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 May 14, 2023 | 91 Comments
The impending publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, along with … y’know … the need for me to say yes to my non-farm-free present, is beginning to impose itself upon my time, so I may have to hold off on new blog content here for two or three weeks. Rest assured that I’ll be getting back to Bakhtin and his implications for contemporary politics soon. I’m also in the process of upgrading this site – more on that soon too.
In other news, there’s a possibility that I might travel to the US of A in the autumn fall for various book and agrarian localism related reasons that have come my way. But I’m not sure whether I should, having basically sworn off flying in recent times. In the last twenty years, I’ve been on three long-haul and three short-haul flights – which I’d guess is less than many, but more than most of humanity. And so we come to Small Farm Future’s first ever reader’s poll. Please indicate which of these statements most closely resembles your thoughts about my possible trip:
A: One UK-US round trip is neither here nor there when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, and your trip may be positively beneficial in spreading the word about agrarian localism.
B: These things are a personal choice, and it’s not for me to judge.
C: These things are a personal choice, and it’s not for me to judge. But…
D: You talk the talk, but you don’t walk the walk, you self-entitled arse.
If I do decide to go, I’ll probably be working my way from the northeast to the northwest of the country over the period of roughly late September to early November. I’m not planning to stray too far south of the Canadian border – hell, everyone needs a Plan B. So probably no further south than the latitude of Wyoming’s southern border. To readers who reside within this sacred geography, any suggestions as to where I might go to talk with others about a small farm future, marvel at the scenery or find a bed for the night would be most welcome.
As part of my book publicity, I’m going to be recording a podcast this week with Ashley Colby and Jason Snyder, lynchpins of the excellent Doomer Optimist group, although it’s not going to be broadcast for a while. So I thought by way of signing off here for a couple of weeks I might say a few words about doom, and optimism, refracted through the very interesting podcast Jason did recently with Gregory Landua and Daniel Schmachtenberger.
‘Doomer’ is one of those dismissive epithets, a bit like ‘woke’, that’s used to negate an entire range of positionings and possibilities and place them beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. So I like the way the doomer optimists oxymoronically rehabilitate it by placing it alongside ‘optimism’. In my opinion, far too much contemporary discourse around food, nature, energy, climate and society finds more underhand ways to exploit the tension between these two terms. Often, it normalises the status quo by rendering the positions of its critics as both too doomy and not doomy enough.
The way this typically works is that somebody says something like – just to pick an entirely random example – ‘our food system is wrecking the climate and destroying wildlife’. They itemize in ghoulish detail all the horrific things going on in the global food system. But then, just when you’re sunk and vulnerable in your existential despair – hey presto! – they bring you back to the present with some amazing high-tech solution that rescues civilization-as-we-know it in all its glorious dysfunctionality. An example might be … ooh, I don’t know … just a wild flight of fancy here … something like a clever way of manufacturing food from bacteria in factories that purportedly rescues the urban capitalist behemoth from its own destructive forces. Never mind that it’s clearly not going to work. If you raise any objections, they hit you with the accusation that you’re too doomy – ‘well, at least I’m trying to do something constructive here, instead of just moaning that we’re screwed’. Or with the accusation that you’re too optimistic – ‘have you any idea of the sh*tstorm that’s upon us? We need radical action NOW, and I’m the man with the plan’.
(Sidenote: it does usually seem to be men who play this rhetorical trick. And it is a rhetorical trick. I’ve seen it used so many times to defuse any radical rethinking of the status quo.)
So I want to suggest that before you embrace your inner optimist (which you should), you need to embrace your inner doomer. No really. You need to go deep, deep down into the doomiest doom and feel flattened by its truculent power. This is not a self-indulgence. It’s essential. There will not be a clean energy system to rival what we’ve become used to with fossil fuels. There will not be new forms of food production that will create easy global food abundance while saving wildlife. There will not be some fast cultural enlightenment in humanity enabling us to easily create a global commons and avoid resource wars and endless free riding on other people’s misery. Now, given all that, go and be as optimistic as possible. There are reasons to be. Especially if you get started on the work of reconstruction, while still carrying the doom within.
This is probably going to sound critical in a way I don’t intend it to be – or not much – but the pod with Daniel, Gregory and Jason struck me as a very high-level version of this doom-optimism paso doble that ultimately recuperates the status quo (though I’m not sure that Jason was really on board with it). I learned a lot from it, and I don’t question the intellectual honesty of the protagonists. There were no rhetorical tricks here – just honest, smart, engaged conversation. I particularly liked the way the conversation focused on social technologies to meet the present poly-crisis – property rights, commons, economic instruments – rather than the usual unconvincing techno-fixes (despite a brief but alarming wobble into implausible energy tech).
At the root of it, Daniel’s basic argument seems to be that we can’t meet our problems by going low-tech and local, because then we lose to those who stay high-tech and connected, and nothing then is gained. I think that’s largely true, but the problem as I see it is that there’s no way of staying in the game with the high-tech, connected folks without getting co-opted and feeding the disease. That option’s days are numbered, and if we haven’t built a distributed localism it leaves us without a Plan B when it crashes. Which it will. And you need the Canada option of a Plan B, right? My Plan B is no hey presto. It’s a numbers game. Slowly try to build a second, low-tech, distributed world within and around the edges of the mainstream world. It’s hard, and most of us will probably fail. The possibility that not everyone will fail is where I find some optimism. And out of that not-complete-failure lies the opportunity to rebuild.
The conversation on the pod struck me as quite ‘American’ in the sense that it was what you might expect smart people to say who can see the way the wind is blowing but are still a bit too caught up in the locus of control that comes with being a mover and shaker within what’s still the world’s most powerful country and it’s only superpower, even if the limits of those powers are ever more painfully apparent. It’s been at least seventy years since the UK had the remotest claim to such powers, but the severance note still doesn’t seem to have reached into our political culture, even though we’re now beginning to fall pretty fast (y’know – Brexit, hubris, failing social contract). So, a word of advice from an old country to a newer one – you guys may be in for a long descent. Rock bottom is still a looong way down, before you can start climbing again up the other side.
Even so, I think we’re beyond the time when anyone can seize the controls of the crazy plane we’re on. Descent is now inevitable and we’re better off trying to figure out the most feasible crash landings. Actually, that’s not such an appealing metaphor in view of my plans outlined above. So let’s move on.
One point that was made in the podcast is that trade of essential items, specialization and the division of labour is a good way of building solidary relationships between people to avoid conflict. This is basically Adam Smith’s origin myth of capitalist society, but I’d argue on the contrary that trade is a terrible way of trying to build solidary relationships, and usually a short route to war and colonialism. Maybe this is where the superpower blinkers come in – it was claimed in the pod that the post-war global trade system reflected a collective ‘never again’ mentality of avoiding war through developing trade. I’d say it was more a case of ‘never again, but on our own terms’ from the USA, which was always going to end in tears. At critical postwar junctures, the US and its allies (including the UK) have placed the ‘on our own terms’ above the ‘never again’ and I believe the payback is now largely out of our hands.
As I see it, a better way of avoiding conflict is minimising long-distance trade dependence while building shared cultural symbols over large territories and long historic time (an idea also developed by thinkers such as the two Davids, and Mikhail Bakhtin). There are no shortcuts, and there will be plenty of obstacles. My optimism lies in thinking that it’s worth embarking on that route, and it’s worth attending to some of the things that throw us off course – things like the way we think about ‘doom’ and ‘optimism’, the way we dismiss low-tech and low-energy systems as antiquated, as if antiquity was a vice, the whole language of ‘regression’, returning to the stone age and so forth that’s routinely applied to low tech and local routes, and that found its way into the podcast. Happily, everyone on it seemed to agree that attending to the local and to local food production is worthwhile. Which is a good place to start, although the starting down it now feels way, way too late. Still, the best time to plant a tree and all that…
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The correct answer is C.
It’s not for me to judge BUT I am judgemental. Two more trips across the Atlantic makes no difference in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Thinking that it is is one more way that the business as usual system pushes the responsibility on to people who have no real choice. Are you going to go to Bristol and book a sailing ship ?
It is only an issue because you care. Weigh up the mass of carbon captured in all the trees you have planted and subtract it from your share of a round trip.
When you come through Minnesota, connect with the Land Stewardship Project and Renewing the Countryside. You can stay with us. The train stops in St Paul and St Cloud, both about an hour away.
If I was on the fence about being a bit of a doomer, observing the way various governments have bungled handling SARS-CoV-2 cured me of it. We could have, and should have, gotten off lightly; instead millions of lives were lost because profit was seen as more important. Fossil fuel scarcity and climate catastrophe are both more complex and slower to wreak consequences than a pandemic (though I daresay more pandemics are something we should expect with climate instability and warming), so I think we are deeply, deeply screwed. I am optimistic that humanity will probably muddle through somehow in various parts of the globe, and that a congenial future is possible. I think the route there will be a very bumpy ride indeed and our chances of getting there without some kind of mass death event are getting slimmer by the day.
I have similar qualms about flying; when I moved to the UK in 2000 I wasn’t considering the flight question so much, and as my various family members all live in different parts of Canada, it wouldn’t be trivial even if I lived there instead of here. I think in the last 20 years I’ve had five trips there, and four elsewhere (shorter haul).
I think choosing not to fly is a valid and important piece of activism, but like all activism it is largely symbolic: the plane is going to fly with or without you on it. And modern-day indulgences like purchasing carbon offsets or paying to plant some trees to try and sequester the amount of carbon you personally will be responsible for are, likewise, symbolic. I’d love to take an airship instead, but I doubt I can get one built by October (crapitalism in yet more “the market will provide what people want!” lies, sigh). I get far too seasick to consider a boat (plus most of my relatives aren’t on the east coast). I am aware that the number of times I will see my father again is very likely down to single digits, and if I don’t go there, he will want to fly here, and so I will hold my nose, mask up, and fly.
The other difficulty I gave when I visit my Canadian family members is that most of them drive and live in situations where driving is a normal part of daily life. That’s not the case for me, and I rather suspect that between the driving for short errands and the driving to meet up with other nearby relatives and the greater distances every item (including food — the shorter growing season means eating locally and seasonally is that much harder) gets driven to reach people, a few weeks there probably raises my carbon footprint more than the actual flight.
That, in turn, makes me think about all the ways in which my current existence is fossil-fuel dependent even without travel. I try to stay away from synthetic fabrics and fast fashion in general, but did finally buy a waterproof that is actually waterproof, and yes, it is made of plastic. I don’t drive, but I do order things online (when I can’t get them locally) which are delivered by people who do. We get our milk delivered in glass bottles on an electric milk float but I don’t think it’s charged by solar panels. Our own electricity comes partly from the grid and partly from solar panels on our roof, thanks to the landlord being willing to sign up for them, but our heating is still natural gas and this is unlikely to change anytime soon, and then there’s all the difficulty with materials for batteries and so on. I grow a fair bit of our own food but also still purchase conventionally grown grains and so on, which have a pretty hideous carbon footprint. I am definitely picking my battles. We all pick our battles, even when working toward similar goals.
So then the questions look more like: is flying such an important symbol that you’re willing to pick that battle? I can’t substitute Zoom calls for seeing my father in person; is what you’re hoping to achieve on your proposed US trip something that requires your actual presence in meatspace, or can you get 80% of the way there by transferring electrons instead of your body? Or, conversely, if you do go, how will you ensure that you are truly spending your time and energy on activities which you and your hosts couldn’t achieve in any other way? And what do you hope to learn that will positively benefit your own agrarian localist project in your own community, or help you to further articulate possible ways forward more generally?
I suppose my answer is a blend of A and C. It is, largely, a personal choice; but personal choices have wider ramifications, both material and symbolic, and while I won’t judge you, I think some people might.
A. You are not the type to take either useful or useless trips often. So don’t beat yourself up over it. Are you considering going to the FPR conference in Madison? If so, might see you there. However, that travel schedule is a bit biased, just sayin.
