The Hidden Cruelty of Sustainability

With the rise in popularity of the ideas of urban gardening, deep ecology, and permaculture amongst activists, anarchists, and subcultures such as punk often questions of ethics seem to have become simplified to the equation of SUSTAINABLE = GOOD. Yet often all kinds of cruelty can be hidden behind the veneer of that buzzword sustainable.

The unfortunate reality is that simple fixes rarely offer much beyond false hope and easy ways out. Perhaps they help people to ease their personal guilt by assuming they are not part of the problem (everyone else is), but is this any more than a self serving delusion?

https://scontent-a-sea.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/p417x417/270848_10151423231148549_2132240944_n.jpg?oh=84644c7e34e2093f6ceeaead85954973&oe=54DB3CD5 — The farm I grew up on near Kitscoty Alberta. This picture looks out the window of my mothers bedroom over the garden and barnyard

I grew up on a small family run farm in Alberta, 10 miles north of a town you have likely never heard of, with a population under 700. My mother grew up on that same farm with her two brothers. Her dad and his family lived there for many years, they had immigrated up from Nebraska where the family had farmed for a few generations since their original migration from Scotland, where again they had been farmers. It would be fair to say that farming is in my blood, so to speak (or perhaps I have just been reading too many Vampire The Masquerade books as of late?) Either way, I feel at least semi-competent to write about some of the ‘sustainable’ realities of small scale farming, drawing on my personal experiences.

I have many memories from growing up on the farm, from playing in the garden and eating carrots straight out of the ground with the dirt still on them, to collecting eggs from the chicken house, or chasing the turkeys for fun, being chased by the turkeys (which wasn’t so fun), or moving cattle from one pasture to another by horse back. There were some great memories too; picking saskatoon berries, wild raspberries that grew in the coolie, or building forts and campfires in the bush by the ravine. However, there were also just as many memories that were not so wonderful to look back on. Branding cattle with a hot iron as they screamed, or castrating steers — many city folks don’t realize you do not eat cows, and you do not eat bulls, you eat a male who had it’s nuts cut off so the flesh will taste better. All of which could be argued as sustainable.

Now I recognize that not all this is relevant to the popular trends I see amongst self styled alternative people over here on the west coast, as most of the folk punks are more into having pet goats and living on boats rather than farming beef or dairy cattle for auction. So I will try to keep more focused on the aspects of small scale farming that would be more of interest to the DIY crowd with their fantasies of farming and sustainable farming.

Chicken Squawk

One of the more popular trends amongst the urban radicals is having back yard chickens, to collect and eat their eggs. Where I live, in the Cascadian bioregion, it has become almost as cliché to have 6-10 birds pecking around your back yard of your community house as it has to wear Carhardts, have a large dog, and all black clothing, or to play banjo. Unfortunately, I also live in an area where one thing that is not popular is sticking around. The radical community here tends to be quite transient in nature, with lots of college kids, traveler punks, and others folks who often didn’t come from here and even more often don’t have much intention of putting down roots. This is a common frustration to those who are part of long term projects propelled by volunteers, but none the less, it has its pros and cons. However for the chickens pecking the dirt and laying those golden eggs, it is a much bigger problem. An average chicken may live up to 8 years, which is far longer than the school term, or even a bachelors degree. A quick peruse of Craigslist at the right times of year will give you a good indication of just how expendable these animals are to many of the people who are excited in September (at the beginning of the school term) to build a chicken coop for their back yard. But even for those who don’t intend to go traveling or tree planting soon as the summer hits, few want to care for a chicken until it dies naturally of old age. You see, chickens only lay a lot of eggs when they are still fairly young, as they get older they will produce less and less. For many of the urban agriculture enthusiasts, a chicken that doesn’t lay eggs is just work with no pay off.

But the plight of the urban chicken doesn’t end there — or more accurately; it doesn’t begin there. You see, chickens don’t just appear, and they are not brought by the stork to deserving families, they come from somewhere – or in other words, someone breeds them. Few of the breeds of chickens people farm have any resemblance to wild breeds, and wild chickens are pretty rare these days due to our destruction of wildlife habitat for cities and farm land; never mind that there was chickens, like Europeans, are an invasive species to this part of the world. So most of the domesticated birds come from a hatchery; either directly – or indirectly.

I remember how exciting it was for me as a kid to order chicks. We would get a catalog in the mail, with pictures of the full grown birds, and you would select them by recording the order number of which breeds you wanted to buy. A few weeks later, you would get a large cardboard box in the mail which would be chirping. Upon opening it, you would see it packed full of fluffy yellow chicks, divided and layered with cardboard dividers so they could fit more into each box. Every so often a couple would die while in the mail, so you would get a few dead ones in every box.Kinda like two scoops of raisins, right?

