I’m Sure This Will Be the Technological Solution That Will Finally Allow Us to Conquer Nature

Agriculture has spent over half a century fully committed to better living through chemistry, using massive applications of industrial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to produce enormous harvests. In the short term, it has worked, but the long-term success of this plan is far from assured. The biggest problem is that humans may try to control nature, but they can’t control nature. To borrow a central theoretical term from my professional field of environmental history, nature has agency and it pushes back against human domination. Specifically in this case, plants develop resistance to chemicals, forcing agribusiness to create ever more powerful poisons that weeds will soon again resist.

So the new strategy is biological engineering, creating a sort of Weed Genome Project to eventually create more effective herbicides. Which I am sure will not work in the long term, but I suppose at this point agribusiness will keep doubling down on profitable chemical applications until the entire system collapses under the weight of declining petroleum supplies.