Cheers,
Brian
Hi Chris, I’m a big fan of yours living in the northeast; Cape Cod, MA. We would love to host you if that worked out. My home is about 1.5 hours from Boston depending on traffic. We have a 1 acre mini homestead with fruit trees, ducks, and veggies plus woodpiles, woodshop, forge, and all manner of projects going on– and lots of kids. If you aren’t put off by that then you are most welcome!
Partly from reading your book, and Wendell Berry, and others, we are thinking of making a big move to somewhere more rural where we can have a larger, more productive homestead. The real estate values in this coastal place are not favoring the small farm even though it is where our extended family live and where we grew up. So we’ve been looking at Maine where abandoned farms abound for less. MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardners) would likely wish to host an event with you, maybe even speaking at their huge Common Ground Country Fair in September. They had an enthusiastic review of your book in their newsletter. I don’t know if that would be preaching to the choir, but everyone needs to keep the vision alive. Where I live local libraries have been sponsoring speakers on topics such as eating factory farmed crickets and selling gmo seed to African nations, as well as eating vegan to save the planet as a constant from all local climate action groups. This in a place where millions of pounds of whelk and dogfish are shipped internationally because people don’t prefer those species here. I dropped out of the Harwich Climate Action Network after trying to articulate the bigger picture repeatedly. The response was basically, “That’s very nice, and now lets get on with promoting electric cars.” So I wish that I knew how to get you a big time platform here in my area where the techno-utopianism holds sway and most people are wealthy enough to buy into it, for now anyway. Maybe the Orleans Farmer’s Market would do something?
About airplanes. The question reminds me of whether I should buy the organic fruit wrapped in plastic and styrofoam or the non-organic fruit with no packaging. Or should I tell the family we aren’t buying fruit from foreign places only to have them all start eating out at restaurants more often because the fare at home is too restricted. Or the question of whether we should be using more gas than we ever have before to drive up to Maine and scope out farmland in hopes of someday living with far less fuel needs. There is no right answer — our situations are in some ways absurd. Your choice. I do admire those who actually refrain in spite of the small and insignificant nature of the act. Some of us need to show that it can be done.
Clara
OK, this might be a long response. It’s raining right now, can’t do outside chores.
A famous plot line in the second Star Trek movie was the “Kobayashi Maru” test. What would someone do in a no win situation? It was a character test at Star Fleet Academy.
Well, Kirk essentially cheated at Academy, but beat the test. Spock’s real life no win situation led to his death, but he justified his choice by invoking “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”.
You aren’t facing death, but just a hit to your green cred, and maybe a feeling of guilt as the downside. Who knows what the upside might be? Planted seeds often take a while to catch hold.
I am reminded of JMG’s point that we don’t all need to band together and pick one path forward, that dissensus and many varied approaches increase the odds that one or more will prove out.
The point I take is that everyone has to chose their own solution, and in no win situations, even the best choice involves loss.
So my choice in the poll is option E- Do it for your own calculation that the good outweighs the bad, and weigh our opinions only slightly.
We don’t know what possible stops you are mulling in your itinerary, but I live in Wisconsin, and would be happy to ferret out options around here if you want. If not, I might try to attend one you’ve already scheduled if it’s not too far.
If you plan train travel, the Amtrak “Empire Builder” ( boy, there’s a whole other conversation) route hugs the northern tier of states, and passes by only an hour from our farm. If you’ve never ridden Amtrak, prepare to be disappointed compared to European standards, but I can give some tips.
Regarding the meat of this post, Doomer optimist fits me I suppose. I generally find labels ill fitting, especially lately. Decline and massive disruption are baked in, but lots can be done to mitigate and prepare locally, wherever you happen to be. I’m planting food trees and the perennials. In general, doing SOMETHING at least eases the mind some.
Lose by going low tech and local? Nah, high tech is a self limiting behavior, and we are back to your queen-less bee hive analogy. Let’s get on with it.
Why men seem to be the ones using the annoying logical fallacies? Maybe a variation on that unfortunate mansplaining reflex we seem to be born with.
I’m not clear on your concern about trade. Surely local trade between equals that results in mutual benefit is ok? A certain level of specialization is rather necessary even in groups of self provisioning farms. Specific long distance trade ( define long in an oil free world….. ) would hopefully not result in conflict if it was limited to essentials like coffee and chocolate!!! Again, not as coerced empire tribute.
These thoughts from 2019 are along the same lines, and confirm that the dilemma is real.
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2019/05/
I think the difficulty with trade, particularly long-distance, is that it inherently comes with incentives to extract more than is sustainable in the interests of profit. It also comes with incentives to create markets to induce demand — and history shows humans are fairly susceptible to induced demand of various types. Then you get market fluctuations based on either a) the natural resources you are extracting crashing or b) your consumer markets getting saturated or experiencing their own market lows due to whatever natural cycles are in place there that allow the purchase of wool or tin or whatever. That’s fine in a situation where every household looks to their own needs first and then does artisanal coffee production (or tin mining or whatever) on the side, but in boom cycles that are combined with local population surplus, people generally move away from that pattern and take up profitable weaving/mining/cash crop production/etc as full time jobs. Then they’re entirely reliant on one commodity for their livelihood. Add in the (well-documented; Adam Smith warned about it, I think?) tendency of unfettered markets to favour monopolies and the number of things that need to go wrong for great numbers of people to starve is even smaller.
This is so normal to us now that we don’t think it’s weird for entire families to have nobody doing subsistence farming. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. All kinds of extraction for trade are also vulnerable to extreme weather events of the sort we’re seeing more of with the unfolding climate catastrophe; your flooded tin mine doesn’t produce tin, and your wool trade will collapse if enough bad years mean the sheep starve or if their pastures burn.
Personally I don’t think trade itself is inherently good or bad, but I do think it contributes to conditions of misery and strife unless intentional steps are taken to limit that tendency. The mediaeval guild system was one such attempt. More recently, anti-trust laws and state welfare systems could be seen as another. Neither of these protected against primary resource depletion, but rather compensated for the effects of market fluctuations on labourers. And neither of them included everyone in their protections.
“To fly or not to fly. That is the question?”
For what it’s worth, nothing much will change whichever you choose.
I think alot about this with my kids. Do I drum into them environmental issues (that they can’t effect anyway) or do I let them live their lives guilt free (as much as possible)?
The complex techno world that we know and live is going to come to an end. There isn’t going to be a techno energy fix (fusion my arse!). And fossil fuels are going to be too energy intensive to extract long before it all runs out. Without energy, it all ends.
So nothing anyone does is going to change the above.
I think my kids should embrace the opportunities that abundant cheap energy provides whilst they can. (And deal with the post abundant cheap energy world (PACEW) , as and when it arrives). We are living in a once in a planetary lifetime of amazing machines running on abundant cheap energy.
So….my question to you Chris is……”why wouldn’t you fly?”
The techno energy fix ,
https://www.rt.com/business/576194-germany-electricity-rationing-green-transition/
There’s the fix ! It’s happening , the electric car is dead on arrival , getting people used to the idea that electricity lighting ,heating , freezers and refrigerators are unreliable is in the near future , with all their obfuscation the powers that be know that the standard of living has got to drop , getting their without their heads on spikes is the problem .The
There a lot of small farm / homesteads groups in the US , they probably never heard of you but they live your dream every day , they are the seed corn of the future . Joe Salatin is a well known author though more into how to make money out of mixed farming , he does teach on his farm how to run a farm to the citified .
After avoiding flying for over 20 years, I did some air travel recently.
A judgmental, non-empathic response:
‘You hypocrite!’
An empathic response:
‘It must have been an important trip.’
Yes, the trip was important, in contrast with the lesser importance (to me) of judgmental non-empathic people.
So I’m in agreement with steve’s option E for no-win situations, where there is a less-bad choice..
But I realize this option can appear to ‘justify’ the guy whose calculations consistently find his flying so important that he makes many trips per year, or even has a private jet flying him to Davos and other ‘important’ conferences worldwide.
Chris,
I think the hypocrite argument is BS. Judicious use of your energy tokens is what counts. You aren’t selfishly jaunting off on a cruise or a cushy all inclusive beach front hotel. If those who understand, care and are working for a better future just stay home, the message wont travel as far as it could. Spread the intention. Take the trip and don’t look back.
If by Northwest you are going to end up in the Puget Sound / Seattle area there are plenty of folks in this area that are trying to live the small farm future. I would particularly suggest the Beaver / Central Valley area on the Olympic Peninsula near Port Townsend. Lots of like minded farming folks there.
We are a few miles closer to Seattle in Kingston but would host you on our small farm if helpful. I could get some contacts on folks that might be able to host a book reading / discussion group. I know some Permi groups and such. Let me know if that kind of thing is helpful. I assume your publicist probably can cover that but the offer stands.
Thanks for all the work you do!
All the best,
Josh
Such great faith you put in our wisdom!
A few poorly organized thoughts:
I’m with Clara above: “There is no right answer — our situations are in some ways absurd.“
Getting on an airplane has given me the creeps ever since the TSA, though I’ve done it a few times.
I have also been heard to say things like “We’re all going to hell, so let’s go fast.”
But not recently. It’s possible I’ve matured a little.
Though surely that sentiment is doomerish enough to qualify?
And indeed, just going about the business of constructing a decent life where we make an effort to live closer to our daily solar budget would be huge optimism, in my view.
Quite some time ago Venkatesh Rao ( https://www.ribbonfarm-dot-com ) wrote an article saying that it’s a mistake to compete with dead people. We are alive, so we should act that way. Use resources wisely, and for good purpose. We will never be better at not using resources than dead people.
Venkatesh writes about other kinds of things mostly now.
Where did I read “Trade is what you do with your enemies.”?
Tyson Yunkaporta?
I took that to mean that you give freely to your family and friends, but with outsiders you need to keep track of accounts.
Everyone who knows you already knows what you are good for.
All of this will become much more of an issue when energy for transport becomes more dear.
The same with ‘High Tech’. As Diogenes notes above, all this high tech stuff requires vast quantities of energy to operate. Even ‘Low Tech’ stuff. Has anyone here ever melted any quantity of steel? Or crystalline silicon?
These are not trivial activities.
If you get to North America in September, look for pawpaws (Asimina triloba). Their native range goes farther north at the eastern end of the continent. Don’t bother looking for pawpaws outside their native range.
On that note, if you are in northern Ohio, you might be interested in talking to Chris Chmiel
( https://integrationacres-dot-com )
And speaking of Wyoming, Devil’s Tower is the single most amazing thing I have ever seen. Much more than the photos. You’ll need a car to get there.
If you dip as far south as northern Kansas, I’m confident that I can find you people and/or meetings/events you could be interested in. And you could stay with us.
Good luck.
Just a simple A, help build the movement.
The trouble with the doomer optimist duo (I find Tris more rootsy) and good old galaxy brainenburger is (and don’t get me wrong, I love em), is that they don’t make stuff. I know this is mostly for Daniel, but the duo are academics and I think your right, that and swimming in the empire waters gives you certain perspectives. I think it’s the delusion that sets of all the most ersatz eco modernist ideas and is firmly set into the foundation stone of capitalism and colonialism. It’s a barmy faith in tech, religious, social, industrial and digital. We are the chosen ones, we are the best, machines are great and the computer is the pinnacle of MANs achievement (and hence the universe)! Bad Magic thinking. We should be able to provide most of what we need to love within our town or village. Its gonna be a question of who has the best festivals and more joy, this is the politics of party – people!
I’ll break from the crowd to say that in-person appearances seem like a strikingly inefficient way to spread the word about anything, unless you’re appearing in person on a television show or widely televised event. Not worth the carbon, in my humble opinion, just to go breathe the same ordinary air as a handful of people who still probably won’t buy the book or change any of their choices.
