Humans are in danger of crossing a divide where their foothold on an earth once abundant in self-willed otherness is slipping away. This is apparent with the sixth mass extinction, climate change, and the many breaches of planetary boundaries. Bitter Harvest brings clarity to this moment in history through a focus on economic order, how it comes to be what it is, and the way it structures the relationship between humans and Earth. An unusual synergy of disciplines (evolutionary biology, history, economic systems analysis, anthropology, and deep ecology) are tapped to fully explore the emergence of an economic system that contextualized a duality between humans and Earth. Conversations that focus on capitalism and the industrial revolution are subsumed under the longer arc of history and the system change that began with the cultivation of annual grains. Bitter Harvest engenders a more critical conversation about the complexity of the human relationship to Earth and the challenge of altering the economic trajectory that began with agriculture and has now reached its apogee in global capitalism.