Indigenous agriculture adapts plants to land while industrial agriculture adapts land to cloned plants

Evidence

In indigenous agriculture, the practice is to modify the plants to fit the land. As a result, there are many varieties of corn domesticated by our ancestors, all adapted to grow in many different places. Modern agriculture, with its big engines and fossil fuels, took the opposite approach: modify the land to fit the plants, which are frighteningly similar clones. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 483

Categorization

• XREF: The modify-plants-to-fit-land vs. modify-land-to-fit-plants inversion is a precise framing for monoculture critique that carries across Eco-Justice and land-rights courses. — connects to: The Three Sisters companion planting is a feat of indigenous agriculture — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 451; Indigenous harvesting practices are environmental factors plants depend on for survival — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 499; Plant communities mirror the cultural displacement of their peoples — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 957 (+2 more)
• SEED: Article angle: biodiversity as the philosophy of fitting species to place versus the cloned uniformity of fossil-fuel agriculture.

Broader Connections

• Indigenous harvesting practices are environmental factors plants depend on for survival #expands (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 499
• Cultivation develops a thing’s inner core rather than imposing external forms #corroborates (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 550
• Some plants now depend on specific human harvesting practices to survive #exemplifies (0.75) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 499
• Plant communities mirror the cultural displacement of their peoples #complicates (0.72) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 957