Sucrose, Fructose and Fossil Fuels: The Rise of Energy-Intensive Societies Since 1500CE

9/18/2022 02:57:00 PM
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1. Introduction: Life in the Zone of Exclusion


In the years after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl in 1986, many people lived illegally in the zone of exclusion. Some said they were too old to leave and couldn’t give up the simple life they loved. Others were refugees from the civil wars and societal collapse that occurred in the early 1990s in the former Soviet republics. It seems outrageous that they would choose to live with the dangers of radiation, but for them it was a rational choice about how to survive in the short term. Necessity made them disregard the long-term risks. One’s first reaction is to feel amazement and pity, but if one looks at their situation as a metaphor for life in the 21st century, one could say we all live in zones of exclusion. The words Godfrey Reggio used to explain his purpose in making his classic documentary film Koyaanisqatsi serve well to introduce the essay that follows:


… the main event today is not seen by those of us that live in it. We see the surface of the newspapers, the obviousness of conflict, of social injustice, of the market, the welling up of culture, but to me the greatest event, or the most important event of perhaps our entire history—nothing comparable in the past to this event—has fundamentally gone unnoticed, and the event is the following: the transiting from all-nature, or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment of life. So these films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry, on people. It’s been that everyone, politics, education, the financial structure, the nation-state structure, language, the culture, religion: all of that exists within the host of technology, so it’s not the effect of. It’s that everything exists within. It’s not that we use technology. We live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence.[1]


This essay discusses the energy crisis of the present day from a broad perspective that includes the energy sources for work done by biological “machines” since the late fifteenth century. As capitalism started to form out of European colonialism, it demanded ever greater short-term gain at the expense of long-term fitness of people and the environment. This economic system had the irrational motivations of an addict, always seeking short-term relief and short-term gain at the expense of enduring health. Short-term motivations were required of both the individuals leading and profiting from these institutions and the individuals victimized by them. Society functioned like an addict, setting up an exclusion zone of insecurity, slavery, labor for hire, fear of bankruptcy, bad food and environmental degradation—a zone where the only relief from this anxiety was the pursuit of power and fleeting pleasure.[2] Unlike the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion, its boundaries can’t be seen on a map, but we live in it regardless. It “as ubiquitous as the air we breathe,” as Godfrey Reggio stated.


Since the 1990s, neoliberal ideologues have declared TINA—There Is No Alternative—to the trans-Atlantic world order held in place by US power, NATO, the EU, the G7 and countless think tanks and foundations that front for corporate oligarchy. The “great power rivals” to this system offer alternatives, but they too have to face the contradictions encountered when trying to establish a new political economy in the technological milieu, when the natural environment is no longer the host of life for human habitation.


In contemporary essays on the energy crisis, much attention is given to global warming, the fossil fuel industry, the nuclear industry, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, but this essay focuses mostly on the energy paradigm that predates fossil fuels. It looks at how the energy dilemma of the 21st century was born out of the energy paradigm derived from slavery and sugar—the first carbon-based fuel to be exploited at industrial scale. The discussion about how to get out of the present energy paradigm contains many echoes of the struggles against slavery and sugar plantations that first arose in the 18th century. This first iteration of the energy crisis also points to the fact that the crisis is not inherent in the energy sources and the technology but rather in choices human societies made about how to deploy those energy sources.


2. The Candid Truth: “This is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe”


In Voltaire’s novella Candide (1759), the protagonist travels to South America and encounters a disabled man who tells him what it is to be a slave:


For clothing, they give us a pair of linen drawers twice a year. When we work at the sugar canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off a leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe.


Voltaire was one of many Europeans who were beginning to raise such consciousness about the price of sugar, making Europeans see the connections between the suffering of others on the opposite side of the world and the simple luxuries they took for granted. Thirty-five years later, the French revolutionary government was the first state in Europe to abolish slavery in its colonies, though Napoleon re-instated it eight years later. Voltaire was not the only social critic who spoke out against slavery in the late 18th century, as the abolitionist movement was growing in Britain also. Slavery and sugar were the energy paradigm of the age, and just as today everyone can see the cruelty and irrationality of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries, it was easy then for all involved to see the soil depletion on the plantations, to recognize Africans as fellow human beings and to acknowledge the cruelty of slavery. Yet in the same breath they would say there was nothing that could be done about it, that it was part of a long process of development and growing prosperity. The powerful people most invested in the system could say that “they stand taller and see farther into the future.”[3] In the present age, after disasters like the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (in 2010) or the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns (in 2011), people declare, “But we need the energy!”


