Anthropocene
Agriculture is everywhere. It produces not only food but also fiber (to make cloth, rope, and paper), fuel (to power buildings, vehicles, and machinery), “fun” (in the form of coffee, tea, spices, and intoxicants), and pharmaceuticals. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the environmental impacts associated with agriculture are frequently referenced as evidence that we have entered a new geologic time period—a “human dominated geological epoch” known as the Anthropocene. Rapid increases in water use, fertilizer contamination, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and, of course, human population are among the most prominent metrics leveraged in support of the Anthropocene designation. Alarming statistics, often displayed as a series of exponential growth charts, portray agriculture’s expanding environmental toll. Agriculture, it appears, supplies ample evidence that the “age of humans” has arrived.
The Anthropocene designation is far from settled fact, however, sparking intense debate within the social sciences, including human geography. Attributing global change to a universalized human “Anthropos,” many critical scholars argue, risks ignoring the fact that some human groups have contributed far more to globally problematic transformations than others. It also tends to elide the role of structural inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class, geography, and more in producing these changes, as well as the long-standing ecosocial crises experienced by indigenous communities. Indeed, the category of human itself has historically anchored social hierarchies and thus might be ill equipped to define a more desirable future. Singling out a species as irreversibly dominant might inhibit action by naturalizing and depoliticizing ecological crises, normalizing narratives of control as progress, institutionalizing human mastery, and reifying a false division between humans and the biophysical world of which we are a part. Social scientists, particularly those influenced by science and technology studies, also observe that writings on the Anthropocene tend to gloss over the diverse ways in which other organisms and objects shape and are coconstituted with human action. By now, these critiques should be impossible to ignore, yet existing scholarship on agrifood systems and the Anthropocene often misses the opportunity to address them.[1]
Sources
- ↑ Reisman, E., & Fairbairn, M. (2020). Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–11. doi:10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025