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Posted on July 10, 2023 | 39 Comments
I’ll be in discussion with Vandana Shiva about ‘The War on Farming’ at an event in London next Tuesday. Come along if you can. Should be an interesting conversation. There’s certainly plenty to talk about, because it does seem to me there’s quite a concerted media effort underway to point the finger at farmers and farming as the culprits for climate change and biodiversity loss.
I’ll write something about the biodiversity side of it another time. Regarding climate, the issue of ruminant methane emissions sucks the air out of more important questions, such as transitioning to low-energy agrarian localism. When people say that stopping farming animals is the “number two or equal number one” priority to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, I think we can probably call it climate science denial. There’s a lot of it around right now.
Much less prominent in the current news chatter are the shocking recent climate change events and indicators (and, for that matter, humanity’s shocking inability not to keep using more fossil fuels year on year). It seems like severe climate effects are kicking in earlier and at lower levels of warming than have generally been expected.
If governments were equal to present challenges they’d declare a proper climate emergency and start taking radical and immediate action to bring down atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. Part of that would doubtless include cutting farmed ruminants in some places. It would have to be done carefully, with a close eye on the local and wider consequences, because these could easily lead to minimal or even negative climate results. The level of understanding around ruminant methane generally shown in public debate doesn’t augur well.
But cutting farmed ruminants is a small piece of the jigsaw. Without also and much more importantly paring fossil fuel use only to what’s critical in the short-term to keep people fed and healthy, it’s a pointless distraction (especially because – why does this still need pointing out? – if you do the latter you inevitably achieve the former, but it doesn’t work the other way around). Done properly, that process of paring would probably mean no more commercial air travel, no more private road travel and a host of other radical changes to consumerist business as usual.
What I’m talking about is the need to build a climate emergency commons. We’re very far from doing that at the moment. The essence of building such a commons is the avoidance of free riding across sectors. If you genuinely want to build it, you don’t point your finger at ruminant farmers while dismissing protestations about flying and other kinds of frivolous emissions as straw manning or whataboutery. At best, that’s politically naïve, but really I think it showcases the complacency and buck-passing of the current climate mitigation narratives that get mainstream exposure. Farmers are just an easy target. The ruminant climate narrative basically gives the appearance of trying to do something, while achieving nothing of importance, and not upsetting anyone of importance. This is an all people, all sectors, all at the same time thing, or it’s nothing.
Given the inability to create a climate emergency commons even this late in the day, I fear we’ve missed the boat and Mother Nature will be prompting a lot of social reorganisation on her own account, in ways that won’t suit many of us. But maybe I’m wrong. If I am, then I’d suggest the work that Gregory Landua is doing is well worth following up. I had an interesting conversation with him on his Regen Network podcast (you can now track the podcasts I’ve done as from now on my new Research and Publications page (I’m still building the historical archive).
I’ve come to think that, unfortunately, small farm societies emerging contingently in some of the margins of a collapsing urban-industrial world system and shining a light to the future is about as good a prospect as we can realistically now hope for. My sense is that Gregory is both less optimistic than me about the prospects for that kind of emergence, but more optimistic than me about the prospects for retooling existing value systems to prevent that rather desperate situation from arising. I hope he’s right. And if he’s wrong, then my next best option is to hope I’m right. Anyway, I very much enjoyed speaking with him. I think we had just the right amount of shared and divergent assumptions to prompt a stimulating conversation.
In other news, for the first time in my life I’ll be voting in a by-election next week – proof perhaps that political shamelessness in the Conservative Party hasn’t quite reached rock bottom, only the sludgy layer just above. A lot of people I know are talking about voting Lib Dem to keep the Tories out. Hmmm, I tried that once – didn’t work. These days I just vote for the party that aligns most closely with what I’d like to see. Which is the Greens, and definitely not Labour.
Time was, I bought into the ‘anything but the Tories’ narrative too and I disliked the ‘they’re all as bad as each other’ one. Well, I wouldn’t say they’re all as bad as each other, but it feels like we’re moving fast into a new epoch when central governments are simply stumbling around like headless giants in their death throes, issuing erratic and pointless directives that risk flattening the little people in their path – ‘Ban cows!’, ‘Plant trees!’, ‘Green growth!’, ‘Go nuclear!’, ‘Stop the boats!’ – while the real stories are unfolding elsewhere. Voting no longer feels very meaningful to me. But then nor does not voting.
Anyway, what with these trips to London, farm work, by-elections and the existential angst I described above, I’m not finding much time to blog about my new book just now. But I hope to correct that soon.
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I will see about Tuesday; I now have a medical appointment of the “boring but hard to reschedule” variety which may interfere with getting there.