An important thing to note is, that they also were separated not just by breed, but also gender. See chicks are born about half females and half males, but most people don’t want to order males. Roosters don’t lay eggs for one, and for two, if you have more than one (or maybe two) roosters, they will kill each other. So the chicks are bred, the females are sold through mail order and the males are killed. Yup, right into the wood chipper. When people get back yard chickens, they often order from a breeder or hatchery. I know some get “second hand” or even call them “rescues”, but where do you think those birds came from before you got them? Buying chickens is putting money into the industry that breeds them for profit. This is the industry of commercial chicken breeders, and they are often the same places that supply big farms, as well as small farms and your average urban gardener with their new found interest in permaculture. And I didn’t even talk about the forced insemination.

Permanent Agriculture?

The study of words can reveal a lot. If you look at the etymology of the word Garden, we discover it is related to the German word for guard, and to words for walled, or closed lot. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to begin to see the relationship between these terms. As anthropologist Layla AbdelRahim explained in Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams, domestication requires the domesticator to control access to food and land. When you begin to garden a space, you must control what other species have access to that land or you will likely not have much of a crop to harvest. Whether we are talking about other non-human animals that might desire and easy lunch, or even competing plant species, insects, or other humans – gardening requires us to control what species are able to access the space. On an even more basic level, gardening usually begins with removing undesired plant species to prepare the land so we can plant seeds of the species we desire.

It has always amazed me how uncritically many Green Anarchists, Vegans, and Primitivists seem to embrace and support permaculture. Yet permaculture is in its essence another system of domestication rooted in anthropocentric desires. In other words, permaculture might be presented by its proponents as being sustainable (and therefore ethical) and based in local ecology, but in fact it is once again about human wants and needs. As well revered permaculturist Erik Ohlson explained in his interview in the book Tangled Roots: Dialogues Exploring Ecological Justice, Healing, and Decolonization, “Permaculture, which could be permanent—agriculture or permanentculture is about designing human culture that is beneficial to both the land and to human at the same time.” That might sound great on the surface, but look at it a bit more closely and it follows all the same old patterns; humans are in control, Erik posits us as the managers and designers, and in the end it is about human needs first and foremost. Animals are not even acknowledged in this relationship, even though you would be hard pressed to find a permaculturist who doesn’t argue that domesticated animals are needed in order to maintain a healthy closed circuit. The implicit goal of permaculture is to make this human domination of wildlife spaces, plants and animals – sustainable and thus permanent.

I am fully aware that not every radical out there agrees with the anarcho-primitivist critiques of domestication, which sees domestication as not only the control of the wild, but also as the root of many other systems of domination such as patriarchy. It took me a long time myself to come to a place where I was open to those conclusions and the difficult questions they lead to. However there are many lenses to view the question of ‘sustainable farming’ through. From an animal liberation lens, another set of problems presents itself in that permaculture like other forms of gardening for human consumption involves turning wildlife habitat into farm lands that are exclusionary to certain wildlife, and even further permaculture also uses domesticated animals.

This is where it really becomes a problem for me, as it perpetuates the use and domestication of non-human animals for human benefit. But due to the SUSTAINABLE=GOOD formula, we choose to not see its implications for animals: both wildlife and domesticated. Often when I have presented these arguments to proponents of permaculture design, the response I get is akin to the lesser of two evils. The same argument often used to justify voting for shitty, racist, business friendly politicians.

I am by no means arguing that permaculture is worse for the land than monocropping, factory farming, or industrial agriculture, rather I am arguing that it is not the be all end all simple fix that many seem to desire it to be. Permaculture still means wildlife habitat is destroyed and used for human benefit that does not allow wild species full access and use of the spaces. Permaculture still involves captive breeding and continued domestication of animals for human consumption, whether it be chickens to scratch and turn the soil, or goats, pigs, or other species. Many of those animals will be from commercial breeders, and the care of those animals will continue to support industries that profit off of animal agriculture. Many of those animals will also still be killed in the end either so humans can consume their flesh and bodies, or because they have quit producing at the rates desired by the domesticators. Most of those animals will also be of breeds that simply did not exist in the wild, did not exist until humans interfered with their reproductive strategies to cause them to develop traits deemed more desirable. Did you know that wild pigs were never pink skinned, that sheep didn’t produce a harvestable amount of wool for hundreds of years after domestication, or that cattle bred for meat are different breeds than the cattle bred for dairy production? Wild cattle don’t produce as much milk, the animals we farm today are the product of thousands of years of selective breeding.

