Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
Posted on September 13, 2023 | 94 Comments
It’s time to turn my attention to a blog cycle fully focused around my recent book Saying NO to a Farm Free Future, after dallying with various preambles and tangents in recent posts. I don’t plan to turn it into quite the marathon that the cycle around my previous book became, but a few posts to fill out some of the material in Saying NO seems worthwhile.
But let’s start slow, with nothing more than a few thoughts on the epigraph on page ix of the book, some words I chose from Mikhail Bakhtin:
The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed.
I wrote a post recently about Bakhtin’s amazing book Rabelais and His World, from which the quotation is taken. That post is probably useful background to what I’m going to say here. Anyway, let me parse out Bakhtin’s sentences and explain why I think they complement the criticisms of food system techno-fixes I make in my book.
The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world…
Bakhtin’s immediate point bears on his theme of medieval carnivals. He says that carnival laughter wasn’t directed only outward at others but was also turned on itself – the people do not exclude themselves from the absurdity of the world they mock.
I find this apposite to my critique of ecomodernism in a different, but perhaps related, sense. Ecomodernists want to separate people from everyday ecological implication in the wider world of organic being as far as possible, purportedly for the benefit of both (high-energy urbanism, not low-energy ruralism; land sparing, not land sharing; synthetic biology, not mixed farming etc.) But I don’t think this separation is possible. And, to the extent that it is, I don’t think it will bring the benefits touted for it. On the contrary, I think it’s likely to promote further alienation and ecocide. Ultimately, humans aren’t going to protect the rest of creation from their own actions by excluding themselves from it.
Sticking closer to Bakhtin’s original, I think there’s a conceit at the root of ecomodernist techno-fixing that humans are the authors of our fate, the subjects and not the objects of history, the orchestrators of the experiment and not its hapless subjects, prescient and dignified sages rather than clueless and pratfalling clowns. This view accords godlike powers to humanity that set it above the everyday dramas of the natural world. But in my opinion the dignified sage is only ever a pratfall away from the clueless clown. Ecomodernist conceits are best answered with the laughter of the carnival that does not exclude itself from the wholeness of the world.
…They, too, are incomplete
We humans are base, fleshly creatures who too easily fail to perceive the limits of our understanding. We need to keep remembering to take ourselves down a peg or two. Hence the antipathy of the carnival spirit to high-ups lording it over people and solemnly intoning the fixed dogmas by which they believe their superiority is assured (these high-ups, by the way, can easily be progressive modernists insisting on forms of collectivism and equality as higher truths).
In relation to modernism – ecomodernism’s parent ideology, as I argue in Chapter 6 of my book – I think this means getting over our modern selves a bit, their tendency to the smug supposition that everything about past societies was terrible, their conviction of their own clear-sightedness, their sense of modern knowledge impelling us onwards and upwards towards a better future. Humans so easily get trapped within specific cultural frameworks, with their limited dreams of liberation that can readily turn nightmarish. As per Eric’s comment under my last post, it’s time to question the modernist notion that moving from agrarian ruralism to a cash-fuelled urbanism is a step up the ladder of the universe. The people, too, are incomplete.
In relation to ecomodernist takes on the food system, my fear is that claims to complete and superior knowledge will be used to discriminate against and dispossess small-scale, local and indigenous farmers on the basis of tendentious evidence concerning climate impacts, wildlife impacts and efficiency. Indeed, it’s already happening. Against this solemn self-superiority of completed knowledge, I propose a carnivalesque inversion. Drub these catchpoles! (Figuratively, of course).
On these points, I must again commend Maren Morgan’s critique of Monbiot’s Regenesis in her essay The Quantitative Cosmology, which addresses the deep history of the claim “I’m right, and my data prove it!” – a claim that’s probably been even more useful than raw might in modern times to those in power. Bakhtin’s emphasis on the dialogic nature of knowledge is also informative here. Knowledge is an endless conversation that’s always open to new twists and reversals, never a monologue of authoritative truth. So it’s not like the dialectics favoured by the Marxists (another solemnly self-legitimating claim to higher truth), nor like any number of policy recommendations supposedly based in what ‘the science says’. My point is not that ‘the science’ is wrong, usually. It’s just that science and policy are largely incommensurate, and always incomplete.
…They also die and are revived and renewed.
Our fleshly bodies grow old, decay and die. Out of decrepitude springs new life. Modern culture recognises this intellectually, as a fact of nature. But by God do we fight against it culturally and spiritually. We celebrate the increased longevity of modern lives, with little thought given to what exactly we’re celebrating. We try to micromanage out of existence every potential harm except critical ones that get in the way of managerialism itself, like wholesome food and a liveable climate. We talk glibly about the need to rewild ourselves if we’re to rewild nature. But actually we duck this challenge, striving mightily to avoid making ourselves vulnerable protagonists in the ecological dance of life and death, to avoid the uncertainty and contingency of wildness.
…which is okay, up to a point. Inevitably, every organism tries to stack the odds in its favour to the best of its abilities. It’s just that humans have got really good at it (albeit that the odds favour some humans a lot more than others), to a point of such unconscious self-domestication and all-too-obvious ecological destruction that some people genuinely believe it’s better to replace the messy, open, dirty, multispecies bioreactor of the cow’s stomach that gives us meat and milk with an aseptic, closed, single-species, stainless steel bioreactor that gives us ‘energy-dense food’.
Now, bioreactor-formed ‘energy-dense food’ might conceivably be a better bet for preserving wild creatures than modern, de-peopled arable agriculture based on the profligate leakage of biocidal agrochemicals across the planetary skin (or at least it could be if it didn’t depend on biocidal electricity generation), but if your fondest hopes for rewilding lie in the proliferation of aseptic steel bioreactors rather than peopled local agricultures whose protagonists get endless dirty feedback from the ecology of which they form a part, then I believe you’ve trapped yourself within an impossibly contradictory ideology that simultaneously over-elevates humans above other organisms in its claims to godlike control and debases them in its claims about humanity’s scourging of nature. Please give me what Monbiot calls ‘bucolic fairytales’ or ‘neo-peasant bullshit’ and what I call agrarian localism, agrarian populism or a small farm future over this sad dualism.
An ecomodernist fear of death seems to lurk behind all this. One example I mentioned recently is Monbiot’s strictures against woodstoves, whose health impacts he compares unfavourably to fossil fuels. The blank celebration of human longevity and the proliferating cargo mentalities of the present historical moment – longtermism, accelerationism, transhumanism, fully automated luxury communism and so forth – all speak to a modernist cultural malaise that betrays its own senility, a desperate clinging on to the outward signs of life. I think we need a better embrace of death as a means toward renewal.
For Bakhtin’s carnival participants, renewal was a joyous human victory over a threatening nature that their superiors tried to use as an instrument of social control. All human life in some sense has to define itself against nature, but modern culture does it badly. It’s time for a different dialogue. It’s time for us to die and be revived and renewed.
Maybe the ecomodernist fear of death arises precisely from the urban alienation it insists is necessary from the grubby business of making a livelihood out of the earth. To anyone who farms or gardens, death and renewal are obvious realities – sometimes painful and unpleasant, but necessary. As with natural ecosystems, they involve a plethora of different organisms, wild and domesticated (including the farmer) interacting in ways that might look like a beautiful symphony to a disinterested observer standing outside it all, but whose individual parts can be brutal. To the extent that many people now live in ignorance of these realities or even presume to have transcended them, I think we’ve come to pathologise death in a way that itself has become pathological.
I wrote recently about the need for a deep cultural transformation to overcome these pathologies, prompting one of my socialist antagonists to remark that this had finally proved my exit from the fold and the error of my ways. There are many people on the left with whom I remain friendly, but I accept this excommunication. I don’t have much to say to anyone who thinks the present meta-crisis can be solved simply with new tech, more collectivism and fairer economic distribution, important as all those things can be. I’ve traced in recent posts some aspects of contemporary class conflict, but this is boiling up into a cultural conflict which will divide people from the same families and communities. Its closest analogues perhaps are religious and civil wars of the past.
I hope it won’t become a real war, but I fear it might. When I write stuff along the lines of this post, I find it resonates with many of my correspondents but some dismiss it as waffle or gobbledygook, before reiterating their commitment to an engineered human progress that they claim will deliver more instrumental control over the world, and longer, more easeful human lives. To me, this is the real gobbledygook. And I doubt these two alternative gobbledygooks can coexist peacefully for long.
Finally, it only occurred to me as I sat down to write this post that my epigraph was appropriate given Bakhtin’s concern for carnival (=putting away flesh or meat) alongside Monbiot’s concern to banish livestock farming of every kind. Carnival and Lent. The calendrical rituals of our medieval forebears suggest they knew perhaps better than some of us today that – for meat as for many other things – there is a time to indulge, and a time to abstain.
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
I think I broadly agree with this.
It is prompting thoughts, for me, of the incongruence of some juxtaposed beliefs within Christian theology — both that sin is bad and ultimately death is a consequence of sin (on a cosmic, not an individual, level), and also that sin and death do not have the last word. For me, lived Christian faith is a sort of tension between these two things: striving to live in ways that reduce my harm to others and creation (and what is sin, but harm to others and creation?) while also accepting that I am going to mess up, I am never going to be perfect, and throwing myself on the mercy of Divine forgiveness. There is even an element of accepting the things we deem imperfect or impure or unclean as also being divine in some way beyond our understanding — Jesus ate and drank and wept and bled and, presumably, shat, though somehow the latter doesn’t make it into scripture or holy relics (to my knowledge). But we are told that the risen Christ ate fish on the beach with his friends; that the risen Christ bears the marks of the crucifixion, and these are at once beautiful and horrible. Pain is part of life.
