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 November 18, 2014 | 19 Comments
In this and the next few posts I’m going to continue my engagement, sometimes obliquely, with the school of thought I term eco-panglossianism because it provides a good foil for thinking about several things that need to be addressed in contemplating a small farm future – among others, historical progress, optimism for the future, humanistic philosophy, and the relationship between livelihood and economy. Oh – and the sustainable synthesis of nitrogen compounds, so do keep reading Tom if you’re still looking at my site. After these posts, I’m hoping to spend more time on this site articulating a positive vision for a small farm future, because it saps the soul to engage too much with those stentorian eco-panglossian voices that insist we’ve never had it so good, the future will be even better, the hungry will be fed, and anyone who disagrees must either be an ideologue or an idiot.
There have always been strong contrasts (and sharp arguments) in green thought, in particular between various strands of reformist, techno-fixer or ‘light green’ thinking and varieties of eco-socialism and deep ecology that demand a more thorough reconstruction of the social order to realise their visions. But it’s noticeable that there’s a new level of stridency among the eco-panglossians. I suspect this has to do at least in part with the current ascendancy of a globalizing capitalism, which is deeply scornful of histories other than its own, and full of misplaced triumphalism about its world-transforming power.
Former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore is one prominent eco-panglossian, who considers environmentalists to have an anti-human mindset and has written that “People support all sorts of nonsense, such as the preservation of subsistence farming, which is romanticised as ‘peasant agriculture’, but in reality this means only drudgery, grinding poverty and a short life.”1
Well, that of course takes us straight into home territory here on small farm future, so in this post I want to engage with these notions of anti-humanism and peasant romanticism by way of a discussion of capitalism, which is a serious weak spot in the eco-panglossian approach. First point: it’s easy to bandy about the charge of ‘anti-humanism’, but if you want to understand alternative viewpoints rather than simply dismiss them, that label doesn’t get you far. I find it hard to think of a political philosophy that isn’t pro-human in some way – it’s just that they differ in their understanding of ‘the human’.
I’ve noticed in my various, usually unpleasant, debates with eco-panglossians that they tend to universalise their own particular values of ‘the human’ into general attributes of humanity, and that they project these values onto history as a story of inevitable human ascent. Thus, to be human is to aspire to more health, more longevity, more peace, more material plenty, more privacy and so on, and human history is the story of how we have gradually accumulated these qualities in ever greater abundance. I don’t think the actual course of human history can bear the weight of this narrative at all, which is something I’ll discuss further in other posts. And though personally I share most of those values myself at least to some extent, a moment’s reflection will reveal that even in modern capitalist societies a lot of people willingly forsake them in pursuit of other goals that are more important to them.
But let us turn to the more important question of peasant agriculture. The eco-panglossians make their contempt for peasant lifeways plain enough. Sometimes it seems to me that it veers close to contempt for peasants themselves, but their reasons are usually couched in the (‘pro-human’) context of wanting to lift peasants out of poverty through the capitalist development of agriculture – a point made by Moore in the article I cited above, and also by Graham Strouts in one of his latest eco-panglossian screeds.
There are two errors in this view. The first is to assume that peasants are an undifferentiated mass, entirely sunk in poverty. But there are 2 billion peasants in the world today, and their situations are not identical. ‘The peasantry’ encompasses landless rural wage labourers, often unemployed or underemployed, among whose number can be found people who are indeed suffering some of the most wretched poverty imaginable. It also encompasses small scale landowners and commercial farmers who can be people of considerable wealth and political influence within their local ambit, and all points in between these poles. This is why Marxists think ‘the peasantry’ is not an appropriate analytical category. In their view, it is always on its way to splitting into a rural proletariat on the one hand and a petty commercial/capitalist class on the other. I don’t really agree with this, but that’s an argument for another time – the basic point is that ‘peasants’ are not all the same, and they’re not all poor. If ‘environmentalists’ romanticise peasant life, as Moore charges, they do not so far as I know romanticise the life of the destitute landless rural proletariat or others on that end of the peasant spectrum.
