Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
synthetic food made in factories from chemicals: 'tissue cultures of meats and vegetables
and junk foods made from any convenient organism'.
The third area would be a wilderness, 'given entirely over to Gaia and left to evolve
wholly without interference or management'. Lovelock proposes to spray the wilderness
from time to time with nuclear waste, not just as a cheap way of disposing of it, but also
to scare off any greenies inclined to 'go native' - but somehow I doubt this will be a suc-
cessful deterrent. The more effective way of keeping out any of the poor who decide that
they would rather eat wild boar than junk food will be to erect a massive fence around the
wilderness area and patrol it with marksmen operating a shoot-to-kill policy. This shouldn't
be difficult as any state dependent upon nuclear energy will have formidable security ar-
rangements and a heavily armed police force at its disposal anyway. Security could also
be enhanced by a vast network of CCTV cameras which will also, incidentally, allow the
biodiversity and the wildlife to be gawped at in real time by urban citizens on their com-
puter screens.
Now, imagine you are James Lovelock, hatching your vision of a civilization fenced off
from nature, and are browsing through the various scenarios for feeding Britain given in
Chapter 9, wondering which model best suits your schemes. It is not a hard choice: both ve-
gan options concentrate all their husbandry into the arable sector and leave all the perman-
ent and rough pasture obligingly empty of agricultural activity, ready to be fenced off for
the biodiversity reserve. But the vegan/organic scenario is unnecessarily wasteful of land:
why sow green manures and accept low yields when you can manufacture all the nitrogen
you need with the aid of nuclear energy? There is no question about it, the chemical-vegan
option is the one for Mr Lovelock.
There is, odd though it may seem, a carnivore variant on the theme of apartheid between
humanity and the natural world. Paul Shepard's 'cynegetic' society, like Lovelock's, fore-
sees eight billion humans fed on food cultured from 'bacteria, yeasts, protozoans and algae'
and crammed into 'compact quarters in very large buildings … built high into the air and
far below ground'. 34 The 160,000 cities housing this concentration of humanity and mi-
crobes would be strung along a five-mile wide ribbon of development following the coast-
line of all continents and islands, while the interior would be kept as wilderness (Shepard
was writing in 1973, before a rise in sea levels from global warming was viewed as a likely
possibility).
But Shepard, unlike Lovelock, doesn't want to protect wilderness by keeping humans
out - on the contrary, he encourages them to carry out hunting activities there on a part-
time basis:
From the age of 13 the adolescent youth would move into a series of increasingly
extended and arduous expeditions for which childhood and juvenile skills had pre-
pared him. All hunting would be done by groups of men, preceded and followed by
 
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