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 30, 2023 | 23 Comments
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism.
If it does, obviously that’s fine. It’s a polemical sort of book, so counterargument is only to be expected. But my hope is for thoughtful, engaged counterargument that’s worth discussing, and not the kind of dumbass dismissals of agrarian localism that are all too common (I’ve already seen a couple online in relation to my book, even though it’s not yet published).
Now, I’ve been writing about this topic for quite a while, and I apologise if what you read below sounds jaded or exasperated. But I thought it might be useful to collect together in one place the five main dumbass arguments that I won’t engage with and explain why I won’t engage with them. Mainly it’s because (1) they’re dumbass arguments, and (2) I’ve engaged with them so many times before. But I’ll try to give a flavour in this post as to why I don’t think they’re worth engaging with.
In subsequent posts, I aim to home in on some more worthwhile points of contention.
I should probably preface the below by stating, in case this isn’t clear, that I’m not projecting an agrarian localist future because I think it’s a nice lifestyle option that everyone should follow for fun. I’m projecting it because I don’t think we have a lot of freaking choice, and the realistic alternatives are worse. Basically, a small farm future is probably the least worst future available, and the sooner we wise up to that, the less worse it might be.
And now for the dumbassery.
For some reason, it seems to be commonly thought that an agrarian localist future where a lot of people are involved in making a livelihood from their local ecological base will involve mass starvation.
People pressing this view rarely provide any evidence to support it – the closest they come in a UK context is the observation that the country has been a net food importer for 200 years. Which is true – but it reflects political choices, not ecological limits.
Still, I get that there are genuine worries about future hunger. So here’s a plan to allay the risk. Let’s concentrate the majority of people worldwide together on tiny land areas in densely-populated cities. Let’s establish elaborate and fragile long-distance supply chains based on non-renewable and polluting fossil energy to import from afar the food, water, energy and other materials that these tightly-packed urban multitudes need to stay alive, and to remove their wastes and dump them elsewhere. Let’s incorporate every farming area into a global economy that pushes them to produce their most advantageous agricultural product to sell into global commodity markets at the cheapest possible price regardless of long-term sustainability. Let’s particularly focus global production around a few grain crops which can be readily mechanized, processed and transported, and let’s concentrate their cultivation in a handful of semi-arid continental breadbasket regions at great risk of climate-induced crop declines or failure. Let’s mine the non-renewable minerals like phosphates needed to sustain our crops from the handful of places in the world where they’re easily extracted, and then after use dump most of them with our sewage where they can’t be recovered. Let’s also try to use scarce and precious generated electricity to energise microbial food production to feed the city multitudes, using vastly complicated and largely non-renewable manufactured industrial plant assembled via the same fragile, fossil-fuel dependent global supply chains that are otherwise servicing our cities. Let’s monetize every possible aspect of society and try to maximize monetary returns to the point where inequalities within and between countries and the increasingly desperate search for economic growth foment geopolitical meltdown.
Let’s do all that, and then ridicule arguments for agrarian localism on the grounds that distributed human populations involved in nutrient-cycling local agricultures might suffer hunger.
However you look at the future, the risk of food scarcity is real. Humanity faces grave problems, to which nobody has easy answers. But the notion that existing economic and agricultural trends are obviously the best means to allay them is not as obvious as many people seem to think. And virtue signalling one’s position in this debate by imputing mass death to other positions isn’t a good look.
Did somebody say distributed human populations with many people involved in food production? What, you mean like the Khmer Rouge?
No, not like the Khmer bloody Rouge. How is this a serious argument? Take some perfectly common historical practice like agrarian labour intensification and dismiss it with reference to the most extreme, pathological and violent context for it you can think of. A lot of people like to ride horses. Not all of them are Genghis Khan.
Let’s play out this talking point in relation to some possible future conversations:
S/he 1: “Honey, the price of fruit and veg in the shops is just getting silly. Why don’t we dig up the lawn and make a veg plot instead?”
S/he 2: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
S/he 1: “No”
Friend 1: “I’ve heard the council are planning to sell that derelict lot down the road to a housing developer. I think we should try to put together a neighbourhood bid for it and set up a community garden instead”
Friend 2: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
Friend 1: “No”
Farmer: “Honey, we just can’t afford the diesel and pesticides to keep cropping the big field the way we’ve always done. And there are a lot of people in the village now who are desperate for a bit of land to grow food on. Maybe we could figure out a way to set up allotments and smallholdings with them?”
