This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

he calls “the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture.”29 That problem, in essence, is that ever since humans started planting seeds and tilling fields, they have been stripping the soil of its fertility. Without human interference, plants grow in different varieties next to one another and as perennials, reseeding themselves year after year, with their roots staying put and growing ever longer and deeper. This combination of diversity and perennialism keeps soil healthy, stable, and fertile: the roots hold the soil in place, the plants allow rain water to be more safely slowly absorbed, and different plants provide different fertility functions (some, like legumes and clover, are better at fixing nitrogen, critical to forming the building blocks of plant life), while diversity controls pests and invasive weeds. It’s a self-sustaining cycle, with decomposing plants serving as natural fertilizer for new plants and the life cycle being constantly renewed. Maintaining this cycle, according to the farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry, must be the centerpiece of humanity’s relationship with nature. “The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state,” he says. “It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay . . . should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted.”30 Simple enough: respect fertility, keep it going.