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Posted on June 26, 2023 | 29 Comments
UK publication day is nigh for my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods. I’ll be blogging about it here over the next couple of months and as ever welcome constructive debate. I’m unlikely to be debating it on Twitter, because I find it a terrible platform for meaningful discussion, so if you’re landing here from Twitter this post is where to place your comments about the book. Unless it’s about a specific issue that I’ll deal with in a later post, I’ll do my best to reply (though I’m not promising you’ll find my best to be good enough).
Before I say anything more about the book itself, just to mention that the official launch is at the Groundswell Festival this Wednesday 28 June, and I’ll also be on a panel there about the diet of the future. My new website offers better tracking than before on the events page for things like this that I’m involved in. Look out there for more details of my conversation in London with Vandana Shiva on 18 July. There’s also now better tracking on the Research page of the website of various articles and reports I’ve written (I’m still building this up at the moment). Some might be interested in the note I’ve just published on the energy costs of microbial food manufacture from hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria.
Turning to the book’s content, in this post I’ll restrict myself to a few remarks about what’s on the front cover.
Now it’s fair to say that not everyone I’ve spoken to loves the title of the book that’s emblazoned over the cover. It wasn’t me that came up with it – with things like titles, I tend to defer to publishers on the grounds that they know better than me what draws readers to books. But I did assent to the title, and so I need to own it. In this post, I’ll explain why indeed I do.
In making that argument, I’m going to enlist the help of Alex Milne, who tweeted his objections to my title thus,
Let’s take each of these three points in turn.
Maybe it’s true that ‘Saying NO’ creates an oppositional dynamic (I can see already that in discussing my book I’m going to have to try to avoid the temptation of repeatedly saying “well he started it!”). In all honesty, I’m not massively bothered if it’s a turn off to those who I “need to convince”, largely because I don’t really feel the need to convince anybody. I’ve never been a politically strategic writer – I pretty much just try to explain as clearly as I can the way I see things. The way I see things is that we’re headed towards a small farm future, like it or not. If people collectively embrace that, and quickly, they might be able to make it the best small farm future it’s possible to have. If they don’t, it will be a worse small farm future. I don’t know how to convince anyone that we’re headed to a small farm future, and I don’t especially feel the need to try. I just want to share my thoughts about it, because … well, because. You can take a horse to water…
Still, let me offer three reasons why I’m happy with ‘Saying NO…’ in the title.
First, my book is a polemical critique of George Monbiot’s book, Regenesis. In it, I make the case for agrarian localism in the face of his derision for the same. Monbiot used to be an influential ally to agrarian localism and is now an influential enemy to it. My first reason for ‘saying no’ is simple heartfelt emotion when you lose something you care about. George Monbiot is now an ecomodernist? Nooooo!
Second, while there’s always a case for seeking concord where one can, there’s also a case for defining boundaries and clarifying key points of divergence. As I see it, there are ambiguities in Monbiot’s arguments in Regenesis that must be brought to the fore. Ultimately, I believe that – wittingly or unwittingly – he’s making a play for urbanism, biotech solutionism, state-corporate control of the food system, enclosure and class conflict with rural and agrarian people, while presenting all this as progressive, humane, democratic and pro-social. I think this demands negation. For those of us who notice and feel this contradiction in his writing, I think it’s necessary just to say no. No to Monbiot’s analysis. No to the way it veils social contradictions that must be brought to light.
Third, I believe that ‘saying no to a farm-free future’ is a good way of setting up the alternative of a small farm future, not in the form of the ‘bucolic romanticism’ that Monbiot likes to allege, but out of practical necessity. Monbiot’s farm-free vision is another iteration of ecomodernism’s efforts to find high-tech, high-energy, high-capital solutions to contemporary global problems that rescue the status quo. But I believe they’re unlikely to succeed, and risk wasting time and resources we can ill afford. Saying no to the pursuit of implausible techno-fixes implies saying yes to the least worst alternative of a small farm future. Getting to that ‘yes’ from that ‘no’ establishes the case for a small farm future – not as some vapid ideological desire, some ‘bucolic romanticism’, but as a pragmatic, clear-headed, real-world, best-option response to present problems.