In his famous 1944 study, Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams documented the debates that raged in Britain over slavery in the 18th and 19th century, and in the sources he quoted, one notes the similarity to voices in the present age who see no way out of the present energy paradigm:


Only a few Englishmen before 1783 … had any doubts about the morality of the slave trade. Those who had [doubts] realized that objections, as Postlethwayt put it, would be of little weight with statesmen who saw the great national emoluments which accrued from the slave trade. “We shall take things as they are, and reason from them in their present State, and not from that wherein we could hope them to be... We cannot think of giving up the slave-trade, notwithstanding my good wishes that it could be done.” Later, perhaps, some noble and benevolent Christian spirit might think of changing the system, “which, as things are now circumstanced, may not be so easily brought about.” Before the American Revolution, English public opinion in general accepted the view of the slave trader: “Tho to traffic in human creatures, may at first sight appear barbarous, inhuman, and unnatural; yet the traders herein have as much to plead in their own excuse, as can be said for some other branches of trade, namely, the advantage of it. In a word, from this trade proceed benefits, far outweighing all, either real or pretended mischiefs and inconveniencies.”[4]


3. Accelerated Life: When did the Anthropocene begin?


When did humanity start its plunge toward ecocide? There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the Anthropocene, the label that signifies the point at which homo sapiens started to have such an impact that the planet moved into a new geological era. Scientists don’t agree about when it began. Perhaps it started when humans went from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, but for the first ten thousand years after that, we didn’t have much effect on the climate and other species, and our waste products were almost entirely recycled. It is more common to set the start of the Anthropocene at the time when fossil fuel exploitation (coal first, gas and oil later) began in the early 19th century. Some scientists say that the Anthropocene began in the nuclear era, after 1945, because a new geologic era requires a detectable change in soil layers, and it was the fallout from nuclear detonations that became the marker of change.[5]


The discussion herein sees the new era as beginning five centuries ago when the discovery of the New World and colonialism began to drastically alter culture, politics, and philosophy, eventually enclosing everyone on the planet in framework that Mark Fisher has called “Capitalist Realism.”[6] The Anthropocene could be regarded as the beginning of an acceleration in the way humans abused each other and their natural environment in the pursuit of short-term gain. The story of fossil fuel use since the Industrial Revolution is well-known, and it is well-known that it put massive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we seldom think about the previous era based on sucrose, the carbon-based fuel that humans began to exploit three centuries earlier. In this “early modern” period the structures of capitalism were formed, and the capital required for capitalism and imperialism was derived from the labor of slaves. The money that poured into Liverpool from the slave trade financed building of the factories of Manchester. All the progress of the Enlightenment in Europe rode on the back of colonialism. On this point, Homi Bhabha stated:


John Stuart Mill, whose word on liberty is accepted everywhere in the world, said, “I am a Democrat in my own country… and a despot in somebody else’s country as a member of a colonial power, as the subject of a colonial power.” So John Stuart Mill’s paradox… gives you, in brief, the whole story about post-colonial studies… And of course this issue is one that bedevils all of modernity. Slavery, after, all was considered to be an economically advanced, modern concept of dealing with questions of trade and production. Nobody said imperialism or empire was unjust. Initially, the justification for it was that it would modernize and christianize many countries that were actually being ruled by oriental despots.[7]


In the earlier stage of energy exploitation, we didn’t burn fuel in human-made machines. The machines were human beings, some of them slaves who made a new cheap and “efficient” fuel to feed the emerging proletariat. The use of this fuel didn’t end with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, but it was overshadowed by the rise of machines that could run on fossil fuels. It is not just a coincidence that the abolition movement grew stronger after the invention of the steam engine. Matt Ridley, citing several economists who have argued this obvious point, devoted a chapter to the subject in his book The Rational Optimist.[8] He argued that the rise of fossil fuel-burning machines did not on its own abolish slavery, but it was the economic rationale that lowered resistance to change.


Nonetheless, sugar consumption did not end after the Industrial Revolution. Humans continued sugar consumption and learned how to produce other types of sugar besides sucrose, and those new habits had further disastrous effects on rates of chronic diseases that are clearly evident in the 21st century.


