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 8, 2022 | 44 Comments
In this post, I aim to pick up where I left off last time with my review of George Monbiot’s Regenesis, mostly in reference to its theme of urbanism (there’s also a bit of housekeeping and an apology at the end).
But first, since it’s kind of a propos, some brief remarks on the trip I took last week, which involved me bicycling from Frome to Chepstow and back, among other things for an enjoyable in-conversation session with eco-philosopher and activist Rupert Read at the Green Gathering (a recording of most of it is here).
Much of the southern part of my route followed leafy cycle tracks repurposed from disused railways, flanked by large arable fields. Then a ride through central Bristol, swerving to miss a strung-out drug user sprawling on the track, took me onto another leafy cycleway through the Avon Gorge – once a place of heavy industry and shipping, but now far too small for the modern incarnations of those trades.
I crossed the Avon on a bridge I shared with the M5 – the first of several motorways entwining my route. These roads feel calm enough when you’re inside a car, but coming suddenly upon them on my bicycle I was shocked every time by the volume of traffic, its furious speed and sound, and the concrete-intensive brutalism of all this inter-city hurry. A sign by the Prince of Wales Bridge later in my trip reported that 25 million vehicles cross it annually. That’s a lot of kinetic energy to pack into three miles of road.
There were Samaritans telephones on all the major bridges I crossed, with their melancholy signage – “Whatever you’re going through, you don’t have to face it alone”. Back by the Avon, the suburb on the other side of the M5 bridge seemed dilapidated. I swerved around Nos canisters, rode through underpasses scattered with fly-tipped garbage and emblazoned with sinister graffiti and then weaved my way through a giant industrial zone of landfill sites, warehousing, sewage works, construction sites and massive wind turbines.
So, a journey from bosky rural byways that don’t quite conceal their industrial cradling, through mostly salubrious city centres and then rougher suburbs housing their workaday servitors, to the new industrial zones that potentiate them, accompanied by the ever-present roar of vehicles and people moving at speed to sustain it all. And gangs, drugs, loneliness amidst multitudes and suicide. Of course, this is only one way of representing what George Monbiot calls the given distribution of the world’s population, but I dearly wish he and others would question its given-ness a little more sceptically, and weren’t so darned pleased about what they see. During my ride, even in the leafy rural parts, it sometimes felt as if the whole fabric of this corner of southwest England was a kind of dysfunctional, ecocidal, industrial machine, sustained by its rushing human functionaries, with only a thin green veneer here and there concealing it.
Anyway, back to George’s book. So far as I know, he hasn’t seriously engaged with critiques of it from the intellectually more thoughtful end of the spectrum, preferring to post online some of the more fetid threats he’s received, which elicit no small number of ‘Go get ‘em, George’ replies from supporters displaying considerable disdain for rural and agrarian life.
And so another skin-deep culture war, benefitting nobody, judders into life. The case for ruralism over urbanism as I see it is simply that the dynamics of climate, energy, water, soil and political economy are going to propel multitudes of people to the world’s farmable regions sooner or later. The question we should really be addressing globally, though regrettably we’re not, is how to manage that process in the most humane and least disruptive way.
One of the best criticisms of my argument for this agrarian localist future that came my way in the wake of my Regenesis review was that it would be energetically costly to establish it. This, I think, is true. But it’s also true of every other proposal to put humanity on a surer long-term footing. The great advantage of agrarian localism is that once its basic structures are established, its recurrent energy costs can be low. Whereas schemes to preserve the urban-industrial status quo invariably have high recurrent energy costs. This certainly applies to George Monbiot’s farm free future, as Steve showed in his calculations under my previous post.
It’s obvious, really, that a proposal to replace sprawling farmland spaces using free solar radiation to energize production with highly concentrated industrial spaces using electricity transformed from other energy inputs by other human industries probably isn’t going to stack up well energetically. George’s vision of manufactured food, like many other ecomodernist schemes, assumes there will be abundant and cheap clean energy at humanity’s command in the future.
It seems to me more likely that concentrated energy will be scarce and pricey compared to the fossil fuelled bonanza experienced by present generations, and it will make no sense to waste it producing food when free solar energy metabolized by plants can do the job. The diffuseness of this solar energy will be a driving force of human biogeography in the future. Today’s world is one of urban concentration built on a legacy of mining energetic stocks. Tomorrow’s will be mostly one of rural de-concentration oriented to skimming renewable energetic flows.
