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 March 16, 2023 | 106 Comments
Here, I’m going to continue the discussion of the supersedure state from my last post, focusing on the Welsh perspective developed by Carwyn Graves in his excellent review of my book, A Small Farm Future. I should have done this a long time ago, but it’s taken me this long to blog my way to the part of the book that’s most relevant to his review, particularly the critical aspects of it.
To over-generalize about those critical aspects, Carwyn’s main objection is my tendency towards over-generalization. Small farm futures, he rightly says, are going to be locally specific, will look different in different places, and will succeed or fail as a result of specific local dynamics – dynamics which I don’t really consider in any detail in the book.
Carwyn calls this a weakness in my argument. Since he kindly goes on to describe my book as a ‘watershed work’ in the same sentence, I don’t plan to get too shirty about this, but I suppose if I were to mount a defence I’d probably say that I see this less as a weakness of my argument so much as an unavoidable political faultline in the societies to come, a practical weakness to be worked on politically, which I can point to in a book but can’t really resolve on the page.
My main purpose in the book was only to suggest that a small farm future is pretty much a given, and whether that future proves attractive or ugly is collectively down to us and our successors. Happily for me, Carwyn basically accepts that suggestion and moves on quickly to a key follow-up question – how to make that future attractive in his own location, and how to surmount the particular local obstacles involved. Unfortunately, remarkably few people do accept my basic suggestion, which I think is going to make the landing all the harder. A large part of my efforts in the book went into explaining why I believe they should accept it, leaving me little room to sketch out the details of future local transformations – transformations which, in any case, I doubt can be convincingly analysed a priori.
All the same, I think Carwyn does identify a potential weak point in my argument where I state that ‘everybody’s voice counts’ in the formation of local agrarian societies. He suggests this too easily glosses the practical difficulties of making them count, and he’s probably right. This leads him into a subtle and thought-provoking account of these difficulties in the context of contemporary Wales.
There are three aspects of his account that I’ll address here. The first is what he calls the lack of a strong civic sphere in Wales, with the national conversation taking place within different bubbles of language and historical identity, leaving little room to discuss other issues in ways possible for countries with more unified civic spheres. The second is, in his words, “the destruction over recent decades of the lingering vestiges of peasant culture in this country, as in other parts of north-western Europe”. And the third is the need for a successful small farm society to be built bottom-up within rural communities, whose members are unlikely to put their hands to the task unless they fully own the process without feeling it’s being foisted on them as an outside solution to somebody else’s problem.
These are all excellent points which I suspect are relevant in varied local ways in many places besides Wales, so I’ll try to address them briefly.
The first one I think may cut both ways. It’s likely that in the challenging times upon us every existing social faultline will get vigorously stress-tested, so the issues Carwyn raises about the civic sphere in Wales may indeed prove problematic there (or, in fact, here, as appropriately enough I happen to be in Wales as I write these words).
On the other hand, such faultlines may also be sources of local political identity facing away from the existing bureaucratic centralized state, which could be a positive in supersedure situations where state power is waning. Places with a strong civic sphere that’s historically oriented to a powerful state apparatus may actually be in a worse situation as that apparatus falters. I suspect Welsh and Scottish nationalisms may, for example, be more likely to form a promising basis for future small farm societies than English nationalisms grounded in a sense of past world-historical colonial power of the kind that have led to dead-end fantasies of national renewal of the Faragist sort. Carwyn aptly describes Wales as a small country on the periphery of the western inner ring of the global capitalist economy. If and when the centre cannot hold, the periphery may not be the worst place to be.
I’ll turn now to Carwyn’s second point about the final destruction of peasant culture in Europe. The destruction is plain enough, albeit depending somewhat on how you define ‘destruction’ and ‘peasant culture’ (Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, for example, has discussed the process of ‘re-peasantization’ occurring in contemporary Europe and elsewhere). But inasmuch as the destruction may have been slightly less thorough in parts of Wales than in, say, most of England, with the former’s small owner-occupied farms and persisting sense of local rural identity, this raises interesting issues.
Perhaps my approach to this in A Small Farm Future was too dualistic. Basically, I said good luck to the small minority of people globally who’ve been able to preserve some kind of local agrarian livelihood autonomy through all that modernity has thrown at them, and I hoped they’d be left alone to get on with it in the next phase of global history. I then devoted most of my attention to those people, the global majority, who are going to have to reinvent themselves as peasantries. In this latter case, while I offered unreserved support to anyone who speaks up for ordinary agrarian, village or small town life, I expressed impatience with such arguments when they start building boundaries around who’s entitled to claim authentic local identity and who’s defined as a kind of deracinated bearer of global modernist culture – mostly because in a country like England (or Wales … or most places in the Global North) it struck me that everybody is a kind of deracinated bearer of global modernist culture, and claims to local authenticity seemed little more than a rhetorical tactic to claim social status.
But Carwyn’s analysis makes me think I should have been a bit more nuanced about this. If you push my argument to its extreme it easily becomes a kind of primitivism of the form that, say, an indigenous person in Australia or the Americas can’t be a ‘real’ indigenous person if they drive a car … or small-scale farmers in Wales can’t articulate the importance of local identity and history simply because they inevitably have to involve themselves with non-local identity and history. To put myself in the frame, when I was searching for land to live on I looked at a few properties in Wales and decided against them partly on the grounds that I thought I’d feel like an interloper there, whereas living as I now do on the edge of a town in southern England a hundred miles from where I grew up and close to one of its largest cities, I’ve felt more relaxed about arguing my case against the occasional ‘real local’ hostilities I encounter.
So there are gradations. And also a sense that I should probably have done more to acknowledge that whether we’re talking about southwest Wales or northeast Somerset, there are voices that don’t get heard, or that get heard only in certain limited circles of civic culture – voices that are invested in a sense of their localness, and that have to be a part of any convincing rebuild of renewable local culture.
I wasn’t too shy about emphasizing in A Small Farm Future the world of profound social crisis that we’ve now entered, but perhaps I didn’t emphasize enough that I think this crisis will greatly disrupt existing notions of insider- and outsider-hood. There are going to be a lot of people on the move, probably mostly quite short distances, and typically from urban to rural situations. In this new world, access to land will matter, social connections will matter and practical skills will matter (especially those few vestiges of peasant skills, like knowing how to make a hay rick, rather than knowing how to set up a silage baler-wrapper), whereas a lot of the other things that mattered to people’s sense of identity in the world that we’re losing – a highly-paid position in senior management, or a local lineage that goes back generations – won’t matter all that much in themselves, except maybe inasmuch as they help to leverage the things that do matter.
A lot of people on the left like to stress that the world of trouble we’re entering will press most heavily on the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged – and rightly so, up to a point. But it strikes me that some of the benefits that accrued to the privileged in the world we’re leaving won’t necessarily benefit them so much in the world we’re entering. So whose voice counts locally and whose voice isn’t heard may not quite be the foregone conclusion it currently seems.
The upshot as I see it is that if there are rural communities who wish to say “we’re good thanks, no incomers here please” then fair play to them. To do that, of course they’d have to have quite a collectively unified vision, so they’d already be ahead of the game in terms of adjusting to the new world of low-energy localism. Equally, they couldn’t expect much service or input from the wider world, and that might prove more of a burden than some who define themselves around local pedigree might imagine.
I’d distinguish that response from the kind of angry, anti-immigrant nativism that’s inevitably whipped up by bad faith political actors in times of stress, as is the case presently alas with Britain’s current government (there’s an interesting story to be told here that’s alive in the present news about the good faith populism marshalled by celebrity footballers like Marcus Rashford and Gary Lineker in holding those actors to account, but I won’t try to tell it here). Generally, though, I think rural communities will do best if they’re readier to embrace who shows up, and try to take a regenerative or clean communication, no blame no shame approach to the identifications of their members. Many rural communities have been depopulated and eviscerated by fossil-fuelled urbanism. Maybe they can be rejuvenated by low-energy localism helped along by incomers as well as insiders.
I suspect this is easier when people are devoting themselves to producing land-based livelihoods or to other useful products that serve them, as will be the case in a supersedure situation. Certainly, it’s seemed easier to me to relate to local farmers and other landworkers around shared practical reference points as compared to differences of background that might otherwise alienate us from each other.
All of which is to say that the concept of the accursed middle-class, back-to-the-land, gentrifying incomer may not prove the best optic through which to size up the challenges of the world to come. It’s kind of inevitable, but I suspect it will be quite short-lived in the grander historical drama we’re now entangled with, and it may serve people best across the various divides it mobilises to kill it off as quickly as possible.
None of that is intended as a criticism of Carwyn for rightly pointing to the local complications of creating a small farm future. These are real issues that need to be worked on. But I don’t think I can really pre-empt or define how to work on them in general outside specific settings. That’s the work that lies before all of us locally. And while I’m aware that sentences like my last one are open to critique for the over-easy liberal universalism involved in invoking such an ‘us’, especially when they’re spoken by a relatively privileged voice such as mine, I feel that’s where I must lay my hat. The challenge is to create a local ‘us’, not a universal one, that becomes authentic enough to survive the inevitable local conflicts among whoever’s living locally. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I think it does need to be the direction of travel, because the alternatives are worse. To invoke a metaphor from a technology that I don’t see a role for in a small farm future, the good driver needs to adjust their behaviour by constantly checking the rear-view mirror – but checking it too much is inadvisable. This has various implications for current standard fare politics of the left and right that I plan to address at a later date.