I’ll now move on to the second objection, the one about falling into a false dilemma fallacy – a future with or without farms. Well, here are nine reasons why I think it’s fair to identify Monbiot and the reboot food ecomodernists as advocates for a farm-free future:
I’m sorry, but unless Monbiot and the reboot food ecomodernists repudiate these positions I’m going to continue to label them as advocates for a farm-free future. Sure, they conceive a small ongoing role for some kinds of farming, but I don’t think this error bar is sufficient to negate identifying them with ‘farm-free’ within the acceptable ambiguities of everyday language. If there’s a false dilemma between the farmed and the farm-free, I think it lies principally with the food ecomodernists (“he started it!”), as detailed in my book.
Now to the third objection, ‘appeal to nature fallacy’ – presumably Alex Milne sees this fallacy in the part of my subtitle that runs: “The case for an ecological food system and against manufactured foods”.
I think this objection is easily dealt with. The ‘nature fallacy’, if I understand it right, is the misplaced view that something is good or right if it’s ‘natural’. But that’s not a view I share and it’s not a view that can be inferred from my ‘case for an ecological food system and against manufactured foods’. Only by absorbing that case, I’d argue, can a critic form a judgment about whether it’s convincing. And so I’d humbly suggest that would-be critics take the trouble to read my book, lest they fall foul of another fallacy – the judging a book by its cover one. But don’t take it from me – if you think you’re going to be ill-disposed towards its contents, I can only quote Joel Salatin’s comment from inside the front cover “You owe it to yourself to learn the best arguments from the opposing view” (thanks, Joel…)
Finally, talking of book covers, perhaps I should remark upon the overall appearance of this one. It’s quite wordy, and unadorned with artwork. This felt right to me. The book is a polemic, somewhat in the spirit of the eighteenth-century pamphlet wars, with their long-winded subtitles and florid engagements with interlocutors, as I mention on page 14. Writing it felt like a job of work that somebody had to do so that there was an alternative analysis to Monbiot’s dangerous visions out there in the consultable record. I feel like the cover nicely captures this mood – unflashy and descriptive, an attempt at an honest and necessary bit of hackery to right a wrong. I daresay the book won’t meet with universal approval, but I hope at least some readers will agree.
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“He started it,” indeed!
You may have had a few “Leave it Chris, it’s not worth it!” comments when you considered picking up your pen for your latest polemic, but I’m glad you decided it IS worth it – Monbiot has a big soapbox, after all.
The excerpt I’ve read from ‘Saying NO’ has a surefooted, sharpshooter feel to it. Its confidence is confidence-inspiring, and like Diogenese, I hope it sells like hotcakes. I believe it could, perhaps in a slow burn fashion as word gets round.
Good on you for not flying off to promote it, too. As with the title/cover choice, doing what may be expected of you simply because it’s the way these things work – i.e. business as usual – is just so naff, so lame. And as for old typewriters, they’ll still be going when the, er, lights go out, won’t they? Nice one, Chris – the wind is in your sails.
Pah! your title’s fine.
Those objections are just “writing skills by numbers” – y’know like “never use passive constructions” and similar blah.
(Twitter schmitter. Am I supposed to have heard of Alex Milne?)
I hope people can read your book and Regenesis at the same time and spend some time forming their own opinions. Hope it goes well.
Not sure why people think growing food in a tank is not farming. You are farming microbes. Any direct intervention of an organisms self-directed evolution and growth for your use is farming. You can directly intervene (agriculture) or not (hunting), or a bit (swidden, maybe).
Sometimes you have to say ‘no’ to things. So what? If people can’t handle a refusal that says more about them than you.
The “appeal to nature” fallacy is a fallacy. Not all things in nature are “good” depends on so many variables as make it meaningless. Take Digitalis: good for the heart, also deadly. Same with most things: the poison is in the dose. Each thing we do sets up a pathway of function towards ends that we cannot foresee, but can only guess at, so having reference to past events is useful.
I’m idly leafing through reading The Matter with Things, mainly as an arm-strengthening exercise, and the modernist view is right there in his description of left-hemisphere dominated thinking. There is a whisper in my mind now, and it says ‘apartheit’ and ‘he’s an ecofascist’ when thinking of their muddy visions of billionaire-controlled food totalitarianism and the segregation of human lives from the web of life. Full spectrum enclosure. Look, but don’t touch. Not yours. Mine.