Just a technical note: I got to this post through the RSS feed, but it isn’t showing up as a post when I follow the “blog” link from the menu on your site. That could be something weird at my end (Chrome on Android again, and I haven’t tried from a proper computer) but I thought I’d let you know.
Meanwhile, I have been thinking a lot about the effects of our current way of life on community cohesion and identity. At my fairly urban church people are enthusiastic about me growing vegetables, but I don’t get a lot of help because the only people with time are leading sufficiently chaotic lives that it doesn’t work very well, and the churchyard is tiny (the big old Victorian barn of a church had terminal subsidence and was knocked down, and a new church built there with the proceeds of selling off most of the land for housing). While annuals are more productive in terms of calories, I am doing a lot of thinking around lower-maintenance perennials, just to keep the workload sustainable. But conversely, many of the semi-rural and suburban churches I know about that do have lots of land surrounding the church, and communities where people have a bit more stability and spare time, don’t usually grow food in the churchyard for other reasons: basically the communities don’t see something like growing vegetables as consistent with their identity and find the idea of some kind of self-provisioning pretty horrifying; honestly, even seeing a churchyard as valuable wildlife habitat is far from guaranteed. (The risk of theft is probably the reason that most people would actually give, and I can relate to that, but while theft is discouraging, when it happens I tend to see it as just another facet of feeding the wider community. And I should add that it usually isn’t whole communities who feel this way, but it only takes one or two naysayers to mean a project doesn’t get off the ground and the churchyard remains a monoculture lawn. Sigh.) And so the places (and realistically, communities exist in physical places) that are already experiencing food poverty often lack the resources for self-provisioning — I’ve written before that the Soup Garden contributions to our soup kitchen are at least partly symbolic — but the places that do have the resources to at least start moving to more resilient local provisioning simply don’t want to.
This might seem tangential, but I do think it is a symptom of the same cultural snobbery that makes farmers an easy scapegoat for climate emissions. The solution isn’t forcing anyone to dig up their lawn against their will (or keeping a tiny herd of sheep or flock of chickens, for that matter), but rather making a deeper cultural shift away from the consumerist individualism we live in now toward something more resilient, rooted both in the reality of the resources we have available and in our responsibilities to one another and all creation. If I could flip a switch and do that I would, but my capabilities are more like sowing seeds.
Further technical note: I can see it now. Not sure what changed.
Good for you Kathryn.
From what I see here in my community, planting fruit trees is a much easier sell than annual vegetable gardens. They just look like landscape trees, but with fruit.
There are a few churches that have agreed to plant fruit trees on their property. Public schools too. The city has also begun planting fruit trees alongside certain bus stops.
This after 15 years of advocacy by some of my friends.
Good luck.
I find people are unlikely to maintain fruit trees well (or even understand that they do require maintenance), and that there are often concerns about the way windfall fruit can attract wasps and rats. Nevertheless, there are enough fruit trees in parks and along residential streets in London that I don’t usually buy apples or plums, and I do enjoy mulberries, pears, and occasionally cherries (though generally the pigeons get there first).
I incorporate fruit trees into gardens anyway, because on the sort of timescale I am expecting serious disruption, they might well be useful to someone before their lifespan is over, even if they undergo periods of neglect.
The churchyard does already have an apple and a cherry, though they are really too close together to be good for either. I have some apricots (grown from their stones) to train along a wall at some point, too; apricots are usually self-fertile, so I’m taking a chance on them and hoping they do fruit, and will be summer pruning them quite hard early on to keep them small.
Hi Chris, I tried buying a ticket through unherd but the links gone, perhaps its sold out.
Yes, I think VS is a great person to speak with, many of the others (Nate Hagens etc al), don’t seem cognisant of the political realities around the cultural and economic understanding we work within.
This relates to Kathryn’s view of a shift in values from consumerism but I think there is an economic basis to the intransigence, seemingly immovable object of ‘public opinion’. It is cemented in waged labour and I think we need an equivalent of the underground railway ti get people out. To do that we have to create the ‘free north’, a place they can come to.
On our own path to land, we have met fellow travellers, one of which is a local French brewer. This former city banker is trying to work out a way to make ecological land entrusting an investment opportunity – surely Nate and all his big city mates can get on to this?
I just watched a video of iron age Orkney and it struck me in a animal free future what are we going to wear without plastics , clogs for shoes maybe linen for clothes but hope the winter is not cold as linen is lousy at keeping you warm , cotton won’t grow in England and with rewilding there will be no where to grow linen , no leather for shoes no rubber for wellies , no wool for warmth . cold wet and miserable with poorer clothes than the iron age .
