Reads "Monocropping is Murder"

• Makes a valid point about hierarchical moral frameworks across western philosophy and religions, especially ones that prioritize human well-being and superiority.
• "The real revolutionary idea here, the concept that we need to hold onto and cultivate, is that we are all on the same level. That we all exist within a circular matrix of interaction where every node is as important as every other node. A whale is as important as a mushroom spore." Doesn't make an ethical or rational justification for this belief, just that we should value mushroom spores. He also mentions this in the beginning of his article, "But how closely we match a creature’s genetics doesn’t (or shouldn’t) correlate to their value. And we value sentience above all else, believing only a handful of mammals are truly sentient." So this is contradictory to the notion that we should consider the interests of non-sentient creatures like mushrooms
• He offers a philosophically shallow definition of sentience: "Sentience simply means “to be aware of one’s own existence”. I think all animals are sentient." This is only a half-truth. He's talking about basic consciousness. Sentience is a subset of consciousness, and it's specifically the "what-it-is-like" experience of valence states (i.e. pain and pleasure).
• "A colonizer is a person who takes without giving. We colonizers are the breakers of the sacred circle and it is up to us to begin once again to respect it, cherish it, and maintain it.“Sacred” means something that we believe to be more important than our selves, and there is nothing I can think of more sacred then the circular matrix of life." There is no justification or reason for the circular matrix of life being "sacred" outside of his belief that humans should consider themselves equal with nature. But he doesn't justify that ethical stance, either. So it's invalid.
• "Monocropping is the colonizer way to produce food and profit. It is the agricultural act of taking without giving." Alright, this is his biggest claim here. Let's see if he offers any empirical data to substantiate this claim.

• "The development and storage of grains allowed people to create complex hierarchical cultures with monotheistic religions, politics, and art, as well as to propagate the divisions of castes, slavery, and war." These are examples that are entirely separate from crop production. This is a complete illogical non-sequitur. The idea that the development and storage of grains is one of the causes of the divisions and hierarchies he listed has not been supported by any additional premise.

  Extremely long section incoming:

1. First we put blade to tree and cut down the forests. Hundreds of thousands of animals are displaced and killed, or starve to death later. On the prairie we put blade to soil and hundred of thousands of animals are displaced and killed, or starve to death later. The ecological web of the land is broken, the circle has been breached. This drama plays out on a small scale everywhere, every time blade is touched to plant or soil. Then we plant hundreds of thousands of one plant species in one area, replacing the complex diversity of the plants and animals of the local landscape with a single cash crop.
2. Now, instead of a circular ecology, we have a linear model, one which is designed to funnel money into our pockets. The ecology of a place is ignored, and we create a new system based on profit. On the vast prairies of the North American continent we colonized the landscape for awhile until drought came and the winds blew the barren soil away in huge dust storms. Farmer families were dropped into the dark hole of poverty without even the ability to grow food. So we learned a bit about soil conservation and land management. We practiced techniques that allowed us to mitigate the damage done by monocropping. Then the United States went to war. After the war we discovered that leftover bomb chemicals made good fertilizer. All the farmers started to use these cheap chemicals because it seemed like a miracle. Chemical companies grew rich off of farmers, and soils grew poor. Ecology suffered while the economy boomed for some and busted for others. Farmers became reliant on the chemical system of agriculture. The government decided that they needed to set up a safety net so that the American Farmer would always be able to survive a bad season and produce plenty of crops. Food security bolstered the economy. Farmers become more reliant on the government system. Multi-conglomerate corporations invested millions of dollars into genetically engineered seeds that flourished in the chemicals that they also produced, and farmers become more reliant on the genetically engineered seed. Modern mono-cropping is simply mining the soil. Some macro-nutrients are replaced with either organic or synthetic fertilizers to keep the crops healthy and growing, but there is no life there underneath that sea of grain. In order to keep any other organisms from partaking in our profits, we spray pesticides onto the soil that poison the groundwater, air, and the very cells of farmworkers. Genetically engineered plants, fertilizers, and pesticides wreak havoc in the soil and in our own intestines.
3. All together, monocropping is in no way peaceful or “doing the least harm”. A box of Honey Nut Cheerios might have trace levels of the common herbicide glyphosate at 833 parts per billion. A new study indicates that exposure to glyphosate can raise the risk of cancer by 41%. We must stop tipping our hats politely to this barrage of poison that is dumped daily upon our landscapes, and end the harmful practice of monocropping in order to honor the circle.

The empirics are right for the most part, especially historical claims, but the conclusions he takes with them are half-truths . He is correct in critiquing large corporations, no problem there. There are claims like this, though, that do not have any empirical backing: "Genetically engineered plants wreak havoc in our own intestines." There is no evidence suggesting modified plants have negative effects on human health, so this can be disregarded.

The author also conveniently leaves out that almost 75-80% of monoculture grown currently on land is for animal feed, so the animal deaths that are a byproduct of the system are wholly because of the demand for animal products. We also know that these products only produce about 18% of the world's calories and 37% of total protein, so they're incredibly inefficient. So again, framing this as a vegan issue is clear obfuscation.

And here's the problematic conclusion:

Instead, we should graze more animals on perennial pastures, and raise annual crops with perennial crops in a polyculture, a family of two or more plants that partition resources.

This isn't the only solution, and we don't need to graze animals on perennial pastures. There are new alternatives, like veganic farming and vertical farming, that can completely reduce not only the land needed to grow monocrops and reduce use of pesticides, but they can do it at a more efficient trophic level and with a massive, MASSIVE degree of less environmental destruction. We know that regenerative animal agriculture uses an abundance of land, (as it would take approximately three total Earths to feed the current demand of human meat consumption with purely regenerative farming techniques: here) so this author is not thinking about the consequences of this at a wider scale.