Somehow I can’t help feeling this; “One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry”, is one of the most dangerous phrases I’ve ever read.
Surely it’s our poetic sensibility, our ability to be moved by the plight of other beings, to put ourselves in their shoes for a brief period, to understand lives that are not our own that might just allow us to make the changes necessary to get through the mess we’ve made of the world.
The poet Robinson Jeffers spoke of his work as “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” I guess Monbiot might argue that much of modern intensive farming doesn’t reject human solipsism or recognise “transhuman magnificence” and he might well be right. But it seems to me that the path he advocates springs from the very same roots as the form of farming he agitates against most strongly.
I wonder what Wendell Berry would have to say about the dangers of poetry in this context.
BTW I don’t read much poetry and never have but every so often something catches me and offers me a new way to see something that had until then been ordinary
Thanks for those supportive comments, folks. I’m going to be offline for a few days – notably because I’ll be at my book launch at Groundswell. If any readers here are going to be there, feel free to drop me an email.
Regarding points raised here:
Simon – excellent zinger there about typewriters.
Martin – no reason for you to have heard of Alex Milne. Though to be fair no reason for you to have heard of Chris Smaje either.
Benn – good point about how to define farming. And also a good point about full spectrum enclosure. I aim to come back to that shortly.
Bruce – agree with you about poetry. My feeling is that GM isn’t being 100% serious and is stretching a point to make a point, so I’m part inclined to cut him some slack with that quote. But only part, because the point he’s trying to make with it is a bad one. It kind of circles back to one of Benn’s points. ‘Look but don’t touch’ is not a good way to build secure ecological sensibilities.
Yes I agree in doubting that GM was 100% serious with that comment -and I agree that a “look don’t touch” approach isn’t going to help – it’s interesting to note that the first game reserves in East Africa were set up by individuals who had been game hunters and whose intimate involvement in those ecosystems meant they could see the changes that were starting to occur and felt moved to do something to forestall those changes.
I think the poetry thing goes deeper than the looking v touching dichotomy because it speaks to how we see and how we touch – as Simon says it’s about access to wisdom rather than simply acquiring knowledge – as I see it the latter is about power while the former suggests sensible limits on the use of that power.
If you ask a farmer about gm it’s not increased production , ( old yellow dent is still the best) , it’s a clean weed free fields they talk about , no blocked combines full of weeds gumming up the works .
I agree, the poetry remark does seem terribly throwaway.
It might be worth bearing in mind that, once upon a time in the history of human consciousness, poets were once regarded by some as the repositories of wisdom, as outlined by Jeremy Naydler in this interview, a few minutes in. And now we are asked to look only to Science, it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWhnDYyYDjk&ab_channel=cupolaproductions
In point #9 above I didn’t find a link or reference in your text… so for anyone wishing to follow up on the assertions there… this link:
https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20127-george-monbiot-teams-up-with-mark-lynas-and-ecomodernism-to-reboot-food
In the “Third” point Chris says:
Monbiot’s farm-free vision is another iteration of ecomodernism’s efforts to find high-tech, high-energy, high-capital solutions to contemporary global problems that rescue the status quo. But I believe they’re unlikely to succeed, and risk wasting time and resources we can ill afford.
From the reading I’ve done I can agree the folks pushing a farm-free vision are very focused on high-tech. Where I’d take exception is the suggestion that they (or the biology behind their approach) are necessarily “high-energy” or “high-capital”. There is a rapidly growing field full of researchers and investors trying various versions of precision fermentation. Some of these folks are going to fail, some not. Some of the successes will end up “owned” by investors and fall into the capital markets. Some of the tech will be patented and some of the first movers will benefit from ‘first mover advantage’.
Before folks jump onto the ‘capitalism sucks’ bandwagon, might it be worth noting that there are all sorts of tech (and not just scythes) at our disposal… improved seeds, improved livestock, improved processing techniques… technologies that the most probable future of humans on Earth will keep in the tool box (and likely continue to tweek as necessary).
Patents expire. And for that matter, if you don’t use the intellectual property divulged in a patent to compete with the holder – OR – if you negotiate a license to use the intellectual property then you and yours can use the tech before a patent expires. Another matter all together is a debate over patenting in the first place… but my current time constraints have to push that off for the moment.
