Agriculture, Topsoil and the Ecology of Colonialism | EV & N – 285 | CCTV

http://ecoethics.net/2014-ENVRE120/20180909-EV&N-285-Link.html

https://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/584960

YouTube Version

The structure of extractive agriculture reflected in the “land-grabs” that have become a world-wide phenomena is not sustainable. Colonialism once took the form of outright invasion by one powerful state against weaker regions of the world. In our day, however, “hedge funds” and international food and agricultural corporations are “investing” in land-grabs around the world.

Institutional investors, including major American universities like Yale and Harvard have undertaken this kind of investment in recent years. This kind of “investment” is based on “mining” the topsoil around the world and it can become ecologically devastating, destroying the healthy soils, disrupting water supplies and displacing indigenous farming populations.

Careful scrutiny is now required by each of these university and institutional investors to assure that this kind of neocolonial land-grab process is not ruining local farming communities and accelerating the destruction of topsoils while destroying their natural capacity to sequester carbon.

See also:

• The Tragedy is that “We treat soil like dirt” — Topsoil, Climate Change and the Collapse of Civilizations
• Climate Land Challenge
• From Farm to Fork: Tools for Investigating Global Food and Agriculture Issues
• Beyond the ‘Green Revolution:’ The Current Paradigm Shift in Global Agricultural Science
• Chapters in African Agricultural History: Much Needed New Investment? or “Neo-Colonial” Land Grab?
• What Comes After Paris COP21…? Agricultural Stress, Food Insecurity and “Climate Justice?”
• Climate Change, Soils and Humans as a Keystone Species in the Global Ecosystem
• Restorative Development: Sustainable Agriculture and the Climate Crisis
• Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it !: Part 1 – Some Prophetic & Enduring Testimony
• Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Part 2 – Global Crisis & Localized Responses
• Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Part 3 – Growing Soil to Save the Human Prospect

as well as:

• GRAIN — Harvard’s billion-dollar farmland fiasco September 6, 2018

More fundamentally, need to re-think the colonial legacy of which we have been the Western World has been so far the primary beneficiary.  See:

• The Troublesome Legacy of Columbus: Look Out ! What Are We Celebrating?
  and
• Drawing the Wrong Conclusions – An Anthropologist Looks at History: Cultural Mistakes Since 1492 – The “Frontier” Metaphor & the Myth of Endless Growth

Ultimately we need now to learn how to run Earth’s finite system on the infinite throughput energy from the sun.  Because of the myth of infinite economic  growth launched and fostered as a legacy of colonialism we have been operating on a metaphor that is headed  exactly 180-degrees in the wrong direction.  We desperately need a compass  change to re-organize our economies in the direction of sustainability — not growth — if we  hope to survive much longer as a civilization.