By Harriet Friedmann
Food makes life joyful. It connects society to complex ecosystems in soils, to metabolism of human bodies, to public markets and shared meals. It is the foundation of democratic modernity. Of course, food makes life miserable when bonds are broken. Capitalist modernity hides the real connections between earth and mouth in long distance supply chains. As intimate relations are broken between what is grown, what is exchanged, and what is eaten, ecosystems become degraded into plantations and cultural cuisines are debased into standard edible commodities constructed like cars or garments from convenient ingredients. Farmers and agricultural workers have to use substitutes to restore fertility or kill pests. They lose knowledge of how to grow what is good for the earth. Eaters of packaged foods, which combine ingredients from unknown places and people who made them, lose touch with eating as a social and natural act. Capitalism sells solutions to each of the problems it creates by breaking social and natural ties of enduring foodways.
Yet capitalist modernity leaves many places intact at the margins, and even in the most desolate foodscapes, people experiment with “alternatives” to the dominant food system. (Goodman, Dupuis, and Goodman, 2011) Democratic modernity revives values of sustainability, social justice, animal welfare and the glories of food cultures, both ancient and hybrid. As the crisis of capitalist modernity deepens, survival depends on renewed connections between society and bioregions, which must move from the interstices to the centre. Capitalist modernity scatters people, plants and animals across the earth. The effects are double: colonial rulers and capitalists establish plantations that displace and simplify, but at the same time, new combinations of people, plants and animals, and of agronomic and culinary techniques, open pathways for diasporic creativity.
Human creativity is our resource for resilience, for growing well, eating well, and sharing foods within and across places. Foodgetting always connects humans and all other natural beings. It is always central to cultural life in each place. Cultures shape nature and are shaped by it as they find ways to meet needs. Unique landscapes and cuisines emerge and endure, and nature and society evolve together. This is not romantic — evolution is full of disruptions as well as collaborations.
Legacies: Layered Landscapes of Capitalist Modernity
In the Mississippi River Delta of Louisiana, where I grew up, a deep and rich cuisine emerged over three centuries from encounters among indigenous peoples who had lived in the fertile marshlands for 6,000 years, and waves of settlers from West Africa (who came as enslaved captives), from Haiti (who escaped from slavery), from Spanish and French colonies across the Americas, and eventually from places as distant as Germany, England, Ireland, and Vietnam. Migrants who arrived by force or choice learned from each other how to fish, garden, and cook in the rich bayou ecosystem. (Carney and Rosomoff 2011) The unique dish called gumbo takes its name from gombo, the Bambara word for okra, which was transplanted from West Africa and thrived in the Mississippi River Delta. Its unique flavour and texture come from filé, a French word for the ground leaves of the native sassafras tree. All the rest of the ingredients are local and seasonal, whether shellfish from the bayou, or chicken which had an erratic journey from Asia or andouille sausage contributed by French and Spanish colonists.
The Chitimacha people were among the earliest on Earth to plant and harvest maize, beans, and other crops and to make salt, which they traded for manufactures with peoples who lived in lands to the north. They lived in fifteen villages, each with about 500 people, and governed themselves together in a kind of self-government we call a confederacy. Another culture, the Houma, supplied the first French military settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi with food by expanding agricultural production. They even learned to raise poultry introduced by the Europeans, though they would not eat the birds themselves — and sold them only in the belief they would not be killed and eaten! (Usner 1986) It was eventually to turn into colonial wars to displace indigenous peoples all along the Mississippi to the Great Lakes and beyond, creating a huge French empire. Like other colonists across the Americas, they turned what they saw as a New World into landscapes that resembled the Old World as much as possible, what environmental historian Alfred Crosby (1986) calls “neo-Europes.” Then came sugar plantations using enslaved labour. Then soybeans for animal feed and oil rigs. Finally, in 2025, I visited one large plantation with many acres of solar panels. Sugar growing in small patches, a lone oil well, and a small town, show layers of a landscape hiding the indigenous cultures and nature of only three centuries ago.