The second error is the assumption implicit in Moore’s view that peasants are somehow outside the capitalist global world order that has enriched everybody else: they’ve missed out on the capitalist bonanza, and need to get a bit more capitalism into their lives in order to reap the benefits routinely enjoyed by others. Graham Strouts makes the same mistake when he writes that “There may still be billions in poverty whom industrial agriculture has not yet served well” (emphasis added), as if these people’s lives have thus far been untouched by industry or capitalism. These are cardinal errors. The truth is that modern peasants are thoroughly implicated within the mechanisms of the global capitalist economy – destitute rural proletarians more than anyone. There is a huge body of scholarship that examines this. Just to pick a few examples of the tomes I spy on my bookshelf: Peasants and Capital, Peasants and Globalization, Farewell to the Peasantry?, The New Peasantries, Cities of Peasants, The Modern World System, Europe and the People Without History. The eco-panglossian case is undermined by their ignorance of this scholarship, and of these issues.
Capitalism is associated with ‘free’ wage labour, and idealises itself as a system in which with hard work and the entrepreneurial spirit any given individual can achieve all imaginable riches, fame or success. The reality, attested by much historical scholarship, is that capitalism happily engages a wide array of labour regimens, both ‘free’ and unfree. So if we’re going to celebrate the fact that capitalism has delivered the unprecedentedly high life expectancy of 82 in contemporary France (though it’s not entirely clear that it has), then we also need to deplore the fact that it delivered the unprecedentedly low life expectancy of 21 years for a slave in colonial French St Domingue (the current figure for Haiti is about 60). If we’re going to celebrate the fact that capitalism makes it possible for ordinary British consumers to buy prawns in the supermarket, we also need to deplore the fact that it incentivises the Thai prawn industry to use slave labour in getting cheap prawns to the market (quite apart from the sustainability issues around the industry). Likewise, a good deal of scholarship attests to the fact that impoverished peasants today are not lacking in their experience of capitalist economics – on the contrary, they’ve got quite enough of it on their plates. That is why productivist arguments about the need to produce more food in order to feed the hungry wholly miss the point. And it’s also why Graham Strouts is wrong to argue that technological developments leading to higher productivity at lower unit cost are good for the poor. Good for rich peasants, perhaps – but I’ll look at that issue in more detail soon.
It’s worth probing a little more at the dynamics of the capitalist economy in order to clarify why some environmentalists, certainly this one, think that a ‘subsistence’ peasant economy is something worth striving for. So, a problem faced by capitalists and capitalist firms is that unless they’re able to engineer anti-capitalist monopolies they have no control over whether anyone buys their product – they have to sell it on the open market, where price alone is king. All that they can try to control is their production costs, either through technological innovations that enable them to produce more for less, or through methods of labour exploitation with the same result. The eco-panglossians make much of the first strategy, but tend to gloss over the latter. Of course, there’s a global limit to labour exploitation, even neglecting labour’s tendency to resist, because there have to be consumers with the means to buy the economy’s products. Thus, capitalism needs labourers it can impoverish to the limit in order to make cheap products, and consumers (themselves wage labourers) with bulging pay packets in order to buy its products. It needs prawn slaves and prawn consumers, and which category you fall into is largely a matter of luck.
Of course, matters don’t stop there. A firm can’t just invent a cost-lowering machine here or expropriate a group’s labour there and then sit back on its laurels, because other firms are doing exactly the same. To stay in business, the search for surplus value has to be continuous and endless – hence the unprecedented economic growth of the modern age, which has brought virtually everyone in the world into its ambit, and with unprecedented ecological effects. When the economy needs to grow by about 3% annually to avoid recession, the need to find new markets, new forms of surplus value, new resources, is pressing and insatiable.
