Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on June 30, 2026 | 22 Comments
This week sees a more personal anniversary for me than the Brexit celebrations/recriminations last time: it’s three years since I published my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. In it, I criticised the idea that factory-produced bacterial food could be a realistic and significant ‘farm free’ alternative to food from agricultural land, as touted by George Monbiot in his book about the food system, Regenesis. I also criticised various other aspects of George’s takes on the food system, and briefly set out an agrarian localist alternative – not, for the most part, a vision I especially want to see, but one that I think will probably be necessary as a least-bad way of extricating ourselves from the present meta-crisis.
There’ve been a few developments in the factory-food sector since Saying NO… was published, so an anniversary update on these details seems apposite. Meanwhile, George hasn’t taken kindly to my book, making various derogatory comments about me – most recently in this podcast with Mark Lynas. Mark is a co-author of The Ecomodernist Manifesto and an associate of George’s from the Reboot Food campaign of the organisation formerly known as RePlanet, which has been supported financially by the hedge fund Quadrature Capital, via its Quadrature Climate Foundation.
In the pod, George characterises my position as “to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve”. He adds “I mean, I’m paraphrasing”. That ‘paraphrase’ is doing an awful lot of creative work, so I’d like to put on record a more accurate statement of where I’d like the rest of the world to go and what I’d like to let them do there. Especially because the podcast is called ‘Saving the World from Bad Ideas’, and I want to explain why the world needs saving from the bad ideas of George and his fellow ecomodernists.1
So, this essay is an anniversary reflection on Saying NO… in three parts:
(1) What have we learned in the last three years about factory-made bacterial food as a means – invoking the subtitle of George’s book – of “feeding the world without devouring the planet”?
(2) What has been happening in the corporate biotech sector around bacterial food?
(3) What can we learn from Mark and George’s recent podcast discussion about ecomodernist politics, from two of its prominent voices?
Let’s begin on the more technical side of things with a quick review of what factory-based bacterial food production involves.
Electricity from so-called ‘renewable’ sources (or ‘rebuildable’ as Nate Hagens more plausibly calls them) is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is fed to bacteria in reactor tanks, resulting ultimately in a high-protein powder made from the dried bacterial mass. The electricity has to come from rebuildables rather than fossil fuels if the technology isn’t just going to be another big carbon dump into the atmosphere. As well as the hydrogen and oxygen, other necessary inputs are tap water (25 tonnes per tonne of protein produced), ammonia (237kg per tonne) and ‘minerals’ (87kg per tonne). The process also creates liquid waste (around 20 tonnes per tonne of protein, if I’ve understood the data presentation correctly) with various contaminants which require wastewater treatment and diposal.2
The main purported advantage of this technology is that in theory it has a lower land footprint than farmed sources of protein, with the implication that this ‘spares’ land for nature and biodiversity that would otherwise be required for farming. Whether it does have a lower footprint in practice, and whether technologies that are land-sparing in theory actually do spare land for nature are matters I won’t pursue here, but the answers aren’t clear cut.
A disadvantage of the technology is that it uses huge amounts of supplied electrical energy. Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
In Regenesis George claimed that the process used 16.7kWh of electrical energy to produce 1kg of bacterial protein, and calculated that on this basis the global population’s protein needs could be met with about 11 percent of total electricity supply (of all kinds – fossil and non-fossil)3. But this seemed to me wrong. I calculated a figure of 65.3kWh/kg using the best data available to me at the time in the research literature.4 Although George doubled down on the accuracy of his calculation, a definitive figure of 69.3 kWh/kg later emerged, based on industry data from the people who devised the process – more than four times the electricity consumption George claimed.2 Running his calculations again with the new definitive figure (and updating it to global population and electrical energy generation figures for 20245) yields these results:
I must note that these energy requirements relate only to the cost of getting from inputs to outputs in the factory, not the total energy cost of the whole process. And they relate only to the protein component of the diet, which is less demanding of energetic input to meet dietary needs than food energy (calorific foods).
