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 August 26, 2022 | 76 Comments
My title sounds like one of those “…walk into a bar” jokes, and if anyone would care to provide a punchline I’d be delighted. But actually this post is more in the way of a placeholder, reflecting back on some previous themes and anticipating some ones to come in relation to my three titular characters.
Most importantly, the novelist in question is G.K. Chesterton – less a novelist, really, than a multimodal writer and one-man torrent of words and ideas. I invoke him as one of the founders of distributism, and I’ve just published an article in the latest issue of The Land making the case for a new distributist movement. I’d like to invite readers of this blog to take a look at the article and let me know their thoughts, particularly if they’re interested in the Distributist Congress idea contained therein.
The idea for a Congress was dreamed up in conversations with several people including Sean Domencic, a friend of this website. Sean knows a lot more about the original distributist movement forged by Chesterton and colleagues than I do, but he convinced me that my book A Small Farm Future – somewhat unwittingly on my part – in many ways charts a contemporary neo-distributist path.
Neither Sean nor I endorse all aspects of the original distributist movement and, as exemplified by our discussions on this site, he and I have a few friendly differences of our own. But we do agree that a revised distributist movement could prove an excellent umbrella under which to build alliances with disparate people and movements working towards renewable, human-scale cultures and agricultures. So I want to signpost that here and invite you to join us under its broad embracing canopy.
Sean and I have recorded a podcast with Ashley Colby and Nate Gates about distributism which I think will be available soon – I’ll alert you when it is. Sean will also be guest posting here soon in relation to an offline debate we had about agrarian theology (yes, it’s a thing – or it soon will be).
Longer term, I’ll be writing more about some of the political issues raised in that debate. In fact, they’ve already surfaced in discussions on this site between me, Sean, Andrew and others. So one way or another, the political theologies and ideologies underlying the present global crisis will be getting some airtime here. My thanks to Sean and everyone else who’s weighed in with me here and elsewhere on these important questions.
Moving on, the journalist in my title is one George Monbiot who, as regular readers will know, I’ve been discussing recently in relation to his problematic book Regenesis (my original review of Regenesis is here). A quick update on some more resources for this debate. My colleague Jyoti Fernandes (who contributed to the online discussion launching A Small Farm Future) wrote an impassioned open letter to Monbiot about the negative consequences of Regenesis, to which he responded here. Meanwhile, in the same issue of The Land carrying my distributism piece, Simon Fairlie has published an excellent critical review of Regenesis. Simon proposes to call the industrially-fermented high protein foodstuff Monbiot celebrates as the farm-free food for the future ‘studge’, after an unappetizing commercial breakfast dish from a Saki story. Works for me. Henceforth, studge it is.
A friend of mine working in fossil energy divestment suggested to me (very gently and politely) that while I’m spending time excoriating Monbiot online the investors he’s looking at are quietly going on their merry way building out the next phase of global fossil fuel infrastructures. I think he was implying that their actions imperil humanity and the wider Creation rather more than anything Mr Monbiot is doing, and it’s wise to focus on the real enemy.
I take his point, and no doubt it’s easy to succumb to what they call the narcissism of small differences. The problem as I see it is that while investors are gonna invest and drillers are gonna drill, in the UK at least Monbiot has considerable influence on ‘progressive’ and environmentally-minded people. My fear is that unless there’s a successful pushback against Monbiot’s proposals for high-energy, consumerist urbanism he’ll take a lot of these people with him and help build a worldview that, against his aspirations, will ultimately only increase the likelihood of a famished, violent, climate-challenged future. In other words, to coin a phrase used by a recent commenter here, he’s operating as a useful idiot for corporate and fossil fuel interests. It’s not a phrase I use lightly, but I regret it’s one I agree with in this instance.
I suppose it’s worth remembering that Monbiot is a journalist (a trade that’s right up there with politicians, lawyers, landlords and, er, farmers in the unpopularity stakes). Catching people’s attention with over-simplified sensationalism is part and parcel of the job, even if it’s hidden in Monbiot’s case with a more highfaluting approach than is typical of the genre.
That, at any rate, is the most generous interpretation I can find for this recent article from Monbiot, with its cunningly-worded title ‘The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb’. I’d suggest that anyone who undertakes a survey of the problems caused by global agriculture and concludes that the production of organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb is the key one to highlight really ought to ponder how their analysis went so badly wrong.
There’s been some pushback to that article – for example, here and here. But I fear the damage has been done. Generously, Fairlie suggests that Monbiot’s journalistic sensationalism may have an upside:
“However much one may disagree with his conclusions, one may thank him for raising important questions and intriguing possibilities in a highly readable book. Perhaps he is making extreme proposals simply in order to shift the boundaries of the debate, and hence the perception of what is mainstream, a tactic known as the radical flank effect. The main worry is his repeated characterisation of farming as “the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the earth”. Agriculture has a lot to answer for; but does it really bear comparison with the threat to life on Earth as we know it from the oil and coal industry?”
My answer to that would be no, and that – far from a radical flank effect – Monbiot’s assumption that humanity’s future inevitably involves high-energy urban consumerism will have a complacent, business-as-usual flank effect that will further lock in fossil fuel dependence. Indeed, as Simon concludes, correctly in my opinion, “The imperative is not to stop farming, but to phase out fossil fuels very quickly. Cavalier polemics that cast primary responsibility for our predicament elsewhere are a dangerous diversion.”
So it’s damage limitation time for those of us seeking renewable agri/culture. I have nothing like Monbiot’s influence, but I’ll try to play my part in another strand of upcoming posts contrasting a small farm future with his nightmare vision of a studgy regenesis.
Finally we come to the anthropologist of my title. The editors of The Land asked me to write an obituary/appreciation of Marshall Sahlins, whose work I recently discussed here and here. My obituary was published in the same recent issue of the magazine as the other articles I’ve mentioned. But it’s not available online, so I thought I’d publish it below. I’m sharing the slightly longer original version I wrote before the editorial trimming required to fit it onto a single page of the magazine. Possibly, I’ll also publish here at some point the original and likewise slightly longer draft of the distributism article.
I’m glad to have been asked by The Land’s editors to write an obituary of Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021), who was a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
A colossus of the discipline from the 1960s right up to his death, Sahlins was a specialist in societies of the South Pacific and wrote formidably intellectual books that – while never wilfully obscure in the manner of some academic writing, and often leavened with wry humour – probably wouldn’t be top of the reading pile for land rights activists, agroecological farmers and other major categories of readership for this magazine. So here I want to say a few words about why his work mattered.
Much the most influential piece of Sahlins’s writing beyond anthropology was the opening essay of his 1972 book Stone Age Economics, ‘The original affluent society’, in which he argued the reality of hunter-gatherer and ‘primitive’ agricultural societies was far from the stereotype of a hardscrabble life scratching miserable returns from an unforgiving nature. The idea that foragers and autonomous farmers enjoyed relatively abundant and convivial lives is quite familiar today, but at the time Sahlins published his essay it was a seismic rupture with the sense of civilizational ascent in which modern, high-energy, urbanized, bureaucratic society placed itself at the apex.
Sahlins wasn’t the only voice contesting this self-satisfied confection, and his arguments and evidence have subsequently been picked over by everyone from eminent professors to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Still, I’d argue his essay had a profoundly enabling effect for many of us who came afterwards with visions for a future of work grounded in something other than more machinery, more high-energy inputs, more centralized politics, and more expert control.
The other essays in Stone Age Economics are less frequently read by non-specialists but are probably even more relevant for anyone hoping to wrest a renewable, agroecological society from the ever-proliferating ruins of the present. Sahlins’s arguments in them were intricate, but in summary they highlight the difficulties and contradictions, but also the virtues, involved in local, non-monetary societies where households work to satisfy their needs rather than to expand wealth and productivity. And to take seriously the complexities of how people build relationships with others in these and every other kind of society.
Nowadays, we tend to separate these relations with others into different domains we label ‘the political’, ‘the economic’, ‘the family’ and so on. Sahlins wrote incisively on all of these (On Kings, 2017; Stone Age Economics, 1972; What Kinship Is…And Is Not, 2013)but his larger point was that people in most historic societies didn’t separate out these domains, and nor should their latter-day analysts. An abiding concern of his was the power of human culture to construct our mental and social worlds. So his answer to the question implied in that last book title was that kinship is cultural, and is not biological (see also The Use and Abuse of Biology, 1976), nor reducible to any other form of supposedly ‘real’, underlying, material causation.
This concern with culture put Sahlins at odds with Marxism, which he aptly critiqued in Culture and Practical Reason (1976) for accepting at face value a few too many of the categories of the capitalist society it wished to overthrow – another case, perhaps, of the analyst succumbing to the mystifications of the natives. And talking of ‘natives’, Sahlins’s emphasis on cultural worlds also put him at odds with another anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, who took exception to the argument in Sahlins’s book Islands of History (1985) about the strange fate of Captain James Cook in 1779 – first welcomed by Hawaiian islanders and then killed by them – which arose, said Sahlins, because Cook unwittingly blundered into a ritual cycle in which he figured as a god.
The debate prefigured contemporary concerns about how to represent indigenous cultures and who is entitled to do the representing. Obeyesekere’s view that Sahlins had drifted into a colonialist narrative about inferior and credulous natives worshipping a white man as a god prompted a lengthy and empirically detailed response from Sahlins – How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (1995) – which argued indigenous people and their cultural categories deserved greater respect than that. On balance, Sahlins probably got the better of the engagement.
All this may seem of only passing relevance to issues like climate, energy, regenerative agriculture, social justice and access to land of most concern to readers of The Land. Perhaps that’s so. But when I re-read some of Sahlins’s essays recently I was struck by how implicitly informative they’d been to my own attempt to wrestle with these issues in my book A Small Farm Future. It’s hard to summarize the lessons from his writings succinctly, but maybe these: take seriously the long-term cultural categories that people construct over generations, and be aware of how they live within your own thought. Appreciate that civilizational progress delivered by bureaucratic states is one of these cultural stories. Take seriously too kin and exchange relations, and don’t try to reduce them to something else. Don’t assume that some particular category of person – rulers, ordinary subjects, or ‘native’ indigenes – is the ‘real’ agent of change within the system.
When it comes to applying these lessons to agricultural history in Britain or elsewhere with a view to creating a just and renewable agrarian future, what I take from Sahlins’s thought is almost the opposite of what a superficial reading of ‘The original affluent society’ might suggest. There may be some grains of truth in the widely held view that in the past people lived amicably together without private property in extended family groups within egalitarian gift economies of abundant commons and villages, before enclosure of one kind or another by landlords, bosses, colonial states and busybody reformers dragged them kicking and screaming into the oppressive modern world. But the real challenge is in addressing the numerous ways in which this is not true, in sufficient detail to plot a plausible cultural path forwards.
