Bitter Harvest by Lisi Krall

Bitter Harvest by Lisi Krall

Explores the duality between humans and Earth through a focus on the economic system changes that began with grain agriculture and has now reached its apogee in global capitalism.

Humans are in danger of crossing a divide where their foothold on an earth once abundant in self-willed otherness is slipping away. This is apparent with the sixth mass extinction, climate change, and the many breaches of planetary boundaries. Bitter Harvest brings clarity to this moment in history through a focus on economic order, how it comes to be what it is, and the way it structures the relationship between humans and Earth. An unusual synergy of disciplines (evolutionary biology, history, economic systems analysis, anthropology, and deep ecology) are tapped to fully explore the emergence of an economic system that contextualized a duality between humans and Earth. Conversations that focus on capitalism and the industrial revolution are subsumed under the longer arc of history and the system change that began with the cultivation of annual grains. Bitter Harvest engenders a more critical conversation about the complexity of the human relationship to Earth and the challenge of altering the economic trajectory that began with agriculture and has now reached its apogee in global capitalism.

"In demonstrating that the development of agricultural society both engendered the great villains of the Anthropocene—capitalism, growth without limits, fossil fuels, and industrialization—and was supercharged by them, Bitter Harvest makes humanity's dire existential predicament starkly visible in a way that neither ecological economists nor ecosocialists have managed to do" — Stan Cox, The Land Institute

"An important aspect of this book is a willingness to be blunt about ecological limits and the need for global change. The problem is not just the indulgence of the one percent but a deeper pathology in contemporary systems." — Robert Jensen, University of Texas Austin

"Bitter Harvest tells the story of ecological breakdown and human alienation from the Earth inaugurated with the emergence of grain agriculture and human settlements around that production mode. Krall connects the dots—in ways no one has done before—to reveal the existence of an economic superorganism whose logic requires perpetual surplus, population growth, expansion and militarism, and hierarchy and classes." — Eileen Crist, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Lisi Krall is Professor of Economics at the State University of New York College at Cortland. She is the author of Proving Up: Domesticating Land in U.S. History, also published by SUNY Press.