Hi guys! I’ve put all my new work on my website and redesigned it so check it out at your leisure. I also made a society6 so you can buy prints of my digital work now! As this year wraps up, I just want to say thank you for all the support, feedback, and general positive energy I always receive when it comes to my work- I’m sending it all right back! <3 <3 <3
my personal belief is that the biggest issue with agriculture today is overcentralisation of agriculture (so consolidation of farming into large corporate farms instead of small independent ones); centralisation of agriculture is, imo, antithetical to ecological and economic sustainability, for a number of reasons but these are the three biggest off the top of my head
1) large corporate farms (talking about crop farms here not pastoral ones) tend to be less biodiverse; they tend to plant single seed strains across massive areas, which makes the seed stock less diverse and more vulnerable to mass blight. it’s literally like plant inbreeding - you wind up with a single plant type everywhere and if that one plant type is compromised by disease, you have massive problems. traditional farming methods involve lots of sharing, splicing, and a resultant plant diversity that is resistant to individual diseases
2) industrial farming practices involve maximum soil yield at maximum efficiency, which is great over the (at most) 20 year timespan through which agricultural corporations think, but catastrophic for soil health and local biodiversity over a span of 100-200 years (which is, I should remind you, ecologically a very short time)authors more informed than I have written reams on the ecological impact of agricultural practices like slash and burn, like replanting jungle with palm oil jungle (another massive blow to biodiversity), so on and so forth, that impact isn’t felt by us so much as it is by the people who live where this is being done, who no longer have floodbreaks or timber stock or the animals that once relied on the disrupted ecosystem
3) corporatisation of farming is one of the biggest roadblocks to economic independence that exists in poor countries; it means that farmers rely on foreign corporations for the land they live on (often paying rent to farm it, which is literally modern sharecropping) and they rely on those corporations for their ultimate livelihood, which means their governments do too. independent farming and independent land ownership is a vital part of self-determination and economic independence, which is why so many revolutionary and anticolonial movements put the politics of self-determination through land ownership at their heart
my biggest problem with the likes of PETA or with vegan activists here in the UK, as well as environmentalists, is that they are focused on individual morality and practice, when I believe that the evils of the meat and dairy industries (which I do believe are evils) are fundamentally economic and can only be addressed alongside a wider set of politics focused on economic inequality
Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