Sahlins himself didn’t write a great deal about these contemporary challenges, and scarcely courted the limelight outside his specialist academic fields. But he was a lynchpin of an influential school of anthropological thought sometimes characterized as ‘the Chicago anarchists’. Its most famous son was David Graeber, of whom Sahlins wrote “David was a student of mine; I supervised his thesis at the University of Chicago. Since then it has been difficult to say who is the student and who the teacher” (On Kings,p.xv). Graeber was very much his own man, but in many ways his political activism and his books – Debt, Bullshit Jobs, The Dawn of Everything, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology – carried Sahlins’s legacy into a more active political engagement with the modern world, especially in the idea that government is an endless problem with no really satisfactory solution.
To finish on a personal note, I met Sahlins a couple of times in the 1980s when he offered me a PhD studentship at Chicago. In the event, I turned the offer down, partly because of the apparent state of tribal warfare in the anthropology department and partly because I felt unworthy to dwell among such gods. He kindly wrote to me wishing me ‘good luck and good anthropology’, which I feel my later career as a kind of amateur scholar-farmer has fulfilled, not least from the ongoing stimulation of reading his books. Along, sadly, with David Graeber, he’s now left us to join the ancestors. But unlike the dead kings he and Graeber described in their book On Kings,who in death dominate the living kings in ever more troublesome ways, instead they’ve left a sparkling corpus of works we can keep beside us to help illuminate our paths into the future.
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Thanks for the article on Marshall Sahlins, Chris. I think it says something that ‘Stone Age Economics’ is still in print 50 years on. I was thinking about Chapter 4 – The Spirit of the Gift – just yesterday, after watching David Abram’s lecture on ‘The Commonwealth of Breath: Climate and Consciousness in a More-than-Human World’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4JvdXjUwfc) in which he discusses words in a number of languages which use the word for spirit and breath interchangeably, and shows that English derives its words for psychology, animal and atmosphere from interchangeable root words. He doesn’t mention the Maori word ‘hau’, but this is the ‘spirit’ in the ‘spirit of the gift’, and also the word for breath, and wind, and (linked with other words) for other fundamental concepts e.g. hauora = health.
In his book ‘Becoming Animal An Earthly Cosmology’, Abram develops the idea of oral, literary and digital cultures. I think this idea is relevant to new forms of politics and farming. Abram is clear that they all have their merits, but by considering literary and digital as replacements for oral, humans are literally losing the earth which gave rise to them and their original oral cultures.
So one way of looking at what Monbiot and the other useful idiots are doing is that they are throwing their lot in with the digital culture (and studge farming is extremely digital as well as energy-intensive) rather than exploring and valuing the insights and practices of oral cultures. Which are relationship-based – which is not the same thing as kin in the genetic sense, and includes non-human species. Even cows – I listened to an Aussie psychologist on the radio the other day talking about the benefits of ‘cow-cuddling’ for those who are emotionally distressed!
There are many more things in Heaven/Earth than are dreamed of in the philosophies of the ‘monbiotic men’ and their horrid ‘metaverse’ , and in IMHO the best way to counter their fantasies is to keep telling the truth. Using this digital platform in an oral culture, relational way. Thanks for providing it, Chris.
Thanks Chris for the Marshall Sahlins eulogy.
I’ll need to find some of his writing.
A brief thought on the investors investing and the drillers drilling:
It doesn’t matter what we do or how we protest, they/we are going to extract and burn all the fossil fuel that we can. The burning may stop because of money or because of geology, but it will not stop because we somehow have become miraculously more mature as a species and started acting en masse in ways that are dramatically different from our behavior of the last 300 (or 3,000?) years. If that were going to happen, it would have been much more likely 50 years ago.
But that little rant isn’t what I wanted to say today.
Reading again about the ‘harm’ done by grass grazing livestock, I was reminded of my own personal experience here in Kansas.
Some years ago I bought a field from a local dairy farmer who was selling some of his outlying land because he was slowly going broke, and in Douglas County Kansas, real estate is by far the most valuable agricultural commodity.
This dairy farmer’s family was among the long-time residents of that part of the county, and not remarkably different from any of the neighboring farms, though perhaps somewhat poorer.
The location is beautiful, with low rolling slopes, a large creek and some woodland. I don’t regret the purchase, but the majority of the land that they had been tilling had no topsoil at all. The hayfield was fine. The woods were healthy. But where they had been plowing and planting, the soil was ruined. And that ruination happened in less than 50 years.
They grew mostly sorghum, cut green for silage, in service of (supposedly better than direct grazing) industrial cropping to feed dairy cattle in a separate barnyard.
Meanwhile, the Konza prairie, about an hour west of here is famous as a beautiful natural landscape – supposedly what Monbiot is arguing to preserve. It has been burned annually and grazed by beef cattle for the last 150 years and still maintains its native fertility.
Of course, the only reason the Konza prairie is in its current condition is because the topsoil there was never deep enough to plow, so the only option was to leave it in native grass.
I now nothing about George Monbiot, but this argument of his makes no sense in the real world.
Stone Age Economics is one of my favourite books. There is a description in it about a village that goes up the hill to harvest turmeric*. They start wandering up in dribs and drabs, taking time to investigate other things along the way, then when they get there they almost half-heartedly harvest it with one of them more inclined to try and make a hat from a banana leaf. Then a bit later, they drift back home, having dug up what they needed. My application to join was refused.
The other book that has a hold on me is Farmers of Forty Centuries, where the work style could not be more different. Page 209 describes green manuring by a farmer in Japan, how each handful was placed, folded, and smoothed, across the whole field. “It is difficult for Americans to understand how it is possible for the will of man, even when spurred by the love of home and family, to hold flesh to tasks like this.”
Two methods. I think the first one describes a people living in abundance, where vast natural reserves are deliberately not tapped (this theme occurs a lot in Sahlin’s book). The second is our future, if we are to have one: a world devoid of fuel or the means to make complicated machinery, where the only thing between you and starvation is incredible attention to detail, simplicity, and many, many people in the fields, every day, all day. We have squandered the path to the abundant future, the second awaits.
Mind you, 500ppm co2 plus other gases means a no-farm future unless some miracle happens…
*Not quoted directly coz I swapped the book for Graeber and Wenlow’s one and haven’t got it back yet.
My comment, both in response to this post and the immediate prior, is that Monbiot and others show profound misunderstanding about how fossil fuels underpin the tech solutions they promote.
I know culture is a variable that is hard to establish limits on, and to predict what is stable or possible, but energy supply and physics do have hard limits. It is agriculture turbocharged by fossil fuels and the resultant exponential population growth that causes our ecological disaster. Agriculture without fossil fuels was done for millennia, and can be ( will be) done again. At a much lower population that is in balance with the carrying capacity of the local terrain.
There are some who attempt to explain with some rigor the connection between the physical and financial worlds, and I wonder if Monbiot has read the work of Nate Hagens or Tim Morgan and if so, how has he reacted?
Not quite a joke:
A novelist, a journalist, and an anthropologist walk into a bar. They hear someone give a toast “to happiness”.
The anthropologist says, “A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy.”[1]
The novelist says, “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable… drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant…”[2]
The journalist says, “Advertising trashes our happiness and trashes the planet. And my income depends on it.”[3]
[1] Marshall Sahlins
[2] G.K. Chesterton
[3] George Monbiot, 2011
Well done!
For Distributism to get any traction it needs a story that people can relate to. Maybe for your next book you can write a distributist future history. Not being familiar with the idea it is hard to see how it would all work out. Writing a novel about it will let you work through some of the contradictions and power struggles.
Distributism also needs a catchier name.
Thank you for the link to your article in The Land.
One of the challenges I can see to more widespread adoption and support of distributism as a strategy is the difficulty that there are, in the world today, a great many people who either cannot do much physical labour, or feel they cannot. I am perhaps more acutely aware of this at the moment than usual, having injured my neck doing I-know-not-what on Thursday (I thought I must have slept on it funny, but it’s Sunday and it still hurts, so maybe it was actually an injury sustained while fishing large cement blocks out of a skip). Crapitalism, of course, pits the “productive” against the “dependent” and only gives the dependent subsistence scraps, while also using “but we have to make sure we are productive enough that there is abundant extra money to support pensioners and disabled people and so on” as a justification for the drive to productivity.
In actual fact, my physical labour, and so our household productivity, has not been too badly affected by my neck troubles. I went to the allotment yesterday as usual and found that while moving logs around to make raised beds certainly didn’t make my neck any better, it didn’t make it appreciably worse. My housemate and spouse both pitched in with some of the things I couldn’t do so well because of the angle of work (thinning and mulching the strawberry patch). We got a bunch of autumn greens sown. There is, in fact, enough slack in our household that it’s okay that I have joint problems that limit what I can do, and it’s okay that my husband can only really do one afternoon per week with me at the allotment, and it’s okay that our housemate keeps wildly different hours than us and is on a very low income. We’ll still have enough, and quite a bit of it fresher than we could ever buy. That slack is partly due to a certain amount of privilege, but I see no reason why there shouldn’t be slack in household systems under distributism. In fact, it seems to me more likely that there would be. I do a lot of manual labour, but there is a flexibility and a gentleness to it that is itself a form of abundance.
It strikes me that one of the lies crapitalism tells is that if you “work hard” (or work smart, or work enough hours, or something), you will have enough money to live in abundance. That’s a big carrot (where the stick is enclosures, or similar). And it wasn’t exactly a lie, in the beginning, and for your average white Westerner it continued being sortof-true (if you ignore the colonialism and the ecocide) for a very long time before the wheels started to fall off.
I think for distributism to catch on, it will be necessary to portray some kind of vision of abundance, and that vision of abundance needs to be grounded in reality in some way. That’s a difficult thing to do while also rehabilitating the idea of productive, physical labour as a positive human value, without accidentally throwing disabled people under the bus (or ox-cart, or what have you) by saying everyone is going to have to do manual labour, or pretending that hard graft isn’t hard (my father-in-law has a thing or two to say about getting up before sunrise to drive the cattle to market). But we already have the stick, in the form of ecosystem collapse. I don’t think I know anyone who honestly believes we can continue as we have been for the last forty years.
Where’s the carrot? What does the day, the week, the month, the year look like in a distributist system?
I can imagine aspects of it. You can imagine it, Chris, you’re much further along the way to living it than I am in many respects. I’m sure many of the other regular commenters here can imagine it, though many of us are also, rightly, concerned that those currently in power will literally burn everything to the ground before we can get very far.
My husband can’t imagine it; when I talk about finding a smallholding, or a parcel of woodland, or some other thing, he sees it as a sortof emergency fallback in case urban living stops being viable, rather than a potentially satisying life to work toward. (Sometimes he feels a bit different about it if he’s being given homemade jam or wine… but we can have those things in the city!) My father-in-law, who grew up on a farm, can’t imagine it; when asked about your book, which we gave him, he says that small farms just aren’t economically viable (in his defense, he’s 92 and I’m not sure his eyesight is up to that sort of reading these days, so don’t take it too personally). I keep meaning to have a good natter with my vicar about it all, and especially about how it overlaps with theology, but day-to-day parish life is more and more a story of making sure people are fed and warm by whatever means are available to us (we are thinking about running an extra urn on the days we’re open, so when we close we can send people off with a hot water bottle, and an insulated flask full of hot water so they can refill it or make themselves a hot drink). My parents can’t imagine it; my father can’t even really imagine a city without cars, despite trying to do his part by giving up driving for months at a time.