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I suppose around the western world as here there are farms that have lost their children to the cities they have left for more money and less work , the incomes from family farms is not enough to support extended families , but , when times get hard and that is on its way they will move back they will be the first ” incomers ” moving back and at least they will have an idea what needs to be done and when , they may not know how to build a hay rick but they understand the process of making hay and what ” good ” hay should look and smell like ( I would think thatching a rick will cause a deal of head scratching ) .
IMHO they will be the first to move back to the countryside and will be the most usefull to even the larger farmers ( though not the agribusiness ) will struggle to survive thru shortages of near everything especially people sized tools , they will become the ” foremen ” over the host of unskilled refuge city dwellers , most of today’s mechanics will go back to their roots as blacksmiths / farriers .
It will be hard for those that will become day labourers , those with no usefull skills .
Cities also have cooks, mechanics, teachers, veterinarians (okay, probably ones specialising in pets), builders, medics, and tailors. A healthy small farm community is probably still going to want cooked or preserved food for certain occasions, mended tools, education, veterinary attention for livestock and pets, buildings, medical care and clothing that fits, sooner or later. Barring the complete disappearance of money (unlikely) and taxes (sigh) you might even find work for a paper-pushing accountant or two.
I certainly agree that people who already have some agricultural knowledge, social connections, primary production skills and a capacity for physical labour will have an easier time of things, but even city kids are capable of learning (and some of us have already started). I wouldn’t want to be too sure about exactly who will end up doing what.
Many rural communities have been depopulated and eviscerated by fossil-fuelled urbanism. Maybe they can be rejuvenated by low-energy localism helped along by incomers as well as insiders.
As a lifelong non-driver, certainly one of the factors that keeps me in the city (for now) is that most of the small towns and villages I could possibly afford to move to seem to assume car ownership as standard. My spouse calls them “car-dependent communities” and in terms of personal transport I think this is pretty accurate. More broadly, of course, car dependence is also a big part of city life even for non-drivers like us. It’s just that the actual car driving (whether it’s a lorry taking food to a shop, or a mobile bike mechanic van) is generally someone else’s problem.
I am interested to find out whether “the countryside” becomes more tolerable for non-drivers before I get too old to move there, but I’m not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, despite my defensiveness in my reply to Diogenes, I’m not that worried about rural Vs urban identity conflicts compared to the racial and national conflicts that I think could happen with increasing numbers of climate catastrophe refugees.
I have some half-formed thoughts around the Church of England and the parish system and how it has been affected by the rural depopulation of fossil fuel culture, and in turn how the response of the C of E has been one of rural parishes increasingly being combined into ever larger units — one benefice with one clerge for 13 churches, or what have you — and how that in turn is only currently possible with using fossil fuels for transport. This state of affairs isn’t actually new, of course; under an older system, the vicar or rector could have several “livings” and install curates in some subset of them to avoid having to take all those services himself. Who got the living was very much dependent on the local patrons (i.e. rich landowners) and on the bishop… and at least in some places, that patronage system is still in place, though the parochial church council does usually at least have a representative at the interviews, now. But I have long thought that the tendency to sell off the vicarage or rectory of churches with tiny congregations and then combine them with some other church four miles away and then repeat this until nobody in their right mind wants to take the job has been extremely short-thinking on the part of those who hold the purse strings. It strikes me that something the C of E *could* do to make a meaningful difference in a small farm future is to get clergy living in every parish again so they don’t have to spend Sundays driving around. I have no idea how we’d pay for it, though, except by scaling back the administrative complexity of much clerical work and encouraging clergy to have second jobs — perhaps, say, in small scale horticulture.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on your perspective, nobody in the C of E is asking me. 😉
And, obviously, the C of E isn’t in Wales, so this is perhaps into the territory of derailing rather than just a tangent. Apologies.
I specifically kept away from the racial / nationalist problem , just to say here in TX its lousy , it will very likely lead to bloodshed sometime in the future . You only have to look at the FBI crime statistics to decide who you would like to be your neighbour .
Car dependant culture , well the UK is well served by public transport as is anywhere in Europe but much of the world is not , out here the towns are a days ride apart , to get to the nearest grocery store it would take me one day there and one day back on horseback , it would take a week to get to the nearest passenger rail network , in the future I expect that the local ” village ” community would get its dry goods store / iron mongers back , it had one until the road system took off when they were tarmacked in the 1950’s but I still live three miles from a blacktop on a dirt road . few county roads are paved in rural TX hence the plethora of pickup trucks / 4×4’s .
Yes, I grew up in Canada.(mostly in Saskatchewan and Albert’s). It would certainly be much more difficult without a car there than in the UK, at least until the small towns get some services up and running again.
Yes I think almost all of rural western North America (well, and urban western North America too) is like this in terms of deep car dependency. The increasing affordability of fossil fuels will play out in ways here that are much different from Europe, Asia, etc. Hard to say exactly what this will look like, but I think the intense distances and wide open spaces will become as much a risk for rural communities here as the are opportunity.
Here in Canada, throw in the mix of subarctic winters and the absolute necessity of snow plough fleets on the highways to keep communities connected for 1/2 the year! And then several weeks of annual flooding and mud as it all melts. There will be a lot of problems to solve, none of which will be made easier by wild climatic variation.
Meant to say ‘un-affordability’ of fossil fuels of course
When Canada was colonised it wasn’t settled by people driving motorcars, and people did already live there who had learned how to deal with winter. The railways were a big deal in colonisation, though, and those did run on fossil fuels.
The right draft horses don’t really need ploughed roads, that’s yet another car thing. The transition back to animal power is going to be a steep learning curve but at least animals reproduce, and you can eat oxen in a bad winter if you have to, they’re just cattle that can pull stuff (horses are edible too, though in my culture we don’t). But people a hundred and fifty years ago generally travelled much less, and shorter distances (though almost everyone walked much, much more). I expect transport patterns to shift in that direction again — at which point you don’t necessarily need to plough anything, but you might need to make a decent pair of snow shoes (slow and relatively low-tech) or cross country skis (faster, given the right kind of snow), and learn how to spend a few months not going anywhere you can’t get to on foot in -30°C before it gets dark. I think even in some kind of high-tech-but-low-energy future that change in patterns would have to be the case, because moving stuff around is just so energy intensive. But just as I choose to remain where I am — with everything I need within easy cycling range — I think people moving to more rural locations and knowing they can’t travel so cheaply will probably gravitate toward towns with a school and a doctor’s office and a post office and a pub and a few shops, maybe a relevant place of worship and a library and some kind of repair shop would be nice too. The inability to use oil to produce food, and the difficulty of transporting fresh food long distances quickly, will be part of what drives that re-ruralisation — and so the vast empty spaces won’t be quite so vast or empty. The short growing season of long winters will almost certainly be a challenge but that is also a problem people have successfully dealt with before fossil fuels came along. It involved a lot more cabbage. My paternal grandparents — two schoolteachers who had grown up on farms — had a root cellar in their basement.
I completely agree it will play out differently in Edmonton, Alberta than Edmonton, Greater London; differently in Moose Jaw than in Swindon or Inverness or Eindhoven.
I see that autocarrot doesn’t know about the province I spent half my youth in… Alberta should have been the location in my previous comment, not Albert’s. Sigh. Never mind. I miss seeing the aurora borealis. I only miss walking to school in -30°C a little bit, though.
The USA declared independence from Blighty in 1776 (I believe?). The same year as Watt created the first successful heat engine that brought in the Industrial age.
The USA has been built on fossil fuels. Can it exist without them? Or will it break into more manageable localised parts?
People did live there before then, though.
Indeed.
But the great expansion westward was only really possible due to fossil fuels. (And every more advanced weaponry)
Early westward expansion in the US was with wagon trains and on horseback. The early steam engine trains were powered by firewood before coal… and firewood is not a fossil fuel.
The rail lines still exist, so I’m ready to argue that the US wasn’t built on fossil fuels early on, and that once forced to revert there will be some success. Ugly? Of course. But not impossible.
The mental picture I have is of people moving via horse and wagon, and railway lines used primarily for freight — so being important for trade and supplying the various new settlements, with passenger rail as something of an afterthought. Either way, there were still already people living there. Many of them died of smallpox; many more were killed in genocide.
Shortage of firewood in Europe was part of what drove the switch to coal. I think overall more wood is burned now than was then, though I may well be wrong about that.
Perhaps, but were those early locomotives made using fire wood? I’m guessing not much iron ore smelting was done using wood/charcoal?
Much of the westward expansion was done post civil war. So, very much in the industrial age.
Winchester rifles and the Gatling gun
were products of fossil fuels.
The native inhabits may have better resisted the European onslaught if the Europeans were limited to muzzle loading muskets!
(Maybe the second amendment should be restricted to MLMs. As was available at the time of writing the amendment ?)