Farmer’s husband: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
Farmer: “No”
Civil servant: Madam President, the economy is in ruins, people are queuing around the block for food and fuel, social tensions are boiling over, and this land-for-all movement is getting out of hand. We’ve got to ramp up the ideology that urbanism, non-farm employment and the growth of capital is the only correct way. And shoot anyone who tries to leave the city.
President: “What, like the Khmer Rouge?”
Civil servant: “Well, sort of, yes”
Seriously, enough.
To suggest that more people in the future might be involved directly in furnishing their food invites the argument that this would involve ‘turning the clock back’ to some previous age – the 19th century, or the Middle Ages, or the Neolithic, or the Palaeolithic, or whatever.
Now, there is a worthwhile debate to be had about what a society with more people producing their material livelihood renewably from their local ecological base would look like, what kind of problems it would face and so on. But in addressing those problems it doesn’t help to look at them through a normative and spatial conception of historical time – the notion that we must move ‘forwards’ and not ‘back’ in order to ‘progress’ and not be ‘backward’ and so on and so on and so on and so on, and God I’m so tired of this argument (see A Small Farm Future, Chapter 2).
Every society in every historical moment faces problems and has choices. If a contemporary society chooses to address a problem by adopting approaches that look a bit more like a society of the past, so what? Why are we so culturally immature as to consider that in itself to be a problem?
George Monbiot says that we need to jettison our ‘Neolithic’ food production methods. For sure, there are problems with the present food system that need to be changed, but what work is the word ‘Neolithic’ doing here? Do we need to jettison ‘Neolithic’ transport technologies by no longer using wheels? Or ‘Palaeolithic’ industrial technologies by no longer using sharpened blades? There are newer technologies around for these things – jet engines and laser beams, for example. Invariably, they use more energy than the old ones and are unnecessary for most day-to-day needs. Maybe there’s a lesson there.
A point I make in my new book is that past societies were often pretty good at figuring out social institutions that enabled them to live within ecological and material limits locally. Hopefully, present societies will be ‘advanced’ enough to learn from them.
People sometimes dismiss vegan objections to livestock farming along the lines of ‘well, you would say that, you’re a vegan’ – to which a reasonable response is ‘No, I’m a vegan because of my objections to livestock farming’.
I’ve encountered people dismissing my defence of farming on the grounds that I would say that, because I’m a farmer (an honorific I’m not sure I fully deserve). Well, likewise, I’m a (small-scale) farmer because I became convinced that what’s needed in the future is more small-scale farming.
I think these kinds of arguments are an ad hominem time-waste in both directions, and I’m not going to engage in them.
But I’ll just add that there are a lot of different kinds of farmer, and there are different industry and corporate interests in the food sector too. It’s important to disentangle them as carefully as one can.
The Guardian and its writers seem to have adopted the line that defending pretty much any form of livestock farming involves pushing an industry narrative. However, there are agribusiness interests that are perfectly happy pushing anti-livestock narratives – for them, it’s a case of heads I win, tails you lose – and I believe that some of The Guardian’s writers have been thoroughly suckered by corporate anti-livestock narratives.
Farmer’s narratives about what they’re doing and why may be more important than industry narratives. These farmer’s narratives are many and various, but they also overlap in complex ways. George Monbiot claims to be pro-peasant, but is also dead against what he calls neo-peasant bullshit. This distinction between good peasants and bad neo-peasants cries out for some critical analysis, and I aim to say more about it in due course. Maybe that makes me a voice of the peasant industry. If so, believe me, there’s not a lot of reward in it.
If you summarily dismiss agrarian localism as a ‘bucolic idyll’ it suggests to me that you’re very ignorant about it, and probably that you’re entertaining an idyll of your own involving abundant low carbon energy. I’m not going to debate this with you individually online, because life’s too short. But I’ll happily enter into a dialogue with you in another way – so feel free to read my books A Small Farm Future or Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, available from all bookselling outlets.
Jibes about bucolic idylls are to be expected from randomers on the internet, but not so much from eminent journalists who’ve written books about the food and farming system. So it’s disappointing to see George Monbiot playing this game. Instead of absorbing the thought of, say, Glenn Davis Stone or Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, what he gives us by way of evidence for the dangerous idealism of the case for agrarian localism is a magazine article about King Charles. Not good enough.