I like the idea of a Neo-Distributist Congress. I agree with Greg that the name could use some work. I’m also concerned it might become just one more conference people go to, with all the organisational overheads involved in that.
I would love an ecological neo-distributist manifesto.
What if instead of making more theory, we focussed on making immersive experiences?? Ways for people to actually touch and live the Distributist SSF way of life for a week or few months.
I’m feeling like there are going to be lots of people looking for cheap holidays with their kids- farmwork in exchange for free camping?
And I’m on a writing course- Thrutopia. What about a week of farmwork mornings and creative writing afternoons, with an ecogical/people powered emphasis. For young people/ arranged through schools.
Or a week of design challenges; redesign with a tiny carbon budget- your diet/ your outfit/ a festival etc
So direct immersive learning, and the tacit learning of being on farm.
I’m working with an education platform in Lambeth to facilitate arts/sustainability learning for young people in the borough. Always looking at ways to empower creative solution thinking, which is how I view the Commons.
In fact we’re having a creative solution building evening in response to the climate crisis in October.
I love teaching design thinking and active learning cycles as a means to empowerment. I think we need to get to the Amazon warehouse workers and give them a comparable.
I’m a bit behind here. What is Distributionism?
You have to follow the link in the second paragraph of the original post to get a short form version of distributism. let me see if I can copy it in here –
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/neo-distributist-proposal. Looks like a solid maybe.
Thanks.
Depends on what, where and how long.
If its a day at The Cheese and Grain – or better still The Merlin I may well be interested.
Thanks for another crop of interesting comments.
I discern a theme running through several of them (Christine, Eric, Benn, Steve C) about the need to develop long-term cultures of sufficiency that build abundance out of a less-productive-than-we-could-be mentality. I agree. It’s something that George misses IMO.
Nice points in this connection from Benn about this ‘under-productive’ dimension of Sahlins’s work – something that perhaps I should have emphasized more in my writings about him – and also from Christine on spirit, breath and David Abram’s writing. Very informative – thank you.
Eric’s pasture/cropland example has some important lessons in respect of natural limits, and I hope to come back to it presently. Several issues here about logics of exploitation, efficiency and ‘sparing’ that go unexamined in the Regenesis model.
Thanks for the not quite joke, Steve L. Definitely the best punchline so far! The GM quotation seems telling, somehow…
Greg & Kathryn aren’t the only ones to question the name ‘distributism’. Well, let’s see where that discussion goes…
A few observations in relation to Kathryn’s & Greg’s interesting remarks:
I agree that there’s a need for a relatable, abundant or ‘carrot’ story about a small farm future or distributism. And I think it’s possible to tell such a story, provided one doesn’t go overboard with misplaced ‘optimism’. I’m less sure if I want to step into that role myself. Perhaps it’s an element of disillusionment just at the moment – too many years of ridicule towards my attempts to make the case for agrarian localism from ecomodernists invoking fanciful techno-wheezes to preserve the status quo, of whom Monbiot is but the latest example; too many people treating the amplifying manifestations of climate breakdown this year by tweeting #ClimateHoax for me to feel much hope for our collective wisdom; indeed, too many amplifying manifestations of climate breakdown to incline me to an upbeat story. A small farm future is what we’re going to get because we’ve left it too late for any other one, and even at this late hour there are still far too many people (George being one) telling tall tales about how we’re going to rescue high-energy, high-tech, high-capital urbanism, and how this is supposed to be a good thing. Despite it all, a small farm future definitely has its upsides, and I will try to highlight them when I can. But I think it’s going to be rough, because we’ve deluded ourselves with these tall tales for too long.
When people invoke the hard work and misery of small farm pasts as arguments against a small farm future, I think there are three lines of counter-argument. (1) Were all small farm pasts uniformly miserable, or were some more miserable than others? What was the difference? Who benefitted most and who least from the long hours of farm labour? Is this distribution of benefits intrinsic to farm scale? (2) How does the misery of work in small farm pasts compare to the misery of work in the large farm, large industry and large service-sector present? Can we be sure that the latter is really less severe? (3) In view of climate, energy and other dynamics, can we be sure that a small farm future is avoidable? If it isn’t, how then can we make the best of it?
I’d invoke versions of (2) and (3) as a defence against the charge that visions of a small farm future are disablist. Horticultural semi self-provisioning is compatible with numerous forms of disability, and is probably a superior environment than contemporary highly capitalized urban society for people with various kinds of mental health issues in particular. Given that it’s probably inevitable anyway and existing politics isn’t doing a particularly great job at supporting people with many kinds of disability, the main challenge as I see it is how people can get support from others as the ability and willingness of welfare-capitalist states to provide it palpably wanes.
On which note, Kathryn’s report about her church’s increasingly important welfare function seems relevant. Likewise, over the last year our holding has increasingly become a temporary haven for people in housing need. I plan to write more about this soon.
Regarding a Distributist Congress, the idea of a Congress rather than a conference is that it has an ongoing activist political identity, rather than being ‘just’ a conference, but time will tell… A published manifesto is an interesting idea, and I’d be interested to know if others would find this useful, and if so in what form.
I hope your neck is on the mend, Kathryn!
Thanks Chris — my neck is not fully better yet, but certainly improving.
I completely agree — the current system is actually pretty horrible to disabled people, and current patterns of work are exploitative and miserable, and semi self-provisioning can be accessible and even beneficial, in terms of mental health, to people who can’t hack office jobs for one reason or another (including myself). But so much of the activism I see around, for example, forming networks of mutual aid is stuck in the consumerist, crapitalist mindset of things like people setting up Amazon wishlists for the things they need, and asking others to buy them, with precious little questioning of the context; and so much else refuses to acknowledge the very mixed bag of compromises that most people make (if I had a penny for every time someone said “but disabled people can’t cycle and need to drive!” to me, a disabled person who cannot drive and needs to cycle, well, I could buy a lot of junk from a certain website named after a much-beleaguered river; meanwhile people driving when they don’t need to has a huge toll in illness and disability as well as climate effects). Perhaps one issue here is really that such efforts are visible, quantifiable and legible, whereas your provision of shelter and my growing vegetables for the soup kitchen are more difficult to put into a balance sheet.
I think in manifesto terms, something that I need to do is revisit (or, perhaps, visit seriously for the first time) the existing permaculture principles, and think about how they fit into a small farm future. I find myself in a position of basically agreeing with your approach (and indeed not having found other voices which I think articulate the issues any better), but not really knowing how to talk to others about it, and that is what prompted my request for a manifesto: I’d like something more accessible than your book which I could point people at to open up discussion. It may be that the permaculture principles with a small farm slant would already provide this, though, and I don’t want to ask you to reinvent the wheel.
The other option, of course, is to keep doing what I can for my own household and those directly around me in terms of self-provisioning, and wait for others to notice and ask me about it. (Summer 2020 my next door neighbours had a tomato plant that I gave them. Last summer they asked me about the copper netting anti-slug measures I used, and they had tomatoes and a cucumber. This summer they have a courgette plant, tomatoes, cucumbers, and various other edibles, and haven’t asked me for advice at all.) But this seems a painfully slow approach given the current state of the world.
People are very good at not noticing things until it’s too late.
I think the flak you recieve is because, to steal a line from Ellul, you are cutting against the grain of History. History, as in the stories told about Progress, from “rural idiocy” to streamlined urban ease with no heavy lifting. To talk of dirty hands, small farms, etc, is counter to the memes of modernity. Orwell, in the Road to Wigan Pier, writes that he experienced the same thing when he dared to suggest the industrialism might not be all beneficial, harmless and inevitable. Not bad company to be in.
I have a theory, probably nicked from J M Greer, that we as a collective entity will maximise use of energy and resources, and use technology to occupy previously unavailable niches. Individuals are powerless: the reason some appear to have power is because they facilitate maximum use of energy and resources, not because they are clever/evil or whatever. Those who advocate restraint, small is beautiful, etc, free up energy which, because they refuse to use it, gets taken up by those who will. George and co. are acting in accordance with the system (Homo Colossus?) and its memetic structures of thought. The “system” will adapt to lowering energy and resource availability as it happens, with accompanying changes in memes and History until one day, after a bit of the ol’ trouble and strife, people get their hands dirty again. Sustainability is an inevitability, one way of the other. Probably the other.
I want to speak against the idea of spending too much time on the story of distributism. Or rather, I would like to speak for great care in how you spend your time.
What is the implied theory of change?
When we say distributism needs a good story, it implies that a good story is needed, and therefore distributism is not enjoying broad popularity due to a lack of good story.
And I just don’t see any evidence for the power of good stories in the world. Most of the systems that shape our world have no noticeable story. The grandest systems, like capitalism, can probably buy the best ad agency to write their story, but there are so many characters mumbling negative and derogatory asides that it is hard to hear the actual story itself.
We are peoples of The Book, and so The Word is regarded as holding special power. As children perhaps the first example of this is Abracadabra, which may derive from the Hebrew for “I will create as I speak.”
We continue on through TED talks, electoral politics, and I am sad to say—for you Chris, and my wife and all my author friends—books.
The theory of change is that we lack good ideas, and so if we share good ideas we will transform the world.
But ideas are not what shapes the vast majority of our behaviour. We respond to our physical and social context almost universally. This is because our brains are not physically capable of more than a few hours analytic thought each day, and we are already overtaxing that capacity.
But we DO use stories to make ourselves feel good about the behaviour we are already doing. We use post-hoc rationalization to select a story that paints our existing behaviour in a flattering light.
Tl;dr?
A snappy new story for Distributism might be nice, but even if it had one it would not transform the world with the ease of the Genie of the Lamp snapping their fingers.
…
As I said last post, this paragraph sums up why I love Small Farm Future:
Anyway, that’s the ground where I stand: convinced of the need for ruralization and an orderly turn to agrarian localism so that it doesn’t happen by default in a disorderly way; unconvinced by varieties of modernist magic that believe in inevitable or inexorable forms of progress, particularly towards high-energy urban futures; puzzled as to how to deal with what Monbiot rightly calls ‘real, existential crises that demand urgent attention’, but doubtful that the magic modernism he invokes can do so, and determined to face the reality of those crises without such comfort blankets.
So story does not transform the world. At best it explains and mentally organizes what is already happening.
The important work in these times then, is to help distributism happen, to actually be present, and most importantly, be visible. When people are flailing about to respond to the increasing pace and impact of “real. existential crises”, it is important that they can see the option of a distributed rural agriculture, to compete with nativism and precision fermentation. We want people to say, “What they are doing looks good. I am going to do that too.”
