The Oil We Eat is a Harper’s article by Richard Manning based on a book he’s written, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. Both the book and the article discuss the increasing toll modern agricultural techniques are taking on our ecosystem and on our dwindling fossil fuels. In short, it is another sign of the apocalypse—so to speak.

It’s hard to have a political discussion about the United States these days without discussing the country’s renewed religious fervor. A scant decade ago we were talking about the ascendancy of the secular state, and was this the final nail in the coffin for religion as a relevant force. No one’s asking that question now, of course. Whenever the issue of the religious right does come up, inevitably someone in the discussion asks a somewhat ludicrous question: do Christians think the end times are near? Renewed attacks by heathen terrorists, an apparent holy war in the Middle East, and a general increase in fear and uncertainty; certainly the idea of the end time isn’t as far-fetched as it used to be. But what the more secular of us may not realize is we have our very own apocalypse myth, and “The Oil We Eat” is one piece of the puzzle.

The 1960s was the decade when Vietnam became a big deal, when the threat of Communism was real and MAD was a black cloud hanging over the world. And yet, for some reason, I associate unparalleled prosperity with the 60s. Hippies, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation: all grabbed the national spotlight in the 60s. People were buying homes and getting college degrees in unprecedented numbers, thanks to U.S. initiatives designed to give returning vets from the Second World War every chance to get on their feet and return to the lives they left behind. A strong America and a revitalized Europe thought they could wipe out world poverty if they gave it a good effort, so apparent was the new wealth. Optimism seemed to manifest itself everywhere in pop culture, from colourful go-go fashions to an astonishing variety of upbeat pop music, from airports that looked like space stations to rockets flying to the moon, an American flag on the side. These things and more are what I take away from the 60s; somehow I don’t really think about bomb shelters and Kent State.

I may not know a whole lot about the 60s, but I do know a fair amount about the beginning of the 21st century, a decade that still remains nameless six years in. And I can tell you that rockets don’t fly to the moon anymore; they disintegrate in mid-air, to the shock and horror of millions of onlookers. Airports are endowed with all the pomp and circumstance of a prison, thanks to stringent security precautions on the one hand and the falling fortunes of penny-pinching airline companies on the other. In the 60s, there was Star Trek, a utopian vision of intergalactic life where poverty had been eliminated, wealth was shared equally, and one could be in the military without every really fighting anyone. Today we have a remounted Battlestar Galactica, a show about the aftermath of a massive nuclear attack that reduces humanity to 50,000 survivors and a handful of spaceships. It’s a show where Commander Adama tells the remnants of humanity that it never once asked itself why it deserved to survive.

It’s a question that, realistically, was probably asked many times during the Cold War, when extinction was just a button press away. Perhaps it’s a question we should ask ourselves again, as we now face extinction not by nuclear-tipped missiles but by starvation. The argument made by articles like “The Oil We Eat” and books like Jacob Diamond’s Collapse is that Mother Nature is one mean bitch, and that we are coming to a time when the resources we’ve relied on for so long will simply run out. Furthermore, this is not a new problem; we just happened to discover the problem very late in the game. Both books trace our current resource crunch all the way back to the beginnings of civilization, with the discovery of agriculture. Agriculture led to increased societal complexity because of the excess of resources it created; we found ways to use that excess, and thus had to expand agriculture to meet new demand. This vicious cycle has continued to the present day, where it is now becoming evident that there is no more excess; what we have is what we have.

Agriculture was the catalyst for civilization, most everyone agrees. Was it also civilization’s fatal flaw? Is everything that we’ve built over the past ten thousand years one enormous mistake, one that we are just now beginning to pay for? Even the most basic simulations of life can model and predict what happens when life grows too quickly in a biosphere: it grows rapidly, overwhelms the carrying capacity of its environment, and shrinks back to very small numbers—often down to zero. We may learn one day that human civilization was a failed experiment, an example of life that simply grew too fast for its environment. No God, no swarm of locusts, no great flood; just a slow, lingering death marked by short, sharp periods of chaos.