Presently, there is no broad-based politics geared to this emerging reality, certainly in the richer parts of the world with the longest histories of stock-mining and capital-concentration such as southern England. We’re still stuck with the exhausted legacies of modernist politics, with their emphasis on market signals, nationalist symbols or class struggle as the key to redemption. All of these fix their eyes too firmly on capital cities, government machineries, political centralization and hurried inter-city journeys to build the economy. All of them take as a given the centrifugal relationship between countryside and city that I discuss in Chapter 15 of my book, where the countryside works as a basically inferior servitor to the city, albeit dotted with pleasant islands of retreat for the wealthy who’ve made their money in the latter.
As I’ve already said, I think ‘simple energetics’ or simple biogeography are going to redistribute populations away from urban areas and towards rural ones in the future. In England, the countryside will no longer be largely the preserve of the rich. Like it or not, people of many kinds will go to it to seek prosperity. This creates the potential for people to forge local agrarian autonomies and genuinely agroecological culture. But that’s not a done deal just because of the maths of a more populated countryside. It’s possible that cities and their elites will retain their centrifugal pull.
To prevent that happening requires politics of a kind we don’t yet have – a politics where cities serve the countryside and its inhabitants at least as much as they’re served by them. I indicate this diagrammatically on page 210 of A Small Farm Future (Figure 15.1) and discuss it in the last part of Chapter 15 in terms of rural disruptors to the centrifugal pull of the city – disruptors that build local political and economic autonomy, that extricate themselves as far as possible, which means not totally, from long-distance trade and geopolitically-centred bureaucratic rule.
Since, as I’ve said, there isn’t a mass politics around this at present, I’m currently quite supportive of many kinds of initiative where people put themselves in the disruptor role. I’m supportive of rich people buying houses in the country with big gardens, growing their own vegetables and joining community organisations. I’m supportive of impoverished van dwellers parking up in laybys and trying to minimize their housing costs. I’m supportive of farm shops, independent town councils, guerilla gardening, allotment associations, people buying small plots of farmland or woodland and living in caravans on them while they start market gardens or charcoal businesses, people occupying (considerately) disused or misused land, people trespassing on aristocratic estates to (sustainably) pick edible mushrooms, wealthy smallholders, impoverished peasants, wily farmers and so on and so on.
Eventually, all of this will have to coalesce into a new politics of local autonomy and access to land, which I think will have to be a populist politics of alliance. We’ll get onto that in more detail when I move to discussing the final part of my book in this blog cycle. But just as George’s gloop factories require a substrate or a feedstock in order to ferment their new kinds of food, so we require a substrate or a feedstock in order to ferment new kinds of agrarian localist politics. It’s from the low base of our present politics and of people trying to get by in the countryside that we need to start creating it.
There are genuine grounds to worry that the outcomes of this local political brokerage won’t always be congenial. Perhaps they’re balanced by the equally genuine grounds to worry that centralized national politics no longer offers that certainty either. The liberal-democratic firmament of late 20th century politics has almost gone now. It seems likely that, locally, nationally or globally, nobody will be coming to save us – unless there’s some other iteration of the centralized state that I’ve not foreseen to safeguard against the potential tyranny of localism, without becoming a tyranny itself?
Even so, I think it’s worth taking seriously the downsides of a new politics geared around rural disruptors. At the session I did with Rupert Read, somebody raised the issue of the conformism of rural society and the greater possibilities for finding one’s tribe in urban settings, particularly for people with spiritualities, sexualities or other traits at variance with majority assumptions in conservative countrysides. That’s sometimes been true in the past, though it remains a story of the future that’s yet to be written. But instead of further belabouring my take on this point, I’d be interested to see what other people make of it in the comments below (note that to be sure of getting my attention, comments should be posted under the relevant post at Small Farm Future and not at other sites where this post may be syndicated). I’ll try to formulate some further thoughts in the light of anything that comes back to me.
Finally, and talking of posting comments, I recently noticed there were a few comments that had been sitting in the moderation queue undetected by me – some from long established commenters, and one from a new commenter. Please accept my apologies for the oversight. If you do post a comment that doesn’t appear, feel free to nudge me about it via the Contact Form. On the rare occasions when I actively choose not to publish a comment it will be for a reason, and I will contact you to explain what that reason is. So if you post a comment that doesn’t appear and you don’t hear from me, it’s best to assume simple incompetence on my part and act accordingly (it’s probably best to assume simple incompetence on my part in a wide variety of other circumstances, but let us not digress at this late stage in the post). Also, finally, if you include more than one hyperlink in a comment it will automatically be held for moderation as an anti-spam measure. So reference judiciously…
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The supposition that we can more efficiently replace the massive inputs provided by the ecosphere is just head-shakingly ignorant.
