
If the Wild West was unimportant and essentially ungoverned, then how much more so was Australia? Legendarily a disposal facility for people unwelcome in their native UK. The site of unimaginably brutal repression and destruction of the local aboriginal people. Which is still going on, in recommending western diets to people who have thrived on their subsistence ways of life. So who could possibly even notice if we introduce lots of sheep that destroy first the vegetation and then the soil? The soil destruction is ongoing: the best reports find that there’s far greater weight of soil eroding from crop fields than the weight of the crop grown. (Read that twice!) Does anyone with a governance role know about it, let alone care?
The colonial attitude is primarily ignorant. It assumes superior rights and superior knowledge and superior culture and superior religion when none of these things can possibly hold water. It has nothing to learn from what happens when knowledge from elsewhere is applied with unexpected and unfortunate results. It knows better by definition and at the point of a gun. It will never learn.
We are still absolutely there. We export western education and are not prepared to see the misery and destitution it produces. We export western medicine and just shrug when it contributes only to big pharma profits. We export arms for nations to destroy each other with and for governments to repress their own populations with.
The problem with all this is that we don’t know the history. Who is going to rehearse the devastation of the Australian continent by thoughtless farming practices? How can be start to address what needs to be done in the coming crises if we don’t know where we are coming from? Terry Harkness, who was on my soils course led by Didi Pershouse, is working on soil regeneration in Australia and has observed dead trees still standing on their tap roots showing a metre of soil has been lost.
So here is the twist. I just saw pictures, via Allan Savory, of 25,000 sheep in a single flock being used to restore the desert in Patagonia. We need actual management practices that regenerate what we have despoiled. Make no mistake, Patagonia will recover in fairly short order. Those millions of buffalo in the Great Plains didn’t overgraze and destroy the wonderful rich deep soils there, they created them. It was ignorant colonialism that destroyed them. Sheep and cattle can regenerate the Australian desert too, and are being used to do so, but we still have the entitled colonial mindset that denies the history we must deal with.
I find it profoundly interesting that we have already let this crisis and the ignorance that produces it get so deep there are no alternative left but learning what actually works. The odds are still on that we fail to learn the lessons in time and this would all have to get called wilful blindness, but a few brave souls are producing the evidence on the ground. And to join to where we started, capitalism has always been about wilful blindness and deliberate ignorance. It never counts the real costs, it never wants to know about a better ways that happen to make less money.
The working class
Didi Pershouse has a metaphor about the soil microbiome. She calls it the working class. Left to itself — no ploughing, no artificial fertilisers, no herbicides or insecticides — this amazing ecosystem delivers ecosystem services. It allows healthy plants to grow that are nourishing for healthy animals, including ourselves. The wider system of course includes this above ground flora and fauna.
Here are both metaphors in play. Our colonial attitude to the soil is that it is simply another resource for us to exploit. We have always ploughed. We have always planted monocultures. We have always treated land as property to be used. And we ignore (if we are even aware of) the places in this system where the work is done. We don’t understand that processes are taking place that our health absolutely depends on even if we can’t see them and have never bothered to investigate.
Somehow this living system in the soil does things we cannot even conceive of. It transports necessary micronutrients to plants. It filters out toxic substances. It allows plants to feed each other. It maximises the surface area of minerals to allow their nutrients to be broken down and supplied to plants. It holds water and oxygen for when these are not available above the ground. It plays a major part in regulating the microclimate. The list goes on. It does these things so well it is invisible and colonists think they just happen like the sun just rises in the morning.
The current “debate” about jobs disappearing because of AI and robots has a similar flavour. Working class people don’t do anything skilled or useful of course: they can easily be replaced and their functions automated.[1] As though in human society it would be better, rather than depend on each other, to depend on machines for what we need. Colonial indeed. Or even the current fad for replacing animals as a source of human food. We would only gain wouldn’t we? Nuts, utter bullshit.
My grandchildren are going to study the soil from before school age. They are going to care for the plants, the animals and the rotations. They are going to understand the interdependencies and the sheer wonder of how all this works. And at five they will understand more than Cambridge professors and directors of Public Health England. They will understand how things work in a practical detail that cannot be subverted by commercial agendas, Stalinist science and modern myths and propaganda. Just think about that.
In James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life, his life as a hill farmer and school dropout takes him to Oxford where his independence of mind is recognised. A professor asks him socially what he makes of his peers and he says they are all imitating each other and what they think a successful student looks like. The professor’s next question was how that lack of imagination and independence might be addressed. When Rebanks says they need to work in a crap job such as a chicken factory for a year, the professor thinks it is a joke — but it isn’t. We all need to know about the working class that carry out functions that we cannot even see.[2] This is absolutely not to romanticise.
A cast of mind
What could be more natural when we come under pressure than to try to annexe the resources we need, without too much thought about who else depends on them or how those resources come to be? Lets not pretend that people are not under pressure to survive. But we have generated a system that puts people under pressure to survive systematically. Instead of making space to learn how things can happen sustainably, space to see what we actually depend on, space to appreciate what other do that is beyond our imagination, we make sure that these things can never happen. We “educate” members of our societies to make the same mistakes again and again. We scorn and ridicule those who actually think independently. We can’t bear the thought that our striving has betrayed us again.
The false turn we make is visible when we do projects. A project has a scope and a budget and when we don’t think we can complete it within the budget, we reduce the scope. But the scope is an arbitrary cut in the fabric of reality and if we want something to actually work we have to deal with the reality of its complexity and connections inside and outside that scope. Almost all project management is a pretence of having control that leads directly to a loss of control. And the thought that we can just reduce the scope betrays the cast of mind that cannot learn about the actual complexity or indeed the hidden simplicities.
Last week we spoke of the active gut and the passive mind. We spoke of the mind whose feeling about the world is largely governed by the state and status of the gut microbiome. So if we have a self-defeating cast of mind we need to look for its origins in a defective relationship to our food and the soil. We don’t acknowledge our dependence on the “working class” of the soil ecosystem and it leads us into having a survival mentality that is likely to lead to poor nutrition. There are dietitians the world over who think that they must construct their dietary advice on the basis of foods that poor people can afford. That can’t end well and of course the economics of food, like all economics, is largely about what costs can be externalised. Externalising the degradation of the soil consigns us all to history.
It is in this precise sense that our reality is internally generated. We impoverish our relationship with the world and the world can no longer supply the nourishment we require. We tell ourselves that we cannot afford to do this and that and our lives contract so that it is indeed so. Rich philanthropists think they can intervene to ameliorate a bad situation and their own poverty of spirit and distorted view of the world makes everyone’s situation worse. Learning to lean on what we really rely on to correct our cast of mind takes a different sort of honesty and courage.
[1] A recent survey of experts (that’s what the title says) by Gruetzemacher et al talks about automating a percentage of human tasks. How likely is it that their understanding of human tasks is sufficiently rich? “Respondents indicated a median of 21.5% of human tasks (i.e., all tasks that humans are currently paid to do) can be feasibly automated now, and that this figure would rise to 40% in 5 years and 60% in 10 years. Median forecasts indicated a 50% probability of AI systems being capable of automating 90% of current human tasks in 25 years and 99% of current human tasks in 50 years.”
[2] The next time you’re on a train or passing through an industrial estate, take a look at all the little businesses that exist there, tucked away in forgotten corners, serving needs that you didn’t even know existed.