And that, in a nutshell, is the capitalist global economy – its booms and busts, its revolutions, its pressure upon ecosystems, its immiseration of some people and its extravagant rewarding of others. To me it is inherently unstable, inherently unjust and ecocidal in fact if not in intent. Destitute peasants are not people who haven’t had enough capitalism in their lives, but people who’ve had too much. So would I prefer a world of subsistence peasant producers to one of unstable and vulnerable capitalist wage labourers? Yes, in a heartbeat, if ‘subsistence’ means not scratching desperately each day to earn a bowl of rice but having the land, skills and resources to produce the varied food, clothes, shelter and social interactions that make for a fulfilled life, rather than the empty striving for more substituted by capitalism. Anthropologist Pierre Clastres describes well what ‘subsistence’ can mean in societies of this sort that don’t fetishize accumulation,
“The term subsistence economy is acceptable for describing the economic organization of those societies, provided it is taken to mean not the necessity that derives from a lack, an incapacity inherent in that type of society and its technology; but the contrary: the refusal of a useless excess, the determination to make productive activity agree with the satisfaction of needs. And nothing more”2
I don’t deny that there are many obstacles to realising an agrarian populist vision of fulfilled subsistence in the modern world. But I think the obstacles are less than those faced in realising the utopian dream of the neoliberals and eco-panglossians for a world in which capitalism somehow delivers social justice, spiritual satisfaction and ecologically sustainable plenty for all.
References
2. Clastres, P. 1987. Society Against The State, Zone Books, p.195.
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Ok, nice description of capitalism and globalisation. The problem here is we are talking about science/engineering and not capitalism. I believe strongly, as a principle, that everyone should have access to modern medicine and that means highly technological machines such as MRI machines. It could be argued that what we are talking about here on this blog is a sort of advanced primitivism (and I have been influenced by primitivism a little in the past) which would rule out such technological doodads (and it would be interesting if you could tell me how it wouldn’t).
Could I also point out that relatively humane/socially democratic/national liberation governments have managed to do technological progress without the type of capitalism you have described.
Anyway it’s late, i’ll come back to this later.
So much to consider.
Before I take off on the substance I do want to admit I’m looking forward to your thoughts on sustainable synthesis of N.
Your vocabulary is considerable and I’m frequently finding new words here to help my limited lexicographic skills. This time ‘stentorian’ made me seek its definition. And if I somehow fit the role of a “stentorian eco-panglossian voice” I hope I might also deserve the adjective ‘ebullient’. Further I hope I’m not considered dismissive. But others must judge.
My views on humanistic considerations in ecology and environment set up a bit of a litmus test… if one considers that we Homo sapiens are somehow apart from nature (not natural… yea perhaps even anti-nature) then would we somehow be super-natural? On the opposite side of the coin if we’re not super-natural then we should be counted among all our fellow travelers as part and parcel of the natural world. We do hold the power to radically modify the planet as we find it – but other critters can and do modify the environment for their own purposes. This is niche construction, and it seems quite natural to me. On a scale from 0 to 10 (zero indicates no niche construction, 10 the most) we might deserve the largest value assigned to any organism currently moving the needle. Someone has to be in that position. And realistically even environmentalists who decry our level of sophistication seldom wish we didn’t posses such power – but instead would have us use it in other ways. That’s fine. But for some who would wish we just didn’t exist in the first place… I just can’t get my panglossian mind wrapped around that.
I like the description of peasantry and that as a group they should not be considered an undifferentiated mass. And I’ll also agree that not all peasants are poor, and there is no justification for ‘projecting’ first world ideas of happiness onto others whose circumstances we can’t or won’t understand. On the issue of a huge body of scholarship existing about peasantry – first, I appreciate the list (lots to avail oneself of) – second, have you seen Peasants Against Globalization (Marc Edelman, Hunter College)? – and finally… is it impolite to regard “The eco-panglossian case is undermined by their ignorance of this scholarship” as a ‘screed-like’ remark? Not quibbling with the thought… just the tone.
In the next paragraph on capitalism I do want to quibble some with a couple of points. Slavery is a horrible human behavior. We should be most embarrassed that we’ve ever been so cruel to other members of our own species. That said, I wonder about the juxtaposing contemporary French life expectancy against the life expectancy of slaves from a colonial period so long ago the enslaving French of that day would consider 82 a remarkable old age. The logic there escapes me. And in the discussion of the international prawn economy you claim capitalism ‘incentivises’ the Thai prawn industry to use slave labor. Perhaps my definition of an incentive is too limited – but I can only fault capitalism with failing to police bad behavior (and I’m not even sure that is an economic system’s role, but we can move on that later). I see capitalism in this situation as more an ignorant accomplice than a witting and willing co-conspirator. Still, I agree that having cheap prawns in the marketplace through the forced participation of slaves is not a good thing. [my pangloss is weakening?]