On a rather more mundane level (and yet related) I am reminded of the response I get from various other gardeners when we talk about slugs and snails. Many of those who (rightly) refuse to use slug pellets also refuse any other method of killing the slugs, resorting to very expensive copper or wool deterrent barriers around plants, because on some level it isn’t the petrochemicals and the balance of harm to soil life that bothers them about the pellets, it’s the killing itself. These are people who are almost always horrified when I tell them that I use nematodes sometimes but my primary strategy for dealing with slugs is to go around the plot in damp early evening conditions with a designated pair of scissors. When one slug is cut in half, a few more usually come to the party, so a few circuits will take care of quite a lot of our gastropod friends. “I am become the Death of Slugs!” I joke, and get on with it. If the hot compost bin in the greenhouse is running a bit cold then sometimes I’ll gather them all up and dump them in there for the nitrogen, but mostly I just leave them in place to return to the soil.
And I am reminded of the way our current culture is so separate from death so much of the time; in my tradition we do still have open casket funerals, but this is the exception rather than the rule now, I think, and not that many people I know have had the experience of visiting the actual deathbed of an extended family member, especially if that family member died in hospital in some kind of medicalised situation. Our mourning rituals, too, seem to be attenuated… there is some level on which we are uncomfortable with death, grief and lament. It leaks in around the edges of our reserve in millions of bouquets bought for the passing of a monarch, or in a roadside shrine for a suicide, or in a ghost bike, those who see themselves as “respectable” look down on all of these things with an air of slight superiority. Death is taboo, and so are most of the feelings around it, not because it is transformed or transcended — but because we are meant to be sidestepping all of that with our newfangled technology.
I think one side effect of this discomfort with death is that we struggle to assess risks well, or think about them in a nuanced way. When I turn up somewhere in an elastomeric mask people sometimes assume that I’m “afraid of dying” — which is really not the case, or at least not more than most people are; my concerns are more to do with not catching anything I might give to someone else. But I think my visible precautions make them feel uncomfortable for another reason: my mask is a reminder, impossible to ignore, that they are taking risks every day that they would have deemed unacceptable a few years ago. Simply by opting out of those risks (and not even completely — I do remove my mask outdoors, for example, and I don’t bother wearing it to answer the door), I am pointing out the incongruence. And so the reaction of “I’m not going to let this stop me living my life” becomes a shorthand for “I’m not going to think about this thing that is still a substantial risk, and the only way to not think about it is to not do anything about it” which, sadly, doesn’t work very well for this particular risk. Meanwhile, I am genuinely not stopping “living my life” by wearing a mask. I am missing out on… indoor dining, basically. Oh noes. The further I get along the foodie-to-subsistence-farming pipeline, the less that matters to me, because nowhere has ever served me wineberries straight from the bush in the sunlight, or potatoes half as nice as the ones I grow. (I’m not even very good at potatoes. It turns out even being a pretty lousy gardener is tasty.) It’s fair to say that this is partly due to my own privilege, and might change substantially in the near future depending on my spouse’s employment prospects, but there is a huge space between “do nothing” and “don’t live your life” and most people don’t explore it much. Meanwhile, progress and technology (or human ingenuity, if you like) have given us simple tools we could use on a collective level to hugely reduce airborne transmission of all kinds of disease (not just covid; I am particularly interested in how TB is going to go once we lose decent antibiotics and high vaccination rates), and… we aren’t doing it, because “you only live once” (yes, and?) or “it’s too expensive” (relative to what?) or some other contagious soundbite that stands in for thought.
I’m only bringing covid into this (again) because I see a similarity in the way people think about climate catastrophe; going all-in on both prevention and mitigation just makes sense, even if we can’t all manage to do all the right things (I am not going to rag on any of our soup kitchen guests about plastic packaging, for example). But most of what I see is a few people taking it seriously, and everyone else either not thinking about it because “we’re doomed anyway” (and people don’t have the distress tolerance to think about this every day) or “tech will save us” (seems to me like wishful thinking).
With covid, the reason I’m not particularly anxious about it is because I’ve done the thinking, talked to others in my household about our risk tolerance, examined my own priorities around staying safe and keeping others safe, and decided how I want to navigate various risks. I keep it pretty simple and I probably err on the side of caution, because life is short anyway. Any residual anxiety I feel is from interacting with people who are defensive when they encounter my boundaries, who have an expectation that to save them from having to think about risks, I will put others in my household in danger. It’s always disappointing to find out that someone else values their own mental comfort over the life of my loved ones, and I appreciate that such a framing is not always fair, but it isn’t exactly news to me any more. Humanity persisted for thousands of years before we managed to prevent cholera or develop germ theory or convince doctors to wash their hands before assisting in childbirth, and we’ll probably persist despite the current and future pandemics, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy to take the same risks as everyone else. I daresay John Snow didn’t drink from the Broad Street pump after they put the handle back on it. I’m certainly no John Snow but I’m willing to use my own agency and go against mainstream practice to some extent where I have reasonable grounds to believe it will keep my household safer without causing undue harm in wider society. I haven’t had a cold since February 2020, so I’m probably doing something right.
And I think I’m coming to a similar place with climate. I am not perfect, by a long way, in my use of energy or materials, but I do think I’m moving in the right direction. There are some things I’m just not willing to do (learn to drive a car, for example), even though they would make my own life a bit easier sometimes; there are some areas where I compromise (still so much plastic, though very little of it now is single-use). I am still learning lots of skills that I think will be useful in a small farm future; I am passing those on, where I can. I could do better at building local community resilience, and “owning” land (as opposed to renting allotments) is off the cards for me for the forseeable future. There is a decent chance that climate catastrophe will pick up pace and make all of my adaptations and mitigations and plans irrelevant; there is a decent chance that I will be able to manouvre my household into a more advantageous position. But I’ve thought about it and talked about it and decided what direction I want to move in. Residual anxiety I feel is mostly from interactions with people who expect me to act like the world is not on fire, because they don’t want to think about it. It’s always disappointing to find out that their mental comfort is more important to them than the collapse of the ecosystem and mass extinction, but it isn’t exactly news to me any more. Human civilisations in various parts of the world have erupted, overextended themselves and died out before, and while I don’t know what’s going to happen to this huge global-scale system, I think there’s a decent chance humanity will persist. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to take the same risks as everyone else. I’m willing to use my own agency and go against mainstream practice to some extent where I have reasonable grounds to believe it will keep my household more resilient without causing undue harm in wider society. My grocery bill has been falling since 2020, so I’m probably doing something right.
In both cases — covid and climate — part of the reason I think humanity will probably muddle through is because we aren’t all doing the same thing. One of the most disturbing parts of the ecomodernist agenda, insofar as they have a coherent agenda, is the imposition of increasingly uniform practice. Their justification for this, if I understand it correctly, is that large-scale catastrophe requires large-scale interventions. But in a complex system I think lots of small-scale interventions, and the humility to recognise that many of them will fail but some will be worthwhile, are probably a better strategy.
I suspect that effective dialogue with ecomodernists, the sort of dialogue that changes hearts and minds on both sides, probably isn’t about arguing from facts and figures to show that they are wrong, though that is still worthwhile. I suspect that effective dialogue with ecomodernists involves some kind of acknowledgement of the terror that underlies clinging to the “tech will save us” soundbite, holding some kind of space where people can acknowledge their lack of control while honouring the agency that they do have. This is difficult to do without being insufferably patronising (as I have probably been in this comment). I wonder whether humour and carnival are potentially a way in, though — not necessarily making fun of our opponents, but of ourselves too.
Rain here yesterday after the heat wave, so I will be getting the slug scissors out at the allotment later on.
@Kathryn
Do you have a designated pair of “slug scissors” or do you just grab the nearest pair!!!????
The cruel reality of life is that……for something to live, something else has to die.
I had this pointed out to me in a book recently. It’s so blatantly obvious, I completely hadn’t realised it before I read it!!!!!
I guess I’m detached from the natural world as much as anyone.
I did go and check out the dead bodies of both my parents though. Needed to see/confirm with my own eyes rather than being told by others.
I have a designated pair. I’m willing to use them for cutting garden twine or whatever, but not for food without giving them a very good wash first, which is non-trivial at the allotment.
“We humans are base, fleshly creatures who too easily fail to perceive the limits of our understanding.”
I’m curious what you mean by “base” here, Chris. There are, of course, many senses of this word. Which one did you have in mind, and what idea did you mean to convey?
I think you are right about the ecomodernist fear of death—I identified that in discussion with the old Internet Archnemesis, Leigh Phillips. Apparently he had tried many worldviews, including Born Again, and finally settled on socialist accelerationism.
I think he is terrified of dying, and embraced the most mainstream response of this culture—if what you are doing doesn’t work; try the same thing, only bigger, harder, and faster.
Personally, I fear a meaningless life more than death. But I don’t believe life is ever ultimately meaningless. Life overflows with more meaning than we can handle, an overabundance of it.
But many of us now living in the “advanced stages” of capitalist industrial consumer culture, with its absurd poverty of political and social wisdom (and wisdom more broadly), are caught up in the nearest thing to meaninglessness as is possible in a natural world overflowing with meaningfulness.
My deepest fear is not death so much as the thought of dying without having made any difference about this pervasive mad nihilism which is the ecocidal, omnicidal sleepwalking machinery of capitalist industrial consumer culture, which seeks to strip the world of meaning because it is convinced that there is none.
Maybe some folks are afraid of dying because they haven’t really lived?
Thanks Ruben.
Yes, I think you are correct that a fear of death is driving a lot of this stuff.
I got an interesting education growing up with my parents. My mother was a devout Young-Earth fundamentalist Christian literalist with a degree in geology, and my father was a devout Darwinian who believed that the universe was rational and fully knowable given enough time and study.
Oh! did they argue.
But my father said something very wise once that stuck with me.