So that theory of change is more like “Write a book so I have an excuse to go on podcasts and video conferences to show the prettiest pictures of my small farm, and invite people into this future.”
…
I am also from here, and so I also was born and raised with an absolute reverence of The Word. The default to the battle and supremacy of ideas is my instinct and reflex as much as anybody of this “culture”. I have to constantly fight against the warm, soothing fog of The Word.
And of course people will point out the length of my comment—but let’s see if these words change behaviour. 😀
It is very hard, but we must be working to build physical systems that shape behaviour without story—without thought, like the yellow lines on a road. And we must work to increase the visibility and spread of behaviour so the gravity of social proof collects more and more people into a group.
Yes. So let’s hear that again:
It is very hard, but we must be working to build physical systems that shape behaviour without story […] And we must work to increase the visibility and spread of behaviour so the gravity of social proof collects more and more people into a group.
I wouldn’t quibble, in a broad way, with “we understand the world through stories” (though the meaning of “story” is rarely elucidated properly) – this is necessary for good communication. But it doesn’t mean “stories” and “words” are magical – even though that is exactly what they feel like.
and once again:
“It is very hard, but …”
Thinking about it, the ‘Distributist’ idea does have something in common with the ‘Basic Income’ only you get the proverbial land and a cow rather than cash.
But, Chris, what exactly are you proposing? A meeting? How Long? Where, When etc etc
Buck up Chris. I wouldn’t put much stock in what people who are grasping at straws say to justify their lack of meaningful action.
Remember the story about the humans in the pot of water on the stove after the frog jumped out ? That is the modernists in the city. The frog is not going back to save them. And, you, me, none of us, are going to save them. They can not imagine getting out of the pot of hotter and hotter water.
People who are afraid of getting their hands dirty don’t care about arguments 1, 2 or 3. They don’t have a plan. Their only hope that they don’t have to do anything, that someone else will take care of everything. The world doesn’t really work that way.
One problem is that they don’t know anything. They don’t know which end of the radish sticks out of the ground. They don’t know how anything works. Nothing. A SFF ? You might as well ask them to flap their arms and fly up to the roof of the barn. They have looked over the edge of the abyss and shat themselves.
What do we do ? Same as we have been. As you know, not everyone is willing to do nothing as the world heats up. Some people do see what we are doing and want to be a part of it in some way. They may not know how to do much but they want to learn. People have always shared information by telling stories.
The baby snapping turtles have hatched out. We have seen a couple of them on their way to where they know not. It is completely amazing that any of them make it. They keep going and they do make it.
Yup all of that !
Kind of reminds me of the fall of Constantinople , the leaders were arguing how many angels could stand on the head of a pin while the saracen army was entering the city .
The nine to five job with a pay cheque is very comforting compared to being outside in all weather’s keeping things productive . I think you have to be some kind of special masochist to have your arm up the rear end of a cow in a snow storm turning a calf round .
Chris wrote, “A small farm future is what we’re going to get because we’ve left it too late for any other one, and even at this late hour there are still far too many people (George being one) telling tall tales about how we’re going to rescue high-energy, high-tech, high-capital urbanism… we’ve deluded ourselves with these tall tales for too long.”
It’s self-delusion and denial. George Monbiot has written this about denial:
“We’re all responding to the same impulses, but we’re all being tripped up by denial. Denial, and a failure to see the whole picture, are our enemies.” [Our Crushing Dilemmas, 5th May 2011]
I say there’s a lot of denial involving the energy consumption implications of ecomodern rescues like the factory food schemes. Along with failures to ‘see the whole picture’ regarding our energy-constrained world.
For example, to manufacture the factory food ‘studge’, 58 kWh of electricity are required to produce one kg of protein (as detailed in my earlier comments). To put this 58 kWh/kg into perspective, steelmaking using electricity as the energy source requires roughly 500 kWh/tonne, or about half of a kWh per kg of steel (with an electric arc furnace which melts scrap at 1,520 °C, or 2,768 °F).
*In other words, manufacturing one kilogram of protein requires the same amount of energy as making more than 100 kg of steel.*
“To produce a ton of steel in an electric arc furnace requires approximately 400 kilowatt-hours (1.44 gigajoules) per short ton or about 440 kWh (1.6 GJ) per tonne; the theoretical minimum amount of energy required to melt a tonne of scrap steel is 300 kWh (1.09 GJ) (melting point 1,520 °C (2,768 °F)).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace
So the tin they put the goop in used less energy to make than what’s in it .
FYI folks, George Monbiot will be interviewed on Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning programme this coming Saturday, some time between 8 am and noon NZ time (which will be 9 pm-1 am Monday evening UK time). The interview will go on line on Saturday afternoon, so anyone who doesn’t wish to listen to it live via the internet ‘Listen Live’ function can listen whenever it suits them. Details about the programme and a link to it are below. I have sent the presenter/producers links to the reviews of ‘Regenesis’ by Gunnar Rundgren, the Sustainable Food Trust, Simon Fairlie, and Chris. I also said that Monbiot needs some strong questioning on the points made by these practitioners of sustainable farming, and that these
“… include that
(1) it would take far more energy than existing industrial agricultural production systems, and
(2) this amount of energy can not be produced sustainably, and
(3) factory-produced foods already exist and they are awful nutritionally and debatable taste-wise, and
(4) the world’s food cultures and farming systems were various, delicious and sustainable, before the fossil fuel based industrial agriculture model was imposed on them (see Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction for many examples) and in most cases they enhanced rather than degraded wild biodiversity, and
(5) to propose that farming be replaced with factory studge making is to be pro-corporate capitalism, pro-colonialism and pro climate change – all the things Monbiot claims to be against.”
So we’ll see on Saturday if any of these lines of questioning are taken up, and if so, what the response is. I am mystified as to why Monbiot has not done the energy maths and found that his proposal does not add up, and will make things worse, not better – but explaining this to people who are not good with figures and/or have never thought about the matter before is not going to be a way to change hearts and minds. Setting good examples and sharing them widely, as some have suggested above (and are doing) is always going to be more appealing. And at a time when global and local supply chains for just about everything are breaking down, it is also going to make sense in a way that it didn’t when endless stuff was available 24/7.
———————————————————————-
Saturday Morning
A magazine programme hosted by Kim Hill, with long-form, in-depth feature interviews on current affairs, science, modern life, history, the arts and more.
Saturday, 8am – Midday
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday
Correction! FRIDAY evening UK time.
Thanks for this, Christine.
Thanks for further comments.
Kathryn – agreed on the ‘not knowing how to talk to others about it’ point. Which stems partly I think from the rigid ideological boundary-keeping that is silently enacted in everyday conversation. It raises questions of negative story that I’ll come to in a moment. Anyway, I’ll ponder your points about a manifesto. I agree that people are good at not noticing things until it’s too late.
Benn – interesting point re use of energy, also touched on in Eric’s comment. That non-human organisms in biotic systems will arise or increase to make use of extra energy or resources is more or less given. I’m not sure the same is true of humans unless they’re motivated to do so by some larger purpose, or feel fated to do so through path dependency. If it is true, then I’d wonder at the mechanism. Your earlier point about Sahlins here is apposite – in the domestic mode of production, households are deliberately ‘under-productive’.
Ruben – thanks, very interesting comment. Good point that the systems that shape our world have no noticeable story, and yet we think they do because … well, our world is shaped by them. Monbiot’s view that urbanism is a ‘mathematical fact’ while my case for ruralism is self-indulgent fantasy is illustrative. I agree that a single ‘story’ around distributism of the kind that a single person such as me could write, a mixture of facts and reason, romance and wonder, won’t achieve much. I also agree that visibly manifesting a different story is a good thing to do. But I think there’s a power of negative story, a return to the status quo, which is what George and the ecomodernists do, whereby some of the humans in Greg’s cooking pot try to restrain others from jumping after the frog – realism, hypocrisy, progress are powerful ideas in the ecomodernist armoury.
Indeed, I think ideas are consequential in a way that stories aren’t. A lot of people seem to be willing to die for their country. Probably nobody would be willing to die for distributism. ‘My country’ really is a human story, but it masquerades as an emotive idea, which needs no telling. So much of what people do involves what I call on p.54 of my book, ‘symbolic goods’ – effectively, ideas made flesh. The challenge is to turn distributism from a story into an idea, a symbolic good, that makes sense to people in the way that the nation makes sense. I think a positive story about it may be a necessary waypoint for that goal. A story with many strands and many tellers. But I agree it needs more than just a positive story.
Another aspect of this is questions about how to transition to a small farm future. I get criticised for being vague on this point. I can tell a story about how it might happen, but I don’t have an IDEA about how it WILL happen. Increasingly, I’m inclined to turn that criticism on its head. There are too many grand ideas of progress – the market, the nation, techno-fixes, class struggle. They act as single keys, unlocking an almost inevitable happy ending. There are not enough stories, which are more complex and uncertain.
Yet another aspect – a classic mainstream story structure, beloved of Hollywood, is a tension-resolution one. The story puts people into some desperate predicament. How the hell are they going to get out of that? But somehow they do, and the story resolves satisfactorily. They all lived happily ever after. I think ecomodernism tells this story, and it’s quite successful because it’s a narrative structure people are familiar with. You have to go pretty arthouse for an alternative story along these lines – people are in a desperate predicament. They fail to resolve it. Bad things happen. But there is a modicum of ennoblement among the ruins.
So there we go. A Small Farm Future is arthouse to the ecomodernists’ blockbuster. Blockbusters get bigger audiences, because people love stories that resolve things more satisfactorily than they ever get resolved in real life. But ultimately we’re talking about real life.
John – the plan is to have a physical meeting at some point. Where, when and of what form TBA. But also to build a more ongoing movement.
Greg – agree with your comment. People “have looked over the edge of the abyss and shat themselves”. And then retreated to the Hollywood story. It surprises me that George has done the same after a lot of years of serious edge-looking. Also agree that too many people don’t know anything that prepares them for a different reality. I’m not sure I know nearly enough myself, but perhaps a little more than some. The worry is that the know-somethings will be defeated by the know-nothings.
Thanks for the further info Steve, Christine & others. Interesting quotes from Monbiot, Steve – thanks. Something’s changed for him in his apolitical embrace of the techno-fix, but he’s not letting on.
Maybe non-agricultural peoples are maximising energy, but based on what can be supported in times of dearth, not plenty. A wiser people than us would know that droughts happen, and if they live like it is always rainy season, they will all die of thirst when drought hits. There might be some cultural memories that restrain them. They must think we are all stupid greedy children.
