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Posted on July 6, 2023 | 24 Comments
I’m guessing that few people the world over will have failed to notice the big-ticket news items last week – most importantly, the official launch of my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future at the Groundswell Festival in Hertfordshire, and secondly the release of the 2022 global energy figures by the unironically named Energy Institute.
Okay, so I’m joking about the newsworthiness of my book. But last I looked it was riding high in the Amazon charts, at No.1 in its Soil Science category (?), No.2 in nanotechnology (??), and No.5 in distribution management, whatever that is. Vindication.
More on that and the Groundswell Festival in a moment. But first let’s take a quick look at the energy figures. Probably the one that will steal most of the headlines is that solar energy consumption leaped more than any other form of energy use last year with an impressive 24% climb. It now constitutes fully … er … 2% of global energy consumption, with a growth rate that appears to be slowing from the 2010s. Meanwhile, fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions from energy also climbed. Not by much (0.4% and 0.9% respectively). Still, more fossil fuels were used and more carbon dioxide emitted from energy last year than ever before in human history. Percentage-wise, about 82% of global energy consumption came from fossil fuels in 2022 – down only 3 percentage points from 2015 when global leaders agreed to try to limit climate change (but up 6% from that year in absolute terms).
In other words, there’s no sign of an energy transition out of fossils yet.
In a recent post I calculated that to quit fossil fuels by 2050, we’d have to lose 16.9 exajoules of fossil energy annually between now and then, more than the entire fossil fuel use of the world’s fifth largest fossil fuel using country, Japan. Well, now we need to lose 17.6EJ annually which is … even more than more than the entire fossil fuel use of Japan.
This is of some relevance to the theme of my new book, as I’ll suggest in a moment.
But first a few remarks on how my two book launches, the local one and the official one, went.
The answer is pretty well, and thanks for asking. I was lucky to have two great interlocutors at my respective launches, the irrepressible ffinlo Costain and the effervescent Sarah Langford, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with both of them about my book. Audience questions ranged from the generally supportive to the appropriately quizzical and thence to the occasionally hostile, but by and large the book got a pretty good reception. Even the reviews so far have been largely positive – for example here, here and even here. I expect there’ll be some brickbats to come, but it’s been remarkably mellow so far. Even so, the reviews and the launch Q&As have raised various issues of interest that I hope to address in the fullness of time.
The question at the launches that I’ve found hardest to deal with runs along the lines of “Okay, so no to a farm-free future, I get that. But what are you saying ‘yes’ to? If techno-fixes don’t work, what does work? And how can we bring it about?”
…to which my answer has been something along the lines of agrarian localism and food sovereignty, the details of which have to be hammered out through specific local politics by multitudes of people and can’t be itemised as a blueprint in a few pages of a book or in an answer at a talk. If that will be a less satisfactory answer to some than “…by rolling out new technology X” to me it’s nevertheless more plausible.
But maybe I need to burnish it into more of a soundbite. If so, it’ll have to be quite a complicated one. As suggested in Chapter 6 of my new book I think we’re now experiencing the beginning of the end of the ‘modernism’ that the ecomodernists champion – an end that I welcome, because I don’t think it can deliver a just or congenial way of life long-term to human or non-human organisms. But the path beyond modernism looks rocky, and I don’t relish treading it. Still, I’d rather tread it knowingly than cling to shopworn contemporary political nostrums that claim to know how to reconstruct a useable modernism.
So yeah, answers below please if you have a good suggestion for how I can frame all that in a cheery, upbeat jingle. Intellectually, my analysis from Chapter 8 on how humans need to become a good keystone species might do it. But I fear I’d then have to spend a lot of time explaining what I meant by ‘a good keystone species’. And then it wouldn’t be a soundbite.
The larger problem that I have, which becomes all too apparent when I venture beyond the familiar and usually comforting environs of my farm or my online village to attend events like Groundswell, is that I seem to be looking at the world and the human future as if through a different window to most of my fellow humans. Like it or not, I just don’t think the high-energy, high-capital cocoon of the global political economy is going to protect us privileged denizens at its centre for too much longer, let alone anyone else. We need to start implementing something radically different. Radically different, from the roots up. Not just some window dressing of the status quo, as with the case for microbial protein manufacture or carbon trading schemes.