Imagine that you are saved by Jesus and go to heaven and live eternally. You have billions of years to do every interesting thing there is to do, and you do those things, bigly.
But, like the tree in the garden, there is one thing you cannot do. You are eternal. You cannot die. My father argued that given enough time, heaven will be filled with depressed, suicidal omnipotent beings.
I can’t find a flaw in his logic.
So don’t bother fearing death here & now.
Really enjoyed this – thanks for the link to ‘Death in the Garden’ – what a great name. I was listening to Ian McGilchrist the other day and he said that real religion wasn’t propositional but was dispositional – from here it feels like your writing is increasingly religious in the sense of that word suggested by McGilchrist.
‘We celebrate the increased longevity of modern lives, with little thought given to what exactly we’re celebrating. We try to micromanage out of existence every potential harm except critical ones that get in the way of managerialism itself, like wholesome food and a liveable climate.’ – Absolutely!
There’s really not much I can add.
I’m sure every era has thought, my god, these people are so insane its beyond humour! In Disney’s ‘Hunch back of notre dame’ its an unchecked fantasy for the gypsy woman that sets off the ruling powers orgy of fire, death and dispossession.
For some people, the sports cars and yachts and young models are the way to express youth, power and virility. Not for these guys – nothing less the subjugation of all people, the recreation of creation and ever lasting life!
Well, I want to go to that carnival – I try to live my life there, where Peter, Mark, Elon and Jeff are what they are – naughty, lost little boys rather than writers of a bad gospel. In a sense, the carnival is the predecessor of the counter culture. To return to that Disney animation, Carnival was the public expression of a literally underground community. Before psychology it is the perfect expression of our base, chthonic
and subconscious desires made joyfully and hilariously approachable, we litterally party with our shadow! This is again the deeply unhealthy nature of these boys, unable to face the dark, visceral facts of being – as if all aspects of life could be wipe down plastic with shiney upgrades. The inversion central to carnival is a key to our survival, I think you have unearthed a very rich seam of cultural practice – look forward to see where it leads us.
In addition to the ecomodernist fear of death, there could be a fear of (or strong aversion to) hard work which gets them dirty. This may drive them towards ‘solutions’ which keep other options available, preferably in offices and cities away from all that dirt.
Farmers and agroecologists might also have a fear of death, to some extent. Perhaps they are generally better ‘grounded’ and thus inoculated against the fear of death becoming pathological.
@Steve L
“In addition to the ecomodernist fear of death, there could be a fear of (or strong aversion to) hard work which gets them dirty.”
I think also, it is the incomprehensibility of having to give up all the gadgets and gizmos that are part of modernity. Mobile phone, laptops, internet, tech etc.
Monbiot is older than I am, I believe.
I didn’t have internet access until I was about 14 — and I was a fairly early adopter. I did schoolwork without a computer for a bunch of my education. I didn’t have a mobile phone until I was 20.
I don’t think it’s helpful to imagine that Monbiot and others of his generation are simply too glued to their devices to imagine anything different. I can remember what that was like and I suspect they can, too.
That said, I’ve made the point here before that human beings value information and communication very highly indeed; I think one of the most difficult transitions we might face in a low energy future is to a world where only the rich have access to fast communication.
As for dirt, there are pretty sound evolutionary reasons for an aversion to it, but… well, dirt does wash off. The social problem of identifying people or groups we don’t like with impurity or contamination is an old one, too, though still very present, but I haven’t seen any of that just yet from the eco-modernist camp.
Hard work isn’t so bad, either, but it is reasonable to seek modes of providing for our needs which allow for rest, refreshment, and even play. If the eco-modernists believe what dominant ideology tells them — that agricultural labour was (and is) ceaseless and unrewarding, with endless toil and no chance of having enough food and fuel to make it through winter without starving in the cold for at least a month, then it is no wonder that they are averse to it. People who are not averse to starvation tend not to pass those genes on. The multitudinous works of art and culture produced by humans with some time for leisure are a good and valuable thing.
But agrarian localism doesn’t have to be that miserable all the time. It gets pretty bad pretty fast in the context of enclosure and extraction of commodities for global markets, for sure, but… well, that’s also true outside of agriculture. Selling labour to produce commodities and services in a global market is all most of the eco-modernists have experienced, so of course they apply those conditions to what they think agricultural labour is like. When the only tool you have is a global market, other forms of production seem like a fantasy.
You only have to look at the disclaimers and warning shown in the media , people have become devoursed from the real world and are scared of it , safety is paramount !
The only people worried about my death are the inhabitants of Hell who will have to put up with me.
They needn’t worry; the gates are busted, nobody has to stay there who doesn’t want to.
Meanwhile… I do think there is something to be said for people’s fear of death driving some of their behaviours.
The only people worried about my death are the inhabitants of Hell
Thanks for these engaging comments. For now I’m just going to answer James’s question and point to a couple of other things to invite comments.
To be honest, I didn’t think all that much about my use of the word ‘base’, but I meant partly that we’re more ruled by desire and emotions and less by reason and intellect than we think. Also, I guess I had in mind the ‘lower bodily stratum’ analysed by Bakhtin that I discussed in my previous post about him – mouths, food, sex, bodily substances etc that carnival builds its symbolism around but that polite modernism tries to efface. Joel’s comment (‘the dark, visceral facts of being’) nicely captures the sense I was trying to convey.
The couple of other things are (1) a largely negative review of my book here: https://earthbound.report/2023/09/11/saying-to-to-a-farm-free-future-by-chris-smaje/. I will probably address some of its points in my next post, but I’m interested in any thoughts from readers here…
…and (2) Rupert Newton has picked up the baton for 100% renewable energy under this recent post: https://chrissmaje.com/2023/06/can-there-be-an-energy-transition/#comment-259582. I hope to come back to this issue in the medium term, but again would be interested in any further thoughts, especially on the sources that he’s linked.
Just an aside — in your comment to Jeremy Williams you linked to a Twitter thread, but I can no longer see the entire thread without logging in to Twitter — just the first post in the thread. It is becoming more and more a walled garden.
His main objection to your book seems to be that you have some feelings about Monbiot’s repeated attacks on mixed farming and your book is a polemic. Well, you set out to write a polemic, so mission accomplished I guess. I wonder what he thinks of Monbiot’s responses in e.g. The Land.
I do think Jeremy is right that we will have neither an entirely local nor entirely global food production system; but I also think that’s not saying much, and doesn’t really detract from your statement that we should be looking to source most of our provisions more locally. People have been engaging in global trade of one sort or another for literally thousands of years, after all, but there is a huge difference between “global trade exists, but it is slow and expensive, and so limited to high-value materials like tin and spices” and “I can order a huge range of goods manufactured all over the world at artificially low prices from the comfort of my smartphone, and it’ll generally arrive within 24 hours.”
It is late and I am tired and I will try and get to the energy question sometime tomorrow, but we’ll see.
Any Twitter/X thread by Chris can be archived in its entirety (by Thread Reader) and be readable by anyone who doesn’t use Twitter/X , as long as Chris or someone else on Twitter/X replies with the following line to any tweet that’s part of the thread:
@threadreaderapp unroll
An example of an earlier thread by Chris which someone saved to Thread Reader:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1685665447704715264.html
This renewable electricity project looks interesting, and while it’s high-tech in some ways, it’s a lot less extreme than some of the heliostat tower type things.
I don’t think it’s going to usher in an energy abundant future, though.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-australian-solar-tech-that-may-have-found-a-low-cost-solution-to-deep-storage/
Thanks Steve. Here’s the unrolled thread –
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1701327611765375400.html
I will come back to it
Interesting that Germany is Losing 10 GW of solar as the backing of the panels is breaking down and the cells are falling off .
About that largely negative review of “Saying NO…”
The writer of that review seems to have previously latched onto the exaggerated “make food out of the air” claims and other hype about bacterial protein powder as a solution…
https://earthbound.report/2021/01/19/how-solar-foods-produce-food-from-the-air/
…and his reviews of ‘Regenesis’ and ‘Saying NO…’ reflect his apparent alignment with this type of ecomodernist solutionism.
I get the feeling that the reviewer didn’t actually read and digest the entire book “Saying NO…” He states that Chris is proposing “a different solution” and he criticizes Chris’s “solution” because it wouldn’t be able to feed Tokyo’s 39 million people (for example), which ignores what Chris wrote in “Saying NO…” about (a) solutionism, and (b) the expected fate of big cities.
The reviewer’s objections seem to ignore a lot of Chris’s nuanced positions. For example, he criticizes Chris for presenting false dichotomies (such as low tech or high tech, agroecology or manufactured food), while Chris acknowledges in the book that manufactured food could make sense for certain situations, such as in energy-rich and arable-land-poor countries.
It seems that to preserve the comfort of a proposed “solution” like manufactured food for the world, Chris’s objections concerning the energy costs are downplayed as if this issue will work itself out with time (ignoring some hard limits which Chris brought up about the thermodynamics of bacterial processes).
The reviewer seems to be speaking for George Monbiot by making broad claims about George’s positions as a way to counter what Chris has written, when it would be illuminating to hear from George himself about the specifics of his related positions (such as the proportion of the future world population that George envisions living rural areas, which Chris has already asked him and received no response AFAIK).
And I’m not sure, but I’m thinking that the reviewer might have distorted what Chris has actually written, when the reviewer said something about Chris accusing George of bad faith. If this is a distortion of what Chris actually wrote, then it would seem the reviewer is being divisive after criticizing the book’s testimonial quotes for being divisive.
Chris puts forward a alternative to the Globalists therefore must be denegrated and silenced
Re the Jeremy review, maybe the writer was pushed for time to think, but to respond to you (in the comments below the piece) with “We will never again have an entirely local or an entirely global food system. It is both and it will be both.” … seems a combination that’s lazy, overconfident, almost akin to astrology. I thought the review as a whole was ‘insight-lite’.