I must note too that efforts to decarbonize the global economy rest heavily on renewable/rebuildable electricity, which will be needed to power almost everything if we expect life to continue along present lines – including things currently energised more efficiently by fossil fuels. We will need renewable electricity for transport, mining, construction, cement, plastics, fertilizer, metals, data centres and so on. Agriculture is the only major sector that at present is significantly energised directly by zero cost and zero carbon sunlight. Yet just at the time when we need renewable electricity to do the heavy lifting of the global economy, advocates of bacterial food for mass nutrition are effectively implying we should use all current renewable electricity, and more, for food production that can otherwise be energised directly by sunlight.
Finally on the technical side of things, a recent study comparing the digestibility of pea protein with the Solein® protein that George advocates for in Regenesis found that while the former exhibited near complete digestion, the digestibility of Solein® protein was in the range of 58-68 percent. That suggests the effective energy cost of Solein® in terms of its digestible component is even higher than the figures I cited above.6
So – if you think there will be abundant, cheap, low-carbon electricity available in the future at levels so far beyond present generation that it can meet not only all the growing needs for electricity in every other sector but also replace the free, zero-carbon energy from sunlight used in farming, then maybe factory-produced protein will be feasible as a mass food technology. But I see no grounds at present for such fantastically cornucopian assumptions.
It seems that investors don’t either. In 2025, invested capital in the alternative protein fermentation sector fell to only 56 percent the 2024 level. The whole ‘food from thin air’ thing always seemed like a voguish attempt by small tech startups to attract venture capital through greenwash rather than a well-informed approach to addressing ecological and social problems in the food system. Unfortunately, it bamboozled a lot of people who ought to have known better. As is the way with fashion, things have now moved on to new fads like AI, with equally questionable food system benefits. (I can’t help noticing that George’s more recent food system ventures involve AI-heavy work funded via Jeff Bezos’s money to help verify soil carbon markets – I discuss this further here).
Despite the feeding-the-world rhetoric that’s surrounded the bacterial food industry, the only product so far on the market I’m aware of containing Solein® is a dietary supplement drink called Planta® marketed in the USA at a price of $49.99 for sachets containing 500g of protein (not all of which is from Solein®). This seems about as far removed as you can get from addressing global food needs, but it’s in keeping with the company’s priorities for “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States, implementation of a concept sales model, [and] increasing product price points”.
It seems that the motivation for starting Solein® manufacture was always about realizing its business potential, according to an interview with one of its manufacturer’s co-founders. Well, it’s a jungle out there in the present global economy. I’ve had to make my own compromises with that, so I don’t begrudge the company trying to make a profit. At present, its shares are trading at less than half their initial stock market price, but if they can turn things around by boosting sales of products like Planta® I don’t particularly have a problem with that.
What I do have a problem with is the notion that such products have a significant place in addressing global food needs and are therefore deserving of public subsidy (such as the EU’s €50 million Horizon funding). I consider this a poor use of public money and of precious time in the face of enormous global inequalities and systemic crises – a bad idea from which the world needs saving. When supposedly left-leaning journalists climb aboard the greenwash train, writing that such business ventures are “a gift to the world, which arrives just as we need it most” and which will somehow avoid the usual industrial scale-up pressures so that it can be “used by local businesses to serve local markets” (Regenesis, p.209) the bad idea takes flight. Inevitably, plans are already afoot to scale up Solein® production in a new factory with the hope of increasing earnings and starting to turn a profit.
Elsewhere, the rollout of Solein® has been even slower. In the UK, the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes reported in February 2026 that information gaps were still present on nutritional and toxicological information for Solein®, putting their review on hold until the manufacturer “returns with the data required to assure safety”. In the European Union, the European Food Safety Authority has repeatedly requested more toxicological information about the product, and to date has delayed their risk assessment until the additional data is received. Perhaps this arm of the EU is saving the world from a bad idea that another arm is funding?
So far, the story of novel proteins that George heralded in Regenesis has been one of stalling investment, boutique products, negative profits, industrial scale up, regulatory delay and speculative public subsidy. It certainly hasn’t been about “feeding the world without devouring the planet”. Let’s hope there’s somewhere to sit down when the music stops. The signs aren’t hopeful.
So much for the technical update. I’ll now make a few comments on George’s remarks in his ‘bad ideas’ podcast.