Keep stiring the pond Chris maybe someone might listen .
I think they call it the celtic circle or crescent. I saw a ‘time team’ on iron age settlements along the Irish coast and they were whipping up and down along that coast line from Spain and beyond, way up to the orkneys on catamaran style dug outs, trading jewellery, leather goods, the lot! We never needed plastic my friend.
No sheep no wool , no cattle no leather , Iorn age man will have the edge over us where clothing is concerned .
Ps I got tickets for Tuesday!
I got one too — hope to see you there.
(I’ll be the one in the respirator mask…)
“I’ve come to think that, unfortunately, small farm societies emerging contingently in some of the margins of a collapsing urban-industrial world system and shining a light to the future is about as good a prospect as we can realistically now hope for.”
Several deeply intertwined topics come to mind having read this passage.
The first topic is the matter of voluntary versus involuntary energy descent. My view, of course, is that a significant amount of energy descent is inevitable, as fossil fuels comprise about 84% of the world’s use of technologically produced energy, and fossil fuels are clearly in permanent decline. But we can’t do anything about involuntary energy descent, other than to figure it into any informed plans we may make for the future. Whereas voluntary energy descent is something we can — theoretically or hypothetically — embrace in an effort to try and avert very worst climate and ecology scenarios.
Anyone reading the comments here in Resilience over a period of years will know that a great many among the commentators here severely doubt that humanity will or can choose voluntary energy descent, as that would be tantamount to voluntary or deliberate economic contraction, and we know how popular deliberate economic contraction is! (Or do we?)
The next major topic is that of the inevitability of the shrinking down (globally) of what I call “the luxury economy” which I think is unavoidable with energy descent, be it voluntary or involuntary. Energy descent — voluntary, involuntary or hybrid — will shrink the portion of any economy which is luxury-oriented. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/ This results in fewer jobs being available, and thus unemployment … and will likely lead to mass homelessness, hunger and social chaos (social collapse) if people do not have access to livelihood in a very low energy economy, such as “small farm societies” which ought to emerge in the cracks with unfolding economic collapse.
I’m going to put it very plain. The world’s luxury-based economy is presently on its last legs, and will be progressively failing as each decade passes, and probably far more swiftly than that — as in the time to prepare for its collapse has utterly and fully arrived. This is so whether our energy descent is voluntary or involuntary. (See the Wikipedia article on energy descent, which, for the most part, I wrote myself in a heavy edit years ago.)
The luxury-based, luxury-dependent current economy is about to fall apart, leaving vast numbers destitute and without access to livelihood, whether or not humanity embraces a voluntary (proactive) energy descent or heedlessly has nature herself impose energy descent. Many millions will simply require access to livelihood which at least roughly consists mainly of self-provisioning (within communities, as community self-provisioning) of basic needs like food and shelter.
But this shift is likely to be much, much more abrupt than we’re prepared for, or even can prepare for. So this is the time of preparation — of, ideally, building as close to a viable bridge to the future low energy economy as can be built ahead of its dire necessity. It will be abrupt for a combination (hybrid) of reasons having to do with some voluntary energy descent combined with involuntary energy descent. But its crucial that we understand that energy descent and economic descent are deeply intertwined. You can’t have energy descent without economic descent, despite the nonsense pronouncements of the techno-optimists and ecomodernists.
So what is my point?
Though no one — almost no one (I’m nearly a lone voice in the wilderness here) — is talking about it, yet, we have a difficult collective crossing to make. We need a bridge, as soon as it can possibly be constructed, to a world in which the soon-to-be-displaced will have access to basic livelihood. And this means moving a lot of urban people out of cities and having them labor at preparing the depleted soil of industrial farmland for post-industrial local agrarianism.
If we do not build this bridge before collapse reaches a crescendo, there will be far more violence and social chaos in the future than any of us would find tolerable.
You’d think it would be possible for such a conversation to emerge in our world, but it’s just not. Not yet.
“I’ve come to think that, unfortunately, small farm societies emerging contingently in some of the margins of a collapsing urban-industrial world system and shining a light to the future is about as good a prospect as we can realistically now hope for.”
I’m saying that this which seems most realistic is far, far from adequate, and is extremely dangerous. We can’t just hope that everything just “naturally” works out this way. It won’t. It can’t. I’m saying we need to be proactive and deliberate about making a demographic shift from hyper-urbanism to a lot more rural villages, or we’re doomed to social collapse of the worst imaginable kind.
I said “here in Resilience” in that response… and forgot to alter that wording when I copied it for pasting over here. Sorry for any confusion.
“…no more commercial air travel, no more private road travel…”
For the record, I am in complete agreement with this.