But my reasoning, like most people’s, is motivated: I dislike travel of any kind (from commute to vacation to an equally pointless jog around the block), am a grumpy introvert (deep down only; quite pleasant to know), and am secretly glad that covid gave me a years-long excuse to avoid parties, weddings, concerts, and my own office. So it’s easy for me to come up with reasons why flying isn’t worth it, but YMMV. I will also say I am expected to fly a few times per year for my new job, and I’m wrestling with how to keep that to a minimum and identify lower-carbon ways to get the job done.
All that said, if you do make the trip, it includes Wash DC, and you could benefit from gratis accommodations with a pleasant young family just a short walk from a convenient Metro stop, please get in touch!
A short answer … C of course and here is my ‘but’:
… I will be disappointed if you choose to fly (even though my feeling are irrelevant to … almost everything). And so would Prog Kevin Anderson if he followed your blog …
The ability to provide everything for ourselves locally as climate change ravishes the land is going to be increasingly difficult, even if we were to stop all fossil fuel emissions today, which we quite obviously are not.
Not to romanticize the “noble savage” Native Americans, because they were flawed humans like the rest of us, but they successfully operated trade routes that were hundreds or even thousands of miles long. Our problem now is that we’ve swung the pendulum too far the other way, relying on exploiting land and workers in faraway places to produce what we could easily produce locally.
The solution as I see it is then, especially with climate change, is to produce what we can locally while maintaining long-distance trade routes as a backstop to prevent misery. COVID broke down global supply chains and showed the importance of being able to produce things locally, but a different pandemic, or natural disaster, could wipe out the local ability to produce critical items for at least a year or two. Having a fully localized system just for the sake of saying you have a fully localized system would be a recipe for disaster.
Dude. You are the only person to be making this decision – as you are the person whose brain will ultimately bear the burden of the consequences. If in your mind ‘D’ is a plausible outcome, AND if you can’t bear facing someone saying this down the road, then you need to stay put. Sell the van, carry produce to market, and join in the shaming of others who just aren’t there yet in terms of walking the walk
Next line of thought – someone else is motivated to bring you to North America, yes? Do they bear some responsibility for this travel and potential acceleration of imminent doom (or being toasted for not walking the walk)?? Potential audience(s) and their benefit of an in-person engagement need consideration in the calculus as well… value vs. cost.
As my only dog in this matter is the eventual timing of the onset of doomishness, and with my age I find it unlikely I’ll suffer personally whatever choice is made, I’m inclined to vote – present but abstain.
Meanwhile, I’ll get on with setting up those wooden barrels in the cellar to be engaged as fermentation vats for precision fermentation. Fungal mycelia like what they produce at Quorn (https://www.quorn.us/company) look low tech enough to participate in up-cycling efforts for a SFF.
BTW, the farm Eric mentioned above is a bit over and hour from me. And there are some other Ohio based stops you might consider if you decide to travel this direction.
According to Quorn Foods, their mycoprotein product is *not* made using the precision fermentation process.
==========================
Did you know there are 3 different fermentation processes?
• Biomass fermentation (the process used to create Quorn products) which uses the high protein content and fast growth inherent to microorganisms to generate large quantities of protein;
• Traditional fermentation, which uses live microorganisms to transform and process plant-derived ingredients;
• Precision fermentation, which uses microbial hosts to manufacture cells and purify functional ingredients.
Here at Quorn Foods, we use biomass fermentation.
==========================
https://www.quornnutrition.com/news/fermentation-and-alternative-protein-industry-report-breakdown
The graph shows that mycoprotein is largely made from intact cells and inert ingredients, while precision fermentation requires a higher degree of downstream processing and can have more active processing agents.
Wooden barrels in the cellar seem better suited for “traditional fermentation”.
I meant to write:
“…precision fermentation requires a higher degree of downstream *purification*…”
Did you know there are 3 different fermentation processes?
If we want to split differences why stop at 3? Beer, wine, and higher level alcohol spirits all have various levels of quality (precision) in their process. Most of the difference dependent upon the skill of the human involved in managing the fermentation(s).
For Quorn to make the distinction that their process (current main process by the way) is biomass is as much for PR as anything. The public facing image of where many (most?) precision fermentation startups have landed has – as you and many have noted – left much to be decried. But the Quorn quote you copy above focuses precision fermentation in a different light than where several of these companies actually exist (for those not making or growing whole cells). And the difference in downstream purification is also something of a continuum (as for instance purifying fermented spirits by distillation).
Penicillin is made by fermentation. Has been for quite some time now. As the final product is a medicine for which much is expected; I’ll offer then that this is a sort of precision fermentation. But it fits nicely into the second definition above.
Rennet… a somewhat similar story. Though this story involves GMO…
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/05/you-can-thank-genetic-engineering-for-your-delicious-cheese/
Insulin…
And the Quorn story is itself not completed. For more on this stay tuned.
Further information on fermented foods:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723656/pdf/nutrients-11-01806.pdf
The researchers here are from King’s College in London.
From the abstract:
The aim of this review is to define and characterise common fermented foods (kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, tempeh, natto, miso, kimchi, sourdough bread).
Various levels of precision in all these VERY old foods.
More on Quorn: Two things –
Similar to Prime Roots, Quorn, which is housed under Marlow Foods, uses a mycoprotein derived from fungi and produced through a precision fermentation process. Last month, Monde Nissin revealed it had set up a new division – Marlow Ingredients – to supply mycoprotein to other food manufacturers, starting in Europe.
This quote from:
https://www.just-food.com/news/monde-nissin-joins-prime-roots-30m-financing-for-fungi-based-charcuterie/
And from another ‘Just Food’ piece:
The Philippines-based food and drinks company, owner of the Quorn brand since 2015, revealed last week that meat-free is facing various “challenges” across its markets, from inflationary headwinds weighing on consumers’ purchasing habits in the UK to the dissipating “hype” in the US.
the link there – sub in a period for ” dot ”
http://www.just-food dot com/features/monde-nissins-quorn-takes-impairment-bruising-on-meat-free-rationalisation-trend/
There are growing pains in the space – no doubt. But there are serious pains in the conventional animal dairy space as well. Leaning very strongly into whether one is precision or not (and even whether precision is somehow not good going forward) seems a tough position to stake out.
Traditional fermentation (including the making of beers, wines, and distilled beverages) requires a certain level of precision, but that doesn’t make the process “precision fermentation” as commonly defined.
The distinction which Quorn Foods makes between the three different types of fermentation (biomass fermentation, traditional fermentation, and precision fermentation) didn’t originate with Quorn Food’s PR department, it’s actually taken from the “2022 Fermentation State of the Industry Report” by the Good Food Institute, which “works alongside scientists, businesses, and policymakers to make alternative proteins as delicious, affordable, and accessible as conventional meat.”
“GFI’s State of the Industry Report series serves as our annual alternative protein sector deep-dive… The Fermentation: Meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy report synthesizes 2022 updates across the global fermentation industry focused on animal-free alternatives to conventional proteins. This report focuses on developments across the commercial, investment, policy, and scientific landscape related to the use of fermentation in the production of alternative proteins—meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy made via microorganisms. For a full primer on the emerging role of microbial fermentation in building the next generation of alternative proteins, please visit GFI’s science of fermentation deep dive.”
On page 13 of the “2022 Fermentation State of the Industry Report” is the section on “Traditional vs. biomass vs. precision fermentation”, including this explainer about “precision fermentation”:
“Precision fermentation is a form of specialized brewing that uses microbes as “cell factories” for producing specific functional ingredients. Capable of producing proteins, vitamins, enzymes, natural pigments, and fats, precision fermentation is well-positioned to create high-value ingredients that improve the sensory characteristics and functional attributes of plant-based products or cultivated meat. Precision fermentation can be used to make products like egg proteins, dairy proteins, pepsin, animal-free meat proteins including heme, and fats. Proteins like myoglobin give meat its signature taste and aroma, and incorporating these proteins into plant-based products can help companies develop products that more closely resemble conventional ones.”
https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022-Fermentation-State-of-the-Industry-Report-2.pdf
Figure 3 (on page 16 of the industry report) shows some overlap between the three types of fermentation, but mycoprotein (like Quorn) is shown as being fully outside the “precision fermentation” realm. Regarding the “degree of downstream purification required”, mycoprotein is shown at the low end, while “precision fermentation” is shown to require a higher degree of purification.
Thanks for this little debate. The Good Food Institute as I understand it is kind of a biotech incubator organisation. What particularly interests me in the quotation from Steve is this:
“precision fermentation is well-positioned to create high-value ingredients that improve the sensory characteristics and functional attributes of plant-based products or cultivated meat”.
In other words, even its industry boosters aren’t really positioning precision fermentation as a technology for producing macronutrient-dense food in bulk.
In other words, even its industry boosters aren’t really positioning precision fermentation as a technology for producing macronutrient-dense food in bulk.
I have the feeling you consider this a negative…
Should salt mining be prohibited because it doesn’t immediately or directly produce macronutrient dense food in bulk?
It appears we’re arguing about the application of a specific word (precision) as it is used at the moment (and by various stakeholders for their own self positioning). In a future (SFF or other) where fermentations of various sorts are technologies available to us, where is the harm in trying new ones? Those that don’t provide value will die… and those that do provide value will continue to serve the greater good.
Chris –
This is for you, if you happen to find a free moment.
I mentioned you and your book.
Between Education and Catastrophe
https://rword.substack.com/p/between-education-and-catastrophe
Thanks for the mention James. Good article! I hope to write about the much promised energy transition a little bit down the line.
Thanks Chris! Be sure to see the (additional) comments here:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-05-15/first-the-doom-then-the-optimism-a-small-farm-future-reader-poll-special/
There are various brokerages that might be able to arrange an Atlantic Crossing on a cargo boat? Failing that there is The Queen Mary.
@Kathryn, Middle Son dug out ‘Flying to Rio’ from the British Pathe website, it is an account of a flight to Rio on the Graf Zeppelin, clearly the only way to go. Sadly however as far as I can make out you cant build an airship that is both strong and powerful enough to be able to master the weather as many were wrecked in storms
Thanks for the comments. Since a couple of people picked up on the point about trade I’ll address that first, and then deal with the poll results.
I should probably have clarified that I’m not against trading as such – I’m not a believer in the total economic autarky of the individual. What I’m against is the notion that if you have two potentially hostile human communities that define themselves as separate with respect to one another, then fostering trade between them is a good way to defuse potential conflict. I think the opposite is more likely the case. Of course, there were many examples of premodern long-distance trade. Some of them were clearly associated with violence and conflict. Others maybe not so much. My proposal is that the not so much ones probably drew from a shared cultural repertoire that helped defuse the potential for conflict fomented by the trade. It’s to developing such a repertoire rather than building trade relations that I think future politics is best directed.
Regarding the poll, thank you very much for generous and nuanced responses of the kind I’ve come to expect on this site. As several of you pointed out, the ultimate decision is on me. In that sense, my poll is a bit like the ones you get in general elections. You all get to say your piece, and then an outcome is imposed which bears little relation to the nuanced complexity of your thinking about it. Obviously in this case what I decide to do is crashingly unimportant to the ultimate course of world affairs. Though actually the same is true of most general elections.
So here’s where I’m at. I like how Amory Lovins put it – it’s best to let the electrons do the talking and leave the heavy nucleus at home. So maybe I shouldn’t go. But ultimately that’s not how people are built – actual, flesh and blood human interaction is the stuff of human community, and I’ve had a lot of kind and wonderful invitations to visit people doing good things in their communities. So maybe I should go. However, their communities aren’t *my* community, so maybe I shouldn’t go. Yet a sad irony of localism is that while a lot of people connect with it worldwide, not enough do in any given locality – hence, there’s a case for travelling and connecting with people face-to-face to build the movement. So maybe I should go. I don’t think I could justify going if it was just to give a few talks at bookshops and shift a little more product. But I have some invitations to meet up with some cool people I’d really like to connect with. So maybe I should go. However, I dislike the self-importance of the kind of people mentioned by Steve L whose calculations routinely suggest to them the special importance of their own chosen itineraries. So maybe I shouldn’t go.
