The greatest tyranny that faces mankind is the tyranny of lack. In a world where ample resources exist to sustain every man, woman, and child, that people should place profit  and comfort ahead of life in their list of priorities can be construed as nothing less than selfish. And that industry should conspire to so impoverish mankind for the sake of profit can be construed as nothing less than tyranny. The greatest threat to the seed pool of Planet Earth, upon which we all depend for food, has not been pollution, but ambition.

 

In our effort to 'feed the world' industrial agriculture has slowly robbed us of countless varieties of fruits, grains, and vegetables. Seed catalogs that a century ago boasted pages of varieties of a particular vegetable now relegate to them only a few lines or a quarter of a page. Of the thousands of varieties of apples once grown in the Americas, there remain, at best, only a few hundred. These treasures and many others, before it became 'profitable' to do otherwise, were conserved on the small local farm or in the cottage garden. But our lust for luxury, convenience, entertainment, and diversion drove us off the rural farm and into the city, out of the garden and into the supermarket.

 

The same could be said for countless varieties of animals. Our global press toward monoculture, in the name of efficiency and profit, has robbed us of the rich heritage of diversity that preserves mankind's health and longevity. Only time will tell the extent of our poverty. But by then it may be too late to cut our losses.

 

If we were really interested in feeding the world, we'd start in our own backyard, in our own neighborhoods. We'd make it profitable for the local family farm or cottage garden to conserve our biodiversity. And though the prosperity of the local family farm could spell out the demise of modern industrial agriculture, if our efforts were truly ethical, supportive and not just exploitative, we would all have more food to eat -- fresher food, more nutritive food, provided at lower cost to more people.

 

Having indentured ourselves to industry, monoculture is depriving us of the biodiversity we need to survive -- biodiversity that can insulate us against disease, pestilence, and famine. And where shall we cast the blame for such deprivation but at the feet of our own engineering efforts. We're deprived of health and longevity by the 'ingenious' products we've engineered to sate our tastes -- products that are all too often indigestible to insects, animals, and humans alike.

 

The pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers now required to grow our engineering wonders, shorten the lifespan of our livestock and leach the nutrients and future productivity from the soil, leaving it more poisoned and less capable of natural productivity than ever. To feed our appetites for luxurious living and addictive tastes, we take the food out of the mouths of the next generation whose population is steadily growing. I wonder how long men will be able justify such brutal exploitation in the name of commerce? How much more can freedom-loving people tolerate?

 

It surprises me that our answer to such exploitation is always to cast the blame on pollution while absolving the industrial paradigms, principles, and practices that caused it. That we should seek carbon neutrality by limiting a population we can no longer feed, or by limiting our travel and our consumption of oil while doing nothing to increase our local agricultural productivity, seems absurd in the highest possible degree.

 

The seed bank of the human race is not preserved in vaults, nor is it wholly preserved in the redemption of wilderness areas (though this is also important). Rather, the seed bank of the human race is preserved through responsible and purposeful local agrarian practices. It is our responsible cultivation of local lands and varieties of food that offers us the best hope for the preservation of the world's life-giving seeds and soil.

 

We should be more circumspect about our use of local land than we are about the clothes we wear and the food we eat. Our 'disconnect' with the terrestrial source of our health and longevity cannot continue much longer without disastrous results. We can only fool the taste buds of our industrial appetites for so long before we begin to suffer the devastating effects of the cancerous lifestyle to which we've become so addicted and whose products we've consumed so voraciously.

 

When there's nothing left to exploit, our industrial ambitions will fail. Borne on the backs of bankruptcy, of lust, and of our lack of restraint, industry will eventually collapse under the weight of its own excess. We've so weakened the supporting infrastructure on which we depend to feed our industrial obesity that it cannot carry this weight much longer or much further. We are about to starve to death with our stomachs are full, if nothing changes, for we are incapable of ingesting nutrients from the infirmed system we've created or from the resources we've exploited so selfishly for so long.

 

But the answer to this encroaching global deprivation is not more efficient industrial exploitation for greater profits. The answer is less exploitation, greater freedom, and broader and more diverse cultivation. It is not the factory farm that will feed the world, but the family farm. The family farm, the cottage garden, is the real source of the only produce that the whole world can really afford. Any other kind of farm, or any effort to obstruct this freedom to feed ourselves, will only rob the poor to feed the rich.

 

We don't need more industry. We need, and need to be, better neighbors. Such thinking might be considered dangerous, revolutionary, or even subversive. To some, growing a cottage garden is like signing the Declaration of Independence and supporting local agriculture might be viewed with the same suspicion as joining a local militia. These revolutionary pursuits are likely to raise some eyebrows and step on a few industrial toes. But they're also personal freedoms belonging to us all. Everyone should have the right and ability to grow his or her own garden. In this pursuit, feeding your neighbor, and teaching them to do the same, is the spark of a new kind of peaceful revolution in which your garden is your signature on the Agrarian Declaration of Independence.

 

Michael Hennen