Feeding Our Food; Starving Our Environment

Abstract

For thousands of years, farmers have utilized organic soil additives to enhance their crop yields and livelihoods. Today, modern agriculture largely relies on synthetic fertilizers to produce enough crops to supply our global population and its competitive markets. While these fertilizers successfully increase crop production, previous research has proven that they perpetuate long-term environmental and human health risks. My goal is to examine how human-environment relationships with fertilizers have changed over time and how capitalism influences the socio-environmental impact of synthetic fertilizers on our world today. Through the Institutions and Commons lens, I examine how fertilizer-related pollution and limited fertilizer regulations pose significant risks to the environmental commons of society and to the health of communities. Additionally, I utilize the Political Economy perspective to examine how capitalistic greed in the fertilizer industry has significantly contributed to global warming, overproduction of resources, and an altered human perception of nature as a whole. While there are advantages of synthetic soil-enhancement technologies, it is clear that more stringent agricultural regulations and responsibility measures are needed to minimize the negative long-term consequences of synthetic fertilizer use in modern farming practices.