The significance of the early industrial sugar trade has slipped from awareness in the modern age, but its importance was common knowledge in the 19th century when innovations in refining technology or the opening of closed mercantile colonial markets could change the fates of nations and empires. The sugar trade has been studied by historians, economists, and anthropologists such as Sidney W. Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History[9] and Eric Williams, author of Capitalism and Slavery, mentioned above. Another excellent resource is Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Queimada starring Marlon Brando and Evaristo Márquez. The story about a British agent provocateur’s exploitation of a slave revolt in a Portuguese plantation colony was so shockingly anti-imperialist, and such an obvious veiled critique of the US war on Vietnam, that it had a very short run and was seldom viewed again until it was released on DVD in 2004.


The long struggle to end slavery and the ecological and cultural destruction caused by plantations was similar to the efforts underway now to find a way out of the prevailing energy system that seems irreplaceable. This history may be forgotten in the 21st century, even though sugar and the social structures and energy systems that grew around it still exist in alternate forms, interacting with and compounding all the effects of the fossil fuel economy.


The early and late period of capitalism and energy exploitation can be best understood by prefacing the subject with some quotes by sociologists who have written about energy. In an introduction to an essay entitled Energy and Democracy, by Joe Costello, Yasha Levine wrote:


It’s obvious that we have figure out new ways of living that don’t totally depend on the death-drive, hyper-industrial technologies that surround us today. It’s also obvious that in order to do that we’ll have to return, at least in some aspects, to slower, more local, pre-industrial modes of living. But I’m not so sure we’re capable of making this kind of transition without being forced to by some kind of massive collapse or calamity that will be outside of our control. Our politics, our culture—everything’s too locked into the present way of doing things.[10]


The essay referred to above quoted two important earlier sociological works on energy. In one, Vaclav Smil wrote in Energy and Civilization:


The adoption and diffusion of new energy sources have been the fundamental physical reasons for economic, social, and environmental change and they have transformed virtually every facet of modern societies: the process has always been with us, but its pace has been accelerating. Prehistoric changes brought about by better tools, the mastery of fire, and better hunting strategies were very slow, unfolding over tens of thousands of years. The subsequent adoption and intensification of permanent farming lasted for millennia. Its most important consequence was a large increase in population densities, leading to social stratification, occupational specialization, and incipient urbanization. High-energy societies created by the rising consumption of fossil fuels became the very epitomes of change, leading to a widespread obsession with the need for constant innovation.


But one fundamental reality had not changed: all of these clear and impressive historical trends tracing the rise of new sources, new superior performances, and efficiency gains do not mean humanity has been using energy in a progressively more rational manner. … Indeed, higher energy use by itself does not guarantee anything except greater environmental burdens. The historical evidence is clear. Higher energy will not ensure a reliable food supply; it will not confer strategic security; it will not safely underpin political stability; it will not necessarily lead to a more enlightened governance; and it will not bring widely shared increases in a nation’s standard of living.[11]


The essay by Joe Costello also quotes the writing of Ivan Illich published in 1974:


Beyond a certain point, more energy means less equity… Over-industrialization enslaves people to the tools they worship, fattens professional hierarchies on bits and on watts, and invites the translation of unequal power into huge income differentials. It imposes the same net transfers of power on the productive relations of every society, no matter what creed the managers profess, no matter what rain-dance, what penitential ritual they conduct.


This profound control of the transportation industry over natural mobility constitutes a monopoly much more pervasive than either the commercial monopoly Ford might win over the automobile market, or the political monopoly car manufacturers might wield against the development of trains and buses. Because of its hidden, entrenched, and structuring nature, I call this a radical monopoly. Any industry exercises this kind of deep-seated monopoly when it becomes the dominant means of satisfying needs that formerly occasioned a personal response. Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.[12]


Joe Costello adds:


All utilized energy organizes society. The resulting organization, in part, defines political structures, whether they’re democratic or tyrannical. Any society wanting democracy needs to create democratic energy systems. Today’s centuries-old agrarian-era structures of government and the industrial era mega-corporations straddling atop them are simply incapable of creating the necessary processes, values, and organization of a new energy era. We have no democratic politics today. If democracy is to arise anew it needs new organization, democratic organization that understands energy use and technology.[13]


What these passages make clear is that whether we are talking about slaves, sugar, coal or uranium, the energy source per se is not the source of our problems. Our institutions and our ways of thinking about energy preclude successful resolution of “the energy crisis.” Even if clean, limitless fusion energy became abundant tomorrow, satisfying all our “energy needs,” the ways we might deploy that technology could create unforeseen scenarios of environmental degradation. Technology cannot provide us with any answers about what we want to be when we grow up.


