What is Radical Agriculture? Philosophical Reflections

Guest Speaker Jason Wirth and Chef Bethany Howlett will lead this event. Jason Wirth will discuss that there are many ways that we can find a philosophical toehold on the nature of the growing calamity of the Anthropocene. In my reflections, I propose that one of them is to examine the Great Acceleration (the global population explosion since the end of the Second World War) as a constitutive inability to recognize that industrial agriculture is an oxymoron pernicious enough to jeopardize human dwelling on the earth. How could this be? Is it not the technologicalmiracle that we can feed billions of people? At stake is a consideration of the nature of agriculture. Agri derives from the Latin ager, meaning field or open land. One can detect a resonance of the word in the English acre. The trickier word is cultura, which meant the “tilling” of the ager. Tilling itself once meant a practice of caring and honoring. It derives from the past-participle stem colere, to tend or guard, a word that European imperial economic might eventually “cultivated” as colonia: “settled land," “plantation or farm,” and “landed estate,” in turn from colonus, “tenant farmer, settler on a new land.” The idea that cultura meant the collective habits of living (a shared “cultivation” of the mind) likely derives from Cicero’s metaphorical extension of tillage to include the mind, but itdid not become a part of common parlance until the 19 th Century. Culture eventually became the personal and collective “cultivation” of the soil of the mind, but for centuries before then, culture spoke to our relationship to the land.

The history of “agriculture” brings us to a fork that I will examine. What is our “cultural” response to the Anthropocene? In the global industrial cultivation (and hence degradation) of
the earth, wherefore culture itself? The cultivation of the soil became the colonization of the world. John Locke’s (in)famous conceptualization of property justified the tilling of the wilds and terra nullius (“nobody’s land”) of the New World (along with its “savages” and “naturals”), transforming them into productive property. After carefully considering the origins of imperial (and eventually "industrial”) agriculture in Locke’s rationalization of the appropriation without consent of the lands of indigenous peoples (human and non-human), I turn to the other prong of the fork, a form of resistance that I call radical agriculture. Here I consider the work of Peter Berg, Jan Zwicky, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry. From this perspective, agriculture can be reclaimed as a radical form of ecological resistance to the global plantation of capital.

Transportation between USF and the event is available, but you must RSVP and fill out the form at the link above.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the host, Professor Geoff Ashton, at gashton@usfca.edu