On the latter front, I found Groundswell interesting in that it seemed to be peopled with a large contingent of so called ‘conventional’, big-scale farmers who were (a) concerned about how they were going to stay afloat financially in the harsh light of the post-Brexit subsidy regimen, (b) anxious to develop better carbon sequestration metrics to emphasize that their livestock weren’t the climate catastrophe they’re too often painted, and (c) vulnerable to the blandishments of numerous business ventures in attendance at the festival offering their services to farmers as carbon portfolio managers.
I’m sympathetic to the plight of these farmers and I despair at the way they and their livestock are being wrongly scapegoated for the ills of our wider society. But I think they’re deluding themselves if they suppose that better carbon metrics, carbon pricing or claims about soil carbon sequestration are going to save their businesses or save the world as we know it from climate system breakdown. Meanwhile, the corporate vultures of the carbon offsetters and the precision fermenters are circling. I believe that existing producers of food here in the UK ought to be concerned. And so should existing eaters of food.
When the case for being allowed to continue doing what you’re doing falls on deaf ears politically, it sometimes leads to a stark choice: to give up or to fight. My time at Groundswell led me to believe we’re now closer to that choice than I’d previously thought. To deliver a renewable local food system in the UK, I think it’ll be necessary for a lot of the kind of farmers who were at Groundswell along with other local landowners to ally with local communities against corporate food system rationalisers. I said as much in a discussion panel I was on, but I’m not sure how much the remark landed. Different vistas, different windows. A few people came up to me after the session and expressed their appreciation, though, which gave me a modicum of hope. Meanwhile, another panellist told me I was wrong about my energetic claims in respect of microbial protein. In her opinion, a bright future for it beckons.
I’ll say more about that in another post. For now, I’ve written this short piece to lay out the energetic issue as I see it. If you think I’ve got something wrong in it, I’d appreciate hearing your critique.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, fossil fuel use and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions continue their inexorable rise. Humanity just doesn’t seem capable of decarbonising its existing energy system. The idea that it makes sense to add a vast new demand for low-carbon energy to produce food that can otherwise be grown with free and zero-carbon sunlight makes no sense to me in that context. There will be no food factories on a dead planet, and there will be no low-carbon manufactured food in a fossil-fuelled energy system.
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Pithy: Because small is better…and it works.
Good to see some reviews rolling in on the new book. Keep sharing them, I’m always curious who weighs in on your work.
Cheers,
Brian
“Okay, so no to a farm-free future, I get that. But what are you saying ‘yes’ to? If techno-fixes don’t work, what does work? And how can we bring it about?”
Yes to agrarian localism and food sovereignty. Support locally-owned food growers with your purchases and political involvement. Avoid eating new foods created in laboratories and produced in factories, such as bacterial protein powder.
“Okay, so no to a farm-free future, I get that. But what are you saying ‘yes’ to?”
Okay, so I have been in a bad mood today. So say ‘yes, get a life’.
It seems to me that we have so much. So much so that the main project is shedding the majority of the stuff we are encumbered with. Saying ‘no’ to the majority of what is considered normal in the modern Western world.
Say no to more money.
Say no to your TV, or whatever the current equivalent is these days. Netflix sub?
Say no to your car.
Say no to all those conveniences that aren’t.
Start there, and the things that you will want to say yes to will magically appear.
Saying yes to growing food will very likely be one of them.
My experience has been that the more I act upon my disinterest in the mainstream values of my home culture, the more I become interested in actually making a life.
Culture, if you will.
Seeing what part of my own living I can make with my own direct labor, together with the grace of providence and photosynthesis.
Maybe it’s something like telling someone that you’ll help them climb out of that hole, but not until they stop digging it deeper.
Positivity is way overrated, and a large part of how we got in this fix to begin with.
Thanks.
I wonder if part of the challenge with being somewhat anti-modernist is that many modern people have bought into a narrative of progress, and particularly of pre-modern times being quite miserable. That, and the assumption that our options are “modernism” or “something earlier than modernism” which seems to me to be somewhat unimaginative. You’ve written about this problem before.
