The dystopian drama in the Gulf of Mexico, where a river of crude oil now bleeds wholesale, underscores a wider, ruder reality: our planetary eco-systems are beginning to collapse. In no way will our daily bread be insulated from this devastation.

If the industrial debacle of the Deepwater Horizon accident  in the Gulf — about a million gallons a day of rank, tar-black petroleum — were not sufficiently toxic confirmation, the UN made it bureaucratically official on May 10. That’s the day they published the third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3), a comprehensive report warning — as so many other science-based reports have — that our planet’s vital signs are failing,

As GBO-3 puts it, “the five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change) are either constant or increasing in intensity.”

In this half-dead world we must dwell,  and continue to find food. This is the very point that journalist Bill McKibben explores in his new book, Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

“Eaarth” is the name McKibben gives to the planet formerly known as Earth. According to Mc­Kibben, Earth with one “a” no longer exists. We have exploited and abused it beyond the point of health. A new, poorer planet, Eaarth, is what we have left. On Eaarth we are well down the road to tipping points that will, among many other travesties, catastrophically collapse the capacity of nature to provide food.

While the BP oil disaster is a signal event, the Gulf of Mexico already had massive dead zones — zones created over the last several decades by the runoff of petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides applied to industrial-scale farm fields all across the American Heartland, noxious substances that streamed into the Platte, the Missouri, the Mississippi and other rivers, and then into the Gulf where they spawned death.

These oily realities are leading inevitably to an agrarian apocalypse. By that I mean the literal thrust of the Greek word, apocalypse, which is a “lifting of the veil,” a “revelation.” Apocalypse is disclosure of something hidden in plain sight through misconception and falsehood. To wit, we are now in the violent twilight of the oil era, a reality which will have a direct and devastating impact on industrial agriculture and consequently on our food supply.

In a literal sense, when we eat food produced by the industrial system, we eat petroleum. We already know that the burning of fossil fuels harms the atmosphere. We need to also realize that every calorie of food we consume is backed by at least a calorie of oil as it is directly manifest in fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel for tractors, combines and trucks.

Oil-based agriculture will be abandoned when the economics are further skewed: when it costs farmers more money to buy petrochemical based inputs and fuel, then organic, sustainable systems will finally make sense to them. That day draws nigh.

Wall Street’s money men see it plainly. Early in May, in one event among many, 400 bankers and some of the world’s largest farmers gathered in New York City to discuss the latest hot prospect in institutional investment: farmland.

According to a report in The Progressive Farmer, financiers are exceedingly keen to channel billions of dollars into buying up cropland. The land grab is well underway. Underlying their  frenzy is their certain knowledge that global food demand will double by 2050, while scarcer, costlier oil will escalate the cost of food.

Profiteers believe agriculture is headed for a super cycle, a prolonged trend rise in real land and commodity prices that will continue for a decade or more. A soon-to-be-released study by the World Bank reports that institutional investors already have announced plans to acquire up to 125 million acres in global farmland. “This is just the beginning,” said the bank’s John Lamb. “It’s like the California gold rush.”

Meanwhile, in general, we are also in a super cycle in commodities — basic resources and agricultural  products such as salt, sugar, coffee, soybeans, rice, wheat, and so forth. Speculators will also drive those prices higher.

In Eaarth, McKibben includes a disturbing chapter on the inevitable decline of our oil-based, industrial agricultural system.  He reckons that it will result in a series of desperate food-driven wars — human beings battling to the death for basic sustenance. But he offers a note of hope, the thought that people can willfully scale back and  build the kind of societies and economies that will hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the types of communities (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather our unprecedented eco-failure.

The Millennial Agrarians profiled in The Call of the Land are leading the way to this kind of change. They represent dozens upon dozens of models that can — and need to be — emulated widely and swiftly, because they can make the difference. One vibrant node in the emerging network of  21st Century Agrarianism is the venerable and trustworthy Rodale press, in particular their online magazine New Farm. Earlier this month the magazine observed that Multiple-farm CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) bring a needed efficiency to the farmer-consumer connection.

Are CSAs economically sustainable over the long haul, or will they last only as long as the idealism of the core people involved? New Farm observes that there is greater stability and staying power in a community of community farms.  As the environment, the oil supply, and the economy wobble wildly, multifarm enterprises are definitely worth considering.

New Farm cites a passage from Local Harvest:  A Multifarm CSA Handbook, a publication released in early May by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program of the USDA.  The Handbook, a bargain at $3.95,  says that three general types of multifarm CSA arrangements have emerged:

1) Supplemental farms: A single CSA farm with supplemental share options or products from other local farms.

2) Multifarm CSA:  Growers are networked to supply a CSA-like ordering, distribution and seasonal food support system.

3) Cooperative CSA: Growers form a legal cooperative to work out growing, quality control and marketing structures, usually with staff to handle the many non-farming duties associated with a CSA.

Dr. Vandana Shiva

“I don’t call it ‘climate change’ any more,” Vandana Shiva said last night in Santa Fe. “That term sounds too benign to some, as if climate change could be portrayed as a beneficial thing with Eskimos able to sunbathe and so forth. But that’s not what’s really happening, so to make the true point I call it ‘climate kills.’ That’s what’s really happening. And industrial agriculture is playing a large part in creating climate kills.”

Dr. Shiva is in New Mexico this week to participate in the first international conference sponsored by IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements). A powerhouse at the podium, she is a scientist, philosopher, environmental activist, and author of over 300 scientific papers. Her influential books include Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, and Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

Last night – as she has consistently and eloquently over her career – she warned about the increasing dangers of industrial agriculture, genetically modified crops and seeds, and the burgeoning monopoly of the world’s food system by transnational corporations. “The monopolies are killing diversity, and killing farmers,” she said. “Food is not a commodity for speculation and profit. It is our essential source of nutrition that life may continue.”

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Dr. Shiva said we must move from ‘suicide economies’ to ‘living economies’  She told of how in India some villages have established themselves as safe zones – free of agricultural chemicals and genetically modified seeds and food. “If governments won’t ban this stuff and protect the people,” she said, “then the people and the villages themselves will do it…No law is high enough to override the ethical duty we have to the Earth and to future generations. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is our survival imperative.”

In 1987 Dr. Shiva founded Navdanya, an organizational pioneer in the movement of sustainable, organic agriculture, and seed saving in response to the crisis of agricultural biodiversity.  Over the last two decades, among other things, Navdanya has established more than 54 community seed banks in India. She encouraged others actively to consider establishing community seed banks, where neighbors, towns, and urban blocks grow and store  natural open-pollinated varieties of seeds.

In her keynote remarks last night, Dr. Shiva said “We can now move forward only by picking up the proven, healthy threads from the past, and extending them into the future.”