Xenophobia in any form is never pleasant, but I think there can be a necessary and perhaps healthier form of it that maybe could be called ‘clannish-ness’ or something similar. It’s loyalty to the people and places that you know deeply, have served you well, and you have served you well, and a tendency to err on the side of that loyalty without any deep-rooted animus to ‘outsiders’, just suspicion and awareness of the delicate balance of social and economic relations. In terms of bad-faith political actors, many problems seem to start when we move from this more grounded approach into abstract categories that are almost aesthetic: ‘purity’, ‘naturalness’, or even ‘localism’ or ‘wildness’. The ongoing and increasing tendency of actors on both the right and certain strands of the deep green environmental movement to center these abstractions in their ethics and politics concerns me greatly (not the least because I really get the aesthetic appeal)
In terms of practical skills mattering, we’re starting to think about schools for our oldest daughter. My wife visited our neighborhood school last night and reports the use of ‘smart boards’ and laptops even in the lowest grades, although it’s pretty controlled. I don’t get this stringent belief that kids will fall behind if they don’t acquire virtual ‘skills’ hard and early, as if using Microsoft Office is not inherently simplified compared to swinging a tool or sewing a stich with skill. Or even conducting a business deal face to face, and with paper, as opposed to via text. I sometimes wonder if starting a sensible school would make a better contribution to a small farm, local future than trying to homestead or fumbling around trying to be a grower, local artisan, etc.
Evan: I’ve had the same thought that starting re-skilling schools would be a better plan for helping ease the transition to a low-input agrarian society than would be the same effort and resources directed toward homesteading.
Locally, we have a folk school (www.mifolkschool.com) that is now supported by our county’s Park and Recreation Commission (that fact alone is astonishing given the high-tech bias of so many of our local leaders). The folk school says: “Our classes create a community where we honor and share the old ways of doing things – offering access to skills you once might have learned while sitting on your grandparents’ porch or as part of your community.”
What’s amazed me is how fast their course list has grown. And how quickly their classes fill up. Getting re-skilling into neighborhood public schools might be slow and difficult. But at least we seem to be training a new group of teachers and mentors.
@Raymond De Young
That sounds like a great idea. Wish there was something similar where I live.
Though, I might struggle to convince my kids to attend . “What!!!!????? No TikTok!!!!!!?????”
Absolutely start a school. A small farm future will require far more than farmers – we tried for a long time to buy land here in the UK but the prices just kept running away from us – we have now got a small field but wanting to a livelihood that would have value in a energy constrained/re-localised future I retrained as an acupuncturist and am currently studying herbal medicine. I think the future will require us to be of value to our neighbors but there are many ways to be thay
We have countries because of xenophobia , look at Europe and all the languages that have survived over the centuries .
I talked to a ” Anglo ” man that lost an election to a person that stood on the same political platform but was Hispanic in a heavily Hispanic area , he was shocked that they would not vote for him they voted for a member of their clan ending his political career . People instinctively vote for a member of their clan .
Somehow I think the internet is a flash in the pan , when energy gets problematic it will be one of the first things to be cut off from the grid , server farm or hospital is an easy choice , probably the same for mobile phones .
Somehow I think the internet is a flash in the pan , when energy gets problematic it will be one of the first things to be cut off from the grid , server farm or hospital is an easy choice , probably the same for mobile phones .
I’m not so sure. I can charge my phone from a small solar panel that won’t run any medical equipment (it might do some lighting, I guess), or from a hub dynamo on the front wheel of my bicycle — which, in a pinch, could be refashioned into a windmill. The limiting factor is really the batteries, but even those are so very common now as to be ridiculous. A friend of mine has been collecting the disposable vapes that people toss as litter, because each one has a little lithium battery in it.
Also, I know more people who don’t have good access to medical care than who don’t have internet access, so I’m not sure our priorities are as clear as “hospitals or server farms”.
And no, my phone is not “the internet” as we know it; but it doesn’t actually have to connect to a server or even a cell phone tower to communicate with other phones. Local WiFi networks are certainly plausible in a low energy, cobbled-together-from-current-junk future; something like the BBS systems I used to dial into in my early teens. That would be a curated library rather than the internet as we know it, but that curated library might be something like all of Wikipedia, all of Project Gutenberg, text archives of several major newspapers, medical reference books, some portion of the various free university courses currently available online, maybe even some select podcast archives… all in a package that would easily fit into a backpack. For more up to date communications I would look to something like Briar, which can send peer to peer messages using Bluetooth. No central server or internet connection is required, but obviously the two phones have to be in range of one another, or connected by a chain of phones that are within range. This is designed for, and I believe already in use by journalists working in areas where governments impose internet blackouts.
All of that would require quite a lot of coordination and quite a lot of salvage work in order to give us something that isn’t really like the internet we have today, but would still have been absolutely amazing to my grandparents. An interesting question is whether our manufacturing techniques and materials can be de-coupled from fossil fuels enough that we can actually build the parts of such a network from what we pull out of today’s landfill sites, rather than plodding along on what equipment already exists now, some portion of which can be kept working for longer than it was designed for but certainly not forever. The answer to that, as so often when trying to predict the effects of climate catastrophe and energy shortage, is a rather unsatisfying “it depends”.
According to Forbes the USA uses 90 billion kwh a year .
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/12/15/why-energy-is-a-big-and-rapidly-growing-problem-for-data-centers/?sh=441c000a5a30
Servers are enormous users of energy the numbers are mind boggling .
Yes, but I just described digital communications that doesn’t use servers.
Without trying to sound too pessimistic, the mobile phone network is only possible because of global supply networks. The handsets we all use are only a small part of the equation. Lots of prescious metals that need to be mined etc. I’m not sure that very much tech is possible to maintain through localisation and simplification.
I literally described a communication method already in use that doesn’t rely on mobile network reception.
I also said it would be very different from what we are used to now.
The mobile handsets we all use are almost ubiquitous, and a lot of them will last quite a while, and there is a *lot* of material in landfill, and there are people who know how to use it to repair things. It won’t be pretty.
There was a global supply network for spices and cloth and various other products long before fossil fuels were around, trade is certainly going to be sharply reduced and there will be a certain amount of disarray, but it isn’t going to just disappear without fossil fuels.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if humans value communication so highly that we would rather have a second-hand discarded phone with a cracked screen than pepper or turmeric or silk. Will it be a phone you can use to order plastic junk from the internet? No, or at least I hope not.
Will it still be a better way to communicate with someone several towns away, or in another country, than going there yourself? Quite possibly; as I said, it depends. But the idea of global communications just stopping is as ridiculous to me as the idea of it continuing as it does currently. Reality is likely to be somewhere in between, and messy, and uneven. So I think we should at least plan for the rich and powerful having access to this kind of communication.
I’m still sceptical that mobile phones are going to be feasible. It’s the other end of the system that concerns me. The antenna and their power supply, maintenance etc.
Semaphore and similar systems are a means of communication, but the message has to be kept simple. (Even more so than Twitter!!!). And it’s not really an option for individuals to keep in touch. The system require for someone to man/woman each end.
Alpine horns are a way of communicating across valleys, but the message again, has to be basic.
The whole mobile phone debate does throw up and interesting question.
How much surplus energy is going to be available in a SFF and what should it be priorities on?
Vaccines or mobile phones?
Health care or guns?
Trains or horses?………..
John
Read my previous comments again: you do not need a cell phone tower/mast/satellite to use a mobile phone as a communication device, it just looks very different. The satellites can fall out of the sky and the phone masts can crumble and it won’t make mobile handsets useless, it will just change how we can use them. The technology already exists for me to get a message to, say, Chris, using mobile phones, without any of those mobile phones being connected to a telephony or mobile internet provider. We don’t commonly use this technology right now, but it does already exist. It works better over a certain population density but if we are looking at de-urbanisation and a re-populating of the countryside, that isn’t actually as huge an issue as you might think. We probably do need to stick to text to prevent things getting all gummed up, but that’s still a substantial gain over sending a physical letter. If you want to test it yourself, download Briar and get some local friends to do the same.
That said, I agree that semaphore and other lo-fi longer-range communication technologies require substantial coordination and energy — and I said as much in my comments about those on a previous post.
My general point is that if we think long-range communication is going away we are probably mistaken. It will certainly change; it will certainly become more expensive, in terms of our time and energy as well as money. We might well only be able to transmit words, and not pictures. But I do believe communication technology will continue to shape our political reality, and I don’t think the holders of power will give up such a useful tool very easily.
As I think I pointed out in an earlier comment, I currently know more people without access to adequate health care than without internet access. I also know people who choose to have mobile phones but not vaccines in a world where vaccines are free and phones cost money. This is partly because people do have a very strong drive to communicate, but it is also at least partly because it suits those in power to have a hyperconnected society. That observation of our current political priorities may or may not be predictive of our future ones, of course, but I think a future where we ration fossil energy to use it for health care and not for communications is extremely unlikely.
I agree that future communication over long distances will still be available at something more sophisticated than semaphore or smoke signals.
I am curious though – on the matter of access to health care in the UK. I thought health care was universal there. I appreciate that you would know lots of folks outside the UK or Canada where health care is not as available, but I’m wondering if my impression of your local health care system is wanting.