Over the brief span of a few centuries, Capitalist Modernity (has blinkered our eyes with ideas of progress. In the threatened but still intact forests of the Amazon, for instance, Achuar both manage forests to support plant and animal foods they eat, and also transplant plants to gardens. They have no term corresponding to “wild,” but distinguish between plants that lend themselves to transplanting in gardens and those that don’t (Descola, 1994). Environmental historian William Cronon explains that the idea of “wilderness” is romantic and misleading. “Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation — indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” (Cronon, 1999)
With revival of indigenous cultures, remnants of precolonial landscapes are only now beginning to re-appear. In an intriguing intervention in the debate about dating the Anthropocene Era, two Earth System scientists noted the geologic record shows a surprising a downward spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1610. Lewis and Maslin (2015) connected this geological marker with the origins of Capitalist Modernity in 1500 to challenge the prevailing assumption that forests in the Americas were primeval before colonial conquest. Instead, American forests were hiding the ruins of ancient civilisations. They argue that deaths of 55 million indigenous peoples in the Americas over the century between 1500 and 1600 led to abandonment of about 56 million hectares of agricultural area and consequent growth of forests that sequester about 15 times more carbon (Koch et al. 2019). Recently, using new technologies, archaeologists have discovered remains of complex urban societies and interlinked systems of water management. They were the work of inhabitants who died or fled, from the Amazon through present Mexico to the Mississippian cultures of North America. The knowledge now recovered by both indigenous cultural revivals and curious scientists is crucial to our collective ability to draw on the ethnosphere, the accumulated wisdom of humanity since its origins (Davis, 2009; 2014).
Vital remnants still exist of the great agrarian civilizations that arose with agriculture, cities, and states. Each evolved unique ways of growing, exchanging and preparing food that endured for thousands of years before they were pushed to the margins by colonial plantations and later by industrial agriculture. They represent the real meaning of sustainability: endurance. The extraordinary chinampas of Mexico were created and maintained in the lake once surrounding Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). The impressive floating farms were created by Aztec farmers using mud from the bottom to grow and renew soils, woven reeds to hold the mud in place and regulate water flows no matter what the season, trees planted at the corners to stabilize each garden (Netting 1993). The maize, beans, squash, amaranth, tomatoes, and chili peppers fed its estimated 150,000 to 200,000 inhabitants and were the ingredients for its special cuisine. Remnants still exist despite modernist pressures that filled in the canals connecting plots. They are beautiful, full of intensely cultivated vegetables, herbs and flowers. Now they partly survive through tourism (Vasiloudis 2021). But indigenous farmers are reviving them, and the Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization of the United Nations (UNESCO) has declared them a Globally Important World Heritage Site.
In 4000 year old terraces in China one can still see how villagers manage intricate flows of water from forests at mountaintops through multiple fields and ponds alongside carefully integrated private gardens and ponds (King, 2004 [1911]). Without romanticizing the oppression of patriarchal and other hierarchical relationships, we can admire and protect the knowledge passed down for many generations to maintain huge garden paradises that yield rice, vegetables, herbs, ducks, frogs, and fish for humans to eat, in quantities and at times that fit seasons and relationships. Villagers know when and how to change the flow of water down the terrace, and when to move small
fish from private ponds, which are shaded by vegetable vines, into terrace ponds.
The surviving terraces I saw in China ten years ago are now studied not by anthropologists, nor agronomists, nor dieticians, but by the government agency — Natural Resources — responsible for health of forests and waters. One startling finding was that fish in terrace ponds not only fertilize the rice but also jump up to knock insects from rice plants and eat them. Yet those responsible for agriculture and fisheries were doing their best to separate rice and fish (with little interest in all the other beings). To increase yields per hectare of monocultural rice requires insecticides and industrial fertilizer to replace the lost work of fishes. Nearby streams were already polluted by nitrogen runoff. Fishery scientists support fish and shellfish farms on the coasts, all requiring feeds that in turn pollute waterways. This type of aquaculture repeats on shorelines and oceans the pollution begun a few decades ago with confined terrestrial animals and maize fields. Both rice and fish farmed alone are more susceptible to diseases, like livestock and its maize and soy monocultures. Once separated from village farming and eating, people improvise what they eat from what they buy in markets, often cheaper industrial foods. These do guide healthy diets like the ones humans evolved to eat over thousands of years.
