I LIKE THE STORY OF THE NOOSPHERE, BUT, quite understandably, it necessarily lacks an account of how it formed in relation to agriculture.  

OVERVIEW

What I am about to say is contextualised by seeing a constant dance between the biospheric and noospheric natures of the human condition. I think of this as a nondual thread of understanding.  Humans are both biological (a body) and noospheric (technologies emerge through us in a manner that is in some way external to our own biological bodies). 

Our technologies can ever increasingly enhance, vivify and proliferate the biological aspect of our bodies, and other humans’ biological bodies, and the non-human biosphere, or they can ever increasingly and excessively limit, disrupt, destroy or proliferate our bodies and other humans’ biological bodies and the non-human biosphere. They can, at the same time, ever increasingly enhance, vivify and proliferate the noospheric aspect of our minds, other humans’ minds and our collective intelligence or they can ever increasingly overly limit, disrupt, destroy or proliferate the noospheric aspect of our minds, other humans’ minds and our collective intelligence. 

I like how Daniel Schmachtenberger defines the human condition as our ability to mix material reality with our imagination through our abstract knowledge to create technologies external to our own biological bodies.  And these technologies ever increasingly diverge from the ability of other biological organisms to adapt to them through genetic mutation and co-evolutionary adaptive pressures. Jeremy Lent calls it the Patterning Instinct. 

This is the topic I am exploring through agriculture.

MY ARGUMENT

My main argument is that Agriculture has been the bridge between the noosphere and the biosphere -- or at least one main pathway through which the noosphere was realised in relation to the biological aspect of humans, as humans first limited the lifecycles of biological organisms and then compressed, accelerated and intensified certain aspects of biological organisms to further the realisation of the noosphere. 

Agriculture has been the art of extending, compressing, intensifying, stacking functions, accelerating, constraining and proliferating the lifecycles of biological organisms other than ourselves (the biosphere) in order to realise the noospheric urges within us, which unfortunately include the proliferation of the Molochian aspects of the noosphere. These aspects relate to ever-increasing amounts of material comfort and the overcoming of the limit conditions of the biological lifeworld itself to potentially approximate the conditions of outer space and overcome the conditions of outer space. This Molochian aspect of the noosphere is essentially the overcoming of the limit of the local, which is inherently biological, to create an ever increasingly coordinated human mind but at a cost to our own healthy biological selves.

From agriculture, we see an acceleration of the concentrations of energy derived through the at least 10,000-year collective field experiment on the lifecycles of plants and animals. This 10,000-year field experiment has given rise to the hospital, the factory, the laboratory, and the theory of evolution. It contributed to the theory of evolution because it created domestic animals and plants and drugs and clothes that were sufficiently dialectically different to wild animals and humans, to then give clues as to the substrates which give rise to biological life itself - i.e. marine ecosystems, forest ecosystems and the soil.

This then gave rise to a smaller but more concentrated field experiment -- the change of land use into the noospheric patterning style of the city and the laboratory. Agriculture is the bridge between wild nature and cities and so it is the medium through which biosphere nature reserves are converted into noospheric information reserves. It is the constraint imposed between the wild biological system (which is more self-managed than human-managed) and the noospheric ecosystem (which is ever increasingly human-managed).

OVERCOMING CRITICAL LIMITS OF AGRICULTURE

We have more or less overcome the limits of critical aspects of agriculture through our ever increasingly effective coordination of no longer biological/inorganic materials.  This overcoming of the limits was responded to most recently with the creation of the ecological movement, and in particular with the emergence of the ecological patterning of agriculture, which gave rise to organic farming principles and permaculture design systems. Both of these practices embed the biosphere and the biological aspects of the human within their practices as a response to the Molochian turn in agriculture.

These responses are movements, techniques and practices that accelerate the biospheric crossing of the noosphere by trying to define what is inherently biological. I believe, very roughly speaking, these are the soil, the forest ecosystem/woody-based/animal-based single lifetime lifecycles and the biological aspect of the human, i.e. our own bodies.  Furthermore, the constraint of constraints within the biospheric nature of agriculture, as articulated by the organic farming movement, involves a  "perennial agriculture".

This means creating healthy soils, healthy ecosystems and healthy human bodies in perpetuity, and therefore necessarily never overcoming those limits, but to work within those limits. This is the defining constraint within which the other constraints reside. Put another way, within this idea of the healthy soil, the healthy life cycle of a single plant or animal, and healthy relations between them, is the idea of constraint that should never be overcome - the soil, the biosphere (non-human biological life) and the lifecycle of the human body. This lies in contrast to the molokian aspect of the noosphere, which is the ever increasingly effective coordination of the human mind in engineering inorganic or formerly organic hyper-accumulated, energy-dense organic materials, which result in ever more non-local, non-biological connections.

1.  A blind person using a guide dog, instead of a blind person using a robot guide. When is it 'better' to use a machine, when the machine would enable the blind person to see again? Would humans rather overcome their own biological limit (eyes that don't work) through machines rather than it be worked within with other biological organisms?

2. Biomass willow for energy - Biomass willow is an example of the traditional agriculture practice of breeding - working within the constraints of individual lifecycles of plants, but constraining certain aspects of their lifecycle (their flowering and fruiting phase) and proliferating other aspects of their lifecycle (their exponential vegetative growth phase) in order to get energy. Biomass willow could be produced locally and burnt very efficiently in superinsulated biochar rocket stoves as a way to produce energy for heating and cooking, for example.