It is indisputable that modern industrial agriculture is anything but sustainable as it depletes the infrastructure of the landbase for higher temporary crop yields. Such a system by definition is incapable to sustaining itself indefinitely and would eventually lead to a collapse as once fertile croplands become less and less able to produce, due to nutrients in the soil being depleted. Technological fixes such as fertilizers may increase yields in the short run, but only work to deplete the health of the land in the long term. Permaculture on the other hand aims to be sustainable, which may be its most insidious trait. It seeks to make permanent the ability of humans to dominate the wild, and thus maintain industrial civilization. Advocates often argue that permaculture can allow us to use less land in order to grow crops to feed our populace (which is a population of not just humans, but also of the animals we domesticate for our use). However, promises of abundance aside, we live in a society of exponential growth. Capitalism is an economic system that requires such growth, both in profits and in populace which will consume the products of the capitalists. Permaculture does nothing to challenge or disrupt this growth, and in fact may allow it to continue far beyond the limits of industrial agriculture in its current form.

Capitalism kills animals. Industrialism kills animals. Civilization as we know it is based on the domestication of animals and destruction of the wild. I have no doubt that permaculture may live up to its promise of sustainability, I would even go further and suggest that many older practices of agriculture (such as crop rotation and choosing crops based on soil conditions) can also allow long term sustainability, yet like permaculture these techniques do nothing to challenge the relationship of human dominance, capitalism, growth, or cruelty to animals. The system always seeks to recuperate easy reforms in order to maintain itself. If we do not actively work to disrupt these power relations and include questions of ethics, sustainability will just become another way of hiding our violence and rationalizing our domination of other species.

At the very root of agriculture is the domination of other living beings by humans. At the very core of ethics is the question of domination and hierarchy. For me, any system that perpetuates these historical patterns is a system based on violence. I am always reminding myself that agriculture is a relatively new invention in the timeline of human existence. The world I would like to work towards in one that encourages and fosters the growth of wild species and habitats, not the subjugation of them.

I don’t know what the solution to all of this is, but I do know that if we hope for total liberation it can not perpetuate the oppression of others.

For those of interested in finding alternatives to these oppressive systems we need to consider more than simple solutions. Directness of our relationship to our food, and sustainability of our practices is only one part of the question we need to be asking. Another key question is, what is the outcome for non-human animals and for other species? Do the ‘alternatives’ we are promoting make any difference to the chicken in the cage? How about to the Wolf? the Trout? The Orca? Or Mycelium? Are they better off because of our actions? Or does our liberation continue to come at their expense? How can we begin to foster relationships that benefit wildlife? And how can we imagine our relationships to other species in ways that have the potential to be liberating and symbiotic?

by Comrade Black

Comments

Nick Montgomery November 13, 2014 · Reply

Thanks for this. Lots to chew on here. I think permaculture is a little more flexible than you give it credit for, though. I think you are right to point out that permaculture can end up creating isolated spaces that don’t do much to resist broader currents of capitalism/colonialism/ecocide, but permaculture can also be pretty rad. That just means permaculture is a site of struggle. Plenty of permaculturalists breed animals and do all kinds of other things you don’t like, but I think you could find a lot of elements of permaculture that resonate with your own perspective. Permaculture doesn’t necessarily do anything to disrupt civilization, but it can… there is a permaculture garden supporting the subsistence of land defenders up at Unist’ot’en camp, for example.
Even when permaculturalists create spaces with some domesticated species, these spaces tend to benefit wildlife. Most, if not all permaculture projects happen on land that has been heavily degraded (clearcuts, lawns, compacted fields, etc). The alternative (when you look at the other ways these spaces get used) is that they tend to stay degraded, or get worse through construction or extraction. In this sense, permaculture isn’t turning wild lands into farms; it’s working to create more habitat for plants and animals (including wild ones) and regenerate landscapes that humans have messed up. Most permaculturalists encourage people NOT to touch intact ecosystems; permaculturalists often seek out, intentionally, land that is fucked up from humans exploiting it.
As a system based in careful observation, I also think permaculture is pretty well suited to respond to some of your questions about whether our actions make a difference. In fact, I think most urban settlers are so disconnected from ecosystems that we have no sense of our impact, except as degrees of damage. To actually be serious about wanting to know the effects of our interactions with land would mean getting really serious about careful observation (and interaction), and permaculturalists have been developing these techniques for a few decades. They are nowhere near as sophisticated or grounded as indigenous peoples and traditional land-based cultures, but I think there’s stuff to learn there, especially for those of us (like me) who have almost none of these skills.
I know a permaculturalist in Anishnaabe territory who is working to replant hardwood trees like walnut and oak, in a forest of primarily pine and maple. 500 years ago, this was a food forest (partly cultivated and managed by Anishnaabe people), and trees like walnut and oak were some of the most important food sources for humans and animals. Because the forest has been logged so much, leaving the forest alone would mean that those hardwoods will never regrow, because none of their seeds are in the ground. You also can’t just plant seeds, because deer will eat the trees when they’re young. So this guy was painstakingly growing trees from seed in a nursery, observing them, fencing them with salvaged wire to protect them from the deer (there was lots of other food for the deer) and even researching which hardwood trees grew a bit further south, because a few species are dying out due to the warming climate. In effect, he was applying permaculture skills and techniques to create a habitat that would be more biodiverse, more resilient, and support more plant and animal life than it would have been if he had left it alone. He just wanted to help regenerate the forest, through careful and sustained observation and interaction. Even from an anarcho-primitivist perspecitve (let alone a permaculture one) isn’t that kind of awesome?
- Comrade Black November 14, 2014 · Reply
  