I don’t know that we need to deconstruct modern culture, but I accept that we need to transform or even transcend it. This will necessarily vary by context and conditions, though you’ve written about some of the common characteristics of modes of production: agrarian, local, distributed (in order to better tap into energy and rainfall) and therefore small, independent where possible from fossil ernergy… I think I might add that some kind of community or commons-based component could well be integral. I think it’s likely difficult for single small farms to increase in number under the conditions of corporate enclosure and captured or supersedure state governance you describe, so those of us with a vision of something else (or simply a “not THIS” aversion to the current direction) are going to have to work together wherever we can.
I will say that the precision fermentation and carbon sequestration measurement industries you describe make technologies like FarmBot (which is designed to work on a micro, one-household scale) look positively utopian, and I wonder whether moves toward micro-scale production might also become important. Perhaps we might more easily make common cause with gardeners than with farmers.
Yesterday there was a funeral reception at church, and one of the people attending recognised the (self-seeded) amaranth in the Soup Garden and started asking questions. It turns out she is doing lots of growing on her small patio space out in Essex, and wanted advice on things like sweet potato slips — she showed me a picture of a sweet potato with more sprouts than I could count, as well as some magnificent runner beans grown by her young son.I had to confess that this is my first year with sweet potatoes (but pulling the slips off and putting them in water to form roots is a good next step), but I was able to provide her with an envelope full of amaranth seed I collected in a previous year.
And… the challenging thing about these small, hopeful interactions is that they seem so very futile in the face of the kind of catastrophe that could happen if large-scale food production doubles down on energy intensity just as we run out of (supposedly) economical fossil fuels while also wrecking what’s left of climate stability. Perhaps it’s naïve or even a bit Pollyanna-ish of me to think that humanity will probably muddle through somehow. But “humanity will probably muddle through” is very different from “most humans won’t suffer unduly” — we can see plainly by observing the world around us now, and listening to the voices of those whose suffering is considered, by the powerful, as an unimportant externality, that many people are already living in startling precarity and crushing poverty. This is why in a previous comment I said I was more concerned about the social context of precision fermentation than the technical feasibility: if it turns out to be a sort of economic bubble because of energetic or material inputs, it won’t be the CEOs or the venture capitalists or the angel investors or even the patent holders who starve, it will be the people who are already undergoing catastrophe. And if it isn’t a bubble — if it can be made to work — well, I rather suspect the same people will still be swept aside and disregarded..
Hey, will the book be available as an ebook? : )
I just don’t think the high-energy, high-capital cocoon of the global political economy is going to protect us privileged denizens at its centre for too much longer, let alone anyone else.
“For too much longer” … Whether explicitly or implicitly we all take a punt on *how* much longer. Impossible to say, of course. But it does make some difference to day-to-day decisions.
Some of my own assumptions are that … well I’m a year and a half off the official retiring age (though not intending to abandon paid work of one sort of another). I expect that at 66 there will still be a viable state pension, but that if I live as long as my mother (who died recently at 92) there won’t. Likewise the NHS (which kind of implies that I *won’t* live to 92). Sadly, I don’t think I’ll live to see the demise of the interent (yeah, I know I’m using it) or the private car (which I use very little – and only as a passenger).
I’ve said in a previous comment, that I don’t think things will collapse, rather they will crumble. The difference is only of timescale – I meant that it will feel like a slow-ish decline, bits falling off with increasing regularity, not an exciting cliff-edge. from the point of view of future historians, it will look like a collapse.
From the point of view of future people, the faster the crumble the better – less total damage to deal with. Though not so good for those living through it, perhaps.
RE: The short piece on energetic issues
For a very short piece, it’s fine, but as you follow up and expand on it, there are a couple topics that the techno food camp needs to address.
Time scale and thermodynamics.
PV panels cannot power their complete manufacture, replacement, including the energy and inputs needed to recycle them in a closed loop recycling process, and still provide energy to power the entire rest of the economy (which is what fossil fuels currently are still able to do).
