To recognize the gravity of our human circumstance we need to remember the obvious fact that there is no such thing as a "post-agricultural" society. Further, we need to understand that the so-called "productivity" of "modern" agriculture has come almost entirely from a non-renewable resource base. What should be our "primary productivity" (ie. the biological capture of energy from the sun), has come to depend almost entirely upon something we now know we are running out of -- cheap oil. Increases in production (a question of volume produced) have been mistaken for increases in "productivity" (a ratio of outputs to inputs). Contrary to popular perception, any qualified agro-ecologist will tell you that in terms of returns to kilocalorie energy inputs, global agriculture has declined significantly in the last fifty years because of the "green revolution."

    The trouble is, very few people realized this. The reason is simple. Since oil has been so cheap during the recent "up slope phase" in the global energy peak the actual decline in the energy productivity of agriculture was effectively masked by an enormous increase in the over all volume of production. In this exceptional moment over the last fifty years, the choice to invest heavily in petro-intensive agriculture may have seemed to make sense to those whose primary focus was upon returns to invested "money capital." In the long run, however, this whole process makes no sense ecologically. Indeed, expanding petro-intesive agriculture constitutes an "energy sink." This is because current photosynthate is being subsidized by fossilized photosynthate.

    Energy sinks in agriculture do not last long because they cannot -- no matter how "profitable" they prove to be for those who have make money from them in the short run. They may seem to represent a momentary triumph of "market fundamentalism" over ecological processes, but in the long run ecological realities will overrule the "virtual reality" of money profit, and the systems upon which they are based will collapse with considerable tragedy experienced by all those who came to believe religiously in this illusory form of fundamentalism.