I’m taking the train from Chicago to St. Louis. The view from the window is green, but it ain’t green. It’s the artificial striations of cornfields, the neutered pastures of grass; it’s pastoral, not natural. It’s green, but it’s a processed green. It’s empty calories. I think of ‘going green’, and this is what it means. It’s a paint job on climate concrete.
One crop as far as you can see ain’t natural. It requires a lot of energy to keep the natural entropy back. One crop every season is abomination, the three sisters told Native Americans that. That’s why there’s behemoth trucks and tractors parked near the barns. That’s why there’s fertilizer and pesticide piled inside. It requires a whole lot of energy slaves to keep the fields looking like that. The fields are green, but they should really be black.
The carnal sin was the industrial revolution, but we forget that the agricultural revolution was also bad. Cain first slew Abel in the fields. And as punishment Yahweh said, “When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” And so soil degrades with every harvest. The modern green revolution was largely flooding the fields with fertilizer produced from natural gas. It was the discovery that we…