In the pod, George divides environmental philosophy into three parts and namechecks me as representative of what he calls ‘green social nostalgia’. He doesn’t justify this, except by saying that I want to ‘re-peasantise’ the world. In fact I argue against this on p.147 of my book, but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input. This might look in some ways a bit like old-time agrarianisms, but it’s a fallacy to think that a low-energy future involves turning the clock back to the past just because of a shared low-energy agrarianism. As I wrote in Saying NO… “people are going to have to invent agrarian localisms anew” (p.147).
In fact, I think it’s the ecomodernists like Mark Lynas and George who are the nostalgic ones. Their thinking involves what Anthony Galluzzo nicely calls “an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century”7 – a yearning for the time when it was genuinely possible to believe that modern high-energy technologies were an unalloyed force for good. Oh for those happy days when we thought we could solve the major human problems technologically with no downsides, before the disillusioning shadow of nuclear apocalypse, novel chemical pollution, social dislocation and ecocide darkened the dream. Perhaps it’s this nostalgia for the innocent days of tech solutionism that leads George to cling on to ventures like bacterial protein which are manifestly inadequate to current food system problems.
Let’s turn now to George’s “to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve” characterisation of my position, which he justifies with two remarks. The first is a partial quotation from Saying NO… in which I refer to “the mysteries and passions” that animate people’s life projects more than secondary goals like cheapness and familiarity of the kind that (eco)modernist managerialism emphasises (p.139). George wilfully misrepresents this as an absurd and repugnant argument that well-off people like me should follow our passions at the expense of the suffering and hunger of others – not a position that a good faith interpretation of my writings can sustain. Quite simply, George defames me and demeans himself with such word-twisting. There’s little need to dwell further on such low stuff, but I’ll come back shortly to why George’s own pursuit of mystery and passion is imperilling the rest of the world.
The second remark is more interesting. George mentions that I describe cities as human feedlots, which he finds objectionable (you can find similar characterisations in the writings of ecologists like Andy McGuire and William Rees). The analogy is biophysical, not moral or pejorative. To remain healthy, the people in a large and crowded modern city – just like the livestock in a large and crowded modern feedlot – require water, food and other inputs to be imported from large hinterlands (nowadays global in scale) and for wastes to be exported, all at high energetic and infrastructural costs. I don’t believe it will be feasible to keep paying those costs in many cities in the future, which makes me seriously worried about the prospects for the people living in them.
So while George – again I think in a wilful misrepresentation – portrays me as someone who thinks people should be forced out of cities due to my prior ideological commitments to ruralism and agrarianism, the truth is that in an ideal world I’d like people to be able to live wherever they want (this includes the many people, often from the ranks of the rural poor, who don’t especially want to live or work in cities, but don’t have much choice). However, in our non-ideal biophysical reality, present levels of urbanism are unlikely to be sustainable without cheap fossil fuels, and the human cost of that could be horrific unless we address it urgently. By talking over me and people like me who are expressing such fears, I think it’s George who’s fanning the flames of mass death. Particularly since he won’t correct a clear numerical error in his writing that makes his touted solution seem more plausible than it really is. This is more than intellectual bad faith – it’s dangerous.
Incidentally, Mark Lynas remarked on the podcast that feedlots are a more efficient way of producing meat than extensive farming. That may be true at the high levels of energetic and material throughput of the current meat industry, but a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput. This isn’t advanced-level economics, but Mark and George’s failure to understand such things – their focus on ‘secondary goals’ like efficiency – betrays an ignorance about food system dynamics that stalks ecomodernism (or ‘green pragmatism’ – it’s interesting to see George reverting to the terminology of his onetime antagonist, Stewart Brand). George’s analysis in Regenesis and in his later pushbacks against me are full of such basic intellectual errors about the food system. Painfully in relation to someone I once admired for political courage and journalistic integrity, I’ve come to see George as just another media voice clamouring for attention without intellectual or ethical seriousness – but alas with a powerful platform to reach people and cause harm.
Moving from intellectual errors to more ad hominem attacks, George makes an issue of my race and gender in his ‘let them starve’ remarks (“privileged white men, living out their mysteries and passions while saying, well, to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve”).