Lights instead of sunlight. Water collection, filtration, piping and pumping instead of rain. Synthetic fertilizers instead of manure, worm casting, leaf litter, crop residues, and fungal networks. Mesh baskets to hold plants instead of soil. Pest control by ladybugs, birds, and bats.
Every single aspect requires that we extract, refine, manufacture, transport, and dispose of materials in order to replace what the ecosphere has been doing an excellent job of for 500 million years.
It is just head-shaking ignorance and delusion, no less fanciful than arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I caught up with the last post’s comments, and dug up an article on the massive challenges facing bioreactors. I posted this under Steve’s math, but wanted to share here so folks could see it.
“Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
“And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.””
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
The assumption that rural communities are all conforming is probably pretty prevalent but it is also not totally accurate. I certainly know of places where assimilation is gonna be required to be part of the community. I grew up in one of those. But I have also witnessed rural communities centered around small regenerative farms, good food, art, music, and community. They are reimagining the whole thing and are at least as open and accepting as any city I have been in. In fact maybe even more so given they understand that dirty finger nails, work pants, beater trucks and farmers tans are a sign of thrift and hard work and not something to be looked down upon. Interestingly the city folks flock to these places looking for something (authenticity maybe). I dont see the opposite happening as much.
It is funny how any criticism of urban setting is missing. There was a time when serious journalist had plenty to say about the misery and horrors of the city. Strikes me there is more narrative shaping going on than any serious reflection. Just another cog in the modernist propaganda machine.
Lived in a city once , my elderly neighbour had seven locks on her front door , lived as quietly and timidly as a mouse , no one ever waved smiled or even noticed you were alive cities are anonymous places , check out LA where people were stepping over a dead person until the stench got too bad .
Cities don’t like them don’t go near them !
And yet I live in London and I know and talk to many of my neighbours, have quite a few friends within walking distance and more within cycling distance, and regularly run into people I know when I’m out and about.
Admittedly some of this is because we’ve lived in the same house for nine and a half years, and the same area of London for a few years more than that..That is unusual for renters today. But it is, in fact, possible to be neighbourly and form communities within city settings..
Josh’s comment, ” Interestingly the city folks flock to these places looking for something (authenticity maybe). I don’t see the opposite happening as much,” reminded me of a piece written by David Brooks (2016) on almost the same theme (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html).
Brooks’ opening paragraph parallels our discussion here, “In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one. This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way.”
The dominant narrative of our time celebrates the modern, the new, and the novel, usually with a consumerist framing. But maybe the psychological pull of clarity, purpose, and meaningful action (all abundant in an agrarian context) is just as powerful, if in a quieter voice.
One quiet voice (well, at least her characters were usually humble) was Ursula Le Guin who accepted a major award in 2014 with these words, “I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.” And those are the very features that has me returning to this blog and following its comments despite too much other work to do.
Get a copy of ” Empire of the Summer Moon ” ( Comanche )
Or ” Nine years among the Indians ”
Some reading there .
I have myself cycled most of the route Chris describes in this post and can second some of his comments about it.
The route goes through the Avon gorge. On the other side of the river from the cycle path is what is effectively a motorway. Half-part eight on a sunday morning and you can still hear traffic from the cycle path.
I think that cultural conflicts between long-established and “conservative” rural populations and newcomers from the city will be the least of their problems, at least in the beginning. When hunger or social unrest start driving people out of the city, everyone in the country will be suffering too. Keep in mind that no significant population can move to the country until after industrial agriculture has failed and while cities will be in dire straits after that happens, the rural economy will also be in tatters.
In situations of severe stress, when everyone is in the same boat, people will either rapidly coalesce and work to keep themselves afloat or conflict will rapidly drive most people away. If the latter, a new population will descend on the countryside and try again. Rural regions will become the new frontier, where everything is in flux, a veritable free-for-all, until folks settle down and create some more permanent and stable social structures with an equally stable population. Only then will newcomers need to watch their step and work really hard to fit in to a society whose population has gone through a lot to just survive and create a little stability for themselves. No freeloaders or troublemakers welcome.
Chris,
In the Avon Gorge you were cycling along the old tow path where gangs of men would tow ships up the river to Bristol.
Ironically the road on the other side of the George, the A4 Portway was the first purpose built motor road built in the UK, the but between The Suspension Bridge and Sea Mills was constructed on the route of the Port and Pier Railway which ran to a pier at Avonmouth – the charming part of Bristol you cycled through, amongst other destinations the railway served was The Avonmouth Hotel and Pleasure Gardens.
Such is life.