I’ve been enjoying Greg Brown’s song ‘Two Little Feet’ recently. I imagine it playing in the bar in the background when Chesterton, Monbiot and Sahlins are drinking. Something like this:
I hear the voice of the ancient ones
Chanting magic words from a different time
Well there is no time there is only this rain
There is no time, that’s why I missed my plane
John Muir walked away into the mountains
In his old overcoat a crust of bread in his pocket
We have no knowledge and so we have studge and
Studge with no knowledge is never enough to get you there
It just won’t get you there
A culture exploded into knickknacks and memories
Eagle and Bear trinkets I don’t think it’s good
Man what am I trying to say it’s a
It’s a messed up world but I love it anyway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoyWteqQEDk&ab_channel=GregBrown-Topic
Yes, Greg Brown is perfect for it.
I have been saying for years that we need more dirges.
Though Greg Brown’s songs are probably more properly classed as laments.
My taste runs to his ‘Here In The Going, Going Gone’.
I’m glad you addressed Ruben’s comment.
My first reaction to that comment was strong disagreement, turning to confusion.
I couldn’t quite figure out what would cause a change if not a plausible new story.
How does one marshal one’s army without a compelling story?
Where does the story end and “…grandest systems, like capitalism…” start?
Can anyone explain the difference between a story and an idea?
Didn’t Einstein develop his theory of relativity by telling stories about trains and spaceships that carried people shining flashlights?
Do ‘facts’ exist separately from our penchant to make narratives for making sense of them?
Weren’t Ptolemy and Copernicus looking at the same sky?
It seems to me that as a species, Narrative is what we do.
My theory of change is not “…that we lack good ideas, and so if we share good ideas we will transform the world.”
I believe that we already have plenty good (large scale) ideas for how to operate our societies, but certain bad ideas are actively promoted and reinforced by various mal-actors for whatever selfish reasons.
And nearly everyone I know goes along with those bad ideas – like capitalism – not because they have examined the stories holding them up, but because that is the water they are swimming in, and it takes a huge act of imagination to recognize that you are swimming in a bad idea.
Or it takes a surprise to the system.
Some crazy person coming in from the hinterlands, speaking in a funny accent and telling a story of another way of being, in a way that makes it sound perfectly natural.
I have been present for that sort of thing once or twice, and inevitably when the initial surprise wears off, I notice that the ‘strange new way’ was actually an old idea that had been around forever, but people forgot or ignored it for no reason stronger than a lack of imagination or the fickle tides of fashion.
Ultimately, I have noticed that most of the people I know are not (primarily) interested in facts. They want a narrative that makes sense to them.
A little story to illustrate:
In 1999, when everyone was all abuzz about Y2K, I had no idea what might be happening out in the larger world of public utility or stock market computers, but I realized that I could know exactly what would happen to my personal IBM PC at the turn of the millennium.
I backed up my data, and set the computer clock for 5 minutes before midnight on December 31, 1999.
Five minutes later, my computer thought it was January 1, 1900.
No problem.
When I tried to tell my friends that this was all that would happen (to a MSDOS PC), they wouldn’t believe me.
When I offered to show them, they insisted that I do not.
I guess this is what I’m disagreeing with:
“So story does not transform the world. At best it explains and mentally organizes what is already happening.”
In addition to that, I believe that it is possible to explain and mentally organize what we wish to happen that has not happened yet.
“I couldn’t quite figure out what would cause a change if not a plausible new story.”
I see Ruben’s point as this: “being the change you want to see” is far more powerful than any story promoting the change. And in a situation where the needed change is something that very few people want, just talking the story is going to have little impact. Being the change might not be enough either, it’s not always sufficient, but it’s probably necessary.
This is why a small farm future will very likely get little traction until it is seen as the best alternative to a big urban future. To have a chance of being seen as the best alternative there have to be as many positive examples of the alternative as possible. You can’t have a herd effect without having at least a smallish herd that people can join. People didn’t create major metropolitan areas because of some story about how great it would be to create a big city, but because the human herd was moving to little cities (that already existed) because they were the best alternative. The result was big cities.
The best way to create a small farm future is to find a way to create small farms right now. What that way might be is still a mystery, at least to me, since most people living in cities are still adequately sheltered and have enough food and water. They’re still happy to be in the city herd. When that situation changes, people will look around for better circumstances. When they see people thriving on small farms, a small farm future will have a chance.
Yes, good.
I’m glad we agree.
I believe you are exactly correct about ‘being the change you want to see’.
I was talking about the part just before that.
Where you find a new story for yourself, and then go out and ‘be’ it in the visible, real world.
Thanks.
Thanks for your thoughts here Eric.
I am not entirely clear where to jump in, so I will just mention a few things, and maybe you can respond to that and we will work our way closer.
First off, here is a fascinating study:
Superstitious learning of abstract order from random reinforcement
And the punchline from the introduction is “The results cannot be explained by simple associative mechanisms that account for other types of spurious learning, suggesting that when presented with random events animals conjure elaborate model-based structures.”
I think the emphasis is on conjure.
If you had a chance to read the Telling More Than We Can Know that I linked above, it shows the same thing. We make things up, out of whole cloth.
As you said, narrative is what we do.
But just because we create narrative does not mean it is real. You described the two different stories of Y2K that you and your friends had. One story was true and one was not. As it turns out the false one was more strongly held.
And, just because we have story does not mean it motivates us. We can all sit down and list our own firmly held and narratively supported issues which we violate.
I have been pretty passionate about reducing my carbon footprint for 20 years now. I understand the issue, I identify as ecologically minded, and I am aware of the stories, like the Inuit who can’t hunt in some seasons because the ice is now too soft, or the Pacific Islanders whose homes will simply disappear beneath the ocean.
And yet I live in a house with a gas furnace, and I occasionally use a car-share. I certainly create more than a fair earth-share of carbon, despite my engagement with technical details and with story.
How does one marshal an army without a story?
Well, in the US you privatize and individualize, so minimum wage is very low and university tuition is very dear. And then you offer a college education with enlistment.
This behaviour is simply shaped by the system.
What story do we tell ourselves about walking up the stairs? We don’t. We simply want something that is upstairs, and we go get it. Try conjuring a story about how you hew a ladder out of tree in order to get upstairs and people will just look at you blankly on their way up the staircase.
A programmable thermostat does not need a story about climate change, it turns the heat on and off regardless of what you do or think.
I don’t see a story behind the yellow lines on the road, and yet it shapes our behaviour with great uniformity.
When we look at things that seem to have a good story the effects remain ambiguous.
John Brown came to understand that slavery was a travesty, and attacked Harper’s Ferry. But many slavers knew the same stories as John Brown—they had circulated for decades or centuries, and yet they held fast to the social arrangement of enslavement.
As I said, I was born into the culture that worships The Word, and I have to take care to not slip into old habits. I think there are some stories that are needed. I may be wrong about that, but it is acculturation I can’t shake.
But I am sure we can do much, much, much more without stories than we think could ever be possible.
Chris wrote, “I imagine it playing in the bar in the background…
We have no knowledge and so we have studge and
Studge with no knowledge is never enough…”
Meanwhile, the telly in the bar occasionally plays advertisements for studge, set to some old songs:
“Lookin’ for some hot studge baby this evenin’
I need some hot studge baby tonight
I want some hot studge baby this evenin’
Gotta have some hot studge
Gotta have some love tonight (hot studge)
I need hot studge
I want some hot studge
I need hot studge”
[Donna Summer, 1979]
“Hot studge, hot studge
Can’t get enough
Hot studge, hot studge, can’t get enough…
Yeah, shake it up, hot studge
Everyday I get another dose…”
[Rolling Stones, 1976]
I’ll ponder the various views about story and being the change here and perhaps come back to this. The discussion of idealism and materialism in my review of Graeber & Wengrow’s book at the end of last year is also relevant, I’d suggest.
Meanwhile thanks for populating the jukebox, Steve.
Letting the ecomodernists (eco, really ?) control the narrative with happy talk makes a chaotic transition more likely. They may pay lip service to using less energy and resources but there is reduction in consumption. No plan, just wishful thinking.
Modernists don’t have any reason to think the future they envision will happen. None. What model are modernists using as the basis for their predictions of a rosy future ? Writing in a confident style doesn’t make it so. They are just hoping that a little more business as usual will bring about a vastly different result. Which is a definition of crazy.
They need to answer the question of infinite growth on a finite planet, in detail. No hand waving. No they’ll figure it out. Let’s hear the nuts and bolts details. Wild speculation is easy. You know, a limitless supply of clean energy from fusion is just around the corner.
BTW, Are you old enough to remember when nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter ?
You don’t have to write a story all about bunnies and butterflies in a SFF future. You also don’t have to paint a doom and gloom picture either. Nobody else is talking up the unintended consequences of their favorite techno utopia. They aren’t even doing half decent job of accounting for the costs. Why wouldn’t you put the best face on a SFF ? It is about the future, i.e. fiction. That makes it a great place to explore new ways and ideas.
Reading the European news perhaps things will start moving as technoutopia becomes unaffordable , a 10,000 euro electric bill that is a possibility that the Danish news tells us, a local small farm with very few inputs needed will look like nirvana compared to living in a appallingly expensive city .
The technoutopian future is looking shaky, did Monbiot et al take into their musings that energy would cost five to ten times more than last year , steel and cement manufacturing closing down making their new factories impossible to build ? German police are getting satellite phones as they expect the mobile network to have no power , pay by phone ? buy by phone ? bank by phone ? It’s a disaster in the making , people will be staring into blank screens and beginning to wonder what comes next . Your garden with potatoes and cabbages will look good compared to a refusal of service because ,A The electric is out( bank systems down , payment systems down cash register down ) or B you can’t afford to have a cell phone .
Late to the comment party here, but my initial reaction to the neo-distributist idea is certainly enthusiasm. One big picture point I’m pondering is what direction can a distributist movement take, given a general aversion to concentrating wealth and power? It’s hard to achieve much political influence without these things, but acquiring them compromises core principles and intent. That seems to have been a general dilemma for a lot of producerist/left-libertarian movements in the past, and perhaps the decentralizing forces of the future will cancel out this problem, but I’m not so sure.
Another point I’m pondering is the third commitment in your article, to the spiritual value of work. I’m in full agreement on the intrinsic good of self-directed work, but I do feel spirituality is a somewhat idiosyncratic and arbitrary value-set to base what may ultimately have to be community/legal restrictions against automation, efficiency, etc. It might be hard to argue for these restrictions in a public sphere if we’re relying on everyone feeling the same spirits. Again, I’m deeply sympathetic to your core point, and the efforts of faith communities will be essential to a distributist future, but I also think there are myriad other ways to discuss the intrinsic and instrumental value of labour.
Slightly more practically, I agree with Kathryn on the manifesto idea, and also think the starting point could be some kind of more structured forum or venue for discussion of distrubutist ideas, especially as they relate to economic and political issues in particular places.
How could neo-distributism work at a small enough scale such that ordinary people can give it a go and be the change they want to see? It seems like there would have to be some very wealthy (and enlightened) participants in such grassroot arrangements.