Amen.
Monbiot ‘s future seems to me a cross between Logan’s Run , Blade Runner and Soylent Green , with a side of When the Machine Stops .
Small farm agriculture has fed the planet for millenia , greed and cheap took over , greed for more land more profit made possible by fossil fuels , cheap by getting rid of people and buying chemicals and machines to replace them though the price of diesel and a half million dollar combine its starting to look like a mugs game . A cow / ruminants are a marvelous thing , near every part is usefull to humans and it does it all without human intervention , no energy required, just grass, man in his arrogance thinks he can do better , technoutopia the new God .
Technoutopian ‘s seem to want to treat people like battery hens , dehumanize them ,separate them from everything that is not concrete brick and plastic , open prisons as long as you don’t go more than 15 minutes from where you live , Caves of Steel , they are trying to make a world that has all ready been forecast in science fiction and prooved dystopian .
@Diogenese10
“open prisons as long as you don’t go more than 15 minutes from where you live”
I think the 15 minutes city/town idea will become a reality in a SFF anyway.
Most people will live most of their time within a half day’s walk from where they live.
Nate Hagens’ recent talk with neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky might be instructive here (The Brain, Determinism, and Cultural Implications).
One of Sapolsky’s claims is that humans don’t have free will. I think that chimes with some of the content of this post (the conceit of ecomodernism, humans as gods, the wholeness of the world) in taking a holistic approach to human behaviour (there’s an interesting detour that touches on Viktor Frankl’s will to meaning, among other things).
I’m only halfway through it, so forgive the blurry sketch, but it’s a fascinating discussion from a slightly different angle to McGilchrist. Taking a ‘no free will’ claim as read, among other factors, points to the shaping influence of the dominant culture in which we find ourselves swimming/drowning/treading water, as we make our way inevitably downstream.
As an increasingly urban species, it’s perhaps not surprising that ecomodernism garners enough attention to continue limping into the limelight, and that people might be more impressed by the trajectory of lives like Musk’s or Bezos’ than that of a Hannah Hauxwell, say. It doesn’t bode well.
Theological claims that humans lack free will almost always circle back around to humans acting as if we do have free will, because anything else gets impractical very quickly. I think it’s a sort of philosophical dead end. I am not sure a neurobiological argument will be any less of a dead end.
I do think most humans are far more prone to outside influences on their thinking than they’d be comfortable admitting, but that’s a problem of negotiating a relinquishment of agency, rather than an actual lack of free will.
Similarly, human choices are constrained by context — I cannot jump thirty feet in the air unaided no matter how much I want to — but that is not a statement about whether I might choose to try. Of course that context includes our neurobiology, but we can also choose how we respond to said neurobiology.
One of the most helpful things anyone has ever said to me, in response to me feeling overwhelmed about a difficult situation, was “How do you want to handle this?”
What I took away from the interview is that the way Sapolsky might approach your example of agency/free will would be to propose that ‘how you want to handle’ any given situation is determined in that given moment by everything from what you had for breakfast that morning (assuming we’re post-breakfast here), to hormones/stress levels, to upbringing, and on and on back into time and your ancestors etc etc.
Personally, at first it seemed almost counter intuitive to weigh up whether we are self-determining creatures exercising our free will as we reach for a glass of water, scratch an itch or whatever, but I ended up being won over by his argument – he’s a neuroscientist with a special interest in primates after all – finding it cogent, fascinating and, potentially, hopeful.
Speaking to my wife, an agnostic agronomist, about all this free will malarkey, the conclusion she drew was “it’s probably a bit of both”, which I thought was typically reasonable. And then (while looking me full in the face, I detected): “But I do think hormones can play a big part.”
Anyway, I sometimes find songs a pleasant way to mull things over. Here’s an apt one – Free Will and Testament – in the piping tones of Robert Wyatt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv_F29h_qxM
Yeah, the concept of “everything you think you decide is actually influenced by all the other inputs on you in an incredibly complex world” isn’t a new one to me. I still think it’s kindof a philosophical dead end.
If we don’t ultimately have free will, then…. so what?
But I haven’t listened to the whole podcast yet, and probably won’t until tomorrow or Saturday at this rate.
I tend to agree that free will is a myth—Sam Harris’ book Free Will is very persuasive.
But as someone who has spent a lot of time working on pro-environmental behaviour change, I also agree that discussing our lack of free will is largely pointless, because it seems so contrary to how we experience the world.
But acting as if we do have free will is also largely pointless because it is divorced from the reality of human behaviour and so it has very poor outcomes.
I use this pyramid to illustrate how I think our behaviour is shaped.
The problem is that we perform tens of thousands of behaviours every day. We remember a few dozen of those, and we point to them and exclaim, “Free Will!” while giving no thought to the thousands of other things we did not consciously choose.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says, “Hm. Is today the day I will exercise my free will to drive the wrong way down a highway?” No. The vast majority of our behaviour is simply responsive to the physical context we live in. Another large chunk of our behaviour is social flocking.
And a tiny little bit, just a few things a day, are behaviours that we think about and perhaps “choose”.
So, our cultural belief in free will has proven quite damaging because it obscures the reality of what shapes our behaviour. We end up with politicians inanely intoning on the nightly news, “It is all about education.” In fact, it almost assuredly not about education, it is about systems.
I posted about free will here “Free Will: we (might) use it just often enough to think it actually matters.”
Thanks Ruben, I enjoyed that post. I thought this had been touched on a time or two over the years here, though I’d never really paid it much mind.
I absolutely believe that context and the systems in which we operate are important in influencing and determining our behaviour, and quite a bit more important than most people would expect. At no point have I said that free will means we do not face limits.
But… the decision to change our systemic context, or to attempt to understand our behaviour differently, is also a decision. If the answer to “OK, there’s no free will; so what?” is “well, we should choose to understand our actions in terms of their context rather than choosing to view individual decisions as isolated instances of exercising free will” then that is also a choice.
Personally, I would like to see less learned helplessness in the world. I don’t think this means dismissing the wider contextual, systemic influences on our decisions, though; I think it means learning to understand those influences and embracing our power to change the context in which we operate, on whatever level that is possible. It means imagining a better world, identifying the steps to get there from here, and attempting to carry them out. This is hard enough without philosophers, behaviourists and whoever else telling us that 100% of our behaviour is predetermined and entirely beyond our conscious control. By all means, let’s pay more attention to context. But most humans, while subject to events that are out of our control, also experience a phenomenon we describe as choice.
I am reminded of a joke:
What did the Calvinist do after falling down the stairs?
Picked himself up, dusted himself off, and said, “Thank God that’s over with!”
(Look up predestination in Calvinism if you’re confused. This is not a new conversation just because we’re now talking about neurobiology rather than God.)
I agree. That is why I put that tiny tip of conscious choice on the top of the pyramid.
One quibble—experiencing a phenomena as choice is not necessarily the same as having choice or making choices. We rampantly use post hoc rationalization to tell fabulous stories about why we made “choices”.
As they say, humans are storytellers—which reminds me of joke: “Humans think like cats swim. They can do it, but they don’t much like to.”
Loved the joke Katherine – it seems there’s nothing new under the sun – which suggests to me that we’re not using whatever free will we do have very wisely – today I hope to chose to make some new mistakes
@Ruben
I agree we humans post-hoc rationalize a large majority of our choices. Also that experiencing a phenomenon is not the same thing as that phenomenon existing objectively.
But for practical purposes, at some point I have to assume my perceptions and experiences have some relationship to objective reality, otherwise I’m in that philosophical dead end again. And my experience is that it does actually matter which cultivar of soup peas I sow and when I sow them, or whether I water the allotment. It does actually matter how I treat other people. Thinking about these choices as if they are not choices but merely things that happen to me does not result in tasty food being available or good relationships with my household and neighbours.
@Kathryn, very few people are going to spend time arguing if we choose pea varieties freely.
But if you don’t agree with the mainstream you have to be very vocal about not supporting it—or you are de facto supporting it.
The logical and cultural assumption is that we freely choose peas, and therefore we freely choose to burn dirty fossil fuels and we freely choose to live in flood zones and we freely choose to be addicts and we freely choose to be racists—and that is wrong and is a huge part of the problems we find ourselves in.
Elizabeth Shove is a UK behavioural researcher who works on social practice theory: the tip of the iceberg analogy overstates the size of the tip. Our choice is a snowflake on top of the iceberg of physical and social contexts that stretch back, in some cases, centuries or millennia.
So, yes, it seems like we can choose to be nice to people, but we never discuss what privileges we enjoy that give us latitude to be nice. We never discuss what we are are not doing because we exercise those privileges in that way. We have decided to allocate and spend energy on pleasant social interactions—what have we given up that other, perhaps less nice, people have not? Volunteering at a food bank? Coaching sports for kids? Helping with river cleanup?
Unless we are explicit that our belief in the Free Pea Choice is nearly the sum total expression of our free will, then we are part of the quiet herd inexorably following the path, which means, sadly, that we are supporting the finger wagging over shorter showers, and the droning about “organic is consumer choice, they need to vote with their dollar”, and the assumption that addicts are weak people, and no doubt morally flawed.
Free will does not need any more advocates stumping for it. Attention to context and systems does not fit in our Descartian worldview, and that needs more time and attention.
@Ruben
I talk about most of these things — privilege, opportunity cost, context — quite a lot.
I worry that total determinism is mostly going to be used to tell the downtrodden that their efforts to improve their circumstances are pointless, and the privileged that the oppressions they perpetuate are not really their responsibility. It isn’t really any more helpful a framing than that of “free will” as meaning our individual choices are completely separate from all constraints and limits (which, incidentally, is not a position I hold at all).
