Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture - and 'The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture' - Book Review

Whole Earth, Fall, 2002 by Janet Brown

Fatal Harvest The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture Andy Kimbrell, ed. 2002; 384 pp. $45 The Foundation for Deep Ecology and Island Press

The Fatal Harvest Reader The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture Andy Kimbrell, ed. 2002; 369 pp. $16.95 The Foundation for Deep Ecology and Island Press

For its latest publication, Fatal Harvest, the Foundation for Deep Ecology has assembled the "A" Team of today's leading ecological thinkers to focus on the case for a safer, more nutritious, more sustainable, and therefore more secure, food system.

Under the editorship of public interest attorney and author Andy Kimbrell, over thirty of the best known authorities on sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, public policy, and social justice compare and contrast the linear industrial model of agriculture with the cyclical biological one. Writers include Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters, Peter Warshall, and Community Food Security Coalition executive director Andy Fisher.

At first glance, this intelligent and sumptuously designed volume could look like a less-serious coffee table book, but it provides both a startling jolt and a remarkable vision for agricultural reform. One of its many useful features is side-by-side visual and verbal comparison of crops--rice, walnuts, melons, tomatoes, and others--as seen respectively through the "industrial eye" and the "agrarian eye."

Even those with a blase attitude about where their next meal is coming from will find the essays thought-provoking and persuasive. This is an important book that should become a textbook for college classes on sustainability, community planning, health, and economics, as well as agriculture. Much less interesting, relevant, and beautiful textbooks cost just as much, but--unlike this one--no one will want to hold onto them when the class is over.

The Fatal Harvest Reader, in a less-expensive and easier-to-handle size, offers most of the essays, without the photographs, from the large-format, heavily illustrated Fatal Harvest.

"One of the primary results--and one of the primary needs--of industrialism is the separation of people and places and products from their histories. To the extent that we participate in the industrial economy, we do not know the histories of our families or of our habitats or of our meals. This is an economy, and in fact a culture, of the one-night stand."--WENDELL BERRY, "THE WHOLE HORSE: THE PRESERVATION OF THE AGRARIAN MIND"

"The new agriculture recognizes that all agriculture is local. Farms are ultimately part and parcel of the ecosystems in which they are located. There are no global ecosystems, only local ones. So farming must be designed to fit into local ecosystems if it is to achieve even a modicum of sustainability. --FRED KIRSHENMANN, "SCALE--DOES IT MATTER?"

"Our central challenge for the new millennium is to change the global economic system which is currently based on fear and scarcity, monocultures and monopolies, appropriation and dispossession, to a system based on abundance and sharing, diversity and decentralization, and respect and dignity for all beings.--VANDANA SHIVA, "MONOCULTURES OF THE MIND"