Lazy (Non-)traveler gets close to a hidden truth. While I can achieve a passable resemblance to a normal human being via the written word on this blog, probably even rising above the level of a chat bot, I fear that in real life my extreme introspection and dislike of large groups and unfamiliar situations will alienate people who might otherwise be taken in by my writing style. So maybe I shouldn’t go. On the other hand, it’s good – is it not? – to face one’s fears and challenge oneself. So maybe I should go.
Boat options are – tricky. And I’m not sure the carbon cost of the Queen Mary turns out too well.
I’ll get back to you…
I wonder if going on this trip might be part of fostering the shared cultural repertoire you refer to in your comments on helpful vs harmful trade.
I have heard of people hitching rides on cargo ships…
Echoing “Josh’s” comment above–Port Townsend, Washington, Olympic Peninsula, working on local food since early 2000s (Local 2020 transition town), Jefferson Land Trust saving farm land, reviving salmon streams, site of Global Earth Repair Conference 2019. Across the Puget Sound (Salish Sea) on the mainland, more agricultural land in river bottoms but also pressure to develop for high tech high speed commuter train and housing for high tech industry from Vancouver, B.C. to Portland, OR. Land, cost of living high. Housing vacancy rates near 0%, positions in trades, schools, healthcare unfilled because of lack of housing. Lots of support from Washington State University Extension Service for small farms – workshops, classes, etc. We’ll put you up if you come this way.
Two possible ‘lateral’ ways of addressing the ‘to fly or not to fly’ issue, Chris.
1. In 2000 I put it out to the Universe that if my presence was really wanted or needed somewhere outside NZ, my travel and expenses would be paid for by those who invited me. Amazingly, within 6 months an all-expenses paid invitation to a conference in India arrived. There were 3 more overseas expeditions on the same basis between 2002 and 2005, and then everything dried up until 2018, when I was asked to teach a 5 day eco-political economy course in Bangkok. Since then I have refused the opportunity to go to a gathering in Mexico – it is too far from NZ, and someone younger than me deserves the opportunity. I am assuming your presence is wanted in Turtle Island, and the good that you do by going there will outweigh any harm you do by flying there. See point 2…
2 The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh supposedly used to say, before every fossil-fueled journey (cars as well as planes), “May the good that I do by taking this journey outweigh the harm that I do by taking it.” I think this is a good way to assess whether a journey is really necessary.
It’s a ‘First World’ problem of course, but still a real one, and a tricky one, so good on you for facing it head on.
… and of course there’s also the question of what it looks like … it does kind of buy you the right to talk about sustainability – if you’re taking on one of the supposedly inconvenient consequences in your personal life then it does look as if you really mean what you say – not just meaning ‘well, sometime in the undetermined future, a lot less flying will happen, probably to people not like me’.
No, I must shut up. I thrashed all this out for myself at enormous length a long time ago and I’m not going to do it all over again.
Those jets will fly anyway , I have traveled across the pond in a Airbus with six of us on it ( we all got upgraded to first class ) , enjoy it while you can , in the near future air travel will just be for the” chosen ” not peasants like us .
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230515/pepe-escobar-us-empire-of-debt-headed-for-collapse-1110374196.html
” Aristotle succinctly framed it: “Under democracy, creditors begin to make loans and the debtors can’t pay and the creditors get more and more money, and they end up turning a democracy into an oligarchy, and then the oligarchy makes itself hereditary, and you have an aristocracy.”
A book that should be on every smallholder book shelf !
Some more votes in, thank you. All good points. Y’all have given me excellent material to justify whatever decision I make. The polls close soon. They say that who speaks last wields the greater influence…
Kathryn says:
>I wonder if going on this trip might be part of fostering the shared cultural >repertoire you refer to in your comments on helpful vs harmful trade.
Ha ha, yes maybe. Though if we have to go on plane trips to build the cultural repertoire we’ll need to cope with a low energy future, I fear we’re in even deeper trouble than I thought.
Clem asks:
>Should salt mining be prohibited because it doesn’t immediately or directly >produce macronutrient dense food in bulk?
Whether a precision fermentation industry producing new high-value, non-bulk products is a good thing or not is an issue I’ll leave aside for now. I don’t have a problem with the Good Food Institute’s straight talking about the kind of products the method produces. But I do have a problem when people lead unsuspecting others up the garden path (or in this case the factory path) by billing a high-value, non-bulk approach as a low-value, bulk one that’s going to do away with most kinds of farming, when it clearly can’t and won’t. The parallel would be if the salt mines heralded their product as a new superfood and insisted that people give up farming, move to the city and eat a diet comprised largely of salt.
But I do have a problem when people lead unsuspecting others up the garden path (or in this case the factory path) by billing a high-value, non-bulk approach as a low-value, bulk one that’s going to do away with most kinds of farming, when it clearly can’t and won’t. The parallel would be if the salt mines heralded their product as a new superfood and insisted that people give up farming, move to the city and eat a diet comprised largely of salt.
Specifics? Here you are specifically railing against George’s efforts?
I used the salt parallel as an ingredient to food, not as a food replacement. Some of the fermentation products coming on the market (individual proteins such as casein) are being used as an ingredient in making a food product. Cheese for example. I feel comfortable referring to cheese as a macronutrient-dense food in bulk. And I don’t think I’ve suggested such efforts will do away with most kinds of farming. But they can participate in a future where today’s farming systems have serious issues to address.
The fermentation systems for simple proteins needn’t force people to give up farming and move to a city. I’m supposing you get that notion from Monbiot’s efforts.
Feedstocks for fermentation needn’t be electricity. Upscaling other biomass is beneficial, and again won’t force displacement of populations.
My point is that demonizing an entire technological pursuit for a few cherry picked bad examples (and/or bad actors) is not a good look.
Clem, to be clear, my animus was not directed at you but indeed at the likes of Monbiot – apologies if it seemed otherwise. Monbiot says that current developments in precision fermentation represent the ‘beginning of the end of most agriculture’ (Regenesis, p.187). I think this is a dangerous position and I will fight against it. I don’t see this as a cherry-picked example, but part of an ecomodernist defence of the status quo that will create no end of trouble if it continues to gain traction. Still, I believe there’s a book out soon that goes through all this better than I can here.
I recognise that what you’re saying is something different. Using precision fermentation to make casein as a cheese ingredient has its pros and cons like everything else that no doubt we can debate, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
* just to add, what interested me about Steve’s GFI quotation was that its claims about PF were much more modest than Monbiot’s, even though they’re very much aligned with the tech
Different from most of the present conversation, but appropriate to a UK small farm future – this government ‘food summit’ going on today:
https://www.just-food.com/news/uk-government-reveals-reviews-of-egg-horticulture-supply-chains/
Reactions from someone with a vege in the fight?
Thanks for linking Clem. Reactions…hmmm. Well, perhaps that it’s more evidence of the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which nevertheless in the long run might be something that makes us stronger. But not while the government is just trying to put band-aids on it like this. In the short-run, maybe it’ll be good for veg growers who don’t rely on cheap migrant labour, but bad for people on low incomes who’d like to eat fresh food. Longer term, I’d hope it would make the government take a look at housing costs … and migration. But there’s a lot of things I’ve hoped for, and a lot of them haven’t come true.
Feeling like Don Quixote then – tilting at windmills?
Without getting into your local specifics (matters such as what your local MP thinks of these ideas) do you have the sense that your community – and you define what community means here – is moving in ways that are helpful?
If I define my community as those living within a comfortable walk of our house then I have a different opinion to my community which includes the diaspora of colleagues who I consider brothers and sisters in arms (farmers and plant scientists I’ve collaborated with). This latter collection I imagine is quite helpful (and yes, I’m biased). The former community – well, so many pensioners in this group that our best contributions may well be to support our children and their offspring. And this last is certainly a good thing.
Now I’d like to turn to other communities. Say the entrepreneurs trying to solve some of the pressing problems in front of us… problems in front of you, me, Steve L, our families… habitat difficulties from atmospheric carbon and other greenhouse gases (I’m looking at you methane), PFOS, safe clean water, on and on. Entrepreneurs, like the rest of us, come in various shades of noble, honest, helpful (or their antonyms). Whether what they bring to market is helpful or not is still largely decided in the market. If they find ways to improve access to what we want at price points better than those to hand their odds of success are good. Of course the opposite is usually the case, if an entrepreneur doesn’t improve something they will fail. But trying is still a positive thing, succeed or fail.
Well, nobody knows what our MP thinks because he’s been missing in (in)action for about a year since allegations of financial, sexual and drug-related misconduct:
https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/21870748.david-warburton-mp-by-election-campaign-launched/
I think there are a lot of good things happening here in Frome, but it’s a bit of a happy-town bubble in the eye of a wider hurricane.
Regarding food and entrepreneurship, if it was a matter of people risking their own money to create products aiming to address wider social problems and then taking the consequences, good or bad, of their entrepreneurial endeavours, I guess I’d be more open to it. But I think the field is too muddied by a government to corporate fiscal pipeline, and a lot of dark venture capital money based on questionable forms of monopoly rent.
But I think the field is too muddied by a government to corporate fiscal pipeline, and a lot of dark venture capital money based on questionable forms of monopoly rent.
In the UK? Or do you imagine this a global matter?
And thanks for the Warburton link. Interesting.
Chris wrote, “Regarding food and entrepreneurship, if it was a matter of people risking their own money to create products aiming to address wider social problems and then taking the consequences, good or bad, of their entrepreneurial endeavours, I guess I’d be more open to it…”
In an earlier comment, I said that when a bad idea like Monbiot’s manufactured food loses money for venture capitalists, I’m not so bothered, but the prospect of government funding being wasted on it by clueless politicians is troubling.
Clem brought up entrepreneurs and “the market”, but when the market decides something’s a bad idea that should fail, the entrepreneurs can get around that by influencing government policy in their favor, and acquiring government funding outside the market.
The main priorities of the Good Food Institute include “influencing policy and securing government investment”!
(from the 2022 Fermentation State of the Industry Report, p. 4)
Some other quotes from that industry report:
“Public-private partnerships provide an opportunity to fund facilities that may be less attractive to venture capital.”
“…alternative proteins have an annual unmet funding need of more than $40 billion. Both private investors and governments are critical to ensure that alternative protein companies have the funding they need…”
What I am going to say might sound off, and I don’t mean to sound ranty, but all the talk of ‘collapsology’ and “too late’ I have heard, have come from people, well meaning although they may be, who live here in the prosperous global north. There’s a glibness to this kind of talk, and it leads me to suspect that they believe that they will either get off unscathed or if there is damage done, that they’ll be left with the resources to rebuild, whether that takes the shape of a small farm future or otherwise.
I don’t know, but I’m in the head space at the moment where this fills me with dismay, not to say anger. Maybe it’s because all the news now coming out of SE Asia, with the unheard of heatwaves, followed by Cyclone Mocha, has left me with my heart in my mouth. It has hit me hard, because it’s home, and I don’t want to lose my home.
You are right in saying that the movement needs to be built, but have you thought about visiting the equivalent builders ib the global south? The subsistence farmers of India who defeated Modi? Via Campesina? The Indigenous Food Sovereignty Movement? I wonder what they think of doomism, given that they are going to be hit first, are being hit now, and will be hit the hardest. My dearest wish is that if there were to be a global localism movement, that it will benefit those who have been most exploited by the current system, and have contributed the least to the multiple crises now bedevilling the Earth
Thanks for that. I see it the exact opposite way – I think it’s the tendency to dismiss the prospect of collapse, disorder and hard energy descent by most people in the Global North that’s indicative of a belief that they won’t face the kind of privations people are suffering elsewhere. I agree that collapse talk can be glib, especially if it leads to resignation, but that’s not what I’ve ever argued. What I’m arguing against here in general (though I’m not going to make this accusation against the podcasters I discussed above) is a kind of white saviour narrative where people think they’re going to save the global population from climate change and other problems via new high-energy technologies, corporate food solutionism and suchlike. I guess I don’t really understand where your critique is coming from in that context.