I think we are probably arguing over shadows, though: we both agree that context and systems are highly important in determining the options available to us and influencing the choices we make. We both agree that perceiving and understanding contexts and systems is a more useful approach than just assuming people make “bad” choices. I assume we both would like to see widespread systemic changes toward a more sustainable and equitable future. We might even agree on some of where to attempt to change some of the prevailing systems — where the levers might be, so to speak.
Yes, I think you are right. As both you and Malcolm point out, we do direct attention and create change—and yet we have very little free latitude for action. System change is the biggest lever we have.
I agree that this can also be used to degrade various groups of people, but I am not sure there is a lens that can prevent that—Free Will is certainly constantly weaponized.
In order to eliminate degradation we need to commit to anti-oppression…an extremely cognitively demanding task.
Of interest is that I used to think we had solved, for example, the systemic racism with various laws and regulations passed in the Civil Rights Era, and what we have left was the personal, which was simply going to require lots of time and attention.
However, Ibram X Kendi exhasutively shows how much systemic racism still exists in his book Stamped from the Beginning, so there is still a lot of system change possible.
Hi Ruben,
I’ve been following this discussion with interest, and I read the linked blog post. I agree with you that the idea of free will is often used to distract from systemic problems. The wealthy and powerful pretend that those they are exploiting are only suffering due to their own crimes or sins.
I think, however, that the denial of free will can also be used in demeaning ways. If we take the position that free will is pretty much negligible for most people most of the time—where will any systemic change come from? Presumably, any change that we might want to see will take conscious decisions being made by particular individuals and groups—we certainly can’t depend on the system to change itself. If we want a road that forces drivers to go slowly, a group of people need to decide that they want such a road and then take steps to get it implemented. If they just depended on their automatic social conditioning they will leave the road as it is.
So if we deny the reality of free will, what we end up with is a patronizing view of “the poor” or “the common herd” who don’t have free will or agency and are constrained by the system, and “we” who are somehow trying to change the system for their benefit—and who therefore presumably have free will, though that isn’t generally stated explicitly.
I see the two errors I’ve outlined as the two faces of modernity; on the one hand, those who mask their greed by claiming that everyone could be well off if they just made the right decisions, and on the other hand those who mask their desire for power with a patronizing claim to be “improving” the condition of the marginalized. Each route ends up denying agency to the marginalized and swelling the power of the elites.
I think a better way of looking at things is that we all have free will, but that conditions constrain the choices we can actually make.
Thanks for reading Malcolm.
I think a better way of looking at it is that we have an astonishingly small amount of free will, and so we should use it with extreme care.
The research suggests we have just a few hours of analytic thought each day—and many of that use most of that analytic thought at work. What we are left with is largely reactive. Go to the grocery store, heat up dinner, do laundry.
As I said to Kathryn, it is not denial of free will that results in demeaning the poor—we are already using our “free will” in order to demean the poor.
Demeaning the poor comes because we live in a culture of oppression, what bell hooks called the Capitalist Imperialist White Supremacist Patriarchy.
Other studies are clear that being poor is extremely hard and time-consuming work. The very poor spend hours interacting with so-called social service agencies. At the end of the day they are drained from the efforts of surviving—and then we look down our noses at them because they do not have the strength of will to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
So, our conscious thought is deeply constrained by the capacities of our physical bodies and by the physical and social contexts we find ourselves in. If we want to call those few dozen choices free will, out of the tens of thousands of behaviours we make every day, I suppose we could. But I think free will creates far larger problems than it “solves”.
Thanks for articulating this, Malcolm.
Just to wade in on “free will” debate.
I think it’s a bit of both.
We are products of our up-bringing, culture, and personal experience.
We also experience the world through our senses. So our biology also influences our actions/decision making.
So all of this inputs into our decisions but we still have agency/”free will” on top of all of that.
It’s not an excuse to say, for example……….
” I beat my wife because of cultural, material and biological pressures”
There is an element of choice going on here.
Changes in culture come about because large groups of people assess their behaviour (for good or bad) and then choose to change them.
Education plays a big part in allowing people to develop their decision making processes.
This is well said Malcom, you have articulated the pincer movement of these propagandas very clearly.
I read what Ruben’s saying as why this is so devastating – he is articulating an embodied, contextualised (phenomenological?) position – what’s happening in the situation rather than what’s happening to it and with a particular focus through activism.
Thank you both, and Kathryn for a interesting discussion
Hi Chris, a big fan from Denmark living in Japan here.
Thank you for your books and your activity on this site. I first encountered SMALL FARM FUTURE in a fivebooks.com feature, and have since gone from Hickel’s Less is More, to Wallace-Wells Uninhabitable Planet, and then to Regenesis (because I thought is was about soil and farming).. but half way through, I started looking up what has been said about it, and got SAYING NO… on the spot. I finished Regenesis last week, and promptly started on SAYING NO.. and am I glad I did!! As a complete layman city dweller, I latched on to the critique of agri-sprawl and the contamination, but had no way of engaging critically with Monbiot’s points.
Reading your book straight after, is providing so much context and clarification.
Thanks aside, I’m actually reaching out about an aspect that I feel is completely absent from Monbiot’s work, as it is looking at agriculture as something isolated. A bad thing to be fixed independently.
Another side of the equation, which is perhaps of even greater importance to the individual than climate contributions, is the mental health and human developmental aspects of modern city life. The modern, high-energy lifestyle of convenience, is stripping layers of our capacities as humans and as communities, and I feel like many people – young people perhaps in particular – are experiencing negative impacts of this, without really being able to putting the hurt into words (and look! A new iPhone!).
Along SAYING NO, I’m also reading Parable of the Talens by Olivia Butler. That’s a take on a Small Farm Future too, I guess, and although I have no idea if things will get to such a point, I do take it as a guide-in-fiction, on the importance of your stance.
I’m still trying to grappling with accommodating the changes in climate and tech (AI?), and well-being and economic needs in the future. But your work is giving me a good spot to return to.
Hi Esben
You might like the work of the Center for Humane Technology in terms of their position on AI.
I think there has been some discussion in comments here previously about the social isolation people often experience in cities, particularly in suburbs where everyone drives everywhere, though I can’t immediately recall which post such discussions were under.
Counter to that, I think a great many people in rural situations have felt isolated and disconnected — especially people who are young and queer living in fairly socially conservative contexts, for example. But I don’t think rural populations necessarily have to be socially conservative.
Meanwhile, a smartphone that doesn’t include any way of engaging with other people is a useless lump of plastic, most people who are heavy users of communication technology are using it to communicate. It’s not the same as a village where everyone knows one another, but it’s also a very different world from the passive consumption of television and radio broadcasting that our parents grew up with.
Hi Kathryn,
Thank you for your comment.
Yes, Tristan Harris is doing good work indeed.
Your comment make me curious to look up how people use their smartphones. I think they have eclipsed communication as their main purpose and use.
Absolutely I think rural communities don’t have to be socially conservative, and hopefully they won’t be in the small farm future either.
On the subject of free will take a look at Delson Armstrong and naroda samappati – you can read about it here https://psyche.co/ideas/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-consciousness-ending-meditation – it seems he’s able to turn off his consciousness for a length of time he determines before switching himself off – he’s been the subject of research by neuroscientists – sorry Chris this is all very off topic
Thanks for the link, Bruce – interesting and somewhat baffling. I guess the ‘no free will’ crowd would argue that the incredibly rare ability to almost ‘turn off’ brain activity by this individual has arisen from his dedicated practice over the years, because he is what he is, or has become: that kind of animal.
It reminded me of something I once heard about how slumping in front of the TV can result in a lower rate of metabolism than that attained during actual sleep.
I’m happy for the free will argument to remain in the folder marked Mysteries (Unsolved), though I think Ruben’s ‘context is king’ covers a lot of ground here. I also think that to give up the tip of the iceberg – the idea that we can and do exercise free will – seems like giving up some – the last? – vestige of personal identity, the Agent ‘I’ that strides out into the world, doing stuff, separate, alas, from all the other things in it. No, I’m siding more with the idea that we are all a part of a whole, and comfortingly perhaps I’m therefore much more of a force of nature than I thought I was! Aren’t we all?
After reading the article you linked, I sloped off to bed, thinking ‘yeah, probably is free will if you can decide to turn off the brain’. Some time in the night I woke and my mind (which could reside in places other than the brain, some believe) came back to the amazing story of a practically brain-dead state for almost a week! And I no longer thought it so amazing as I realised I’d spent years of my working (salaried) life assuming a similar state, and that indeed many jobs require that workers placidly slip into that mode, and that furthermore (so as not to risk sounding too facetious) people often take walks in nature to switch off, disconnect, become almost unconscious as we leave our cares behind.
Maybe brain activity isn’t the be all and end all here.
This strand might touch on wholeness but admittedly not so much on the other aspects of the post. And yet I think the idea that free will doesn’t exist is humbling enough to potentially usher in a more humane outlook on everything from addiction, outrageous inequality, so-called ‘pre-meditated’ crimes. We know not what we do? I don’t know. But at least my disturbed sleep gifted me a new understanding of Smog’s ‘Vessel in Vain’.
I’m curious to know what folks here might have to say about my reasoning in this comment on Patrick Mazza’s The Raven (Substack). I think I have a strong argument for a near term reversal of the urbanization trend of the last couple of centuries, and especially post WWII. But some folks have difficulty comprehending the basic idea in my argument.
