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Posted on September 23, 2023 | 126 Comments
It’s been nearly three months since Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future was published, with its critique of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis and its alternative arguments for agrarian localism. The responses that have come my way so far have run the gamut from ‘brilliant’ to ‘nauseatingly silly’, while happily erring more towards the former.
Meanwhile, as I feared, proponents of the bacterial foods advocated by Monbiot have been busy trying to mobilise public investment in it (see, for example, here and here). This is a surefire way of veiling the basic energetic implausibility of the approach for as long as possible. It’s not that private corporations behave with greater financial probity. Nor is there anything especially unusual about joint private-public finance (though try telling that to an online critic of mine who took my arguments about the perils of the government-to-corporate investment pipeline in the food system as some kind of Marxist paranoia on my part). It is, after all, the business of governments to invest in what they consider beneficial for their citizenries. I just wish they more often exercised better judgment about what’s beneficial, rather than swallowing the messaging of corporations and their breathless media boosters.
Anyway, turning back to my book, I’ve not yet had any pushback of substance on its key arguments about food energetics, urbanism, agrarian ecologies, mixed farming and modernist culture. I know of one largely negative review by Jeremy Williams (remarks on it from the Small Farm Future commentariat can be found here, here and here). I’ll pick up on a few of Jeremy’s criticisms in the second part of this two-part post. Suffice for now to reiterate that I don’t think I’ve yet had any pushbacks of substance in relation to the key arguments in Saying NO.
To my mind, the most telling criticism so far has been a case of friendly fire from a correspondent who wrote (paraphrasing) ‘the main problem with your book is that you treat Monbiot’s as if it’s somehow coherent. Regenesis gave me whiplash multiple times as it jumped from stories to numbers without addressing the necessary social implications’.
I find these remarks helpful in appreciating why Monbiot’s book has been so discombobulating to many of us in the food sovereignty and agroecology fold (it sounds like he’s pro agroecology and food sovereignty … but then it sounds like he isn’t … and indeed he doesn’t spell out the social implications of the various positions he takes, which seem antithetical to it). Likewise, I find the remarks helpful in reckoning with the main criticism my book (or at least its title) has faced – namely, that nobody, including Monbiot, is advocating for a farm-free future.
On the contrary, I believe that despite surface evidence to the contrary, that is basically what he’s advocating, in keeping with core ecomodernist tenets. In this two-part post, I’ll try to explain how this works – and why it matters. To do so, we need to talk about myth.
In everyday language, when we say that something’s ‘a myth’ we mean that it’s untrue. But when we focus upon the foundational myths of a culture or civilization – its own deep narratives about itself – often we rightly consider them to be true in a higher sense. Whether somebody called Prometheus really stole fire from the gods, gave it to humanity and was punished for his trouble matters less than the higher truths encoded in the story about such things as the human relationship to nature.
But higher truths can be elliptical and ambiguous. This is a signature of religious texts. At its best, we might say there’s an openness, complexity, and ambiguity in these texts which reflect the openness, complexity and ambiguity of the real world. At its worst, the ambiguity is such that the text or the myth can mean more or less whatever anyone wants it to mean, which scarcely helps to clarify choices and values.
I think a good deal of Monbiot’s Regenesis takes the form of a contemporary cultural myth (the title is surely a clue). The lack of coherence identified in it by my critic is a reflection of its mythic ambiguities (at best) or (at worst) perhaps just of its author’s eagerness to be all things to all people, or at least to all the people he wishes. So yes, it’s easy to find passages in the book that speak positively about some kinds of farming. It’s also easy to find passages in it that speak negatively about all kinds of farming. You could spend a lot of time highlighting specific parts to claim a particular interpretation – for example like this fellow here, and this one too. Perhaps this is to miss the essential ambiguity of the Regenesis myth that allows it to be whatever you want it to be. But I think there’s also a deeper structure to the myth that’s important to notice.
Regenesis takes the form of a hero’s quest. It begins with a protagonist who’s enraptured by the complex micro-life of the soil and nature’s web of righteous connection that it exemplifies. He then outlines in harrowing detail the many ways in which human relationships with nature – particularly in the case of farming – have departed and fallen from this ideal. Devastatingly so when it comes to climate change and species extinction.
Seeking redress for these failings, the protagonist visits various good people who are trying to develop better farming practices to overcome the problems with business-as-usual agriculture. His choices here are somewhat questionable, and – to speak bluntly – heavily slanted towards a handful of white guys in southern England. But that’s an issue I won’t pursue here, perhaps conveniently so given that I count myself among this over-represented minority. Anyway, in relation to the structure of the myth, these men figure as valiant tryers whose efforts are ultimately doomed to failure – with the possible exception of the Land Institute’s research into perennial grains and Iain Tolhurst’s horticultural operation, to which I will return in my follow-up essay. Perhaps agriculture can be reformed a little in some positive ways, the story seems to say, but it remains sunk in sin.
Still, sinful agriculturalists are really just a foil for the revelation that comes in Chapter 7 of Regenesis, entitled ‘Farmfree’. Here, Monbiot makes the case for synthesising food from microbial biomass – a ‘counter-agricultural revolution’ that spells ‘the end of most farming’. In one of his newspaper articles, he wrote “I watched scientists turning water into food”. In Regenesis he describes the process as “a gift to the world, which arrives just as we need it most” (p.209). There’s an almost biblical sense of miracle, salvation and revelation in play.
The next and final major chapter of Monbiot’s book calls for an awakening. Foolish humans, scales over their eyes, have been seduced by dreamy ideals of the agrarian life. Instead, they should ask tough, factual questions about it that would reveal its limitations and point the way towards farmfree microbial redemption.
At the end of the chapter, Monbiot writes,
It is time to create a new, rich, productive and, ideally, organic agriculture, no longer dependent on livestock, growing food that is cheap, healthy and available to everyone. It is time to develop a new and revolutionary cuisine, based on farmfree food …. We can now contemplate the end of most farming, the most destructive force ever to have been unleashed by humans (pp.230-1)
…which offers a certain mythic ambiguity in invoking both a farmed and a farmfree future – though, it seems clear from the quotation, mostly the latter (puzzlingly, Monbiot’s other mentions of organic agriculture in his book are largely negative). Yet it also offers a certain mythic redemption in projecting a future food system where all of humanity is rich, healthy and well-fed, while treading lightly on the Earth.
Indeed, the core mythic concern of Regenesis, rather like its Biblical namesake, is redemption. This is a common theme in myth. The world is imperfect, complex, chaotic and violent. People, likewise, are imperfect, complex, disorderly and sinful. This needs to be set right, and the myth gives a key as to how.
Premodern thought often did so by projecting a resolution between the divine and the worldly via the redeeming power of a godly king or a kingly god. Monbiot effects a typical (eco)modernist update to this narrative of redemption. No more gods and kings – instead, science, technology, rationalism and progress do the redeeming.
This ecomodernist redemption narrative works better as narrative – a story – than as real-world material practice. Monbiot’s book begins with a doomy litany of all the ways humans are presently screwing the world – most of them arising through the recent techno-fixes of previous generations. But then we get the gift of a new technological redemption just when we need it. As detailed in my own book, there are just so many technical and socioeconomic question marks over microbial protein manufacture, but hard questioning of it isn’t on Monbiot’s agenda. Instead, his text transfigures it into the stuff of salvation.
This is the ecomodernist doom flip. In the first part of his book, Monbiot takes us to rock bottom in his accounting of impending climate catastrophe and agricultural ecocide. But then he offers redemption in the form of farm-free food. The doom is not only defrayed, but transformed into something magnificent – “We can envisage the beginning of a new era …. We can resolve the greatest dilemma with which we have ever been confronted, and feed the world without devouring the planet” (p.231).
There’s no need to invoke a new era. We have always been able to feed the world without devouring the planet via existing low-energy forms of agrarian localism. But to do it farm-free through microbial biomass while preserving all the accoutrements of modern, high-energy, urban lifestyles does require something new – a new energy economy, in the form of the near-immediate availability of low-carbon energy at levels of abundance an order of magnitude or more beyond present capabilities.
Monbiot doesn’t explain where this energy economy is going to come from. If it’s imminent, there’s little reason to fear climate catastrophe. Wild creatures would have great reason to fear their own catastrophe in this situation, arising from humanity’s endless energy voracity. But on our own account we humans could lighten up. The story has a happy ending. The doom is flipped. There’s a narrative structure to Monbiot’s book that seems crafted in this way. The doom was always going to be flipped – so why the doominess in the first place? Perhaps only to set up a mythic resolution to a contradiction needed by the narrative – the problem of climate change and wildlife loss caused by the modern urban-industrial economy. This is resolved by an impending new era of farm-free food, along with some putatively new farming techniques, so that the modern urban-industrial economy with its patterns of settlement, material production, ethics and intellectual norms can proceed in continuity with the present and near past. Prometheus is set free, and the existing cultural order is redeemed and confirmed.
But if abundant low-carbon energy doesn’t immediately materialise, or if it’s used to grow the human economy and its footprint, then Monbiot’s farmfree solutionism offers no solutions to real present predicaments. Those predicaments arose because of past technological solutions to problems we didn’t fundamentally have. The predicament of Regenesis, on the other hand, is that it offers non-solutions to problems we do really have. Or at least it offers only mythical solutions, storybook solutions – science, technology, rationality, progress as ideas, as a redemptive divine, not as plausible technology directed towards renewable human societies, and not as a different ethical or intellectual framework able to comprehend the mess that past technological solutions to non-problems and the cultural myths undergirding them have got us into.
Monbiot and other ecomodernists basically offer a path towards redemption via an ideally farm-free human dematerialisation from nature and the elimination of human impacts upon it, which paradoxically involves massive materiality in the form of high levels of generated low carbon electrical energy and the high material flows associated with it. The problem as I see it is not the urge for redemption, but this path of conjoint dematerialisation/materialisation the ecomodernists have chosen. I’ll say more about it in my next post.
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My first question is what’s the feedstock for goop ? You certainly can’t make it from water .
Whatever the feedstock is it will run into problems , Texas was the cotton belt untill the bol
Wevel moved in , then they turned to peanuts and a nematode moved in , soy pests are begining to make headway on that crop and alfalfa is also in trouble . ( more pesticides anyone ?)
Energy , Siemens has closed its wind turbine production in Germany , the UK auction for offshore turbine ‘s has failed with no bids the same has happened this week in the gulf of Mexico , no bids . Plus 90 dead whales have drifted ashore in the area where they are building offshore turbines in the north east ( crickets from the MSM /greens )
Renewables have run into a cost wall that governments can’t subsidise away ( roughly $30 per Kwh subsidy ) here in TX .
The failure to look at the problem as a whole blinkers far too many writers .
The feedstocks for the bacterial protein powder which George Monbiot touted in Regenesis consist mainly of ammonia and some minerals (like phosphorus), plus lots of electricity to supply hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and power the processes.
For the synthesized dairy proteins (excreted by genetically-modified microbes, usually fungal), the feedstocks are typically sugars (which require farms), ammonia and other ‘nutrients’, plus significant amounts of electricity for the processes.
By the way, 2023 has been an eventful year for the synthesized dairy protein industry, with one large player suddenly dropping these products, another company stopping production of its $7/liter ‘milk’ and putting the brand up for sale, and a third company deciding to contract out the production of protein instead of constructing its previously planned ‘world’s largest precision fermentation facility’:
‘General Mills launched Bold Cultr in 2021, partnering with Perfect Day to create a cream cheese spread that featured the latter’s animal-free whey proteins. After switching animal-free dairy ingredient suppliers from Perfect Day to Remilk at the beginning of 2023, General Mills unexpectedly pulled funding for Bold Cultr in February. No details were given regarding the decision to cease funding for the product… The startup Betterland Foods (Betterland) made its debut with much fanfare at Expo West last year, launching Betterland Milk, which was created with Perfect Day’s animal-free dairy proteins. The price for a quart of Betterland Milk was to be set at $6.89, and the company planned to sell the milk via Amazon beginning in late August… However, earlier this year, the [Betterland] company paused production of all products and announced that its founder and CEO, Lizanne Falsetto, was seeking a buyer for the brand… In April of 2022, the Israeli synbio animal-free dairy developer Remilk announced plans to build a $750,000-square-foot precision fermentation facility in Denmark, which was touted as being the world’s largest precision fermentation facility. However, in February of this year, the [Remilk] company announced a change in plans, opting instead to use a contract manufacturer to produce its animal-free dairy proteins…[Perfect Day] cited confusion among retailers with regard to product placement, and this confusion can extend to consumers, especially for products that strive to attract vegan eaters but also need milk allergen warnings… Perfect Day has also quietly adopted a new trademarked term to describe its product – ProFerm – which the company describes as “whey protein isolate from fermentation”…’
https://www.nongmoproject.org/blog/new-gmo-alert-dairy-is-shutting-doors-seeking-buyers-and-selling-to-consumers/
Thanks for the info and link , ammonia hmmmm lovely stuff , glasses lined tanks are expensive !
Two thumbs up for this comment.
The typo in the title (the wholeness of the word) made me smile — the Word, or Logos, being one of the ways my own faith tradition refers to Jesus. I would argue that “kingly God” and “Godly king” aren’t quite the right descriptions, the whole point of the incarnation is that the Word was made flesh: became fully human, made of the same stuff as us, and dwelt among us.
