Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/212/en

This opposition becomes manifest in relation to the organism principle at the very outset of the fifteenth century. On the one side we see how Spaniards and Portuguese, using the already long-familiar Canary Islands as their stepping-stone, venture with their great sailing ships into ever wider arcs across the Atlantic — and it was the Portuguese who, in the course of this, discovered the island of Madeira in 1425. It was uninhabited and bore a species-rich mantle of primeval forests, an «organism in natural growth» that had grown since time immemorial. Shortly afterwards, from 1426 to 1428, the first settler-farmers from Portugal burned off the island's unique natural biotope, brought over the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands — the Guanches — made them into slaves, had them lay a network of irrigation canals across the land and cultivate sugar cane in monoculture over the whole island; this was processed into raw sugar and found a ready market on the mainland and above all in England as an export commodity. Here, as in a germinal cell, something takes place symptomatically that would then unfold on a grand scale in the following centuries in the New World — land seizure, large-scale clearance, monoculture, enslavement, the slave trade, and export markets for foodstuffs: an early form of agrarian industrialism and, in its decadence, a repetition of culturally grounded pre-Christian streams of development.