4. The Rise of Sugar and the Decline of Traditional Food Cultures


Sidney W. Mintz’ book Sweetness and Power tells how over four centuries of European history (roughly 1500-1900) sugar went from being a rarity to a luxury and finally a cheap necessity, a caloric supplement that was essential fuel for the proletariat. Plantation owners and empires became wealthy as two groups of laborers grew simultaneously: the slaves growing sugar and the proletariat consuming what the slaves produced. It was the first iteration of industrial agriculture and an energy-intensive economic system. Mintz wrote, “Slave and proletarian together powered the imperial economic system that kept the one supplied with manacles and the other with sugar and rum; but neither had more than minimal influence over it.[14]


In 1800, world sugar production was 250,000 tons (see Table 1). By 1880, it had risen fifteen-fold to 3.8 million tons. By 1914, production was 16 million tons, then in 1945, 30 million tons. From 1900 to 1970, production increased by 500 percent and sucrose contributed an estimated 9% of all calories consumed in the world.[15]




Table 1

 

Global Sugar Production 1800-1970 (tons)

1800

250,000

 

1880

3,800,000

 

1914

16,000,000

 

1945

30,000,000

 

From 1900 to 1970, sugar production increased by 500 percent. In 1970, sucrose contributed an estimated 9% of all calories consumed in the world. Global population increased 230 percent during this period, from to 1.6 billion to 3.7 billion. After 1970, sugar production included the use of corn to manufacture high-fructose corn syrup, a process which, like sugar cane refining, required fossil fuel energy inputs. Data from Mintz, 1986 (see note 9).

 

This change occurred as the English commoners were being pushed off the commons in the period of the Enclosures and forced into the factories of the industrial revolution. They lost their access to local food and to their native food culture. They also lost time in their daily routines to prepare food. Sugar and manufactured sweets filled the gap for the working class who lacked calories and access to nutritious food. A common pattern by the 19th century was the male breadwinner getting portions of meat to sustain himself at work while his wife and children subsisted on the calories provided by jam and sweetened tea and porridge.[16]


There was concern by the mid-19th century that workers in some sectors were being worked to extinction, that the future strength of British industry was in peril because the workers’ lives were so miserable that they could not raise the next generation of factory workers or miners. Frederick Engels wrote about the deploring conditions in 1844 in The Condition of the Working Class in England, but he noted in the preface of the American edition in 1887 that England, but not other countries, had outgrown the “juvenile state of capitalist exploitation” for the sake of the bourgeoisie’s self-preservation:


Again the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.… But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I could describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery.... The bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working-class.[17]


Sugar was obviously a partial solution to this desperate situation of workers. As long as they were burning the calories in their muscles, the damage wrought by nutrient-empty calories was less apparent than it is now. Sugar consumption increased and dietary habits declined further in the 20th century, and new problems developed when the sugar-eater became unemployed through de-industrialization or became a sedentary worker in the age of machines powered by oil and split uranium atoms.


Mintz points out, “There was no conspiracy at work to wreck the nutrition of the British working class, to turn them into addicts, or to ruin their teeth. But the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an artifact of intraclass struggles for profit.”[18] These changes happened slowly over centuries, with no individual leaders able to alter course by “standing taller and seeing farther into the future” (referring again to Madeleine Albright’s justification for US imperialism). Yet the opportunities for exploitation and profit were apparent every step of the way, as were the horrible circumstances and inhumane treatment of slaves and laborers. It is another question altogether whether anyone would have cared if they could have known the outcome. Williams notes that, just like contemporary corporations being oblivious to resource exhaustion, nuclear waste storage, and environmental degradation, the plantation owners’ intensive agriculture exhausted the soils and led to their own ruin. That awareness didn’t stop them from trying to squeeze more out of the soil for as long as possible—even when they were aware of the soil exhaustion happening before their eyes. And this happened quite early in the age of the sugar plantations. By the late 18th century, British plantation owners in the West Indies were already complaining that they could not compete with the richer soil in the more recently exploited plantations in the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti).[19]