Neo-distributism sounds quite revolutionary and it might require an actual uprising or revolution of sorts to result in widespread government facilitation of it. Otherwise, the government will likely continue to be influenced largely by big-money interests while doing what it can to maintain the status quo and stamp out any hints of revolution.
Regarding stories, any stories supporting neo-distribution would have to compete with the barrage of status-quo-promoting stories and narratives coming from government sources, the media, and corporate interests (advertising and PR).
Neo-distributist stories might still persist, like unwavering voices of reason which eventually make sense to people, as long as they don’t make the mistakes of many competing stories (like overpromising and losing their credibility).
Revolutions tend to be great… for the people who are charismatic enough, or have enough resources, to benefit from the chaos they cause. I’m not sure they work so well for everyone else.
I’m not trying to discount the gains of, say, the labour movement over the last few centuries. I’m glad we have a five day workweek, for example, and laws against locking children up in a factory for sixteen hours a day. But most of those gains weren’t caused by revolutions as such (and things like a national minimum wage are relatively recent).
The narrative stuff is difficult. I don’t think neo-distributism can dominate the mainstream narrative, and I don’t think we should waste time and energy trying. But I do think there is something to be said for planting seeds of other ideas. A lot of people do think the status quo is a dead end.
I think small-scale examples are more likely to arise in places with cheaper land than the UK.
I enjoyed the Greg Brown song – a new voice to me. Put me a little in mind of the popular song Nature Boy, a number 1 for Nat King Cole in the Forties penned by an interesting character by the name of Eden Ahbez, who according to his Wiki entry lived for a while beneath the Hollywood sign and “slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week.”
We need more Edens.
It isn’t a manifesto but I believe you can’t go far wrong bearing the Native American Indian ’10 commandments’ in mind: Keep close to the Great Spirit, and all of that. Keep it simple.
Speaking of great spirits, it’s been such a desiccated year here and yet the plum trees all around are laden with perfectly healthy juicy fruit. To Hungarians, when live gives you plums, you make plum brandy. Or your neighbours do.
A powerful one for the jukebox about power? Try Old Fire’s recent cover of John Martyn’s ‘Don’t You Go’ – this should clear ’em out come closing time if nothing else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lvcOxTJzxg
From Monbiot’s reply it all seems to hinge on precision fermentation.
Like most people I’m ok with wild fermentation – the village today enjoys wafts of fermenting fruit from hundreds of 200-litre drums in yards all over the place – but feel a wariness towards tweaking this natural process with electricity, among other things.
I’ve been trying to reconcile these recent posts in light of a book I read about the evolution of human consciousness and the prehistory of the computer titled In the Shadow of the Machine, by Jeremy Naydler. My precis won’t do the book justice, but there’s a quote from Rudolf Steiner that I believe warrants reflection:
“Electricity must be recognized in its true character – in its peculiar power of leading down from nature to subnature. Only human beings must themselves become aware lest they slide down with it.”
You’ll have to read the whole book to get the context:)
There is a discussion of the book on youtube (Sheldrake-Vernon dialogue 41). Naydler charts the shifts in human consciousness from Ancient times to today, via the erratic adoption and steady march of mechanisation into people’s lives, and how this increasingly exacerbates the disconnect people feel from the natural world – this may sound like a hackneyed trope to readers of this and similar sites, but Naydler offers many penetrating insights into the development of the devitalised state many modern people suffer today.
In its way, Small Farm Future is attempting to precipitate a similar shift in human consciousness, a mammoth task that may take generations. It’s the seeming impossibility of this valiant goal that sometimes weighs me down. But good on anyone for trying.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/42gGzg3FopZfA3TmRnI4N9?si=u3YTZxBQSqKYenB__Loo6Q&utm_source=copy-link
This is a good one from Tyson Junkaporta regards the stories. I’ve heard him describe himself as neo peasant, and is definitely on the team. He’s very careful not to be on any team that’s got a brand though, in as much as he’s of the thinking that as soon as it does, it’s dead – but he still loves a catchy name! Distributism seems good to me, does what it says and is a bit difficult – which it will be. Could take the dis off, you’ve got tribune, or tribute, brings you to Christine’s gift culture. Giftism?
Any way, thank you Chris and sFf people
He sounded so reasonable! (George Monbiot on RNZ this morning.) But then he always has had that ‘your kind and sensible uncle’ way of talking, hasn’t he? He is of course right about intensive animal farming (disgusting morally and environmentally), and the over-promising of ‘regenerative’ farmers regarding the supposed environmental benefits of extensive grazing. In New Zealand and Australia this regenerative trope is catching on – but as most of the meat produced this way is exported it means it is just another contribution to the unsustainable diets of the ‘rich world’.
His answer to the question of where the electricity to make gloop would come from was that it would come from the ‘surplus’ in the renewables supply e.g. wind turbines turning at night. This is nonsense, of course, but it would require an energy wonk to explain why.
His contention that cities take up only 1% of the world’s habitable land while farming ‘wastes’ x% of it is also nonsense. If a city is cut off from the food produced outside its boundaries things get very nasty very quickly – as has happened in many places many times over the past 10,000 years.
He also gave a totally useless answer to Michael Pollan’s much-quoted line “Don’t eat anything your grandmother would not recognise as food” which was to riff on the disgusting diet eaten by his own grandmother. This of course was the industrial British diet, which was and still is disgusting. Plus it did not include a lot of foods (and their cuisines) which are now common in the UK and elsewhere. This same process happened in NZ, and I now eat Indian dishes I never ate as a child, BUT I always make them from fresh organic ingredients, and NEVER buy Indian ready-meals, which are as bad as any other kind.
I have written a whole book (Food@Home, 2012) about the changes in the NZ diet over the previous 50 years – I will send you a copy, Chris – and if anyone else reading this wants one just let me know where to post it. The book puts a lot of emphasis on home-produced and cooked foods – which is how I was raised and is IMHO the only ‘safe’ way to raise children to eat well. It has been the shift to eating from industrial systems which has led to the obesity crisis as well as contributing to climate change. Home and all that it can and does mean is also (now that I reflect on it, and after reading Wendell Berry approaching the subject from different angles in the 2017 collection of his essays The World-Ending Fire) the crux of the issue here. Industrial capitalism despises home production (and reproduction) and wants to monetise it all. It has succeeded in the cities, and even in the countryside where the majority of farms are no longer largely self-sustaining as well as surplus producing – but as we all know, it is a horrible way to live, dependent on a system which at this moment is starting to crumble. Much more to be said on this topic, but enough for now!
Thanks very much for the recap, Christine.
Coming back to the question the host raised about studge’s energy requirements (she quoted that it was estimated Monbiot’s idea for precision fermentation of high-protein studge would raise global electricity demand by 11 per cent), I agree his answer was weak but he does start answering with the words “All things being equal”.
I got the impression Monbiot has perhaps back-of-the-envelope accounted for the reduction in both land use and the current energy requirements of Big Ag to farm it and concluded it’s a no-brainer in terms of energy savings from that sector if his ideal world could go ahead. I think that’s a fair assessment if a) we lived in an ideal world and b) things in the real world actually worked like that. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to stick to stodgy bread, lardy cake and porridge, like Monbiot’s granny.
My grandmother absolutely loved being able to “cook” from a packet. Special treats I only got when visiting my grandparents included single serving emulsified cheese (the individually wrapped squares) on white
factory bread; hot dogs, similarly individually wrapped in plastic; tinned creamed corn; “cream of wheat” (semolina, my grandad made it specially lumpy just for me); tinned fruit in heavy syrup; a strange sort of ‘casserole’ (North American use of the word) consisting of cut-up hotdogs, quick-cook white rice and tinned sweetcorn; pancakes made from a mix; and those wafer biscuits with layers of weird chemical icing. For a special treat when lots of people were visiting, they would buy one of those family buckets from KFC, as my grandmother certainly couldn’t manage cooking a roast dinner for 12 by then. There was a fair amount of junk and I think it was partly because it had a long shelf life.
But my grandparents also kept a root cellar and grew a lot of their own veg. I remember the carrots, peas, potatoes, onions and especially the raspberries with at least as much fondness as the processed stuff. I still make “weiners, rice and corn” sometimes, but with better rice and with some chicken stock. I preserve my own fruit, admittedly mostly as jam or wine rather than in heavy syrup. I still eat semolina, and I make it with lumps in because that’s how Grampa made it, and I put jam on it. I never buy the wafer biscuits but I’m not averse to the taste and texture of the weird cheese (only I can’t get past the huge amount of plastic packaging).
Of course, in Saskatchewan when my grandparents were growing up there wouldn’t have been any “fresh” food in winter. In much of the UK we can overwinter brassicas and chard, though there are sound reasons for not basing your entire diet around either, and some leeks and parsnips. In the Canadian prairies… not so much: very little will stay alive, never mind succulent, when the high temperature over a period of weeks is -20°C. So the root cellar was absolutely imperative, and so was a period every winter of mostly eating starchy breads or stored root veg and pickled cabbage with preserved meat, gravy, and some dried herbs for flavour — maybe with some bottled fruit or jam as a treat.
All of this is a bit of a tangent (regular readers of comments here know I am an incurable tangenteer), but I idly wonder if Monbiot is making the mental error of thinking humans need to eat *fresh* fruit and veg every day of our lives, and comparing the energy required for producing that (in industrial hot houses etc) to the energy required for making studge. I remember seeing questions around this at the start of UK lockdown — “how am I meant to shop only once per week for five-a-day for a family of six? The veg have wilted by the end of the week” — people genuinely seemed unaware that frozen and tinned veg still “count” and carrots keep longer than 3 days if you store them right. I mean, I don’t fancy getting scurvy either, but it strikes me that a lot of the starchy, stodgy foods my grandparents ate over the winter were actually pretty good fuel for doing manual labour in a situation where you couldn’t keep lettuces or spinach alive over the winter anyway, and the sugary stuff — jam, bottled fruit, syrups — was a pretty good hedge against scurvy too. They might not be so great if you’re sitting in an office all day.
So many things depend on context, and I guess what I am wondering is what assumptions Monbiot makes about context, and conversely what assumptions my grandparents made and what assumptions I make. I suspect he is assuming that the energy and feedstock calculations will just work out, as well as assuming we all need the diet that is right for desk jockeys. My assumption is that getting away from the desk and eating the most diverse range of locally produced food possible is a better bet than anything involving further industrialisation of production.
I wonder if I’ll get to the elderberries before the pigeons do, this year; I’d like to make some syrup.
Perhaps pigeon should be in the menu ?
A lot of work for not much meat…
But it’s free meat , a few simple traps made from junk and bingo a taisty meal ( squirrel tastes good too )
My grandparents ( from the old country) kept a pigeon nest in the rafters of their garage. They ate the little ones.