Now, like George, I’m unquestionably a white man who was born into a lot of unearned privilege, albeit not quite as much as him. Generally, I try to avoid playing competitive games with other white guys about who cares more for underprivileged others, because nobody comes out of it looking good. But I’ve got to say it takes some nerve for George to call me out on this when the substance of his book involves explaining how a handful of white folks are solving the world’s food problems, while he gives no significant space or consideration to the millions of small farmers the world over who might have something to say about it too. Scholars of agrarian societies in the Global South have likewise challenged George and the elite techno-utopian politics he speaks for, as it reshapes rural lives and landscapes from afar without regard to local consequences.8
In this sense, I think I was wrong to imply in Saying NO… that ecomodernism focuses on secondary managerialist goals like the efficiency of feedlots without speaking to the mysteries and passions of what animates life. A mystery and a passion that seems to animate the life of a lot of the privileged white men who embrace ecomodernism is a belief in the ever-growing ability of high-energy high-tech emerging from rich countries to redeem all of humanity – ‘progress’ as the master narrative of the modern. It’s a mystery to this particular privileged white man as to why so many of my kind, like George, are so passionately committed to this mysterious belief system – for example in evidence-light advocacy for bacterial protein as a mass food solution. My guess is that it replicates the sense of power and control that such men are accustomed to exercising, deploying it to feelgood ends without fundamentally challenging their apical social position.
There’s a sentence in Regenesis that I keep coming back to. With the advent of factory-produced bacterial food, George says, “Indigenous people could reclaim and restore their land” (p.189). Initially, I missed the underlying claim involved in saying this, perhaps due to my own white privilege. But George seems to be implying here that Indigenous people lost their lands because in the past these lands were needed in quantity by colonising white people for the production of food, using inefficient, old-time, extensive methods. Yet now, he implies, the new and purportedly more efficient food technologies devised by white guys in the labs and factories of the Global North happily allow Indigenous people to claim their lands back. You’d be hard pushed to efface the politics of colonial and postcolonial power and land-grabbing more glibly.
Which brings me back finally to politics. I’ve noticed an uptick in the tendency of supposedly left-wing commentators like George to invoke the spectre of the far right in relation to agrarian and rural politics, sometimes thoughtfully and with good reason, but often in a kind of kneejerk way that smears any kind of ruralism with the ‘far right’ association.
Meanwhile, I sense a growing convergence of most forms of ‘progressive’ politics into a kind of mushy centrist techno-liberalism newly anxious to roll over, paws up, for a tickle from corporate interests. This is the only way I can understand George’s recent involvement in projects supported by the likes of Quadrature Capital and the Bezos Earth Fund, along with his business-as-usual geopolitics.
The alternative to this isn’t ‘the far right’ but a range of citizen-focused politics like agrarian populism, distributism and civic republicanism that badly need excavating, as I’ve tried to do in my writing. You can write op-eds fulminating against neoliberalism and corporate malfeasance all you like, but if you implicitly support that modus operandi in the food system and in other aspects of contemporary political life, those fulminations are worse than useless.
Various people have said to me it’s a shame that George and I are at loggerheads over the food system, since ultimately we’re on the same side. But here’s where I do agree with the parting of the ways that George articulates on the podcast, albeit not with how he characterizes them: I think his position is a charter for an ineffectual disaster techno-capitalism that will lead to wealth for a few and misery for many. That’s why I think George is now a politically dangerous operator, and why – three years ago – I wrote Saying NO… I haven’t seen anything from him or from the wider corporate world of manufactured proteins since then to suggest otherwise.
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For all his talk about the importance of crunching the numbers, the fact that Monbiot hasn’t updated his over-optimistic calculation on Solein’s feasibility amounts to a glaring lack of accountability. Hard to believe he’s still banging on about it, actually, and I agree that it’s partly about power and control as a means to self-soothing in disconcerting times. Interesting update (that goes to Steve L too).
Chris Smaje wrote “In the pod, George characterises my position as “to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve”.
After saying that, George Monbiot then stated “I find it deeply shocking and amoral”, which perfectly fits the definition of “pearl clutching”.
From the Cambridge Dictionary:
Meaning of pearl clutching in English
pearl clutching
noun
“a very shocked reaction, especially one in which you show more shock than you really feel in order to show that you think something is morally wrong”
In that podcast, George starts his straw man argument against Chris at 26:30, and George’s pearl clutching (about his own straw man argument) begins at 28:15.
