This is the second part of a series of essays that explore the impact of food systems through four key territories: oceans, forests, countryside, and city, reflecting on the research behind Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s 6-part publication The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security first published during the UIA World Congress of Architecture in 2023.
Forests
The soil beneath the Amazon rainforest is nutrient poor; largely barren. A dormant desert, miraculously overgrown, drives the water cycle, feeding the rivers and tributaries that in return feed the metabolic chain of growth and decay. Over a desert, underneath the tropical sky. It appears odd that thousands of years of plant growth, biomass created by the reaction between sunlight, air and water has not built up a thick layer of humus: rich, black soil typical of potting mix formulated especially for tropical flora. Yet it remains that in many parts, the cover of leaf litter that sustains the cycle of nutrients providing the sustenance of the rainforest is only a few inches thick; it is a veneer of matter over sand and clay that preserves the necessary humidity and nutrients to support the abundance above. This fact is revealed each time a foot trail is tramped out through the undergrowth, or in the satellite imagery of a yellow arterial slicing its way through a bumpy blanket of green with its ubiquitous fronds, expressed as pixels of brightness—farmsteads and lumber clearings, annexed from the forest. These otherwise illegal claims on the land are supported by a string of governance loopholes that preserves the squatters’ rights – most often poor, hard-working farmers attempting to raise cattle or crops for the gluttonous open market, which is anything but open to them. One might presume that carved from the richness of the forest, yields would be promising and reliable, protected from erosion by the density of the surrounding flora and supported by the precipitation made regular by the transpiration of the canopy layer. But the richness evaporates quickly when not fed by the metabolism of leaf litter or studiously reinvested by the churn of natural fertilisers from animals and fungi living in the undergrowth.
If we have the habit of excusing the ecological brutality of our own industries while working for a pay-cheque, it should be infinitely clear why farmers in Brazil do likewise.
So why, if gains are so small, do farmers fell, burn and clear land for grazing or soy production if they gain little for their efforts? One obscure, but simple dynamic at work, which results in this steady siege on the forest is explained in the following way. A law established to support the rights of the rural poor allows federal land to be converted to a title deed by means of occupation. If one can prove they have lived on the land for enough time, they have the right to claim it. For access to this right to claim the land, one requires literacy and legal acumen, which of course, is offered by agribusiness in return for the title itself. The deal includes a bonus that is just enough to make the continued march into the wilderness worthwhile for the impoverished. Because the smallholder farmers are in need of fertile farmland, the inexorable creep into the forests continues. Nothing substantial is gained, and everything else is lost. Once depleted, forest regrowth is painstakingly arduous. It appears that the Amazon rainforest is now a net emitter of carbon rather than a sink, a sign of a system in distress. This means on balance the forest is dying more than it is growing.
A number of small organisations are working to defend the rainforest by hindering logging, planting trees, and upholding native title. Certainly, working against this disposition is, in part, a social equity question. If we have the habit of excusing the ecological brutality of our own industries while working for a pay-cheque, it should be infinitely clear why farmers in Brazil do likewise. Unlike those in Western cities, a change in life direction is alien and risky. Livelihoods are made in generations, not in the salient years after a high-school prom. One organisation, Courageous Land, takes the local economies of farmers and ranchers into account. They offer an alternative, creating careers for farmers by growing regenerative crops that bolster the rainforest perimeter. The work pays better than logging and ranching, and it becomes easier over time, as balance is restored.
Farewell to the Holocene
If we consider the precarity of our current food systems, it becomes clear that a multitude of approaches are required to establish food resilience and security. What is less apparent are the opportunities to enhance our daily lives. The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security is conceived as a tool to stimulate new conversations and insights of how food systems might be recomposed to transform cities, landscapes and oceans for mutual benefit.
Enlai Hooi is the head of innovation at Schmidt Hammer Lassen. Since 2021, he has led the firm’s research into the impact of architecture and urban systems on the ecology.
