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]
Critical Agriculture Analysis
We argue that critical agri-food scholarship provides a powerful vantage point from which to engage with the Anthropocene idea—one that precludes historical oversimplifications, enriches theoretical insights, and keeps alternative futures squarely in view. Rather than wholeheartedly accepting or rejecting the term Anthropocene, we embrace its controversial nature as a source of insight. The Anthropocene concept is contentious because it calls for a single, all-encompassing global story that risks erasure of alternatives. Focusing on agri-food systems as a central theme for understanding Anthropocene debates helps to hold several narratives simultaneously while keeping central concerns within the field of view. Examining the histories and theories of agrarian change alongside Anthropocene discourse, we argue, illustrates the limits, friction, and unevenness of human influence while underscoring the inseparability of people with their environments. Moreover, if the Anthropocene concept is to mobilize action for reversing problematic trends, it must address agriculture in a way that does not treat it only as a set of impacts to be avoided but rather as a site of political economic processes to be accounted for and reimagined. In this article we open up such possibilities by offering an integration of agri-food studies and critical Anthropocene scholarship, arguing that agri-food systems can serve as a critically engaged through line to competing Anthropocene origin stories, a source of theoretical insight for the complexity of human–environment relations, and a site of agency for forging alternative futures.[2]
Root Cause Analysis
Agriculture
The rise of agriculture, or Neolithic Revolution, is one proposed marker for the onset of the Anthropocene that, upon closer inspection, reveals the oversights that come of treating history as linear and of treating humans as an undifferentiated group affecting the globe. As archaeologists have shown, the transition to farming has been far from complete or irreversible. There is no clear mark indicating “before” and “after” the transition to agriculture, as groups shifted food provisioning strategies based on their circumstances, often with agriculture as a last resort (Head 2014). Labeling societies as either foragers or agriculturalists, even for a single moment in time, is also falsely dualistic, because many groups have lived from both wild and cultivated foods for thousands of years (B. D. Smith 2001). Where agriculture did arise, it is often associated with forced labor and the use of violence by elites to retain populations attempting to flee the disease and periodic famine brought on by farming’s dense settlements and instability (Cohen 2009; Scott 2017), a clear indication that treating all humans as equally responsible for agriculture’s impacts neglects deep inequalities. Importantly, foraging continues today (Jordan 2014), and its association with lack of “civilization” has proven deeply damaging, showing how the idea of a linear and complete conversion to agriculture is not only inaccurate but ignores real harm caused by such assumptions. For example, Native Americans in what is now called California “tended the wild,” managing land for food production without plant or animal domestication, until forced to farm by settler colonists who deemed their nonagricultural lifeways inferior, expendable, and threatening (Anderson 2013). In considering the Anthropocene, a closer look at agriculture’s origins indicates that the transition to farming is not unidirectional, comprehensive, or universally attributable to human groups, and thus neither are its biogeochemical effects.[3]
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
- ↑ 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
- ↑ Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025