“Ecocide” was the term coined to recognize environmental destruction as an act of war.  Britain’s Jojo Mehta made headlines in alternative news recently after her speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, where she stated that ecocide needs to become a punishable offense and included farming and fishing.

Wait…that’s nuts.

This sounded too crazy. Maybe she was speaking off-the-cuff and exaggerated.  So, I went to the Stop Ecocide website, and sure enough, they include a variety of farming and fishing practices in their definition of ecocide.

The American Professor Arthur W. Galston, who identified the defoliant effects of a chemical that later developed into Agent Orange first used the term “ecocide” in 1970 to describe what the US was doing in Vietnam.  He called for the banning of ecocide, though he was calling for this in the context of war destruction.

Vietnam was the first state to codify ecocide in its domestic law in 1990, and given their history with napalm, this is understandable.  Beginning in the mid-1990s, Russia and many former Soviet states codified ecocide in their domestic laws, too.  Like Vietnam, however, the Soviet Union had a history of true environmental catastrophes.  Kazakhstan has seen the poisoning and destruction of the Aral Sea, as well as many nuclear detonation tests.  Uzbekistan is home to the infamous “black goo” base, where the Soviets dumped chemical weapons and radioactive wastes. These countries view ecocide in a totally different context than Westerners unhappy with certain farming practices.

Stop Ecocide was founded in 2017 by Scottish lawyer Polly Higgins and British environmental activist Jojo Mehta. These women have backgrounds in law and activism. They have no industrial background and know nothing about actual production.  I wish we could write Stop Ecocide off as a ridiculous publicity stunt, but it’s no laughing matter.  The designation of farming and fishing as ecocide, and then the criminalization of ecocide, is just one of many efforts designed to prevent average citizens from producing or procuring food.

The WEF is leading the charge against self-reliance.

The WEF has been coming up with various schemes to alter the lifestyles of average citizens for years in the name of saving the environment, whether these average citizens are willing or not.  At this year’s summit, leaders urged international cooperation on climate change “even if it’s unpopular.”

We’ve talked about some of these efforts before.  The globalist crowd has spent years demonizing meat-eating and promoting synthetic foods made from insects or cell cultures.

There are threats against the ownership of farmland.

We’ve also discussed how property values are being manipulated in favor of investors, not those who actually farm. This takes ownership of control out of the hands of the people who want to live and work on the land and puts it in the hands of people who are not necessarily interested in producing food.

Some press attention has been paid to the amount of farmland being bought up by foreign investors.  In particular, Chinese holdings have increased fivefold in the past ten years, which has caused some concern.  In general, however, the government does such a poor job of tracking foreign investment purchases that Americans don’t actually have a very clear picture of who owns what.

Americans did get lucky recently in that we narrowly avoided the New York Stock Exchange taking control of federal lands.  On January 17, the NYSE withdrew its proposal to establish and list Natural Asset Companies (NAC).  These would have pooled money from investors around the world to buy controlling rights to public and private land throughout the US. Naturally this would all be done in the name of sustainability.

However, it would have thrown a huge wrench into a variety of economic activities.  For example, let’s look at the potential effect on livestock grazing, keeping in mind that limited grazing is actually beneficial for the land.

The federal government owns much of the land in the Western states, but ranchers have been able to graze animals on it for decades.  If that land use were taken away due to the belief that grazing is “unsustainable,” ranchers would have to confine their animals and bring in food.  Many of them would probably go out of business due to increased costs.  Of course, this would be no problem with the folks at Davos who want us all eating bugs, but it would ruin the livelihoods of many ranching families and raise the cost of food for average Americans.

Quantifying the value behind nature, and then turning those values into tradable assets, would have necessitated a variety of legal loopholes, and so the NYSE withdrew the proposal.  This was a win for average Americans, but it should serve as a warning for what the investor class, both here and abroad, wants to do with our federal land.

What happens now in relation to “ecocide” could determine whether we eat in five years.

Unfortunately, what goes on in ag-land is easy for the majority of the voting public to ignore because it involves relatively small numbers of people.  However, rural issues demand attention.  Whether people choose to pay attention to the food supply now may very well determine the accessibility of food in five years.

Many places already have supply chain problems, including school districts.  I see no good reason to place sweeping restrictions on food production.

Do I think farming could be improved?  Sure.  Some solutions may even involve high technology.  But farmers and ranchers need to adopt these practices as they make sense financially; top-down, widespread restrictions of the kind that the Stop Ecocide crowd wants to implement will do nothing but further restrict food production and drive knowledgeable people out of the industry.

I believe that that’s the goal.  I don’t know if it’s stupidity in thinking the whole world can magically switch to eating ultra-processed laboratory food or malice in hoping half of us die off.  But it is clear to me that these people want to end landownership and independent food production as we know it.

If this sounds hyperbolic it shouldn’t.  Look at the farmers’ protests.  They’re still continuing in France and Germany.

Jordan Peterson conducted an interview with Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the Dutch activist who has spent the last couple of years widely documenting European farmers’ protests.  Dr. Peterson has 8 million subscribers on YouTube, and his videos regularly reach close to a million views within the first day or so.  His interview with Eva garnered barely 50,000.  Scrolling through the Twitter comments, many of his premium subscribers say that the video never popped up in their feeds.  The only explanation for this is that YouTube is intentionally burying the story.

Thanks to Elon, Twitter isn’t, and you can still see footage from the massive protests being staged throughout Europe.  You can watch Jordan and Eva’s 100+ minute-long interview here.  One of the big reasons for burying the interview may be at about minute 23, when Eva talks about interviewing the average commuters stuck in traffic behind the truckers and farmers.  She told Jordan that nine out of ten said that they were fine with being stuck. They supported the farmers.

This is why producing food is so important.

Understanding where your food comes from, and hopefully learning to produce at least some yourself, has never been more important.  I’ve come across young at-home moms who joke about their “lame” suburban homesteads.  They’re not lame!  Can you produce 100% of your caloric needs on a suburban lot?  Probably not.  That doesn’t mean suburban gardens are not worthwhile.

Learning to produce at least some of your own food will supplement your household income in times of tight finances.  During inflationary periods, food represents a commodity whose value to your family will remain stable.  (You can get ahold of ALL of our food production content in physical format with this paperback book.)

There is a widespread belief that what happens to farmers doesn’t matter because “anyone” can farm.    However, producing food involves a lot more than tossing seeds in the ground.  If you and your family take time now to find out what will grow in your area, you will gain skills and confidence that no one can take away.

The restrictions that the Stop Ecocide movement and the WEF want to place on conventional farmers are not about saving the environment.

They are about control. 

They want to break the ability of the average person to sustain his own family.  

Most of us don’t have giant farm machinery with which to make political statements.  But we can protest in our own small way.  Learning about what it takes to produce your own food and putting that knowledge into practice to the best of your ability can be part of that.

What are your thoughts about food production being called ecocide?

Do you think farming, fishing, and hunting could become classified as the “crime” of ecocide? How concerned are you about this possibility? Do you produce food at all? Do you think it could become illegal in the future?

Let’s talk about this troubling trend in the comments.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.