But being interested in Railway History I inevitably end up studying what life was like in the period up to the 1960’s and it highlights the challenges of moving back to a low energy society, how will we do it and how can we take most of the rest of the population with us?
Caveat on this comment: the most rural place I’ve ever lived was still a city of 35000 people.
But if we look at, say, homosexuality… there is a stereotype that in the past it was seen as evil to be gay but now we are more “enlightened”. The actual history is a little more complicated than that.
I wonder if some modern urban expectations of the countryside as “backward” or oppressive are partly projections, and partly due to the narratives that privilege stories of young people who felt trapped in rural areas moving to the city and finding soulmates for the first time, while erasing stories of, say, two spinster women setting up house together in a village.
The counter-argument here would be to look at anti-Semitism throughout history and the way Jewish people and communities were consistently made into scapegoats in Europe, resulting in repeated violent pogroms. Modernity… didn’t exactly change that, though, and I’m not aware of it being particularly worse in rural Vs urban areas.
It is true that in a city you have the opportunity to meet many more people, so if you are a bit odd in some way, you have a greater chance of finding people who share that oddness. I do think this is important; as a fairly isolated teenager the internet (still new then) was a real help to me, but it isn’t the same as spending time together in person. But I would argue that many (not all) urban dwellers today are less involved in their local community and less likely to interact more than superficially with people who aren’t like them. Many of my non-churchgoing friends don’t spend any social time at all with people who are old enough to be their parents except maybe their actual parents, don’t interact with children on a regular basis unless they have children themselves, and don’t really have many friends from other cultures or even income brackets. Church attendance means I do all of these things; still, my non-churchgoing friendship group skews very white, very Anglophone (though with plenty of bilingual and trilingual people), very queer, very left wing (with widely varying opinions on implementation) and very middle class in terms of how we make our livelihood. (Insert here the tangent about the hollowing out and eventual collapse of the middle class due to rent-seeking and wage theft.)
I also note that the popular narrative of rural areas as excessively conformist, intolerant or whatever is one that has arisen in a context of pretty relentless hollowing out of rural life as the population moves to the cities. Maybe this is just a positive feedback system that has been in place, in England at least, since the Enclosures? People left because they couldn’t stay, so local services of whatever kind were reduced, which made it harder for the next people to stay. Places that are going through population contraction like that will select for people who don’t like change and are wealthy enough (in real terms, not bank account numbers) to stay put, and people who move to the city are a self-selected group who are perhaps more open to change, so there could be an origin for the stereotype.. But re-ruralisation will be a completely different context.
Rural southern England does seem very populated to me, compared to the vast expanses of prairie of the road trips of my childhood, but there were ghost towns there too.
As someone who frequently moans about being stuck in the city because I don’t drive a car, I am very interested both in how to resettle the countryside without making it car-dependent, and also in a conversation about what current city-dwellers can do to truly serve the countryside — to have a mutually beneficial relationship rather than an extractive one.
“Accordingly, in speaking with rural queers throughout Canada, Michael Riordon observed that many rural queers find that they are judged and granted acceptance into the community based primarily by their farming abilities, their community involvement, and their roles as good neighbours (1996:47). Indeed, social involvement and community participation are strongly embraced within rural communities and are the primary means by which respect and reciprocity are achieved (Smith and Mancoske 1997:17; Wilson 2000:208; McCarthy 2000).”
“Of those five who did experience verbal homophobia in their rural towns, two also reported having experienced homophobia (and to higher degrees) while living in the city.”
Taking New Directions: How Rural Queerness Provides Unique Insights into Place, Class, and Visibility
Kelly Baker
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291345413_Taking_New_Directions_How_Rural_Queerness_Provides_Unique_Insights_into_Place_Class_and_Visibility
Thanks for this!
Five in the whole of Canada ?
To clarify, those are two separate quotes from a research article focusing mainly on the “experiences of rural GLBT Nova Scotians”. The total number of participants wasn’t clear, but the five mentioned were “less than half” of the participants in the Nova Scotia study.
Living in a county with fewer with people 35000 ( nine per square mile , some think that’s getting crowded ) with two small towns where most of the people live the basic thought is we don’t give a crap wether you are homosexual black yellow Hispanic whatever , your character matters and that’s about all , our two gas stations are owned by 1 a Nepalese family and 2 a Hindustani family ( the Hindustani speaks with a broad Birmingham black country accent ) both keep a loaded pistol under the cash register , coming and trying to ram city ways down our throats is what gets our goat , ” there is no cinema ” well no their ain’t but there is rodeo , bull riding and ” cowboys ” (treated like dirt ) who get accosted for wearing spurs , ” people carry guns !!! Well yes we do coming across a rabid coyote ain’t funny ,( I shot 5 rabid animals last year ) they complain of shooting feral pigs , nasty buggers they are ! And then wonder why they are ignored , fit I or don’t come .