A difficult thing about redemption is that, at least in my tradition, it’s open to everyone. Another difficult thing about it is that it cannot meaningfully be separated from reconciliation with the rest of Creation. That is a much harder doctrine than the idea that technology will come to our rescue yet again.
I don’t know, and can’t know, exactly what reconciliation will involve. I can say that I do not expect my reconciliation with those who have harmed me in this life to be a pleasant process. I don’t expect to particularly enjoy my reconciliation with those I have harmed. Steps I might take now to be reconciled to those I currently consider my enemies are only the preliminaries… practise, almost, for the real thing. They are halting and uncertain steps.
I do, however, expect that final reconciliation, in whatever form it might take, to be worth the discomfort.
So what? What does any of this religious stuff have to do with a small farm future?
I can do more than take preliminary steps toward reconciliation with other human beings. I can take steps to acknowledge and really live with the implications of the idea that I am a created being, and as such my own life and health is bound up with the rest of Creation. I can try to live in some sort of balance with the ecosystem in which I find myself; indeed, anything else is only going to add to the list of those I have harmed. I can learn to be a good member of a keystone species.
I am bad at this, partly because of my background and skills and context, partly because I’m a human being and we are imperfect, complex, disorderly and sinful. It’s worth trying anyway, not only for eschatological reasons, but because even my fumbling and insignificant efforts do more good than would occur if I just didn’t bother.
Just to clarify, ‘The wholeness of the word’ isn’t a typo, but the title that I chose, following on from ‘The wholeness of the world’ in my previous post. Perhaps I need to explain why I chose it, which I’ll do in due course.
BTW I agree that godly kings & kingly gods doesn’t fully capture Christian theology (though I believe it partly does), but I think this works in a rough and ready way for a good deal of premodern mythology more generally concerning human redemption.
Ah — I couldn’t quite figure out whether I was being dense or it was a typo…
Agree re: premodern mythology more generally. Walter Brueggemann wrote in one of his books (I don’t remmeber which and there are dozens of them) about redemption and scapegoats. If I remember which one it is I’ll dig out a reference for you. (He’s an interesting read anyway.)
Mr Monbiot is a writer, a spinner of yarns, not a realist.
Doom and redemption. Crisis and resolution. What have you, it is a classic story line. Mostly from fiction. He is not trying to lay out a coherent plan, he is trying to persuade people. And he brings relief to people who are worried that their consumptive urban lifestyle is going to wind up killing the planet.
Really though, climate change or not, the planet will be fine. Humans may not fare so well in a +3°C future. But conveniently, in the ecomodernist view there is no need for facts or digging into the unintended consequences. Instead of all that, it will all be just fine, buy a Prius and eat some beyond beef. It’ll be okay.
See, how soothing that is ? Well, I’m not buying it. I’m holding out for a flying car. And working on drought tolerant seeds.
I wish you would wait until it snows or at least first frost to delve into ‘Saying No to a Farm Free Future’ I haven’t had time to read it yet.
“Humans may not fare so well in a +3°C future.”
Nor will a great many species other than our own. A +3°C future would be a future in which myriad climate tipping points will have been tipped, resulting in many positive feedback loops toward a biosphere with well less than half of its current significantly depleted biodiversity.
Our species isn’t so important and valuable that the story of life on Earth can or should center on us. It doesn’t.
i’m not so sure the planet will be “fine”, unless you think Venus is “fine”. There may not be enough petroleum on planet Earth to cause runaway green house effect, but there IS enough water vapor to do so.
personally i’m afraid it’s all too possible that humans will be the last species to die. That’s how it works in a cancer-ridden body: the cancer cells adapt to survive the conditions that kill all the normal cells. Eventually, the cancer cells die too… UNLESS it’s a transmissible tumor that can spread by contact to other individuals. when i hear people talk about colonizing mars that’s what i think of : a transmissible tumor.
on the other hand, some cancers go into remission and i have some hope (a tiny bit) that we will voluntarily reduce our numbers and consumption to be more in balance with the rest of creation.
‘Meanwhile, as I feared, proponents of the bacterial foods advocated by Monbiot have been busy trying to mobilise public investment in it (see, for example, here and here).’
Proponents of ‘precision fermentation’ for making *dairy* protein substitutes (which can be fungal as well as bacterial) are spreading some myths of their own.
The open letter (linked above and signed by George Monbiot among others) and the associated petitions ‘calling for a moonshot investment [by governments] into a rapid protein transition’ are organized by the ‘Replanet’ NGO, which claims on their website that ‘By removing the cow entirely from dairy production, Perfect Day has cut greenhouse gas emissions and land and water use by over 90%.’ This myth was busted by a team of researchers in a peer-reviewed article (linked below) which concluded that ‘The environmental impacts of microbially produced milk protein were of the same magnitude as for extracted dairy protein.’
So, the synthesized milk protein is not an improvement.
Furthermore, when the ‘microbially produced milk protein’ is compared directly to dairy products such as milk, yoghurt, and cheese (instead of being compared to ‘extracted milk proteins’), the study found that the cow’s milk dairy products would most likely have a *lower* environmental impact!
Thus, producing the synthesized milk protein would actually be counterproductive since it has a larger environmental impact (or footprint) than the real dairy products!
Quote from the study:
‘Milk protein at the dairy farm-gate vs. milk protein by cellular agriculture at the production facility gate… For many dairy products such as fluid milk, yoghurts and cheeses, it is reasonable to use raw milk as a raw material instead of extracted milk proteins. For these products and in countries with developed dairy chains, dairy proteins within the raw milk are likely to create a smaller footprint than the use of rBLG [the recombinant milk protein excreted by genetically-modified microbes in the ‘precision fermentation’ process] would create.’
Behm, K., Nappa, M., Aro, N. et al. Comparison of carbon footprint and water scarcity footprint of milk protein produced by cellular agriculture and the dairy industry. Int J Life Cycle Assess 27, 1017–1034 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-022-02087-0
“Furthermore, when the ‘microbially produced milk protein’ is compared directly to dairy products such as milk, yoghurt, and cheese (instead of being compared to ‘extracted milk proteins’), the study found that the cow’s milk dairy products would most likely have a *lower* environmental impact!
Thus, producing the synthesized milk protein would actually be counterproductive since it has a larger environmental impact (or footprint) than the real dairy products!”
This appears to be just like the Direct Air Capture (DAC) scam which is gaining a lot of steam these days, and government subsidies, too. See: https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2023/01/19/direct-air-capture-climate-scam/
DAC boosters say DAC reduces atmospheric carbon, and can do so “at scale” eventually. Neither of these claims are true. And yet governments are giving oil companies money for DAC facility construction and operations.
TANSTAFL- There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. I learned this iron clad rule in thermodynamics, and while folksy and humorous sounding, it embodies a central truth we have to live with.
I see two things- first, an unawareness of this truth of the universe ( or misguided efforts to bargain with it), and the inability to draw correct boundaries around a process to accurately assess the energy flows. It can be difficult math, but it will reveal what needs to be known to make wise decisions. Biases and agendas can lead to intentionally misdrawn boundaries.
second- I think that Monbiot and many others realize our predicament, while nearly everyone else subconsciously realize that the end of the carbon pulse is nearing, with the decline in our coddled lifestyles ( in developed countries and the core of empire anyway) to follow. Grasping at straws ensues, but with “sciencey” sounding logic that ignores my first point.
The puzzle that is actually a good one to solve, is how to best use the last of our high EROEI resources to prepare for a low energy future. Unfortunately, most solutions in the hopper are stuck in the endless progress narrative and aimed at maintaining the status quo, not on making the glide slope more manageable.
Since our political systems are degraded and coopted, it’s likely that studge and other bright and shiny vapor ware will get the funding.
So it goes.
PS- hats off again to Steve L for pertinent research and links.
“The puzzle that is actually a good one to solve, is how to best use the last of our high EROEI resources to prepare for a low energy future. Unfortunately, most solutions in the hopper are stuck in the endless progress narrative and aimed at maintaining the status quo, not on making the glide slope more manageable.”
Uh-huh.
And this all means we ought to be phasing out automobiles (including electric ones), mass jet travel and the global tourism industry which depends upon it, and other things which are both high ranking as luxuries (as contrasted with necessities) and high ranking in terms of energy use.
But politicians, governments … and the mainstream “environmental” movement / green movement has been co-opted by the very same ecomodernism which Chris perpetually names as our enemy — meaning an enemy of truth, facts and life.
TANSTAFL is the 5th law of thermodynamics (if you are counting the 0th). It is often forgotten.
Thanks again Chris, I think you’re headed down a productive path here.
The ‘word’ indeed.
As Greg says “Mr Monbiot is a writer, a spinner of yarns, not a realist.”
Well, yes, that’s what we do, we humans: we make narratives.
So in that light you got me wondering about the Monbiot quote: “…the most destructive force ever to have been unleashed by humans…”
The statement that agriculture is the most destructive force covers a lot of ground.
What about the agriculture that was (and is) being practiced by the peoples of the non-western world? Those methods that when the Europeans first came upon them, they didn’t even recognize as agriculture? Surely those methods aren’t the most destructive force(s) ever unleashed by humans.
But since we were talking about stories and narratives, maybe we could say that the destructive force we are looking for takes the form of a particularly powerful story.
I think this is an area where Graeber & Wengrow’s ‘Dawn of Everything’ is really helpful.
As I understand it, agriculture is much older than the godly kings & kingly gods.
But somewhere – much later than the first mass human settlements – there arose a narrative saying that those godly kings & kingly gods were somehow necessary, and we ordinary mopes had no alternative.
I try to imagine the transition – from (somewhat more egalitarian) farmers/foragers – to subjects of some overlord. Surely there was memory of the time before the kings. Surely those people knew that the kings were there mostly to serve themselves, not the people.
Sadly, we seem to have almost entirely forgotten about that. We mostly seem to think that this current mess is normal.
So, I won’t disagree with you when you say “It is, after all, the business of governments to invest in what they consider beneficial for their citizenries.”
But I will point out that this isn’t very often what actually happens.
At this late stage in our little experiment in Western Civilization, I find it much more accurate to assume that the actions of the higher levels of authority are mostly for the purpose of collecting more wealth and power for themselves and their friends.
The urge to concentrate power seems much stronger than any sense for whether a particular technology is a good idea.
Will vat-grown studge solve world hunger and climate problems?
That’s not really the point.
In the Hebrew Scriptures there are several books that basically go something like this:
People of Israel: Hey, God, we want a king! Send us a king to rule over us!
God: Um, you do realise that if you have a king he will lord it over you and oppress you and send your young men away to war, right?
People of Israel: Yeah, we know, but we still want a king! It’s better than not being told what to do!
God: This seems like a really bad idea, how about some judges instead?
People of Israel: No! We want a king, like the other nations have!
God: Fine, have it your way…
God: *gives the people a king*
King: *is nifty for a while, then messes everything up, as predicted*
Woe ensues.
I mean, I paraphrase, but.. it’s fair to say that the compilers of this canon were really not that keen on kings. And if you grew up reading the King James version of the Bible… well, let’s say there were some interesting editorial and translational choices, because King James was quite keen on remaining a king.
That said, I suspect as soon as you have a certain degree of settled agriculture and non-perishable food storage, you need some way to enforce property (or at least usufruct) rights, to a degree that I suspect is less apparent with more nomadic societies. Very often that’s going to take the form of some kind of militia or military class, people who spend their time training for combat rather than weeding vegetables; and having such a military class usually means having someone to command them. There are probably ways to organise that which aren’t hierarchical, but I haven’t seen very many of them in practice.
This was meant to be a reply to Eric F. above.
There was a volunteer on the permanent culture farm in North Wales who was a nurse and a medieval fighter who represented England in some European fight off – they won. Her favourite move was kick to the chest – as they would be looking at your weapon arm and wouldn’t expect it.
From historical record we know that one of the arguments for and against enclosure was the sturdiness of the peasants and there use for war and soldiers. I think the idea that we need looking after might be one of those myths for the ruling classes.
Well, people make a lot of written arguments about what other people can and cannot do these days, too, and they aren’t all accurate. In many cases they can’t possibly be accurate. So I’m not surprised if we have arguments that the commons should be enclosed so that the peasants don’t get too strong, and arguments that the commons should be enclosed so that the peasants can be sent off to war, and both might have an element of truth at various points in time but weren’t necessarily the primary reason for the enclosure of the commons.
I’m not sure that I entirely agree with whoever it was who came up with the idea that the state is granted a monopoly on the use of violence, but I do know that even the rather flimsy gates that separate out one part of the churchyard are enough to prevent the casual theft that happens in the more publically accessible bits. Some of that is just a matter of “out of sight, out of mind” but some of it, I think, is that a gate, however flimsy, is symbolic. (I don’t mind the theft that much, really, except of perennial plants, which is vexing because whoever takes them presumably has somewhere to plant them out and so isn’t desperate, and I’d be happy enough for them to take a cutting; but I do wish people would put their needles somewhere more suitable, and at this rate I need to get a composting toilet for the other materials that are left in the churchyard… there is a serious lack of public toilets open after dark locally. Sigh.)
Lots of interesting themes there. The degree to which people both want and don’t want to be subjects. And the Biblical grounding in what you might call rural reaction – a pastoralist critique of state formation?
