Commercial Crops DESTROY The Environment! | Lierre Keith

slowly you're wearing through your top soil because every time you do this activity there's less and less soil because the only thing that holds soil in place is those perennial crops not crops the perennial plants um acted on by the action of animals that's what builds soil the moment that you clear that land it is just like us it dies under exposure all the places where agriculture first started are just they're just dust like we've all seen pictures of Iraq you know because of the war and it's a desert right everybody just thinks of like some and then some sand and maybe a few goats here and there eating the little bits of scrub that are left that was a forest people it was a forest it was so dense sunlight never touched the ground we need to restore these ecosystems it's the only hope that we've got and we need to learn to live inside them again this what we did for 2 million years this is why I am not hopeless it's because for 2 million years we were not monsters and destroyers it's just one activity that wrecked us story you're told in school is what oh we were all starving it was so hard being a hunter gatherer we had no control over our food and then this wonderful thing happened we figured out how to do Agriculture and we were never hungry again and hasn't it been great and the truth is exactly the opposite hunger does not become institutionalized until people take up agriculture there were absolutely seasonal moments of hunger you at the end of the winter everybody probably would have been hungry a little bit because the animals were really lean they were getting kind of slim out there but eventually you know it comes back and then everybody gets to eat again so you'd see that in the archaeological record right there's those little lines in the bones and the teeth it's like all right there was a little bit of a h but you don't see evidence of famine ever in hunter gatherers like that's just not a thing until you're dependent on two crops and one of them fails um then it's over you're all you know you all stve and in agricultural societies every time it ends in collapse and the last proteins in the cooking pot are always human cannibalism like it's so Grim that that's where it's always where it ends um and it's this is just civilizations okay civilization is what's based on agriculture it's a way of life based on cities cities are only possible because of Agriculture so when you do agriculture when you do this when you take over the land and then you plant these annual crops you will temporarily have a surplus okay you don't do that as hunter gatherers you have nowhere to put a surplus you don't need a surplus when you're hungry you just go out and get more food you don't need to have a surplus of anything it's all there it's all just you know you can bury it in the ground and ferment it and then eat it in three months because it's more nutritious we don't need to do it there's always food available in your you know in your region and you know seasonally what to eat and where your Camp is and all that like here in the Pacific Northwest people have permanent settlements because there was so many fish the salmon coming up the river so they had Perman so you see that pattern too that's fine but nobody's destroying the land and just planting it for humans right but that's the problem so they do this right you take over the land you plant the animals you harvest them now where you going to put them so now you've got these human settlin that are dependent on it and slowly you're wearing through your top soil because every time you do this activity there's less and less soil because the only thing that holds soil in place is those perennial crops not crops the perennial plants um acted on by the action of animals that's what builds soil the moment that you clear that land it is just like us it dies under exposure so you've got the sun and the rain and the wind all beating it to death and there's no bacteria left so it just turns into dust which is literally what's happened around the world all the places where agriculture first started are just they're just dust like we've all seen pictures of Iraq you know because of the war and it's a desert right everybody just thinks of like some rocks and then some sand and maybe a few goats here and there eating the little bits of scrub that are left that was a forest people it was a forest it was so dense sunlight never touched the ground it was an oak Savannah like it's gone it's been gone for thousands of years why because people started doing agriculture so that's the problem you use up all of your land you slowly draw down your soil you've got this huge population explosion because of that temporary Surplus now what are you going to do you've got two choices you can all starve or you can conquer your neighbors and take their stuff this is the thing about agriculture is that it makes a permanent class of Warriors possible soldiers they don't exist in Hunter gathers and I'm not saying people don't fight each other and sometimes kill each other and what like yeah humans are humans you know we're not a different kind of human we're still human I get that there are conflicts I'm not saying that like life is perfect for hunter gatherers you know I'm not like making a romance here but the point is that there's an entire class of people who this war and civilization makes that possible because of the Surplus also makes it inevitable because you're drawing down all your resources because you're living in a a population density that requires the importation and if your neighbors don't want to give you their stuff you're going to have to go out and get it from them and that's why agricultural societies always end up militarized hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor of the show for everyone in Australia and that is Stockman Stakes Who deliver stakes and other meats direct to customer delivering high quality grass-fed and grass finished 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coming in um and then of course you take the people as well and you make them do that that backbreaking labor um even in the Year by the year 1800 which we usually say is the beginning of like the Industrial Age age um at that point 75% fully three4 of the human beings alive on the planet were living in some form of indenture serfdom or slav three quarters because it's the only way for the Leisure Class to have any any Leisure is somebody else has to do the backbreaking work so it ends up with these really stratified societies it's the beginning of patriarchy it's just like nothing good has happened since then we wrecked our health we've wrecked the planet we've taken out 99% of the habitat for wild animals you can't say this is good for animals um and we destroyed our capacity to be human with each other because now we live in these terrible hierarchies um that involve you have to live behind a military barricade so here we are like we've done it and now we're wrecking the climate on top of it all and just one more thing global warming did not start with burning fossil fuel it started with the beginning of Agriculture why because we blew through all the soil and what that means is that you know you too much oxygen gets in the biological activity increases really quickly and the soil structure just evaporates essentially and where does the carbon go up so rice agriculture in particular um has been horrendous for the climate but you can take you know see that sort of that hockey stick graph the famous one so year 1800 to now all the carbon we've added and that is true we did that by burning coal and then oil and gas that's all true but if you back that up like 6,000 years it's the same amount of carbon that we added so fossil fuel is an