Clem
I do know people in the UK who have internet access through using our WiFi at church, but have inadequate access to health care due to problems registering with a GP surgery because they have no ID documentation.
I also know people reluctant to seek health care because of the attitudes of (some) medics. I have folate deficiency for reasons we don’t understand (I get plenty of legumes and leafy greens in my diet; flour here isn’t fortified with folic acid but my intake is still good) and the routine assumption by my GP is that I am not eating enough vegetables. It’s tiring and frustrating to advocate for myself in that situation, and I can understand why some people would rather not bother. GP appointments are ten minutes long, which isn’t really long enough to deal with more complex health issues. It’s possible to book double appointments sometimes but you have to convince the receptionist that it’s necessary, which is not always straightforward.
Additionally, glasses and dental work are only partially covered by the NHS, which is less than ideal.
That said, I am never worried about how much my medication might cost, or whether I can afford a hospital stay. I never worry that if I’m hit by a car, I won’t be treated. I think the NHS as it is now is much, much worse than it was in, say, 2009, largely thanks to over a decade of underfunding (or asset-stripping) by the Tories. It still beats the Canadian system out of a cocked hat, and my understanding is that the Canadian healthcare system is substantially more accessible than the American one; and I do know plenty of Americans who routinely put off medical care because of the cost.
The pandemic and Brexit have brought some additional challenges. It turns out you can’t tell your foreign healthcare workers to go away and then let a pandemic kill or disable a substantial fraction of the remaining ones without some pretty dire consequences. Personally I think it has been deliberately run down to make way for privatisation, and I will probably be angry about this for the rest of my life.
Briar is interesting. I’m going to get my tech savvy friend to explain it all to me.
If it only works on Bluetooth without a network connection, then I might as well just talk to the person direct.
How did the old pager system work? I’m guessing it was through the existing telecommunications systems??
@Kathryn,
I’m a little curious about Briar, but only recently have been issued a cell phone, so it does not seem that vital. Being able to text is handy but only maybe once a week or two.
As surprising as it may seem, I have made it through 60 some years of life without a cell phone.
Sticking a stamp on an envelope still works for just about everything. In a SFF, I don’t think that keeping in constant contact or missing out on what’s happening will be a huge issue.
Ring the bell or blow the siren if the barbarians are on the march.
Energy available and use will be the issue. Do your local solar installations shut down if the wider electrical grid fails ? Here there is no point in putting a 20kW system if you can’t use it when the power is out.
@Kathryn
Mobile Phones.
I guess it comes down to timescales.
In the short term it may be possible to keep handsets functioning.
But will any existing mobile phones be functioning in 100 years time?
Or 50?
Most Hi-tec gatgets I’ve ever had seen to seem to have a shorter shelf life the more complex they are. I’ve got through a fair few phones in my time!
I can’t see any batteries lasting more than 10 years and in a Small Farm Future there won’t be the capacity to make new ones.
Greg,
I am sure that not everyone needs access to fast long-range communication for it to be politically relevant. I personally have never made a radio broadcast (though I was interviewed once), and yet radio has been a factor in the political reality that shapes my life; I don’t make television programmes or write newspaper articles and yet those media are also politically relevant. I largely stay off of the Book of Face — and yet FB was instrumental in the Brexit vote, which does have an ongoing impact on my daily life.
Of course, in a world where I can’t easily contact someone via landline telephone, and paper, envelopes and stamps cost ten times as much as they do now and letters take weeks rather than days to arrive, the ability to send digital messages might become more important to me. They massive increase in mobility facilitated by fossil fuels is also a factor here, with it being quite normal for people to move far from family and friends for education, work, or just because they can… I remember the days of phonecalls with relatives being few and far between because of the high cost. I hope that energy scarcity will push back on this cultural norm at least some, but the prospect of re-ruralisation will also involve relocation for many families who would quite like to keep in touch with friends and loved ones.
In any case, a folding solar panel with USB outputs that will charge a mobile phone handset isn’t even worth tying into the grid. I use one regularly at the allotment to charge one of my bicycle lights. (I do have lights that run off of a dynamo but I like to have more than one light, in case of technical failure). In practice if I were using this withy phone I would probably charge an external battery and then charge my phone off of that, to reduce the chances of damaging the phone if the solar charger is a bit iffy with voltage control, but more importantly because I tend to use my telephone during the day and charge it at night, which poses a problem for solar charging without use of a secondary battery. I would probably need to use my phone less than I do now (though there would be far fewer podcasts available without internet-as-we-know-it for streaming, so that wouldn’t be too hard), though it would depend on the size of the panel and so on. Another good option (though one which I haven’t tried) is a larger panel that will charge, say, the external battery for a drill or similar, and then getting an adapter to charge the phone from the drill battery. (Hand drills are slow, and sometimes only a hole will do.)
All of this sounds inconvenient and expensive compared to “just plug it into the wall,” but the balance of that comparison will change. I suspect a lot depends on the rate of collapse.
More doom and gloom from that Clarkson guy:
After reading your previous post I commented that it was pretty easy to imagine the physical parameters of local agrarian communities. The basic circumstances of agrarian peasant life put definite constraints on what those societies can look like, but I do agree with Carwyn Graves and you that their political structure is more or less “up for grabs” and likely to have a great deal of variety, depending on local circumstances and community preferences. The problem is that I just think worrying about the details of supersedure small farm community and its political organization is very premature.
The thing I do worry about is when and how existing states will either lose control of local communities or deliberately set them free. When will it be that the supersedure community can come into existence and actually begin the process of self-organization? It looks to me like something dramatic will need to happen to allow it.
Considering that political power in modern countries resides almost entirely in cities, it seems to me that as long as modern cities exist there can be no agrarian supersedure state. This is because the main interest of people in cities will be the continued flow of food, water and other resources from “outside” areas into the city.
It’s now pretty easy to supply every modern city from the global market. Cities don’t really care what happens in the immediate countryside, as long as it looks nice and green. After all, only a tiny part of what cities consume is provided locally. But once the global market breaks down, the only place left for cities to get their necessities will be from surrounding regions. The prospect of small farmers diverting land productivity from commodity agriculture toward self-provisioning will be anathema to city folk, especially if it becomes a “thing” and people begin leaving cities and setting up small farms for themselves in significant numbers. Indeed, I can easily imagine desperate cities commandeering the output of small farms which might have already existed for many years.
And even if existing small farms are left alone, every resource needed for commodity agriculture, like diesel, irrigation water, and soil amendments will be reserved for those who are producing for cities. Land reform, the breaking up of large farms into smallholdings will likely be forbidden. The reverse, a modern “enclosure” process of combining small farms into large industrial farms is more likely once food can’t be imported from overseas.
In sum, I find it hard to believe that existing political power will ever be persuaded that resources, or even attention, should be shifted toward the creation of small farms. To do so would be a tacit acknowledgement that cities had no future and that the best thing to do would be to depopulate them, an acknowledgement that is highly improbable, at least for the foreseeable future.
I do think that it is inevitable that cities will be depopulated, but it won’t be by choice. It will happen when the resources needed for industrial agriculture/transport are gone and cities can no longer be fed. Only then will survivors in rural areas have the freedom to organize their supersedure statelets. In the meantime, existing small farmers might have to “fight like hell” just to stay around. In the interval prior to the small farm future, the future of small farmers might be pretty grim.
I pretty much agree with Joe about the existing political powers.
As I’ve commented here before, I got somewhat stuck in the ‘doom and gloom’ until I looked beyond the fate of myself and the people I know, and took the longer view. The transition period to the inevitable small farm future could — and probably will, in my view — coalesce over several generations, beyond a single lifetime. It’s humbling.
One impediment to a small farm future is that the landless are a major segment of the population, and perhaps will be a significant majority for some time. Ripe conditions for oppression, or a political movement.
Before any widespread land reforms take hold, the initial regions comprising the ‘supersedure statelets’ might be the relatively remote areas, further away from the railroads and motorways. Perhaps in areas too hilly or fragmented for the big combines and equipment of large-scale farming.
Diesel .
With out enough diesel it all stops , mega farms will become worthless without it , around here a 100 acre fields are being sold and turned into ten ten acre plots for building , a few years down the road and they will be being sold for homesteads ,( some are already being made into homesteads )
Perhaps in areas too hilly or fragmented for the big combines and equipment of large-scale farming.
Exactly! Small farming will have to exist in the “cracks” of the larger industrial-farming regions until the end of industrialism and the end of modern cities. Small farms on flat land will be in danger.
The UK, for example, imports about half its food. Just imagine how desperate the central government will be to expand food production within the UK if food import becomes difficult. The effort to expand industrial agriculture will be frantic. The only saving grace may be that fuel for the bulldozers may also be difficult to obtain.
What is infuriating is the fact that the coming mess was easy to see and has been foretold for decades. The concept of population overshoot has been known for centuries. A great deal of misery could have been prevented by severely limiting population increases, the size of cities and dependence on industrial agriculture. What were they thinking?
If the “back to the land” movement of the 1970s had expanded as it should instead of fizzling out we would be in an entirely different situation. Instead of hunkering down and enduring catastrophe to enable a small farm future, we could be basking in the sustainable glories of a small farm present (and a healthy ecosphere).