****
“In my essay, Energy Transition & the Luxury Economy, I said “I define a luxury economy as an economic mode of access to livelihood which depends upon luxury goods and services in order to avoid economic and social collapse.” https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/
By this definition, a nation, society or culture has a luxury economy if and when its economy would go into collapse if people stopped consuming luxury goods and services. This is certainly true of the USA today — where both of us live. Luxury goods and services provided access to livelihood to workers displaced from (for example) agriculture. I highly recommend that you at least look at the agriculture labor graph I provided in my above-mentioned essay. It really explains a lot! Overwhelmingly most workers in the USA were farmers back in the 19th century, and as time went on farm labor, as a portion of the ‘labor market’, shrank and shrank over time, such that today only roughly 1.3% of workers are farmers. (That’s one point three, not thirteen.) What changed? Mostly, it was technology which changed. Technology largely automated agricultural production, enabling one point three percent of the population to feed essentially 100%. (Some people actually feed themselves through self-provisioning directly, thus “essentially”.)
Obviously, food is the very epitome of a necessity, in contrast to a luxury. So is shelter, clothing, medicine, water…. A few things are utterly necessary for life. And some things are clearly luxuries.
Some people believe automobiles are necessities, and even lawn mowers — and lawns. I think they are all wrong on this question.
Back in the day, as you remember, we had a thing called “the yellow pages” in a phone book. If we still had that, I’d ask you to flip through the yellow pages to look at the business in your city. And I’d have you rank the businesses on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being utter necessities and ten being utterly luxury oriented. This exercise would provide you with a sense of how much any urban economy is oriented around the provision of luxury goods and services.
84% of the energy used in the world today is fossil energy. An adequate response to the climate emergency would require us to reduce that consumption by at least (probably much more) half over the next decade. Currently, GDP / GWP is utterly tied to energy use, so halving energy use would mean halving the economy as we know it. That means cutting luxury goods and services very dramatically. And that means cities would largely empty out, because there would be essentially no access to livelihood for those displaced by the collapse of the luxury goods and services sectors of the economy of those cities.
Where will people then seek access to livelihood? Rural areas! Because only in rural areas is there land enough for people to engage in community self-provisioning of basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing (fiber), water, etc.
My point is that cities will not be economically viable for most of their current inhabitants if we were to dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption, as is necessary and also even inevitable (due to coming scarcity of such fuels).
If cities were not so densely populated (and covered in buildings, concrete and asphalt), perhaps folks could manage to engage in community self-provisioning of food and other basic necessities there as fossil fuel use plummeted. But cities are much too densely populated, and lack sufficient land for food growing for their current populations. Only so much lawn could be converted to growing food. An economy half its present size would force migration from urban to rural simply for folks to have access to basic livelihood.
Do you disagree with this, Patrick?”
My comment follows Patrick’s article here: https://theraven.substack.com/p/how-to-build-the-future-in-place
Hi James
I think some of this depends very much on the city. You may be familiar with the book “Retrosuburbia” — all those big quarter-acre lots would make a pretty good mixed horticulture food production system, probably enough to hugely reduce the food transport requirements of many suburbs. In London? Not so much. So while older cities have been cities for longer and will probably still exist as centres of trade in non-perishable goods (much as they did before fossil energy came on the scene), newer ones, especially those with extensive, spacious, car-dependent suburban areas, are in good shape to do quite a lot of local self-provisioning.
But where I live — at the outer boundary of Zone 3 on the Tube map — while the gardens are much smaller than in parts of North America and Australia, the area was considered quite rural before the railways arrived. The ancient pilgrimage road from Barking Abbey (est 666AD) to Waltham Abbey (church founded 1030AD) now forms part of my local high street; some of the pubs on it are pretty old too. I think technically I might even still have grazing rights on some local common land, though I would have to go through the charter to be sure. So I could theoretically end up “moving out of the city” just by… staying put, and letting everyone else leave.
So I would say cities will probably still exist, but not as we currently know or imagine them, and substantial ruralization is certainly on the cards.
Hi Kathryn –
I spent my whole day today writing this:
What is a “luxury economy,” really?
counterurbanization and the future of livelihood
https://rword.substack.com/p/what-is-a-luxury-economy-really
I utterly and completely agree with your principal points in your ‘comment’ to me, especially the importance of large suburban lots vis-a-vis the retrosuburbia book, website and movement. The suburbs will likely often be far preferable to cities in the coming low-carbon, low energy economy. And David Holmgren is a bit of a hero for me!
One thing that gripes me is that the ” government ” blames the population , bringing in new taxes carbon credits whatever , when did you hear about government taking the lead ? When has any western government trumpeted about insulating government buildings ? How about mandating turning off the lights when no one is in the room , turning off spotlights on government buildings , turning down heating and A.C. ? even ordering themselves and employees to use the train instead of jets and cars , governments should be leading the charge not lambasting the public over their profligate ways
I think it’s delusional for critics of a Small Farm Future to expect an increase in service jobs to keep the populations in the cities during a less-globalized, energy-constrained future when there would be little to no marketable production bringing money into the cities (money that would have to be churned back and forth between all those service providers to pay their wages, before the money eventually leaves the city to pay for food and other necessities produced elsewhere).
In London (England) as recently as 1961, the ‘manufacturing industry’ sector was the largest employer, providing one out of every three jobs in Greater London, while only 1 out of 10 jobs was in ‘financial and business services’. By 1999, these proportions were reversed, with only 7.5% of the jobs being in the manufacturing industry sector, and the largest employer (1 out of 3 jobs) being the financial and business services sector [Source 1].
In the 2000s, there were further declines in London manufacturing employment. Between 1996 and 2015, while the overall number of jobs in London actually grew by 40%, the number of jobs in manufacturing fell by 51% [Source 2].
Without the continued influx of globalized capital (from which the financial sector takes its cut) driving the economic ‘growth’, I think the situation in London would become pretty bleak.
Source 1:
Unequal City: London in the Global Arena
By Chris Hamnett, 2003
pages 35-36
Source 2:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/compendium/earninglearningandbusinesschurning/revealinglondonsindustrialeconomyin2015/businessactivitypayanddecliningjobsinmanufacturinginlondon2015
Important to note that those manufacturing jobs in London didn’t move to rural areas of the UK, for the most part. Nor are Brits in general buying less manufactured stuff.
It’s hard to separate 20th century, fossil-fueled urbanisation from colonialism and globalism.
Looking at most US cities without ample electricity they are toast , no one is going to carry two buckets of water up fourty floors the make coffee and wash up .
I completely agree , here in TX re t for city dwellers is one third to one half of their income that is not sustainable when huge amounts of froth jobs / work disappear when energy to keep them going gets short or too expensive As for building in place there will be a diaspora from the south ( TX,NM ,AR ) they are unsustainable being mostly desert .
“As for building in place there will be a diaspora from the south ( TX,NM ,AR ) they are unsustainable being mostly desert .”
I live in Santa Fe, NM, and so you’re writing about me at the moment. NM has a very low population density, for lots of reasons, and so we’re not quite as f-d up as you might imagine. We might even be able to feed ourselves on our own land, if we ever wanted to try it, but only by adopting community oriented self-provisioning outside of the market economy, which is of no help whatever to farmers. (I mean the Market is of no help here.) But, yes, our climate is going to pot as quickly as all of the rest of ’em are, so all bets are off.
Where’s the water going to come from ? , here in TX wells are 300 + feet deep , wind pumps don’t reach that far .
Then there is of course the question of summer heat , Californians are all ready leaving Austin because they can’t stand the summers even with a.c.
There has been a fair bit of talk about “free will” here lately, so I want to chime in a little about that.
It seems to me that the classical notion of “free will” is intensely individualistic, with the notion of a fully independent ‘rational’ being at its center — a center with agency. But this picture of an individual person as a fully independent, discrete entity doesn’t seem to me to accord with the facts about how we’re all embedded in many complex systems, of many kinds, ‘natural’ and cultural — including the complex cognitive fields we all think within, with their many conceptual schemas which we borrow from history and from one another.
I’ve been researching and thinking a lot about politics, recently, and so have been doing a sort of deep dive into the cultural-cognitive bases of political thought and systems. What I’ve mostly learned is that our political imaginations tend to be profoundly constrained by the habits of thought which we ‘learn’ from the common public discourse. We take a lot of our assumptions for granted, without really examining them for their relative truth value, applicability, aptness, etc. And so we’re mostly not enacting “our own” politics, but enacting the politics of the dominant culture.
So if we want significant change, we’re going to have to examine and question our most basic assumptions, because these are where our decisions are being made for us by the larger social field and its cognitive habits.
This is a huge, big deal!
@James R. Martin
“So if we want significant change, we’re going to have to examine and question our most basic assumptions, because these are where our decisions are being made for us by the larger social field and its cognitive habits.”
I agree with your assessment.
I was lucky enough to do a degree in Fine Art (back along). Not much use in getting a job but…….
It did teach me to question my previous assumptions and to look/question everything about myself and my view of the world.
It’s a fine line though and I hope I didn’t disappeared up my own arse too many times!!!!
Watching my kids go through the State education system has been sad. They aren’t taught to be critical thinkers. They had to be “sponges” of information and “box tickers” to succeed at school.
As a society, we promote the ability to earn money above all else. But it comes at a price.
Sponges and box-tickers. Yup. That’s gotta go. You’re gonna have to get out the Roto-rooter. 😉
Thanks for all the comments above. I’ve been mostly offline the last few days, due to speaking at the Marches Real Farming Conference & the Abergavenny Food Festival, among other things. A bit late I think to weigh in on some of these topics, but I’ll ponder the comments here with interest.
We were just at Henbant again this weekend, doing the food for agro forestry workshop they were holding – Alice designed the menu and we did a beef ragu with chestnut pasta dish that was particularly delicious and perennial! (Ish!)
How was the food? Any memorable dishes, did they have a perennial menu/dish?
That sounds very tasty indeed!
@ Chris (and others) –
If you should find the time to read and comment upon my latest essay, I’d be appreciative.
What is a “luxury economy,” really?:
counterurbanization and the future of livelihood
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-18/what-is-a-luxury-economy-really/
I’m basically arguing, here, that a counterubanization demographic shift is inevitable, but also the most ethical response to our present polycrisis.