I also want to quibble that in the open market, price alone is king. An honored prince perhaps. But quality matters, freshness too (or so a veg box purveyor has convinced me).
I do like the closing paragraphs much more.
I want to close with a rumination on a thought attributed to a Rabbi from a couple thousand years ago: “The poor you will always have with you”. And this seems obvious on its face, but I want to consider not just a comparison among contemporaries – wherein to be poor is to have less than others. I’d like to consider or contrast the poor across time. Are the poor today more or less destitute than the poor from say 50, 100, or 1000 years ago? I have to agree with Tom in the sense that science and engineering matter in this consideration. There’s never been a good time to be destitute, but perhaps today it isn’t so severe as it has been in the past.
I’m looking forward to the synthesising sustainable N discussion as well but I get the teeniest impression the subject is being avoided.
There is a danger of fetishising social organisations, as I very much know as a trade unionist with syndicalist tendencies. In the past any question for me was answered by “organise on the job for workers’ control” in much the same way as the answer to any question in the garden is “add bulky organic matter”. But it doesn’t take a minute to work out that I am wrong, that a great many important questions aren’t answered by “organise on the job”, questions such as “how do we cure cancer?” or “how do we solve the palestinian/israeli problem?”. I’m very much ashamed that I publicly argued that Israelis and palestinians should unite and go for the no-state not two state solution which is the second dumbest thing I’ve said in public. Ideology mashed up my ability to see the world as it really is, and what reasonable and committed people need to do to solve those problems, ie political action and diplomacy.
In the same manner “land reform” doesn’t answer all the world’s questions any better than “organise on the job” though it probably would answer many important questions for many millions of people.
I’ve got to rush off again. Continue later….
See comment below.
I’m not avoiding the subject of nitrogen, it’s just that I haven’t written the damn piece yet, I’ve got a million things to do, and it’s not quite as high up my agenda as yours! Plus of course now I know your interest in it I’m trying to keep you hungry for my posts by keeping the prospect dangling…
But if you want a one sentence answer from me: could be a good thing, so long as we use organic matter first, keep things clean downstream and know when enough is enough.
Thanks for your comments, gentlemen – as thoughtful as ever. But I fear I may have failed to convey sufficiently well what I’m arguing, and indeed what I’m not arguing. Though if I may make so bold, aside from my own inadequacies I suspect this failure may partly have to do with the very strong cultural hold that notions like ‘primitive’, ‘subsistence’ and ‘progress’ have over us. For this reason, I don’t imagine that your average eco-panglossian would be able to spot the difference between my position and what they’d be likely inclined to dismiss as ‘romantic anarcho-primitivism’ or some such. But you gentlemen are cut from superior cloth and so I will try to clarify. Clem, from what I’ve read of your thoughts you are no eco-panglossian. But nor, Tom, do I consider myself a primitivist, a term that I think is of little use, for reasons I’ll try to explain.
So, I seem to have provoked some ire with my point about subsistence, but let me try to clarify exactly what I mean. I do not mean that we should not develop technologies, for example medical technologies, that we consider useful to fulfil needs such as good health. I do not mean that we should only produce enough to satisfy our basic bodily needs (in fact I think you’d be hard pressed to find any human society that has done only this). I mean that we should decide what our needs are, aim to fulfil them and then stop, and I mean that we should not yoke ourselves to an economic system that, precisely, cannot stop because it depends upon constant growth in order to stave off its own internal crises. Therefore I would argue, contra Tom, that here we ARE talking about politics and economics, and not really about science and technology. One of the problems with the eco-panglossians is that they think economic and political problems can be solved by technology – but the historical evidence runs against them on this.