The problems of the sugar industry did not disappear with the abolition of slavery. In the 21st century, sugar plantation workers die young from kidney disease caused by dehydration and mineral insufficiency, so the toll must have been enormous among slaves in earlier centuries.[20] Europeans campaigned for the abolition of slavery from the mid 18th century to the mid 19th century. However, after abolition, the economic system was never stopped or replaced in a fundamental way, regardless of the transition from colonial mercantilism to free trade and freed labor. There was no colonial revolution that cut ties to the global system and reverted to local self-sufficiency. When the Haitian Revolution first succeeded in the 1790s, its leader, Toussaint Louverture, had the unfortunate task of telling the freed slaves to go back to the land and bring in the sugar harvest. Without the essential commodity, the revolution would be unable to defend itself against the imperial powers.[21] The Hawaiian Kingdom, before the US overthrow in 1893, also became dependent on a plantation economy. In more recent times, after the 1959 revolution and until 1991, Cuba continued to export sugar to the Soviet Union. Cuba finally developed self-sustaining agriculture after it lost its supportive arrangement with the Soviet Union.


5. Sugar and Chronic Illness in the 21st Century


In the 20th century, authoritative voices in science and government finally stopped saying sugar had beneficial medicinal effects. The mechanisms of tooth decay and type 1 and type 2 diabetes were understood, and the discovery of insulin’s role made type 1 diabetes a manageable disease. Nonetheless, the pathological food culture and energy system continued to evolve in a negative direction. The modern condition is familiar and summed up well in sources such as the following published by Organic Consumers Association:


The pernicious but profitable U.S. food and farming system feeding our supersized/supersick nation continues to be subsidized with billions of dollars in public funds. These bi-partisan, ongoing subsidies guarantee the profits of Big Food and Big Ag, chemical, pharma, and genetic engineering transnationals, with little or no consideration for the catastrophic damage to public health, the environment, climate, and the livelihoods of food workers, small farmers, and rural communities—both at home and abroad.


Health damages that are directly caused by America’s food and farming system include a chronic disease epidemic (cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, et al.) that has doubled since 1980, as well as the extraordinarily high hospitalization and death rates triggered by COVID-19 and its underlying chronic disease comorbidities.


Environmental damages include excessive greenhouse gas emissions (more than a third of which come from our food system); water pollution; and loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.


These collateral damages (estimated at more than two trillion dollars a year) are categorized as “externalities,” costs or damages to be paid for by consumers and taxpayers, rather than the debts owed to society by polluters and perpetrators of so-called “modern” food and farming. Things are so dire that now, even the global elite, in this case The Rockefeller Foundation, are sounding the alarm on the multi-trillion-dollar collateral damage of Big Food and Big Ag.[22]


The very problematic twist on the present long emergency is that capitalism is taking over the process of finding solutions to the problem caused by capitalism.[23] The trend is similar to what Engels noted (see note 17) about the bourgeoisie of the 19th century calling for better sanitation because they found that their interests in this case merged with those of the proletariat. Capitalism has awoken belatedly to the ecological emergency, but it insists on determining and owning the solutions. Cory Morningstar, an independent journalist who has covered this phenomenon more thoroughly than anyone, sums it up thus:


Framed as altruistic imperatives, SDGs (UN Sustainable Development Goal’s) are, in reality, nothing more than emerging markets to save the global capitalist system. The economic system is being transformed, rebooted, digitized, and privatized… as it transforms and reboots via a new global/industrial, surveillance infrastructure being rebuilt from the ground up. Via the exploitation of multiple crises, under guise of “solving” the multiple crises, (created by those who have caused the multiple crises), the ruling classes and corporate interests will continue to access public monies (treasuries/emergency funding, global health tax, pension funds, etc.) to pay for the infrastructure which will be owned by corporate/private interests.[24]


In the present political climate, such analysis is often falsely equated with political factions that deny that there is any sort of ecological crisis that needs to be dealt with. It is dismissed erroneously as “right wing” or “global “warming denialism.” Mainstream environmentalists are on board with sustainable development goals and capitalist solutions because few seem to be capable of imagining any alternative economic order. A century ago, people did imagine an alternative, but since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, neoliberal ideology has entrenched the concept of TINA (mentioned above). It has colonized the imagination of even the once marginal and radical “green” parties in various countries. In late 2019, just before the pandemic emergency, the righteous anger of Greta Thunberg was brought to global attention by the World Economic Forum.