What amazes me is green governments in Europe constantly want Europeans stop having kids ” to save the planet ” yet import tens of thousands of immigrants to stop the population shrinking .
.Is there something wrong with that or is it just me ?
I get the doom and gloom. Several people talking about clannishness and ethnicity. I think that in a situation in which the power of states erodes plenty of people will be willing to create/exploit division in order to maintain/obtain power.
Here we have local elections coming up and our Conservative councillors with heavy backing from the wonderful Mr Rees-Mogg are pushing the line that they’re on the side of the motorist who is
apparently increasingly persecuted by speed limits, traffic calming, speed cameras etc etc in order to favour pedestrians and cyclists. As someone who drives, cycles and walks this looks like a very obvious attempt to open a division between people in order to capture a political constituency. On a larger UK scale we have the ‘migrant crisis’ constantly talked up for, as far as I can see, very similar reasons. Simple stories of us and them which fail to actually address the problem. I think we’ll see a lot more of such things in the coming years and so it seems to me that moving toward an amicable SFF might be harder than we hope.
A Welsh perspective is the leader for this thread.
Wales has been harassed for over a thousand years yet they still have their own outlook / society hell the Romans killed off every druid they could find yet they still survive , , every society has its tribal base and always will have that’s why diplomacy was invented to cut down on wars .
I absolutely agree that all societies have some sort of tribal (for want of a better word) base and i don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’ve never understood wny being called a NIMBY is considered pejorative – If I won’t care for my back yard who will. In fact I think that the sense of belonging implicit in ‘tribalism’ is a human need.
But I think the homogenising effect of modernity has made tribalism problematic in the context we’re discussing. 100 years ago this country still had regional dialects such that people from different areas might have struggled to understand each other (in fact state education had already given people ‘English’ as a shared tongue and WWI had also done much to break down regional difference). The regions of the UK still had local folklore and folk customs, food, songs, dances (morris dancing the last vestige of this) etc. In Wales maybe a little more of this sort of thing persists but I’m not sure – I think despite the best endevours of the Welsh Govt. the Welsh language is still in decline as a living language, since the 1970s back to the land movement there’s been plenty of outsiders moving to/buying property in Wales for various reasons and across the whole UK high streets look largely the same as economics have favoured large chain stores over the local. As for druids – they really were wiped out – what exists today started as a18th century romantic revival that initially modelled itself as a fraternal organisation – a sort of romantic alternative to Freemasonry. But yes things like the Eistedfodd do maintain historical Welsh culture to some extent – but perhaps more as a tourist attraction (this is probably true of many local traditions – Helston’s Floral Dance for instance has lost its original connotations (with St Michael I believe) but draws large crowds) than as something relevant to the lives of most Welsh people – I don’t know I don’t live in Wales so shouldn’t opine too much on that.
My point is that strong local identites based on a shared culture have largely been undermined/extinguished by the homogenising effect of modernity but the underlying human need to belong to and identify remains. Perhaps for convenience we could call a shared culture based on shared practices/work/food/custom etc outlined above a positive tribalism (there’s undoubtedly an aspect of scale to this). This sort of positive tribalism, while easy to destroy, is probably the work of generations to rebuild. My guess is that a strong positive culture of this sort is probably fairly fertile ground for the sort of resilient and adaptive ethical universalisms discussed under Chris’s last post.
But in the absence of such a positive culture and with the innate human need to identify with a ‘tribe’ its very easy for the tribe to defined not by shared practice but simply in opposition to the other. Such definitions of identity are, I think, more easily manipulated for political ends than those based on practicalities and less hospitable to the resilient and adaptive ethical universalisms that an amicable SFF might require – but that might be naive of me.
When I was younger there were a number of such movements in Wales that attacked the property of ‘incomers’. I’m sure that there was (and is) a problem with outsiders buying up property and pricing locals out of the market and that this is corrosive to local culture – so I can see times and situations when such opposition is valid. So I can’t draw clear lines – yet I still have a sense that there’s something about how we define what we do – My question would be; are we defined more by what we are for than by what we’re against and where do we put most of energies?
Sorry for going on a bit 😉
Scottish nationalism is an interesting case of this too. It’s certainly valid for the Scots to be thoroughly fed up with English rule (or Westminster rule if I’m honest — the rest of us have little say), but seeing some of the anti-Polish graffiti in Aberdeen unsettled me.
Welsh government , Scottish government , Northern Ireland parliament , all saying we are different .
I think it is a tough task to imagine the future in anything but generalisations.
It’s like trying to explain the present. It’s so mind bogglingly complex, that any explanation is only a vague summary.
Plus, societies are constantly in flux. They never stand still. So a Small Farm Future will be an ever changing thing.
Some worries I have are around the “enforcement” of any rules. For example the exclusion of “others”. Hierarchy and inequality are ultimately enforced by violence.
Also, the role of disease in history, is something I have only just become aware of. In Pre-modern times, women needed to have on average, 6 children to maintain population size. So much for equality and freedom and women’s rights. All because of the disease burden of human populations.
Or that pre-1900, the death rate in Cities was bigger than the birth rate!!!!!
women needed to have on average, 6 children to maintain population size. So much for equality and freedom and women’s rights
That seems to say women did not want children / having kids is a burden .
Well….any society where the women didn’t want 6 kids wouldn’t last very long!!!!!
The choice was 6 kids or oblivion.
The personal freedoms women (in the developed world) enjoy today are partly because they have choices about how many kids they have and when.
I know my partner (AND I !!!!) was/were done after 2!!!!
Disease shaping human behaviour. Humans killed of all the megafauna but the microfauna are the real apex predators.
Sorry, but going back one blog with regard to religion and politics.
I have always seen a formulated, codefied, rules based religion as a form of social control by States/Kingdoms, on their subjects.
As George Orwell pointed out. You only truly have control over others, if you have control over what they think.
I think that early Christianity was a passive rebellion against Roman rule.
“You may have material control over me, but I don’t see you as my Lord/Master. My Lord is not of this world and is in a place where Roman power can’t get to him”.
This along with an ethos of being nice to eachother was a powerful concept, that spread throughout the Roman empire. No amount of feeding Christians to the lions could steam the flow.
Eventually Roman realised that it couldn’t stop the spread, so adopted Christianity as it’s religion. This brought Christians out of the shadows and into the public sphere. This gave Rome the opportunity to then start imposing rules onto the religion. Anyone who didn’t like the new rules could then be branded a heretic and eliminated. Divide and rule.
The Church and State ended up having a “symbiotic” relationship, where each reinforced the authority of the other. Kings became God’s representatives on earth and all kinds of brutal acts could be excused as the “Will of God”.
Religion can unify a community, but this comes at the cost of excluding those that don’t agree with the rules. The act of unifying, is in itself authoritarian.
I’m am very wary of any kind of religious aspect to a Small Farm Future!!!!
I don’t think religion is going to go away, though: attempts so far at societies free of religion haven’t been any less brutal. Utilitarian ethics get pretty brutal pretty fast, for example.
That doesn’t excuse those who preach loving kindness and practice brutality. But I don’t think avoiding religion actually allows a society to avoid brutality, and I don’t think religion itself is something to be feared.
@Kathryn
I think that religion is what in part makes/defines us human.
I’m not aware of any society that didn’t have a religion.
I guess what I was getting at was, that for a religion to be a unifying factor in a society, it has to have a set of rules. Otherwise it breaks into factions and sects.
The Roman Catholic Church “unified” Europe, but only by the eradication of anyone who didn’t agree.
As soon as the RC Church started to loosen its grip, Christianity began to split into different denominations, so the unity began to disappear.
I agree with you though. Religion is never going to go away.
I don’t necessarily see the Roman Catholic Church itself as a unifying force, though. It existed partly because of the controversy over the filioque (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_filioque_controversy if you have no idea what I’m on about).
I also maintain that the “loosening of grip” that we see in the Reformation was largely facilitated by changes in communications technology (e.g. the emergence of the printing press and moveable type), as well as being pretty hard to separate from various forms of colonialism.
But it’s hard for me to see the Roman Catholic church as successfully unifying Europe before then, either, considering the Muslim conquest of Iberia in the 8th century, which lasted until the late 15th century in one form or another, or the various struggles between Arian and Nicene Christians before that. It’s really all pretty messy, and very tangled up with access to resources: largely land and labour, but also information.
I think that the Church did a good job of unifying Europe. Every town and village in England has a church, which is testament to the Church’s reach. Europe was Christian.
The pursuit of heretics showed the importances the Church gave to controlling what people thought.
When the reconquista was completed in 1492, the Church unleashed the inquisition to hunt out any remaining Muslims and Jews in Spain who hadn’t converted to Christianity.
The Cathars were also subject to the wrath of the Pope, when they rejected the authority of the Vatican.
The Roman empire prior to Constantine, was much more tolerant of other religions throughout the empire.
I don’t see the Reformation as a time of “liberalising” of religious practices. The Protestants could be just as finatical as the Catholics. It was just a power struggle between those who made the rules. Henry VIII understood this power struggle.
By “loosening of the grip” I mean the point when Catholics and Protestants stop burning people at the stake for being heretics. Enforcement by death became no longer socially acceptable. I’m not sure at what point this began, but I would guess, The Enlightenment.