I think the ‘opportunity’ element you highlight here is indeed important. Regardless of what proportion of city people are small-c conservative in their social habits, the fact is that a small percentage of politically active people translates into a larger number of people in cities where the population is denser.
I think we need to take seriously the fact that political activism in global core regions is often city-based, whatever we think of their politics or their likelihood of success, and however we might measure that success. This has a lot to do with histories of political activism over the past couple of centuries, which was often based in urban workplaces, but I think the opportunities afforded by denser living and throughput of people is also more likely to revitalise political activism in the present.
In more rural areas, there is both less of a history of activism and more stability in less dense populations. Even where villages have been remade as retirement settlements, the process was often gradual and took place among a segment of the population more likely to possess their own resources and not to want to rock the boat.
I think the key to any activism lies in what could broadly be called assembly practices. Clearly city living is very amenable to regular assembly of many kinds. Social media has provided an interesting addition to such practices over recent decades, but not a replacement, and is ultimately limited in how far it enables people to push activism forward. So if we want a new rural politics, we need to think about how we are going to engineer regular gatherings of interested people. This might well involve piggybacking on existing practices but will ultimately require pushing beyond them.
So, liberal attitudes might well be spread quite evenly across both urban and rural areas, despite the stereotypes, but they don’t really mean much politically without more assertive political activity, and I would suggest the scope for that is where the focus needs to lie. Likewise, judging people on their desire to conform or contribute is all very well, but useful political activity will doubtless appear quite disruptive to many, and cause discomfort, before it’s utility becomes more generally recognised.
Why try and fix something that ain’t broke ?
Yes fifty years ago there was racism , that generation has died out and took it with them , I would say that rural Texas is far more multicultural than most cities and they do not build a little China or a little Vietnam or Mexico city we even have a Brazilian family they mix , live in the same street , they get on together , it’s the Californian refugees that do not mix , somehow they think they are better than us .
People come from the cities for the lifestyle, peace , low crime here why try and change it into the shithole they just fled ?
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/171aaa9017804a6e.jpg
But I think the point here is that the world is pretty much broke and therefore no one place within it can expect to ride things out by staying the same, nor should it.
We will have to create or reinvent ways of welcoming people and/or being welcomed and dealing together with the changes that ensue.
The stereotype of rural life is that everyone goes to the parish church, or to town meetings, or similar. I suspect this is much less true since car culture/commuter culture set in.
I think it’s not difficult to get people meeting together regularly if you commit to eating together regularly. Maybe that looks like visiting the local pub for a roast of a Sunday afternoon; maybe it looks like someone organising a bring-and-share meal (“pot luck” in North American) in a village hall or even someone’s barn. Maybe it means three farms that aren’t really in town but are close to one another get into the habit of dining together on Friday nights, or a cup of coffee and breakfast after morning chores, or some other thing.
Eating together, especially sharing food you’ve produced yourself. builds relationships between people. If those relationships are there, and someone says “I think we should have a formal meeting about an Important Issue”, people will either sort it out without the formal meeting, or they’ll turn up to the formal meeting. But if you try to call such a meeting when those relationships are absent, fractured or failed, then most of the people who turn up will be the officious busybodies who really like going to meetings — which will soon put off the rest.
It is possible, of course, to end up with a situation where people all agree that they shouldn’t have meetings, they should “just” decide things amicably, which is open to all sorts of problems when those with forceful personalities bulldoze the rest. I think it’s good to keep the social events mostly social, and the governance events focused mostly on governance, and to find a balance between the two. I have no idea what the ideal ratio is, though; most organisations I’ve been part of err on the side of too many governance events and not enough social events.
(If my allotment society wants more people to be involved in admin and site maintenance, they should really have a monthly bring-and-share lunch in summer. Ho hum.)
I think your points about eating together are spot on, and ameliorating more formal assemblies with food will always go down well. An allotment society is perhaps a good example of an existing institution that might form the kernel for more expansive activity in the future.
With regard to governance events more generally, preventing them from becoming the territory of officious busy-bodies seems essential, as does keeping participation as wide as possible and practical. I think it helps to have a sense of formality about these things, so that decision-making is something that all can see happening ‘properly’ – early notions of public were very much concerned with the idea of what we might call transparency – something is public if it is witnessed. It’s a good way of circumventing ‘amicable’ stitch-ups, albeit imperfectly.