The high energy complaint has a morsel of value. Where the approaches espoused actually do employ more power (embedded and external) then we do need to call them out. Some of the new approaches are very efficient and as such needn’t be tossed to the curb simply because they share the bathwater. Those approaches that don’t currently have a “better than” vitae to share today might, with continued tweaking, come round to usefulness. Who is to say whether resources deployed in this endeavor are ones we can “ill afford”? I agree that you’re entitled to your belief… but I don’t agree that your belief in the matter should foreclose someone else’s chance that they might be able to prove you wrong.
The high capital complaint suffers along these lines as well. Where the capital consumption is too high, the market should correct. Where markets fail to consider externalities we have a problem of course – all of our tech, old and proposed, should be subjected to market forces where their true costs are measured.
Finally, there are geographical and geological differences across the planet. Even in a Small Farm Future there will be differences in how various locations deploy the technology and techniques that exist. Energy availability in one location may allow the useful deployment of a tech that is too difficult to deploy in a different place. I don’t see the logic in suggesting that if all can’t use it then no one can.
In closing I do want to thank you for posting your Energy Costs response to the PNAS paper by Leger et al. I will take a close look.
Clem,
How long do you think we should funnel increasingly scarce existing resources into expensive, unproven and novel industrial-scale technologies for producing food, when we already have much more easily distributed technologies such as seed selection, cover cropping, crop rotation, microclimate creation etc?
How long do patents take to expire? Do we have even that much time?
And are such novel technologies attractive because they might be helpful, or because they might be profitable?
I mean, I am firmly on team “capitalism sucks” here, partly because the technology itself doesn’t worry me as much as the social context does. If the technology won’t work economically in a low-energy future then the whole thing is just another (small-ish) bubble, not worth getting worried about. If it’s more economical now in our high-energy present than over-financialised industrial monoculture food production, then I suppose it could become quite widespread while we still have the energy available for using several kilojoules of fossil energy to produce one kilojoule of food energy, but… that’s not going to last forever, and then what!? And my understanding is that anything using hydrogen as an input is going to be either pretty shockingly high-energy compared to, say, plants, or else significantly slower, simply because of the limits imposed by thermodynamics. If that is the case, then perhaps Chris is right that we can ill-afford to throw resources at it now. We don’t have a lot of time.
In any case, in the shorter term it looks like precision fermentation will need to, at very least, be less expensive (that is, less energy-and-materials intensive) than vat-grown animal tissue: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/21/1183484892/no-kill-meat-grown-from-animal-cells-is-now-approved-for-sale-in-the-u-s
Kathryn:
From Google:
How long does a US patent last?
The term for which a utility patent is valid is generally 20 years from the date of filing, and the term for which a design patent is valid is generally 15 years from issuance.
Now some can (justifiably) suggest that a patent claim can be extended by an owner through some slight modification to the original effort. Big Pharma gets accused of this. And like the conceptual value of a patent in the first place – we can dispute the merits.
As for limited resources… our current population includes many thousands of public (universities and NGOs) and private sector (both commercial and non-profit) individuals working on possible technologies for our future. Many of these individuals have already obtained a Ph.D. in their chosen discipline. Thus we’ve already made a considerable investment – one that is underway. The resources to hand may dwindle at some point, but I don’t see any sense in pulling the rug out from under an ongoing effort to help.
And are such novel technologies attractive because they might be helpful, or because they might be profitable?
Why does it matter? If they are not profitable it’s quite likely they weren’t helpful to begin with. Profitable works at many levels. Chris might eschew modern tech in principal, but then go into his woodland with an electric chain saw to accomplish some firewood harvest. He could get the same amount of firewood using a stone axe… but his opportunity cost would be very much out of kilter. Profit isn’t always an evil.
Profit certainly isn’t always an evil, but prioritising short-term profit over the long-term wellbeing (or even survival) of humans is a pattern we’ve definitely seen before. Arguably, it’s part of what got us into this mess; I have very low confidence in our ability to get out of it using the same strategy.
I don’t think we can go on as we have been for another fifteen or twenty years without massive negative repercussions. In that sense, I don’t think we have time to keep on doing industrial monoculture farming and then transition to precision fermentation; instead we should be transitioning to smaller, mixed farms now. I don’t think that tools and inputs that seem achievable now — custom-built steel vats, special catalysts, hydrogen feedstocks that are said to be somehow “green” despite the extremely high energy cost of cleaving hydrogen off from just about anything — will be anywhere near as economically viable twenty years from now. In that sense, I’m not sure we should be putting our remaining resources into specialist equipment that can’t be easily repurposed for operation at a human scale.