Regardless of the apparent invisibility of the problem, examples of what is happening abound. Journalist Whitney Webb reported on a clear example in September 2021:


The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.”[25]


The latest example is the sudden targeting of the use of fossil fuels to create synthetic fertilizer. In the summer of 2022, governments in several countries took simultaneous action to end the use of synthetic fertilizer, provoking angry protests from farmers who suspected that it was shock therapy intended to force them to sell their land to corporate investors. In an interview she gave in July 2022, Vandana Shiva, author and founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, explained her view of why this was happening:


We do face a serious crisis caused by industrial agriculture. Fifty greenhouse gases come from farming with fossil fuels and chemicals, and shipping food long distance, transforming it with ultra-processing, and packaging it. All of this has added up to more greenhouse gases, but that same system that is punishing the farmer is punishing the earth and is punishing the consumers through disease… The chemical fertilizers… use fossil fuels to fix atmospheric nitrogen by burning fossil fuels at very high temperature. There are better ways to fix nitrogen. Let the earthworms give you forty kilograms per hectare. Let the soil micro-organisms work... The same people who are pushing a very anti-nature, anti-people, anti-life globalization agenda shaped a system that has caused the problem that forced the farmers into that system—to use chemical fertilizers, to get the cows off the grass and into factory farms, then feed them with GMO’s… Forty percent of soil goes for animal feed. Another forty percent goes for biofuel. It’s not feeding the world. All of this was forced on people through regulation and subsidies. European tax money was used to create this kind of agriculture, and now the same people who caused the problem are saying, “Farmers, you’re responsible.” It’s a bit like saying to a person who became obese because of junk food, “You are responsible.”… The original cause of pollution is the manufacturers and the governments who subsidize, and the governments that promoted the false idea that without chemicals you can’t grow food. Billionaires today like Bill Gates are promoting that same false idea. There are huge numbers of alternatives, but farmers need to be given a 5 to 10-year period of transition, and the structures that were created to promote chemicals should be used to promote ecological agriculture... Farmers are a victim of this system.[26]


“Nitrogen bacteria teach us that Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilizes methods which we do not as yet know how to imitate.” - Fritz Haber, “father of chemical warfare” (chlorine gas during World War I), inventor of the method for manufacturing ammonia fertilizer.[27]


6. The Age of High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)


How did we get to this ironic situation in which capitalism is trying to portray itself as the savior from the system it created? The modern age of Big Oil, Big Ag and Big Pharma spread worldwide and developed over a long time, but a key inflection point of the modern period came in the United States during the Nixon and Ford administrations (early 1970s) when Earl Butz was Secretary of Agriculture. Nixon had a simple demand: make food cheap. In concert with the neoliberal economic agenda, Butz put US agriculture on a “free-market” (but nonetheless subsidized) path of maximized production. Previous policies, first put in place to avoid a repeat of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, controlled supplies, moderated prices, and prevented over-exploitation of soil. They didn’t function perfectly, and they often had an effect which seems at first glance to be irrational—that of paying farmers to not produce. In retrospect, it is clear that Butz’ policies were a disaster for public health in spite of their superficial efficiencies. They paved the way for “Big Ag” to industrialize agriculture with the energy-intensive practices described above by Vandana Shiva.



This history and its devastating effects were portrayed effectively in the 2007 documentary film King Corn.[28] The filmmakers went to Iowa in the springtime and planted an acre of corn after spraying it with subsidized ammonia fertilizer. With this small-scale example they illustrated the bigger picture of how corn has penetrated the culture and afflicted human bodies. The following excerpts of interviews in the film tell the story:

Michael Pollan:


We happen to have a kind of subsidy system—and we haven’t always had it, only for the last 30 years or so—that rewards the overproduction of cheap corn. All that cheap, surplus corn goes somewhere. And in fact, a lot of it’s going into our bodies.


Loren Cordain (University of Colorado):


The meat that what we eat in this day and age is produced in the feedlot. It’s grain-fed, and we produce a characteristically obese animal, an animal whose muscle tissue looks more like fat tissue than it does lean meat of wild animals. If you look at a T-bone steak from a grain-fed cow, it may have as much as nine grams of saturated fat whereas a comparable steak from a grass-fed animal would have 1.3 grams of saturated fat. This is the meat that we eat in America… Hamburger meat is really not meat. It is rather fat disguised as meat. 65% of its calories are from fat.


Ken Cook:


Corn is the crop we’ve spent the most money on over the past 10 years, so we’ve got mountains of grain all over the Midwest because the subsidy programs keep the production going full blast. There is a role that the subsidies have played in making the raw material available for an overweight society. We subsidize the Happy Meals, but we don’t subsidize the healthy ones. There is a very specific history to this… you really do have to go back to Earl Butz and the revolution in farm policy that happened in the 1970s.


