Unlearning “we can have a healthy and sustainable life in the Plantationocene”

This chapter explains how the deliberate destruction of the diversity of ways for human animals to live on this planet is linked to a collapse in biological diversity, fast fashion with deforestation, “junkspace” architecture with mountain-toppling mining. We know from ecology that diverse systems, and a range of systems, are essential for resilience and ability to withstand shocks: uniformity is dangerous. The Colombian Exchange spread pests, diseases and put species out of place. The 20th century expanded earlier developments into the Plantationocene, embedded in the delusion from the tremendously destructive “Green Revolution” fronted by Norman Borlaugh that productivity came from rigid narrow order, rather than the rich tangles of nature. Still, we rely for food security on just three crops for more than half of human calories, smash up and poison the soils on which our future depends, at great cost to the complex ecosystems of fungi, bacteria and invertebrates they contain. And having treated the planet as a dumping ground, stretching it beyond capacity to cope, there is an inclination to fling our troubles away into an already crowded space, or, as a few would have it, flee into it ourselves. But Earthly troubles cannot be left behind.