| mp via Nettime-tmp on Fri, 21 Jul 2023 15:30:45 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Bioregionalism |
On 7/21/23 15:13, Joseph Rabie via Nettime-tmp wrote:
I am curious about this determinism that "mp" postulates – that the worm was in the fruit, so to speak, the moment some human, ten thousand years ago, had the brainwave of planting a wheat field. That from that moment on, with the concepts and practises that were their logical consequence, we were set onto the tragic path that has led us inevitably to the Capitalocene. I do not think that it is correct to equate a small wheat field in ancient Irak to a mega-farm in the American Midwest. The ancient idea of abundance, of the breadbasket, has both a social and aesthetic value that are profoundly anchored in the collective psyche, and positive vision of the rural landscape.
Not intending to plead for determinism. Merely pointing at the conditions and the specific tools underpinning that type of civilisation, especially the plough, which rips open the skin of the earth, let's the nutrients bleed out, extracts the resources and leaves the soil depleted. It is a pattern and it repeats. With land with people. It permits, but does not determine, certain actions. James Scott's Against the Grain is useful here.
Class society, enslavement and whatever else could have found other platforms to rest on. Of course.
However, as per Montgomery, who calls it the most destructive invention ever made, the plough is extractive and eventually the soil dies. Then whoever was living on it go away.
It already happened in "our culture" - as it did in all those that came before. We are here, still, only because petrochemical input makes it possible to carry on a little further.
All this is just to say that premodernity was not, as originally suggested, in harmony with nature. They were also ploughing themselves to death. That is a romantic view, I belief, which obscures the continuity.
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