So yes I agree with you about Via Campesina, indigenous food sovereignty and grassroots agrarian populisms – things I’ve written about quite a lot on this blog. In terms of personal engagement … I mean I don’t really like this way of spotlighting people, but I was involved in setting up the first Via Campesina affiliated organisation in the UK … and the last flight I went on was to Nicaragua as part of a farmer-to-farmer learning project involving people from Nicaragua, Senegal and the UK … and I’ve corresponded a bit with people from India arising from my book. But yes I’m mostly engaged in Global North or Euro/American issues … because it’s where I live, where I best understand how the politics works and am most politically engaged, it’s where the damage is most being caused and where I think the socio-political assumptions most need to change.
For sure, there’s a kind of colonial-historical framing around the fact that the people I mostly engage with are other Anglophone Global Northers. As per my comments above, I’m not really looking to go anywhere, but it’s tempting when I get a nice invitation and I guess chances are the invitations are most likely to come from North America or Western Europe. If I got an invite from India or Malaysia, of course I’d consider that too – but I would have more qualms about what I could usefully contribute, and how applicable the learnings from the trip would be to my local political engagements.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post. It wasn’t terribly well thought through mostly because I have been having a hard time dealing with the news out of ASEAN at the moment.
I’m going to put it another way. From the solidarity work that I’ve been doing with indigenous communities from East Malaysia, what they need least of all is is incessant talk of collapse being unavoidable, especially by those who live in the global north who willl be the least affected. What they do need is hope, that the grassroots work that they are doing will result in the healing of their lands, and a liveable future. Constant talk of doom and collapse come what may undermine that faith. Who knows what will come?
Thanks Hoon, and I’m sorry to hear about the weight you’re carrying. There’s a playful hyperbole to the word ‘doom’ which may not hit the right register, and I agree the message that there’s no hope at all – not what I’m suggesting – isn’t much help to anyone. Where we may still differ is that in my opinion much of the ‘hope’ in the Global North to mitigate the biophysical negatives of our high-capital, high-energy political economy so that it can continue on its merry way is really antithetical to the wellbeing and long-term prospects of many indigenous people, local agrarians and land defenders. So I feel we have similar motivations, but are putting different framings around them.
A bit of (A) and a bit of (D). These matters aren’t “private” in that we are all obligated to undergo ecological conversion, with all the sacrifices that this entails. However, there also isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. We have to personally discern what sacrifices and vows to make.
I’m trying to build a car-free life, but I don’t have an eco-village quite yet, and I did just drive up to my family for Mother’s Day.
A prayer some CWs say before driving: “Almighty Creator, have mercy on the whole human race, my country, and me, for the sin of offering the profane fire of fossil fuels. Grant us the courage and opportunity to offer penance for these sins against Brother Fire.”
But if you DO come… I had better start scoping out a venue in Lancaster, PA!
Good points by Hoon, I thought. But at the risk of sounding glib, it may be a cockeyed way of looking at it, but to help assuage any misgivings over the dirty business of travel by jet engines, you could always view it as you doing your bit to accelerate towards a much-needed collapse many see as unavoidable. Farm-free foods, fracking, cloud seeding, GMO in-flight meals – bring ’em on, let’s get it over with.
One possible caveat might be that a very unexpected rapid collapse happens while you’re in the States, leaving you stranded.
Still vaccillating? You could always row. 70-year-old Frank Rothwell did it in a couple of months and concluded it was very boring.
Once there, you may find yourself preaching to the choir, but maybe not. When I watched the Fairlie-Monbiot argument a few months back, I found it curious that when the audience was asked if anyone had changed their opinion of farming after hearing the debate, only one person raised their hand, and sadly we didn’t get to hear whether that person had been won over by Monbiot’s camp, or persuaded by Fairlie.
Whatever the outcome, it sounds like you’d have a great time once you get the sham glamour of an international flight over with.
PS. It might be useful to hook up with some Landrace gardeners – it would seem a good direction to explore, particularly for small gardens, farms and communities, and interestingly shifts the focus from soil to the greater importance of genetics when it comes to plant nutritional content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UTZ2j0F-gc&ab_channel=LandraceGardening
It doesn’t sound like you’ll go as far south as Utah, but gardener/author Joseph Lofthouse appears to be the one banging the drum for Landraces. He dwells in Paradise, lucky guy.
Here’s a question for the organic gardeners and farmers here.
If humans were to all go vegan (hypothetically), farm animals would largely, if not entirely, disappear — and so would the manure-based fertilizer so basic to organic farming and gardening. So how would or could organic farming proceed without such inputs? Can it?
My request to you who would answer is that you please answer in the comments following this article.: https://rword.substack.com/p/radical-home-making A bit of a conversation on this topic is opening up there.
I dropped over to Jame’s substack to leave a few remarks in answer to the question.
While there I pulled up an article that I think some here might find interesting:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7414965/pdf/AEM.00588-20.pdf
Here is a fermentation method using processed corn [Pozol is a refreshing, nonalcoholic acidic Mayan beverage made of fermented nixtamal (alkaline cooking of maize kernels, generating a nonsticky dough)]. This centuries old process involves several different microorganisms, uses primarily the fiber component from nixtamal as feedstock, AND it generates a small amount of additional nitrogen in the process.
This won’t be patented (prior art), it survived in an indigenous population subsequently lost due to gold theft – so it had (at least at that time) some market success. I’ve no idea whether the Mayan administration subsidized it’s implementation… but it seems to check several boxes in some aspirations for a SFF.
[ Travel disclosure: I haven’t flown in 20 years and in the 20 years prior to that I flew only once, to a conference. I say this not to “blow my own horn” but to reveal what may be my bias. I’ve been an academic during all that time and truly believe my career suffered somewhat as a result. ]
I teach courses on the psychology of behavior change focused on environmental stewardship. It’s a large research university populated with many folks (>70,000 students, faculty, and staff) who fly a great deal. I often use some version of the question “should I fly to xxx” and “how to support such behavior in others” as a final exam essay. I’ve read some great student responses on all sides of the issue.
I often have students first build principles (from case studies) and then use them in their answers. Principles like what Ostrom listed in her book “Governing the Commons” or like is presented in the last chapter of “The Localization Reader.” In addition, I ask not just for their yes/no/maybe-depends answer but how they would implement that decision (i.e., how to change individual behavior in a durable way).
Lately, an interesting framing has taken hold more often than not. It starts from realizing that the climate/energy impact of an individual’s behavior is small, often infinitesimal at the global scale of the climate crisis or coming energy descent. Yet, while the impact of an individual flying or not flying might be inconsequential, the aggregate impact of those decisions is not. Nothing new here.
The principle that emerges (and while I admit it’s not original it is new to the students) is that the decision-making/behavior-change-implementation should be made at the same scale as where the impact is detected. Here: if the impact of flying is detected at the scale of the neighborhood, village, county, or state aggregate, then the decision of whether to fly or not should be decided at and an implementation developed at that scale. Generally, this conforms to the principle of subsidiarity.
“Subsidiarity principle – Decision making should be at the lowest possible level — that is, as close to affected peoples and their resources as possible. Water supply and sanitation, for instance, should be arranged by those who enjoy the services and pay for them; most often, this will occur at small scales, within a watershed, and bounded politically and financially. By contrast, reduction in greenhouse gases should be arranged at the scale where their impact is first noted, at the regional, national, or international scale. Both examples conform to the subsidiarity principle and both have ecological content.”
The approach here is different from the idea of a general election. In such a case, as Chris write, “You all get to say your piece, and then an outcome is imposed which bears little relation to the nuanced complexity of your thinking about it.”
There are well over a dozen models of behavior change the students can draw from although lately they seem to prefer using those that leverage social norms (e.g., the Norm Activation Model, social norm marketing procedures, leveraging dynamic norms). Almost all the students start off assuming that norms have little effect of individual behavior yet, through a review of decades of empirical evidence, come to appreciate their powerful role in durable behavior change.
But the key requirement is that the approach they suggest for changing behavior has to have worked at the scale of the aggregate impact.
And unexpected to me, since I don’t teach it, is their use of the “veil of ignorance.” Such as: knowing that the aggregate impact affects us all, what norm would we want to be enforced even if we didn’t know if we’d be the one grappling with the decision to fly or not.
I hate that my writing comes across as a lecture; that a bad habit I’m paid for doing. Maybe a shorter version of all this is: Deciding whether to fly or not is currently done by the individual. However, the basis of the decision should be at the scale where the aggregate impact is noticeable. Here that would be at some size like the village. Then, invoking a “veil of ignorance,” what norm would you wish to have applied at that scale to reduce/eliminate the negative impact. Follow that norm.
To Clem’s question above, I see it as a global matter. But there’s a pull towards the centres of capital from weaker parts of the globe. In the UK for example, a lot of tech start-up companies seem to spin off from academic research into university business parks and basically wait until they get noticed and bought up by a big US corporation which has the financial power to make the product profitable. There are often a lot of government sweeteners as part of such deals. Having a university business park in the first place involves the prior accumulation of an awful lot of public-private capital, making it already the preserve only of rarified global economic elite countries and operators.
On the flying issue, thanks for the further interesting thoughts from Raymond, Simon, Sean & others. I’m not persuaded by Simon’s accelerationist provocation, but I have to admit that the prospect of some kind of systemic collapse stranding me in the US did cross my mind. It seems very unlikely, but the fact that it’s occupied headspace suggests an orientation to home on my part which is maybe telling me something (we hosted a long-distance strandee here on our farm during the Covid lockdown who was with us for months and missed the birth of his child, which may also be relevant…)
I agree with Simon’s point about the poor returns on trying to change people’s minds (maybe Raymond might have some further thoughts about that?) So if there’s a reaching out to people logic to the trip, it has to be about movement building. I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of top-down techno-fix solutionism, and one of my invitations is to start building a movement and organising around that. So … more to think about
It’s fortunate that you can sidestep an “oh, sod it!” kind of accelerationist approach.
And so, if it comes down to movement building over great distances, ironically, perhaps the techno-fix solution of using the electrons is best, or least worst?
That said, I see Paradise, Utah, is basically a bike ride away from Wyoming’s SW state line. God damn!
(It’s internal conflicts of this sort that refresh and drive home the true nature and value of ‘home’.)
Something more to think about, Chris… What Hoon Seong is saying goes deeper than whether the ‘white saviours’ are dooming and glooming or alternatively going full techno-modernist. It is closer to the ‘fly or not to fly’ issue, which as several people have pointed out thus far is only a ‘problem’ for those who have the opportunities to do so in the first place.
For those who do not have those opportunities (like the majority of small farmers in Asia and Africa and Latin America) I can only imagine how annoying it must be to hear well-meaning ‘white saviours’ saying either ‘We are all doomed’ or ‘We will all be saved by over-hyped technology X or Y’.
The white saviours all use the word ‘we’ as though it applies to the whole of humanity, when it only applies to their bubble of ‘big thinkers’. Like the smart-arse one called Amy Webb I heard on radio yesterday, whose latest book (The Genesis Machine (Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology) probably makes Monbiot’s fantasies look quaint.
I totally agree with your point that you should work with the people doing things most like you, where you can contribute the most, but I am wondering whether that actually means Europe, rather than N. America. For example, the small/organic farmer organisation Confederation Paysanne in France. I know there are language issues to overcome, but they are not insurmountable.
With regard to how those in the ‘white saviour’ category can get to hear more of the ideas and practices from the non-Anglo world (and I include myself – a little bit – in this category) then I am eager to read anything published in English about ‘movements from below’. I am currently reading Raul Zibechi’s book ‘Territories in Resistance’ , about Latin American social movements, but it is 10 years old now, and I really want to know how things are going today. I get some information from the on-line publication The Esperanza Project, which covers the Americas, but where and how to find out about what is happening Asia and Africa I don’t know.
Recommendations for good websites to check out for this are welcome!