On a scale that dwarfs the United States, which invented monocultural feedgrains for confined animals, agricultural scientists in China foster “efficiency” of one thing at a time. Over time, as environmental scientist Rachel Carson predicted only a few years into the era of industrial monocultures, toxins turned into ecocide, which not only kill birds locally but over time accumulate into dead zones where streams and rivers carry nitrogen runoff to the sea. For less than a century, Capitalist Modernity has been chasing the problems created by separating unified social natures. Now those ancient terraces, too, are declared a UNESCO Globally Important World Heritage Site. They are preserved as tourist attractions. Yet it is those who must restore clean water and forests, not those seeking to produce the most calories to “feed” the people, who keep this precious legacy alive.
The unique terraces of Asia and the Andes, like the less hierarchical societies of grassland and marshland ecosystems, share an enduring pattern that the great historian and anthropologist Sidney (2011) calls core, protein, fringe (CLF). Since humans began to farm, agronomies and cuisines have centred on three kinds of plants: a starchy staple or “core,” a protein plant or “legume,” and everything else, including small quantities of animal flesh, which Mintz called “fringe.” The core defines a cuisine and a landscape: rice in Asia, maize in Mexico, potato in the Andes, wheat in West Asia/Middle East, millet in parts of Africa and Asia, manioc in the Amazon. The core provides most of the calories. The legume complements the core plant in two ways. Agronomically, it renews soil by fixing nitrogen used by the grain or tuber. For diets, the legume is a protein that complements the starchy core: lentils with wheat, or beans with maize or soy with rice. The fringe is everything grown or gathered in fields, gardens, forests, and waters to give flavour and character to the cuisine. Animals are both hunted and raised as participants in growing crops — to restore soils with manure, to work with humans, or to eat insects. Meat, eggs, and sometimes milk for most of human agrarian history in most places and for most people, complemented the core staple and protein plant. It was part of the fringe, which along with vegetables, herbs and spices created distinctive cultural flavours and tastes.
Like the CFL pattern, all societies share ways of governing themselves. Commons is a useful word if widened to include practices much broader than Europe. Understood with respect for distinct cultures with long experience in each landscape, commons is a way to dwell wisely together. There are lessons to learn about democratic self-government for working with nature to shape landscapes. At least in English, we have inherited an idea of commons as what was lost to commoners (the word for most people) by enclosure of common fields, forests and waters in Europe. Those enclosures famously turned traditional foragers and hunters into criminals (poachers) and forced villagers into waged work on and off the land (Thompson, 1975). Less famously, colonial expulsions of indigenous dwellers in the land also enclosed vast landscapes. In contrast to class formation in Europe, colonial enclosures — or settler colonialism — contrasts “civilized” Europeans with indigenous “primitives.” In settler colonies, Europeans created their own commons on lands appropriated from indigenous peoples, from eighteenth-century Boston to twentieth-century kibbutzim in Palestine. Since the nineteenth century creation of natural parks, conservation of supposedly natural places fences them and guards against indigenous poachers who once managed them as human foodgetters. The two types of enclosure share a crucial feature: they change habitats where all beings can live and eat, into the exclusive property of those with power.