Almost nobody uses the phrase ‘bucolic idyll’ unironically. But there’s one exception I can think of – on page 68 of Regenesis, Monbiot writes: “I have met people who have moved to the countryside in pursuit of the bucolic idyll, only to find themselves immersed in fear and loathing” due to conflict with farming communities.
There’s a lot to unpack there, and maybe I’ll try to do it in a future post. Meanwhile, I’ll just suggest that idylls invest everybody’s thinking. Many who scorn bucolic idylls seem to be heavily invested in other idylls of the techno or urban variety. Maybe to get to a worthwhile debate, we need to identify the reasons and passions behind these different idylls, rather than just mocking them.
And talking of bucolic idylls, I hope my Twitter profile picture of me wielding my scythe sets up the necessary resonances. I wrote an essay nearly eight years ago called On the iconography of my scythe which I think stands up pretty well for my present purposes. The only really troubling thing about re-reading it is the fact that, eight years ago, I was promising to stop wasting my time debating with ecomodernists. I don’t seem to have succeeded…
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IMHO the technoutopian’s all follow their own line like a blinkered horse and never listen to what the other technoutopian’s are saying, goop grown in vats fed by imported feed stock delivered by the then non existent bulk carriers then delivered in non existent plastic / metal cans to shops that are no more than 15 minutes walk from your home ( a logistical nightmare ) on non existent electric trucks . So much of their verbiage is bs !
The non existent electric tractors tilling fields far from a electric outlet powered by non existent electric supply capacity delivered by a grid that can’t cope ( TX has a 15%_chance of blackouts after 8 pm when the sun goes down ) Every step has a energy input which MB ignores , industrial farming does not work without energy and chemical inputs .
Even with small farms there are enormous problems down the road , by the year 3000 where are you doing to get metal for horse shoes a new spade or scythe ? We are plundering the resources that provide them .
@Diogenese10
I’ve just weighed in my scrap metal at the scrap yard.
One thing going for us going forward. There is lots of metal around!!!
It’s already been mined and seperated from the ore. It just needs to be reheated (using charcoal) and shaped into something new like horse shoes or scythe blades.
But metals corrode , a century and a half left in the open steel becomes a dirty mark in the ground cast iron lasts a bit longer stainless steel lasts better but will not hold an edge .
Where I live (Santa Fe, New Mexico), there’s almost zero evidence that anything other than a technofix, eco-modernist, pseudo-green fantasy is afoot in our world. Or a plain “ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away” attitude is alive in the culture. Nor is there much evidence that anyone (more than a tiny handful, at most) is doing anything to challenge this narrative. So my question is… what are we who are persuaded otherwise to do about our situation? Lots of old-school greenies (eco-folk) know better, but we’re not organizing much to make any difference in either the narrative of the material situation. So I feel like a Martian, naturally. Decade after decade has passed and the shaping cultural narrative isn’t changing a bit. And isn’t it this which is determining how we behave collectively?
Maybe we should spend one third of our time and energy (etc.) on arguing for why those who are simply wrong are wrong … and spend a LOT more energy, time, etc., organizing toward some synergy on truth-telling (and responsive action) on the part of the relative minority who understand that the political majority are willfully ignorant?
Decade after decade has passed and the shaping cultural narrative isn’t changing a bit. And isn’t it this which is determining how we behave collectively?
Collective behavior might be a bridge too far at the moment. While I would agree that humankind might have accomplished more in the recent ‘decade after decade’, I think one can reasonably point to some changes in the shape of the cultural narrative that might offer succor. Greta Thunberg comes up first on my Google search of ‘Greta’ – ahead of any actress or other personality.
Substack didn’t exist a decade ago – and today both you and Chris have a presence there (congrats BTW)…
Recycling as a collective behavior has made significant strides over the last couple decades. Is this enough? Hardly. But it is more than nothing.
There are vast sums of capital and entrenched thinking aligned to maintain the status quo. But there are also significant headwinds from the physics of planetary warming and the human caused destruction of habitat that are being realized more and more. Perhaps the Martians will eventually win the day.
When futurists spew invective at each other over their favorite views … where a calibrated conversation might better pull us together… well I don’t think it helpful.