However, while this interests me, even as I read up on it, I know that global problems can only be solved locally. Somehow the 70s slogan ‘Think globally, act locally’, coined by the global North environmentalists of the time, has been corrupted into ‘Think globally and pretend you are acting that way by proposing on your global communications devices that ‘we’ should or will all eat gloop’.
Whereas it is the efforts of small farmers who manage to put good food on the tables of their communities, despite all the batterings they get from the state, the market and now the climate extremes, that will enable those communities to survive and thrive when the white saviours are wondering why the supermarket shelves are empty, and discovering that you can’t eat money. (Especially when it is digital!)
Hmm, I’m finding the thread of this conversation initiated by Hoon & responses to her a bit puzzling. Nowhere have I said ‘we’re all doomed’ or assumed a unified global ‘we’. The main point of my OP was to critique ‘saviour’ universalisms that construe a globalized we but actually mask and perpetuate vast differentials of power. So I think what I’m saying is congruent with what you’re saying, Christine. The doomer/optimism framing may be a bit too knockabout but I don’t understand how the points of substance I was making in the OP can be represented as a white saviour narrative or an example of white privilege, unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying?
Maybe we can get some clarity around this if I frame it the other way around. What if there is no contraction or system limit to the ability of the contemporary global political economy to accumulate capital and harness energy, so the system is not ‘doomed’, allowing the handful of countries that greatly monopolise capital and energy flows to augment and perpetuate their global economic hegemony? Would that give indigenous land defenders more hope?
As to the flying issue, that unquestionably is a matter of privilege on my part … but I already knew that before I uploaded this post. Where one draws the line of geographical outreach I guess is kind of arbitrary, but maybe somewhere you don’t have to fly to is a reasonable rule of thumb, so perhaps yes Europe. Though whether I can justify hammering down south in a TGV then rears its head…
As an aside, I’d hazard that the majority of people who engage with this blog are based in N America, which is interesting. And the politics of the UK are probably more comparable to the US, or Canada, than to France. But that’s a whole other thing.
Andrew Millison just did a tour of tradotional permaculture projects in India, there is also Vandana Shiva. There is a selection of essays about Africa by Silvia Federici called Re Enchanting the World.
I’d also add to what Chris is saying, the doom and collapse narrative is:
– the western industrial fossil fueled super
structure
– the natural systems
No one can do anything about these 2 facts. Facing them leads to optimist narrative:
– if we work together we can transition to a low energy steady state inter sufficiency (SSF)
– the natural systems will respond to our efforts
I’d love to hear about the efforts going on in France and if we can learn from your processes. Is it easy to buy/acquire land there, what are the laws like for establishing an SSF?
I vote for “A” but feel compelled to add that, as a fellow lazy (non-)traveler who’s prone to extreme introspection and who dislikes large groups as well as unfamiliar situations, such an undertaking sounds quite unpleasant. 😉
Further thoughts on “to fly or not to fly”
Chris, if it’s your “green” credentials that you are worried about contradicting by flying, then I would argue that no-one in the industrialised “West” has any “green” credentials.
Our complex lives are totally dependent on abundant cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.
I wonder if the folks at Just Stop Oil really understand what a world would be like if we just stopped oil?
I’m not sure I can full appreciate the implications of a world without fossil fuels. The complexity will unravel.
In all honesty, if you look around. How would your farm function without fossil fuel inputs? Would it even function?
I work in the heating industry. I go into houses that have gone “green”. It makes me laugh. I walk into the “boiler room” an look at all the complex pipework and “kit”. One think it isn’t is “green”.
Why single out flying? We communicate on this blog through a whole network/infrastructure that is only possible with fossil fuels. Why not stop blogging?
This device I am typing on right now has a huge carbon footprint. It isn’t just the carbon inputs in its manufacturer and utilisation. It’s 200 years of increasing technological and social complexity made possible by fossil fuels that has created a mobile phone.
I’ve bought the bamboo toothbrush because I thought it was the right thing to do. Then I look at the yoghurt pots that I throw away and realise that the toothbrush is just a gesture. To not to fly would be the same thing. Just a gesture. Very few of us are really willing to make the changes to really Just Stop Oil.
This all became apparent to me after reading a book. It was called Small Farm Future.
‘Maybe we can get some clarity around this if I frame it the other way around. What if there is no contraction or system limit to the ability of the contemporary global political economy to accumulate capital and harness energy, so the system is not ‘doomed’, allowing the handful of countries that greatly monopolise capital and energy flows to augment and perpetuate their global economic hegemony?‘
This does get at something I find a bit iffy about the doomer optimism ideology. However you define ‘doomer’, whether positively or negatively, it basically describes an attitude to the future: the crash will inevitably come. Even those who want to emphasise the urgency by claiming it’s already started will still insist that things are going to get a lot worse.
That’s fine at a certain general level – we’re all signed up here to the fact that the use of fossil fuels and the resulting high levels of energy are simply not sustainable, and the effects of past and current use are going to be difficult. But I think there are two serious problems with it.
First, doomerism seems to neglect the asymmetry of the crash. Not only will it hit different people in different ways depending on their geographical and social positions, but the actions of the rich in the global core areas will almost certainly actively compound the plight of the poor in the global peripheries. So while there undoubtedly is a ‘systemic limit’ to the ability of capital to accumulate, those at the top of the global tree have to act as of that’s not true in order to stay there, and so in effect those who ‘monopolise capital and energy flows’ will continue to ‘augment and perpetuate their global economic hegemony’ to the detriment of the rest of us. In contrast, doomerism seems to imply a wave crashing down to wreck us all, and the only real issue is building an effective life raft among the ruins – to extend the deluge metaphor a little further, the idea doesn’t have much to say about the fact that there are already large luxury yachts and armoured warships set to weather the crash by any means necessary.
Second, doomerism undoubtedly is an ideology of the global core, the core of the Anglosphere in particular. Again, fine at one level, it’s great that some of the more privileged in the world are recognising the limits that apply even to them. Nevertheless the point that this might come across as rather glib (to say the least) outside the core regions, where forms of ‘collapse’ have already been actively inflicted by decades or centuries of (neo-)colonial restructuring, has already been made by Hoon. Now, the point of the OP may have been to criticise the techno-saviourism promoted by influential inhabitants of the global core, and that absolutely needs doing (can’t wait to read the book), but that’s not all the OP does – it also invokes doomerist ideology in its ‘optimistic’ form. And that’s also a discussion worth having.
This reminds me a bit of a discussion here a little while ago about the extent to which the makeup of humanity after the collapse will essentially be a function of a kind of evolutionary dynamic, in which the ‘fittest’ will demonstrate their fitness by surviving. Doomer optimism strikes me as similar, in that the optimism can really only be felt by those who have some capacity to build effectively among the ruins, to try to make themselves the fittest. Looking down the podcast list, there’s quite a few interesting-looking people doing good work, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with trying to make a difference in one’s own backyard. But still, for an ideology predicated on global collapse, it is a problem that it doesn’t seem to have much, if anything, to say about asymmetries of capacities for optimism across the globe – and rather disconcertingly, also seems to offer a home to some rather reactionary views that don’t strike me as optimistic at all.
There’s been the odd mention of movement building in the discussion here. That strikes me as crucial, and not remotely doomerist if taken seriously. I understand that the process of coming to terms with the extent of the change sweeping the globe needs to be faced head on, but I worry that doomerism is basically an excuse to retreat from the big questions around global solidarity. I hope that optimism can be cultivated without it.
You seem to be describing a “Hunger Games” kind of world of the Citadel (or was it Capital?)
And the 13 precincts.
This is a possible scenario but not the only one. Total collapse of the Centre is also a possibility.
Homesteaders and Prepers are possibly cultural responses that are particular to North America. (It’s less talked about here in the UK. There just isn’t enough space). The culture of the individual, which is central to identity in western culture, will be the starting point hence people trying to prep and removing themselves from their fellow citizens.
This may not be the the same approach in other parts of the world.
SFF is really written with the UK as it’s model. The world is too varied and complex to cover it all in one book.
The industrialised “West” probably has further to fall when fossil fuel extraction is no longer viable. Will the “West” still be able to impose itself on the rest of the globe without all the tech? Who knows?
I guess the Spanish Conquistadors managed it, but then tech did play a part.
All that said. For me, the most interesting question and one that covers all cultures is………
HOW DO WE STOP THE BULLIES FROM TAKING CONTROL???????
On a local, national and global scale. I guess if you stop the local bullies then they can’t turn into national and global ones?
So, polls are now closed on the US trip. Thanks for your votes. Here I’m going to provide a brief analysis based on exit polls – official results in due course. And later today I will also post a response to Andrew and others on the interesting doom-optimism issue.
I find myself in complete agreement with all the mutually contradictory positions people have staked out around flying. That includes John’s recent comment that nobody has any ‘green’ credentials. My only caveats there would be firstly that perhaps matters of degree are still significant. So while indeed my computer and blog are fossil-fuelled monstrosities, I imagine they’re preferable in terms of positive impact per carbon emitted than flying to the USA for a speaking tour. Likewise in relation to my farm, indeed it’s heavily dependent on fossil fuels – but, I’d argue, quite a bit less than most of the surrounding farms, which maybe counts for something. And secondly, while whatever decision I take is ultimately symbolic, symbols are important things in human life. For that reason I’m generally supportive of people who take some kind of non-consumerist stand against the global capitalist machine, whatever it happens to be, even if it’s ultimately of little import – provided they’re not too judgmental of others about it and don’t take themselves too seriously.
On which note, now that I’ve blown my cover about this potential trip I fear I’ve created a predicament for myself. Go, and it suggests I’m taking the impact of my role as a prophet of agrarian localism way too seriously. Stay, and it suggests I’m taking the impact of my role as a refusenik of fossil fuelled modernity way too seriously.
The only way out I can see is some kind of comic negation of both these positions, such as flying halfway there and back again without talking to anybody. To that end, I’ve booked an autumn beach holiday in the Azores.
Ha Ha, brilliant! The Azores were staring us all in the face all along, it does seem the obvious choice. 🙂
A suggestion for some in-flight reading material:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11250-020-02442-z
“The dairy sector in the Azores Islands: possibilities and main constraints towards increased added value”.
Excellent idea, Chris! I never even knew where the Azores were before, but after a bit of armchair on-line travel I have found that they cover the same latitude north as NZ does south; like NZ the only mammalian fauna pre-human settlement were bats; endemic birds were prolific; and they even have a native tree fern.
What’s not to like?
I guess I missed the polling window, but my answer is A.
We need voices like yours on this side of the pond. As such, I hope you will make it to the Front Porch Republic conference in Madison, as others suggested. I would also selfishly recommend you make a stop in Traverse City, MI if you can. Certainly I can put you up here nearby at our place in Honor, MI. The scenery here is wonderful in the fall.
Thanks John. It’s genuinely touching to get offers like yours. Who knows, maybe your late vote will swing the decision…
Thanks Andrew for an interesting intervention as ever, and to Hoon for initiating it. I’ll try to construct a response. Apologies if it’s a bit garbled. I’m rushing.
To your first problem, I agree with everything you write up to “In contrast, doomerism seems to imply…”, which is consonant with what I’ve said. I partly agree with your next gambit too – I mean, I think I’ve written a lot over the years about global disparities in the impacts, but you’re probably right to say that there’s a strand of generic doomerism that doesn’t pay enough attention to this.