But sitting in the middle of North America, I can think of no more stark statement that we will not bring our energy consumption down voluntarily.
The US is famous for loving guns.
According to Gallup, 44% of US households own guns.
Forbes says the corresponding number for private automobiles is 91.7%.
Both are fetish items. I won’t speak of the consequences of fetishizing guns, but it’s clear what our car fetish has made of us and our landscape.
The US public will not give up their cars voluntarily. And if any government agency makes a serious attempt to un-car the public, I predict open violent revolt.
Thanks for the comments. Briefly:
1. Kathryn’s point about the effect of naysayers rings true – one reason why forming commons is so difficult. No doubt resistance evaporates when people’s hands are forced and there’s a clear need to build local food infrastructure. But in the present global moment, by then it might be a bit too late.
2. A lot to be said for fruit trees as, er, the low-hanging fruit for community food projects. But even that’s not straightforward. The, er, fruitlessness of trying to get our local authority to plant fruit trees in our road was for me an early lesson in the likely difficulties around the politics of transition.
3. I agree with Kathryn about cultural snobbery concerning farmers and landworkers. But I also think it’s a failure to own the issue as a matter of deep shared culture. Finger-pointing rather than collective cultural critique, so the problem becomes those [farmers], [fossil fuel companies], [politicians], [Chinese], [insert of choice] – anything other than a deep trend of modernist culture that requires everybody’s might and main to transcend.
4. Agree with Diogenese about the value of animals for their fibre and fabric. A neglected issue!
5. And I also agree with Eric’s comment. I’m full of agreement today! But it raises a difficulty I have that also manifests in appraising George Monbiot’s position. On the one hand, a lot of us agree (George and I included) that we’re facing system shocks so monumental as to prompt a mass extinction event that may well take humanity down with it. On the other hand, some of us are saying ‘whoa, but it’s unrealistic to think folks will just eat beans/give up driving/shift to agrarian localism etc.’ So does that mean that our cultural patterns are so hard wired that we’ll opt for extinction over cultural change? Or that we’re that misled ideologically? Or some other thing? And what are the implications for the Monbiot-style argument that to avoid catastrophe the best approach is to tweak the existing capitalist value system with complex techno-fixes so that people don’t really notice the apocalypse-avoidance work going on behind the scenes?
6. Much I agree with in James’s comment. I’m not sure how much you’re articulating it as a criticism of what I wrote, James, but I don’t suppose that matters. I’m not arguing that small farm futures will ‘naturally’ emerge out of civilizational breakdown such that we can sit back, relax, and wait for happier times. I’m just saying, a propos of points 3 and 5 above, that that’s about the best outcome I can see ‘actually’ emerging. I agree with you about the need to build the bridge, but how to do that when it’s not a conversation mainstream society is having at all? My farm work and my writing has been my own feeble attempt to do a bit of that building work. Governments could obviously do much more in theory, but I think they’re congenitally incapable of doing so in practice. So I’ve baulked at questions of what I think the government should do and emphasized local community-building and resilience-building. Maybe I should stick my neck out further than I did in my two Groundswell talks, although it felt protuberant enough at the time. I don’t think anyone inside the political tent would take me seriously anyway, so perhaps I should sing it loud and proud – ruralise now, slash energy now, build local agroecosystems now etc. But if anyone has any suggestions for more efficacious acts of bridge-building they think I should be doing, my comment box is always open.
Interesting that while we are having this conversation the EU just voted to take 20% of Europe’s farm land out of production .
Well it would, wouldn’t it. See WEF policy.
The WEF controls the EU pretty thoroughly. Well documented during the ‘COVID period’.
The WEF apparently wants people to live in smart cities where they eat synthetic meat, processed plant pap/PPP and produce from ‘vertical farms’.
For examples of PPP, visit any supermarket.
None of my response to this post was intended as a criticism of your article, Chris. But I did have a criticism in the back of my mind, acting strongly on what I did say. I’m an increasingly severe critic of what gets passed off as “politics” in our world today, whether it be there in the UK, here in the States, in Canada, Australia… or any of the other countries which utilized one and the same paradigm of politics within mainstream politics.
My criticism of “politics” is that it’s almost ubiquitously presumed that all which can legitimately be called by this name has to have its focus on deciding or influencing the operations of “the state” (in the polity sense). The result is that nearly everyone is engaging in a mode of politics which dis-empowers ordinary people — and especially ordinary people who are not multi-millionaires, billionaires, or CEOs of major corporations. But, to be honest, I can’t fully make my political views known accurately without writing at great length about how and why I came to think the way I now do about politics. I can be so easily dismissed as a mere anarchist. But my politics really isn’t so mere or so simple as that. I simply believe we the people ought to take our politics into our own hands, whether this be within the state apparatus or outside of it.