Attempting (often unsuccessfully) to suppress heresy with violence doesn’t sound like unification to me. But that kind of political unification is also not what the church is for.
Thinking about the process of creating a local “us” — my church has been looking at Census data and comparing that to our actual congregation to try and get an idea of how and whether we might serve the needs of the local community better, where “local community” is tightly defined by parish boundaries. Who is over-represented at our community tea afternoon or soup kitchen or whatever? Why? Who is under-represented, why, and how can we meet them where they are? It’s an interesting and instructive exercise, and one that I wonder whether the Transition Towns movement and similar groups might also do well to explore. Census data is not perfect, but it is probably the best we can get.
One of the actions coming out of this is to translate some of the information about the tea afternoon into more languages.
Thanks for the comments. I’m deep in the copyedit of my new book at the moment, so much as I’d like to weigh in I’m going to have to stick to my main task for the next few days. But I will definitely be coming back to some of these issues again!
Here are some supplies for your copyediting:
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Try not to use them all at once.
(I was going to try for an ASCII art cow, but I am not working with a fixed width font here…)
Surely, a local “us” will always summon into being a “them”, unless one has an (extremely concrete) universalism that can harmonize the local/universal tension.
But I agree that the “answers” (a la “blueprints) to our political crises can only begin locally. The specifications of justice (or of “distributism”) will vary, which is precisely the point!
Something like, oh, seeing Christ in the face of a stranger, perhaps?
I wish we as Christians were better at this, collectively and individually.
Maybe fear/distrust has practical roots.
Strangers can bring unwanted pathogens with them.
Distrust of strangers could have been a survival strategy.
“Surely, a local “us” will always summon into being a “them”” – I think this is true. My question is about whether we primarily define ourselves in opposition to a ‘them’. I think modern societies are so fractured, our dependencies on each other so abstract, our belief systems so personal etc that almost the only way to define a collective ‘us’ is on reference to an amorphous ‘them’. I wonder if a culture rooted in place would define itself quite as strongly relative to the ‘them’ simply because it would have other ways of defining itself – shared work, interdependence, shared cultural practice/belief. Its all hypothetical really.
I also wonder about those religious/ethical universalisms that Chris raised – hospitality and generosity have always been among those – perhaps they give me hope that the future can be navigated somewhat amicably
Sean wrote: ‘Surely, a local “us” will always summon into being a “them”, unless one has an (extremely concrete) universalism that can harmonize the local/universal tension.’
It seems to me that as long as ‘property’ or any other form of ‘exclusive rights’ exists (and I think the concept is here to stay), there will be no such harmonizing universalism.
‘Local’ implies the existence of the ‘non-local’.
The concept of local people exists concurrently with the concept of non-local people.
At the root level, ‘my’ body implies that it isn’t ‘your’ body (so hands off unless I give ‘my’ consent).
Even animals can have conflicts over ‘their’ territory or ‘their’ food.
This would be true… if only material things existed. But bodies, persons, properties, localities, etc can share in universals (without losing their particularity) if we perceive the spiritual reality of the common good.
I think it’s not so simple.
When speaking of a ‘local’ ‘us’, these terms are meaningless is there is not a corresponding concept of ‘not us’ and ‘non-local’.
Using these terms is part of a way of dealing with the realities of the material realm, along with the concepts of property and exclusive rights (even though they might seem incompatible with the spiritual realm/realities).
Even the Vatican owns properties and uses locks to keep ‘others’ out.
I don’t disagree with any of that. A true universal will not and cannot annihilate a particular thing. My point about the common good is that you are wrong to say that: “as long as ‘property’ or… ‘exclusive rights’ exists… there will be no such harmonizing universalism.”
Sean, you claimed that a universalism could prevent a local ‘us’ from summoning into being a ‘them’.
I opined that as long as we (or the ‘us’) have ‘property’ or ‘exclusive rights’, there will be no such harmonizing universalism which prevents the existence of a ‘them’.
[‘Exclusive rights’ are, by definition, excluding some people (‘them’).]
You replied that I am wrong, but you didn’t provide any convincing substantiation (IMHO).
Chris – thank you so much for this response. Was worth writing the review then 😉 (and hopefully it also encouraged one or two to buy the book). I read this the other day and in between spring, two young kids and work haven’t managed to pop my head up here. I do actually have something longer to write – with two years’ hindsight since reviewing your book. It pertains to this:
“All of which is to say that the concept of the accursed middle-class, back-to-the-land, gentrifying incomer may not prove the best optic through which to size up the challenges of the world to come.”
… which seems to me to be a really important optic in much of Europe, at least, to sizing up the challenges of the world to come not least because that is where most of the capital – and hence access to land does and perhaps increasingly will lie. Anyway – your work, writing and level-headedness are much appreciated. Thank you for it.
Well, the copyedit is now basically complete so let me announce it first here on the Main Street of my local village that my book “Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods” should be hitting the shelves in the UK on 29 June and around the same time but exact date TBA in the US. There will also be an audio version, to be narrated by myself. I had to audition for it, and since sounding like Chris Smaje is one of the few things at which I’m genuinely well qualified, I was worried I wouldn’t get the part – and where to go from there? Happily I got the thumbs up, so I’m looking forward to doing that.
Anyway, more on the book soon. And thanks Kathryn for the copyediting supplies – I don’t know what I’d have done without you!
Thanks also to everyone for keeping the conversations here going and particularly to Carwyn for your thoughts in between spring, work and kids – yes, I think there’s more to say and debate about the accursed middle class, so hopefully we can come back to that. Likewise with the interesting strand of debate on us & them. I hope to pursue Bruce’s line of thought about whether it’s possible to define an ‘us’ more strongly than a ‘them’ in agrarian settings. My feeling is yes, but landownership is tricky.
I’m also interested in the discussions about communication & the Reformation. It’s pretty clear now that improving communication technologies doesn’t intrinsically improve human concord – but maybe when discord proliferates it’s a consequence of the underlying politics rather than the technology. Or to put it in the context of the Reformation, I’d say that it’s easy to understand why there was a movement to reform the Catholic Church and to see that it was assisted by new information technologies, but I’m not sure this explains why the schism split the church so fundamentally, and why the religious wars in Europe were so brutal and invoked quasi-racial demonologies on both sides. A larger aspect of the Catholic Church that interests me is its ability to meld a universalism with local vernaculars.
Regarding the NHS, I’d echo Kathryn’s analysis. Good emergency acute care free at the point of use (provided you can get an ambulance) remains, but a lot of the rest is crumbling away to the point where many people get rationed out of care for a lot of chronic and elective issues. I agree that it many ways this has been a deliberate policy choice by recent Conservative governments, and it could partially be reversed by a government more sympathetic to public health care, but I think it’s also a harbinger of situations where governments will be increasingly unable to offer the levels of service people now expect, even if they want to. That, combined with the slowly tightening energetic and climate noose, might prompt reconfigurations of political sovereignty of the kind I describe as supersedure situations sooner rather than later … but who knows where it’ll end?
I am increasingly convinced that the idea of the middle class is a distraction from the hugs inequality between the rich (rentier? Capitalist?) class and the rest of us.
I think the point I’m trying to make about the Reformation is that communication technology does have tangible effects on how power is distributed, because knowledge is powerful, especially if that knowledge is asymmetric. The tensions of the Reformation pre-dated Luther (or Henry VIII for that matter) by some centuries, but separation of church and state wasn’t as clear as it is now: I see these tensions as political rather than only theological. I believe that in a low-energy future we should expect “knowledge is powerful” to continue to be the case. I also think long-range digital communication is so valuable *now* to people who hold power that they will try to keep it going for as long as possible. That could turn out a number of ways, and I don’t propose to know exactly what communication technology will look like in a small farm future (even if it’s fun to imagine setting up a printing shop or running some kind of mesh network or whatever), but it has the potential to make daily life for ordinary people quite a bit different than it was for pre-modern peasants — even if most of the “ordinary people” don’t actually have access to such communication tools. I don’t think it will prevent the necessity of a small farm future; we’re so firmly on that trajectory now that I suspect “collapse now and avoid the rush” is pretty good advice. But I do think it is one way that a small farm future could differ substantially from our small farm past.
“Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods”
That’s a book which needed to be written. Thanks for writing it, and congrats on finishing it.
Amazon has already listed the new book, said to be released in the UK on 29 June, and in the US on July 20, 2023:
—————————-
Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case For an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods Paperback – July 20, 2023
by Chris Smaje (Author), Sarah Langford (Foreword)
A defense of agroecological, small-scale farming and a robust critique of an industrialized future.
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world.”―David Bollier
One of the few voices to challenge The Guardian’s George Monbiot on the future of food and farming (and the restoration of nature) is academic, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje. In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Smaje presents his defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of Monbiot’s vision for an urban and industrialized future.
Responding to Monbiot’s portrayal of an urban, high-energy, industrially manufactured food future as the answer to our current crises, and its unchallenged acceptance within the environmental discourse, Smaje was compelled to challenge Monbiot’s evidence and conclusions. At the same time, Smaje presents his powerful counterargument – a low-carbon agrarian localism that puts power in the hands of local communities, not high-tech corporates.