When faced with the proverbial glass of water and questioned whether half full or half empty… I go with the guy who says it is completely full. Half full of water and the other half full of air. And with just some positive outlook, some elbow grease, (and a faucet within reach 🙂 ) one can fill the glass the rest of the way – which will then displace the hot air that once got in the way.
Oh, and when you’re feeling overwhelmed by so much negativity around you – plant a soybean. Legume, rich protein source, CO2 fixer, traditional food source (can be fermented)… a beautiful thing.
“Oh, and when you’re feeling overwhelmed by so much negativity around you – plant a soybean. Legume, rich protein source, CO2 fixer, traditional food source (can be fermented)… a beautiful thing.”
Instead of chasing money with which to purchase land, I mistakenly threw in with various kinds of social change “activism” — which has gotten me no closer to having land for growing soybeans nor an inch closer to meaningful social transformation. My glass is full empty.
I guess that the need just isn’t obvious yet for most people.
But a rumbly tummy can focus the mind.
I’m reminded of a documentary on Cuba after the collapse of the USSR. Cuban agriculture was heavily dependent on russian tractors and industrial farming, then that all stopped virtually overnight.
Every man/woman and their dog then frantically started to grow food. Rooftop gardens sprung up and every available bit of waste land was cultivated.
The old boys who knew how to run a plough with oxen became superstars.
It’s going to take a similar shock to the system to make the collective shift.
Agree. I’ve just pre-ordered a copy of “Say no to a Farm Free Future” at my local bookshop and fell into a good natured discussion with the owner who, though presumably well read, only seems to know the Monbiot story. He stated confidently that food is better produced in factories rather than farms, and when I asked why, he said because factories are better for the environment! With a straight face….
Thanks, glad you’ve ordered a copy – sounds like the bookseller could do with one too! I’m a bit shocked at how easily some of George’s talking points have taken root – factories good, can’t argue with the maths, must increase yields etc 🙁
In the first arguement, the question is not addressed, but is deflected onto how our current modern food supplies are fragile.
Will millions of people starve? This depends on the timeline looked at. The Haber-Bosch process and then the Green Revolution created huge surpluses, making for population growth, and global supply chains theoretically balance out deficits, creating more population growth up to a point, before levelling off as people start having smaller families because netflix is much easier on the wallet. This works until the gas, soil, etc runs into the back of Hubbert’s curve, which is a lot steeper than he plotted because he thought nuclear power would take up the slack. Then the population will decline to homeostasis via famine, death, and declining birth rates.
Small-scale agriculture will have crop failures, and famines, like always. Can’t control the weather, seed goes mouldy, seed viability declines, you break an arm. Just how it is.
As Stalin said, ‘both options are worse.’
From a wider perspective, resilience at the species level means loosely connected, diverse populations. So a famine here doesnt mean famine there, or if your spuds go down with blight, the oats are ok. Etc.
Even more generally, the key to lasting as long as possible barring meteor strikes or hot hail from Ming is to:
1. Use less than is regenerated.
2. Waste less than is reabsorbed.
All else is self-terminating. All farms try to push ecological succession back via soil disturbance, poisons, etc. Soil loss happens, and at some point it gets to the point where it ain’t there. The closer you can get to following ecological succession the better: less energy inputs are needed, less soil loss, etc. But less yield. So less people, but fewer people who live longer as a species.
A true revolution cuts against the grain of a societies trajectory. Which is why GM gets to speak at Hay festival and write in the Groanian, you don’t as much, and Lierre Keith never will coz she’s a nutter who wants us all to wear Hair Shirts, Live in Caves, and spend all day turning Clocks Back.
‘… “I have met people who have moved to the countryside in pursuit of the bucolic idyll, only to find themselves immersed in fear and loathing” due to conflict with farming communities.’
Sounds like the culture wars coming out to the countryside.
Maybe this isn’t fair, but I’m imagining nice, urban liberals coming out to the farm country and being shocked by all those rednecks.
I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with the rednecks, but I recognize that much of what they do works for them in their local situation.
Isn’t that the old joke? Silly city-slicker comes out to the farm and shows how ignorant he is…
I think it would be good for the writers of these sad stories to look at them from the other side. How were the Bucolicidyllers insulting their neighbors?
Perhaps this lack of willingness to allow the other side of the argument to share the ‘truth’ of the situation is a large root of the conflict.