English settlers, as Cronon (1983) shows in Changes in the Land, forced a “world of fields and fences” onto a world of forests and villages. When they arrived, they saw a Biblical Paradise, full of abundant deer in forests and strange foods such as maize, which indigenous peoples taught them how to prepare and grow. They couldn’t see how indigenous peoples managed forests, how tribes in the in the southern part of what they called “New England” traded maize they grew for deer from hunting tribes father north. To reshape the land like the England they had left, they cleared forests for timber, fenced lands for private farms, and created their own commons to graze the cattle they introduced. Deer disappeared from forests where indigenous peoples had shaped gathering places to attract them. Clearing, fencing, grazing animals, all transformed paradise into a place where food had to be got by the hard labour. Like Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, colonists understood the changes as divine punishment for their sin. They failed to understand the effects of their own actions.
Colonists across the Americas, from New England to New Spain, displaced existing commons that European eyes could not see. Historian Alan Greer (2018) shows how indigenous peoples governed within and across overlapping territories, which he calls adaptive commons. People moved with climate and seasons, planted and harvested, then allowed places to recover before returning to plant and harvest again. Relations among cultures were not always peaceful but they were long lasting. The landscapes managed by indigenous cultures could not be seen by European settlers nor by pioneering theorists of Capitalist Modernity. Ironically, theories of property and markets sprouted in British imaginings of a New World that was never visited by foundational thinkers John Locke and Adam Smith. Locke, who is still celebrated for his idea that property is based on one’s own labour, owned stock in slave trading companies and was secretary of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, where slavery was permitted (Uzgalis 2017). Their examples of “wilderness” and “natives” to be displaced by “civilized” colonists reflected neither settler experience nor indigenous practices. Even the name “Indians” for all precolonial inhabitants of North America is a mistake: the colonial “discoverer” of “America” thought he had found “India.”
Capitalist Modernity: Emergence and Crisis
Agriculture was key to both the imperial organization of the world centred on European states after 1500, and the system of national states that emerged under US hegemony after 1945 (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; Friedmann, 1993). The main features of colonial reshaping lands across the earth were cities and plantations. Empires centred on Lisbon, Amsterdam, Paris, and London were different from the Ottoman, Austrian, and Russian empires that had long dominated Europe. In their place, they created plantations in distant colonies, and sponsored shipping and trading companies for the first systematic trans-oceanic organization of commodities such as sugar, enslaved Africans, and cotton (Friedmann, 2018; Beckert, 2014; Mintz, 1986; Wolf, 1982) .
The geographical shape of Capitalist Modernity began with empires centred on cities, very different from the nation states which later become familiar. As London, Manchester and Chicago emerged as distinct types of city, each created conditions for the next. The ancient city of London became an imperial city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by reshaping world ecology through massive trade in slaves and sugar. Raymond Williams (1975) writes that unlike later industrial cities, London was a capital centre based largely on expansion of what was noted in 1749 as “…agents, factors, brokers, insurers, bankers, negotiators, discounters, subscribers, contractors, remitters, ticket-mongers, stock-jobbers and…a great variety of other dealers in money, the names of whose employments were wholly unknown to our forefathers.”
Colonial plantations and trade in enslaved Africans organized by London (and Paris) opened to colonial expansion by Iberian rulers and Amsterdam merchants (Arrighi 1994). London in turn created conditions within Britain by the late eighteenth century, which allowed for the rise of Manchester as the first industrial city, and the template for all to follow. Like London before it, Manchester emerged to manufacture cloth from colonies with the right climate (and unfree labour) to grow cotton in India, East Africa, and the Americas (Beckert 2014). This is the context for the “industrial revolution:” once colonial cotton flowed in sufficient quantity, cities filled with refugees from rural areas, who could no longer weave cloth on their own looms from local flax and wool, and thus became vulnerable to enclosures of their mixed farms of food, flax, and sheep.