It seems to me that people always create de facto structures to clarify rights of appropriation, whether foragers, herders or farmers. But, per James Scott, it’s probably true that the chances of them getting turned into de jure structures are greater in grain-based agrarian societies – you then need someone or something to jure over the juring, and by then you’re well on the way to hell.
The Biblical chronicle has a bunch of tension also between Temple worship and making altars in the “high places” (which was associated with rural forms of worship, but also with idolatry). Also a lot of back and forth about whether God allowed the Babylonian invasion and subsequent exile of (some of) the people of Israel because people weren’t doing worship correctly, or because the hierarchy within society was mistreating the poor.
“Will vat-grown studge solve world hunger and climate problems?
That’s not really the point.”
I think that when I realised that this was true for almost every large scale solution proposed for our various environmental predicaments I sort of stopped being so bothered by it all. I think Chris (and people like Paul Kingsnorth and Derrick Jensen) are right – the real problem is the myth by which our civilization has been created – without a different myth we will just recreate the same problems in different forms.
it seems strange that realising this stopped me worrying so much about the destruction of the world and sometimes I wonder if I’ve slipped into apathy. But I think it’s more that I no longer feel that desperate need to find ‘the solution’ – I think it was in ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’ Kingsnorth said something along the lines of it being too late to really change what’s coming and that collectively we’re just going to have to find a way through as things unravel (of course we may not find a way through) – I suppose that’s the stance the Deep Adaptation lot take.
I find it helpful – the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves makes hypocrites of us all and people’s responses seem to veer from denial to a striving for some perfect form of living that will free them from their own complicity. I think the messy middle is where reality sits – and here I am posting on an internet forum using a 4G phone to discuss how we can live in more sustainable ways.
I feel you Bruce, to be free from the hand bag clutching of every perceived wrong which is actually just business, is a blessing. It means you can just get on with whatever you thinks gonna help. I look forward to the day the phones are over but for now this is a reasonable group therapy, I believe in you man!
Great post. I sense a kind of victorian mania of science and technology in it, with its twin shadow of spiritualism and magic. It is air brushed by the new American empire with Nasa and silicon Valley upgrades but is essentially the same split – the ongoing search for the grail Cup – now a stainless steel vat!
John Micheal Greer is always talking about the schlock magic of Harry Potter, as opposed to the skillful use of will to bring about change in the world. I mean, he even looks a bit like him. Wielding his pen against ‘he who cannot be named’, expelianoos!!
Look forward to the next installment.
A question for you folks, following on from Bruce’s and Steve L’s points.
It’s interesting in the light of the apparently fading corporate interest in gloop documented by Steve that RePlanet are calling for ‘moonshot’ public investment in it. Putting people on the moon was a basically pointless endeavour that no private corporation would fund (unless they had paying passengers) but was a great piece of political theatre and symbolism. A myth, in other words (even though it really happened – sorry, conspiracy theorists).
Back on Earth, I’ve been enthusing to various audiences about Dave Goulson’s book on the insect apocalypse, given that he comes out for local, small-scale, low-impact food production in it and not whizz-bang techno-fixes. So I was horrified to discover that he’s signed RePlanet’s petitition.
Now, I’m quite a long way along the Bruce or Paul Kingsnorth ‘this shit is going to happen’ trajectory, but I’m potentially still up for fighting for a better redemption myth. So my question is whether to do something to agitate against RePlanet’s moonshot nonsense, or just get on with my own stuff?
A further consideration is Eric’s point about historic sustainable agricultures, mostly non-western/indigenous. I fear that what’s left of them is getting further obliterated by the ecomodernist carbon offset plus manufactured food moonshot. Worth shouting about?
Those are tough questions Chris. For me it’s not that I think we shouldn’t oppose idiocy where we see it – its more that the triumph of that idiocy doesn’t upset me anymore because I see it as the working out of something whose roots are deep and whose momentum is huge – Nate Hagens describes it as the super organism.
Were I in a more powerful position with a louder voice I hope I’d be more active in at least calling attention to the idiocy I see. But at the same time I have to acknowledge that I’m part of the super organism to and that it may do something with my actions that I really hadn’t anticipated – anyone fancy a limited edition collectible Che Guevara ‘Viva La Revolution’ T-Shirt (https://tinyurl.com/yc7vwrtu).
This all sounds very fatalistic – as I’m writing I find myself thinking “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” – thoughts driven in part by my current circumstance – I injured my back quite badly in the spring and I’ve been having to try and earn more of my living on a computer (which I’m conflicted about – it suits my solitary nature and offends my desire for a more sustainable existence). But I don’t mean it to be fatalistic – in your original piece Chris you talked about many of our current predicaments resulting from the techno-fixes of previous generation – I think that’s certainly the truth, although even if that truth were widely accepted the myth of modernity would have us believing our fixes are going to have a different trajectory – and I think that’s it, the problem isn’t necessarily techno-fixes but fixes full stop – ‘Oh something must be done’ is a sentiment full of hubris – it usually means that I should do something (heroic, important, meaningful), or someone else should do what I tell them to do (because I’m brilliant, smart, insightful). And for me if the myth is the deep root of our problem then hubris is the root of the myth.
So ultimately I probably come down on the side of trying to do our own stuff, quietly and without fanfare or expectation.
(All views correct at the time of writing but may be subject to unexpected fluctuation ;-))
“I was only talking to a friend today how in the late 1970s the UK Labour party was convinced the agricultural sector had no worth as it was smaller than the packaged sandwich business, thus the countryside should be wilded and all food imported. ”
Sound familiar ? This has got to be a bottom up not a top down solution when politics is so fixed on financial solutions they are willing to screw up the food supply because it’s not cost effective .
Chris wrote, ‘So my question is whether to do something to agitate against RePlanet’s moonshot nonsense…’
RePlanet’s moonshot letter is asking for 25 billion euros from the EU, plus 1 billion pounds from the UK government (and many people would probably agree that there are better uses for those taxes). It claims that:
‘…sustainable protein production includes three crucial areas of innovation: precision fermentation…, cultivated meat… and plant-based foods [including whole food beans and pulses]… Of these, precision fermentation shows particular promise but has received the least attention.’
I can guess which area they want most of those billions in funding to go.
Already, as a basic premise, the signatories are presenting precision fermentation and cultivated meat as ‘sustainable’ proteins, when this is debatable, to say the least. I think that’s a debate which should be happening, but evidence which goes against the narrative (such as in ‘Saying NO…’) seems to be ignored.
Surely some of those signatories, and those influenced by the signatories, have the intellectual honesty to seriously consider the opposition viewpoint and perhaps change their minds. Trouble is, there is no opposition viewpoint in the spotlight.
A similar type of open letter may be an effective way to get the opposing views into the spotlight. I’m not suggesting a long and involved campaign with some competing petitions signed by Joe and Jane Public, turning it into a numbers game. Instead, an open letter, signed by some authors and academics who have seen the related research findings and agree with the opposing viewpoint, would at least be there for the record, and could get the attention of influencers and policy makers who would otherwise accept the unchallenged premise that precision fermentation and cultivated meat are ‘sustainable’.
So, I think it would be beneficial and worth doing by someone who’s able to do it and feels moved to do it. I suspect that Chris may have felt moved to do something like this, which led to his question.
“Now, I’m quite a long way along the Bruce or Paul Kingsnorth ‘this shit is going to happen’ trajectory, but I’m potentially still up for fighting for a better redemption myth. So my question is whether to do something to agitate against RePlanet’s moonshot nonsense, or just get on with my own stuff?”
I suppose my redemption myth (at least regards politics) would have it that our politics has been almost entirely co-opted by deceptions spun by disinformational propagandists and their media apparatus… and our way out of this mess is to identify this key feature of our politics and to organize a direct response to it vis-a-vis media and the other institutions of cultural reproduction.
Is that a myth? Does it need to be a myth? Can we make it more mythical? I dunno. I’m just disgusted by how lies run our world from top to bottom.
I think it’s pretty important to ask indigenous non-western people what they want and to avoid speaking for them. “Nothing about us without us” essentially.
The request I have observed, at least in North America, is a simple one: getting their land back. It’s hard to say from here whether public investment in precision fermentation will be co-opted as a way to do this.
I also think public funding for studge is likely to go the way of, say, public funding that went to procuring PPE during the pandemic. I’d be more concerned about it if I thought the funding would actually be allowed to fund things, but I don’t think people who are in the business of getting government funding for private enterprises are always (or even usually) people who are in the business of actually providing goods and services. Perhaps that’s too cynical.
I’m a basically white guy who has a lot of native American blood, but who still looks like a white guy. Culturally, I’m basically Native American (indigenous), in that I don’t believe land belongs to me but that land belongs to all of us in communalistic fashion, and for lots of other reasons, such as my general rejection of capitalist-industrial-hierarchical nightmare “white” culture.
I live in a US state which has a very large native community, so to speak. Most drive in cars and trucks, shop at WallMart, etc., and are in their material culture just like “white folks”. And the topic only gets more complicated from there!
North America’s indigenous people are, sadly, mostly intensively assimilated into “white” culture. This was a consequence of deliberate and intentional genocide. My people lost, and when we lost we were assimilated. Almost entirely.
North American indigenous communities do still exist in some form, despite the genocide, and my understanding is that there are criteria other than bloodlines that most tribes use to decide who is a member. It’s not something an individual can necessarily determine for themselves.
I do have some Plains Cree ancestry but over the course of my lifetime I have had little to no contact with any Plains Cree tribes, and would be highly remiss to claim that cultural heritage as my own. My cousin, on the other hand, has a certain degree of acceptance as a partial member (I won’t claim to understand the particulars) of the Inuit people he grew up around in Iqaluit. These things are complicated.
I never claimed to be a member of any North American indigenous tribe. What I said is that, culturally, I have a great deal in common with traditional native people of North America. I consider those things I have in common with traditional native Americans — especially the attitude toward the land which has it that we belong to the land, rather than having the land belong to us — core elements of a cultural ethos. There’s a big difference between being culturally indigenous in this broad cultural ethos sense than being member of a particular tribe. And no one can tell me I’m wrong about the cultural ethos in my heart.
I am not culturally “white” — though I do appear to be white visually.
My grandfather was mostly native American. Unfortunately, he was ashamed of this fact, and never proudly said so. So I am partly native American, and am proudly identifying with all native people of North America, despite my apparent whiteness and my ability to “pass” as white.
The original moonshot was a military project. You can’t deliver a hydrogen bomb to Moscow in an airplane. I doubt that the precision fermentation fantasies are really that much about food.
This shit is happening. When we started this farm we didn’t own any irrigation equipment. Didn’t need it, usually we got an inch or so of rain per week. Now we don’t get so much as a tenth in a month but at least we are better of than those poor souls in Texas and Kansas. So far.
The business-as-usual powers-that-be will not allow the problem to be fixed. It’s not that hard. Even a bunch a yahoos like us know what to do, but it is bad for profits for every quarter after this one.
Is solar electric renewable ? How ? DAC? More nonsense. Studge ? Ha. It’s not even that funny.
Anything and everything that you do on you own farm or in your own garden makes the situation better. Maybe not for everyone but certainly for you and the people you care about. Absolutely bend the ear of every representative or official you come across, but don’t wait for them to do something.
Agitate.
While I see the trajectory as well, I also know that tipping points and quick shifts in the political winds DO happen, even if I don’t understand the mechanisms.
The nearby neighbor who planted our hundreds of nut trees (Mark Shepard, who you are familiar with)has been pushing permaculture based agriculture for decades, and travels the world giving talks, conducting workshops, and helping kick off similar projects to his own farm here in Wisconsin. So his farm suffers. It’s still an amazing example of what transformation can look like, but he is so busy on the advocacy side, much of its potential is unrealized.
And yet he persists.
Easy for me to say in effect; “do both”. But that is where we are. I don’t have the elocution or writing skills, or I’d try to do both as well.
What to fill this mythic vacuum that resulted from failure of the current narrative as well as the loss of the belief in the immanence of the natural world?
I don’t know.
Further thoughts on the question of whether to shout about RePlanet’s open letter, now that most of the attention is on the next post along…
In the Ignation tradition of spiritual direction and discernment (stay with me here) there is a concept of desolation vs consolation. I’m probably going to misrepresent it slightly here but I don’t feel like another super-long comment today, so you’ll have to be stuck with my layperson’s understanding and paraphrase. The basic idea is that at some times in your life you may be feeling far from God/hope/goodness/whatever and at other times you may be feeling nearer.
The Examen is an exercise (ideally, repeated nightly, though other formats are available) in which you look back over your day and notice which parts of it felt like consolation and why, and which felt like desolation. And the idea is that if you notice you’re going through a period with lots of desolation, then maybe it’s a good idea to address that somehow before making any other major life decisions; a bit like the advice not to make major life changes while clinically depressed. Desolation might be prompted by grief or other external stressors or it might just be “one of those things”. With time and repetition it becomes easier to notice when you are in a general state of consolation or desolation, and this can inform when to be gentle with yourself and when to take on additional challenges, and even starts to influence smaller daily conversations (“I’m tired and grumpy today for unrelated reasons, can we talk about the Big Stressful Thing tomorrow instead?”).
