Landowners have always had power. Indeed, history was made and written by landowners or their agents.
In the sixth century BCE, Athenians recalled a respected politician, Solon, to save them from the violence of landowners. Rich Athenians were getting richer and poor Athenians were becoming poorer. Landowners had most of the land and money. They were selling indebted farmers like chattel slaves. The situation in Athens in 594-593 BCE when Solon was elected archon (ruler) was verging on civil war.
Solon cancelled farm debt and made debt enslavement illegal. To this he included borrowers willingly selling themselves to slavery. His laws made that unacceptable. These reforms paved the road to autarkeia, self-reliance, and better government and more equality. Athenians called Solon’s measures seisachtheia or shaking off of burdens. Solon also prohibited the hereditary monopoly to power. Wealth, not birth, led one to politics and government offices.
Land inequality, however, never found a just solution. In his “Laws,” Plato explained poverty as a result of increased greed rather than diminished wealth. He thought each family should have enough land for “modest comfort, not a foot more.” But that land belonged to the state. He recommended the largest farms not being more than four times larger than the accepted minimum-sized farm.
Plato’s ideal state never became real. We must wait until George Gemistos Plethon, a fifteenth century Platonic philosopher, for a Platonic land reform. He advised the Medieval Greek emperor to confiscate the property of the church, build a national army, and divide the land among soldiers and their families defending the state. Once a family ceased to work the land, the property reverted to the state. Thus with one stroke Plethon abolished landownership and farm workers-slaves.
For the second time, Platonic land reforms did not find fertile soil. Medieval Greece stood by the church with the result of losing everything. The Turks took over the country for four hundred years.
In the rest of Europe and, in time, the United States, landowners continued with their slaving the peasants, small farmers. It took the French Revolution of 1789 to abolish rural slavery (feudalism) in France.
But the agrarian liberties of the French Revolution did not last long. The Old Regime came back to power all over Europe, a condition that made possible the industrialization of agriculture, which gave birth to a new feudalism.
I have written extensively about this new feudalism: intricate state regulations of farming; encouraging the use of pesticides; contaminated food and drinking water; governments and land grant universities defending pesticides and giant agriculture; the global spread of factory farms and cancer; the diminution, nay disappearance of villages and the rural world, at least in Europe and America.
What is to be done?
We need more of Solon: a new seisachtheia, ways and means to get rid of old burdens threatening our very lives and the health of the natural world.
Start by cultivating fruits and vegetables in your garden or, if you don’t have land, purchase food grown without pesticides, a process Americans call organic farming and the Europeans biological agriculture.
Organic food is more than food grown without poisons. It’s the outcome of the merging of traditional agrarian knowledge and agroecology, the science of raising food without harming the natural world. Organic food is a symbol of that marriage. It is also health, life, and a livable world. It means you are not alone in this agribusiness empire.
Feed school children and students at high schools, colleges and universities organic food. Convert most school ground to organic gardens.
Second, we need to educate Americans, Europeans, and others, that small organic or biological farms are the future: they are as productive per acre as the largest plantations. I document this reality in the concluding chapter of my book, “Poison Spring.” Indeed, two thirds of all food comes from the tiny plots of peasants in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Of course, I am not suggesting we return to some imaginary Eden. Our world is or could be our Eden. It is what it is because we built it and transformed it. There’s no path back to a pristine past.
This should boost our determination to change our present to a better future for children, our grandchildren, and us. Yes, our world is polluted and full of unnecessary and unacceptable technologies of war and destruction.
But we can start electing people who have our ecological interest in mind. As politicians and active citizens we can see that the regulation of chemicals, for example, is less hazardous than it is today. Redraft environmental laws with the intent of banning all substances harming human and environmental health. Create a national laboratory dedicated to testing chemical away from the corrupting influence of the producers of those chemicals. Safeguard the independence of your environmental agency or ministry from the influence and power of the industry.
Build schools in villages and rural towns teaching traditional agricultural wisdom and agroecology. Become self-reliant in food and export only crops that are in abundance and import what you cannot produce.
These rural schools can also take advantage of the plentiful sunlight that bathes Greece so many hours nearly every day in the spring, summer and fall. They should develop solar power for their needs and export the rest. All of Greece could become a solar civilization.
Revitalize villages and the countryside while you check the power of corporations in farming: banning pesticides and genetic engineering or crops.
In Greece, for example, too many rural people moved to the cities thinking life would be easier. It’s not. Financial support and training might tempt some of those former villagers to return home.
Rural America also needs to recover its former self of lively towns for a good life: ban factory farming.
This is an ambitious political agenda that demands ideals, democracy, persistence, and knowledge. We all need to be interested in life lived well. Love the natural world, which was sacred to the ancient Greeks.