Industrial capitalism despises home production (and reproduction) and wants to monetise it all. ”
And there is the crux of the matter , in a small farm future it is the farmer who gets the bulk of the profits not the middleman , even today with factory farms middlemen take the bulk of the profits , daries around here earn around 15 cents a gallon , stores around the same , milk is $5.45 a gallon in the store , $5.15 cents for ” processing and packaging , ” nice earner !
Thanks for the further comments. Apologies, pressures of work mean I need to keep my response quite brief.
Regarding ‘story’ & ‘being the change’, the problem with the latter – as Monbiot has elucidated quite nicely – is that it’s next to impossible to extricate yourself fully from the modern machine, which makes attempts at ‘being the change’ vulnerable to two counter stories supportive of the status quo. You’re either hypocritical, or your life is so extreme as to be unfeasible for most.
I agree with Ruben that distributism/a small farm future isn’t failing to happen for lack of an enticing story about it. Nevertheless, I do think stories can be consequential in bringing about their claims.
Adam Smith wrote a story about the emergence of capitalism, which was only partly observationally based. Likewise Karl Marx. Their stories, in combination with other people’s, were pretty consequential for subsequent events. I agree with Martin that the meaning of ‘story’ is rarely well elucidated, but I quite like the vagueness of it – various flavours of capitalist and Marxist will tell you that their creed is more true and objective than any story. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Anyway, more on that in due course.
More too in due course on the energetic requirements of studge. If, as Simon suggests, Monbiot thinks that the substitution of crop plants by studge offsets the energy used in the latter against savings in the former then he profoundly misunderstands a lot of things.
The politics of distributism is, I’m afraid, another ‘watch this space’ item, but thanks for the comments from Evan and Steve. In my view, implementing distributism would definitely involve enormous political transformations – whether they’re ‘revolutionary’ or not is a question I’ll reserve for the time being, though I’m happy to offer a sneak preview of my answer in brief – yes and no. Actually that’s my answer to most things.
A lot of people at the more conservative end of the distributist spectrum like to say ‘distributism doesn’t mean re-distributism’. However, I think they’re basically mistaken.
Thanks also to Evan on the point about the spiritual dimension of work. Perhaps this could be reframed without recourse to the ‘s’ word. Work is a good or end in itself, and a society’s decisions about work should not be made first and foremost with financial increase or input efficiency in mind. Arguably, though, putting flesh on those bones probably does require us to step into territory best charted by religious thought.
Thanks also for your comment Joel. I like Tyson Yunkaporta’s thinking – will try to give that a listen. I’m mindful too of the difficulties of alliance-building without branding. As to giftism or tributism, it’s neat but for me as things stand at present in the rich world at least we need to emphasize distributing the means more than sharing the product. Plus ‘tributism’ sounds a bit like a description of where rock music has now got to…
…on which note thanks to those of you who’ve been building the playlist in the last chance saloon…
And also thanks for the various book suggestions. Christine, of course I’d be delighted to take a look at your book.
Sorry if I’ve missed other commenters off – I’ve got to go for now but some new content here is imminent
The back of Mr Monbiot’s envelope must be rather small.
In rough numbers:
US agriculture uses 1720 Trillion (T) BTUs of energy per year. That converts to 0.5 TkWh per year.
If 30% of your diet is protein that comes out about 150 grams of protein per day.
150 gm of protein /day X 365 days / yr = 54.75 kg of protein /yr.
54.75 kg X 58 kWh / kg of protein from studge (per Steve L) = 3175.5 kWh / yr to produce that much protein.
3175.5 kWh / yr X 330,000,000 Americans = 1.05 TkWh/ yr to produce enough protein for the US population per year.
Compare this to 0.5 kWh / yr used by US agriculture.
Even discounting the population by 20% for people under the age of 16, 0.8 is still larger than 0.5. It should also be noted that the other 70% of your diet has to come from somewhere.
This is not to support Monbiot’s Regenesis vision (fever-dream?) in any way – I doubt I’d even consider feeding studge to animals, given the choice, though I salute Simon Fairlie’s bright-side musing on this – but Monbiot has said he would like to see a studge factory in every town where farming – presumably producing protein – is particularly difficult for the local populace (I can’t recall where I read this but I doubt I’ve fever-dreamed it up).
That might mean that your figures have to also account (if they don’t already) for transportation of the protein US Ag produces to get it to the slaughterhouses, and from there to the refrigerated storage facilities, then to the markets, as opposed to a more in situ food factory.
Monbiot also repeated the phrase “livestock farming can’t even wash its own face” when referring to the fact that the best carbon sequestration figures from livestock farming still end up with a deficit, producing around 40 per cent more emissions than they sequester (if memory serves). Theoretical comparisons might therefore have to somehow factor in this potential for all the emptied-out CAFOs and feed-crop arable land being left to rewild and capture carbon. Maybe. Among many other ‘ideal world’ mathematics like studge factories running on renewable energy (on the nightly tariff!) vs fossil-fuelled John Deere’s.
This is why envelopes are no good for this kind of thing. We need Einstein’s blackboard. And probably Einstein too.
From the ‘energy-blind’ comments I’ve read concerning Regenesis (which I haven’t read) it’s only my supposition that Monbiot is winging it a bit here (it’s all futurism anyway, isn’t it?), so I’m just guessing my way around Monbiot Man’s Imaginarium, but he’s clearly not stupid, though he may be energy-blind in one eye…
One thing I did take away from that NZ radio interview Christine flagged up was that he seemed far more passionate talking about soil than he did when explaining and defending his latest ecomodernist turn. I hope that bodes well for his future fulminations. He’s probably sick of talking about Regenesis already. He’s only eaten one studge pancake, for goodness’ sake! Not only that, this dream is reliant on a feasible hydrogen economy, which must raise a red flag. Incidentally, in the original Genesis (no, not the Peter Gabriel line-up) in the Bible, it’s been noted that, on the second day, God divided water from water, and it’s the only day on which he did not declare ‘and it was good’. Did He get out of bed the wrong side that day, or is there something more meaningful going on here? Something else to consider on this lovely Sabbath.
(Another apparent reply to self – is this what they mean by echo chamber?)
Among many other things… Greg, my wife works on a large pasture-fed beef farm (it produces some pork too), all certified organic (what an annual headache that is, and I don’t even work there) and I’ve noted before how the operation’s largest expense is diesel. But discussing Regenesis with my wife (mental note to self: don’t post a comment without first consulting wife) she brought up the fact that the abattoir basically supplies the farm’s butchery with a slaughtered carcass without hide or skull but with the bones (which often get bought for big dogs to chew on). Some of the horns do go to craftworkers creating intricately carved objects like whetstone holders, or simple hair combs for humans. There are also the various uses for the leather, she reminds me, which studge won’t be able to replace (until we get studge leather). Other bits of the animal carcasses can also be used for pet food, unlike studge (OK, forget that example, studge might probably be deemed ‘suitable for animal feed’).
I’m just trying to score a few goals for animal farming here, imperfect though it is, that any direct comparison might also need to account for alongside the facets mentioned earlier. Also, the thought of people having to up sticks and move into a goop ghetto is worrisome, but considering the phenomenal rise of vaping – electric cigarettes! – stranger things have happened.
My number for energy used in all of US agriculture came from the USDA ERS from 2014 (released in 2017. Seems kind of slow but maybe nobody cares.).
The text says that 60% of that number is direct and the rest is pesticides, fertilizer, etc.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/januaryfebruary/energy-consumption-and-production-in-agriculture/
I don’t think they included the energy used in the wider food system. It looks like an equal amount of energy is used in the rest of the food system.
https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-production/
Steve L’s energy numbers only deal with making protein. Even with the above additions, studge and agriculture come out pretty even.
But protein is only 30% of your diet. The other 70% of your food has to come from somewhere else, i.e. agriculture. And then there is fiber. Got any cotton clothes ? It’s probably best to forget about renewable fuel.
If studge is an energetic wash, why bother ?
Since it does not reduce energy consumption, what does the rest of Mr Monbiot’s urban utopia look like ? Will there be any energy left over for them ?
This whole thing might be another good example of the kind of narrowly focused thinking that got us into this mess.
“studge might probably be deemed ‘suitable for animal feed”
It already is, sort of.
Except that most pet food starts with soybeans as feedstock instead of synthetic protein.
Not many people get 30% of their calories from protein! It’s actually quite difficult to do that on a conventional Western diet. Eating 150g of protein per day without exceeding calorie needs can also be a challenge if you’re not very active. Even then, my understanding is that most people will have a pretty big drop in appetite after around 15% of calories from protein. (For me this number is higher, but I am an outlier, not the average. But that’s why I know how difficult it is to get that much protein: I have actually done the macronutrient counting and food logging.)
Also I think a lot of US agriculture is for biodiesel feedstock.
So: I think studge wouldn’t need to provide as much protein as your own envelope calculation suggests; but then the “we still need to eat some non-protein food” issue becomes an even larger aspect of meeting dietary needs. Swings and roundabouts.
Per capita meat consumption in the US is between 150 and 250 pounds per year (depends on what source). They are trying…
250lbs is 113kg (give or take). 150lbs is 68kg.
Most meat is less than 30g protein per 100g. Fillet steak, for example, is 26g. Bacon is 13.3g (uncooked; values for cooked vary, depending on what you do with the fat, and how much water was in the bacon in the first place.) Chicken thigh is 24g/100g. Skinless chicken breast is somewhat higher, but then what do you do with the rest of the chicken? Many processed meats are below 20g/100g.
So, no, I don’t think most people are consuming anything like 150g protein per day, from meat. Some might be getting that much when you count the additional protein in dairy, egg and grain products.
Let’s compare microbial protein studge (at the factory gate) directly with soybeans (at the farm gate).
To make the comparison more interesting, we’ll use theoretical ideal-world numbers for the microbial protein (upper limit, thermodynamic constraints on the processes), compared to real-world data from soybean farmers.
Table 2. Soybean agriculture system inputs, weighted averages of 19 major soybean‐growing states, 2006 (source: ERS, 2009a; NASS, 2007; NASS, 2010).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233955304_Energy_Life-Cycle_Assessment_of_Soybean_Biodiesel_Revisited
Inventory [item], Quantity Used (per ha); Life‐Cycle Energy Equivalent (MJ/ha)
Diesel 33.3 L; 1417.6
Gasoline 12.8 L; 515.7
LP gas 2.0 L; 52.7
Natural gas 4.1 m3; 161.4
Nitrogen 3.3 kg; 168.2
Phosphorus 12.1 kg; 111.2
Potassium 22.4 kg; 133.4
Lime 463.7 kg; 57.9
Seeds 68.9 kg; 324.4
Herbicide 1.6 kg; 507.7
Insecticide 0.04 kg; 13.2
Electricity 17.1 kWh; 127.1
Total 3590.5 MJ/ha
3590.5 MJ/ha = 998 kWh per hectare of soybeans
“Total Life‐cycle energy input in soybean agriculture was 3590.5 MJ/ha”
“The weighted average yield equaled 2906.7 kg/ha (43.2 bu/ac) in 2006.”