But we’re not doing this. Not by a long shot. And so what is NECESSARY (even direly necessary) is regarded by most everyone as being “simply impossible; too big an ‘ask’.
In my view, the most crucially necessary conversation we all need to be having about politics is the question of WHY and HOW politics is, and became, so broken that we can’t address any rather obvious applications of reason or rationality in it. Why can’t we repair what is so obviously broken in our politics? Why are our political imaginations shaped by “the political class” — which, so far as I can tell, is an assortment of folks without good faith, sincerity, accurate understanding of the world, etc.
I’ve been pushing rope for so long, though, that I’m as weary of it as you must be, and as any intelligent people must be. How much time do I want to devote to explaining an emergent alternative framing for politics, even though I understand it so much better than I did a decade or two ago. That’s a lot of work. Will it turn out to be an exercise in rope pushing? I don’t know. I can’t know. But I can know I’m weary and afraid of spending yet more of my precious time and energy pushing rope.
To me, that our world’s political systems are fundamentally broken, and broken quite purposely and deliberately, is rather obvious. But what’s less obvious to most is that this makes us all — forces us all — to be complicit in omnicide. To me…, as I said…, this is obvious. And it’s only when it becomes obvious that we are ready for a new paradigm of politics. That comes when grief nearly swallows up the soul, as it has done with me for the last decade.
Indeed, I think I’ve concluded that only those who have met and lived within such grief are really ready to get to work on the political shift our times call for.
Chris, if you say to me, “Yes, James. Write that work. Tell your story! Explain what you need do explain… even though it may be an exercise in rope pushing,” I’m apt to accept the invitation. But it cannot be done without spending a LOT of time crafting the message. And, really, I know what we really need most is not such a statement from a nerd like me, but a dialogue and conversation from many nerds like us.
We have a blank tree space at the end of our road, and I’m extremely tempted to go ahead and stick a fruit tree in it if it’s still empty this winter.
I couldn’t possibly comment on where else I might be considering planting trees. Permission is overrated. Of course, many of them won’t make it due to drought, because another thing that’s overrated is carrying a watering can around to a wide distribution of untended bits of land in order to water young saplings. Selection for drought tolerance is also not a disaster, and it’s not as if I spend any money on this anyway. (I would direct sow if I thought it weren’t just a tiresome way to feed rats and squirrels. I’ve considered grafting onto some of the ornamental prunus species among the street trees, but it takes a rather more organisation.)
I’m pretty sure this is not the kind of re-wilding that Monbiot and the eco-modernists have in mind.
Meanwhile: one tactic I sometimes find useful with naysayers is “OK, will you let me try doing X for a year or two?” — propose it as an experiment, generally a small one with a limited timespan. This has the advantage of getting me to think a bit about my own goals (am I prioritising yield? skill building? enjoyment?) and potential pitfalls. The Soup Garden started with three beds, but very quickly became “normal” to those members of the community who don’t even really think about the churchyard. That said, this, like so many other approaches, is a slow method of actually getting things done.
I think at this point it is inevitable that there will be a certain amount of political and societal upheaval. I do hope that we get to some kind of congenial small farm future, but given the choice I wouldn’t start from here.
That said, most people do survive most major disasters; most people do adapt to huge lifestyle changes (though media has an outsized role to play in which lifestyle changes are favoured). Humans are pretty much everywhere, not that easy to kill, and are capable of eating a wide range of plants and animals. I am certainly pessimistic about how bad things could get, but also optimistic that humanity will probably muddle through rather than going extinct.
This is not meant to downplay or disregard the enormous amounts of suffering and death that already happen due to climate destabilisation, or that will happen in the future. We are in deep ecological trouble. Every untimely death is a disaster, and every oppression is an atrocity, and the way these tend to go hand in hand with resource scarcity and political upheaval is frightening, or should be. It’s also not meant to suggest that the extinctions that are happening don’t matter; they do.
But my observation that there have been many disasters in the world, many times before in the history, and that we have continued to exist anyway is still somewhat comforting, because it means I don’t feel l must solve the entire tangle of problems at once. I can’t do that, and neither can anyone else on their own. At this stage, even working together is not looking great for staving off disaster on a worldwide scale. Instead, I can think about whether having a fruit tree at the end of the road (in addition to the various fruit trees in the rented back garden and at the allotments and in the churchyard) would put my household (if we are still here) or this neighborhood (if we are not) in a slightly better position in the event of a serious food shortage or economic collapse. It would be a pretty small advantage, to be sure, but on the other hand the opportunity cost is very low: there isn’t another tree there now, and there isn’t really anything else we could do with that space which would be better. Additionally, and importantly, planting a fruit tree there won’t be hurting anyone else or harming the ecosystem. There are a thousand small things like this that will help, from getting to know neighbours to actually weighing my produce this year in the interests of finding out how accurate my sense of abundance actually is. (We have a French bean glut at the moment, and many many potatoes. It’s pretty great. But the thing that really makes me smile for the coming winter is looking at the squashes that have set fruit.)