  Thanks for the thoughtful comment Nick. And thanks for reading my post. I appreciate some of the comments you made, and I agree that some of the ideas in permaculture can be useful in certain contexts, where as I still think other common practices promoted by permaculturalists are problematic.
vinto November 14, 2014 · Reply

Thanks for this article, I think you brought up some good points for discussion and consideration. As someone connected to both the punk and anarchist subcultures, it’s been frustrating to see how many people in somewhat “alternative” subcultures (I guess DIY, vague leftist, punk, etc) have been jumping on the urban chicken and localism bandwagons. While as anarchist I don’t expect much out of many of those folks, it’s still been surprising to see how many people that once had at least somewhat radical views have been completed absorbed by these approaches. Needless to say, the approaches have been completely co-opted by capitalism (of course that kind of assumes they had an element of resistance to them in the first place) and they’re just new ways of integrating people into the same system.

It also breaks my heart a bit when I see former vegans raising backyard chickens while claiming to have some kind of more radical “local” oriented approach.
- Comrade Black December 3, 2014 · Reply
  
  I totally agree.
farmerkhaiti November 23, 2014 · Reply

so, what do you eat if all agriculture is domination of the planet, in how you are defining it. Grains, fruits, nuts, legumes as well. Even certified organic crop production comes at a cost to wildlife and naturalness of the planet. The only way one could opt out completely from agriculture would be to only eat foraged wild food. I read about a guy who did this for a year as an experiment, I believe the article ran a couple years back in the UK Permaculture Magazine. Examining this food and sustainability and agriculture is extremely important, I commend your writing this all down for us to ponder as we try to make the best choices we can.
- Comrade Black December 3, 2014 · Reply
  
  Thanks for reading it and commenting.
  
  Yeah, this shit is complex, and the reality is that often these criticism come from being trapped in a problem without options to get outside it. I don’t know the answer(s). I also realize that I have tons to learn, and lack many of the skillsets to live outside of agriculture, and civilization. All of this is further complicated by the history of this land, and the fact that I am living on stolen unceded land – an occupier.
  
  Personally, I eat a plant based diet, even though it is also problematic for many of the same reasons (as agriculture is based on domination and anthropocentricism). I don’t eat plant based under the belief that I am somehow saving the world; -or some nonsense like that – I eat a plant based diet because I consider it to be part of a “least harm strategy” meaning that it still causes harm, no doubt, but it causes less harm than killing and slaughtering, and branding, and castrating, and growing crops humans could eat to feed cattle, pigs, etc. I think of it like harm reduction, but none the less it is agriculture and agriculture is based in domination and violence. This of course might not be a point we will agree on from the look of your blog, but that’s ok – no one said we need to agree on everything. It is clear that you take the time to think about these things, even if we come to different conclusions. Again, thanks for reading and commenting.
  - farmerkhaiti December 6, 2014
    
    thank you for your reply, thank you for your explanation of the least harm concept of eating. I admire it and think it’s really something more should aspire to, instead of mindless stuffing their faces with what smells good or is cheapest. I agree that having these kinds of discussions is the only way more people may be exposed to thinking differently, and seeing others who are aspiring to do their personal best sometimes urges others to do the same. SO keep on keeping on, and I really appreciate your thoughtfulness!
Neil December 3, 2014 · Reply

Another awesome article. I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff in the past few weeks about the deforestation of medieval Europe for a paper I’m writing, and pretty much everything you write is spot on with what I’ve read. One of the biggest problems moving forward obviously seems to be just getting people to think 500 years down the road instead of 5 minutes. The fact that most people alive today can’t even conceive of what a continent full of canopy forests, deciduous and coniferous, temperate and tropical would be like makes the task that much harder, as giving up the convenience of industrial agriculture without an equally tangible benifet to show them for the trade is a tough sell. We can only hope it doesn’t take a global disaster to push them in the right direction.

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The Hidden Cruelty of Sustainability

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