In terms of balance between social and governance events, and drawing on your point about eating together, perhaps the ‘ritual meal’ is a useful notion – ritual in the sense that it constitutes an event with structured elements built around defined purposes, but friendly enough to allow sociability to smooth jagged edges and encourage flexibility where necessary.
In other words, as members of this atomised modern society, we need to invent a formal practice of mass picnicing!
I’m Christian and we already have Mass. No need to invent it…
😉
There are genuine grounds to worry that the outcomes of this local political brokerage won’t always be congenial.
https://petersweden.substack.com/p/dutch-farmers-11200
The Dutch way is certainly UN congenial and seems to be the absolute opposite of the small farm future , the EU and the rest of the Anglo Saxon world wants to drive people into what will be ghetos , considering farmers feed the world yet politicos think that goop will feed the world therefore cutting down on pollution do little to actually stop pollution. Holland DAF truck plant output creates more CO2 pollution in four months than Dutch farmers do in a year so they close down farmers whose cows create the urea ( DeC ) that they pump into truck exhausts to clean them up , they hate the smelly cows and love shiny 500 horse power trucks , perhaps when the people get hungry enough they will remove the morons that are doing their best to build ghetos to stack them up in and feed them the new PATENTED goop and start small people sized farms but I expect we will have to see blood on the streets before it happens .
Thanks for all the comments. Between you, I think you’ve answered the question I posed as well or better than I could have, and I don’t have much to add. So thanks for saving me from further writing! But I will pick up some of the points about the urban and the rural that you’ve all raised again when we come to Part IV of the book.
Interesting point from Josh about how the critical ambivalence towards urbanism of earlier thought – certainly a big feature of 19th/early 20th century sociology – has gone missing. And yes, ‘narrative shaping’ rather than reflection seems bang on.
Also thanks to Martin & John for the local colour & local history…
Nice read, thanks. Given the collapse of capitalism underway and wider strains portending that we are in a wider societal collapse scenario, the project you offer and suggest comes with this notion of social justice and giving people a stake in the future, via land ownership and reconnecting them not only to the means of production for their continued existence, but ‘nature’ and also one another too.
The loss and death of community life via the enforced movement of people to cities, this loss of face to face small communities bounded by the local with shorter chains of interdependence that are more personal, graspable and ‘real’, gets at wider human needs that were thrown to the wayside. Thrown to the wayside, I might add, in pursuit of ‘efficiency’, ‘profit for a few’ through what was a general nuanced ‘enslavement’, learnt from the immediately previous and overlapping periods of colonialism and the use of slaves from Africa and elsewhere, to work those plantations.
And here being understanding of our history and the unreality of our postmodern times, the death of what makes us human, what you suggest is a return to being more authentically human and in a way that meets these other genetically encoded needs that I would say, and as Maslow and others would argue, are vital for human happiness. I feel these aspects are not talked about enough nor highlighted enough in your above piece and your book……
(Caveat: I’m only part way through your book so I might discover these points are focused on adequately enough by you.)
………as for Gorge Monbiot, well, I do not think he understands what the ‘human’ needs and what its wider spectrum of needs are and how social justice works and is required, to prevent widespread civil unrest and riots too as collapse continues and wealth gaps increase at pace.
Thanks again,
Amin
I am old enough to remember when cities had communities , I went to school with some of them , that was before the powers that be decided on what was called slum clearances , houses with toilets down the yard and no bathrooms , they exchanged two story ” slums ” for ten story slums with bathrooms most which have been knocked down , I participated in one in Linwood built for a car factory workers (Birkenhead) driving a truck hauling the concrete away , they were twenty years old and no one would live in them , the old back to back terraced had a community , the high rise did not , People voted with their feet and left .
A few further thoughts.
Thanks to Andrew for a characteristically thought-provoking comment, and to those engaging with him. I will try to pick up on this issue when I get to blogging about Part IV of my book. I find ‘assembly practices’ a useful framing, although I sometimes think people obsess too much about the practices of the assembly itself and not enough about the practices that are prompting them to assemble. This leads into considerations of subsidiarity, and to the kind of dilemmas of power that Kathryn points to. More on all that anon, I hope.
Thanks also to Amin for your comment. Possibly indeed I don’t talk enough about authenticity and happiness The main places where I do touch on it are Chapters 16 & 19, and perhaps the epilogue. I’m wary of over-pressing this because I think the transitions we face are tremendously challenging and I don’t want to invoke over-easy agrarian utopias. But there are also counter-arguments to that, and I’m minded to go more in that direction in future. I touch on some of those framing issues in Chapter 2.