Maybe using my agency locally in this way is more symbolic than practical, more a coping mechanism than a real solution — but it seems to me that it may be the most adaptive and resilient path available to me short of moving to the countryside (still not trivial by any stretch), and if everyone in every locality were to do similar then we would increase our capacity to preserve many lives and much that is of value otherwise. Probably not everyone will — if it were easy to make that happen we would be facing a very different set of problems — but this isn’t an all-or-nothing deal.
Oh dear — I appear to have posted twice. The earlier comment is the duff one.
I deleted it. Hope okay now?
Yes, thank you!
Hope to see you tomorrow. Still might end up not able to attend due to timing but I’ll do my best.
Your book is now on sale here in the U.S., I ordered mine yesterday. Chelsea Green was offering a discount on book orders, I hope it did not trim your share.
Red pen is poise and ready……. 🙂
Took the train last month to California to visit our son. Clattering away across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska though the heart of the corn belt, it was apparent that this will be the last of the industrial farmland to make the transition, maybe for many years. Flat, fertile plains that would take enormous investment in housing, other infrastructure to create local small scale foodsheds , it is currently pretty productive and efficient in a fossil fuel subsidized way.
However, on many other stretches of the journey, we saw patches and clusters of more heterogeneous and small scale farming going on. While they are nearly as dependent on fossil fuels as the big tracts right now, the step to a low energy future is more plausible and less daunting in those areas.
I call them potential lifeboat communities.
The transition will be like eating an elephant- one bite at time, To try to change the whole system at once is too daunting. Low input, agile and nature cooperative farming will be a bit of a subversive and decentralized thing for a while, but where I live, there are more and more young folks leaving the old narrative and getting on the land, learning on the fly.
That said, your work is still absolutely important, as so many more see the dim prospects, and just need to be exposed to a clearly stated alternative to make the leap.
Access to land will be the linchpin for expanding the new paradigm.
I listened to the pod cast with Gregory, a master class in your inimitable understatement and good humoured patience. It struck me that the very thing Gregory et Al are trying to do – the encoding of ecologically ethical values into individuals, communities and regions – is achieved through those individuals, communities and regions growing their food, making their clothes, making their furniture and houses.
The need for a global super computer working out all our relations brings up this question, is the Internet a physical manifestation in Gregory (and Daniel’s) mind of what in indigenous culture is ‘the all that is’? ‘The commonwealth of breath’ as David Abrams calls it?
I think this bridge will be built through word of mouth and demonstrable actions, and will talk to anyone who stands next to be long enough about a small farm future. It is a running joke in my family! It is the only thing worth discussing and most people see the wisdom in it. You dont need complex algorithms to explain or agree with what is palpably evident. Give people the chance and I think at least 50% would take their chances on the land.
Thanks for further comments.
Diogenese, can you link to the EU vote? Welcome Neil. Happy to host discussion about collusion in high places, but a polite request not to overdo implications of cabals or italicisations of Covid.
Appreciate Steve’s travelogue from a journey I now won’t be making. I’m interested in hearing more views on the future of the global breadbaskets like central N America. Climate & water dynamics? Energy inputs? Trading realities? Food aid as weapon?
Thanks for your thoughts Joel – insightful IMO, and not only the first sentence! Indeed, is a second order reality of valuing value necessary? I’m not sure … more opinions?
John, I appreciate where you’re coming from, but making life easy is only one among several human values, and IMO gets excessive ideological reinforcement. At the limit, suppose you could experience any food or pleasure at the touch of a button from the couch, summiting Everest, shooting a moose or whatever. It makes life easier, but who would want it? Agree with you of couse that transitioning to a small farm future from where we’re at is extraordinarily daunting.
And three cheers for rewilding, Kathryn style. As to surviving the future, end-Permian scale temperature rises aren’t too encouraging. But on the bright side at least we’re not facing years of leaf-stripping acid rain.
I guess that I look at all the little things that make life easier and they all add up to quite a lot of saved effort.
Turning on a tap to get drinking water. Turning on a tap to get hot water.
The whole process of processing fire wood becomes a whole different story without an electric chainsaw, van/trailer, etc. It turns a fun activity into a real chore.
