ABSTRACT
The four elements in this chapter’s title – the Iliad, the Odyssey, agriculture, and climate change – fit together. This might initially look unlikely. We might think that the two great Greek epics, ancient and literary in character, lie far away from what I consider to be the two most pressing crises afflicting our planet today: an ecologically disastrous system of agriculture and an irreversibly abused global climate. I believe otherwise. If we listen, the Iliad and the Odyssey (summarized in this chapter) will tell us much about how to prevail over these ecological crises and over their base causes. Those base causes, after all, lie in human values, frailties, and emotions. It is those values that have favored a form of agriculture – especially grains and legumes, comprising roughly two-thirds of global human caloric intake – that emphasizes humanity’s distance from (not its integration with) the natural world. Especially those landscapes that have now been so thoroughly converted to grain-and-legume production (e.g. maize, wheat, soybeans, and rice) face ecological collapse. In parallel fashion, fossil-carbon use (especially for fueling energy production) rests on an ethic – or a pretension – under which human action can disregard and damage the planet’s natural systems without negative consequence.
