In the year 2016, food security is a critical issue needing to be solved. Efforts over previous decades has been towards Industrial agriculture, especially monoculture; heavily centralized into private corporate hands. For almost a century, the agricultural process has become largely intertwined with the petrochemical industry. In more recent years, the debate over the employment of genetically modified organisms, not to be mistaken with natural selection driven hybridization and modification, has raised a philosophical issue that few seem to recognize. The question that we as a civilization and as a species has to seriously ask ourselves, is whether or not the process of agriculture is in and of itself still relevant in the 21st-century.

We must first come to terms with reality that this is a +10,000 year old model and method of food production. One which is largely designed for the generation of surplus resource. We must also come to terms and acknowledge the immense psychological conflict and moral issue that agriculture generated. Which makes us try to fight and conquer nature; bending the biosphere to our will, in order to anthropocentrically sustain ourselves. This anthropocentrism is further reflected by our more modern desire to artificially prop up agricultural products by synthetic means as a source of profit; rather than the logistics for food security. It must also be recognized that the entirety of human civilization for the last 10,000 years, organizing entire economic and political systems, has been over the basis of food production, distribution, and consumptions systems. These cultural moldings and dictations generated by this agricultural model have twisted entire economies and nations into consumerist mentalities that defy all sustainable logic and is suicidal in its un-sustainability.

Since the agricultural model has been the basis of civilization for the last 10 millennia; it is imperative that a new model is employed expeditiously. We possess technological means in the year 2016 that is unseen in human history. Besides normal greenhouses and local civil alterations like edible plants at parks or community gardens. Vertical industrial greenhouses are structures that we can build in every city, town, and settlement; which requires 1/10 of the resources to produce via techniques like aquaponics, hydroponics, aeroponics, etc. It is locally based to ensure direct food security; eliminating distribution systems. And can supply year round production that requires no leeching off or dictated alteration and control of the biosphere. Community gardens operating off of permaculture would be a prime means of food security while restoring and rejuvenating ecosystems. Permaculture is a method that also dates back to a similar date as the inception of agriculture. However, it is opposite of monoculture; meaning it is a wide array of genetic diversity used to cultivate food production. As well acting as a means of rejuvenating and restoring ecosystems.

Shifting away from fossil fuels in terms of energy would require a complete food production overhaul. Since the entire process is the skeletal system of our entire global Oil based civilization that is a huge consumer of oil and petroleum products. These food production systems and oil based civilizations spawned from the skeletal means of distribution and transportation is a main driver of climatic destabilization. The amount of oil based materials that is require to produce the food, ranging from herbicides, fertilizers, pesticides etc.; to the amount of oil base machinery and oil powered vehicles used to produce and distribute the food. Results in massive amounts of resource consumption of fossil fuels. And the toxicity of the environment through ecological destruction in exchange for cropland, as well as the pollutants of the petrochemicals within the greater environment.

Not only is the food production system inadvertently a huge destabilizing force; traditional agriculture and its production network is not capable of withstanding a catastrophic event. Whether it is natural disasters, ecological collapse, civilization collapse, or extraterrestrial impacts. The system of food production and distribution is incapable of supporting the entirety of the human population. A decentralized localized technological source is an imperative alternative that our civilization needs to adapt to immediately.

While it may seem difficult to perceive the notion of evolving past a 10,000-year-old method of production that has single-handedly shaped human civilization throughout its history. We must keep in mind that a plan of mobilization towards the efforts of creating a new skeletal system of civilization based on a decentralized localized technologically organic production of food is currently being proposed by a presidential candidate within the United States. The Green Party and its platform, led by Jill Stein, outlines a means to shift the entire US energy system to 100% renewable energy sources by the year 2030. This plan is proposed under the auspice of a Green New Deal. Which proposes to mobilize industry equal to that of wartime mobilization. Not only is this mobilization intended to convert the entire energy system; it is also designed to lay the legitimate foundations for a skeletal system of food production that is exactly what our civilization, and the human species, requires for survival.

The challenge of evolving and upgrading ancient archaic ideas and models that have been the foundation of civilization progression throughout the millennia is one that we must confront. Just as the evolution of agriculture itself has changed immensely since its onset after the end of the last Ice Age. So too must our perception as to why we originally created agriculture. It was a means of harnessing a food supply to ensure humanity survival through the climatic changes that occurred following the Younger Dryas Mass Extinction. Through a cruel cosmic irony, that very system of agriculture that once saved us from the brink; now pushes us to the precipice of an even larger mass extinction. Let us keep in mind that this dilemma is by no means unalterable. And is by no means beyond the reach of humanity or our civilizations. A potentially major political party within the United States is currently mobilizing and organizing towards the initiation of a new paradigm of food security. Let us recognize and embrace this effort and usher in the coming decades with new model of human civilization. One that aspires to ensure the life of its citizenry over potential profits off of commodified surplus. One that relinquishes attempts to control and dictate the biosphere; and one that ceases the Conquest of Nature.