Finally, in the mid-nineteenth century, after more than three centuries in which hungry humans had moved from rural areas to Manchester, London, New York and Boston, Chicago emerged as an agro-industrial city to feed urban markets. Just as Manchester had been just one of many villages in Lancashire, Chicago was at first one of many small culturally diverse trading places along the Mississippi River, where indigenous peoples mixed with descendants of colonists from New France (which had been sold to the expanding American state only a few decades earlier) and entrepreneurial migrants from the eastern United States. Chicago re-organized the haphazard wheat farms organized by railways, and the cowboys who drove cattle across the grasslands before they were fenced, into continuous flows of industrially and financially organized “rivers of wheat” and “tides of flesh” destined for distant industrial cities (Cronon, 1991). This integrated a vast contiguous territory recently inhabited by Lakota peoples and millions of bison, who used the grasslands completely differently. Railroads cut through both indigenous landscapes and early settlements centred on rivers. They delivered wheat to the centralized storage, grading, and processing centres in Chicago, and after stockyards were established for industrial meatpacking, railways carried chilled meat across the continent. All this replaced human scale connections with creative financial instruments: commodity exchanges and futures markets.
Nations displaced imperial cities as the political organization of global agriculture as colonies became independent from empires. It was a gradual emergence beginning with the United States in 1776, followed only two and half decades later by Haiti, which at the same time freed itself from colonial slavery, and led the French to sell the huge territory of New France to the expanding territory of the United States. Shortly after, Spain’s American colonies gained their independence and created national states. These early nations were the first wave of decolonization. The next wave came a century later. After World War II, the United Nations defined national states as members of an international state system, and one former colony after another became a member. The key difference for agriculture is that while empires used colonies to supply agricultural raw materials for metropolitan industries, national states follow a new ideal of “development,” in which agriculture and industry, cities and countrysides, should follow the United States template, to be organized within national borders.
In principle, this meant plantations should give way to commercial family farms. And so it did in what became known as the “developed” world. But most colonies inherited a legacy of plantations and imperial trade. Some such as coffee, tea and other tropical exports became giant capitalist enterprises. Others were marginal until increasingly autonomous capitals found reasons to invest in monocultural crops. Industrial agriculture in turn spawned industrial food manufacturing, which became hungry for new ingredients. Plants such as palm, which has long been part of mixed farming systems and foodways in Africa, is the most recent. In a speeded up process from recent history, corporations transplanted palms to Asia, creating vast monocultures in place of the landscapes of forests formerly inhabited by people who had been using the land in their own ways. Highly processed foods then spread through supermarkets to people no longer able to produce their own, displaced from inherited foodways, and forced to buy what they can afford.
When materials flow across distant landscapes, they break open complex socio-natural cycles in each place. They thus create problems that must be fixed by complicated mercantile, financial and political institutions. These institutions become less visibly attached to natural cycles and flows, creating a highly mediated human experience that Cronon (1991) calls “second nature.” Some scholars name our time the earthly era of monocultures, the Plantationocene. The name, however clumsy, points to contradictions — displacement of peoples and ecocide — that we now call climate change and loss of biodiversity. Even corporate agro-food industries, that long stayed away from international environmental conferences, finally acknowledge that the food system they have created is dangerous to life on earth. They now show up ready with language learned from critics and promise to reduce the harm of one thing at a time.
They are complemented by advocates of “half-earth” and “rewilding,” who see humans as only destructive to nature. The alternative is shown to be possible by ecologists Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer,and Angus Wright (2019), who combine agro-ecology with conservation biology to re-interpret farming as the matrix for nature. They and their students and the farmers they work with, mostly in central America, demonstrate the multiple ways that farming can support biological diversity and thriving ecosystems. By creating habitat and corridors for many animals to live and move from one place to another, by mixing cultivated plants with forests, grasslands, and coasts, agro-ecology allows human foodgetting to complement food for many beings. It can also grow commercial export crops, such as coffee farms. Farmers can support many species when growing coffee in shade, which mimics the way coffee plants grow under the forest canopy. Many other species thrive in this way, and in turn provide biological controls that reduce need for toxic chemicals. Foundations for using land well in Democratic Modernity are agro-ecology — or similar names such as regenerative agriculture — and food sovereignty, that is, self-management by small to medium farmers who steward the land, and are deeply connected with other inhabitants of the landscape. As knowledge grows about how industrial agriculture contributes to climate change and ecocide, it becomes ever more pressing to grow food to fit specific conditions of each bioregion and even places within them. Farmers and gardeners, even those who grow herbs on windowsills, can avoid commercial seeds bred to complement chemical inputs to “solve” the problems of specific ecosystems. Supported by ecologists, and in conflict with intellectual property, communities save and share seeds they adapt to be diverse and resilient. In this, indigenous knowledge can combine with the streams of science attuned to indigenous knowledge of places (Kimmerer 2013).