In any case, this kind of story just makes the teller(s) look bad to all but their own particular audience.
Personally, I’ve had much more trouble with hobby farmers and suburbanites than with anyone seriously growing crops.
City folk moving to the countryside is happening in the context of fossil fuels.
Even the country folk are living on the back of fossil fuels.
Neither are living a SFF.
Once the fossil fuels are gone everyone will be living with the same challenges.
I don’t know many farmers who would cope/maintain their present practices without fossil fuels and likewise “city slickers”.
Walt Disney has a lot to answer for , nature is red in tooth and claw , Disney gave kids Bambi !
Thanks for the above – anticipates various items for future discussions, but briefly:
Yes I think there’s probably enough scrap metal around to fund a lot of low-input agrarianism, whereas the manufactured food vision and its associated tech landscape will require more mining.
Does James’s point cut the other way to the debate around my recent ‘doom’ post? How to change the narrative with sufficient urgency, particularly the narrative around agriculture which is largely missing from mainstream debate? Organising politically is certainly required, but damned if I know how best to go about it. I’m hoping to turn more of my attention to that when my present phase of writing has passed.
Interesting again from Benn. You’re right, I deflected the first question. But I think we need to start from the position that hunger is a present reality and a future concern for all possible production scenarios. I agree that diversity & loose connections are the way to go – question is, whether that can be built out from present configurations of the modernist system of centralized nation-states. IMO, no. So back to questions of political renewal.
I’d slightly take issue with the point about ecological succession, which I talk about in Chapter 3 of my book – drawing among others on William Bond’s fascinating book ‘Open Ecosystems’. I’d say organisms are always working to disturb ecological succession – ecological succession is kind of the vector of their disturbance. So the key is not so much to go with the flow as to find your sweet spot both with and against the flow, swimming in the current, which is harder. Apologies if that makes no sense. I hope to come on to it in more detail presently.
Eric – yes, there’s definitely a class and culture war element to all this, and I think it’s extremely important. Another theme to come back to. At one level, I agree with your point about hobby farmers & suburbanites vs people seriously growing crops. Another part of me wants to subvert it – fossil fuelled modernity has made suburbanites of us all…
The reason that any discussion about agriculture, SFF or the serious straits we are in is missing from the narrative in the mainstream media is that it does not benefit them.
Chris, have you advertised The Telegraph, The Daily Mail or the Guardian ? No, then you don’t exist.
From a broader perspective, there is no revenue generated by a SFF, (real) sustainable agriculture or degrowth. That is antithetical to their business model. They exist to support the business as usual, a growing economy. They will be no help in this. Hey Presto! right or not, you are relegated to the lunatic fringe.
Nate Hagens has a long winded discussion about this (and artificial intellegence) with Daniel Schmachtenberger. IMHO, you should be on his podcast.
Yours are good points, Greg. Genuinely sustainable and regenerative modes of economy are necessarily deeply post-growth, small, lean, and ultimately also post-capitalist. Industrial capitalism is extractive in every conceivable sense of the term. It lays waste to land and people. What economists call “negative externalities” are essential to industrial capitalism. And the mainstream media is a wholly owned subsidiary of industrial capitalism, so mainstream media will not be helping us replace industrial capitalism with something saner and better.
We MUST somehow grow a movement large and powerful enough to replace industrial capitalist media systems (rooted as it is in a now fully obsolete — in the sense of ‘no longer useful’ — ethos, paradigm and ideology).
That’s obviously a really very big ask. But I think we have the requisite components to begin. What we’ve not yet got is the organizational synergies coalescing at the necessary pace. And by “organizing” I’m NOT calling for a centralized, hierarchical form of organizing — or a systemically centripetal form of organizing. I’m calling for centrifugal organizing. But the only way this can work is to implement a whole new “ecosystem” of media, including and especially its economic design. Only a radically holistic approach could work, I think. That is, as one of my friends has put it, “the revolution will not be funded” (to echo the famous “the revolution will not be televised”). What we need to do is grow a new media “ecosystem” by providing food and shelter (etc.) for those doing the work, but not providing a salary, per se. It has to all be set in (mostly) gift economy. Local communities set a worker up with a “tiny house” or a room, bread and soup, etc. We give to these workers the freedom to use their time to do the work which needs doing. We “have their back”. We show them we’re not going to remove their safety net and they have an opportunity to fly. That’s organizing!
