Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food

New era of food scarcity echoes collapsed civilizations

by Lester Brown, originally published by Earth Policy Institute  | Feb 8, 2013

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.
This new era is one of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system. Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilization, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilizations whose archeological sites we now study?

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Tom Waits - Green Grass

Nicole Foss

The Myth of Human Progress

by Chris Hedges

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

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Jean-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

SULCOS

À direita a aurora de verão desperta as folhas e os vapores e os ruídos deste lado do parque e à esquerda os taludes guardam na sua sombra violeta os mil rápidos sulcos da estrada húmida. Desfile de maravilhas. Com efeito: carros carregados de animais de talha dourada, de mastros e de telas sarapintadas, ao grande galope de vinte cavalos de circo malhados, e homens e crianças sobre as suas alimárias mais espantosas; - vinte veículos
corcundas, empavezados e floridos como caleches de lenda ou de conto de fadas, repletos de crianças ataviadas para uma pastoral suburbana; - até caixões, com os seus dosséis nocturnos alçando os penachos de ébano ao trote de grandes éguas negras e azuis.

Rimbaud, Iluminações Uma Cerveja no Inferno, Assírio & Alvim, 2007, p. 49

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