In earthly places deeply simplified by Capitalist Modernity, indigenous knowledge itself adapts, for instance, learning to use lockweed, which most ecologists see as “invasive” to North America, for medicine. (Grenz 2024). As cultures revive from fragmentation and displacement, formal sciences can support rather than suppress indigenous knowledge. With recovery of this kind of knowledge, collaboration between formal science and traditional knowledge allows choices to be made so that encultured humans can get food in service of both society and nature, of how to eat in ways that support thriving of nature and nourishment of humans.
As encultured humans are in turn displaced from their habitats in increasing numbers, they carry their knowledge of growing and cooking. In Toronto, Canada, where I live now, people adapt cuisines from many places to new natural and social features of the Great Lakes ecosystem. Gardeners — and even sometimes farmers — continue the centuries-long experimentation by settlers to adapt familiar crops and animals to new soils and climate. Like older transplants of wheat and cattle, new migrants today experiment with growing okra from Africa and bok choy from Asia. Gardeners and cooks across the world love tomatoes, chili peppers, and potatoes, all transplanted from South America (Crosby, 1972). An ecological farm I love is part of an organization called Shoresh, a Hebrew word meaning roots. Its tagline is “Canadian soil, Jewish roots.” Its land, its schools, and its celebrations continue the thousand year old practices in which diasporic Jews have adapted ancient cultures to new places, learning from others, and helping to renew social nature. (Grenz 2024)
Turning Towards Democratic Modernity
Wild rice reveals the revival of social nature in the thousands of lakes and wetlands of the vast Great Lakes region of North America. Ojibwe call the plant (ᒪᓅᒥᓐ) manoomin. It is the weaning food for infants (LaDuke 2017) and a sacred link among all beings. Ojibwe peoples manage the watery landscapes where it grows, taking care not to take too much by attending to where it can be harvested and where it should be left alone. They use manoomin for food and ceremonies. They harvest with long poles from canoes. Much falls back into the water, which reseeds for the next year.
Yet pollution, dams, cottagers, roads, railways, and other kinds of so-called “development” all threaten the watery ecosystem in which manoomin thrives. Commercial monocultures, especially in California, now supply much growing demand. It is no longer “wild,” yet it is wild enough to require intensive management of landscapes in the different California ecosystem. It requires breeding of seeds, application of nitrogen fertilizer and industrial pest controls for insects and fungi. Land is usually tilled by machines adapted to not get stuck in mud created by regulated flooding, and the crop is harvested and dried by large machines. Traditional processing techniques are used for the elite market, but almost three-quarters is prepared in money-saving ways to sell as an ingredient for industrial foods.
Ojibwe are part of the larger Anishinaabe cultural group. At the western edge of the Great Lakes, Winona LaDuke is a pioneer in recovering manoomin as part of wider indigenous politics of land, energy, and culture. She leads the nonprofit White Earth Land Recovery Project, which since 1989 seeks to recover illegally taken settler land and restore forests and wild rice lakes. It is in the US state of Minnesota, at the northwest shore of the largest of the Great Lakes, Superior, across from the Canadian Province of Ontario. Anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists and ecologists across the Great Lakes region are working with indigenous knowledge keepers to find ways to revive manoomin in relation to fish, water quality, and more, as a holistic restoration of both food and landscapes.