However, I think it’s harder to discern future patterns than you imply. It’s true that the impacts of climate, energy, water and political crises are likely to disproportionately affect poorer and less powerful people and countries, but –a point made by the likes of Dougald Hine and Joe Clarkson (we miss you, Joe!) – there are also ways in which they could disproportionately affect richer countries completely hooked on cheap capital, energy and excessive urbanism. Sure, the super-rich are preparing their armoured boats (partly because, as Douglas Rushkoff nicely illustrates in his recent book, they’re absolutely terrified that they’re not going to survive what’s to come – and they might well not). A lot of the doomer-homesteading-rural-community-building nexus is basically a bottom-up movement of people who feel they have no power over that and over global power structures. They can critique those structures, and it’s worth doing, but it doesn’t really get anybody very far. Maybe there are parallels here with Raymond’s subsidiarity point. The proper level of redress for global power disparities is at the level of the state, not at the level of individual, household or community resilience building. But building local resilience can nevertheless be an act of global solidarity inasmuch as it can help people exit the machine, both locally and – through its ripple effects – elsewhere (though I agree it’s good to be aware of how individual capacity to act is historically structured).
I’m less persuaded by your second objection. If it were true that doomerism was restricted to the global core, then maybe that would suggest indeed there are reasons in the core to fear collapse more than in the ‘periphery’. But I don’t think it IS an ideology restricted to the core. No doubt it manifests differently in different places – as John suggests, the US neo-homesteading and small town movement has its own historical specificity. I’m no expert on Global South doomerism (I don’t, y’know…travel much) but there are, for example, rich traditions of religious millenarianism within many poor communities in the Global South (the original doomer optimists?), there are strong political movements around climate change, and examples of the “we’re f*cked” thinking motivating a lot of Global North doomerism aren’t that hard to find in the Global South.
If I’m understanding you right, you go on to criticize me for over-emphasizing the optimism that you say can only be felt by those who have some capacity to build among the ruins. Whereas Hoon, if I understood her right, was criticizing me for under-emphasizing the optimism that she says those who are disadvantaged in that respect need. I’m not minded to plant my flag in either of those places. I’m *hopeful* (not optimistic) that the decline of high-capital, high-energy global monopoly capitalism will create spaces for people worldwide to build better local societies. But I have close to zero faith that the existing system of states will assist them in that task top-down. Which is why I say the ‘doom’ (doom for a corrupt and irredeemable system of states) has to come before the optimism.
All of this is somewhat separable from what the specific Doomer Optimist folks are doing. It’s interesting that you use the word ‘reactionary’ in respect of some of their contributors – an idea I’m hoping to explore in more detail a couple of posts down the line. I share your dislike of some of the opinions within the Doomer Optimist world, but I’ve also come to dislike the tendency of both ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’ to think that the other lot are bad faith actors who need to be silenced. Neither lot are going to be silenced long term, so where do we go from there – engagement? As I see it, there are left-wing and right-wing versions of top-down statist industrialism and there are left-wing and right-wing versions of bottom-up community self-organisation. As a basically left-wing proponent of the latter, I’d venture to say that I may have more in common with right-wing communitarians than with left-wing statists. But I aim to write more about that soon.
Possibly a ‘reactionary’ US neo-homesteader who’s trying to build practical autonomy locally and who doesn’t want their government to get involved in expensive foreign policy adventures might be doing more to help the reconstruction of just and renewable societies elsewhere than, say, a left-wing politico jetting off to try to influence people at distant conferences. It’s very hard to predict how all these chips will land.
“It’s very hard to predict how all these chips will land.”
Indeed it is.
Maybe a remote Andean valley community will fair better than an over populated, technology based, western society such as Britain?
Being remote from the present centres of global power/politics could be an advantage.
Agrarian communities that understand how to grow stuff but at present are being squeezed by multinational corporations may stand the best chance of making a go of it once/when the globalised, fossil fuel driven, “West” hits the wall?
Thanks for the reply Chris, and John for yours a little earlier. A few comments by way of response.
First, I make no claim to be able to predict what will happen in the future, but I suppose it’s difficult to speak much about the future at all without indulging a little speculative fiction – we all tell ourselves stories in order to work out what to do with our lives. I hadn’t really envisioned the Hunger Games, but I’ll admit I’m haunted by Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ in darker moments.
I don’t think there’s much disagreement here about where the impact will land – I’m sure it will hit richer countries as well, but within them it will be poorer and marginalised people that suffer disproportionately. I probably could have been clearer, the global ‘periphery’ is not solely located in a particular territory (like the vaguely defined Global South) but is woven throughout the world.
I also don’t mean to criticise local responses to these crises, wherever they hit, but doomerism seems to make claims to a comprehensive response that completely marginalises more global considerations – it’s about building small worlds as a way of escaping the mess of the big one. But small worlds don’t usually manage to exist in isolation (perhaps John’s remote Andean community might manage something close to it), and if the modern state withers or is transformed into some kind of rump repressive apparatus, I don’t think we can expect it to become the ‘proper level of redress for global power disparities’ – later you yourself note that you have ‘zero faith’ in the ‘existing system of states’. In my view the transnational level is something we’ll continue to be implicated in whether we like it or not, and so it needs to be something we continue to worry about and seek to affect, not something that can be left to take care of itself (‘ripple effects’) or die quietly while we all get on with local lives.
It would be interesting to hear from others on the presence of absence of doomerism outside the core of the Anglosphere. I’m not convinced it has much of a presence elsewhere, but I’m handicapped by my monolingual status and would find it difficult to hunt down. That said, I wouldn’t associate it with religious millenarianism, which is surely about hopes for salvation (doom only in its archaic sense of judgement), not the kind of pragmatic honesty about the plight of the world that you associate with doomerism in the OP. Talking of hope, I would never criticise anyone for optimism per de, but I think Hoon’s point was that doomer optimism isn’t generally transferable to the Global South, and that a more constructive way forward might find a better language of common cause between communities in the two hemispheres.
Finally, I never suggested that the doomer optimists were ‘bad faith actors who need to be silenced’, and expressed admiration for the projects of many on the podcast. Engagement is crucial, but I fear reaction more than you I think. To go back to states and the desires of those with power to hold onto it, it seems pretty clear that people in both the UK and the US are currently dead set on stoking reactionary flames to keep the rest of us in line – some of the state legislation being passed in the US right now is horrific.
So this goes back to my transnational point – I don’t think we can afford to view reaction as some kind of personal quirk in otherwise decent people. There’s plenty of room for differences of opinion on a whole range of topics, and plenty of scope for engagement across different parts of the political spectrum. But there are some kinds of ‘reactionary’ politics that implicate people directly in the repressive policies of our current governments and their close supporters, and I don’t think that can simply be overlooked. If a ‘right-wing communitarian’ was only concerned about the expense of foreign policy adventures I might not worry, but in my experience the words ‘right-wing’ and ‘communitarian’, when placed together, often imply more exclusionary practices closer to home.
Thanks for that Andrew – thought-provoking. I’m hoping to come on to some of these issues more directly quite soon. In the meantime, being short of time, just a few placeholder responses to some direct quotes from yours –
“I don’t think there’s much disagreement here about where the impact will land – I’m sure it will hit richer countries as well, but within them it will be poorer and marginalised people that suffer disproportionately”
I think that’s true, but not necessarily in quite such a totalising way as I believe you’re suggesting. The questions I’d like to explore here are whether there are ways in which some currently poorer and marginalised people might weather the impacts better, what kinds of politics they might devise to help them do so, whether they’re likely to find traditional socialist or Marxist politics a help or a hindrance there, and how generationally enduring the buy-out of the richer and more centralized people will prove to be.
“if the modern state withers or is transformed into some kind of rump repressive apparatus, I don’t think we can expect it to become the ‘proper level of redress for global power disparities’ – later you yourself note that you have ‘zero faith’ in the ‘existing system of states’. In my view the transnational level is something we’ll continue to be implicated in whether we like it or not, and so it needs to be something we continue to worry about and seek to affect, not something that can be left to take care of itself (‘ripple effects’) or die quietly while we all get on with local lives”
I agree with most of this, but it poses big dilemmas. I think that states are the proper level of redress for global power disparities, while also thinking that the chances of them actually redressing them are close to zero. Yes, we need to continue to worry about and seek to affect the transnational – but how to do so effectively? I’m in favour of transnational solidarity work, but there are a million tricky questions about how to do it. On the left particularly, I think there’s a danger of a kind of gestural moralism of caring about distant others and thereby claiming superiority over those who devote more attention to local reconstruction and care. Not saying that’s what you’re saying. For me, the key political crunch comes around how the politics falls out at the point when translocal politics interferes with the local reconstruction work of those who have a strong political analysis of why they’re doing what they’re doing with their localism
“I wouldn’t associate [doomerism] with religious millenarianism, which is surely about hopes for salvation (doom only in its archaic sense of judgement), not the kind of pragmatic honesty about the plight of the world that you associate with doomerism in the OP.”
Here I think you risk imposing and universalizing your own values – ‘pragmatic honesty’ as against … what? – on other people and movements that have their own political critiques of the situations they find themselves in, but a different analysis of where salvation might lie. This is one of the problems with solidarity work. Who do we choose to forge solidarity with, and on what or whose terms?
“Doomer optimism isn’t generally transferable to the Global South, and that a more constructive way forward might find a better language of common cause between communities in the two hemispheres.”
Well okay, so the challenge then is to start finding that better language and defining the forums to articulate it. IMO ‘doomer optimism’ is just a bit of wordplay to organise a loose group of people willing to interact on social media. I like the way they’re fairly open to anyone who’s willing to come out and play with them, and I’m sure they’d be open to you presenting your critique and reformulation to them. Obviously fine if you prefer to work on other forums, but … I guess I wonder how constructive the criticism of DO for its biases is …
“I never suggested that the doomer optimists were ‘bad faith actors who need to be silenced’”
…sorry, I wasn’t aiming that remark at you specifically. But I’m weary of the battles between left and right that devote so much attention to how to root out the reactionaries/commies. I think they have a shared authoritarianism.
“… I fear reaction more than you I think … I don’t think we can afford to view reaction as some kind of personal quirk in otherwise decent people … there are some kinds of ‘reactionary’ politics that implicate people directly in the repressive policies of our current governments and their close supporters, and I don’t think that can simply be overlooked.”
Interesting points that I hope to come back to in future. I question the ‘we’ and its epistemic grounding in your passage. I agree that politics is more than a personal quirk, but nevertheless I think trying to connect to people’s decency may ultimately be more important than not overlooking their troubling politics. At the same time, I’m finding the whole terrain of ‘reactionary politics’ and people’s implication in repressive government policies an increasingly complex one to negotiate. For example, I find the ostensibly left-wing ecomodernism of the ‘farm-free’ variety (per Monbiot’s remarks on ‘neo-peasant bullshit’ which I believe is much closer than he thinks to a position of ‘peasant bullshit’) deeply ‘reactionary’ at least in one of the many senses of the word, and absolutely congruent with state repressiveness. I’m genuinely fearful about the political landscape of the world the ‘regenesis’ crew want to ‘regenerate’.
“ If a ‘right-wing communitarian’ was only concerned about the expense of foreign policy adventures I might not worry, but in my experience the words ‘right-wing’ and ‘communitarian’, when placed together, often imply more exclusionary practices closer to home.”
Agree with that. In any case, I was trying to wrap up too many things in the one sentence, so hopefully we can unwrap it a bit in future discussions. I think John’s point about bullies is a propos here. In the absence of a powerful state, local bullies can be a big problem. With powerful states local bullies may be less of a problem, though not always. But with powerful states, national or global bullies are then usually a problem, and that’s not necessarily a trade up.
Who do we choose to forge solidarity with, and on what or whose terms?
Exactly.
For me , it comes down to who is willing to do the work. When I’m out in the field sweating, politics is just one of the possible topics for conversation, but any willing hand who has a basic grasp of physical labor is welcome.
Interestingly, here in Kansas there are plenty of ‘liberal’ rednecks who are quite adept at manual labor. And as everywhere in the US, plenty of people all along the idealogical spectrum who haven’t a clue how to pick up heavy things.
What I see of the local religious millenarian communities (and there are a few here) is that they are generally friendly and have good skills, but tend to keep those to themselves mostly.
just a couple stray thoughts…
Thanks,
Thanks Eric. Maybe on the back of that, a couple of tricky examples from my limited experience of marginalised people’s movements –
In Jamaica, Rastafari as a movement appealing mostly to men, involving a lot of patriarchal ideology as well as a finely tuned critique of colonialism and racism. Pentecostalism as a movement appealing mostly to women bearing the brunt of domestic responsibilities, involving aspirations to a kind of middle class domestic respectability.