Sad to see George Monbiot stoop that low.
https://savingtheworldfrombadideas.substack.com/p/bad-idea-58-environmentalists-are
I noticed that in the podcast, George Monbiot’s body language oddly contradicts his professed concern. He actually smiles and laughs while talking about “the great cruelties of moving huge numbers of people around” (26:52), and he was smiling while saying “to hell with the rest of the world and let them starve” (28:05).
Are we dealing with a smiling killer? 🙂
Nice antidote to the grandiose plans of would-be foodstuff producers here:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/30/suffolk-agroforestry-farm-wakelyns-community-ownership-survive
Aerial view looks much like Chris’s own farm.
Chris, leaving aside the infantile and quite obscene charge that you are the Khmer Rouge reborn, I think that Monbiot’s development of these, “three very different and distinct philosophies” is in danger of becoming a self-serving exercise in sophistry.
It’s sadly telling that he’s going to test these ideas in academia first. Only a process of elite abstraction could gloss over the obvious tensions within his categories, each of which contain enough political contradictions to obfuscate the existing divisions across environmentalism.
For example: He’s confusing tactics with philosophy when he discusses ‘Green Liberationism’; He’s glossing over philosophical and ideological diversity and conflicts within the category of ‘Green Pragmatism’ (they both appear quite cosy in this podcast but Monbiot would surely disagree with Mark Lynas’ adherence to pragmatic neoliberal strategies like ‘natural capital’ and ‘biodiversity offsetting’); And his category of ‘Green Social Nostalgia’ is so all-encompassing and ahistorical that it threatens to fold-in La Via Campesina with neo-Nazis through its simplified sketch of rural-urban dichotomies (the source of fascism is middle class panic in the face of capitalist crises whether in rural or urban contexts). No-one would deny the rural romanticism within fascism but organisations and movements like Seeding Reparations and Hate Out Of Farming are actively trying to engage with that discussion despite the discomfort that brings. Also, rural livelihoods can, as with La Via Campesina, also be a source of progressive activism.
That category of ‘Green Social Nostalgia’ is pretty disingenuous but it’s the journalist in him coming out, I think. He kind of needs a catch-all category to act as bogyman to his enlightened arguments and truths (in respect to his preferences for clearance rewilding, veganism and manufactured food in particular, not to mention his excellent history of supporting direct action etc). It’s about throwing mud at a broad category of people so that they all appear indistinguishable, I guess. He’s done that before against the radical left (he does it again in the podcast where he conflates democratic debate with the left “tearing [itself] apart over the minutest detail”). It’s a way of self-certifying his own iconoclasm in contrast to others who are fighting the system too but whose views he disagrees with. He wouldn’t be too impressed if people did the same to him – arguing stupidly that his dietary preferences made him sympathetic to Hitler for example.
I addition, his assertion that it’s ok to have ‘ecological nostalgia’ is also quite revealing and ahistorical. The biosphere and its patterns of biodiversity, habitats and ecosystems co-evolved with human societies for the entire 10,000ish years of the Holocene (excepting Antarctica and a few islands). Unless your ‘ecological nostalgia’ is a misanthropic yearning for prehuman patterns of flora and fauna, then ‘socioecological nostalgia’ must surely be the order of the day on Monbiot’s terms (although climate change and capitalist ecocide have cast the dice for the biosphere now, come what may).
Monbiot would be better off taking existing environmental sociology seriously. His categories certainly lack the clarity of John Barry’s socioecological schema that divides environmentalism into Mainstream and Critical, and Naturalist and Social Constructionist positions. If Monbiot wanted to add richness to that existing discourse, then it would be more productive to think about how Barry’s categories express themselves through environmentalists’ ‘theories of change’ on society (ignoring the fact that mainstream views don’t want change except possibly in an Orwellian ‘appearance’). That way we could divide environmentalism into those who want to change the world through class activism, social movements and bottom-up strategies, and those – like the selected attendees at the ‘National Emergency Briefing’ in Westminster of November 2025 – who are content for a new generation of ‘enlightened’ leadership to take over where others have failed (not realising that this journey will see them slide smoothly into the mainstream without blinking). Judging by the podcast, I suspect that both he and Lynas would find unity in the latter.