Earl Butz:


Well, [the corn subsidies are] the basis of our affluence now. The fact that we spend less on food is America’s best-kept secret. We feed ourselves with approximately 16 or 17% of our take-home pay. That’s marvelous. That’s a very small chunk to feed ourselves. And that includes all the meals we eat at restaurants, all the fancy doodads we get in our food system. I don’t see much room for improvement there, which means we’ll spend our surplus cash on something else.


A half-century later, it is apparent that mass production of corn, boosted by manufactured ammonia fertilizer, has come with mineral depletion of soil and less nutritious corn. The kernels of corn consist mostly of starch and have a lower protein and nutrient content than they used to.


King Corn describes how the abundance of corn led to the surplus going into animal feed and fructose production. Fructose became the preferred sweetener of the food industry because it was a cheap, domestic source which freed the US from reliance on the widely fluctuating price of sugar on the global market. Little concern was shown for the fact that fructose is metabolized differently than sucrose. The abundance of fructose in the diet led to a crisis of liver disease and obesity, and numerous chronic diseases that result as secondary consequences.[29]


The abundant supply of corn was also funneled into livestock, even though it was not the natural diet of cattle. Before corn-fed cattle die young from digestive problems, they have to be fattened up faster and fed more medicines to make them tolerate the corn. In spite of its cruelty, it became an excellent method for extracting short-term profit. The overuse of corn led to cheaper and more processed foods to the next livestock in the production process—the human, who could be viewed now not as the ultimate beneficiary but rather as a consumable resource now exploited by those who own capital in the food, medical insurance, and pharmaceutical industries.


The consumer of meat and high fructose corn syrup is entertained and distracted, and lives a contented life quite removed from the wretched suffering of a slave, but he or she is subjected to psychic and physical suffering, and when it becomes unbearable, there are health insurance policies to be sold and drugs and vaccines that can be given, which offer further opportunities for corporate profit. These therapies, which the victims are induced to want and demand during a crisis, produce side-effects that add to the spiral of declining health, and so it goes until the resource is exhausted, much like the soil on 18th century sugar plantations.


Capitalism has run out of other resources to exploit, and perhaps because of the threat of nuclear holocaust, it can’t resort to full war in a time of crisis, so it has turned to this last frontier, perpetual low-intensity war, commodification of culture, and the exploitation of the human body. As early as 1981, social scientist Jacques Attali noted:


… today man is no longer important as a worker but as a consumer (because he is replaced by machines in his work). Therefore, we could accept the idea of increasing life expectancy on the condition that we make old people solvent and thus create a market. We can see very well how the big pharmaceutical companies behave today, in relatively egalitarian countries where at least the mode of financing retirement is achieved: they privilege geriatrics, to the detriment of other fields of research such as tropical diseases.[30]


Although the human does not experience the tortures of plantation slaves of centuries past and may instead live and “work” in an air-conditioned cubicle, he or she is nonetheless being worked on as a consumer/worker. The automation trend underway now is for there to be no more cashiers at the grocery store, no assistants at hotel and airport check-ins, and no human help at the consumer help desk. People work less, and may soon be given a universal basic income, but they will be forced to work more at consuming.


The chronic diseases that arise from this life can be tolerated for a long time, and solutions can be forestalled, at least until a virulent pathogen appears to make the victims perceive an acute emergency. Yet even when that occurs, the pathogen is seen as an opportunity for profit and as the cause of the problem. Ignored throughout the official pandemic reaction were the underlying illnesses that have been worsening for decades.


I suspect the victims of this process, even though they may be called uneducated and unsophisticated, and may vote against their interests for a populist demagogue, they feel in their “gut intuition” what has been done to them. During the great vaccine coercion campaign of 2021-22, there were many who rejected the treatments proffered because they believed that the treatments had a poor chance of being safe or efficacious (which turned out to be true[31]), and they judged that they were healthy enough to survive the viral infection. Yet there were many people with serious chronic health problems who also rejected the offer of salvation by vaccination, knowing full well that with their “comorbidities” it might save their lives. They seemed to be making a defiant last stand—a desperate protest against what had been done to them over the long term, as if to say, “You’ll squeeze no more from me. If I die on this hill, so be it.”



The directors of King Corn interviewed Earl Butz in a seniors’ residence shortly before he passed away in 2008. He expressed pride in policies which, he asserted (see the quote above), led to greater efficiency and cheaper food, allowing for a greater prosperity in which Americans were able to spend their money on other things besides food. The film’s most powerful statement comes in a brief shot with no words spoken. The elderly but very slim Mr. Butz had to conclude the interview because his grandson was coming to take him to a family event. The filmmakers waited in the parking lot after the interview and photographed the obese grandson helping the grandfather into his car. That visual message laid bare the Secretary of Agriculture’s true legacy.