I think that rather than attempting to redefine “luxury economy” despite the conventional meaning, you could possibly get further by using a slightly different term: a “luxury-dependent economy”.
It seems to me that what you actually mean, though, is an economy dependent on abundant energy.
The thing that worries me about the transition to an economy with much lower energy inputs is that wealthy and powerful people have, throughout history, held onto as much luxury and convenience for themselves as they possibly can, usually to the detriment of those over whom they hold that power. The question is just how far that can reasonably go with shrinking, rather than expanding, energy available.
An equitable and just society that uses half as much energy as now could, indeed, be very pleasant, if still radically different than the present day. But if I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here…
Meanwhile: my impression is that many urban households have more than one adult in some kind of job. If half the city jobs disappear, a return to households with one breadwinner (and considerably less money available for leisure spending) seems plausible, alongside any ruralisation. One confounder of this is that there are more single-adult households than ever before; but I think that trend can change pretty quickly. (I know very few single adult households in practice: most of my friends who are not part of a couple, and many who are, do have housemates. As we’re mostly in our late 30s and early 40s these days, we have housemates we’ve known for a while and tend to be close to, or at least can tolerate. And arrangements where one housemate covers various costs while the other looks for work are more common than you might expect, too.)
“I think that rather than attempting to redefine ‘luxury economy’ despite the conventional meaning, you could possibly get further by using a slightly different term: a “luxury-dependent economy”.
I think this is a good point. I’ve just been using “luxury economy” as a shorthand for “luxury-dependent economy” (LDE). Perhaps I should call it by the longer name, and after mentioning it once in any essay or article use the abbreviation LDE.
“It seems to me that what you actually mean, though, is an economy dependent on abundant energy.”
Years ago I started imagining the sort of world we’d have to have if we were to take the climate emergency seriously. I contemplated all of the things which would top the list of things which would have to go. Those items which, on a scale of one to ten, are energy intensive would simultaneously be evaluated on a ten scale quantifying whether they are more like luxuries than necessities. So those things which are both very high in energy intensiveness and the luxury scale would be the first we ought to abandon. I thought of global mass tourism as one thing which should immediately be phased on on this basis. But automobile use is a close second — even though many people are deeply dependent upon automobiles today (though we could all re-shape the world and our lifestyles so we’re much, much less so!).
When I had thought about how much would disappear from “our economy” in a low energy economy, I fully understood that it would shrink GDP / GDP so enormously that most folks would regard the result as “economic collapse”. Indeed, the financial system as it is presently designed would come to a grinding halt. But if we don’t adopt this shrinking down of the economy, surely Earth will soon become largely uninhabitable — by most humans and myriad species. So it’s a matter of having to make a choice between these two options. Either we shrink or we die, basically.
Meanwhile, the conventional / mainstream narrative on “energy transition” is preventing us from understanding and addressing this conundrum. That narrative says, “No problem, we’ll just replace fossil energy with renewable energy. Problem solved!” But not one of the genuine energy experts I know think this is so.
Alice uses ‘commodity dependent’, I think it covers the economic relations better.
You must not have read my essay, Joel. “Commodity dependent” would not be a good fit for the purpose of the essay, which was (a) to reveal how and why modern economies require an immense amount of provision of non-necessary goods and services to avoid collapse, and (b) this can no longer function in this way in a low energy economy — and post-cheap and abundant fossil fuels –, etc…, which (c) means many will have to leave cities in order to have access to livelihood in the near future.
I read both this and the mazza essay you respond to, keep up the good work mate.
@ Kathryn
There is the problem of * economies of scale * the are no oil refineries small enough to keep just the super rich in petrol and jet fuel or factories making plastics from natural gas to wrap the goop they intend for us to eat . Many unexpected things will happen that have not been thought about as energy supplies dwindle .
Indeed! I’m not sure the super rich realise that, though.
And on the other hand… it seems like we’ll use fossil fuels until they become too expensive. But “too expensive” is a relative term. So I wonder: are oil refineries small enough to keep the super rich in petrol/jet fuel/etc physically possible? I expect they are, just currently uneconomical; it isn’t profitable at current prices to bother with such facilities, but it might well be when oil is $500/barrel (or whatever). Just like the rich in previous times could afford to keep multiple horses (some for transport, some for their labourers to use for farming), while everyone else had to use oxen or manage without draught animals. The rich had access to enough land to grow the food for the horses: they had literally more sunlight energy available than people who didn’t have that much land access.
I don’t think higher-tech renewables are going to get us out of the coming energy scarcity problems, but it’s notable that pretty much all of them require access to land, and also that some of the super rich are busy purchasing lots and lots of… land.
When energy costs ($,£) reach a certain level of increase the present mode of economy and finance seizes up and breaks. Traditionally, historically, this has resulted in recession, but a recession is defined by being very temporary, unlike a depression, which lasts longer. But if energy costs were to essentially permanently rise to a certain height it would’t be a recession or a depression, but a financial collapse — a collapse of the existing financial system. If the world hadn’t by then figured out and emplaced an alternative financial system which could function under such conditions, money would no longer function in such a collapse situation. It would become useless — and just as useless to the very rich as the very poor.
It’s also important to keep in mind that what we call “property” is a social agreement, and only a social agreement. If the financial system permanently collapses, property relations as we know them could no longer function. There’d be no good reason for poor people not to simply inhabit the land/property now ‘belonging’ to the rich. After all, it “belongs” to the rich only because we go along with the program of property relations at present. But if people are starving — or at risk of starving — in great enough numbers, all bets are off about ‘property’.
Personally, I strongly suspect that the shift of one kind of energy economy to another will require, demand and even force a transformation in politics of a kind which should dramatically impact property relations.
@James
The very wealthy don’t hold all of their wealth in currency. They hold assets, such as land and housing, and they can leverage those assets to enforce a social order that gives them de-facto continued ownership, or at least control. Their currency holdings are a tokenisation of their wealth — that is, their control of assets and influence of political process. You could say their cash is the result of their wealth, not the cause of it.
This is why poor people didn’t “simply inhabit” the land of the rich previously. Even the Diggers were inhabiting commons.
But yes, if enough people are starving there will be bread riots. Or fascism. Or both.
What are the basic luxuries we all need , clean water , sewage removal / treatment and food ,remove electricity from the equation and cities are death traps . Remove diesel from farming and transport and oh boy anyone want to take a horse drawn wagon load of cabbage from Kent to Bromley , US grocers lost one billion dollars of goods to theft last year !
Will there be enough renewables to keep this going ,IMHO no .
Diogeneseo10 –
I get the impression (from what you’ve said) you’ve not really thought very carefully about the distinction between luxuries and necessities clean water is an ideal example of a necessity, as is food.
Did you read my article?
If you have clean safe water coming out of a tap it is luxury of you only have a polluted river as your water supply .
Same with sewage having it removed by a hidden system carrying waste to a treatment plant is luxury compared to a community hole in the ground .
It is a necessity to have clean water but for half the world it’s a luxury .
How long would any western city last if the electricity went out for a week ? Water would stop within a day , sewage would take a little longer but it would be overflowing within a week , the sheer stupidity of spending billions in electric cars when it is almost certain even the basic services will struggle to keep going with limited energy confuses , amazes and appauls me .
The A.C. Bad , electric cars good discussion simply baffles me !
I admit I haven’t had time to read all the comments as well as I would like, and expect to return to this thread. I’m on my way to speak as part of the “Small Grantee, pool 2” meeting of the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, on a panel about market engagement and development, and I plan to say something pretty different from what they might expect, and a lot of my framing echoes and is informed by yours, so, many thanks.
First, I would say that we are coming from this already from the point of view of a for-profit small business that was marketing consumer products, and products which we handle from soil through processing and packaging, marketing and sale. We make CBD oil and topicals, hemp grain chocolate, distilled spirits, herbal tinctures, and sell grits, corn meal, eggs and frozen beef by the cut. We have a main street brick and mortar, a webstore – Laurasmercantile.com, and active wholesale relationships. We have already begun to open up these markets to other farmers in the region, and expanding this to serve a broader network is the core of our market-building strategy. We are talking with a branding agency, thanks to support from USDA and refining our vision as we simultaneously grow the producer network and logistics around processing and distribution.
One of our key determinations as we have thought about building this brand is that “climate-smart” claims are going to be everywhere, at all scales. There will be a huge new market built around feed additives that reduce methane ‘burps’ combined with methane digesters for manure lagoons; this will be combined with some kind of Prescribed Grazing requirement and maybe use of Climate-Smart Grown grain in rations such that Climate-smart beef will be rolled out nationally with any capital costs to put the system in place covered by State and Federal government and by the corporations needing off-sets, in-sets and marketing claims. The corporate side will pay itself back with a small premium at retail, knowing that a subset of consumers wants to vote with their dollars to “fix” the “climate problem” and support the good actors with their choices. Grain will be mass-balance accounted for at the big elevators with a new industry of 3rd party verifiers paid from a modest premium on that end.
This entire enterprise of creating a climate-smart layer to the commodity food system is not likely to help a lot of us in the “Small Pool” to bring more customers to the regeneration of the old-time farm system where farms grew food and not commodities. Where local people spent their money at local places for food that kept their families healthy. To regain market share for this alternate kind of system, where farmers can make a decent living on mid-sized, human-scale farms that they can be glad to pass on to their children. Where the land can have a voice through people who live on it for generations and know every inch of down to its soul. To make this market self-sustaining after five years, we need regional processing infrastructure. And we think this is also the climate-smartest thing to do.
There’s two ways to address the increasing instability in terms of weather; and between all of us present and not, we’re sure to try both ways. One way is to further centralize people in urban areas, to apply precision/robotic/AI-managed industrial process to the land where its big and flat enough to suit that system. To make food processing more efficient at the factory scale through consolidation and invest heavily in precision fermentation and the like. To adapt the food-buying-people to whatever is made available to them at a price they can afford.
