Agriculture vs. nature

How do you grow wheat? First, clear the ground of trees, and then plow it. This will kill the plants that would’ve competed with your wheat for sunlight and soil nutrients. Then plant your wheat seeds. As the wheat plants grow, some other plants will come up around them. Either their roots survived the plowing or their seeds blew in. These are called weeds. Kill them. Also, insects, rodents, and birds will come and eat your wheat plants. These are called pests. Kill them.

If you kill enough of the weeds and the pests, and if the weather is good, you’ll grow a lot of wheat. You will have worked all summer to kill everything but wheat, and now you’ll have more wheat than you and your family and friends can eat. You’ll have to trade the surplus for the meat, fruit, and fiber you need.

Agriculture is unremitting war against weeds and pests—that is, against nature. And agriculture is winning. Awkwardly for us, however, when nature dies, humankind will die with it. Miserably.

But can we ever abandon agriculture? Of course we can. A civilization that figured out how to fly a man to the moon can figure out how to thrive on Earth using just what comes up or runs by.

Acorns, for example, are abundant but inedible for humans. Perhaps we can devise a cheap, easy way of preparing them that will make them delicious.

To give another example, we grow cotton in Georgia to make shirts for people in London. Perhaps we can devise a way to get spinnable fiber from London’s native bushes.

In principle, we can make almost anything out of anything. In practice, the only question for any given transformation is: how much work would it take? If it’s not worth the work, we won’t do it. But a new invention might make it easy.

A thousand inventions got us to the moon. A thousand more inventions can enable us to thrive without agriculture.