The concept is not without problems. Particularly: if you are in a very bad situation and it is making you sad or depressed or anxious and you do actually have the opportunity to make your situation better (or possibly to escape it for a much better one), you absolutely should do that, rather than staying stuck because it isn’t the right time to make a decision because you don’t feel at your very best. And of course there are some actions which must be taken regardless of one’s mental or spiritual state; livestock need to be fed every day whether or not you feel good about it, and feeding them while hating the world/yourself/your enemies/entropy/whatever is a better course of action than not feeding them. Children need to be comforted based on their emotional state, not yours.
Nevertheless, I think it is prudent to apply some kind of examination of this kind to decisions around taking public positions on urgent and controversial issues, let’s call it prophetic speech perhaps, not least because such speech can be highly unpredictable in terms of the consequences (though most often nobody listens), but also because prophetic speech is most effective when it comes from a deep sense of passion and purpose which can be difficult to discern whilst in a state of desolation, railing at/against some danger (real or perceived). That isn’t to say that anger, outrage, and a sense of moral indignation can never inform prophetic speech; but that prophetic speech that comes from a place of desperation is often especially costly.
Switching back to the protest metaphor, the question then isn’t “is this an issue worth going to jail for?” because it clearly is, but “am I in a good place to risk going to jail for this? Is going to jail for this the highest purpose (however you might frame it) that I have right now? Even if nobody listens?”
I cannot decide any of this for you, of course. Nobody can.
I can note that you are getting some negative attention from the Monbiots of this world, and this is likely to have an effect. I can note that you appear to have a lot on your plate in other areas of your life, which you (very wisely) only allude to here. I can note that you do seem, understandably, frustrated with the ecomodernist, technologist and urbanist directions some people are taking. (So am I.) I can note that you spent last winter writing a book under a deadline and have been busy promoting it since. I can note that you do seem to keep coming back to writing — books, blog posts, whatever — as a way to both develop and communicate your thoughts. I can note that this blog of yours is one of the better places on the internet to discuss the harder aspects of whatever is going on in this time we inhabit, whether that’s about energy shortage or finding meaning and wholeness in a fleeting and chaotic world, and that this has value in and of itself for those of us who choose to spend time here while it exists. I can note that you appear to have pretty stable housing and livelihood otherwise, in relative terms, and so a bit of flak from the usual suspects over an open letter is unlikely to cause you and those around you as much harm as some other actions might. I can note that “any publicity is good publicity” is not entirely correct but also not entirely wrong. I can ask the kind of questions I asked before, about what your intended audience might be, and what consequences might be wrought if you either lose your usual nuance or take an increasingly combative tone.
But I cannot tell you whether writing “Saying NO…” brought you to a state of consolation or desolation (which is a very different question to whether it was easy). I cannot tell you whether you most need to write an open letter or go for a long walk. I cannot tell you whether you thrive or deflate in response to the sort of under-nuanced vilification that is already coming your way, especially from someone who you have known an conversed with for a long time. I cannot tell you from where you draw your own best encouragement, or what about your life now makes you feel most discouraged. I cannot tell you what your highest purpose is.
I know you take such decisions seriously or you wouldn’t have asked for our advice in the first place, and so I feel like all this is a bit personal and a bit obvious and a bit awkward and maybe a bit over the top — it’s just a letter, for crying aloud — but I’ve been pondering it since my comment on the next post where I mentioned our passion and purpose and how those meet the world’s needs, and it strikes me that “just a letter” is still an issue for discernment.
So I think a question you should probably answer for yourself is: How is your heart?
I just wonder why the powers that be have turned on food I have seen all sorts of numbers from 7% to 30 % of methane is farm produced , what about the rest ? What’s happening to stop industrial pollution ? Seems like a bate and switch like carbon offset credits something to molify part of the population and doing nothing in the process .
Has anyone else read the NASA sunspot forecast ? They are saying 1 to 10 sunspots at solar maximum in the 2030’s , forecasting a new maunder minimum .
I’m up for the fight Chris. What does the alternative look like right now? Is it establishing town and village community supported farms, in the style of county farms? I think everything you are personally doing, and your careful deconstruction of the ecomodernist argument is essential. This work underpins the construction of an alternative bid for resources, a local agrarian moonshot – and what that is and looks like should be the coordinated work of the real farming/regen organic agrarian movement. Sign me up!
A commenter in Resilience.org (where this article was also published) said, “I wish the Guardian had you on as a columnist instead of Monbiot.”
I replied:
“I’d not mind if the Guardian kept Monbiot on as a columnist while also bringing on Smaje. But having just Monbiot and not Smaje is imbalanced.
[Not that Smaje, as a farmer, has time to write for his blog independently of the Guardian … right? I mean, when would he farm?]
“And while I’m thinking about it, I think the Guardian should be able and willing to print at least one guest editorial from Smaje — at minimum.”
Myths in a post truth era can sure get confounding.
I was interested to hear John Gray referring to the times we live in as an age of absurdity.
An appreciation of the absurd is supposedly what differentiates human brains from those of other animals.
Anyway, I thought this an interesting jumble of thoughts not a million miles away from some of the themes in this post, from climate change to political ineptness, a call for adaptation not mitigation, even a telling anecdote on funding for measures to address climate change. There are some missteps regarding going nuclear, but nobody’s perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g-zIudeFAU&ab_channel=UnHerd
Responding to further comments –
Replanet
Yes, I’m minded to try to put together something like an open letter along the lines Steve suggests. Perhaps I’ll use this site to get editorial input on a first draft. And apologies Bruce for my clunky rendering of your instructive points about accepting the momentum behind the existing cultural mythology, and avoiding the hubris of ‘here’s my grand alternative plan to the existing grand plan’. I think where I’ll try to thread that needle is that ‘my own stuff’ in part lies in writing/talking about the need for long-term cultural change rather than techno-fixes, and by its nature long-term cultural change is the work of multitudes of people in which I can only play a small part. But it’s worth people trying to play their small part in whatever form they’re best equipped to do … in my case, I think it involves an element of writing and political activism.
Indigeneity
This is a contentious area that I want to explore some more in the future, but I’m glad James has voiced some points that also run around in my mind. When it comes to renewable indigenous farming, I’d argue that in some ways the least important word there is ‘indigenous’ (or ‘non-Western’ in Eric’s original formulation) – or if it’s important, then ‘Western indigenous farming’ is equally important. In other words, what matters is that people farm locally for the long term as if locality matters, which they’ve done all over the world. The issue is to (re)develop renewable local agricultures, usually with the local preindustrial agriculture as inspiration.
Then there’s the wholly different issue of restitution for colonial violence and expropriation against there-before peoples and their descendants. For what it’s worth, I’m sympathetic to ‘land back’ and ‘not about us without us’ but there are difficulties about who ‘us’ is and ‘back to whom from whom’ which in my opinion are too often glossed in many of the discussions of indigeneity I’ve seen, where (in relation to my theme above) ‘indigeneity’ is invoked more as a kind of redemptive myth than in the context of reconciliation with actual, complex, modern people with indigenous ancestry.
Here in the UK, the concept of being an ‘indigenous person’ is kind of a far-right coding for being white, which perhaps underlines the importance of context. Then again, ‘the UK’ itself is a colonial concept. Spending time recently around Welsh upland farmers at the Abergavenny Food Festival – and interacting with interesting voices like @Cynfab after writing ‘Saying NO…’ – has made me more conscious than ever of the colonial way that ecomodernist food system fixes present, even within the UK and its constituent countries. It’s complicated.
The Guardian
To be fair to George Monbiot, back in the days when we connected over a shared critique of ecomodernism and he was calling me ‘one of the best writers in the country’, he did try to engineer some writing opportunities for me at The Guardian. They didn’t get past the sharp spike of his editor, but perhaps I should have been more pushy. I’m not expecting a further invite any time soon, especially now The Guardian has become much more top-down and corporate friendly. But I need to give credit where it’s due. Guess I have a tendency to bite the hand that feeds me.
It is indeed a needle to thread
I’m not against anyone doing what they feel they can to slow the destruction of the natural world – as you say Chris it’s part of your thing and you have some standing from which to do it. So more power to your elbow.
I used to think that knowledge and analysis were precursors to meaningful action with regards our various environmental crises – time has proved that assumption wrong, thus far at least. I think this has made me somewhat fatalistic – and in the face of that attempting to quietly live a ‘good’ life seems like the way forward – I guess it’s the supersedure state from the other end of the telescope.
Much appreciation to you, Chris, for handling the indigeneity topic with your usual kindness and sensitivity to all involved, including myself.
The indigeneity question is indeed complex, and also context-dependent. And difficult to navigate, because any criteria I might try to impose to decide who does and does not count as “indigenous” or even “colonised” is, de facto, putting a white western framing on the issue.
Nevertheless I do think it’s important, and I do worry that it will be co-opted as an argument toward further enclosure. It’s not a big jump from “land for re-wilding” to “land for Native Americans” for a public that largely sees indigenous people as a sort of nearly-extinct very smart wild animal (who can’t possibly be “authentic” if they drive cars, use mobile phones or shop in, er, shops; and yet my white ancestors also did not drive cars, use mobile phones or shop in the large discount department stores, and if I do these things it is not considered a diminishment of my cultural heritage. Go figure.) But perhaps I’m worrying about the wrong thing, because I also think enclosure in North America might easily take a different form than in the UK, with less government regulation involved; enough lack of regulation will still trend toward monopoly over the longer-term, and I’m sure people who are buying land as an investment rather than to live on and tend are aware of that.
I think if you are going to attempt to move the needle on public opinion regarding studge production and re-wilding you’re going to have to either engage in a much more sound bite-y, less nuanced way (and live with being incorrect more often) or accept that your careful, complex, in-depth treatment of these issues is not going to gain wide traction. But I’m not sure public opinion is actually your target…
…say you write this open letter. This is probably a good thing to do, much as disruptive peaceful protest is a good thing to do, but… what is it going to achieve? Who is it addressed to? Will they even read it? What would actually change their minds, given the amount of money that is likely changing hands?
Or is it, like disruptive peaceful protest, addressed to one target, but with a different audience in mind? Is it a tool for building solidarity and galvanising support within an already-existing community of people who don’t want to eat studge and do want land to be tended? Is it a tool for finding members of said community who don’t really know they’re not the only ones? To what end? There’s nothing wrong with the option of “it won’t do what it says on the tin but it may have this other effect” but it’s probably a good idea to consider, first, what other effect you are aiming for. Finding the others is good, but finding the others and not giving them any actions they can actually take (beyond maybe signing a petition) is an exercise in frustration for all concerned. You could pick a thousand other topics and say “hey this thing the government is funding looks like a colossally bad idea” and you’d be right; picking this one is an obvious move for you because food production and land use are areas of expertise, but I’m struggling to think of an open letter that has had much impact.
More broadly, it feels like if most of your writing is balanced toward opposition of one thing or another, you’ll draw in the sort of people who like to oppose things. That might be fine, or it might be incredibly tedious. Either way, there is value, I suspect, in being clear and communicating clearly about what you stand for, rather than against.
I’d be interested in reading a book about the resilience case for starting a veg garden today, looking not at “there might be a short-term food availability crisis” (I mean, the response to that is to keep a big sack of rice in the cupboard) but all the longer-term issues around catastrophic climate change, atomisation vs connection in communities, and even the meaning/myth/spiritual issues… Basically SFF but from the other end, not “this is where we’ll necesarily end up” but “here are some criteria for deciding what to do next, which should probably include growing some food of your own”. Perhaps such a book already exists, but I feel like most of the material out there that mentions that gardening results in having some food to eat tends to treat resilience as a happy side-effect to something that’s a nice hobby (if an expensive one, as it is if you’re buying compost and containers and so on), or overly romanticise the reality (“this abandoned city lot feeds 400 families!” no, it doesn’t, it gives 400 families a veg box and they buy grain, dairy, meat, eggs, coffee, tea, and processed junk food from the supermarket like everyone else). Certainly my own growing is largely seen and treated as a a hobby rather than as part of my household’s livelihood and a contribution to community resilience, and while this is partly accurate (insofar as I do just go to the store and buy food if my crops don’t do well), I feel like it glosses over a lot of the meaning within the wider context which is a big part of why I do it.
But perhaps, being already largely on board, I’m also not your target audience. Or perhaps “why garden?” is the book that I should be writing. (I’m not planning on it though.)
I am still mostly unconcerned about studge because it seems like the sort of thing that doesn’t make a huge difference to my own ability to access land, as well as looking like a bit of an economic bubble. It’s a terrible idea but I think it won’t work, and so it doesn’t matter that much; it’s not like the government are going to spend the money on something actually helpful anyway. The cynic in me even thinks that when carbon credits (or whatever) for re-wilded (or whatever) land turn out not to be quite so lucrative, it might actually get easier rather than harder for me to access land of my own. (The cynic in me is wrong often enough that I don’t think she has much predictive utility.)
” … for a public that largely sees indigenous people as a sort of nearly-extinct very smart wild animal (who can’t possibly be “authentic” if they drive cars, use mobile phones or shop in, er, shops; and yet my white ancestors also did not drive cars, use mobile phones or shop in the large discount department stores, and if I do these things it is not considered a diminishment of my cultural heritage. Go figure.)”