In the ongoing fight for our food future, this book will help you to understand the difference between a congenial, ecological living and a dystopian, factory-centered existence. A must-read!
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Thank you Steve. Looking forward…
Are there copies of the book on sale in Frome? Give me an excuse to pop over and make a day of it. Take my boy to look round the model shop (if it’s still there)
Well, I am that “accursed middle-class, back-to-the-land, gentrifying incomer”, more or less.
Or as they say it here in Kansas, one of the “California people”.
In my defense, I’ll say that I was fairly near the bottom of the middle class, and had to get out of California to be able to afford anything. My financial situation is much improved now, owing mostly to the pressure of gentrifiers following after me.
Lesson #1: if you’re going to be a gentrifier, get in on the beginning of the Ponzi.
But all of this suggests a radical solution. Going back to the us/them, local/outsider problem (or as they say at the Southern California surf spots ‘local vs. tourist’), what if we somehow managed to rip our primary value system away from financial wealth?
What if we defined “us” as the people we love and care for?
And why bother worrying about “them”? We’re busy loving and caring for our friends.
Certainly the British NHS and US Medicare are getting crapified.
Because that pushes more money to the people who control money.
So we the public take the loss. We are the losers in this game.
But as I look around, I don’t see very many people who have the imagination to reject the game and play another one.
We the losers keep playing because we still hold many of the same values as the oppressing winners.
But what if we changed our values such that we spent most of our effort ensuring the well-being of our families and friends and neighbors? What if the highest value was human feeling rather than money?
I won’t claim to have any talent for such a mindset, but I can imagine it.
Surely the current emphasis on money is counter to the vast majority of our evolutionary experience. Money (as we know it today) isn’t even 5,000 years old. Capitalism is barely 500.
I recognize that this kind of change is not simple. It needs to be done by many individuals living in many communities. And I have no idea how conscious our value systems are, but to the extent that they are conscious, changing our values is as easy as speaking a sentence and meaning it.
How hard is that?
Thanks for that Eric… the surf spot ‘local vs. tourist’ comparison resonated. I think tourists get a different consideration from the locals, as some locals benefit from tourist dollars (or pounds, euros, etc) and tourists eventually leave. But there is still the ‘us vs. them’ dichotomy. Glad you mentioned it.
‘Us vs them’, like the weather, changes in various aspects all the time. You and I might like root veges while Dave and Monica abhor anything that ever touched the soil. Seems a simplistic example, and one that isn’t likely to destroy community coherence. But one might imagine that opening up dialogue and finding common ground (hmmm…. common ground and good soil – another metaphor to abuse?) finding common ground for such a simplistic matter could teach us how to find conviviality in more difficult circumstances.
Doesn’t a lot of the us versus them depend of if they are coming to eat our seed corn or if they are coming to help out ?
Yes I think it does but again I think the complexity of modern societies makes that incredibly hard to determine. For instance many (but by no means all) asylum seekers here in the UK are qualified professionals – engineers, nurses, doctors etc that could make a valuable contribution to the UK but they can’t work until their asylum claim is processed and that can take years. In the meantime they are part of what some people term/see as ‘an invasion of immigrants’.
I think there are those who use such terms for political gain. I also think that they are able to do that because there are parts of the country where the character of communities has been radically changed by immigration. It’s hard for people in those communities to assess whether immigrants are coming to eat our seed or help out because the areas in which migrants might be able to afford to live might not be those in which they are actively helping out.
The scale of cultural change modernity has created is hard for people to assimilate – so there’s a question of scale. But I wonder how much of that dislocation people feel is actually the product of the wider acceleration of change with immigration just being a visible face to which people can point – I don’t know and I live in a place where immigration isn’t an issue so maybe I’d feel differently if I lived elsewhere.
A more personal example: My father has problems with his heart and visits hospital quite often – he often complains that he struggles to understand what the [foreign] consultant is saying – I ask him if he’d like to wait for treatment until there’s someone with a more acceptable accent – he never says yes.
Feel I should add that I’m not for or against immigration and have been arguing for 20 odd years that the debate we should be having is about carrying capacity – how many people can live a good life on this island – I appreciate the political dimensions of that question are insuperably vast but there you are. If we collectively decided 30 million then close the borders and reduce the birth rate and I’m ok with that. But we should be asking the right question and politicking around that at least.
Interesting setup Bruce…
how many people can live a good life on this island
Expanding on the UK island concept to the larger planet (which is an island in a solar system configuration) – what is the overall carrying capacity? Planet-wise there is no immigration; and no material emigration.
A community may well be able to “close the borders”, modulate the birth rate, determine just exactly what the parameters are for a ‘good life’, but I doubt even these measures dispel all difficulties.
‘Carrying capacity’ as an ecological metric has a long and hazardous history. It changes over time. It is malleable to both human and non-human influences. On the human influences side of the ledger we appear to have increasing levels of impact (discussed widely and distinctively here at SFF). That fossil fuels enable a great deal of our human influences is clear. That there will remain for some time a legacy of this fossil fuel use is also fairly significant. But deciding what a ‘good life’ is, who is entitled to said ‘good life’, how such ‘good lives’ get paid for… these questions will have answers at more than a local community (or island) level.
Hi Clem – well I do say that the political dimensions of the question are insuperably vast 😉 But that doesn’t stop me thinking we should be asking the question.
I’ve been thinking about something Wendell Berry wrote somewhere – “How can we claim to love God and be complicit in the destruction of his creation.” I used to think this was a way of trying to use the faith of his fellow Christians as a prod to move them toward ‘greener’ ways of life. Now I think the question points at least as much toward the complicity of the questioner. There’s no way to avoid complicity but the commandment to love God remains (I’m not a Christian but don’t feel this question/dilemma doesn’t apply to me)
Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I think our lives would be better shaped by being lived in the light of impossible questions rather than only being guided by practical answers.
“How can we claim to love God and be complicit in the destruction of his creation.”
I think it’s related to the human concept of ‘ownership’ and the exercise of ‘exclusive rights’. Instead of being ‘stewards’, modern humans seem more inclined to being ‘owners’. (The stewards are generally not the owners.)
” For instance many (but by no means all) asylum seekers here in the UK are qualified professionals – engineers, nurses, doctors etc that could make a valuable contribution to the UK ”
Their have been long and hard arguments that the West is denuding poorer countries of their skilled people .
Regarding the broad question of what a Small Farm Future can/will look like.
I guess a big factor will be how much surplus food (energy) a SFF community can generate?
It’s a surplus of food that allows some members of a community to do other things than just being involved in the production of food.
Teachers, doctors, scientists, dentists, priests, soldiers, blacksmith, bio lab technicians, school caretaker, electrician, carpenter………etc etc etc.
Fossil Fuels and machinery have allowed for the vast majority of today’s population to NOT be involved in the production of food.
Hierarchies/aristocracies/monarchies are only possible if there is a surplus of food.
Professions can lead to inequality and division. People can form guilds and secret societies etc to creat advantages for certain groups.
How much surplus energy can a Small Farm Future provide?
Very good question !
Untill the industrial revolution 95% of the population worked the land before that wind and water were the only energy slaves once coal arrived everything changed as steam provided the muscle !
As for your list well IMHO electricians will be worthless as a trade as will scientists and biolab techs , kids will be homeschooled so teachers will become rare along with caretakers , dentists will be looking for customers ( victims ) when sugar is in short supply , doctors will be needed but the high tech side will shrivel , a ssf can’t supply the infrastructure needed , there will always be a need for blacksmiths and carpenters though blacksmiths will find it more difficult to find materials steel framed buildings will become a source of steel / iron , the detritus of our civilization recycled for as long as possible .
@Diogenese.
My pet interest at the moment is disease and it’s impacts on human history.
So, would a SFF provide enough surplus food (energy) to maintain any kind of pharmaceutical industry? The manufacture of drugs, vaccines, antibiotics etc? Or the development of new ones as new threats arise???
I’m not convinced that many professions that I listed above will be sustainable.
I very much doubt that there will be any health services we would recognise ,the technology of making something as simple as a syringe will be difficult , I think pacemakers will be a non starter , there is a whole rabbit hole that could be followed of lost technology , drugs ,anesthesia, birth control , its a DEEP hole .
. I read a few days ago that after the Romans left manufacture in England of wheel thrown pottery disappeared in a couple of centuries , something as simple as that gone , does not bode well for the future .
On the bright side all the GM crap will also go !
Talking of Romans…….
I also wonder if in a SFF there will be enough surplus food energy to maintain the roads, bridges etc. There is a lot of embedded energy in their construction. Bitumen, asphalt etc.
Without a navigateable road network, people’s worlds will become very localised/small.
(The Roman managed it but with slave labour)
I mean, some of those Roman roads still exist. I cycle on a few of them from time to time.
Roads with no car traffic don’t wear out quite so fast, and vehicles that aren’t going as fast as cars don’t need the same quality of road surface to get anywhere. But the area that is now Cornwall was trading copper and tin with the Mediterranean and the Middle East four thousand years ago; clearly the Romans didn’t invent road transport or trade, even if they did build a lot of straight and durable roads.