When one also adds the material and energy to mine, process and manufacture the rest of the needed panels to replace fossil fuels, we quickly realize that we are in the predicament that Simon Michaux has been pointing out for some time now.
I mention thermodynamics because current analysis of energy comparisons does not fully consider all the inputs to the system in question. Emergy analysis, as explored by Odom, while still evolving, and difficult to calculate, will I think show the disadvantages of technology intense systems to be even greater.
Which leads to my second point of time scale.
Seven generations is not enough. I find it implausible to think that we will be able to maintain a PV and wind powered economy for one thousand years, but that is really what one would have to consider to be truly sustainable. Proponents of said economy should need to defend that premise.
A well crafted agriculture that works with nature instead of fighting it can and has lasted for time periods of this scale.
Those two things are a lot to tackle and enter the discourse, but use them as you will.
Book releases:
Maybe the early positive reviews are simply that confirmation bias is much quicker to respond than rebuttal, which takes time to marshal arguments and gird the loins, so to speak. 🙂
Response to “What are you saying yes to?”
Well, you can work on a pithy phrase, or even an elevator speech, but instead of getting sucked into minutia, I rather like how Holmgren distilled permaculture into 12 principles. Each is signified by a single word, but then a paragraph or two explains each. He went ahead and wrote a book that wasn’t all that long, but unfolded it a bit more. You’ve already done your book version!
The point is, they are general principles, that when understood, can be applied across a full range of situations. No one tool is suitable for any biome, but the principles are.
To me, the description of a plausible small farm future is the easy part. The hard part is imagining and executing a path to it given entrenched power structures, and our fractious and reality denying nature.
Keep slogging, and thanks for your efforts.
I couldn’t find the Country Life review via the link given, despite a search.
I think even a low energy future is debatable , complex societies need continuous supplies that are transported a long way , living near the the oil patch I can talk to those working there , I talked to a guy in the last couple of weeks that said the holes they are drilling now need a price of $ 150 to break even ,near double today’s price that will hurt , a lot , we care drawing down the world’s reserves at 8% a year and replacing them at 4% a year and they need $150 a barrel for it .
Adding to Steve c ,Siemens is in a hole , they expect 25% of their wind turbines to fail in the ten year guarantee period Their share price has tanked , we can’t make reliable turbines , period , solar I a lot of t he world is a bust and the price of oil has to double ,soon , we may pump out enough co2 to screw up the climate but I doubt it as fossil will be too expensive to use , leading us to small farms growing food locally or starvation .
Thanks for the suggestions about my elevator pitch. I’ll ponder it. But some polite variant of ‘that’s your job as much as it’s mine’ feels right.
Re various other points raised:
Reviews #1 – I made an error in my original links to the reviews on Resilience by Jason Bradford and Mary Wildfire, now corrected. Unfortunately the Country Life review is paywalled. Suffice to say it’s more positive than somebody like me could reasonably expect from Country Life, although – no surprise – it’s none too keen on my notion of opening the counstryside to smallholders en masse.
Reviews #2 – Steve C, you’re probably right that the negative ones will be slower to materialise. Time for another reader’s poll. Assuming Dr Evil of Protein Powder Inc is currently war gaming how to deal with me, which of these do you think he’s most likely to recommend?
A: Just ignore Smaje and hopefully he’ll go away
B: Let’s marshall our best intellectual arguments and have a proper debate
C: What have you got on him? Attack! Attack!
D: Dangerous places, farms. It’s oh so easy to have a nasty accident…
PV panels: yes good points from Steve C. I don’t have an awful lot to add here beyond what I wrote in my recent post on energy and the 100% renewables movement, but it’s a key issue and I daresay I’ll come round to it again.
Re Elin’s question – yes my book is available as an ebook and an audiobook. I’m not sure how you access those formats except through the dreaded Amazon, but I’m guessing there may be a way – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saying-Farm-Free-Future-Ecological-Manufactured/
And thanks for the other comments of substance about where we’re headed. More on that soon.