The revolution will not be funded.
I’m sorry. I’m afraid I have set myself to be misunderstood when I said “We MUST somehow grow a movement large and powerful enough to replace industrial capitalist media systems….”
I should have been careful to say that I don’t mean a full replacement. That would be a rather naive thing to hope for at this point in time. Maybe that could happen later. But what I meant is to offer a truly effective alternative to the capitalist-industrial media system. That means it has to be large and powerful enough to challenge the ideological narratives of the dominant / dominator system (which is what capitalist industrialism is — a system of exploitative domination of humans, land, water, wildlife, everything.
It is my strong belief that the capitalist industrial system utterly depends on misinformation and disinformation to be sustained. What we call “mainstream media” is the vehicle for delivering the lies and deceptions which allows the madness to continue.
“Does James’s point cut the other way to the debate around my recent ‘doom’ post? How to change the narrative with sufficient urgency, particularly the narrative around agriculture which is largely missing from mainstream debate? Organising politically is certainly required, but damned if I know how best to go about it. I’m hoping to turn more of my attention to that when my present phase of writing has passed.”
*****
Everywhere I look I see the urgent need for brainstorming sessions on politics — the how to talk we all need to be having. None of us have that all figured out, for sure. But I have some crucial pieces of the puzzle, I believe. And others we know have some of the pieces. We need to share these with one another.
As I see it, essentially everything occurs within paradigms of thought, also know as “within conceptual schemas”. The paradigms we are operating within, however, are now generally obsolete, in the sense of “no longer useful”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a thing (or institution, or whatever) as obsolete when it is either (a) not in use, or (b) no longer useful.
The obsolescence we’re trapped in, of course, is of the b type. Our mainstream, conventional ways of understanding and talking about politics are now fully obsolete. So is our ways of thinking and talking about economics and education, etc. Everything is becoming obsolete just now because of human overshoot. Or, rather, it’s clear that these modes of thought and talking are now obsolete because of human overshoot. Human overshoot is forcing us to wake up to how utterly and catastrophically useless our familiar old ways of thinking and talking about these interwoven things really are.
The best metaphor I can think of for what we require is holistic medicine for Earth and all of its living creatures and ecosystems (biospheric medicine, we could call it). At the moment, most of us are making a fuss about treating symptoms without deeply examining the root causes. Clearly, this isn’t working for us — at all.
We have to bore down into the level of root causes, which are in a terrain which goes by many names: e.g., ideology, ethos, culture, story, narrative…. Our pathetic economy (the most destructive machine ever evolved) is a symptom of an ethos, at root. Nothing can change without doing medicine at the level of ethos. Inventing that kind of medicine is what our world most desperately requires now. But none of us know how to do it. It’s never been done before, and only lots of us talking about this and brainstorming about it can nurture it into being.
Let’s bring folks together in a brainstorming circle!
Hi James, I believe your analysis of the current state of capitalist society is correct.
In fact, looking around at my neighbors, I see that they are all sick of capitalism too, but don’t know what to do about it.
And I’m happy for those among us who want to discuss ideas.
As you say: ” As I see it, essentially everything occurs within paradigms of thought, ”
I’m not in any position to disagree with that, but when it comes to changing people’s minds, my experience has been that it almost never happens.
But the few times I have seen people change their minds, have been the result of seeing someone living their words in real life.
Leading by example. Which is the hard part.
I believe this is what we most need to do, as far as we are able. Don’t worry about the publicity – people will find out soon enough. Too soon, probably.
“Success” at creating a movement can be very dangerous.
Agreed that the “ecological succession argument” is overused. The key species are mostly those that are disrupting ecological successions: Elephants that tear down trees, Beavers that hinders the force of gravity pulling water down to the sea. Humans that farm etc.
Indeed – I discuss this point in some detail, including the beaver example, in ‘Saying NO…’
Your Marshall plan against hunger is brilliant Chris. Let’s create a strong lobby for it! Perhaps we still need another book to in a simple way debunk this prevailing narrative. I have tried myself but we need something smarter..
Yes, there’s a need to debunk the prevailing narrative. As Benn says above, it’s tricky because the prevailing narrative gets the money and the platforms. But I’m open to ideas…