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Agriculture
Reflection on human history
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Totalitarian Agriculture
The idea of Totalitarian Agriculture is scary. Especially considering the fact that it is the exact type of agriculture that is being used in every civilization except for the remaining tribal peoples of the world. I will try to define Totalitarian Agriculture here:
“According to an ethics, followed by every sort of creature within the community of life, sharks as well as sheep, killer bees as well as butterflies, you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete, but you may not wage war. This ethics is violated at every point by practitioners of totalitarian agriculture” (Story of B 260).
I will refer to the users of Totalitarian Agriculture as OUR culture because we all practice the same type of lifestyle concerning agriculture. In this paper, I will present the arguments against Totalitarian Agriculture, and also discuss its potential impact in the earth in years to come.
Origins of Totalitarian Agriculture
Human beings appeared on this earth hundreds of thousands of years ago and eventually formed into tribes. They lived the life of hunter-gatherers and flourished at it, although not to our standards of population explosion, but they prospered nonetheless. The population of humans steadily grew at a very calm rate, “On the average, our population was doubling every nineteen thousand years. That's slow---glacially slow” (The Story of B 288). Then something happened. In the region of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now ancient Mesopotamia, and agricultural revolution was started bringing the practice of Totalitarian Ag...
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... Produce more food of course! This is a cycle that will lead this culture over the edge.
The idea of totalitarian agriculture was something that is very new to me. Upon learning what it was and the probable affects of it, I immediately wanted to learn more about it. This is something that everyone on this earth should know about because we are all a part of it. Our culture definitely has some changing to do before we can save the world. We need to save ourselves.
Bibliography:
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. copyright in 1992 by Daniel Quinn. Bantam Books, NY.
Quinn, Daniel. My Ishmael. copyright in 1997 by Daniel Quinn.
Bantam Books, NY.
Quinn, Daniel. The Story Of B. copyright in 1996 by Daniel Quinn.
Bantam Books, NY.
Scarre, Chris. Smithsonian Timelines of the Ancient World. copyright in 1993 by Dorling Kindersley Limited, London.
Wendell Berry writes in his book, “What are people for?” a thesis that modern culture is destroying the agricultural culture. He feels that technology is seen and used as the easy way to produce food faster and more efficiently. With this modern way of farming comes the idea that we need to work smarter not harder which is not always true. The goal is comfort and leisure and Berry feels that this is the reason for the down fall of the agricultural culture. He believes that hard work and pride in workmanship is more important than material goods and money. This was by no means a perfect society. The people had often been violent wand wasteful in the use of land of each other. Its present ills have already taken root in it. Even with these faults, this society appreciated the hard work of farming compared to the easy way of living today.
As small mobile groups of hunter-gatherers adopted a sedentary lifestyle, they mastered both agriculture and animal domestication. These small settled groups quickly evolved into cities and towns that encompassed the entire globe. Today the estimated population of the world is over 6.2 million people.1 As the population has grown, it has had several deleterious effects on the Earth. These include climate changes, the spread of diseases, declining food production, deforestation, and environment pollution (particularly air pollution). As people have become more conscious of these harmful effects, they have begun to devise strategies to combat this problem. Among the suggested responses include a switch to renewable energy, a call for zero population growth, and adopting sustainable agricultural practices.
12,000 years ago, the discovery of agriculture triggered such a change in society and the way in which people lived that we now call this important era in time the “Neolithic Revolution.” Traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles were cast away in favor of more permanent settlements and a reliable food supply. Agriculture helped form cities and civilizations, and because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet growing demand, populations skyrocketed from around five million people 10,000 years ago, to more the more than seven billion people that walk this earth today.1
This covert control -in farming, capitalism, and discourse- is part and parcel of the land and its people, and it always has been: "You [Ty, but by implication everybody in this system] see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did. I see getting others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was. Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own?[...] No. I think he had lessons, and those lesons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger and bigger machinery..." (342-343)
There are people do who do not like the Agriculture industry;some of these people are PETA, and there is tension between the two groups and I will be discussing the tension. So before you read this essay you may be thinking “ Who is PETA?” Well I will provide a little background information on who PETA is, PETA ( People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals) is a animal rights activist group who zone in on certain groups of people. One example of one of those groups would be the 4-H and the Agriculture world. So now that you know some basic background information, let’s go into some topic that have caused problems between the two sides.