Link below to a video of “a healthy debate” with four participants including Dr. Chris Smaje and Dr Catherine Tubb (“director of research at Synthesis Capital, world’s largest VC foodtech fund”).
The Diet of the Future: What Will we be Eating in 2050?
“Sheila Dillon, BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, will lead a healthy debate on what we’ll be eating 27 years from now. If we are to successfully transition to fair and equitable food production which benefits people and planet, what will end up on our plates? What role will farming and tech such as precision fermentation play in feeding us? And who is set to benefit most?
We hear from Chris Smaje (Saying No To a Free Farm Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods), Sue Pritchard (Chief Executive of Food, Farming & Countryside Commission), Mallika Basu, food writer & cultural commentator; and Dr Catherine Tubb, director of research at Synthesis Capital, world’s largest VC foodtech fund.”
https://youtu.be/w-NoC17PsUo
How did I do?
You did well!
Interesting viewpoints all round, I particularly enjoyed your anecdotes, Chris. I chimed with Sue’s vision too – optimism can be infectious – but still I intuit a general energy blindness (perhaps incorrectly if an upbeat comment under this post on Resilience is anything to go by). Thanks for flagging that up, Steve. Also interesting to hear snippets from Benn on the McGilchrist tome – I have a friend who’s reading it, or rather wading into it, then wading back out for a long think. There is an interesting discussion between its author and Rupert Sheldrake on yt. Fascinating stuff.
Sue Pritchard’s comment along the lines of “I’m not looking for “How do we financialize this more?” I’m not looking to venture capital to fix this”. I laughed outloud and loved her. Chris, you were very grounded and sane, leading with energetics. Two thumbs up 🙂
How about “farmers of the next forty centuries”?
The Matter with Things, page 582, on precision vs. accuracy is worth a read. Pre-cision means cutting something off too soon, and what gets cut away is meaning.
Love the Small Farm Future book, can’t see how I wasn’t on your newsletter, corrected. I wrote this maybe 10 days ago and was tweaking it, and then today I was adding additional links to your work and saw the launch of “Saying No to a Farm-Free Future.” And well, just see, I’m on board and also terrible at making it into a soundbite. https://aliceem2de3u.substack.com/p/channeling-cultural-change-energy
Thanks – glad you’ve found my work of interest. Always nice to hear a new voice here!
Interesting to see Pictet Asset Management lapping up Monbiot’s words here:
https://am.pictet/en/globalwebsite/mega/2023/reducing-food-environmental-impact
Some of the claims in this article are an absolute travesty.
“Operating out of 18 Pictet offices worldwide, Pictet Asset Management had CHF 259 bn of assets under management on 31 December 2021 and employed around 1000 full-time equivalent employees…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictet_Group
259 billion Swiss Francs is currently equivalent to around 291 billion US dollars.
At first, my reaction to that article was that somebody at Pictet should be fired for how sloppy and one-sided it is, IMHO. But then I wondered how many of those hundreds of billions of dollars were already invested in such novel food ventures, and whether this type of article would help the value of those investments increase?
In 27 years I doubt there will be any ” asset managers ” left , BRICS Is starting a new gold backed currency , when that hits the wests fiat currencies it will be a blood bath !
I’m not good with sound bites. I’m usually several flights up the stairwell before a snappy response occurs to me.
Sound bites are good for people with short attention spans. They won’t remember what you said but if it clicks and they think ‘He’s right’, it will be effective. It is a big ask, but if you could lead them into thinking…
I think the biggest hurdle is……
Who in their right mind would want to swap modernity for a Small Farm Future?????
All the gadgets and gizmos that make our lives easier, well……..they make our lives easier.
The Small Farm Future alternative is not very appealing on face value. A “Small World Future” without mass transport, geographically tied to one spot. Limited communications.
For us folks born into modernity, it looks grim. Maybe that is ultimately Monbiot’s problem. He would rather have “studge” if it means he keeps his laptop and his publishing career.
But there isn’t really an option. It’s a Small Farm Future or bust.
For the generation born after the end of modernity, things will be easier. They won’t know any different. Small Farm Future will be the norm.
How many of us “modenistas” will be able to make the transition. Not many I fear.