What the podcast does reinforce, for me at least, is that environmentalism itself is entering a period of identity and political crisis because all its modern avenues of reform (the UN, COPs, the planning system, NGOs, corporate responsibility, regulations and legislation, etc) are being ignored, avoided or dismantled by states and corporations in pursuit of profit and power. In the coming years, two simple categories will suffice: In your environmentalism, are you against powerful ecocidal interests? And, are you on the side of the oppressed (human and non-human)?
As an added resource/POI, the SCARF (Standing Conference Against Racism in Food and Farming) alliance has been set up to counter the far right and racism in the food and farming sectors. https://www.scarfalliance.org.uk/
Yes, Monbiot looks like he’s attempting to shift or control the narrative by coming up with his mishmashed categories.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/06/26/net-zero-power-station-to-be-built-on-loch-ness/
In the head long search for electricity to feed goop plants , they are working on despoiling another piece of the country . It is green if you see it thru welding glasses .
I have also read they want farmers to dump their cattle and grow lentils , ( they don’t grow well in the UK at scale ) I suppose it gets rid of farts , slaughter houses and freezers and replaces them with digesters and a ready supply of lentals as a feedstock , I suppose this is Gov version of joined up thinking .
Hmph. I do want to re-peasantize, and your Peasant Wessex series is my favourite stuff by far.
But peasant is like Luddite, a word meant to dismiss used by people who make sheep look like iconoclasts.
In my sea shanty group, drunks would often stagger by and wax rhapsodic about how these hard sailors didn’t even have gore-tex, to which the chorus would respond, “But if they did they would have used it!!”
It is similar in the sourdough and canning community—masturbatory whimsy about covered wagons and whatnot.
I don’t know about you all, but my ancestors were smart. They adopted new technologies where it served them, and sought out improvements.
So peasantry carries a lot of freight for me—a social contract that stands against the Hollywood fantasy of individual survivalism, but a worldview in which self-provender is the basic premise. Villages, bio-regionalism—lots of holidays.
And if they had gore-tex, they would use it. I use an electric golf cart for over 90% of my farm work. I seldom need a truck or a tractor because I am mostly transporting a small bag of tools and a bit of material to where I need to work. My first solar panel on the golf cart was too heavy, and so I am moving to flexible panels. I have cheap wifi sensors all over the property.
Today’s peasants do not look like a Monty Python character.
Again. Masturbatory. These white men with their saviour fantasies.
The change over from pastoral to mechanical farming injured a hell of a lot of people , the railways delivered 212 pound sacks for grain transport , I have moved a few in my day they are freaking heavy , that happened for near a century , loose hay is far easier on the back than a 60/70 pound bale , ( we made 35/37 hundred bales a year every one handled three times . )I remember the change over from 16 gallon milk churns to 12 and they were still freaking heavy , I would not like to go back to ploughing with two mules like my father in law did, cab AC saves a hell of a lot of heat stroke and skin cancer .
.not having a banker involved in your small enterprise makes life far easier than when you owe one , so small farms can be idilic even with crazy weather and animals , far better than a 8 til 5 existence and TV !
Today’s farming is a mortgage treadmill keeping what was yeoman farmers hard at work and bankers in the way they have become accustomed , those without borrowed money
have a far easier life .
Texas is working on removing property taxes , ( Florida already has ) , that will make things better taking away a high cost of daring to grow food without paying some burocrat for the privilege .
Yes, like Simon I was a bit surprised to see George banging on about bacterial protein again – I thought he’d quietly dropped it in favour of his new Bezos-funded venture after all the holes that had appeared in it. Perhaps it was a third anniversary gift to me. Thoughtful of him!
Interesting point from Steve about the body language. To be fair, if someone took a close look at my words and postures in the podcasts I’ve done I imagine there are things that wouldn’t look great. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever ‘paraphrased’ somebody’s work as outrageously as George did. It does seem to be a case of pearl clutching. And perhaps it underlines my point above about George’s lack of intellectual or ethical seriousness – it’s a game to him about winning arguments, not about truthful analysis. Cue smiles and laughs.
