Artificial Nature.

After thousands of years of teaching ourselves how to cultivate crops and rear live stock we are now looking towards technology and creating synthetic environments and modifying our crops. However, due to high demand is quality being sacrificed for quantity? Battery farming of chickens for example, although widely disputed, is widely practiced, demonstrates an increase in quantity relation to a decrease in the quality of living for the animal. Looking at the ‘Pig city’ from the lecture is it, although sustainable, ethical. Is the wellbeing of the animal compromised by the artificial surroundings of the ‘city’? By man deciding it is our right to dictate how other beings should live are we creating another battery hen situation or is it really an ideal substitute to valuable space, or are we creating a global solution to a local problem. Despite being a trend today, buying local produce and maintaining a low food mileage is sustainable and, as long as the animal is raised in its natural environment, it is ethical.

            Consumerism today is starting to drive most forms of cultivation. Agriculture in particular is becoming a playground for technology creating artificial environments for animals and genetic modification for crops may enhance production but the ethics are questionable, as well as overturning millennia of the evolution of crops and agriculture the soul has been lost from the harvesting process.

            However today as we are made more publicly aware of this it seems we are starting to revert to more traditional methods of farming although it may be a trend in some cases, but the consumers are demanding more organic, free range and local produce suggesting the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way towards more classical methods of farming.