Tom, your second paragraph basically answers the question for me that you posed in your first paragraph, though rather than ‘doing technological progress’ I’d say that the national liberation governments harnessed technology to socially constructive ends – and not only nor most importantly ‘technology’, but also various political and economic structures such as marketing boards: not coincidentally, these same governments were among the most pro-peasant the world has seen. That has mostly all gone now, largely as a result of the aggressive privatisation agenda implemented by the likes of the WTO and the IMF, which in the black-is-white world of the eco-panglossians is vaunted as a pro-poor policy aimed at lifting the poor from their poverty. But inasmuch as blame can be attached to those national liberation governments for allowing it to happen, I’d say their residual Marxist fondness for ‘technological progress’ didn’t help matters. They lacked the courage of their convictions in seeing through truly pro-peasant agrarian populist solutions.
Another part of my argument is to oppose the notion that human history has been a story of a progressive ascent from a miserable hunter-gatherer existence to the glories of the 21st century. This is a remnant of 19th century social evolutionism which lacks credibility in contemporary anthropology but lurks at the heart of the eco-panglossian viewpoint, and is basically just another iteration of the common human ethnocentrism which supposes other times and places to be inferior to one’s own. In rejecting it, what I am NOT arguing is that those other times and places were better than our own. I really see no virtue in debating whether the Yanomami or the ancient Greeks or whoever were better or worse off than ourselves: indeed, I think the question is philosophically meaningless. But the really liberating thing about jettisoning the Victorian social evolutionism of the eco-panglossians is that, in confronting the problems of our times, it allows us to learn from what other peoples have done without rejecting what they can teach us because of a misplaced sense of our superiority over them. So for example my colleague Ed Hamer is using horses in his market garden not because he wants to go ‘back’ to some premodern era, but because he thinks it makes sense in terms of the economic and ecological pressures of the present – see http://www.chagfood.org.uk/pony-power/. And of course there is a great store of historical knowledge about working horse skills available from the past that he can learn from. Whether he’s right or not is another matter – but I don’t see why anyone should assume he’s wrong just because it’s something people did in the past and don’t much do today.
So Clem, the reason I raise the issue of Caribbean slavery is in the context of this social evolutionist view that capitalism is an advance on what went before and has improved the lot of humankind. I don’t see much purpose in these kinds of pronouncements, but they’re common enough in the eco-panglossian oeuvre and if they’re going to make them then I think it’s worth suggesting that they ought to consider all the evidence and not just the bits that suit their case. I do disagree with you though about the role of capitalism here: its systemic logic is to create surplus value however it can. If it can do so through using slave labour, then that’s just fine. If it can’t, for example because a society decides slavery is abhorrent, then it’ll find other ways to do so. Basically, it’s morally blind. And to move from slavery to veg boxes – yes, quality and freshness matter, and a host of other values, but not quite enough to escape the systemic driver of price, which is kind of my argument in my piece in the Journal of Consumer Culture. As to the issue of which era’s poverty is the worst, as I’ve already said I don’t really find such questions illuminating, but there are around a billion under-nourished people in the world today (and another billion who are obese, mostly the poorer people of the richer nations): since global population in total didn’t exceed a billion until around 1800, I find it pretty hard to accept that the modern era represents some kind of major advance.
To come back to the issue of technology, I’d agree with you Tom that it would be no bad thing in principle for everyone to have access to modern medicine such as MRI scans. But the present global economy has not been conspicuously successful in realising that ambition, and I don’t think it’s because capitalism hasn’t yet had time to work its magic. It’s because of those systemic inequalities I mentioned. Speaking more generally, the ideal of spreading elite high energy technologies to everybody will, I suspect, greatly lower collective wellbeing because of the environmental cost – the motor car being an obvious example. But of course it’s not fair if those technologies are restricted only to the few. The consequence, I believe, is a need for a fundamental rethink of our approach to technology. Maybe fewer MRI scans, but also less malnutrition. An interesting issue, to which I hope to return in more detail.
I take your point that our cultural notions will strongly color our thinking. And I often notice my own ability to approach objectivity is heavily dependent upon how invested I am in some aspect(s) of the issue. So thanks for your insightful 1st paragraph.