To tackle the threat of famine, Liu think that some free markets should be allowed as the only way of combating famine. He implemented polices that allowed peasants to cultivate private plot in the backyard of their homes and sell produce to farmers’ markets. Liu also decentralized economics decision-making and planning to economic organizations below the level of communes, restored material incentives to peasants and collective farming, and carried out more realistic economic planning and programs. (Guo, 2013) As a result, about half of the farm land in China was in the hands of individual families once again. The results of these changes were sudden increases in the amounts of food being produced in China. (Karl, 2010)
The idea of totalitarianism that is shown in Animal Farm is represented by the pigs treatment of the other animals. The pigs start off treating the other animals as equals but as their hunger for power increased they began to differentiate themselves from them. According to the facts on file companion to the British novel: 20th Century, vol.2 “They allocate the food that all the animals help to growing an unequal manner, reserving the milk for their own exclusive use.” (British novel: 20th Century, vol.2) Bec...
And, because food now comes at a low cost, it has become cheaper in quality and therefore potentially dangerous to the consumer’s health. These problems surrounding the ethics and the procedures of the instantaneous food system are left unchanged due to the obliviousness of the consumers and the dollar signs in the eyes of the government and big business. The problem begins with the mistreatment and exploitation of farmers. Farmers are essentially the backbone of the entire food system. Large-scale family farms account for 10% of all farms, but 75% of overall food production (CSS statistics).
begin vertical farming to feed the masses, and keep them from starving. They will eat everything
The blessing and curse of the Agricultural Revolution is advocated with its augmentation and dissemination. Taking the stipulative definition of “blessing” and “curse” from the original premise, one can only superimpose the layman’s terms of “negative” and “positive”. Upon examination of the two classifications within the Neolithic Period and ancient Mesopotamian civilization one can confirm the premise. Therefore, the agriculture revolution was a blessing and a curse for humanity. Human society began to emerge in the Neolithic Period or the New Stone Age. This new age began around 9,000 B.C.E. by the development of agriculture in the region surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and what is commonly referred to as “The Fertile Crescent” located in West Asia.1 The very development of agriculture had benefited humans by no longer having to move about in search of wild game and plants. Unencumbered by nomadic life humans found little need to limit family size and possessions and settled in a single location for many years. One negative aspect of this settling is that the population increased so much so that wild food sources were no longer sufficient to support large groups. Forced to survive by any means necessary they discovered using seeds of the most productive plants and clearing weeds enhanced their yield.2 This also lead humans to develop a wider array of tools far superior to the tools previously used in the Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age. The spread of the Agricultural Revolution in the Neolithic Period also cultivated positive aspects by creating connections with other cultures and societies. Through these connections they exchanged knowledge, goods, and ideas on herding and farming.3 Another major positive aspec...
It is a known fact that the world population is increasing without bound; however, there is a debate if this increase is a good thing or if it will prove catastrophic. The article “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin discusses how the ever-increasing world population will exhaust the world of its natural resources, and eliminate human’s capability of survival. On the other side of the argument is Julian L. Simon who wrote “More People, Greater Wealth, More Resources, Healthier Environment.” This article proposes the theory that with an increase in population, human’s quality of life is amplified. One particular issue that they both mention and have drastically different views on is the future of agriculture and human’s ability to sustain it.
Therefore, totalitarian dictatorship was evident through Russia’s history and in Animal Farm. In both cases, these dictators did not care about the welfare of their civilians, they only cared about themselves.
Human population growth was relatively slow for most of human history. Within the past 500 years, however, the advances made in the industrial, transportation, economic, medical, and agricultural revolutions have helped foster an exponential, "J-shaped" rise in human population (Southwick, Figure 15.1, p. 160). The statistics associated with this type of growth are particularly striking: "Human beings took more than 3 million years to reach a population of 1 billion people...The second billion came in only 130 years, the third billion in 30 years, the fourth billion in 15 years, the fifth billion in 12 years..." (Southwick, p. 159). As human population has grown, there has been simultaneous growth within the industrial sector. Both of these increases have greatly contributed to environmental problems, such as natural resource depletion, ecosystem destruction, and global climate change. Also linked with the increasing human population are many social problems, such as poverty and disease. These issues need to be addressed by policy makers in the near future in order to ensure the survival and sustainability of human life.
As agriculture has become more intensive, farmers have become capable of producing higher yields using less labour and less land. Growth of the agriculture has not, however, been an unmixed blessing. It, like every other thing, has its pros and cons. Topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, continued neglect of the living and working conditions for farm labourers, increasing costs of production, and the disintegration of economic and social conditions in rural communities. These are the cons of the new improved agriculture.
The reduction of the Earth's resources has been closely linked to the rise in human population. For many thousands of years people lived in relative harmony with their surroundings. Population sizes were small, and life-supporting tools were simple. Most of the energy needed for work was provided by the worker and animals. Since about 1650, however, the human population has increased dramatically. The problems of overcrowding multiply as an ever-increasing number of people are added to the world's population each year.