When the Ground Can No Longer Feed Us

What are we sacrificing in our race towards progress?

It is a horribly helpless feeling to own land and realize you may not be able to grow food on it.

As I’ve been sorting through my recent garden woes, my brain, doing what brains do, has jumped to the worst-case scenario several times:

What if I can never grow a garden here?

I usually spiral over that for a while before my rational side takes over and reminds me that I’m still at the beginning. That I always, always figure things out. That I’ll figure this out too.

But still.

There is something so unsettling about realizing that owning land doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself from it.

And I believe we’re only at the beginning of this problem.

For a very long time, we’ve romanticized the idea that you could buy five or ten or twenty acres, learn a few skills, plant a garden, raise some chickens, and therefore possess a meaningful degree of food independence.

Or perhaps it wasn’t even a point of romance. It was simply the way things were.

The challenge used to be:

Learn how to work with nature.

Now it is shifting to:

Figure out how to overcome what humans have done to it.

Contaminated manure. Herbicide carryover. Depleted soils. Chemical drift. Water problems. Unfettered development. Poisoned resources. And whatever comes next…

Once again, I’m over here in my little prairie office asking the same question I’ve ruminated on repeatedly in my books and writings:

At what cost?

The circle of life.
The water cycle.
The carbon cycle.
Seed to plant to seed again.

Plants grow. Animals eat the plants. Waste and decay return nutrients to the soil. The soil feeds the next generation of plants.

Round and round it goes.

But our progress-at-all-costs obsession seems determined to turn these circles into straight lines.

We extract.

We consume.

Then we extract some more.

Someday, the bill will come due.

Yet anyone who questions when that bill is coming is painted as anti-technology, anti-growth, or nostalgic for a past that never really existed.

We’re told, in no uncertain terms:

This is progress.

This is what it takes to feed the world.

This is just how things are.

In essence?

Get over it.

Dare to question the resources these sorts of projects consume and someone will inevitably say, “Well then, stop using Amazon. Stop using Facebook. Stop using the cloud.”

As if shutting down my laptop would somehow slow the freight train of development barreling toward us.

But okay, sure. I’ll admit my hypocrisy.

I am typing this on a computer connected to Wi-Fi. My businesses exist on the internet. My livelihood depends on technologies and systems I sometimes criticize.

I am not standing outside the machine pointing my finger at everyone inside it. I am inside it too.

But surely participation does not require permanent silence.

Surely we are still allowed to look around and say:

This is hurting us.

At what point does the price of progress become too high?

At what point do we admit that we cannot extract and consume forever on a finite piece of ground?

At what point do we stop dismissing the people asking questions as crackpots, alarmists, Luddites, or obstacles standing in the way of progress?

The consequences of our current choices may not fully arrive in my lifetime, or even my children’s, but that doesn’t make asking hard questions foolish.

And someday, we may wish we had started asking them much sooner.

To be clear, I am not arguing that we abandon technology, modern agriculture, electricity, computers, or every convenience industrialization has given us.

I don’t have all the answers or some easy peasy 1-2-3 solution.

But I am increasingly suspicious of the assumption that forward is always better simply because it is forward, especially when there is so much money to be made from convincing us it is.

Progress is not inherently good. It is a trade.

Sometimes a worthy trade, but a trade nonetheless.

And perhaps we should spend less time asking whether we can build the next thing, scale the next thing, extract the next thing, or make the next thing more convenient— and spend a little more time asking what are we giving up in exchange.

Our soil?

Our water?

Our ability to grow food?

Our landscapes?

Our independence?

Because a machine that requires us to sacrifice the things that sustain us is not progress. And at some point, we have to stop calling it that.

-Jill

P.S. A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this very topic. You can find it here.