The story of the last 200 years can be told many ways, but one way we can tell it is as the triumph of the extractive industries -- and their mindset and their methods -- over all other human activities. The masters of mining and metallurgy, and of the colonialist exploitation that corresponds to extraction, have the following fundamental premise: a reductionist approach that isolates the "valuable" in any "resource base", separates it from the "dross", and discards -- externalizes -- the "dross" while selling the "high value" extracted product for the best price possible.

...

We now practice farming as an extractive industry. "Farming," furthermore, is supported by other extractive industries: mining topsoil and fossil water, growing only a handful of predetermined "high value" crops and discarding/exterminating all other cultivars, and seeking "best price" in markets regardless of distance and appropriateness.

If it makes more money to grow palm trees for biofuel to ship to wealthy customers overseas, then by all means destroy peasant smallholdings that produced food for local people, or forest that maintained water circulation and climate stability, in order to establish massive monocrop palm oil plantations.

The mindset and praxis of mining has been superimposed on all other activities: fishing is now practiced as stripmining by factory trawlers -- gargantuan, destructive bottom draggers. The "bycatch" phenomenon, decimating hundreds of species as "collateral damage" in the hunt for select high-value species, is directly analogous to the proliferation of slag piles and acid pools around mining operations. Dairy farming is now practiced like stripmining, pumping external inputs (hormones and other drugs) into heifers to force maximum production and extraction of the "high value" product (milk), and discarding the "dross" (a cow burnt out as a milk producer by the age of 3 and sold for cheap meat).

This extractive praxis inherently destroys biotic systems -- whether it be the body of a cow, or an entire ecosystem -- because no biotic system can survive being stripped for specific "high value" parts. Ecosystems, like animals, function as a whole. The rates of return demanded by finance capitalism are inherently incompatible with the rate of solar return expressed by natural growth patterns in biotic systems.

We are biological -- biotic -- creatures, and all our food is the product of biotic systems. The extractive mindset that capitalism requires to provide its fantastical rates of return is incompatible with biotic reality. Capitalism and food have been on a collision course from the beginning.

my bold...

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.