It is likely that without fossil fuel transport, people will travel much less, and trade will be more limited than it is now. And it is likely that at least some roads will become impassable through erosion and neglect. But I suspect the largest limits on travel and trade will be energy, not road conditions; shank’s pony can only cover so many miles per day.
@Kathryn
The roads were pretty bad prior to McAdam.
I’m not suggesting that roads won’t exists, but they will be of pretty poor quality and a rough ride for those wealthy enough to take a carriage.
Shank’s poney will mean a very small world for most people.
Small worlds can create small minds
Pretty sure there was surplus food in the decades after the Black Death, compared to before. These things tend to happen when a third of the population dies.
(That is: more calories produced per worker; a labour shortage resulting in higher wages; more meat and dairy since these are lower-labour ways to get energy out of land than growing plants directly for humans to eat. I’m sure there were fluctuations in food supply while things settled out, though.)
You see, this is the problem of proclaiming your news only on the high street of your hometown … it’s kind of like “oh that Chris, always banging on about some new book or other. Anyway, as I was saying…” Extra points to Steve for noticing.
Oh, just kidding. Y’all are very welcome to keep talking here…
I’m not going to weigh in too much on all these interesting debates, but just a few snippets. There’s much of interest here that I want to come back to in time.
On us, them and property, the debate we were having here a few months back seems relevant. Even the strongest forms of private property – and I do believe that renewable agrarian societies require such forms, as well as more collective ones – are ultimately a right of appropriation accorded by the political community, and are amenable to collectively-organised change through alterations either to the right or the political community. However, I agree that access to land is one of the stickiest points in small farm societies.
On carrying capacity, I’m with Clem on the variability of what’s being carried, but I like Bruce’s point about living with impossible questions. My new book (did I mention that?) talks about this a little.
I also like the wisdom of Eric’s contribution. The shared values of the losers with the winners, and alternatively the shared value of sharing.
Agree with your clarification Kathryn about the consequential nature of knowledge/power, and agree also that the situation we’re in now is very different to the late medieval one in its distribution of those qualities, with interesting potential implications.
And thanks for the other comments – some interesting lines of enquiry. But I’d better get to work on the next blog post…
I am looking forward to the book! I meant to say but forgot, I’m sorry. I also forgot to proofread my own comment, but trust that people here know I meant “huge inequality” rather than “hugs inequality”.
And I think, given the narrower topic and it’s starting point as a pamphlet, it might be something I can give away or recommend to people a little more easily, as the topic of fakemeat does come up in discussions from time to time. SFF is quite a lot to digest for someone who isn’t already thinking about the concepts, but I do know people who are trying to reduce their factory meat consumption by switching to factory meat substitutes.
Its, not it’s. Sigh.
I should just stop writing comments on my phone, autocarrot makes it look like my English is much worse than it is.
I think the American historical experience might be different here, although that might not be universally true. The distances involved and the very scattered nature of settlement probably meant that ‘homesteads’ we’re more self sufficient than the pre-industrial UK (and Europe?). A few years ago I was at a re-enactment event and listened to a potter who was an expert on medieval pottery – the division of labour he suggested was quite sophisticated and pre reformation England supported a large monastic population (some of whom would also have worked the land).
In his famous statement about life being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ Thomas Hobbes was referring to life outside society suggesting that within a well developed agrarian society life wasn’t necessarily any of those things.
Of course there are many things that mitigate against a future SFF being a pleasant and accomodating future – not least the sheer number of us
This is a good point, Bruce, and I think people who haven’t spent much time in Europe could easily struggle to comprehend just how densely populated the countryside here is…
I think there are also substantial differences in settlement patterns between the east coast of North America and various points west of, say, the Mississippi. Certainly there are population density differences today between the plains and the coasts.
Thanks for further comments. In relation to my new book, it’s a lot shorter than ‘A Small Farm Future’ and in some ways might work as a more accessible intro to the ideas about social-political transformation than its predecessor. But before you get to the social-political stuff in chapters 5-7, there’s some sciency stuff about energy, biodiversity and climate change in chapters 2-4 that some might find heavy going. Swings and roundabouts!
John, yes the book will definitely be on sale in Frome – and in all other ‘good bookshops’ … and online. I’ll be holding a launch event of some kind in Frome and will put the word out about it in due course. The model shop is still open as I recall … haven’t really looked at it since my kids were little though.
On the issues of substance being debated above, maybe I’ll just briefly venture an opinion on surplus-generation. Usually it’s not all that difficult, and it’s worth taking a look at the ways societies have tried to limit the surpluses they generate. I’ve recently been re-reading Mikhail Bakhtin’s incredible book ‘Rabelais and His World’. He makes the striking observation in it that large medieval cities devoted three months of the year to carnival festivities. Though you do wonder about the implications of that for small medieval farmsteads.
Limiting surplus is an interesting thing. I read (I can’t remember where) that one of the functions of burial practices where large amounts of wealth were buried with the deceased was to ensure socieies didn’t become too unequal through the accumulation to wealth in just a few hands – no idea if its true or just an idea someone had. But I can imagine that in many societies maintaining social cohesion was so important to long term success that cultural practices emerged to defuse anything that might imperil that cohesion. But disposing of wealth in that way does suggest that there was a surplus in the first place
@Bruce
I think burial goods was discussed in The Dawn of Everything.
In some societies “social cohesion” was enforced. Or at least the social order was enforced. All possible because of a surplus of food.
The bigger the surplus, the more complex the society.
The ultimate (pre industrial) way of maximizing energy outputs against inputs was to use slaves.
Slaves have the lowest inputs. They have subsistent food inputs and housing and clothing costs can be kept to a minimum.
This provides a surplus of food that can be used to feed, administrators, soldiers, civil engineers, philosophers, teachers, priests, monarchs, etc etc etc.
And when those slaves start to die off or you want to expand your economy, you have to go looking for more slaves.
I fear for an egalitarian, homstead Small Farm Future that has a neighbour that is a slave owning authoritarian monarchy!!!!
“I fear for an egalitarian, homstead Small Farm Future that has a neighbour that is a slave owning authoritarian monarchy!!!!”
I get that – one of the reasons I’m so keen to own land is because I see it as insurance (for my young sons) against having to work someone else’s land for their subsistence – who knows if we’ll get to that sort of place that fast but reading William Cobbett on the plight of agricultural workers in the late 18th / early 19th Centuries suggests one sort of future that might be waiting many people
I think land is almost always a wise purchase. They aren’t making it any more, and so on. But I think ability to work collaboratively with others is probably even more important.
Yes, the 4th F of permaculture – Festival! We are made to Party!
Looking forward to the book.
Also, on surplus, Prof Richard Wolff talks about ‘surplus’ being a bad interpretation of something closer to ‘more’ one being abstracted the other embodied. The abstraction draws makes universals seem attractive and possible whereas the embodied situates and contextualises. We (and Alice) are going a bit further and looking from the experience of the maker. The embodied, loving connection of care to what is made radically questions the presumptions of need and hence more and surplus. As before, the medieval commitment to party is not an aberration, as the ‘dawn of everything’ testifies we are here to play – homo ludens. I’m sure barely any of us are ‘making surplus’ let alone thinking about our lives through that abstraction – I could say quite confidently that everyone here lives their life through care (love etc) – that should surely be the basis of the new structures and its language?
The good life and its inherent Incommensurables is humdinger of political philosophy I understand and I know of John Gray’s agon as a rub along theory of toleration.
So much of our thought is dictated by people who never made, or grew anything, some who never loved! There is a fiercely robust care in the process of the act of making that supersedes these effacing theories.
Surplus food, in my view, comes with an obligation to share it. May as well celebrate while we’re at it.
Will a Small Farm Future generate enough surplus food (energy) to decommission all those nuclear power stations and safely manage the radioactive waste for generations to come?
Yes, there’s a lot of potential for inequality in future agrarian societies – though possibly less than in the present global industrial one – but I think I’d demur on the matter of slavery. Slavery in Britain was pretty much gone by the 12th century, long before fossil fuels or industrialism, and interestingly its demise was helped along by an invading colonial force. Then the Atlantic slave system, which was nothing if not industrial, arose and reached its peak during the Enlightenment era with all its fine words about freedom. It ended only with emancipation in Brazil in 1888. Haiti made its last reparation payment to France/the US for overthrowing slavery in 1947. There are certainly difficult issues about the relationships between small farm societies and centralized states, but IMO slavery doesn’t loom particularly large among them. But I agree that access to land is going to become increasingly important. Small farm societies will, of course, be the ones that make it widespread.
Regarding nuclear waste, I doubt that managing it safely will be within the capacities of almost any plausible future structuring of global societies. As I see it, producing it and handing it on to posterity is one of the more unconscionable acts of present generations.
For those of you who aren’t from these shores.
The UK isn’t very big and it has a ring of nuclear power stations distributed around it’s coastline.
There isn’t really anywhere to go to get away from them!
If they can’t be decommissioned before we get to the point that we can no longer feasibly decommission them, then they may make the UK a very hazardous place to live for generations to come.
I live down wind of a brand spanking new one being build about 20 miles away as the crow flies. (Though I have my doubts that that one will every become operational)