I can’t help wondering if this commentary was partly motivated by my mention of how most indigenous people here in North America (Turtle Island) have been assimilated into white culture as part of a deliberate genocide process. You know, like boarding schools and being moved around to reservations and such — or just shot. What I said was just a plain fact. Their cultures still exist, sometimes, but in a very profoundly altered way, and what has been altered most generally and most profoundly is their means of livelihood and their relation to the land.
I’m not speaking as one who has movies and television as a window on this world. Where I live there are a *lot* of indigenous people – “indians”. Fragments of their traditional culture remain, and in some cases more than others. A great many are more assimilated than I am. I say that without disrespect or diminishment of them as people. I’m just very not much assimilated. I’m a perpetual outsider because I reject and refuse “white” modernity as much as I do–and because my soul has always been deeply communalist … and because my soul has always been oriented to land relations very different from modern white people’s land orientation. I don’t see land as property. It doesn’t belong to us. We belong with the land.
For me, this isn’t just an intellectual orientation. It’s much, much deeper than that. I’m just not a “white” guy, though I look like one. (Here, I’m using “white” more as a cultural identification than an ethnic or genetic one.)
When they have the powwows around here, I don’t go. I do love to watch the hoop dancers in the plaza now and then, though. They are glorious! But to turn sacred dances into a competition, with the competitors wearing numbers like race horses makes me want to puke. That’s the epitome of assimilation, and it hurts the soul.
Apologies James. My intention here was not to question your own position or context, but to highlight that a double standard is so often applied. Nor did I intend to downplay the consequences of deliberate genocide, or indeed the unwitting damage done by those attempting to be “helpful”. But I don’t think we should write off what fragments of these cultures do remain.
I belong to a Christian tradition that uses candles. We could use electric lights instead; indeed, my church also has electric lighting and the congregation would think it absurd if we *only* used candles. And the use of candles is not particularly central to our beliefs; there are no teachings of Jesus or the early church that focus on candles particularly. So we don’t need them to see and we don’t need them for religious reasons; they’re entirely symbolic.
I can guarantee you that if I replaced our Easter candle with a battery-powered torch there would be an almighty row about it.
I suspect, though, that there still wouldn’t be anyone (in my own congregation) seriously claiming that using an electric torch made us somehow less Christian. I do occasionally read of anti-modern sects within Christianity claiming that modern culture in general is antithetical to Christian culture and life; I actually somewhat agree, but my stance is more along the lines of “Christians should probably commit to sharing their wealth with those less fortunate, to not driving cars, and to other acts of solidarity with humanity and the more-than-human world” than “television is dubious and television on a Sunday is right out”. Most of these anti-modern voices are seen as outliers by the mainstream… but then, so am I. Western Christians in general are still not subject to the same kind of gatekeeping and demands for authenticity that I have seen applied to Inuit and other First Nations people within Canada.
If the descendants of settlers and colonisers are allowed to believe that no “true Indians” exist any more, that lets them (i.e. us) off the hook of engaging with the damage that was done. That in turn has implications for the question “Where do we go from here?”
An interesting turn to issues of indigeneity, which I do touch on in Chapter 5 of the new book. I’ll hold fire mostly until later, but just a couple of points.
Agree with Kathryn that it’s not for me to say who’s indigenous or not – albeit that per James I think anybody can claim whatever identity they like … the crunch is what other people make of those claims. Agree also that driving a pickup or shopping at Walmart doesn’t disqualify anyone from being indigenous in my eyes … but those or other such practices might disqualify them from being someone whose opinions I would especially value on questions of renewable local agriculture. When it comes to questions of indigeneity there’s often a muddying of persons, identities and practices that doesn’t serve anyone well.
When we touched on this here a while back, Ruben made the interesting point that indigenous membership is conferred on people by an indigenous nation. Seems reasonable to me – but then I’d argue that how those decisions are made are as contestable and open-endedly political as those of any other nation. I don’t, for example, like the way that Britishness gets defined by this country’s government. Likewise, I believe that people (of any kind) are entitled to disagree with how membership of an indigenous nation gets defined by the political processes within that nation.
Identification with peoples, traditions, ideas, practices and histories seems to me an inherently fluid thing, so I think I’m in agreement with James there. Whereas membership of a group is often binary – you’re in or you’re out. This is especially so when it becomes subject to government bureaucracy. I haven’t looked in detail at debates about land back – I’d be interested in reading recommendations – but I’ve seen some of the difficulties of how this kind of thing plays out in various countries. If, for example, it was decided that land should be given back to indigenous people individually or collectively in a country like the USA, you’d almost certainly then get a vast increase in the number of people claiming indigeneity and a hell of a bureaucratic job (ultimately an impossible one) sorting out who qualified – or else very intense politics within indigenous nations as to who gets to call the shots over these decisions.
I’m open to counter-arguments and I’d like to learn more about this, but I’m not sure it’s the best way to go generally in global politics at the moment. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of people moving from urban to rural areas and from agriculturally/climatically poor to rich areas – this kind of politics can play out endlessly around ‘here first’ identities in these arenas too. This is one reason why I generally favour a different kind of political narrative to identitarian ones – civic republican, agrarian populist and distributist.
Regarding Kathryn’s comments on an open letter about studge – thanks, yes, all good points of the kind I’m trying to weigh up!
Arguably the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a nation, but several.
I have largely English, Scottish and Irish heritage (with, yes, a bit of Plains Cree, and probably some other things in the mix), but having been born in Canada and moved to London I would not describe myself as either English, Scottish or Irish — and I suspect that most members of the nations of England, Scotland and Ireland would also not describe me as such. The less said about UK citizenship the better. Meanwhile my own livelihood is probably more locally sourced, and more consciously connected to the land that I inhabit and tend, than that of the majority of people in Britain — and I’m not particularly high-achieving in that measure.
My understanding is that there are already fairly fiercely contested politics around claims of indigeneity and who gets to decide who qualifies, at least in Canada. Land back would complicate and intensify that, for sure, especially in a situation where the state is involved.
The British / English are a mongrel breed , kelts, Saxons, Viking , normans , and a plethora of others that became mostly one nation , IMHO there is little difference between a Welsh nationalist and ” native American ” the only real difference is time .
The imperialist West believes that it’s studge factories will fed the world , I doubt that China or India will play that game , the rest of the world is too poor to invest in studge production , the West I not going to control the narrative .
@ Chris –
“If, for example, it was decided that land should be given back to indigenous people individually or collectively in a country like the USA, you’d almost certainly then get a vast increase in the number of people claiming indigeneity and a hell of a bureaucratic job (ultimately an impossible one) sorting out who qualified – or else very intense politics within indigenous nations as to who gets to call the shots over these decisions.”
Given that my grandfather was mostly native American, I have some legitimate claim to being native American myself. But just how much “blood” must I have of a certain character to qualify me? That’s not the way I go about it! My claim to indigeneity, which I take seriously enough, is that I am not of the modern white culture which surrounds me, but I am of the indigenous cultures which surround me, in that our relation to the land is THE central theme of our shared ethos. We belong to and with the land, and the land decidedly does not belong to those who stole it from the original inhabitants by force of violence and the violence of the pen in enacting laws. My people were not allowed to participate in the Constitutional Convention of the USA. Like women, and non-property owning men, and other than “free” men, and people brought here from Africa… and other folks, including animals and plants, were not invited to the Constitutional Convention in which strictly white, male, property owning men of leisure decided to form a government for themselves with one another, and not including me and my people.
Ultimately, of course, all people are “my people”. But most of them don’t know this. These are generally Takers. And my people would like to encourage them to share, cooperate and give, and thus to become indigenous with us.
What I just said will not fare well for me among many of the people who have an obviously legitimate claim to be indigenous to Turtle Island. And that’s okay. I love them too. Utterly. And I believe love is a healing balm. Just like Jesus was said to have said.
So I think we’re in agreement that livelihood practices built around a local ecological base are more important than an identitarian approach when it comes to indigenous agriculture?
…that doesn’t mean that restitution for past colonial violence and expropriation against indigenous people is irrelevant in particular cases. But it’s a different issue.
I think it’s redundant for me personally to weigh in with a view about the relationship between indigenous people, white people and the government in the USA or Canada. But, as I said previously, I think too much contemporary politics is geared around the notion that the existing system of nation-states will endure, and around making claims in respect of these states. I think it’s more pertinent to focus on how the future of any given locality is likely to play out in relation to the different people inhabiting it or moving into it as that system of states declines, and the various shocks they will have to deal with.
Here in the UK, I agree with Kathryn about its multi-national character. But when it comes to indigeneity here, the food ecomodernists and rewilders have done a pretty bad job so far of reaching out to upland farming communities. I don’t trust the likes of Monbiot in his claims to be supportive of indigenous peoples’ land use when he’s so dismissive of what matters to many within these communities in his own backyard.
“So I think we’re in agreement that livelihood practices built around a local ecological base are more important than an identitarian approach when it comes to indigenous agriculture?”
Well, speaking for myself, I certainly agree with this premise. But I’m a bioregionalist with a very potent personal experience of history, which history — made personal — has me being born naked on Turtle Island, with no say in the matter. Some of my ancestors, of the biological / genetic (and cultural) sort were here much longer than my “white” ancestors. I had no say in any of it, or whether I’d be born naked. I think the fact of my naked birth stands out as most salient. I had need to eat, and to take up some space and participate in something we like to call “culture,” but whether or not I am of a particular culture is a question I face in my full nakedness even to this moment in a difficult longing to belong, to be fully born here, naked.
When I was a kid, long before I knew my grandfather was mostly “native American”, I came at some point to wish to be indigenous. It’s taken me all of my 57 years to come as far as I have into understanding, in my own way, want it means to be “indigenous” in a way common to all as much as uniquely my own. Part of that journey was to discover, now decades ago, that my grandfather was very reluctant to identify with the indigenous people of whom he was born naked into this world. This was due to racism, of course. He associated the indigenous people of North America with alcoholism, poverty, a lack of education, … “dirt people” — the “dirty hippies” of olde.
The older I get the more I long to be dirt poor in the richest sense of that phrase. But I am not “wealthy” enough to be dirt poor. So I have my grandfather’s heart in me, and I’m trying my best to heal his own wounds in my own heart. And ours hearts beat together in this way. It’s not a topic reducible to ethnicity. It’s a human problem. And the only solution is generosity, and generativity emerging out of that. Kindness. Lovingkindness. It’s our only hope moving forward.
Sometimes I take a “technical” approach to that problem, but mostly I’m just a dirty hippy poet at heart.
Nicely and powerfully put. It’s a good lead in to what I hope to be addressing once I’ve stopped arguing with ecomodernists.
So I think we’re in agreement that livelihood practices built around a local ecological base are more important than an identitarian approach when it comes to indigenous agriculture?
I think so, yes.
But, as I said previously, I think too much contemporary politics is geared around the notion that the existing system of nation-states will endure, and around making claims in respect of these states. I think it’s more pertinent to focus on how the future of any given locality is likely to play out in relation to the different people inhabiting it or moving into it as that system of states declines, and the various shocks they will have to deal with.
The existing system of nation-states strikes me as a rather creaking edifice at best, but a lot of the nation-states we have now only really turned up in their current forms in the late Classical and early Romantic periods, or even later, so I don’t see why we should expect them to continue in the same forms in the future. City-states with varying degrees of control over their immediate countryside seem more likely to me… but perhaps we’ll see something like the return of the Hanseatic League?
But I feel like whether any individual nation-state continues to exist, even if only in name, could go either way. Perhaps that doesn’t matter much in the face of the kinds of changes we’re likely to be up against; but at risk of stating the obvious, people will continue to inhabit places, and whatever powers of governance exist in those places will probably inherit some of the advantages or positioning of current structures, because it’s pretty much impossible to just start with a blank slate. Acknowledging and attempting to put right past injustices could be a massive distraction, or it could be one tool (of many) for holding the powerful to account and encouraging more just behaviour in the future. So I think some concept of people having the right not to be violently displaced, not to experience genocide, and so on — let’s call it anti-colonialism — is a good idea to leave lying around, even if it isn’t something we can meaningfully solve in global as opposed to specific and local terms.
At what point does an ” invader “. become “indigenous” how many generations must pass for people born in a country or area of a country to become ” indigenous ” . If you choose britain then it should be handed back to the Kelts or maybe even Neanderthal’ s , here the Comanche would loose out to the caddo as they over ran them around 1750 or whoever lived here before them .
This becomes a very thorny question , for the Brits is someone whose family came from the Indian sub continent are their children British or Indian ? the same here are the children of the ” asylum seekers ” American or not .
The storing up division between ethnic groups always begets strife and at times genocide .
And Now hopefully move on to how small farms can feed the civilisation of the future without strife .
“Nicely and powerfully put. It’s a good lead in to what I hope to be addressing once I’ve stopped arguing with ecomodernists.”
Thanks. That was a quick, spontaneous response. A bit rough, but it has the feel of what I meant to say, I suppose.
While there may be some good faith ecomodernists, their movement — as it seems to me — was the creation of a less than good faith public relations campaign which meant to co-opt the real, actual “green” / “ecological” / “environmental” movements. So you should never stop arguing with it, though it may be a good idea to stop arguing with it. I’l help. I have your back, man! I intend to reveal its primary tropes as a load of horse feathers. Just watch me! Here it comes! I’m not just writing my own stuff, but assembling a team to go for the root of the problem.
“So you should never stop arguing with it, though it may be a good idea to stop arguing with it.”