I began this essay by saying that the inhabitants of the earth are living in a cultural space much like the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. It started to form in the years just after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, when investors in Europe started to finance sugar plantations and the slave trade in the new colonies. This was the start of an acceleration in the exploitation of human and natural resources, of a new energy paradigm which later integrated itself with the energy paradigm of fossil fuels and uranium. With the rising use of non-human machines and automation, the excess carbon-based energy source circulating in human bodies triggered a new catastrophe—a long list of chronic illnesses with insulin resistance as their root cause.[32]





This essay has illustrated the process by which humanity became enclosed in this technological zone of exclusion. However, this trap was not inherent in the technology itself. We created it and walked into its trap because we never stopped to ask the important questions. Quoting Jacques Attali again, from forty years ago:


With the internal combustion engine, we could have made two choices: either to favor public transport and make people’s lives easier, or to produce cars, tools of aggression, consumption, individualization, solitude, accumulation, desire, rivalry... We chose this second solution. I believe that with genetic engineering we have the same type of choice and I believe that we will also choose, unfortunately, the second solution. In other words, with genetic engineering we could gradually create the conditions for humanity to live freely but collectively, or we could create the conditions for a new commodity, genetic this time, which would be made of copies of men sold to men, of chimeras or hybrids used as slaves, robots, means of work...[33]



Reclaiming human dignity must begin with rejecting the false notion of prosperity endorsed by Earl Butz, which seems to be a prime example of what Attali thought of as his disfavored second solution. What is needed is a radical re-imagining of the way we produce and deploy energy in machines and in human bodies, and of the societies that grow around this deployment. A growing segment of the global population is rejecting the idea that this reform should be entrusted to the institutions that caused the problem—the billionaire philanthropists who continue to travel by private jet during this long emergency. Corporate executives and wealthy philanthropists cannot be allowed to greenwash harsh reality and propose false “sustainable” solutions imposed from above without democratic participation of the masses of people who will be told to make all the sacrifices, that the age of abundance is over, as President Macron told his French subjects in August 2022.[34] Unless they are opposed, these self-appointed benefactors will unleash further chaotic “creative” destruction of energy systems, health care, agriculture, and food supplies, with the citizens who survive reduced to being consumers, “target demographics,” items in databases, and raw material and products. Indeed commodification of the human mind and body is well underway, as these are surely considered to be among the “natural assets” bundled up for listing as Natural Asset Companies on the New York Stock Exchange.


Notes


[1]. Godfrey Reggio (Director), Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (MGM Video and DVD, 2002, original film release: 1982). https://youtu.be/8oiK4vPLtVw

[2]. Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict (Harper One, 1987).

[3]. US Department of State Archive, “Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show’ with Matt Lauer,” February 19, 1998. https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html  I use these words to refer to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s declaring to critics of US policy, “But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

[4]. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 38.

[6]. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009).

[7]. Homi Bhabha, “Why Empires Fall, Full Interview, Homi Bhabha,” Institute of Art and Ideas, February 14, 2019. https://youtu.be/9t82nbsoiqE

[8]. Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimists: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010), Chapter 7, 213-246.

[9]. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin Books, 1986).

[11]. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT Press, 2017).

[12]. Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper and Row, 1974).

[13].  Yasha Levine.

[14] . Mintz, 184.

[15]. Mintz, 197.

[16]. Mintz, 128, 146.

[18]. Mintz, 186.

[19]. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

[21]. Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg, Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto Press, 2017).

[23]. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005). Without going into a discussion of this work, I borrow the phrase “long emergency” to credit James Kunstler for his excellent coverage, seventeen years ago, of the themes discussed in this essay.

[24]. Cory Morningstar, Facebook, September 15, 2022. See also www.wrongkindofgreen.org for related articles by this author.

[28]. Aaron Woolf, Ian Cheney, and Curt Ellis (directors), King Corn (Mosaic Films, 2007).

[30]. Michel Salomon, L’Avenir de la vie. (The Future of Life, interview with Jacques Attali) (Seghers, 1981), 264-279. English translation: https://dennisriches.wordpress.com/2022/08/16/past-visions-of-the-present-future-jacques-attali-in-1981-on-the-future-of-medical-care/

[33]. Michel Salomon, 1981.

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