Your discussion concerning surplus value is instructive for me – at least in the sense that I’ve not considered economic growth alone as somehow a source of a problem until it gets excessive. As with most things, too much is – well too much. My problem with Malthus is that he’s been wrong for such a protracted time (and that he seems bigoted, but that’s another matter). In a global setting where we have a finite resource – the planet – then Malthus’ ideas should have some merit at some future point. As a technophile I’ve always felt we can push back the ultimate date of reckoning. My own particular skill set most strongly appreciates plant biology and what our green leaved commensals can do for us if we husband them well. What our fellow mankind will do – politically, anthropologically, philosophically… interests me but I’m not much use trying to predict any of this. So my contribution for the betterment of the situation is to stick to my knitting – improve plant husbandry, and hope someone with more people skills can pitch in on these other matters.
But I still have a nagging problem with a couple points. For instance – I am sympathetic to calling out another’s argument for cherry picking the evidence. So on this point I see the Caribbean slavery anecdote you use as exaggerating the real effect. So while I agree that slavery is bad – I don’t find value in comparing longevity rates in 21st century France against slave longevity in 18th century New World. I can stipulate that slavery may shorten longevity, but that alone isn’t what I think you are suggesting. So if we are attempting to establish some baseline – this system has done such and such to the lot of mankind – then in order to compare to another system we might want relevant data. [French colonial slaves lived 21 years, modern French live 82… slavery costs 61 years…. hmmm]
To me it can also be argued that because slavery precedes capitalism by many centuries – then other economic systems should also be held to blame by this line of argument. And arguments (eco-panglossian or otherwise) made to suggest that “human history has been a story of a progressive ascent” shouldn’t be put down because slavery existed.
I want to have a go at anthropomorphizing Capitalism as well [“If it can do so through using slave labour…”] but here I have only feelings about whether capitalism can actually ‘do’ anything of its own volition… no training to help guide me. So I may come back to that at some future point.
Thanks Clem for more interesting points. A brief response. I’m not persuaded that Malthus is the relevant referent for discussing the consequences of economic growth. If we were talking about the implications of the relative rates of population growth and food production then yes, but not so much when the focus is on the implications for labour and equity of a growth-dependent economic system. Having said that, I do find it hard to see how the need to treble the size of the global economy in the next 35 years or so in order to maintain acceptable returns to investment can avoid creating major environmental stress. And on the matter of Malthus being wrong for such a protracted time, I’d argue that the length of 3 human lives is not a protracted time. Exponential functions have a habit of creeping up on you, and as one of Malthus’s contemporaries said, the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk.
On slavery, well yes – you’ve applied a reductio ad absurdum to my argument which I think is not entirely fair, but not entirely unfair either. Really one needs a thorough analysis of social and economic history to make my point truly convincing, but then the same applies to the contrary eco-panglossian argument that we’ve never had it so good – Atlantic slavery is really no more than an obvious counter-example to be raised to make the prima facie case that the joys of the capitalist world order can be over-stated. And on that note, yes slavery predated capitalism but scarcely the kind of organised field-gang slave labour to produce cheap food export commodities. My point here is not to get into whether capitalist slavery was ‘worse’ than pre-capitalist slavery, though I’m hard pressed to think of something I’d less like to be than a slave in late 18th century St Domingue, but to emphasise the systemic logic of capitalist production.
It’s that systemic logic of production, rather than anthropomorphisation, that justifies calling capitalism ‘it’. I do agree with you that the ‘capitalism does this and that’ way of thinking is dangerous ground to tread, and if I wasn’t knocking out blog posts after a hard day of knocking in fence posts I would try to find a more subtle way of expressing it. But I think it’ll do – economic systems are not reducible to the intentions, beliefs or hopes of the individual people who enact them but exert an independent logic on their actions.
I agree with you that the example of Atlantic slavery is not enough to put down the argument that human history has been one of progressive ascent. But I don’t think that argument is tenable for all that. It wasn’t my main aim in the above post to make that particular case. But it’s one I propose to take up soon…so long as Tom doesn’t mind waiting longer for his nitrogen…
I’m out of my depth again, I’ve no idea how growth can even be measured let alone this business with 3%. But what about the role of the state, though it’s plain to see that a state’s economic growth is vital to a government can we not see that laws skew and modify unfettered capitalism? Or is state regulated capitalism factored in to the term ‘capitalism’?
