Food, ethics, killing

Recently published in Arena.

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The Great Interruption (or, 'We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist')

From here.

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Greenwash #25 in Trouble - Locavore Intimacy

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Please note, my critique of agriculture in this piece is not an attack on farmers per se. We are agricultural consumers, farmers are agriculture providers. Urban-centric attacks on farmers for being ecological destroyers are misguided and simplistic. We grow the demand, desire and populations that necessitate ecological crisis. We're all participants, or as Gary Snyder puts it: "No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders." (Earth House Hold, 1957)

If only the following table read: "The Main Types of Damage Anthropocenes Inadvertently Cause to Wildlife," and unpacked all the different ways in which we dwell on Earth and the consequences for each. When white people began farming in Australia, Aborigines were rounded up and killed as 'cattle stealers'. I find the same continued hypocrisy in this table:

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Two forms of death: ecological and anthropocene made

Deborah Bird Rose (2011):

There are two big contexts of death. The first is the fact that death resides in life... Death, as a corollary to life, happens to all of us complex creatures. It may happen through old age, or illness; it may happen through hunting or killing; it may happen on larger scales through events such as cyclones, earthquakes, or volcanoes. In this context, living things are bound into ecological communities of life and death, and within these communities life is always making and unmaking itself in time and place.

The second context differs from the first in being a uniquely human invention: man-made mass death. This form of death arises out of a will-to-destruction that seems to be confined to humans... The will-to-destruction can most vividly be thought of as death work. It involves imagining a future emptiness, and then working systematically to accomplish that emptiness... In ordinary life, death is the necessary completion of life. Man-made death is not necessary and does not complete life. Instead it is a massive interruption, a negation of the relationships between life and death.

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