I wouldn’t mind so much if the eco-modernist view were something like “we have to stop industrial farming ASAP, maybe eventually precision fermentation can be part of that”; but I don’t think that is what most of the proponents of precision fermentation are saying.
Thanks for the link !
IMHO non of it works , taking animals out means more fertilizer the acres of grains taken out by not feeding animals will be replaced by soy for the vats with feedstock .
Rewinding seems to me to be a way to re introduce deer parks for our ” betters ” to hunt in .
I’m not averse to a bit of venison myself, and I guess there is an argument that managed deer parks are really part of a small mixed food ecosystem, but it does seem like “re-wilding” would not achieve much in terms of emissions.
Anyone seeking a sneak peek at the first 35 pages of Chris’ new book can check out google books here:
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=aPHEEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR1&ots=3fn8dSnzFX&sig=xI2t7lSsK5O_LCNFDlZSWm0O3c8#v=onepage&q&f=false
And as an interesting aside – I found this because Chris cited Wise et al. ’22 in his book.
He also cited it in the worksheet he mentions above (and is available on this site). Google Scholar allows one to see who has cited a particular paper… and as of a few minutes ago Wise et al had 6 cites… Chris’ being one of them. When Google Scholar shows the citing reference it also provides a link. I followed that link…
Another question I have – how does Google Scholar have all Chris’ yet to be published references in their database???
Clem asked “how does Google Scholar have all Chris’ yet to be published references in their database?”
Google evidently has already digitized the entire book that’s previewed at that Google Books link. I imagine it was done in cooperation with the publisher. The entire book is searchable. Clem, I suggest that you go to the Google Books page for “Saying NO…” that you linked, and search for the word “Clem” (the ‘Search in this book’ box is at the left of the page).
: )
From an article by Chris Smaje published today:
“This is a clear alternative option to ecomodernist techno-fixes and food system ‘reboots’. Politically, I call it agrarian localism. Ecologically, I call it being a good keystone species. It may succeed in overcoming present challenges, or it may not. There are no inexorable logics. But I think it’s our best shot.”
https://wickedleeks.riverford.co.uk/features/tech-versus-small-farms-there-is-a-different-way/
A different article by Chris was published today at Resilience dot org, titled “Stepping beyond the livestock sustainability debate”.
“To help celebrate the UK launch of the book, Chris sent us [Resilience] an exclusive piece, which we have posted below.”
https://thepostmillennial.com/trudeau-government-recruits-insect-protein-companies-to-attend-uk-future-of-food-tech-conference
I found this if anyone is interested
Hope everything went well at the book launch! I’d have loved to be there, but ever since they discontinued the ferries between Norway and the UK it’s been a bit of a pain to get there without flying.
I did get my copy of the book delivered. Thank you for the enjoyable read as always. It’s good to have a solid refutation of the techno-fix du jour, and if this book gives you a chance to piggy-back off Monbiot’s fame to bring your wider thinking and the idea of a small farm future to a wider audience, I think that would be a very welcome side benefit too.
As for Milne’s negativity comment, I had some of the same misgivings at first, but after reading it I actually felt the book did a reasonable job of balancing it out. Yes, it’s a polemic, but there also seemed to be a very conscious effort to highlight the reasons a SFF is a better alternative too. And I agree that it’s useful to draw a line sometimes.
Re. “appeal to nature”, couldn’t you rather make a case that’s what Monbiot and the ecomodernists are doing? They’re the ones who seem set on a pristine “nature” unsullied by human touch, and that this is better than a symbiosis by default. “Ecological” seems pretty reasonable to me, and more like a practical description than an attempt at an emotionally charged one.
Besides, while it can obviously be taken too far, I think there’s some merit in appeals to nature in a culture like ours, where the human has been given such a skewed priority over the natural for centuries now. If a way of doing something is more “natural” (and I know that word can be problematic and contested, but bear with me) and less abstract/mechanized, I think that should be a point in its favor right now, not the opposite. A point that can be outweighed by other considerations if they’re important enough, of course.