Ack! Sorry. My fingers on the keyboard got ahead of my thoughts. I meant for the last word there to be “them”.
To argue with an idea or ideology is something very different from arguing with the people who are spreading the idea or ideology around.
Thinking a bit more about indigeneity, membership, and identity…
…it might be helpful to draw a distinction between identification with a group, and formal membership of that group. We can then get into the weeds (though I’d rather not) on who gets to decide what the boundaries or requirements of formal membership are, without that being a threat to anyone’s identity.
So: I identify myself as Christian, that is I hold Christian identity, for reasons that include “trying to follow the teachings of Christ” and various beliefs and traditions that are Christian in nature. But I am a member of a church that determines membership primarily by baptism, and I would not be considered a member of that church without being baptized. This gets tangly, because in fact, there are a bunch of churches who would accept my baptism (even though it was in a different denomination), but might not accept someone else’s — not everyone uses the same formula for baptism and in sacramental matters the formula is important — and there are churches that do not practice baptism at all, and still identify themselves as Christian and have other membership mechanisms. There is also the problem of people who have been baptized (often as infants) but do not identify themselves as Christian…
Usually when I use the word “Christian” I am talking about people who identify themselves as Christian, rather than in the sense of individuals who have been baptized, because then I am neither invalidating the Christian identity of someone from a denomination with different membership practices, nor telling someone who does not identify themselves as Christian but has been baptized that they are “really” Christian whether they want to be or not. I am fundamentally happy to sit with a “well, maybe; but God is merciful and ineffable and we have to hope God will sort it out in some satisfactory manner” in these cases. Someone with a much more authoritative theological and ontological view of what happens at baptism, though, might use the word “Christian” to refer only to people who have been baptized. And someone with a less sacramentally technical view of the whole thing, but with a strong personal piety and expectation of the same from others, might use “Christian” only to refer to people who go to church.
This does all get massively more complicated when we get into the claims around indigeniety, land access, righting past colonial wrongs, and so on; I am not trying to claim that issues of religious identity and membership are one and the same as those of indigeneity, ancestry and so on. I do think that the distinction between identity and membership might be a useful concept to take into such a discussion, though.
Further thoughts on colonialism: is it accurate to frame it as another sort of enclosure? Are the colonial mindset and the enclosing mindset basically the same?
Where the re-wilding folks get messed up is in thinking re-wilding is about further enclosing land, and then leaving it alone. I suspect that re-wilding ourselves (guerilla gardening and all) and consciously integrating our lives into some kind of balance with the rest of the ecosystem is a form of de-colonialism or un-enclosure, perhaps even the end goal of un-enclosure. Ideally it’s a societal project, not an individual one, though individuals might be at various points along the way at any given time.
I have 20kg of apples to process (and no cider press, not even a crummy little plastic electric juicer) and need to get all the dried beans and winter squash in (and home, by bicycle) before going away on 9th October so might not be about much, please stop being interesting for a bit.
Quick! Reach out in your neighborhood for someone with a cider press!
Doing much coordination before 9th October also seems unlikely, to be honest. There is someone at the allotment with a cider press, but their pressing day will be 15th October.
I think the moral of the story here is that I need to delay going away a bit more than I did this year.
Let those apples ferment a while before you press them. Adds to the flavour and “bite”!
Apples store great when refrigerated. Anybody near by with a walk in cooler that isn’t completely full ? Somebody with a spare (beer?) fridge parked in their garage ? Maybe two spots, 20kg of apples would be about a bushel, 1.25 cubic feet.
*laughs in East London*
Greg — I live with two other adults in a house that is about 700 square feet, no basement/cellar and no garage. So do most of my neighbours, though a lot of these two-bedroom.houses have been subdivided into poky one-bed flats.
Any apples that I think won’t keep for a few weeks at room temperature or can’t be dehydrated, frozen (… freezer space is at something of a premium though) will go with me to church on Sunday for the soup kitchen, so they won’t be wasted. But I have to shift those by bicycle too, and for complicated reasons my church is about six and a half miles away.
Since you are chopping apples, make them into apple sauce and can it. Goes great on pancakes or ice cream in the winter.
@Greg
Thank you for this unsolicited advice.
I do actually know *how* to process apples, and indeed how best to store them in my context. But it does still take time, and I have less than a week now until I go away, and the apples are not the only thing I need to deal with between now and then.
I believe this article, which I wrote this morning, discusses a crucial component at the heart of all we’ve been discussing here.
2023 – 2033, The Decisive Decade
https://rword.substack.com/p/2023-2033-the-decisive-decade
We are all ready there , watching the shortages of equipment slowly building there is no way to get to a renewable future , here in TX new wind generators are standing idle as there is no cable to hook them to the grid and some of those that are connected to the grid can’t run at full output because the cables are to thin to carry the load , they used what they could get . That’s just cable never mind the shortage of transformers and insulators , there will soon be a shortage of cable splicing clamps , our local provider is splicing cables instead of replacing it . Germany has closed wind turbine manufacture and both the north sea and the gulf of Mexico have no bids to build offshore wind farms .
Keep a watch on diesel the fuel that’s supposed to power is to the brave new electric world , there too are shortages , bulk shipping has ordered economy over speed , drivers have been ordered to stop idling engines to keep the ac going .
There is not enough energy now to build out renewables , the party is over .
That’s a fascinating, disturbing and certainly newsworthy bit of reportage, Diogenese10! Where do you find these kinds of stories? Are they in the news anywhere?
If you’re willing to develop a piece on this perspective with me, I’d be happy for us to co-author it and publish it both in The R-Word and in Resilience.
https://www.tpr.org/business/2022-08-03/home-builders-advised-of-transformer-supply-shortages
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/shortage-changed-how-utilities-are-adapting-supply-chain-issues
Two for a start , cable splicing and transformers are from my pole truck driving friend working for ercot .
Trying to find written information on articles heard on local radio .
Thanks for the research assistance Diogenese10 !
That is a crucial point. But very unpopular. It has been brought up here several times but has not gained any traction. Once you have the analysis, how do you crack the hard shell of any kind of modernism ?
@Chris
Just to throw my tuppence into the debate about….
“So my question is whether to do something to agitate against RePlanet’s moonshot nonsense, or just get on with my own stuff?”
Ecomodernism is a dead end. It’s not going to happen. Or if it does it will be small scale and short lived.
So why bother getting into a debate with ecomoderists?
It would be like getting into a debate about colonies on Mars or asteroid mining.
All a bit pointless, unless of course, you like having the debate?
“Getting on with my own stuff” for me, has two prongs.
One is to learn about the practical skills that will be required when modernity comes to an end.
How to grow food in general.
How to preserve food when electric refrigeration is no longer an option.
How to collect wood when chainsaws and I.C.E vehicles are no longer an option.
etc, etc, etc………
Two is more about pondering what a SFF society might look like. This is all a bit more vague and speculative.
I’ve been reading Just Enough by Azby Brown. Interesting look at Edo Japan and how they managed a sustainable society/economy with a stable population (30 million) and resource management.
The big question for me is……..
Is it possible to have a sustainable society like that of Edo Japan without the whole society being held together, ultimately, by the threat of (State) violence??????
How do people manage resources sustainably, if some people don’t want to play by the rules and, for example, cut down all the trees????
It’s also important to consider the rate at which we might transition from “modernity” to whatever may be coming after. If the rate is too fast, you can be sure that a lot of nuclear power plants will melt down, because they depend on grid electricity to run the pumps that pump in the cooling water. I think I read that there were around 500 such plants in the world, so if something goes off the rails bad enough and fast enough, having that old fashioned two man (or one man) manual saw and a way to keep it sharp, and the skills to so so, will be of very limited utility.
Personally, I think we should begin to decommission all nuclear reactors yesterday. Or sooner.
Actually, given the extreme fragility of our financial system, a sudden and dramatic breakdown there could lead directly to the extinction of most or all life on Earth due to nuclear power plants meltdowns. But, hey, “whatever man. You win some, you lose some.”
….
Edit:
Operable nuclear power reactors worldwide 2023, by country
As of May 2023, there were 436 nuclear reactors in operation in 32 countries around the world. The United States had the largest number of nuclear power reactors in operation at the time, at 93 units. Operable nuclear reactors are those connected to the grid.
@James R Martin
I try not to dwell on nuclear reactors too much!!!!!
Too scary!!!
I live about 10 miles down wind of Hinckley Point!!!!!!
Here in the UK, the nuclear reactors are nicely and evenly spaced around the UK coastline.
Nowhere would be safe, if they were all left to dereliction.
I read somewhere recently that someone in France had calculated that, to decommission the 50+ French nuclear reactors, would bankrupt the country.
Makes my attempts to create an efficient solar food dehydrater seen quite insignificant .
The vast majority of nuclear power plants also have emergency backup generators for use in the event of a sudden electrical power cut, and can be switched off (and kept cool while the reactions die down) using that backup power.
Hinckley Point has the additional safety measure of an environmental containment system designed to contain the results of a coolant loss or failure accident. Third generation PWRs are not only capable of containing a coolant loss, but containing an actual meltdown. Post-Fukushima, older nuclear reactor designs in the West have had upgraded backup generators added.
None of this means that nuclear accidents don’t or can’t happen, but 500 nuclear meltdowns at once isn’t something that keeps me up at night.
@Kathryn
“The vast majority of nuclear power plants also have emergency backup generators for use in the event of a sudden electrical power cut, and can be switched off (and kept cool while the reactions die down) using that backup power”
I’d like to think they ALL had backup power. And backup for the backup!!!!
Thanks for the book recommendation John – was the Edo period when Japan shut itself off from the world? I’m not so far from Hinkley – I wish it wasn’t there for all sorts of reasons but there’s no where in the UK that isn’t fairly close to a nuclear power plant – I read an article about sellafield not long ago – essentially the place is falling apart faster than they can decommission it – the author wrote about passing crumbling buildings that had temporary lead screens over parts of them and which were being repaired at great expense so they stood up long enough to be decommissioned safely. Radio 4 had a program about size well A a few years ago – it’s decommissioning was going to take longer and employ more people that generating phase had. I wonder about our new coalmine in Cumbria as well – nice and close to all that radioactive waste at sellafield that needs to go somewhere and as the people of Cumbria already have it they’re less able to oppose it being put in long term storage there.
@Bruce
Yes. The Edo period was between 1606-1868.
It all came to an end when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo (Edo) harbour and forced the Japanese to open up their boarder/economy to the rest of the world.
I have to admit that my ignorance of Japanese history is pretty comprehensive!!!!
It’s quite remarkable that from 1868 to 1905, Japan industrialised to the point where they defeated the Russian navy. With very few natural resources on home soil.
We’ve all got about the same amount of time to do the whole process in reverse!!!!!!
The book is really fascinating and shows what is possible. Well worth a read if you get hold of a copy (eBay). My one concern is that it was a very authoritarian society.
My ignorance of Japanese history is confirmed.
Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1854 not 1864.
But still…. pretty impressive industrialization in 60 years!!!
Coal is actually pretty horrible in terms of radioactive waste material, too.
@ Chris (and all others here) –
There’s a fellow who has been a frequent commenter following articles published at Resilience.org, who keeps insisting that moving a lot of people from the cities to rural areas in order to have a rural agrarian small farm future won’t be possible for various reasons, and one of the main reasons he cities is the fact that the soil in the rural megafarms of the present has been profoundly stripped by industrial agriculture, and is basically just dead substrate rather than living soil. It lacks fertility.
And he’d agree that it can be returned to fertility over time, but he likes to give the impression that refugees to such places would starve in the time it would take to try and recover that fertility.
How would you, Chris, and others here too, respond to this objection to the idea of re-ruralizing a significant potion of our present rural dwellers in a low energy and low inputs future rural agrarianism?
But it’s not like there is going to be a choice!!!!
Cities without lots of fossil fuels are unsustainable. People in cities are going to starve.
So it’s the countryside or bust. Whether the soil is poor quality or not. We all better start making biochar!
It’s simple: all we have to do is compost the rich….
😉
Seriously, though, unless the shift happens very suddenly indeed this seems unlikely.
Improving soil fertility substantially is certainly possible on a pretty short timescale using hand tools — a few years, not decades.
Further, even in a severe famine it seems unlikely that absolutely everyone would starve immediately. Most of the city-dwellers around me have significant energy stores and could survive for some time at below their daily energy expenditure.
Besides all of that, the cities currently get their food from that same stripped, depleted soil. It’s not like people who decide to stay in cities in a low energy future without industrial agricultural inputs are going to be eating any better than their rural counterparts.
Well for starters, echoing John & Kathryn, any problems of stripped soils faced by small farm rural communities apply a fortiori to industrial farm urban communities, so this doesn’t work as an argument against a small farm future.
But I think he’s overstating things. Nitrogen is a quick-cycling nutrient that’s easy enough to furnish – besides which, most industrial farmscapes are flush with it … and with P and K too. It may be true that the minor elements have been depleted in many soils. Still, a lot of people aren’t getting much of them anyway with low-diversity modern diets. IMO this doesn’t count among the major problems we face in the short term. But in the longer term, I think it could become a critically limiting factor – and it’s (another) one weighing against urbanism and industrial farming, not against a small farm future. We can’t keep flushing these nutrients down the sewers and out to sea indefinitely (peak phosphate is a widely discussed issue). Hence the need to cycle wastes (including human wastes) locally. In the long run, I believe humanity will need diverse horticultures involving complex rhizospheres and the cycling of human, plant and animal wastes locally to avoid stripping soils. Which is another argument for the inevitability of a small farm future.