It’s the added time that all these little activities take up if fossil fuels are removed, that will be the real challenge.
I love to get off the “hampster wheel” and go camping. The simplicity of just cooking, washing up etc are really grounding. But then non of it is really real. It’s just playing at “the good life”.
It’s when there is no other alternative, that’s when things will get really challenging and all those “easy life hacks” are no longer on offer.
Small Farm Futures are a hard sell to us modenistas.
I found after retirement one real thing , I had TIME , I cut firewood at weekend , now it takes a week or so and I pick the weather I work in ,no rush , same with the garden , not trying to fit it around working time , cattle are the same I have time to lean on a gate and watch them keeping an eye out for trouble instead of by the time I notice it I had to call the vet , when it all grinds to a halt having time will be the greatest boon !
My worry is that when it all grinds to a halt, getting the basics will take a lot of time and more importantly (human) energy.
Oh an cutting firewood with a cross cut ain’t as hard as you would think as long as its sharp ( felling with a axe is a different matter ! )
On the firewood front.
I’ve realised that my fire wood processing (which I enjoy) is made possible by fossil fuels.
It’s not so much the cutting/splitting (though a chainsaw does speed up the whole process), it’s that I don’t have access to wood within walking distance of my home, so the van is essentially to get my “scavingings” back home.
That’s why I’ve gone down the rocket stove rabbit hole. If rocket stoves can produce the same heat outputs with 1/10th the wood, then my effort/calories needed to heat my home will be significantly reduced.
Getting close to perfecting my design. Hope to test the latest tweeks in the next couple of weeks (if I can find the time!!!)
One thing that makes me interested in growing more of my own food and trying to figure out ways to source e.g. water locally is that the large, centralised systems that make life “easy” are much more vulnerable to disruption than distributed systems that might be harder work.
A petrol strike or even a bad car crash can stop a driver from gettign where they need to go; on a bicycle, sure, I have to work harder to get there, and sure, I won’t get anywhere as fast… but I’m not limited by fuels shortages and I don’t need a wide road clear of obstacles. (Stairs are admittedly not great, but cars can’t go up stairs either.)
Electricity is incredibly convenient, which is why I do make sure I have at least some sources of it that aren’t tied to the grid. In a blackout, my spouse can still work from home for a day or so. Similarly, we have enough clean drinking water stored to get us through a few days of the taps drying up; if I didn’t also have water treatment tablets and some emergency filters and, longer-term, water collection and storage facilities and the knowledge of how to filter water to a level fit for human consumption (…and, honestly, probably enough stuff lying around to cobble something like that together), I would feel very much more uneasy about turning on the taps.
I can’t make my own steel pots and pans, but I don’t expect to have to replace the ones I have in my lifetime, even if I end up using them to cook over a wood fire. I don’t have great woodworking skills, but my next door neighbours does traditional carpentry with no power tools while making and repairing musical instruments, and would surely use those skills toward a joint project of getting the neighbourhood fed.
Food prices have risen since I took on my first allotment in December 2019. Our grocery bill has fallen. (Have I spent some of that money on gardening tools and infrastructure? Yes. Do I have to keep spending it? no, and there’s a lot that I could honestly have done without; but while certain things are readily available, and my spouse is working full time, it is worth paying for ease in some cases.)
The precarity of the current system makes “hard” things like learning to keep a blade sharp or figuring out the best way to grow potatoes in your area or learning to forage for wild foods a lot more attractive, at least to me. I’d rather work harder and have some resilience.
Kathryn
I too am looking into water storage/provision.
Going to get a IBC tank. (One of those white plastic cubes in a metal cage) for the garden. Holds 1000 litres. Fill it with rain water.
Then try and filter the water through biochar and then an MSR filter. Will get the kids to drink it first to see if it is safe .
Slowly getting together the equipment I think I need to become a bit more self reliant/resilient for when systems start to fail. I actually enjoy the process of “prepping”! Figuring out the chain reactions of a particular system fail.
But the point I was making earlier is that, of all the people I know, non would swap modernity for a SFF through choice. (And they don’t realise yet, that there isn’t a choice)
That’s why Monbiot’s position will probably gain more traction than Chris’. Monbiot’s appears on the surface to be less “disruptive”.
But………as the saying goes.
Fail to prepare and prepare to fail.
I am looking into some IBC tanks for the allotment, as the (now discontinued) 350L water butts I have keep splitting. I keep repairing them, but it’s definitely not ideal.
The challenge, of course, is in transporting IBC tanks without using a vehicle. Some places that have second hand ones do seem to be able to deliver for an extra charge, so we’ll probably have to shell out for that.