The magnificence of the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth leaps to the eye from the satellite image. Yet maps show a red line running through most Great Lakes, including Superior, to mark the border between the United States and Canada. When she was about six years old, my daughter ran her finger along the border of a globe we kept in the kitchen, and asked “why is it there?” That is the question we need to revive. I answered something like, “There were lots of wars and agreements to put it there, but basically, there is no good reason.” That is the answer I stick to.
Landscapes were shaped by indigenous peoples and their plant and animal relations for thousands of years, a vastly longer time than the few hundred years of shipping, industries, agriculture, and border guards of Capitalist Modernity. Fish have no passports, nor rights in either national state. Citizens have rights only in the state(s) whose passport(s) they carry. The encompassing waters create problems for both national states. For instance, when cities in one country draw water for drinking or industry, or when sewage or industrial effluents pollute the waters, the quantity and quality of water changes for both sides of the red line. In 1955 the United States and Canadian governments created The Great Lakes Commission “to ensure a healthy environment, strong economy and high quality of life for current and future generations.”
The red line marks the Shadow of the Great Lakes. Like many “transnational” bureaucracies throughout the world, the Great Lakes Commission tries to solve one problem at a time, or just a few problems at the same time. There has been some progress — fish can now be eaten again from Lake Erie, barely revived from the dead. But prevention of damage faces a losing battle against “development.” This word is deceptive, hiding the damage to nature and cultures done in its name. Development, which began to be used in the now familiar way only in 1947, replaced the condescending English colonial word “improvement” as European colonies gained independence and joined the system of national states in the new United Nations (McMichael and Weber 2025). More than thirty years ago, Wolfgang Sachs (1992) wrote, “The idea of Development stands today like a ruin in the intellectual landscape.Its shadow obscures our vision.”
Fixed borders ruled by central states that try to control who and what is inside and outside, are a relatively new way to organize space. It is usually dated to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that ended Protestant-Catholic wars in Europe. Newly empowered territorial states, at first absolute monarchs, imposed a single language and religion on all inhabitants. In the nineteenth century, states began to define themselves as culturally homogeneous. Now they attempt to turn mixed cultural communities into homogeneous ethno-nations, with ever more violent control over borders, who is inside and who is out. In place of efforts to control and contain people within arbitrary national borders, cultures and nature can thrive within adaptive boundaries. Despite efforts to control and contain movement of people, plants, and animals, landscapes continue to be co-created by humans and nature. Capitalist Modernity simplifies into plantations and global supply chains are mysterious to everyone, but creative people thrown together in each place create cultural diversity in crops and cuisines.
Biocultural communities dwelling in changing landscapes require ways of governing democratically and with attention to natural features in the places where they live. It requires reshaping human groups on the model of ecosystems, with nested and overlapping jurisdictions. One system in the constitution of Europe is the principle of subsidiarity, which seeks to regulate everything at the appropriate scale. For instance, each place reduces waste to zero with cyclical ways of creating what is needed. This extends to the earth, since every atom of carbon in the atmosphere is created somewhere. Where inter-state organizations to regulate climate and species diversity flounder, nested and overlapping commons can connect upwards and outwards to make a social nature that works.
Adaptive commons are an aspiration of Democratic Modernity. Self-governing communities can attune to the natural world across scales. They can connect restoration of polluted streams to reviving life in oceans. They can end waste through cyclical ways of farming, selling, and eating foods. They can forbid toxic emissions in each place, which together can begin to restore the balance of gases in the atmosphere and stabilize earth’s climate. The challenge of creating social and natural communities can be guided by the long view of human history: that Capitalist Modernity with all its problems is far more recent than patriarchy. Democratic Modernity in this light is best pursued by all and led by women, who already lead in creating new ways of growing, sharing, and preparing good food. To the twentieth-century revolutionary cry for bread, peace, land, and roses too, in the twenty-first century we can add the Kurdish Women’s Movement’s cry, taken up in the Iranian women’s revolution, for a new way to live in social nature: woman, life, freedom.
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