Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [8]
Inescapably, awareness of our environment is also awareness of a “commons”—a reality on which we share dependency and therefore mutual responsibility, a commons which defies division into individual goods. I was struck recently by reports of a survey of American youth’s knowledge of geography. A shockingly large share could not name the country that borders the U.S. on the south, but almost all had heard of the ozone hole! Its consequences touch us all.
The environmental crisis teaches perhaps more graphically what is true of all our social problems: The health of the whole is literally essential to the individual’s well-being. If we are ultimately interdependent, it becomes silly to think in terms of trade-offs between social integrity and the individual’s unfettered pursuit of happiness.
I have come to think of this shift in understanding as moving us from a mechanistic to what might be called a relational worldview.
Rethinking Farming and Food
These thoughts provide a framework for what you will find in the chapters that follow. Diet for a Small Planet identifies the roots of a wasteful, destructive, and hunger-generating food system in underlying economic “rules.” In the pages that follow, you will read about how these unquestioned “rules” drive farmers to overproduce, eroding topsoil, polluting groundwater, and decimating farm communities.
But all that I lay out here can also be understood through the inherited “ether” I’ve just hinted at—the dominant mechanistic worldview. Why have we accepted these “rules” of economic life? They conform to the notion that there are laws governing the social order, just as laws of motion govern the material world. They “fit” neatly with the view of nature as giant machine. And once nature is so perceived, our job is to tinker, even redesigning nature where necessary.
Nonhuman animals become mere cogs in that machine. First Jim Mason and Peter Singer in their book Animal Factories12 and then John Robbins in Diet for a New America13 have told us in horrifying detail how first poultry and now other farm animals were denied expression of their own nature, constrained to the point of pain and ill-health—and, ultimately, reduced to nothing but “food processors” for human convenience and taste. Farm animals, as I discovered early in my research for Diet, are to the U.S. Department of Agriculture mere “units of production.”
By the 1980s, the view of nature as machine for our tinkering set the stage for genetic manipulation of a new order. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture spliced a human growth hormone gene into swine. They were delighted with their success: hogs that gain weight faster and are leaner. Never mind that the animals are arthritic and cross-eyed. These problems, as the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson puts it, are just aspects of “fine-tuning” the hog.14
If, on the one hand, we condemn modern agriculture because it involves the killing of life to sustain life, do we run the risk of furthering the fundamental fallacy: that we human beings are not really part of nature; we stand outside and redesign nature by human-made rules? On the other hand, outrage at the cruel treatment of farm animals by “agribusiness” can lead us to question the whole notion of human beings as outside nature. When we reconnect with our place in nature, we may well rediscover respectful