And what if we can produce clean energy and growth can meet its 3% without mashing up the planet would it then be acceptable?
On growth and its measurement, all will (possibly) be revealed in my forthcoming article for Statistics Views called ‘Gross national happiness’, but the basic point is that with debt-financed production capital seeks the best return on its investment and hence fuels economic growth. There are those who argue that everyone’s a winner with economic growth, but I’m unpersuaded. I agree with you Tom that states have an interest in fettering and directing growth as well as promoting it, but I don’t think they’re able to resolve the contradiction and act as a sufficient bulwark against the consequences of the growth imperative – particularly in these neoliberal times when much of their capacity to act in these regards is getting tossed on the scrapheap.
Would a clean energy fuelled growth be acceptable? Well, not to me – firstly because I don’t believe that growth truly promotes equity; rather, it just makes it easier to toss enough crumbs from the table to prevent too much insubordination in the ranks. And its development is usually uneven. I would, however, be interested to speculate about what the world would look like if there were no controls on the flow of money or people, and strong enforcement of free market principles (ie. no monopolies and no farm subsidies) – I think it would probably look like a world of small peasant farming. And in such a world, economic growth may not occur. Why would it, and who would need it?
But the other reason I’m dubious about clean energy growth is to do with limiting factors, as the ecologists would say. Energy has probably been the major one throughout human history, but if we can overcome it, others will replace it (this assertion on my part previously led to much ridicule from Graham Strouts with his silly Tigger and Eeyore pictures…I’ll be coming back to this issue soon). Over nitrification could be a case in point. Let me offer the following example, which touches on your point about states.
Farmers here in Somerset and throughout the EU are enjoined and subsidised in various direct and indirect ways to produce as much as they can from their land, although even so they confront low prices which make it difficult for many to stay in business. One of the main ways they increase productivity is by heavy applications of nitrogen & phosphate fertilisers. But these have bad environmental effects downstream. Therefore there are regulations about how much fertiliser can be added – though these run against the other incentives in the system. Even with these regulations in place, there is too much fertiliser getting into the River Frome which has now been declared a vulnerable zone (bad for both biodiversity and human health). The result is that the government is paying to hold meetings in which farmers are exhorted to manage their land better, and offered grants to improve cattle sheds, handling yards and farm roads. Now imagine we crack nuclear fusion and replay this scenario with cheap clean energy upstream, which means the cost of fertiliser is basically zero (there’s an additional complicating factor here of phosphates, which cheap energy won’t solve, but I’ll ignore that for now). I’m not convinced that state attempts to modify the consequences of economic growth principles in cases such as these will be worth the candle. Mean time, farmers are told they have to modernise and compete, and are then blamed for trashing the environment.
Wow, firstly – many thanks for the description of your local Ag. and government landscape. Sorry to hear about the condition of the River Frome, but I suppose I might have guessed as much – conditions on our side of the pond are so comparable it’s embarrassing.
I will agree that lower energy cost will not likely drive an improvement in the situation by itself. It might offer a bit of respite if it is ‘clean’ enough so as to heap no extra burden on a bad situation (and for that reason alone could make its pursuit valuable)…. but the lack of capturing external costs into the prices of ag products seems more significant to me. I don’t think these issues are insurmountable – but do imagine its high time they are faced squarely.
By way of comparison and contrast the ag landscape here in Ohio USA stacks up this way: Last summer there was another serious algal bloom on Lake Erie and about a half million folks in Toledo had to stop drinking their tap water for a good while until the situation could be remedied. Phosphate load in the Maumee River was blamed and this backs up to a handful of sources – on the short list of bad guys – farm fertilizers and animal manures. A law has now been passed in Ohio that will require fertilizer applicators to have a license (getting said license will require training and meeting certain standards). I don’t know what Michigan and Ontario are doing on this particular matter, but there will be some response – Lake Erie is too important to all three governments.