Water storage is one of those things that I think could get a lot more difficult or expensive in a post-fossil fuel world, we rely so much on plastics for it now, and once plastic starts leaking it’s very hard to repair without using more plastics. Two of the things on my “learn to do this someday” list are digging (and maintaining) a natural pond, and building barrels out of wood. I think the skills of the cooper are probably more difficult to learn than the pond building, but on the other hand, barrels can also be used for storing wine.
Regarding filtration, I would strongly advise some kind of pre-filter before your biochar filter.
And yes — it’s hard for me to say which of the people I know, even those I’m quite close to, would truly swap modernity for what I think a SFF might be like. The lack of certainty over timing (until such point as it’s too late) does make this a much harder sell, too.
But even the small things I’m doing contribute to greater resilience, and if I learn a bunch of skills and grow a bunch of very local food and make more of my own clothing, and then by some dubious miracle modernity continues in some fashion, I won’t have lost a lot.
Meanwhile, if the temperature rises far enough, or if I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time for a flood or fire, no amount of preparation will help. So it makes sense, to me, to make use of those parts of modernity that are relatively benign (and it is all relative, because we don’t currently live in a distributed, resilient, sustainable system — everything is harmful to some degree) while they do still exist — hence IBC tanks, meltblown respirator masks, solar panels, and a bicycle.
@Kathryn.
Yes. I probably need to look into water purification in a bit more detail.
Kinda figured that I’d get the IBC first and worry about filtration later.
I don’t know where you are but IBCs are about £40 (second hand) around here and £25 delivery (Somerset)
Was thinking of cladding mine in pallet wood to protect it from UV (plus to make it a little more aesthetically pleasing.)
Also just built a solar dehydrater. Thinking about food storage without electricity. Done a bit of fermentation (where to get salt in a SFF???). Thought I’d give dehydration a try
@John
Let me know how you get on with the solar dehydrator — something similar is certainly on my project list. The sort of fermentation I’ve been doing requires yeast rather than salt, but one can only drink so much fruit wine. I would think we could get salt from seawater; how easy that is where you are depends on just how close you are to the sea, and on what is being dumped into it locally, but trade in salt was totally a thing for pretty much all of human history. (That said, salt is another thing I keep in stock in fair amounts — it doesn’t make a noise, need feeding, or take up very much space.)
IBC tank delivery locally to me in East London would be at least £50 and I haven’t seen any second-hand for less than that. Still worthwhile, but not something that’s going to happen before autumn now.
Cladding it in pallet wood sounds all right if you’ve got enough of that lying around, but I’d be inclined to make some kind of cloth cover (maybe out of weedblock fabric or similar) — easier to remove to inspect the tank and mess around with taps and so on. Definitely worth protecting the IBC itself from UV light and the contents from sunlight, algae growth in your water supply is kindof yuck.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/12/eu-passes-nature-restoration-law-vote-meps
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/climate/europe-nature-restoration-law.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/europe/eu-nature-restoration-law-climate-intl/index.html
There try those .
Liege is certainly not the only region firefighting the future in regard to food – the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire is developing with similar ethics – but there is some real inspiration here nevertheless. Worth a read.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jul/16/the-good-life-in-liege-the-start-of-a-food-revolution
Thanks for the comments, links etc.
I’m short on time to respond, but James I hear your pain and your political dilemmas – I hope you’ll keep contributing here, and I hope that the conversation here will help unfold a part of these political questions.
More on firewood here soon…
Looking back, a very good retrospective on the Monbiot-Savory debate from a friend of this website, Gunnar Rundgren here: https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/two-arrogant-men
Looking forward, I’m hoping my discussion with Vandana Shiva and Flo Read tomorrow will be illuminating. Sounds like I might even have the rare pleasure of meeting some contributors here in the flesh! Meanwhile, the American Council for Science and Health is gunning for Vandana’s appearance at the event.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/07/13/activist-vandana-shiva-mortal-threat-most-vulnerable-17186
Probably suggests she’s doing something right. Corporate Malthusianism & the #MillionsWillStarve narrative amping up.
Their rebuttals of Vandana Shiva’s positions seem pretty disingenuous, which is a shame. I’d give more weight to their complaints if they said “ah, yes, actually the Green Revolution bought us some time but at huge ecological cost” or something.
(That said, I’m very much not an anti-vaxxer; I just wish we were actually taking any other anti-COVID measures, particularly ventilation and filtration, seriously on a societal level. Our inability to do so despite the other benefits of these measures seems to me to be more evidence of a serious breakdown in governance.)
I haven’t checked on how Cuba is doing recently.