![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorOne idea I'd like to write more about is how the current societal conception of efficiency is actually part of the problem when it comes to climate change. The reason for this is simple--it leads to monocultures. And monocultures are only beneficial for short term profits, they're not ecologically sustainable or beneficial to either ecosystems or the humans living in them.
The ecological collapse caused by monocultures is hardly an 'efficient' way to mend our rapidly deteriorating environment. A small farmer is better off growing a wide variety of foods so their harvest will be more resilient if one crop fails due to drought or insects or disease. Locals are better off when massive quantities of manure aren't dumped in their waterways and pesticides aren't sprayed in their faces.
The only real beneficiaries to the huge 'efficient' monocultures of animal, plant, or fungal agriculture are megacorps and their investors. This is why I believe that in order to fix our food system (which as is uses vast amounts of fossil fuels and horribly depletes our environment), we have to discard a notion of 'efficiency' that is filled with waste and serves neither the Earth nor the average human being.
In short, before determining something is efficient, we have to determine the context-- we must answer the questions of who, and what, is that efficiency for?
The ecological collapse caused by monocultures is hardly an 'efficient' way to mend our rapidly deteriorating environment. A small farmer is better off growing a wide variety of foods so their harvest will be more resilient if one crop fails due to drought or insects or disease. Locals are better off when massive quantities of manure aren't dumped in their waterways and pesticides aren't sprayed in their faces.
The only real beneficiaries to the huge 'efficient' monocultures of animal, plant, or fungal agriculture are megacorps and their investors. This is why I believe that in order to fix our food system (which as is uses vast amounts of fossil fuels and horribly depletes our environment), we have to discard a notion of 'efficiency' that is filled with waste and serves neither the Earth nor the average human being.
In short, before determining something is efficient, we have to determine the context-- we must answer the questions of who, and what, is that efficiency for?