I also wonder whether your commenter’s objection to re-ruralization would be so strong if it were framed as decentralisation and democratization.
A tangent I think about (I really ought to be chopping apples but here I am) is around food adulteration and community size. When I buy flour, I trust that it doesn’t have lead in it to make it look whiter… because I know there is a system of food inspection and similar, and it has just enough teeth that in general people aren’t adding that sort of thing to flour.
In the absence of a functional, centralised state apparatus, I would have to find another way to ascertain whether the flour is safe to eat. Probably the easiest way to do that — again in the absence of a functional, centralised state to enforce food safety standards — would be to have some kind of positive, direct relationship with the farmer.
(And food safety with wheat flour can be more complex than simply “there are no toxic additives” — darnel is pretty hard to distinguish from wheat until it’s too late, and can be infected by a fungus which makes the resulting flour a dangerous intoxicant… modern sorting equipment means we rarely worry about this now, just as modern drying equipment, pre-harvest dessication etc means we worry a lot less about whether it’s going to rain just when we need to be harvesting the wheat So I need to trust the farmer’s competence, not just their honesty.)
A quick response to a few of the new threads:
– Nice article, James. And a good bit of citizen science brewing there. ‘Energy cannibalism’ is a term that’s sometimes used (this paper that I’ve discussed before addresses it briefly on p.78189: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9837910 – it’s predictably dismissive of the problem, but not very convincingly IMO. There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this beyond just the energy inputs into manufacturing renewable generating facilities. I hope to say more about this soon, so definitely want to keep a watching brief on this issue and your analyses.
– Agree on nuclear. Extraordinary cultural hubris. Another poisonous and possibly terminal legacy left to our descendants.
– On engaging with the ecomodernists … well, I basically agree with the pointlessness of it. It’s just that given I’ve not yet had any empirical pushback on the impossible energetics of bacterial food I’m thinking that my analysis is probably right, and I’d like to raise the profile of that if I can. But, again, yeah, pointlessness…
– On indigeneity, maybe I should clarify that I’m absolutely behind the endless need to remember that land was taken violently, and that finding reconciliation with that is a just demand. How best to achieve it is another question, on which my voice counts for little. But I wonder if Katherine’s Christian example illustrates some of the difficulties? It’s not an exact parallel, but suppose a modern state announced a restitution for past wrongs against Christians involving material benefits directed to present Christians, with the decisions about how to organise it left to present Christians through an assembly of their formally constitued churches. I’m wondering if addressing poverty and racism more directly might be a better way to go?
– Also maybe I should clarify that I firmly believe there are indigenous cultures and agroecosystems that have important lessons for people today. These include ones figured out by Europeans and their descendants here and there. In other words, maybe there’s a need not to reify indigeneity as a property of the ‘non-West’? I’ve found Tyson Yunkaporta good on this.
– On nation-states, indeed my point was that they’re an unstable historical form that are on their way out, and I wish we didn’t invest so much of our efforts on claims in respect of them that assume their longevity. But we do have to reckon with them one way or another (the ‘we’ encompassing humanity … and other organisms, I guess).
– On colonialism, I think there are different kinds. I don’t think all of them are reducible to enclosure, but all of them involve it. Anyway, more on that another time.
– Thanks for the Azby Brown reference, John. I hope to follow up on it. I think I’ll leave your two closing questions hanging as prompts for future discussion.
‘On engaging with the ecomodernists …’
Instead of engaging directly with the ecomodernists (‘you ecomodernists are wrong’), my suggestion was more about engaging with the non-ecomodernists (‘don’t be fooled by the ecomodernists, here’s why they are wrong’). I think this is beneficial, not pointless.
Yes, good point. I suppose the two issues for me there are (1) what’s the best forum for me, without much of a media platform, to try to press that ‘don’t be fooled’ message? (2) even without engaging directly with the ecomodernists, I’d still be engaging with their arguments, and it gets a bit dispiriting. I spent a good while writing ‘Saying NO…’ because I wanted a considered critique and alternative to be out there in the public domain. I’ve now achieved that, and the book seems to have had some modest success but of course the ecomods are going to keep on keeping on with their ‘dismiss or ignore’ tactics, which are likely to be more successful than my attempts to say ‘listen to me’ given the funding and ideological resources they have.
Comments welcome!
@Chris.
I think that a big part of the problem is that most people want the ecomoderists to be right.
That tech/science will save the day and we can all continue with our lives.
I’ve stopped telling friends that modernity is doomed. It doesn’t make me very popular ! People would rather not know. And those that do, already do.
Bingo. I mean, I sometimes wish they were right, and I definitely don’t like the idea of eating studge and never getting my hands dirty.
If they were right, though — if cheap, clean and limitless energy were really just around the corner — that could be amazingly good news for all the people in the world now who are exploited or live in fear for their lives because of war, pestilence or famine.
I think some kind of low-energy future is vastly more likely though.
Since ‘Saying NO…’ is not getting substantial attention in the mainstream media, most people (including many authors and academics) are probably happily unaware that ecomodernist ‘solutions’ like ‘food from the air’ are energetic dead ends. The Replanet narrative presents synthesized foods as ‘sustainable’ alternatives to farming, and the media allows such claims to go unchallenged, reinforcing the narrative.
It’s obviously not enough to just write a book, hence the promotional activities afterward. ‘Agitating’ could be seen as a form of book promotion, but it goes much further than that. It would be presenting uncomfortable yet important facts about the ecomodernist narrative which the mainstream media (and corporate funders) have been withholding, effectively preventing the information from influencing the general public opinion.
I agree with your reasoning … I’m just not sure if I’ve got the personal energy to carry through with it.
What I’d probably be up for doing is:
– Writing an alternative open letter to RePlanet’s. But where should I try to publicise it?
– Recording a short video laying out the issues. Same question.
– Writing to most of the great & the good who endorsed RePlanet’s letter, drawing their attention to the problems.
@Chris
Isn’t the answer to this the same as “OK, where do I get decent news from these days?”
Try the Byline Times. Try the FT. Maybe try Private Eye. I imagine you might need different pitching strategies for these two media outlets, but people who are looking for something other than Monbiot aren’t going to be looking in the Grauniad.
@Kathryn
“If they were right, though — if cheap, clean and limitless energy were really just around the corner — that could be amazingly good news for all the people in the world now who are exploited or live in fear for their lives because of war, pestilence or famine.”
I think what you say raises an interesting point.
If a cheap, limitless, clean energy source was ever discovered would it actually be a good thing……????
Our capacity to destroy the natural environment is mostly down to cheap abundant fossil fuels and the machines that go along with them.
A limitless new energy source could be the last nail in the ecological coffin.
@John
I said “could” rather than “would” partly because the abundant energy we have had from fossil fuels hasn’t, in fact, been used to ensure that every human being lives a dignified and worthwhile life. We did create a middle class, but we also massively increased inequality.
I don’t consider fossil fuel energy cheap. It might have a low immediate monetary price, but it is, environmentally, extremely costly.
Taking a leaf out of somebody else’s book,
they say sometimes you have to move fast and break things,
to make people look up…
why not strap a copy of saying NO
onto the next Cornish rocket that’s lined up to go
where few men have ever gone before,
though one once launched into orbit a fancy car
I’m loving all of this conversation about the media’s role in shaping and distributing the narratives we live by, and how relatively weak the voices of real truth tellers are, as contrasted with the voices who advocate for BAU, business, corporations, etc.
What I think all of us should be doing is challenging this media power, even if doing so means putting up our own alternative media … by consolidating our minoritarian powers. That’s essentially political action, but how often do we talk about political action as media action?
We must understand, I think, that the technofix, ecomodernist, technocratic, corporatist, WEF style of approach to energy / ecology / economy topics has simply co-opted the green / environmental / ecological movement, and they did this by shaping the media and public relations using the might of their dollars, pounds and other currencies.
We can allow this to continue, or we can consolidate our own media power through organizing all of the networks we’re a part of… folks who are aligned with us and our narrative framing. It may not work, but I’m tired of not trying in a real way. Let’s give it a real try?! Worst thing that can happen is that we tried and failed.
Who are our allies in publishing and media? Let’s identify our allies and collaborate with them to shift the Narrative.
Resilience.org seems to be willing to publish serious critiques of the dominator co-opters. But their audience is relatively small. Who else?
@James
I think that you are absolutely right. It is the stories that people hear that influence how they think. If all you hear is ‘Donald Trump is the only one telling the truth’ , that is what you believe. It is very hard to break through the self selected, self enforcing media consumption.
It should be noted that before the Greens failed as a political party they were a movement that organized around Committees of Correspondence via the USPS. Anything should be better than that.
Although, it was fun to get real mail…
Thanks Chris and others for your responses to my question about soil fertility (stripped industrial soil) above. The same fellow who says that the only lands likely to accommodate large numbers of small farmers in a urban to rural refugee situation (one way of naming it) would be presently held by vast industrial scale “farmers” … or “operations”, also says that the amount of energy which would be necessary to facilitate such a demographic shift (building homes, “infrastructure…” in such rural places, would exceed keeping folks put in the city. I would argue that they’d probably use mostly locally available materials and build very small homes, but this was not persuasive to my interlocutor. I figured a lot of folks would probably be using stuff like adobe bricks (using local clay), straw clay methods of various kinds, and stone — perhaps with clay rather than cement based mortar. I figured it would be labor intensive rather than energy intensive.
Basically, this fellow says the whole project is basically impossible, that the modern world is painted into a corner from which there can be no escape. Others have said that without the Haber–Bosch chemical fertilizer that most of humanity would simply starve to death.
It would be wonderful if there were a book (and/or a website) which could persuasively address all of these claims of impossibility, one by one.
@James R Martin
Sorry to keep banging on about it but Just Enough by Azby Brown addresses some of your questions above.
There is a whole chapter on house building in particular. Nothing was wasted and at the end of a building’s life all the materials were recycled, used as fuel or returned to the soil/land.
Thanks John Adams. I’m looking into Azby Brown and Just Enough.
@James R. Martin
Also, there are lots of people out there doing all the practical stuff.
Have you looked at……
https://permies.com
There is so much content on the site, I can rarely keep up!!!!
Lots of people, with lots of good ideas, doing lots of practical stuff.
I had a little time this evening to read Jeremy Williams’ review. It seems that he is missing the point that the reason there are so many people is that the Haber Bosch process, the ‘green revolution’ of the ’70s and the use of half the world’s resources since the 1960s made it possible. If those conditions cease to exist, how do all the people continue to exist ?
Here and in the rest of the corn belt it is very clear which edges and corners of the fields missed out on the spring application of anhydrous ammonia. The plants are 3/4 size and a sickly light green color. I can see that in the heavier clay soil just across the fence line. It is really that obvious.
Chemical nitrogen is water soluble and leaches out of the soil. The issue of hypoxia around the world indicates the end point of agricultural fertilizer. There is very little residual fertility in conventional farm soil. It took between 4-6 years to bring the soil on this farm back to life. After decades of conventional agriculture I was adding fifteen tons if compost per acre and practiced serious cover cropping to grow a reasonable vegetable crop.
People moving out of cities are going to have a very hard time of it unless there is a great plan in place to provide shelter and a means to feed themselves. Here is the US we seem to have a hard time coming up with a plan to keep the lights on in our government. A plan to reestablish 1910 levels of rural population does not appear too likely.
@ Greg R –
This stuff is really, really complicated. The Haber-Bosch process chemical fertilizer, combined with ever increasing size and capability of mechanical farming equipment, dramatically reduced the need for human labor — or units of production in proportion to units of human labor … in food production. (This enabled folks to have lots of other kinds of “jobs” — and it allowed a luxury-based economy to emerge — and then to become “necessary” to avoid economic collapse.)
To grow food in other ways is certainly possible, but requires a LOT more units of human labor per unit of production (e.g., apples, potatoes, wheat, corn, tomatoes….). So I don’t think there is necessarily a mass human die-off coming should we have to phase out Haber-Bosch fertilizer. What will certainly happen is that farms will become much smaller — much, much smaller, and will be using a LOT more endosomatic, and less exosomatic energy. And the luxury dependent economy will collapse. And jobs will dry up and blow away. And folks working lives will involve a lot more food growing and preserving, and making basic shelter, maintaining it, and so on.
Unfortunately, however, this will all be occurring during a time of relative climate chaos, so clearly it’s not going to be an easy or smooth transition to whatever comes after technological-industrial-capitalist modernity.
The graph here puts everything into some perspective.: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-18/what-is-a-luxury-economy-really/
Just a few further remarks on this.
It may be true that “the modern world is painted into a corner from which there can be no escape”. My arguments for a small farm future aren’t about magic solutionism, but least bad decision-making in present circumsttances. A lot depends on the rapidity of collapse, which is likely to be uneven globally, so there will probably be small farm futures *somewhere*. Again, though, I think it’s hard to argue that urbanism is a more resilient settlement geography in a situation of rapid collapse, except inasmuch as existing urban-centric states prioritise the needs of urban areas. But that can only be a short-term palliative.