Thanks for your comment, Ian – it’s good to see you here. Much to agree with in it. Indeed, there are obvious tensions in George’s categories, as there are obvious tensions in Regenesis, which surely wouldn’t survive an even modestly rigorous academic review. The whole rural-fascist thing is such a shopworn trope – why don’t people focus on the affinities between urbanism and fascism, fascism’s obsession with machines in reality and metaphor, vast human collectives, Italian futurism etc? It bugs me that contemporary culture is so jumpy about rural romanticism and so soft on the romanticisation of the urban. Your questions at the end are good – although unfortunately corporate apologists have got pretty good at positioning biotech and agribusiness as being on the side of the oppressed. George exemplifies this.
Ruben! Good to see you here too. I agree in principle that re-peasantizing may not be a bad goal – it’s happening anyway (ref Jan Douwe van der Ploeg’s work) and seems likely to happen more radically whether we like it or not. I’ve cooled toward the term I suppose mainly because it’s such a propaganda gift to the likes of George. But for those who can see beyond the absurd equation of ruralisation or re-agrarianisation with ‘turning the clock back’ there’s much to be gained from talking about peasantries … EXCEPT that so much of the intellectual narrative around it has been dominated by the idea of de-peasantisation as ‘progress’. New broom needed!
Your golf buggy example is a good one in terms of moving ‘forward’ into peasant agrarianism, although I’m not sure how sustainable even golf buggy tech might be in the long term. In the short term, I’d like to hear more about your experiences with it – we’re debating such technologies here at Vallis Veg currently, by way of replacement of our electric goods trike.
Diogenes, thanks for those observations from the hard edge of old-time farming life!
for those who can see beyond the absurd equation of ruralisation or re-agrarianisation with ‘turning the clock back’
What’s so absurd about it? If we could turn the clock back to, say, 1400, how much better the world would be!
Of course we can’t actually go back in time, but by now just about every truly feasible social and technological aspect of human life has already been tried out somewhere. So imagining a state of affairs that is sustainable (makes sense for the long term) is just going to be ‘turning the clock back’ a few times to select patterns of human behavior that will work. And there is enough variety in those patterns to suit every taste.
I will admit that the future will contain entirely novel technologies, like precision fermentation or flying cars, but how likely is it that any of the products of modern industrialism will be around in 1,000 years? The real technological gems are to be found in the past.
How many people were on the planet in 1400? Plagues periodically kept the population down, and many many children died from childhood diseases. Nobody knew about germs, of course. People generally weren’t happy.
In both books, along with Bruce Friedrich’s” Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food–And Our Future” nobody mentions alt-milk, which is helping put dairies out of business. Just check your local store’s dairy area. I drink almond or flax milk because by kidney doctor warned me off potassium. They have zero potassium. They don’t exactly taste like milk, but I like them.
Bruce doesn’t have anything to say about either Smaje or Monbiot.
“if we expect life to continue along present lines – ”
Mighty big if there. As per usual, Monbiot, as well as the other “thought leaders” having conversations on the many other elements of the polycrisis, is trying to address one specific problem without the necessary wide boundary, long time line perspective needed to truly make wise choices. We’ve created a complex economy based on a one time bonanza, and the dependencies and ripple effects are hard to follow, but quite real.
As much as I’ve enjoyed the party, I can see the punch bowl emptying and the host reaching for the light switch……..
For most folks still partying, Denial writ large.
And no, I don’t expect life to continue along present lines, that is why a low energy, relocalized small farm future is what I am planning on.
Big rains this week, so less watering, more weeding for a while. I’m off to pick the wild black raspberries now.
A quick follow up on new comments.
Joe, I broadly agree with your general points but what makes good ideas of the past good and relevant today isn’t that they were formulated in the past but that they address current issues satisfactorily in ways that modern high-energy, high-tech approaches don’t. Given that the likes of Monbiot find receptive audiences for dismissing people like me arguing for low-energy agrarianism as mere nostalgics wishing to ‘return’ to the past, I think it’s important to make the distinction, for all the good it does me.
Robert, it doesn’t surprise me that the founder of the GFI doesn’t mention me in his book. With alt-milk … I mean, I mention grains and cereals in my book. Milks based on them are different from dairy milk in various ways that go beyond taste and which are relevant to renewable farming systems. But I’ve got no problem with people using them if that’s what they prefer. They’re solar-energised farm products after all!