3. The use of non-native plants to restore healthy ecosystem functionality - the arrival of vigorous plants into ecosystems intensifies the functions of an ecosystem.

4. The blending of wild ecosystems with noospheric ecosystems for hybrid vigour- i.e. forest gardening, forest farming, rewilding, etc.


THE LAST 200 YEARS

 

There are certain important limits that have been overcome in the past two hundred years as agriculture moved from the driving force of the noosphere's realisation to a more second-tier layer as access to energy density increased. These events shouldn't be considered so much events as layers on top of one another that then reinforce each other to bring us to the present-day situation.

THE LAST 500 YEARS

1. Medieval times, roughly 500 years ago.  The proliferation of plant materials from the days of colonialisation, in particular the proliferation of plants and animals from the Americas and the proliferation of sugar, grain and tobacco.

2. Occurring at the same time, from Medieval times onwards. The constraining and proliferation of certain psychoactive plant medicines. In particular, the constraining of entheogens and the proliferation of refined sugars, alcohol and caffeine-based or similar substances such as tobacco. This could be broadened to the constraining of what states humans could go into or not. In my own life, I have been deeply moved by my daughter’s deeply addictive response to refined sugar and how it disrupted and changed my relationship with her so obviously.

3. steam power - replacement of traction and transport and various farming operations by the effectiveness of human coordination of non-biological materials. This was a huge change. For the almost entire history of agriculture, humans were dependent on animals for essential agricultural operations and transport - mainly horses for moving over land and oxen and working horses for traction and ploughing. I've heard also that, in the lead up to the rollout of trains and steam engines, there were the highest concentration of wind-powered and water powered windmills and horses per person, because human civilisation was still completely reliant on individual animals and the constraints of needing to train them up and reproduce them, and cultivate individual plants for wood production, and water-based forms of energy i.e. renewable forms of energy production. It was the peak of purely organic,natural forms of energy production. Fossil fuels, initially coal, and the increasing effectiveness of the human coordination of non-biological materials it afforded, completely overcame this limit of working within the lifecycles of plants and animals, and the need for wind and water for energy production. This really freed up the majority of humans no longer needing to be engaged in agriculture.

4. The Haber-bosch process in 1909 removed the need for rotational farming and ley farming, whereby land needs to be periodically rested or sown to temporary pastures, by overcoming the limit of needing leguminous plants for nitrogen fixation from the atmosphere by synthetically producing ammonia by combining Nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from gas.

5. 1950s.  The “Green Revolution” - industrial farming, exemplified by Norman Borlaug and his successful creation of dwarf wheat hybrid varieties suitable for combine harvesting - was the successful backcross of the farm with the factory. Once the limit of nitrogen was overcome, this intensified the delocalisation of farming so that global farming flows of foodstuffs intensified in relation to local flows.

6. The ecological movement of the 1970s intuited the Molochian turn in agriculture and the “Green Revolution”.

7.  The 21st century - we see the proliferation of metabolic diseases, in particular childhood obesity, which only first started to occur after the Second World War, to about a fifth of children in most developed countries. This has come about through the progressive stripping of fibre, both into the breeding of fruit and vegetables (sweeter carrots, sweeter berries, and into the post-harvest processing of food in general, which also entails the removal of fibre. Removal of fibre is a very important element in refining any food.
 

IN CONCLUSION
 

Agriculture is the space in between our biospheric nature reserves and our noospheric information reserves. It straddles the moment where the chain of  'development' takes place, whereby biospheric land starts its journey of progressive noospherizing until it reaches a land that 'looks' and 'feels' like outer space. Is it so strange that a nuclear weapon's power puts into reverse the whole chain of development, so the Earth on which we live would resemble (and feel like) like outer space, or pre-emergent life? Is it so strange that our never-ending conflicts that result in war and death and destruction feel like the destruction of the most precious elements of our existence? It is so strange that an AI data centre is a process of the most recursive refinement process/ and experiment of human coordination of inorganic materials that's ever been attempted. No, it is not. It is feeling the life force and feeling the accumulated preciousness of the biosphere and feeling that once it's lost, it's gone forever. That urge is the biospheric urge to preserve life. Fuck the rules, preserve life at all costs.

 The Molochian aspect of the noosphere is anti-human in the sense that the development of the noospheric information reserve is the ongoing divergence between the humanly human part of ourselves and the unhuman, non-biological, alien part of ourselves, so much so that even our own bodies can't adapt to our own hyperaccumulated inorganic technological advances meaningfully anymore. This is why it feels so bizarre to witness the continued destruction of the rainforest when it's clearly a dumb thing to do. This is why it feels so bizarre that our own biological brothers and sisters, whose life force we eat to continue ourselves (we must kill to survive and thrive) are laced with inorganic residues that will in turn break that, until now, unbroken chain of life begetting life.This is why it feels so bizarre that we lose the most precious gifts of organic life through species loss, and their accumulated collective emergetic, vitalizing struggle to reach the point that we are to witness them at all. We are witnessing our biological selves being annihilated by our technological selves, and agriculture sits in one of many potential imaginative spaces where the process of development may end up being an incredible dance rather than a war.  We are inspired by the liberative, proliferative potentials in agriculture, 'the garden of eden', and we are horrified when it goes wrong because we didn't notice the limits. We take inspiration from both sides, hoping to make a cross, a child, a seed, that outlives us and thrives in the struggle between the two.