In my line of work I deal with quite a few farmers and lots of ag sector professionals from scientists and regulators to agribusiness folk in many capacities. There is no one voice or opinion when phosphate pollution is mentioned in these parts. I am heartened that some serious efforts are underway now and the typical finger pointing a excuse making is quieting down as sleeves are being rolled up. So its a shame its had to come to this, but now that the nest has been sufficiently fouled there is some coming together to make amends.
On the one hand we humans seem pretty bright and technically capable. On the other, too lazy and ambivalent until the stakes get so high we’re essentially forced to respond. Remember the Martian looking down on planet earth? I imagine it shaking its head – when will they ever wake up?
Thanks for the info Clem – interesting to hear of the situation your side of the ocean. Agree with your sentiments.
On the mere two hundred sixteen years since publication of Malthus’ essay — you make a fair point. But population statisticians might also observe that the explosion in Homo sapiens numbers in the very same timeframe has been phenomenal (exponential even??). Some technologies have more than kept pace (Moore’s Law).
And I suppose I can confide that I do see some worth in your suggestion that making comparisons of human welfare over long historical arcs can have dubious value. But don’t let it get around – I’ve a curmudgeonly reputation to maintain…
You also point out:
“Having said that, I do find it hard to see how the need to treble the size of the global economy in the next 35 years or so in order to maintain acceptable returns to investment can avoid creating major environmental stress”
Have to agree that consistently maintaining 3% growth per year does paint an odious picture. Not sure that sort of growth will be maintained – and if your logic is beginning to wear at me then I suppose this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Beginning to think I should go build a fence or something… to clear my head 🙂
Synthetic nitrogen. One wonder if Malthus would have been less pessimistic if he’d known of it.
Thanks Clem – yes, a bit of fencing is an admirable mental tonic. Not so great for the back though…
Oh its great for the back (eventually)… it’s just that the brain’s sensitivity to the pain gives one second thoughts. Getting older doesn’t help matters either, and gravity starts moving stuff around. I’ve come to a stage where I won’t exercise merely for the sake of physical activity. I need a project that will accomplish two or more objectives. So building or repairing a fence is just the ticket. Splitting firewood is pretty good too. And a pint when I’m through 🙂
Happened upon this and thought it resonated with a couple of the thoughts expressed here.
http://zielonygrzyb.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/post-growth-credit-interest-and-money/
He also mentions a couple books that I might need to have a closer look at.
I’m enjoying this discussion. Everyone has a lot to bring to the table. And, Chris, I appreciate your skill at navigating the different personalities.
Not sure that I have anything to add. But I did want to respond to the piece that Clem (thanks for the link) posted re: post-growth vs. growth, as I see both of those as a red herring.
Having an economy based on growth is its own trap which provides no coherent decent plan, if the planet has finite resources. And the de-growth writers in the piece you mention are struggling to figure out a way to keep up a basic global standard of living. Not sure that is going to happen in a post-global economy.
There are plenty of models out there, however, for what will happen in a peak-growth society. One simply needs to look at the trajectory of every failed state or empire. They follow remarkably similar paths down, none of them very pleasant.
I personally think that once the hubris of imagining that we have stepped outside the confines of historical cycles the belief of a continual ascent of humanity as a dogma crumbles. We might then see that our achievements are not all that special.
Our small farm future however can be shaped today. Which I guess is the overall purpose of this blog. Borrowing again from the Wobblies (in a nod to Tom’s syndicalist tendencies): building the new society in the shell of the old. Laying the foundations of small farms and local community will be far more valuable in the years to come than global supply chains or technological marvels.
I’m just saying….
Thanks for the link Clem. It’s very interesting, though not entirely convincing on a few fronts in my opinion. But I need to think about all this some more, and hopefully come back to it.
And well said, Brian!
Your 30 November post – Why poor… is very thoughtful. And I imagine closing the comments is a fair thought so the sight doesn’t get trashed. But you suppose a conversation (argument, debate, you pick) will take place somewhere else?
I was wondering the same. Glad it is fixed.