So, one hectare yields 2907 kg of soybeans
which required 3590 MJ of energy.
3590/2907 = 1.23 MJ/kg of soybeans
Conversion 1 MJ = 0.278 kWh
1.23(0.278) = 0.34 kWh/kg of soybeans
Protein content of soybeans (from the internet):
“Whole soybeans typically contain 38 to 42 percent crude protein and 16 to 20 percent fat (dry matter basis).”
At 40% protein, to obtain 1 kg of protein for soybeans, we need 1/.4 = 2.5 kg of soybeans
At 18% fat, that 2.5 kg of soybeans will also contain 2.5(.18) = 0.45 kg of fat
To grow these 2.5 kg of soybeans requires 2.5(.34 kWh/kg) = 0.85 kWh of energy
So, to obtain 1 kg of protein, plus 0.45 kg of fat, from soybeans requires 0.85 kWh.
Thus, the energy requirement of 0.85 kWh/kg of protein from soybeans (with a “bonus” 0.45 kg of fat included in the deal).
Continued below…
(continued from above)
We’ve established that 0.85 kWh of energy inputs will produce soybeans containing 1 kg of protein (plus about a half kilogram of fat), based on real-world data from soybean growers.
How does the microbial protein (studge) compare? Let’s look at the upper-limit constraints on the microbial performance, which result in the lowest energy inputs (per kg of product) that are theoretically possible for these processes (in an ideal world):
“Here we present a molecular-scale model that sets an upper limit on the performance of any organism performing electromicrobial protein production. We show that [genetically] engineered microbes that fix CO2 and N2 using reducing equivalents produced by H2-oxidation or extracellular electron uptake could produce amino acids with energy inputs as low as 64 MJ [per] kg”
“Thermodynamic Constraints on Electromicrobial Protein Production”
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.22.469619v1.full
So, “energy inputs as low as 64 MJ/kg”
converts to a minimum of 64(.278) = 17.8 kWh/kg
for microbial protein.
At this point, it’s unclear whether this 17.8 kWh/kg applies to the actual protein product suitable for human consumption (after milling and microfiltration to remove the harmful nucleic acids from the mix, and other processing, which requires additional energy).
For the purpose of this comparison, let’s be generous and assume the 17.8 kWh/kg of microbial protein includes the energy to make it safe for human consumption. This gives us:
Microbial protein production requires an ideal-world minimum of 17.8 kWh/kg of protein.
vs.
Soybean farming requires a real-world 0.85 kWh/kg of protein (with a “bonus” 0.45 kg of fat included in the deal).
17.8 is more than 20 times 0.85
This means that the energy requirement of microbial protein production, at its theoretical absolute best, is more than 20 times the actual real-world energy input for farming soybeans, per kilogram of protein.
Besides the advantage of requiring less than 1/20th of the energy inputs to produce protein, soybean farming provides fats and other nutrients not included in the microbial protein process.
In other words,
How much food can be produced with 1 kWh of energy inputs?
Soybean farming: 1176 grams of protein, plus 529 grams of fat, plus other nutrients.
Microbial protein production: less than 56 grams of protein, with no fat, and no other nutrients.
Has anyone taken in the plant residue ? The bean itself is a small fraction of the entire plant much of which that I have seen is ploughed in and therefore locks up carbon .
Regarding plant residues, the PNAS article linked in a previous post said they were “accounting only for the edible portion of crops”.
They also admit that “To our knowledge, no SCP [single-cell protein] studies have yet considered the life cycle of PV arrays within their analysis. Clearly, sustainable production and recycling of PV arrays are vital for PV-SCP to be environmentally friendly.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2015025118
The real-world farming data (which I listed above) presumably includes all of the farmers’ energy inputs (diesel, etc.) associated with the soybean crop, including what’s used for dealing with the plant residues.
Thanks Steve.
The soybean/studge comparison makes a damning case regarding the profligate energy requirements of the latter, though in his focus on land use Monbiot still appears to feel it better to spare land where possible, which is why he’s mainly gunning for the livestock farmers, though surprisingly he does say in the NZ interview he has “better ideas” than people eating soybeans for protein, so perhaps he feels even soybeans gotta go.
As ever, Simon Fairlie nails it in his final Regenesis review sentence concerning the dangerous diversion of such cavalier polemics. Unfortunately, in his marshalling of the figures as he sees it, I believe Monbiot reckons he’s simply calling a spade a spade.
Another one for the junkfood jukebox if I may, Chris – it’s Donovan’s Sunny Studge, sorry Goodge Street, just a pleasant mellow tune with a particularly nice flute, I think it is, at the bridge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuPUBb2PdzY
Thanks for all the studge energy research and comparisons, Steve. Have you thought about writing a full article/paper on this? It would be really good to get all the facts in one place on-line which people could be referred to. There is already good research published on why ‘renewables’ will never replace fossil fuels. Plus the global digital corporations are currently scouring the world for ‘renewable’ sources of energy for their huge server centres. (Amazon and Microsoft are currently active in this space in NZ, plus several smaller companies.) I am pretty sure that studge ‘farming’ will never happen at any scale because it is energetically and economically impossible, and Monbiot’s support for it will go the way of his championing of other daft ideas, like a world government.
This still leaves the question of what WILL work, and when, and where, and how. In that regard, here is a quote from Wendell Berry’s 2002 essay “The Agrarian Standard’:
“I don’t think that being landed necessarily means owning land. It does mean being connected to a home landscape from which one may live by the interactions of a local economy and without the routine intervention of governments, corporations, or charities.
In our time it is useless and probably wrong to suppose that a great many urban people ought to go out into the countryside and become homesteaders or farmers. But it is not useless or wrong to suppose that urban people have agricultural responsibilities that they should try to meet. And in fact this is happening. The agrarian population among us is growing, and by no means is it made up merely of some farmers and some country people. It includes urban gardeners, urban consumers who are buying food from local farmers, consumers who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the dependability of the corporate food system — people, in other words, who understand what it means to be landless.”
This is a ‘movement from below’ which can and is being misrepresented and gamed by the ‘wellness’ industry, and the ‘wellbeing economy’ promoters, and so on. I have been trying to work out what the bedrock principles are which can not be subverted and betrayed by corporate capitalist theory and practice. Ideas welcome!
And thanks for introducing me to Greg Brown, Chris.
Good songs and great guitar playing.
Finally, is the latest thing from Oxford the advice given by Monbiot in the RNZ interview (last 2 minutes) to prune stone fruit trees in spring when the sap is rising? Every fruit-growing book I have and all the on-line advice available says do it in late summer, after harvest, to reduce the risk of disease. I have 25 stone fruit trees, so I take this (mis?) information personally!
I’m not sure if it applies to the other stone fruits, Christine, but in ‘Plums – Production, Culture and Cultivar Directory’, UK-based forest gardener and author Martin Crawford, of the Agroforestry Research Trust, writes that established plum trees should be pruned ideally during early summer, when the fruitlets are still small. For formation pruning of planted trees he suggests late spring, thereafter pruning should be done in summer when the risk of infection from canker and silver leaf is less.
If you like Greg Brown, you might also like Jerry Jeff Walker, who has a wonderful back catalogue with hardly a dud IMO (Song for the Life, Morning Song for Sally, Friends and Memories, Down in Belize, Contrary to Ordinary – so many!) though he’s mostly known as the writer of Mr Bo Jangles.
I would also love to see all these calculations presented in a single spot, instead of spread across many comments on several blog posts. I think this is very rich data, and it would be great for it to be shareable and arguable.
I appreciate the suggestions to consolidate my studge comments and calculations into a larger post. Some of the pro-studge research papers I used at different times were contradictory on certain points (such as the amounts of required minerals and chemical inputs), so it would be good to add some clarifications.
I was thinking that Chris would be addressing the energy issues soon, and I was providing some information to consider in the meantime. However, if Chris wants to use a summary from me in one of his upcoming posts, then I can work on writing it to a higher standard.
Christine and Ruben, here is a link to all my studge calculations in a single comment, as you suggested:
https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1978#comment-254088
I enjoy the discussion here. Only wish to say I really liked the term gloop or industrial gloop more than studge. I have already started using it and can’t change now.
Thanks, Clara. Well, since George won’t debate with me or Simon, maybe the two of us should go head to head and thrash out whether to call it studge or gloop 🙂
Initially I called it eco-gloop. But then Miles King made the wise observation that there’s nothing very ‘eco’ about it.
Thanks for the ongoing discussion here. Small farm future is your one stop shop for intricate analysis of food system energetic futures and catchy song recommendations.
Like others, I’d welcome a summary report from Steve on his energetic analyses. But if Steve doesn’t do it, I’ll try to provide something along those lines when I come back to this in due course.
Maybe Monbiot thinks he’s calling a spade a spade. But he really isn’t. The analysis in his book is, indeed as both Simons have said, astonishingly cavalier.
I’m going to move on from this now, but I’ll return to it! Thanks for all the informative comments.
I’m no expert on fruit production, but indeed most people here prune stone fruits in summer.
Thanks for the stone fruit pruning feedback. The NZ experts say to prune in spring to shape the tree, but after harvest/in summer to avoid the risk of disease. Given that stone fruits produce their fruit on 2-3 year old wood, after the initial spring shaping when the tree is newly planted, I would think that summer is better as one can see what is old wood then.
I loved Kathryn’s account of what her Canadian grandparents ate and served up to others. Those weird processed cheese things….In NZ the brand was Chesdale and it inspired what has become a classic NZ ‘folk song’ – all details at https://www.folksong.org.nz/chesdale/
But Kathryn’s grandparents’ grandparents would have eaten something much more like what they ate in Missouri in the 1820s, as shown on the youtube channel Early American – look for ‘A Working Class Supper in 1820s America – Winter’, which went up in February 2022. It is really well done.
Lastly, I thought Monbiot’s ideas would be restricted to the chattering classes, but then I read a September 4 story in The Guardian about Animal Rebellion activists disrupting milk supplies in the UK last weekend as part of a campaign to get the government to switch all Britons to a plant-based diet and re-wild all the vacated pasture land. WTF???!!!
Twenty years ago Wendell Berry wrote an essay called ‘Two Minds’ (easy to find on line) where he says:
“The Rational Mind, convinced of the need to preserve “biological diversity,” wants to preserve it in “natural preserves.” It cannot conceive or tolerate the possibility of preserving biological diversity in the whole world, or of an economic harmony between humans and a world that by nature exceeds human comprehension.”
So true…
The milk disruption thing completely passed me by, but doesn’t surprise me much. It is tempting to dismiss such activity as the realm of the middle class given the privations the rest of us expect over the coming winter, but of course in reality it is more complicated than that.
I don’t know if anyone has run the numbers on this, but unless we reintroduce wolves in a big way (and maybe even if we do), re-wilding will involve eating a lot of deer if we want the trees to survive. Either way we end up with ruminants.