And yeah, what the heck happened to Monbiot, anyway? He did always champion nuclear power IIRC, but it’s still a pretty drastic turnaround. Between his remark about poetry, his response about mysticism to Kingsnorth you refer in the book and his self-admitted obsession with numbers, he seems to have become some kind of quantification extremist? (For lack of a better term.) He used to write movingly about the less tangible sides of caring about nature, but now he seems to have fallen into the same trap as mainstream neoliberal culture, where only raw physical matter and what can be measured has any value. That’s pretty sad to see.
Also, as a typewriter enthusiast, I resent that conference comment of his (tongue-in-cheek, but still). It’s pretty classic “myth of Progress” stuff, I suppose, but I’d hoped Monbiot was more thoughtful.
Out of interest.
Chris, have you had any correspondence/debate/discussion directly with George Monbiot since you published your book?
Relevant to “studge” but covers “tech” more generally.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/06/27/where-fantasy-crashes-into-reality/
Chris Smaje –
Jason Bradford published a review of your latest book over in Resilience.org –https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-06-30/review-saying-no-to-ecomodermism-smaje-versus-monbiot-its-no-contest/ Then a fellow named Michael Mos wrote a long comment following this revew, in which he says your latest book consists largely of straw man arguments.
I believe you should respond to Michael Mos when you find the time.
I don’t think Chris should reply because I wasn’t talking about the book, I was talking about the review. So I was not saying “… your latest book consists largely of straw man arguments.” (talk about straw-manning). I haven’t read Chris’ book, so I’m not the one to comment on it. But I did read the review, and I thought it contained obvious errors. And that’s what my comment was about.
Jason Bradford seemed to consider Chris’ suggestion that Monbiot is now an ecomodernist as a given and took it from there. I think the recent quote from Monbiot that I put in the comment makes it clear that Monbiots position doesn’t justify simply lumping him in with the ecomodernists. As convenient it might be for critics. Without that premise the whole review falls apart. And that’s why I called it out as straw-manning. Bradford boldly claims Monbiot says ‘no’ to farms, but as my quote clearly demonstrates he doesn’t, I’m left wondering why Bradford is taking shortcuts.
I think there can be fair criticism of Monbiots position without calling him an ecomodernist. I haven’t read Regenesis, but I’ve read enough of Monbiots recent articles and interviews to have a clear idea where he is with his thinking. If I wanted to call him an ecomodernist, I personally couldn’t do so without cherry-picking. Maybe Chris does a better job in his book, but to be honest, I’m not really interested. I think I have a good enough idea of which of Monbiots ideas make sense to me and which don’t. I don’t feel Chris’ book would change a lot to that, based on his recent writings.
Of course, labeling Monbiot as an ecomodernist could also be something the publisher of Chris’ book came up with, just to manufacture some kind of controversy to help with attention for the book. In which case I’m happy I didn’t fall for it.
I don’t think you’re in a strong position to talk about cherry-picking if you haven’t read Regenesis or my book but consider a short quotation plucked from a recent Monbiot article sufficient to prove anything.
Apart from anything else, there are no hard and fast definitions of either ecomodernism or agroecology, and I daresay there are people who’d see no contradiction in identifying with both.
I’ve written about why I consider the ‘farm-free’ sobriquet adequate shorthand for Monbiot’s position, and why his pro-agroecology protestations don’t cut it. I won’t repeat that here, especially since you say you’re not interested anyway. What I’ve described as Monbiot’s ‘agroecological ambiguity’ increasingly strikes me as deliberate rhetorical camouflage that bamboozles people by sugar coating the real logic of his analysis. Too bad it seems to be succeeding.
I’m now back from the Groundswell Festival where my book officially launched. More on that soon. Thanks for keeping the blog ticking along with your comments while I was offline.
Perhaps I’ll just venture a few remarks in relation to them.
I don’t eschew modern tech in principle, but nor do I think there is any secure arbiter with which to judge what technology to adopt and what to eschew. Partly this is because technology itself is a protagonist – in Nolen Gertz’s words “modern technologies appear to function not by helping us achieve our ends but instead by determining ends for us, by providing us with ends which we must help technologies achieve”.
