The Small Farm Future Blog

Eco-panglossia: interim conclusions

Posted on February 18, 2015 | 4 Comments

My last few posts have mostly been grappling with that school of environmental thought that styles itself ‘eco-pragmatism’, that others dub ‘techno-fixing’ or ‘hair of the dog environmentalism’ (William Ophuls), and which I prefer to call eco-panglossianism, particularly when it’s chained to a kind of Spencerian doctrine of social evolution through technological progress.

I was going to put up a few more posts on the topic, but frankly I’ve become bored with it. I think I’ve pretty much said what I want to say about the eco-panglossians in my recent and not-so-recent posts, and now I want to move on to issues that seem to me more important than the cheerleading for nuclear power, GM crops, urbanisation etc. at the heart of the eco-panglossian project.

I suppose if it were possible to have a productive and civil debate with the eco-panglossians it would be more tempting to stay engaged, but I’ve learned from my dealings with the likes of Graham Strouts and Mary Mangan that this isn’t possible. They think that folks like me trying to articulate a left-green agrarian populism are misguided purveyors of contorted reasoning in service of an ideological agenda that lacks empathy with the plight of the poor. I think exactly the same of them, and there seems to be insufficient common ground for any worthwhile engagement. I’d find it easier to accept their self-avowed empathy for the poor if instead of writing posts glibly imputing urbanisation to the self-improving voluntarism of the rural poor, or on how GM crops enable peasant kids to go to school rather than doing the weeding, they would look just for once at things like international commodity trading and its effect on rural poverty or the nature of rural rent. But there you have it – as I’ve written before a basic point of difference between us is that they think the contemporary poor are poor mostly because they have too little technological capitalism in their lives, whereas I think it’s mostly because they have too much. Never the twain shall meet.

One thing that does give me pause about my own agrarian populist agenda is a doubt as to whether it’s truly possible to create sufficiently healthy, wealthy and happy lives for an acceptable proportion of humanity globally from small-scale, locally-oriented farming. It seems to me pretty clear that the existing industrial world system won’t be able to do so, despite the rosy Silicon Valley market utopianism of the eco-panglossians. And likewise with the pro-poor GM crops narrative, which I posted on recently. We seem condemned to repeat all the mistakes of the green revolution. What’s the betting that in 30 years’ time somebody will write a book called something like Two Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World which will argue that modern biotech has amazing potential but has delivered less than it promised in alleviating hunger because of sociological, political and agronomic mistakes in its implementation, and will call for a novel redeployment of biotech solutions – a doubly green revolution – to tackle the resulting failures? Repeat feedback loop ad infinitum. You read it here first.

Still, the fact that the existing food system is clearly not fit for purpose doesn’t necessarily mean that a relocalised, repeasantised one will do the job any better. My recent reading, research and writing has been focused upon, firstly, the prospects for annual and perennial grain crops on the semi-arid continental grasslands, and, secondly, urbanisation and industrialisation in China. Tangential as those topics may seem to the matter at hand, I hope that once I’ve finished my next cycles of posts on them I’ll be able to make a stronger fist of tackling the prospects for an agrarian populism of the future.

In the meantime, I’m not too sorry to be letting go of the eco-panglossians and their Victorian worldview. I’d been planning to write something more on the stubbornly inequitable distribution of global resources despite the eco-panglossians’ ‘rising tide floats all boats’ rhetoric, and something on their rather one-dimensional take on the issue of ‘progress’ (though, to be fair, it’s one that’s widely shared in contemporary western thought). Likewise with the question of ‘optimism’. These ideological dimensions of eco-panglossianism and their place in the wider history of ideas do still interest me. But I’ve probably already said enough about them here on this blog and in my other output (such as ‘Farming past, farming future’) that I should stop belabouring these issues. In any case, once again it’ll be easier to come back to them after I’ve finished the next cycle of posts.

So, I’m going to be away for a week at a conference followed by a bit of down time before the maelstrom of the growing season hits. If you’ve commented on my site before, you have one week to say what you like below before I have a chance to reply. If you haven’t, then please feel free to do so – but forgive me that your comments won’t appear for a week until I can moderate them.

Next up – most likely a post on the inverse size-productivity relationship, and then we’re into the issue of annuals and perennials, starting with a post on Clem’s 100 species challenge. Hope to see you here in March.