people love to say things like, “oh, humans used to live in harmony with nature. we’ve lost touch with that balance.” and every time i hear that, i want to roll my eyes so hard they dislocate. (probably the reason i am wearing specs)
the idea that we were once these peaceful, barefoot guardians of the forest who just coexisted lovingly with plants and animals is a complete fantasy. the truth is, we’ve always been hackers of nature. agriculture itself wasn’t some divine hand-holding with the earth. it was a survival cheat code. early humans didn’t sit around waiting for berries to grow, they engineered their environment to produce more food with less risk. that’s what agriculture is: a giant, ongoing bioengineering project.
just look at what we did to plants. wild bananas? full of hard seeds. wild apples? tart, bitter, barely edible. corn? originally a grass with tiny grains. we reshaped all of these, not to make them more “natural,” but to maximize calories, sweetness, shelf life, and productivity.
we bred out the seeds, made the flesh fatter, sweeter, more digestible. that’s not nature, that’s human manipulation. farming didn’t emerge from a zen connection with mother earth. it was cold, calculated, brilliant domination of nature. and we’ve only gotten better at it.
which is why i find the whole “organic farming is more natural” argument laughable. agriculture, by its very definition, isn’t natural.
nature never intended for monocultures to exist. never intended for rice fields to stretch for miles. organic or not, you’re forcing a patch of land to do one thing repeatedly, suppressing everything else, killing the competition, and calling it “eco-friendly” because you used cow dung instead of urea. cute.
people who fetishize going “back to nature” aren’t looking at the past, they’re looking at a fiction. they’re my favorite retards. they enjoy the luxuries of the modern world, filtered water, antibiotics, thermostats, and then pretend that giving up pesticides is some kind of spiritual awakening. it’s not. it’s regression dressed up as enlightenment.
you think early humans wanted to sleep on the dirt, break their backs planting stuff, and risk starvation every other season? no, they did what they had to do to survive, just like we do now. we’re just more efficient, more precise, and yeah, a hell of a lot messier on a global scale.
and here’s the kicker: even the people who pretend they’re living “naturally” today, the off-grid, raw-vegan, handwoven-linen crowd, they’re still using tools, practices, and seeds that are the result of thousands of years of civilization. you’re not going back to nature. you’re just cosplaying in a curated version of it, built on top of the very systems you claim to reject.
so no, agriculture was never natural. it was never harmonious. it was human will imposed on the wild, and i respect the hell out of that. because it got us here. and pretending we can unwind all that and become magically “pure” again is not just naive, it’s delusional.
now that we’ve understood this, we must do two things.