In Canada, a first nation group with politics somewhat divided between a patronage-oriented political leader pressing for economic development around fishing and logging with questionable ecological implications, and a democracy-oriented one emphasizing connection with nature stewardship.
I’d be interested in a discussion about what solidarity work I could or should get involved in with such groups. My reality has been a reluctance to stick my oar in, whereas if and when I’m working alongside people locally in my own neighbourhood as we confront the reality of wresting local livelihoods I’d have a lot more to say about how to make my society better. Hence, first the doom, then the optimism.
But I’m interested in other views…
Probably just talking to myself here, but I’ve been musing about these points concerning solidarity, transnational connections and so on. Generally, my argument – as laid out in ‘A Small Farm Future’ – is that yes, as Andrew puts it, it’s something we do need to worry about and try to affect, but there’s no really plausible mechanism by which people can do that with mass effectiveness – I can only see renewal coming from people figuring out effective human ecologies locally in the interstices of decaying mass state projects and the effects of that indeed ‘rippling out’.
Inasmuch as the issue of glibness has arisen in the discussion, I guess I can see how a doomy perspective from privileged voices might seem glib. Equally I think there can be a glibness to the assumption that the answers lie in solidarity or connection with less privileged voices. Maybe there’s a glibness too to my Jamaican and Canadian examples above, but I do think it’s worth asking what happens when less privileged voices don’t share the assumptions motivating the attempted solidarity from the more privileged ones. Dangers of glibness all round, to which my reflex response is getting more grounded in the local.
But maybe there are other ways?
“…a doomy perspective from privileged voices might seem glib”
Frankly, it strikes me as being more fearful than glib, including the fear of losing privileges and having to live like some unprivileged currently live.
Can solidarity really exist between the privileged and the unprivileged? Perhaps there is solidarity (beyond the glib type) if the privileged are working to end the disparities, and not take more than their ‘fair share’, even if it means giving up their own privileges.
If privilege is recognized, it can be reduced at a personal level, with resulting surpluses going to the unprivileged. Avoiding air travel could be part of a stance of solidarity with the unprivileged.
Still listening Chris, not had much time to reply lately.
‘I think there’s a danger of a kind of gestural moralism of caring about distant others…’
You got me there! I fear I’ve been guilty of this on occasion, not, I hope, for the sake of claiming superiority over localists, but because I truly believe both scales have to be thought and acted through together – but thinking is one thing and acting another, and I have far more trouble with the latter, so it’s sometimes difficult to get past gesturing at something important. When you say, re transnational solidarities, ‘there’s no really plausible mechanism by which people can do that with mass effectiveness’, I’d tend to agree, or at least acknowledge how difficult it would be to cultivate such a mechanism, even if I then maintain that there must be possibilities worth following up.
On reactionaries, I think you’re absolutely right to put Monbiot in that category. Whatever the nuances of his position, and however he justifies it himself, I think he’s sold out his earlier commitments and as a ‘public intellectual’ is now a very real danger, especially to people living in areas that are viewed as ripe for ‘rewilding’. I agree that the terrain of reactionary politics is increasingly complex, probably because it’s increasingly present in our lives; I think I’d probably insist that anyone who actively enables existing authorities to do things ‘to’ people rather than ‘with’ them can’t be overlooked – is not, in fact, ‘decent’ – but contact with realty can be problematic for such a general proclamation (!).
I’ve looked over the DO podcast list again, as I’d started to feel it was becoming something of a straw man for me. I’m not sure I’d entirely agree with your suggestion that it’s ‘just a bit of wordplay to organise a loose group of people willing to interact on social media’, but it’s clearer to me now that my objections to ‘reaction’ relate to only one of the hosts rather than the entire setup. If doomerism isn’t a particularly clear ideological position and is instead a hook for a more varied set of conversations, then obviously it’s less vulnerable to critique, but I need to find time to listen to more of it – no. 100 taking stock of doomer optimism seems relevant to me here, so that’s next on my list.
Returning, finally, to transnational connections. I’m not sure your tangent on ‘marginalised people’s movements’ you have known is quite to the point here – not saying it’s not interesting in itself or valuable experience for you, but I can’t see what your role with them was or might have been. It’s one thing to show support for a group or affirm its goals (or not), another to act in solidarity with it.
I suppose your question is really about the second of these – what kind of solidarity work is practical and effective? Clearly I don’t have the answer, but I think any answer has to come from the position of identifying shared problems, identifying practices that marginalise both others and yourself. The world is currently so joined up that farmers and would-be farmers face similar problems around land access, security of tenure and making a living from the land, driven by rentier landowners and transnational outfits, not least supermarkets. Actions that highlight those connections, make clear the shared nature of problems, might be very effective in the changing the ‘public framing’ of these issues and shaping policies at various levels of formality.
I can see clearly here that my own inability to suggest anything more concrete is a problem – equally clearly, your writing in publication and on this blog already touches on this, one of the reasons I keep coming back! Personally I would be really interested in writing that reads your ideas alongside and through the actions and words of the ‘movement builders’ that Hoon mentions – organisations like the Brazilian MST have been touched on here before I think, but never in much detail. Are there possibilities for generating a more joined up movement for agrarian change globally that also remains rooted in the particularities of different places? I remember years ago being quite taken by a call to action promoted by one of the participants to the Dark Mountain project that I’m sure you’d approve of: ‘Rise and Root!’ It’s very important to get on with the work of rooting, but just as important at the same time to call out to others to rise and do the same.
Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’
I’m not familiar with that book and perhaps shouldn’t be in the future .
For me, on those dark days it’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road!!!!
Not really sure what “doomer optimism” is??? Sounds like one of those terms used to undermine and opposing opinion. Like “woke”, “Corbynista”, Gammon”, “red neck”, “Trotskyite “etc etc.
If someone self identifies as a “doomer optimists” then fair enough but I’m guessing it used not as a compliment.
I’m not suggesting that you are saying that I am a “doomer optimists” Andrew but am I……..?
Maybe it depends on if I have had a good night’s sleep or not.
I like to think that I listen to the debate, look at the data and then form a conclusion. If the conclusion is “doomer” then so be it.
I think we in the West are “energy blind”. That we don’t full understand the role that abundant cheap energy means to our lifestyles or even the way we think and that cheap abundant energy is coming to an end. When we Just Stop Oil, or rather oil becomes too energy intensive to extract (The Energy Costs of Energy) then our western world will become unrecognisable.
The West will no longer be able to project it’s will onto the “Global South”. The demise of The World Bank, IMF and the Petrodollar will go a long way to dismantling globalization.
With regard to a Small Farm Future, I look at it through an energy lens. How much available energy will determine what a SFF will look like.
I don’t see a techno fix and ultimately the available energy will come from photosynthesis.
Does this make me a “doomer” or a realist?
In defence of Chris regarding SFF being Anglo centric. It’s difficult to write a book about, say, India or Colombia if you don’t actually live there. I can relate to SFF because it’s about where I live. Im sure there are people in those places that are writing about local issues.
To write a SFF that encompasses the whole world would be a tall order.
I think the responses to the predicted environmental/social/economic/eenergy problems will be many a varied. It will depend on culture and specific regional challenges.
For example “homesteading in the US has a long history. “Go West, young man. Go West “. So this approach may be followed. Here in the UK, it isn’t really debated as there just isn’t the space to get away from eachother.
Like I have said before. The most important things are going to be available energy and how to stop the bullies taking control. The rest will be a kaleidescope of different solutions.
Thanks John,
I highly recommend Octavia Butler too.
“how to stop the bullies taking control” features highly in her work. She also spends a good amount of time with the business of making community during difficult times.
I couldn’t read Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ because he has all photosynthesis stop, but people still walking around.
I’m fine with dire fantasy, but that is just ignorant.
Eric F.
It’s the implausibility of “The Road” that stopped me getting too depressed in the end.
I’m not sure how long someone would last eating just other humans? Not that I’m hopping to ever have to find out. 🙂
Looks like I may have to give Octavia Butler a go.
Just a quick note to say that The R-Word would like to welcome articles, essays, interviews, conversations, poems, etc.
https://rword.substack.com/p/and-now-for-something-a-little-different
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=1376&v=IF8opPN16LQ&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wnd.com%2F&source_ve_path=OTY3MTQ&feature=emb_imp_woyt
John Kerry …..
Video of ag conference held in Washington
Briefly, thanks for the discussion Andrew – I appreciate the way you act as a certain kind of conscience or voice of caution for my analyses! I hope to pick up on some of your specific points in more detail soon. Your point about the MST sparked a minor brainwave for me that I intend to work on, so hopefully more on that anon too. But I’m still a bit uncertain about how to orient to global solidarity work … if I’m rooted in southwest England, my call to the landless of Brazil to rise will have to be very carefully judged to avoid being … glib. But maybe it would be interesting to build a movement in England loosely inspired by the MST. And then to think about how it related to MST style movements globally. La Via Campesina is one model, but only one.
Regarding Doomer Optimism, John, it’s a podcast and grouping of people based in the US: https://www.doomeroptimism.com/.
Generally, I dislike the way people who question the possibility of a continued high-energy, high-capital, growth-based global political economy are dismissed as ‘doomers’. To use an older environmentalist vocabularly, I think the doomers are the realos, and the techno-optimists are the fundis. So I like the playful juxtapositioning of the DO crew. Andrew, maybe you’re right that it’s more than a loose grouping – although I guess I’m (loosely) associated with it, along with other people with whom I disagree pretty fundamentally. I’ve only listened to a fraction of their output. I’d be interested to hear more from you, publicly or privately, about what or who you see as the reactionary elements.
My feeling about DO is that it leans quite conservative, whereas I know others think it leans too far left… There are definite differences between the UK and the USA on these framings. But even here… when you can call Rishi Sunak a socialist and get taken seriously political labels start to lose their grip.
Thanks for other comments. Ciao for now.
I am quite behind on the DO podcast (the next one in my queue is from January this year), but I have noted them making an effort to include what I would call leftist voices.
The difficulty with bullies is that if you assume they are arguing in good faith, they will run rings around you, and if you beat them at their own game, you endorse their bad-faith tactics as acceptable. I think the only longer-term solution is to find out why they are bullies in the first place and address that, but… well, we probably don’t have time to get that many of the world’s politicians into appropriate therapy…
My take on bullies would be that while most people have the capacity for bullying, only a small minority are out and out bullies. The key people to work on are not the bullies themselves but their sidekicks. If enough people organise against them rather than with them, they can be disarmed. It gets a bit harder seeing through technocratic states that don’t look like bullies, superficially.
I think that small groups are able to bully the majority because they are organised.
How they become organised is an interesting question. I guess that in the past, it has started with biologically related people organising to dominate a neighbouring group.
As we all know, families can bicker but come together when collectively threatened.
The British aristocracy have a long history of knocking chunks out of eachother but come together when the “peasants revolt”.
The Bolsheviks managed to overthrow Tsarist Russia and fight and win a bitter civil war because they were organised. (A feat that seems incredible regardless of your politics)
Keeping the plebs ignorant is a big factor too.
Peasants were illiterate because that’s how TPTB wanted it, not because there wasn’t the time or resources to teach people.
A fear I have is that, in a SFF, most people’s world’s could potentially be very small. Lack of transport and a need to look after the smallholding will restrict people’s day to day lives to a 10 mile radius of where they live. This can lead to ignorance which can make organisation at a national level difficult and vulnerable to organised “administrators”.
History of the MST https://www.mstbrazil.org/content/history-mst
The last 5 mins of this podcast looking at diets in a 1.5C warmed world, discusses Solar Foods’ Solein (pronounced soylent:), or protein out of thin air.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2023/may/23/science-weekly-global-heating-temperature-food-podcast