Also just wanted to go back to Raymond’s comment and thank him for the native/colonial America example. Again, this raises some themes I’d like to explore further…
…not least in relation to my critiques of George Monbiot, who I managed to prod into stopping ignoring me briefly on Twitter yesterday. He came out swinging pretty hard, describing my approach as “the most self-indulgent proposal I’ve ever seen”. I swung back. So, two old blokes yelling at each other – just another day on Twitter, I guess. But I’ll try to write something about it that extrapolates the broader issues as I seem them.
I’ll look forward to that, Chris.
‘Two old blokes shouting at one another’ is exactly how I’ve come to simplify the Biden-Putin showdown to myself, concerning which I heard some interesting news via a Ukrainian contact this morning – no doubt I’m way behind the curve – but this article kind of sums it up.
https://hungary.postsen.com/world/39282/American-colonization-in-Ukraine-they-bought-up-a-third-of-the-agricultural-land.html
Looks like bugs are off the menu .
Are you sure this is correct? The law allowing Ukrainians to purchase farmland prohibited foreign purchasers without a national referendum. As far as I know, such a referendum has never taken place. Foreign companies can lease land. I did read that the Chinese have leased a lot of agricultural land.
https://medium.com/@pitt_bob/has-zelensky-sold-off-ukraines-agriculture-to-us-multinationals-ab3cd76937ca
Phew! Thanks for that, Joe. I should have dug into that A LOT deeper than I did. It just sounded so plausible!:)
Apologies for sullying the site with that link. I shall now ask the Ukrainian where he’d heard that story, and maybe attempt to put him right.
Thanks for your response Chris. I, er, prodded George on twitter so I feel some kind of responsibility for your engagement there, and I say and apologise for that because you report it was not as constructive as it could have been!
I think, sometimes, we become too focused on individual ‘lifestyle’ creation, as you rightly identify; this Zukin ‘Shopping’ and making monad-selves thing. When I read you I think creating spaces of interactional opportunities, the harvest festival, the village fete or one of the many other communal things we used to do more regularly, a worthy addendum; rural carnivals, in short, and opportunities for collective experiences that we then reminisce on<- a primary mode for human bonding and humour.
Georg Simmel was right when he spoke to the magic that happens when a dyadic relationship between two becomes triadic, with the introduction of a third person and, as some social network theorists will tell you, there are both upper and lower limits to what tends communal life towards being harmonious, rich and rewarding. Of course, that is per squared area and what happens when you cram everyone in.
It is not so much a utopian position I think I operate from, though honestly there is nothing with that, but rather looking to other cultures too, how smaller based communities can be and getting at what the human is sans 'Western consumer man' (sorry, old fashioned and un-PC). Here (that is elsewhere), notions of what is wealth and affluence differ, as does this notion of happiness through consumption and material self, in this consumer sense.
Granted, it is always hard(er) to ask people to be reflective on and to address their own wants and desires. People in our culture have been, after all, subjected to quite the sophisticated psychological techniques by way of marketing and adverts 'from cradle to grave', to amplify, stimulate and even shape those desires. And if that is turned off for a generation?
I digress slightly so will end by trying to be more succinct in my point; I think we need to come at it across all levels of analysis micro-meso-macro (etc.), to set out the extended layers, opportunities and visions, as to what type of communal life and interactional opportunities we might be able to bring to be, to fill worsening emotional-social voids. I would humbly suggest this would involve looking at cultures other than our own too.
Amin
My 2 cents worth… I think what Chris and others are puzzling over is how to best smooth the way towards sustainable energy flow living – which is coming like it or not due to the abuse of fossil fuels for the past century. But the time frame for this is unknown, and meanwhile those of us alive today who care about such matters are having to re-examine all the assumptions made about politics, economics, etc. in a time of peak fossil fuel use.
I recently read this article – https://roarmag.org/magazine/dual-power-then-and-now-from-the-iroquois-to-cooperation-jackson/ – about how some people in some places are approaching this issue. Assembly practices are part of it, as are food sharing, health care, repair spaces/workshops, etc, etc. Whatever the community needs and can offer. The difference between these initiatives and the charitable food banks and other ‘helping’ services is that they are based on a principle of solidarity which extends beyond the locality where they take place and have political ramifications at a larger scale. They are also not meant to be a temporary reaction to increased need due to whatever crisis or long emergency has been generated by the global and local elites; they are a sensible way to live regardless of material circumstances.
How this can work where you are and I am will look very different. My examples for this will come next – but for now the sun is out and has melted the frost and I have to go prune my raspberry canes!
