Other perspectives

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 weeds: kill them. Also, insects, rodents, and birds will come and try to eat your wheat plants. These are pests: kill them.

If you kill enough of the weeds and pests, and if the weather is good, you’ll grow a bounty 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 too. Miserably.

Can we abandon agriculture?

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

Wild strawberries, for example, are delicious, but they’re delicate, and their season is short. Maybe we can devise a way to preserve them for winter.

Today we grow cotton in Georgia to make shirts for people in London. Maybe we can devise a way to get spinnable fiber from London’s native bushes.

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

Adventures in ecotopia

A lot has happened on Earth between now and 2365, when Ernest of Dezrett leaves home and goes wandering. Earth’s forests have grown back, its plants and animals gone wild. Nature is flourishing—and so is humankind, its genius expressed in diverse local cultures and a vibrant cosmopolis.

Agriculture has been abandoned. Money has been forgotten.

Or so we gather, as Ernest, the lead narrator in Clementa, recounts his adventures. He’s writing for his contemporaries, not for us, so he doesn’t need to tell them what they already know; but we see their world and infer how it got to be that way.

He accepts an assignment to reside in a backward homeland, expecting to do nothing more than amateur ethnology. Instead he gets mixed up with people who blunder and prevail, wound and heal, kill and love in an epic struggle for—and against—liberation.

Clementa reads like the novelization of an opera

• The hero sees through his culture’s delusions. Then he falls for a woman.
• The heroine escapes a ritual sacrifice to save her life. Does this cause the fire that destroys her beloved forest?
• The singer is gang-raped. Then the gang is captured, and she massacres them.
• Powerful crowd scenes, including a rite of awakening performed in a cave and a bawdy victory celebration with fantastic costumes.