The idea that people generally weren’t happy in the past seems to me something of a modern conceit. However, I’d agree that people with the plague probably weren’t.
Steve C, just to be clear, I don’t expect life to continue along present lines either, but that has to be the expectation of anyone who’s advocating for bacterial food (apart from their need to conjure up vastly more electrical energy from somewhere). My frustration is that Monbiot’s propagandising for flawed corporate money-making schemes and his dismissal of the only feasible approaches for dealing with the mess we’re in under his catch-all ‘green social nostalgia’ category is causing a lot of damage … I’d even go so far as to say that it may be a formula for mass death, and he doesn’t seem to care.
Of course, the kind of farm-free alt-milk Monbiot, Lynas and the WePlanet crew are keen to promote is not only not solar-energised but may also raise significant concerns around nutrition, toxicity and allergenicity, as a recently published paper makes abundantly clear. The “precision fermentation” product the researchers analysed was one already on the American market – having gained regulatory approval from the FDA – and which the manufacturer claimed was “biologically identical to traditional milk.” WePlanet in their Reboot Food campaign, which Monbiot has helped to lead, also claims that “precision fermentation” brews “proteins that are biologically identical to those found in animal products.” But this research shows that that may be very far from the case https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-38994-7
I’m glad that study was published by the highly-esteemed journal Nature, and I hope it gets lots of attention.
“Precision fermentation” may seem cost competitive for uses where the amounts consumed are low, and likewise may seem harmless to humans at lower doses (as in pharmaceuticals and supplements). For bulk foodstuffs, however, start-ups are failing because “precision fermentation” is not cost-effective, and there are many unknowns about the health effects at those higher doses, as the Nature journal article points out.
A heads up for Chris and all his readers per the state-level society discussions. I just got onto a professor/analyst at King’s College, London, named Andreas Krieg. His work is looking at violent non-state actors and the network state. He has spent significant time on the ground in the MENA area. (Middle East North Africa) A network state is different from a conventional state in its decentralized focus, less emphasis on territory, and more emphasis on associations. Ergo network. [And to prevent misunderstanding, conventional states are always looking for more territory. Staying within your own country’s frontiers is going against the grain. The incursions of Iran into Iraq are more about the Shia association than just a land grab, like Israel.] The sterling example of a network state is Iran, which had to pivot in its society post-Shah and because of the heavy sanctions laid on it. The response has been to become a network state and the sterling example of this sterling example is the mosaic defense of the IRGC, which made its own localized decisions in responding to US/Israeli attacks. Where to attack, who to attack, when to attack, how long to keep up the barrage, etc. Quite unlike the Amerikans and Israelis, who have a topdown hierarchical command structure.
Anyways, this adds a new dimension to my own studies of the state and how states will adapt to collapse. I am working on a Substack post for my own readers, but it is simple for all you readers to just go to YouTube or Krieg’s own site to get more information on this idea.
Where I know Monbiot and others get things wrong is that for every pint of fake milk every pound of fake meat energy is consumed , probably from gas maybe coal even from ” renewables ” but energy is used , co2 is produced , cows produce milk and meat and fart methane directly from grass , and very locally if needs be ( and was ) not transported half way around the world ( almonds pulses grains ) by oil .
The UK / Europe is spending billions subsidising ” renewables ” but that subsidy is not made by renewables they are too expensive , it’s made by / from fosil fuels , European manufacturing pays those taxes and are dying on their feet , Siemens is building a brand new half million S/Q ft factory here in TX and closing German production , up to 100_000 unemployed non tax payers . one company of many . Net zero can never happen unless there is a total collapse of western civilization
Thanks for the info Jonathan. I might dig a little more into the corporate and safety side of things in another post here soon.
And thanks also for that info on the network state, Walter. An interesting analysis that I’ll look into. Good to hear from people about this kind of stuff.
europeanconservative.com/articles/news/eu-new-kivestock-strategy-agriculture-food-safety-independence/
Livestock is not only about agriculture,” Executive Commission VP Raffaele Fitto explained during Tuesday’s press conference. “It is about competitiveness, it is about food security, […] and it is about Europe’s future.”
Changed their minds ….