accelerant to this process absolutely an accelerant but the same amount was done just from blowing through all the all the the the fossil soil we can call it um by doing agriculture because we wed the soil so all of that is like this is what this is agriculture is a war against the living world and you're going to have to keep fighting it every year and that's what plows are for because the world doesn't want to be a monocrop of corn it wants to be a forest or a grassland and it keeps trying to come back like life wants to live this is the planet trying to fight back and we just keep pushing it out um and saying no we just want corn and we just want wheat so we're going to keep fighting you and all the animals that want to be there well we're just going to drive you into Extinction there's no more bison like it's all wheat and corn and soy now right um elephants couldn't survive rice agriculture they're all they were this they were the pink Asian elephants they're all gone um that's what's happened around the globe and it's it's absolutely horrifying once you start to learn about it and I could not absorb this as a vegan because I needed my diet to be the wonderful peaceful you know animal happy friendly sustainable food and it's not it's the the worst thing humans have done to the planet we need to restore these ecosystems it's the only hope that we've got and we need to learn to live inside them again that's what we did for two million years this is why I am not hopeless is because for two million years we were not monsters and destroyers it's just one activity that wrecked us it's just the one thing the agriculture just we just got to stop and in fact if you stop eating that food and starting food that actually does repair the world it repairs the soil and repairs the waterways and fills up the groundw you know the the aquafers again and makes the habitat for all those creatures to come back um it's actually not that hard and that food is actually perfect for the human template and I speak here of grass-fed beef and bison and you cannot be happier than eating that food so in fact you can take those same values and change the world into the world that we would rather have um by doing a very simple thing which is finding a grass-based farm in your area and buying all the beef for bison that you want hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys so that's um well thank you for that that was fantastic my mini lecture right yeah um so well that that's one of the things too that that people say was like okay well you know let's say that that eating meat is is very good for you and we should only eat that how are we going to feed you know 8 billion people is that possible uh eating it with just meat what do you think about that when people okay nothing that we do can feed eight billion people and that is the thing that we need to face we are on such bad overshoot that it's hard to have hope some days when I wake up um there's literally nothing the only reason we have 8 billion people is because we're eating fossil fuel so there's this thing called the hbos process that was discovered by two chemists um they needed to make nitrogen for the effort in Germany um and they figured out a way to take uh oil and gas as the feed stock and get usable nitrogen out of it and then that was used to make bombs isn't that lovely um and then when the war is over oh what are we going to do with these nitrogen factories well a whole other bunch of scientists around the globe were cheering this on because for God 80 years ever since nitrogen had been discovered there were a number of scientists were like I think we have a problem which is that we're going to run out of nitrogen we're clearly blowing through the top soil uh where's the nitrogen going to come from well we're going to use B guano for a while but that's clearly on draw down like there's not going to be more of it there's these huge caves that are filled with Bano right and they were using that to make bombs too and that's why Germany did this was because their supply was cut off um in the Atlantic so they couldn't get to it anymore and they're like how do we make bombs like we got it we can do it chemically we're gonna do this so you know anyway all these scientists were like yes this this is the this is how we're going to solve this because we're looking at Mass starvation without the nitrogen um and so this thing was created that was the Green Revolution so after World War II all of those nitrogen factories were turned over to the peace time effort and what it meant was we're going to create fertilizer that plants can use and then we're going to breed plants that really love this nitrogen stuff like really heavy doses of it we're going to pump them full of it and we're going to make them grow really short because we don't want any of that cul Lo stuff we just want that big fat seed head so we're going to make plants that are like as biologically to the Limit as we possibly can that are super short super big seed head you know until they basically fall over and we're going to feed all the hungry people so that worked for about a decade but you know what happens a few things happen one is that the human population quadrupled under this plan we didn't save we didn't fix this problem we've in fact made it four times worse because now what are they all going to eat um we are absolutely on the downside of peak oil and you know people make all kinds of predictions I think that's a very bad idea we are going to run out like any adult should be able to tell you that you have a substance that is finite and you're using it so whether you use it slowly or whether you use it quickly whether you don't even know exactly how much there is it doesn't matter you are eventually going to hit zero you will draw it down until you can't get any more of it or really what's going to happen is it's too expensive to pump it out anymore and it's not worth the energy that goes into it to get it out we're going to approach that at some point in the next few decades right we are absolutely on that downside of that curve so what do we think we're to eat when the oil and the gas run out because this was never a plan with the future right like the oil and the gas it's not like the big drops of oil have like a birds and bees talk with a little drops of oil like they don't reproduce it's oil okay it's like ancient bits of sunlight plants crushed you know millions of years later we have these pools of oil underneath the surface of the planet and they are finite there aren't going to be anymore it takes millions of years for them to accumulate we' we've blown through them right now take any human being around the globe test the nitrogen in their bodies half of it comes directly from from fossil fuel half of it that's what we're eating we're literally eating Oil we're literally eating oil there is no future in this so nothing we do is going to feed 8 billion people okay we've used up all the nitrogen that was in the soil we've blown through all the soil there's none left we've skinned the planet alive and now we're on our way toward the end of all the fossil fuel that was sort of taking over from that sort of filling the Gap and in the meantime we've got you know this enormous population of people so they don't have a solution if they're offering you some kind of vegan you know alternative that that's not a future this it's just not we don't have enough oil and gas forever to feed these people here's the thing about animals uh they only live a really short time and so their whole reproductive strategy is to make really big seeds so that have a little coat around them and they can drop into the ground and stay there until they get their moment and their moment is a disaster so so I like to use the analogy of if you