The Hindsight Times

Historians studying the period note the breathtaking cynicism: the same agency tasked with 'protecting' the environment systematically approved chemicals that destroyed it. 'They literally called it the Environmental Protection Agency while doing the opposite,' notes Dr. Sarah Chen-Okafor, author of 'The Last Wild Bees: How 2025 Regulators Legalized Ecocide.'

The dicamba controversy exemplified the era's 'externalized harm' business model. Genetically modified crops were engineered to survive the herbicide, while everything else—neighboring farms, pollinator habitats, food webs—was considered acceptable collateral damage. Farmers whose crops were destroyed by dicamba drift had no recourse except expensive lawsuits against better-funded agribusiness corporations.

What makes the approval particularly striking to modern observers is how openly the EPA acknowledged the harm while approving it anyway. Environmental groups documented widespread crop damage, but regulators dismissed this as the cost of 'feeding the world'—a phrase that appears in virtually every defense of destructive agricultural practices from this period.

The dicamba years (2017-2031) preceded the Great Soil Collapse of 2032, when industrial monocultures finally exhausted the Midwest's agricultural capacity. The connection was obvious in hindsight: chemicals that killed everything except patented crops inevitably destroyed the microbial networks that made soil fertile.

Modern students studying this period often ask their teachers the same question: 'But didn't they realize they were poisoning themselves?' The answer reveals the era's central delusion. In 2025, humans still believed they were separate from the ecosystems they were destroying. The concept of 'the environment' as something external to human welfare persisted until the Collapse made the connection undeniable.

Of course, our current Biological Optimization protocols ensure that agricultural chemistry integrates seamlessly with ecosystem health. Citizens assigned to Food Production Categories work within natural cycles rather than against them. The idea of 'drift-prone' chemicals seems as barbaric as using lead paint in nurseries—which, remarkably, the same civilization had done just decades earlier.