There was a native city just across the river from St Louis , the remains are still there , huge mounds covering many acres , the historians tell us it collapsed around 1490 , 1/3 of skeletons dug up had fatal head wounds , many had broken arms , others showed signs of strangulation what happened who knows but it’s end was violent .
Graeber & Wengrow speak at some length about Cahokia in ‘The Dawn of Everything’.
Apparently, it was a really nasty totalitarian society, except that nearly everybody left the city for a good part of the year.
Nobody has figured out why they would come back.
My memory is that Cahokia collapsed a couple hundred years before Columbus, and that Cahokia was widely known as an example of how not to be.
Anyway, there is good evidence that the Iriquois did many of the things they did for the express purpose of preventing that nasty kind of society reappearing.
What I think is really funny though, is that not far from the mounds built by the people of Cahokia, the city of St. Louis is building another massive mound – the city dump:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/WM+-+Milam+Landfill/@38.6651278,-90.1169738,1183m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!1m2!2m1!1sst+louis+dump!3m5!1s0x87df52b63a96c8d1:0x57279c070ff96a7c!8m2!3d38.6651276!4d-90.1087337!15sCg1zdCBsb3VpcyBkdW1wkgEMZ2FyYmFnZV9kdW1w
Chris.
I haven’t read Regenisis, but I wouldn’t get too worked up about any form of future society that requires “renewables” as a central plank. Such societies aren’t going to exist. Renewables are not an option. Increasing cost due to more difficult ore extraction and rising ECOE (Energy Costs of Energy). Urban living without energy, isn’t going to be possible. We’ll……not as we know it now!
On a slight tangent. I’ve just reread The Dawn of Everything. Too much to take in on the first read.
Chris. Do you know much about the ayllu system of social/land management used by pre-Inca societies in Latin America? Seems to have some interesting ideas on land allocation, in particular.
The ayllu system is still in operation in Latin America, John. Here is an article – https://satoyama-initiative.org/case_studies/the-ayllu-system-of-the-potato-park-cusco-peru/ – about how it works in the Potato Park in Peru.
Someone reading this who knows Peru better than I do could perhaps comment on how widespread and functional the ayllu method of socio-political organisation is elsewhere in the country and neighbouring states. I first read about it in ‘Soil and Civilization’ by Edward Hyams (1952). Chapter XIII is on the soils of the Western Andes – Hyams is very positive about the Inca and related peoples being soil-makers rather than exploiters, and also being well-organised to provide for all. But the book and hence its sources are 70 years old now – hopefully someone can point us to more up-to-date work.
Thanks Christine
I’ll check it out.
I like the idea of a “collective”. With land allocation decided by the whole community. This opposed to individual private ownership.
But………….,I’m self-employed and like the autonomy that it gives. Am I for the collective or a private little farm all of my own??????????
there is a old saying , a fish rots from the head down , , in every previous civilisation from Mesopotamia through to North and central America the cities collapsed first , weather changes , lack of silly things like firewood , and the final problem of food production and transport of same , after the collapse the peasants carry on where they can .
Good short book here on the ‘agrarian question’ comprising three essays by Samir Amin, which bear on the current topic considered in its global context. I’d say they’re thought-provoking, whatever your own political stripe, and hopefully of interest to some here.
http://www.agrariansouth.org/short-book-series/
Thanks for further comments. I might take a look at the Amin book, Andrew. Definitely feels overdue to reformulate Kautsky’s agrarian question…
I don’t know a whole lot about ayllus. I’m up for the notion that the Incas had good soil preservation practices, not so much that endogamous clans within a wider colonial structure are necessarily the way to go, or that clan property is necessarily better than household property + commons. But we debated all this on here at some length recently, so I have nothing much further to add!
Christine, I’d be interested to see where you go with examples of economic assembly as non-local solidary sharing.
And Cahokia – could it be a model for the collapse of the present imperium?
As far as I am aware the ayllu system pre-dates the Inca empire.
In fact the Inca appropriated the existing ayllu accounting system to its own ends to extract/record tribute extracted from it’s conquered subjects.
Fair point, although the way pre-existing structures are re-purposed within distributed colonial power arrangements is also of relevance.
Meant to respond also to Amin – indeed, there’s a lot to be said for learning from other cultures and operating at multiple levels, as exemplified by the case John raises, which I should perhaps apply myself to. At the same time, I think the learning from others has to resonate deeply with practical applications – in other words be built slowly into adaptive culture.
In the Dawn of Everything, there is also reference to Basque forms of communal land allocation/management. It’s in the same section as the ayllu, but again, not in much detail.
Never enough time to take all this stuff in!!!!!