PROJECT OF SUBDUING NATURE

    Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural
environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependant on a technological
production system in which finally even our senses have become redundant;
taste, once vital for judging a food's value or safety, is no longer
experienced, but rather certified by a label.  Overall, the healthfulness of
what we consume declines and land once cultivated for food now produced
coffee, tabacco, grains for alcohol, marajuana, and other drugs creating the
context of famine.  Even non-processed foods like fruits and vegetables are
now grown to be tasteless and uniform because the demands of handling,
transport and storage, not nutrition or pleasure, are the highest
considerations.
    Total war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions od acres in
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, but the plundering of the biosphere
proceeds even more leathally in its daily, global forms.  Food as a function
of production has also failed miserably on the most obvious level: hlf the
world, as everyone knows, suffered from malnourishment ranging to starvation
itself.
    Meanwhile, the "diseases of civilization," as discussed by Eaton and
Konner in the January 31, 1985 New England Jounral of Medicine and
contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless,
sickly world of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the
manufacturers or medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food.  Domestication
reached new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering, with
new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived microorganisms and
plants.  Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this
order as the world of production process us as much as it degrades and
deforms every other natural system.
    The project of subduing nature, begun are carried through by
agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions.  The "success" of
civilization's progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes
more and more like ashes.  James Serpall summed it up this way: "In short we
appear to have reached the end of the line.  We connot expand; we seem
unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc, and the
planet is fast becoming a wasteland."  Lee and Devore noted how fast all of
this has come to pass and how, to interplanetary archeologists of the
future," the probable fate of civilization would look: ". . . a very long
and stable persiod of small-sclae hunting and gathering was followed by an
apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology . . . leading rapidly
to extinction.  'Stratigraphically' the origin or agriculture and
thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous."
    Physiologist Jared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture "a
castastrophe from which we have never recovered."  Agriculture has been and
remains a "catastrophe" at all levels, the one which inderpins the entire
material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us.  Liberation
is impossible without its dissolution.