The Green Revolution’s yield gains depend on monocultures that destroy local farming knowledge.
Evidence
It’s important to see that even the so-called “Green Revolution,” which claims to have sharply increased the yields from crops, is based on diversity-destroying monoculture crops. In this process, a very small variety of seeds are used in widely different climates, but in order for them to thrive, these seeds must have heavy doses of pesticides and fertilizer. Farmers who can’t afford these expensive inputs are pushed aside, and the methods that had been passed down over generations about how to grow crops in this particular soil with these particular seeds are lost forever (Shiva, 1993). — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1422
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Vandana Shiva framing that reappears in the book’s later chapters; reinforces the knowledge-loss warning of ch9 on language and biodiversity. — connects to: Biodiversity protects systems from collapse while monocultures die wholesale under disease. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1418; Avoiding plurality produces social monoculture that destroys existing dynamism — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 476; The Green Revolution drove Punjab’s large labor migration. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 924
- SEED: An essay angle: ‘the Green Revolution is the textbook’s cleanest case of a progress narrative that hides its own cultural and ecological violence’ — exactly what eco-justice pedagogy teaches students to unmask.
Broader Connections
- Avoiding plurality produces social monoculture that destroys existing dynamism
#complicates(0.75) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 476 - The Green Revolution drove Punjab’s large labor migration.
#expands(0.72) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 924