On soil nutrition, I think it’s true that we wouldn’t have a human population of 8 billion+ without Haber-Bosch. That’s not the same as saying that without Haber-Bosch, billions would starve. I’m much less convinced about the population-increasing consequences of the Green Revolution, which in my view was more about preserving the socio-political status quo, at longer term negative cost. I agree with James that these innovations were largely about shedding labour from agriculture.
Bear in mind also the massive overproduction of arable crops relative to human nutritional needs – I forget the exact figure on how much of the US corn crop goes to feeding people directly, but I believe it’s much less than 10%. And the varieties that are grown are the ones that are responsive to high N application. So I’m not convinced the vicious circle is quite so hard to break. No doubt Greg’s right about the difficulties of using industrially farmed soils in terms of residual N … but there’s also a lot of accumulated N in the landscape that can be used for horticultural production. Human labour is the key.
Regarding the energy demands of ruralization, I daresay this would present genuine problems in some or many places – but it will unquestionably be less than the energy demands of ongoing urbanism. Putting figures to it is nigh on impossible, and I haven’t seen anyone try. I’d be interested if anyone could point me to any studies that have tried. But only moderately interested – it’s one of those areas where the obsession with quantification easily turns pathological.
Regarding this from James “It would be wonderful if there were a book (and/or a website) which could persuasively address all of these claims of impossibility, one by one”: one part of me enthusiastically puts my hand up to volunteer, another part recoils in horror. Interested in views on this. I might write a post soon inviting a list of what all these claims are.
I wonder whether, rather than a static website or book, a wiki might be one approach to this — it might allow collaboration from some of your more data-minded commenters.
Also, hard agree re: transition happening unevenly and the high likelihood of a small farm future *somewhere*.
The allegedly energy demands of ruralization usually include some unrealistic expectations regarding personal transport and housing density, I think. But a village or even smallish town can have an energy footprint as low as any urban area, if it is densely populated enough that nobody needs a car; and having such villages and towns spread out over the landscape such that nobody has to walk (or maybe cycle) too far to get to their crops seems do-able. I mean, I do love horticulture but we probably aren’t going to stop eating field crops any time soon and the whole point of them is that you don’t need to visit them every three days to pinch out side shoots or whatever. People living in such villages could fairly easily grow microgreens on their windowsills, tomatoes and summer squash and herbs in back gardens and community gathering places like parks, and spuds, beets, carrots, parsnips, winter squash, drying beans and turnips on an allotment that they visit every week or two. Grains or pastures in alleyways of orchards also seem to work reasonably well.
“A lot depends on the rapidity of collapse”
Not wanting to be Debbie Downer here but reality is tough. At 2% growth we will need 20% more resources than we use right now in 10 years. Is that possible ?
Bad things happen to the current economic system when it quits growing. Maybe 10 years to too short a time scale but the point when the growth and depletion lines cross is probably the upper limit for business as usual. What is a realistic number ?
It is not that we can’t feed the world without fossil and non renewable resources, it is that we won’t. Not you and me, but there is a lot of the world out there besides us. They have to start thinking about living on a finite planet too.
Let’s start right here. Put up another tab (and get the Remember Me function working…) and start filling in the pieces. Let people criticize the info. If they are valid it makes a better model. If they are BS, call them out.
“Bad things happen to the current economic system when it quits growing.”
One possible way to talk about this is that we have both “an economy” (or economic system) and finance (a financial system). The financial system is utterly growth dependent, and the present dominant modern of economy in the world — most nations, if not all — is more-or-less glued to the financial system. So if the growth-dependent financial system collapses, so does the economy.
Were we enough in number and influence, we could rapidly grow a movement meant to detach the actual economy from the present growth-dependent financial system. And this is one of the topics we could discuss in the “wiki” Katherine mentioned, or in the forum — “new tab” — space you proposed Greg.
I must say, I very much like the idea of creating a forum attached to this website, where anyone and everyone can share ideas, essays, articles, etc., which enable us to imagine and design an actual path forward from the very stuck place we’re in, whether in the UK, the States, Australia, New Zealand or whervever we happen to be.
But another book can’t hurt! I like paper and pages and all that old fashioned stuff.
The threat of fines and prison time has surely dealt a blow to anyone thinking of actual, physical activism, as Chris has experienced to his cost.
Similarly, it could be the case that those controlling the net increasingly start to shut down content that doesn’t support or align with a mainstream narrative. In fact, it appears likely. And then… I think I for one will be spending a lot more time at play in the fields of the Lord, aka the field our donkey bosses.
Kurt Cobb might have something to say on the resources required for an energy transition away ( that’s not the right word) from fossil fuels –
https://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/
Kurt Cobb is okay, and all that. But it has been my perspective that he’s not solidly opposed to the technofix / ecomodernist response (and co-opting) of old school “green” politics. Indeed, there are ever so few of us who are challenging the bastards! It’s heartbreaking.
Let’s get honest here, almost all those who have not sold out to the Megamachine are reluctant to stand up solidly against it. And, yes, that includes people like Bill McKibben. We can appreciate these people for what they’ve done to move the ball down the field, but the ball is not in a safe place on the field at the moment, and it will take organized courage to move the ball.
Probably not a good time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Do you disagree with his assessment of the resources needed for a conversion to replacing fossil fuel is fossil fuel once removed ? It seems like he has gathered a lot of interesting data. I won’t be afraid to use it.
Same with ourworldindata. Chris thinks they are pro business or otherwise untrustworthy. Their numbers are handy and pretty well line up with the rest of the world’s numbers. Global energy consumption was 179,000 terawatt-hours in 2023 and sorta renewables were 24,000 TW-h. Prefect ? probably not but close enough to show that any talk about completely subbing out fossil fuels is nonsense.
PS –
My main entryway into all things human ecology was ecological design. It fascinated me, and I read lots of books and articles about it. That led me to imagining a world which is basically comprised of ecovillages (at least in essence) — set within bioregionally oriented communities of ecovillages. I do think something like this will be necessary in the future… just to ensure that people have access to livelihood. So ecological design is really at the heart and core of all I do as an eco-cultural philosopher.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ceraweek-brazil-petrobras-idUSKCN2AU2CL.
A few million more acres of Brazil forests replaced by bio jet fuel
(Tecnoutopians must be drooling )
Wow, a lot of ferment bubbling here, and I’m late to the game again.
Some quick comments, focussed on the U.S.:
The vision of a small farm human engagement with the natural world as the end state is good, it’s the getting there…………..
Re James question on how to respond to the arguments posed about how difficult/impossible the resettling of America( a nod to Wendell Berry) will be. I live on a farm in rural Wisconsin. Even here, where there are small towns sprinkled across the land, the majority of people are not farmers. In the U.S., about 17% ( ~57 million people) of the population is rural, but actual farmers is much less, at 3.3 million.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#size
With fossil fuels, the distribution of people on the land with respect to where and how they farm provides some flexibility( and ability to get really big of course). Without fossil fuels, the distribution has to be much more diffuse and connected than it is now.
this link helps characterize farms as economic and productive entities.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/
There will be several difficulties with the transition, some have already been mentioned. Housing and the rest of the infrastructure needed by each farm will be a big lift. In 1900, farmers were about 40% of the population. If a similar ratio were needed today, we would need around 130 million farmers. That would be housing, outbuildings, water wells, all manner of tools and equipment suitable for muscle powered farming, and let’s not forget the horses. Maybe it’s not 40%. Pick a number.
Chris has worked out reasonable scenarios on the biophysics of small farms, so I’m not worried about that, but the transition to get there is problematic, especially in competition with all the other draws on resources being clamored for, not to speak of the crippling debt many countries are already carrying.
I still think small farms will be the best and essentially the default future, but a widespread and timely transition is unlikely, because of the vast effort involved, and the inertia of the political status quo. Even a patchwork of small farm clusters is still worth striving for though.
More to follow…….
A sampling of the information and ‘information’ found at the moonshot letter’s FAQ page:
https://www.fundfuturefood.org/faq
“Is the genetic engineering of food dangerous?”
“…Most of the foods you eat on a daily basis, except for rarities like wild fish, have been genetically modified and are in that sense ‘unnatural’. Teosinte was made into corn through careful selective breeding by Native Americans, and cows, chickens and pigs today barely resemble their ancient counterparts…”
“Isn’t this ultra processed food?”
“Firstly, it’s important to state that the Reboot Food campaign (of which fundfuturefood is one part) starts with the principle that a varied, wholefood, plant-based diet should be the basis of our food system. However, if we want to get serious about transforming our food systems, we need to be grown-ups about the role that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are currently playing.
Today, the standard Western diet is dominated by ultra-processed foods. UPFs account for 60% of calories consumed by Americans – and the figure is similar in many developed economies…”
“Are you planning to campaign to ban animal agriculture?”
“No. RePlanet acknowledges that a dramatic reduction in animal agriculture is necessary to stabilise our climate, improve food security and biodiversity and reduce animal suffering. However, evidence demonstrates that people are more willing to change their behaviour when alternatives are a choice made on grounds such as cost, ease of access, social acceptability, and taste. This is why we advocate for a scaling up of techniques like precision fermentation which will allow alternative proteins to become affordable…
“We haven’t seen mass adoption of plant based alternatives to meat, why do you think this would be different?”
“…So we expect new sustainable proteins like those involving precision fermentation to become tastier, cheaper and more available: however, we need to accelerate their development. Apart from working on taste, price and availability, we know it’s important that more people become aware of the issues with our current (meat/dairy heavy) food system. By raising awareness, people will be more inclined to try alternatives.”
The FundFutureFood moonshot organization says that “By raising awareness, people will be more inclined to try alternatives.” But I think that raising awareness can also have the opposite effect.
For example, strip away the hype and advertising glitter from the “precision fermentation” protein which George Monbiot touted, and it is simply bacterial protein powder which was processed a certain way to supposedly make it not harmful for humans to eat. For someone who becomes aware of these aspects, it seems like bacterial protein powder would be much less appealing than the pea protein powder currently available at the market (for the segment of the population who really want to be consuming protein powder instead of whole legumes and pulses).
It reminds me of an article (linked below) written recently by a proponent of these novel foods, in which he states that “The biggest challenges for microbial foods in terms of both commercial success and beneficial environmental impact will ultimately be consumer acceptance and adoption.” He also says that “A central issue is investor uncertainty regarding consumer enthusiasm…”
Since “consumer acceptance” and “consumer enthusiasm” are contenders for the Achilles heel of microbial foods, I’m not surprised that FundFutureFood wants to “raise awareness” to make people “more inclined to try alternatives”. I wonder how many of those billions in moonshot funding are envisioned for advertising campaigns and other methods for “raising awareness”.
————————————–
Beyond Agriculture ─ How Microorganisms Can Revolutionize Global Food Production
Tomas Linder
ACS Food Science & Technology Article ASAP
DOI: 10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00099
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00099
[free access]
“The biggest challenges for microbial foods in terms of both commercial success and beneficial environmental impact will ultimately be consumer acceptance and adoption. At present, it is not clear whether microbial food products will be able to replace animal-derived foods (meat, eggs, and dairy) within a timespan that is short enough to have any significant impact on slowing climate change…. A central issue is investor uncertainty regarding consumer enthusiasm, which impedes investments into bioreactor infrastructure until there is confidence in the consumer adoption of the corresponding microbial food product.”
Equating selective breeding with gene insertion technologies makes me disinclined to believe any of the rest of what they say, frankly.
Also I suspect UPFs (that’s ultra-processed foods, not ultra-precision fermentation) are a symptom, not a driver, of the overproduction of grains (and oilseeds?) that Chris referred to earlier.
The other thing that I don’t see people talking about much with ultra-precision fermentation is the amount of single-use packaging involved. Almost every meat substitute it’s possible to buy comes in some kind of plastic, and while it’s fair to say that supermarket meat is also very plastic-heavy, I do at least have the option of getting my meat from the local butcher, wrapped in paper.
Thanks for the comments, and apologies I’m short on time to answer them. I’ll ponder the idea of responding to the studge-pushers, and the wider idea of a book or website. Thanks.
This blog post from Dougald Hine popped into my head this morning. So I decided to share it here, whether or not it has been shared here before.
We Need to Talk About George
https://dougald.substack.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-george
Thanks James. Not sure if it’s been shared, but Dougald is always well worth reading, and not just because he namechecks me 🙂
Coincidentally, I’ll be talking with him, Nate Hagens and Pella Thiel this evening on Nate’s ‘Reality Roundtable’ podcast on the topic of ‘Food and community in the ruins’, which I guess will see the light of day at some future point.
It’s not a romantic attraction, or merely an intellectual appreciation, and I would not become a dangerous stalker or mad fiend. But I have something like a human-to-human embodied, Earthy heart crush for Dougald. It isn’t longing, or merely appreciation, but some kind of That Man Is Deeply In My Heart thing. It’s unique to him. I hear his voice and I can relax and open up in ways I can’t even quite understand. He’s like a brother by another mother. And we’ve never met … except in text.
And while he’s a kind of hero to me, it’s got none of that icky-sticky hero worship vibe at all. I think of him and am just glad he’s here in (not on) this planet with me. He’s not my guru, that’s for sure!
In not on, because — atmosphere.
Oh, I am glad Nate Hagens has finally sorted out a conversation with you! I look forward to listening.