Reading

Food is different. It is not just any merchandise or commodity. Food means farming, and farming means rural livelihoods, traditions and cultures, and it means preserving, or destroying, rural landscapes. Farming means rural society, agrarian histories; in many cases, rural areas are the repositories of the cultural legacies of nations and peoples.

One reason technology and markets are unlikely to prevent overshoot and collapse is that technology and markets are merely tools to serve goals of society as a whole. If society’s implicit goals are to exploit nature, enrich the elites, and ignore the long term, then society will develop technologies and markets that destroy the environment, widen the gap between rich and poor, and optimize for short-term gain. In short, society develops technologies and markets that hasten a collapse instead of preventing it.