Human thinking tends to adhere to a default framework of linear causality and predictable outcomes, often at the expense of insight and resilience. Similarly, human-created systems are often constructed according to linear thinking and a centralized structure model. In practice, both natural and human-made systems often present complexity in the form of nonlinearity that cannot be predicted or accounted for within the rigid framework of a linear thinking model. Human affinity for linearity begets the ubiquitous application of reductionist thinking, operating on the basis of direct cause and effect relationships and deterministic approaches to complex problems.
The global food system is astonishingly complex, weaving together both natural and human subsystems. As a system, food and the human connection to it are non-linear and increasingly self-organizing. (See Figure 1 for visual overview of the global food system). To diagnose, assess, and create apt resolutions for problems within a system of this magnitude, human thinking and the systems we create must evolve in the direction of the nonlinear, holistic, abstract natural world.
Figure 1.
The Global Food System
ShiftN. (2009). The Global Food System. [Figure]. Retrieved from FutureLearn https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*t-yZUIXuaXo97yiqYtpC5A.jpeg
Thomas Malthus, an eminent 1770s scholar in the fields of political economy and demography, is known for outlining a scientifically-informed but impractical argument in his work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. His work underlines the complexity of the global food system and humanity’s place within it. Malthus observed that increased food production improved quality of life, resulting in population growth. With the increase in population, demand for food would then match the increased food supply, creating a cycle that seemed to point to certain doom. Malthus argued that because resources for food production are finite, the human population faced inevitable crisis as our numbers and need would eventually outgrow the capacity for environmental resources. The result would be catastrophic for both humanity and the environment. Human population numbers would suffer at the hand of starvation and disease, creating a spike in mortality. Natural resources extracted for food production to meet consumption needs would be overused to a critical point; driving stock of renewable resources below this critical threshold would cause them to become nonrenewable.
At the time, Malthus was certainly thinking more abstractly than his peers; however, he failed to account for critical variables within this extraordinarily complex system. In his argument, Malthus takes an apolitical approach, adhering to a demographic explanation of environmental change – excluding moderating factors such as technology, affluence and poverty. As Paul Robbins writes in Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, “Subsidies of the poor do little to alleviate the crisis, since they only serve to reinforce the demographic trend. Population control, rather than reconfiguration of global distributions of power and goods, is the solution to ecological crisis. The continued advocacy of an apolitical natural-limits argument, therefore, is implicitly political, since it holds implications for the distribution and control of resources.” Rather than pushing consumption to a critical threshold, in which renewables become obsolete, humans have instead opted to exploit and abuse both natural resources and the world’s poor in the name of efficiency. Increased corruption, dissociation, and systemic abuse now run parallel to innovation within the global food system.
In applying linear and reductionist solutions to complex nonlinear systems, humans continue to interact with the global food system as an apolitical machine – a whole composed of the sum of its inert parts. However, as Malthus inadvertently demonstrated, even seemingly apolitical concepts carry conspicuous political consequences. Holistic, nonlinear thinking and self-organizing systems are more relevant to the challenges we face than ever before. The current state of our global food system warrants robust, adaptable, and resilient solutions that account for both demographic and political factors. We must depart from thinking that obstructs an integrated and holistic experience with the natural world.