I come from a hilly place. The robots don’t like fields shaped like lungs, and if you don’t need to feed much, then feed additives can only do a little of the work of responding to the real challenge presented by the shifting climate.
The other way is to bring food closer to home. The vision I described will be written off as nostalgic by the champions of Progress, but we like to hedge our bets. Maybe more of the same practices that got us to where we are now will not get us out. Sure, the only way out is through, but we plan to take a different path. So we’re building a mid-sized slaughterhouse close to home. We’re hosting a Heritage Food Festival on the farm with a feast where everything comes from within 20 miles or so and is made from absolute scratch. The more our customers can work with unprocessed ingredients, the more they will get the powerful benefits of whole food nutrition – heck that fancy grocery store even put it in their name! And the more of the food dollar that the farmer will get. So our market sustains, not for five years, but for five hundred, by bringing eaters and food growers back into relationship through processing that is scaled to make this relationship possible again. Industrial food is a historical anomaly. Many who profit from it in different ways are doing their best to say, this is the end of history and to gather all the attention and resources for the next iteration of our ever-adapting food system to themselves. From that point of view, buying food direct from farmers is a fringe activity for the rich at little street markets once a week in the cities. But we think there’s a place in the future for this other, older way. We aim to make it real for our neighbors and our watershed.
Joel –
We seem to have run out of room for more comments in the thread where we were discussing “commodity dependence”.
I looked up that term and the material I saw in that said, “Commodity dependence is when a country’s exports are heavily concentrated on primary commodities. A country is considered commodity-dependent when more than 60% of its total merchandise exports are commodities.”
The same source said, “Primary commodities are raw materials that are extracted from the earth and used by other sectors of the economy. They include agricultural products, fuels, electricity, and potable water. Primary commodities are often traded on commodity exchanges.”
A luxury dependent economy (by my definition) is one which requires a very large percentage of non-necessary goods and services to be flowing in the economy to keep that economy from collapsing. So I’d generalize and say that “the global North” constitutes a luxury-dependent economic system.
This becomes important, as an idea, when we’re considering voluntary energy descent as a significant proportion of response to the climate and ecological crisis — rather than just presuming that we’ll have a full energy replacement of fossil energy with ‘renewable energy’.
Hey James,
I agree with your line of thinking, the luxury economy as you describe it is responsible for the irresponsible use of resources which will lead inexorably to collapse. I’m with Chris, I can’t really say how it’s gonna go down.
We’ve used the phrase commodity dependent as a short hand for being forced into a position that you cannot self provision from; wages and rent – the twin evils of enclosure. It also serves to out line a lack of choice in the process – nicely described in Malcom, Ruben and Kathryn’s discussion.
Ruben’s position, which I described as embodied, is similar to my own and in this respect, the word luxury to me is a sensual word, relating to textures, tastes, feelings brought about through a skillful kind of being in the world. A local agrarian culture would indeed be the most luxurious way to live. If you read JM Neeson’s Commoners, you will hear the peasants of the day luxuriating in their many treasures ‘Lords of there own manors’. And you will see them willing to fight to the death for that way of life, because it was of great value to them.
The economy we see today is far from luxurious, its a kind chimaera of the skillfully made objects and textiles, foods and drinks of even those peasant cultures, and not even the best restaurant in the world could serve that mix of foraged, natural foods in an embedded, embodied context and architecture.
We see it as an economy of convenience, that commodifies everything in its gaze – making it easily available through money. But what is lost is the very thing it seeks. The luxury brands that are enjoying this fin de siecle are ciphers for a world that no longer exists, feeding a hungry ghost.
The image of the yacht that opens the essay is the perfect example of some thing that is seen as luxurious that in essence is a debased plastic simulacrum of the freedom and danger of sailing and sea faring and the many crafts that have come together to make that possible – it has made that aggregate of energies convenient.
So, perhaps some separation of luxury, convenience and commodification can help round out. I don’t know if this is helpful and it is certainly not a criticism as I enjoy your work, poetry, essays and curating. I’m increasingly feeling that even our frames of reference, our means of communication will undergo the same processes of transition/collapse that we see happening – that broad cast media will be superceded by face to face, local meetings and in person discussions. As you have said, that is where change can effectively take place.
Alice is working with some architecture students and here’s a quote from her opening talk:
Building the commons starts in our heads when we let go of the hierarchies engendered in capitalism- that tell us that only a very few people are good at things and everyone else must follow them, recieving the fruits of their brilliance. It is my understanding that within the commons, everyone has a gift to bring, and that gift regularly manifests with the full potential of human skill in whoever is willing to work at it. The idea of community comes from the interlacing of those skills. The richness of crafts shared amongst neighbours. When we build the commons we fully expect, that the infrastructure we create will bring out excellence from every corner of our communities. As designers we might have to put down the ego that places is in such high esteem, but in return we gain access to the best of every discipline, as our neighbours discover what they are capable of.
Hi Joel –
This was an older comment post from you, and I want to apologize for not responding to it sooner. I’m not sure what happened. I may have just been overwhelmed by things, as if often the case.
Your comment post here was beautiful, delightful, inspiring and in every way just plain good. Thanks!
Chris.
Have you ever read
Just Enough by Azby Brown?
It’s a look at life in Edo Japan. A sustainable society supporting a population of 30 Million people prior to “opening up” to the world and industrialization.
Some very interesting social and practical solutions to the many problems that come along with large populations.
I was “tipped off” about the book on another blog. (Thanks Don, if you are watching)
Looks very interesting, thanks for the tip
John – this ties in to your reading of olde Japan, or at least an aspect of it, and its wider ramifications (kintsugi). I thought this a good talk all in all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADIutKvhL7c&ab_channel=AllianceforResponsibleCitizenship
Thanks Simon.
I’ll check it out
@Simon H
I loved the bowl !!!!!!!
It’s all just a change of attitude/perspective.
Seeing the beautiful in a different way.
Valuing things differently.
A repaired bowl as having value. Seeing the craft/care/attention in the repair.
We have all been conditioned to value the new and discard the old or damaged.
Bringing something back into use is so much more thoughtful than just buying a new one. Each repair becomes unique.
It’s kind of like healing. Bringing something/someone back to health.
I’m glad you got something from it, John.
I appreciated the accent on care over time, shared among people (in this case, craftspeople/artists).
I agree there’s a conditioning/culture aspect to these perspectives that sometimes take energy and attention (aka more energy) to override (cultural rehabilitation?). I’ve come across similar repairs, though much more workaday, to household items like cracked wooden dough-mixing troughs (big as a baby’s bathtub, usually carved roughly from birch), involving handmade staples, now rusted. Sometimes a workaday bodge is the way to go, though I appreciate the Japanese approach too.
@ Kathryn –
“But yes, if enough people are starving there will be bread riots. Or fascism. Or both.”
I could not agree more. That was my main point. When there is enough social distress — e.g., in the form of widespread hunger and poverty — “the social contract” as it has generally been interpreted in the current iteration of modernity simply fails. It breaks.
Many thanks to AliceEM for her detailed, thoughtful and inspiring account (above) of what she and others are doing in her part of the world to create a better farm and food future. (And best of luck with getting grants to help it along.)
Dave Goulson was (I thought) doing an equally inspiring job of producing real food at home (500kg of veg and fruit from a 160m square area in Sussex in 2018, as documented on p 239 of his 2019 book ‘The Garden Jungle’) , so I was saddened to learn from Chris’s post above that he has signed up to the RePlanet crap. (Or maybe it was an AI fake version?)
Now on to outrage – I sent the letter below to New Scientist magazine on 6.9.23:
“Why do the members of the American Society for Nutrition find it hard to define what is meant by Ultra-Processed Food (UPF)? (News, 10 August, 2023, p 16) Could it be because – as documented by Dr Chris van Tulleken in Ultra-Processed People (p 65) – the ‘research’ they have received on it was paid for by food processing corporations which profit mightily from making and selling UPFs? Probably, since it is easy for non-conflicted people to follow the NOVA classifications, as explained by van Tulleken. UPFs are any edible substances produced using ingredients not used by (or available to) home cooks, and/or processed by methods not possible in home kitchens. (Yoghurt made the traditional way is most definitely not a UPF, and should not have been used to illustrate the story.) Are UPFs harmful to health? Van Tulleken provides plenty of research findings confirming this, and since his book came out new studies on the rising rates of bowel cancer and cardiovascular diseases in younger people have considered the extent to which increased UPF consumption is driving these trends. I’m getting that deja vu all over again feeling. There used to be scientists and doctors who said that smoking is not harmful to health. Who paid them to say it?”
On 23.9.23 this was published under my name:
“Why is it hard to define what is meant by ultra-processed foods (UPFs)? These comprise any edible substance made using ingredients not used by (or available to) home cooks, processed by methods not possible in home kitchens, or both of these.
Incidentally, yogurt that is made in the traditional way is most definitely not a UPF, and I don’t think it should have been used to illustrate the story.”
Definitely a fake AI version, no? Hardly any words the same, and meaning completely destroyed. Suggestions for what to do about this travesty of truth welcome.
Out of curiosity, I looked into who owns the New Scientist magazine, and Wikipedia says ‘New Scientist was acquired by Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) in March 2021’, and ‘The 4th Viscount Rothermere is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the company [DMGT]’ and he’s reportedly a billionaire.
Regarding UPFs, earlier this year New Scientist published an article (behind a paywall) titled ‘How ultra-processed food harms your health and how to fix the problem’, which had an interview with Chris van Tulleken, with a mention of his book.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25834361-600-how-ultra-processed-food-harms-your-health-and-how-to-fix-the-problem/