Groundswell further stoked my growing belief that we’re in the early stages of a new class conflict over land and food, and the technologies we apply to them. The ‘right’ technologies can be no more than the ones that emerge out of the conflict – a conflict that will never be over. In that sense, nobody will ever ‘prove’ my beliefs wrong – not the most important ones, anyway – nor I theirs. But the outcomes of the conflicts over such beliefs certainly will foreclose some people’s opportunities. It’s at that level that I want to pitch my own contributions to the political debate about technologies.
I disagree that market forces measure the true costs of technology. And I disagree that patents are of much significance for understanding the nature of the capitalist political economy (a point I touch on briefly in Chapter 5 of ‘Saying NO…’). I’ve written quite a bit in the past about the nature of capitalism. In my previous book (p.72) I frame it thus, borrowing from Wolfgang Streeck: capitalist societies are ones that secure their collective reproduction as an unintended side-effect of individually rational, competitive profit maximization that puts its productive capital into the hands of a minority, thereby largely abdicating political responsibility for human welfare. That’s pretty much it, IMO.
To Kim’s points – thanks for that appreciation. And I agree with you about the need to push back a bit against the ‘nature fallacy’.
John – to answer your question only elliptically for now there’s a bit going on behind the scenes. I’ll let you know what, if anything, comes of it in due course.
James – I’ll look if I get the chance, but not sure if I’ll engage. The accusation of straw manning can pretty much always be applied with a greater or lesser degree of plausibility whenever someone critiques someone else. IMO Monbiot’s book itself involves numerous instances. In the parts of my book where I felt accusations of straw manning might fall strongest against my position I took pains to explain why I felt otherwise. If I’ve failed to convince readers of the book (they HAVE actually read the book, right?) there might not be much purpose served in further debate. Possibly there is if it feels like it might generate worthwhile new perspectives. Anyway, I’m very happy for other people to argue the toss about the two books in this respect. Ultimately, perhaps it’s not for me (nor Monbiot) to judge whose arguments best hit home.
Chris –
Whether or not they read the book is a question I have no answer for. They say they have read Monbiot’s articles…, and imply this should be enough.
Commenting’s value and purpose may be to encourage folks to actually read the books before evaluating their merits, claims and positioning?
Hi Chris,
Someone in my local climate action group recently pointed me to your book. I’m a bit of a fan of precision fermentation so it made me sit up and take notice. In particular, I tried to follow your argument that PF is unfeasible because of its energy requirements. And I believe that you might have this wrong.
I’d been meaning to write a blog post about precision fermentation for a while. Your book (and related information on your website) provided the impetus for me to do so. I’ve summarised my counter-arguments in my post: https://michaeldaw.net/saying-yes-to-animal-free-dairy/
You might be allergic to the first part where I wax lyrical about the benefits of PF(!). If so, you can skip down to the heading Environmental Impact which is where my summary of your position begins and then my counter-argument. It would be great if you could consider what I’ve put and then respond.
My blog is nowhere near as well-read as yours so I normally attempt to promote it through various channels. I’ve deliberately not done this yet because I wanted to give you the chance to have a look first.
I don’t have a comment feature on my blog but if you want to discuss this directly you can contact me via my website. (I’ll receive an email if you do so.) Or I guess you may like to respond here. I’ve ticked the box to notify me if you do so.
Best wishes,
Mike
Hi Mike
Thanks for your comment. I’ve looked at your blog post and your criticisms of my analysis concerning manufactured food energetics. I don’t think your claim that I overestimate the energy costs of the relevant processes stands up to scrutiny. I’ll explain why in a separate blog post that I’ll aim to publish within the next few days. But thanks for probing at the issue. I appreciate your engagement – and your politeness, which seems to be all too rare in this field.
Not read this one yet but I am aware of the content and the argument. I do agree with you Chris. I think it is an and/both scenario and not either/or. I think social justice AND ecological needs require what you set out, albeit with my having ‘opinions’ on the details. For me, urban food grows and innovation here, I feel, is going to be key. Further, that we have to allow a socially and culturally diverse approach to ‘who gets the land’ for small farms. The military already have a subsidised scheme for it’s people and ex servicemen and whilst I understand, appreciate and think that a good scheme, ‘civilians’ need and deserve a counterpart. On George, he is a company man very much like Rupert Read; discerning the difference is key. Chris, will you and those like you set up a learning platform and apprenticeships to enable willing others to pivot towards what you suggest <- it has to be more than just an argument and backed up by process and action.