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Posted on October 25, 2023 | 136 Comments
The last couple of weeks have brought some of the activity here at Small Farm Future Central to wider audiences – perhaps most obviously through George Monbiot’s response to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. I also joined Nate Hagens on his Reality Roundtable podcast to discuss food and community futures along with Pella Thiel and Dougald Hine, and Alison Kay on her Ancestral Kitchen podcast. Then there’s this interesting review of my book, in which I emerge relatively unscathed despite unpromising beginnings as “another joker on the left”.
But here I’m going to focus mainly on some learnings from George’s response to Saying NO. I’ve published another essay about it over at Resilience.org, which I’ll probably reproduce next on this site for archival completeness.
I doubted that George would respond to my book at all, but I was steeling myself for something aggressive if he did. Even so, I wasn’t expecting quite the hit piece that he served up with his ‘Cruel fantasies’ essay, Nazi comparisons and all. Although slightly shell-shocked at first, ultimately I think I have to find the Bakhtinian comedy in it – “Sire, you protest too much. I have tweaked your nose!”
My overall sense of George’s piece is that he’s more interested in trying to get one over me – not difficult, with his vast media platform – than he is in seriously debating the issues. Happily, I’ve only had a couple of people contacting me to ask why I connive at mass death, and far more thanking me for my intervention. I tried unavailingly to get a reply placed in one of the august journals that reproduced George’s piece. Oh well. Now that his energy figures are shredded and he’s fired his fusillade, I think it’s probably time for me to move on without giving his writing a great deal more attention. All the same, his response does clarify a few things, and it provides a foil to lay out some further aspects of agrarian localism. So in this post I’m going to mention a few points of interest arising from his essay that I hope to return to in the future. Just a little bit more nose-tweaking, then, before moving on.
Although George said nothing about the manufactured bacterial protein that he favours as a source of human food in his response to my book, in the aftermath of his intervention I was able to get him to clarify on Twitter/X his source for his claim in Regenesis (p.190) of 16.7 kWh electricity input per kg of bacterial protein. I think I’ve now shown conclusively that this figure greatly underestimates the total energy costs of the technique.
It wasn’t easy to get George to reveal his source. He engaged in quite some foot-dragging and diversionary tactics, including the claim that he was using real data from Solar Foods, so I should take it up with them, before finally revealing that his figure came from this study. Which is not real data from Solar Foods. The figure that George takes from it manifestly underestimates the energy costs of manufacturing bacterial protein several times over. I’ve laid out the issues in this short document, with a bit more background here. Do let me know if you’d like me to write another post about it. Likewise if you think I’m in error. But my conclusion as things stand is that manufactured bacterial protein is completely fanciful as a way of feeding people en masse.
It’s a bust for bacteria.
George sets a lot of store by numbers in his recent writing on food systems. “As I’ve discovered since publishing the book, if there is one habit that incites fury more reliably than any others, it is to put numbers on the problem.” In my opinion, actually he ventures surprisingly few numbers in his analysis, and – as I’ve shown – the ones he does venture are sometimes crucially wrong. Meanwhile, there are other important numbers he doesn’t mention at all. If ‘people of Chris’s persuasion’ are to come around to his future visions, then I think people of George’s persuasion need to develop more numerically informed positions around issues like low carbon energy futures, agroecological food productivity, arable overproduction and livestock greenhouse gas emisssions.
There are other numbers and evidence that George does cite in his essay. I’ll just mention one here, contained in this quotation:
The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be supplied with staple foods…is 2,200 kilometres. Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly-habited lands (US plains, Canadian prairies, Russian steppes etc) and shipped to tight, densely-populated places.
These are the numbers to which people of Chris’s persuasion most furiously object, even though they have no answer to them. Why? Because the numbers are incompatible with their worldview. They show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.
I’m not exactly sure what ‘answering’ a number means, but I guess George’s point is that humanity is now so far down a globalized food supply route – so boxed into what I called in A Small Farm Future ‘the arable corner’ – that localizing the food supply is just a pipedream. The flipside of that objection is to ask how the hell we’re going to keep shipping staples 2,200km as climate change and energy, water and materials constraints along with geopolitical fracturing and a bunch of other issues play havoc with the world we’ve known. George has no answer to this, as far as I can see. Another pipedream.
So we could embark on the difficult path of deurbanization and food localization now. Or we could follow George’s path and try to put it off. I think we’ll end up in the same place either way – mostly rural populations eating mostly local food. George’s route will just cause that bit more misery and suffering along the way.
To put it another way, I think George’s take is another variant on the old cliché that we can’t introduce ecological policies because they’re bad for the economy. Which is to forget that the economy is a subset of the ecology, and the ecology always has the last laugh.
This exemplifies what I’ve called the ecomodernist doom flip. While readily invoking terrible future circumstances, George seems incapable of imagining that these circumstances might be so terrible as to prevent business-as-usual scenarios like transporting staple foods 2,200km, or stable megacity populations. I’m happy to debate the difficult details of how to effect ruralization and agrarian localism, but if people want to dismiss it out of hand I think they need to offer a more plausible alternative. I’ve not yet seen one from George, or anybody else.
In summary, I don’t furiously object to numbers like George’s 2,200km. They express exactly why we need to localise food production, urgently. The only thing I furiously object to is the history of enclosure, farm engrossment, destruction of local food systems and foolish dependence on ecocidal fossil fuels implied by such figures – a history that George barely mentions. Grain producing regions that are ‘lightly-habited’? Why would that be?
I have been reading the palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak’s strange and enthralling book The Naked Neanderthal. Slimak illustrates something I’ve noticed before – that actual scientists often have a more nuanced understanding of the limits of numerical evidence than non-scientists who make rhetorical appeals to ‘the numbers’ or ‘the science’ to buttress their opinions. Slimak complains about the kind of positivism which, he says, is “a failure, an obstacle to thought. It is a way of denying human nature and the animal logic rooted within humans. It hides behind graphs, measurements, tables in order to avoid looking human nature in the face.” (p.125)
…and so on in this vein. Maren Morgan’s excellent review of Monbiot’s Regenesis also takes a dive into this issue.
Ultimately, the key questions before us are ‘how should we live?’ and ‘what should we do now to move toward it?’ (questions that admit to multiple ‘wes’, answering them in different ways). Neither can be answered simply by numbers or evidence. I hope to say more about this soon.
But to press my point further now, I believe that numbers are sometimes actively inimical to living well. In the companion essay to this one I explain how I think George’s number-mongering easily leads to a politics of enclosure.
There’s a huge social science literature about how the quantitative bureaucracies of colonial governments in particular have denied local and indigenous peoples rights over land, on the grounds that their claims are based in stories, songs and oral accounts of authority which cut no ice with modern forms of governmentality. Show me the numbers, show me the lines on the map, show me where it’s written down, show me where it’s clarified and quantified. Further back in history, there were similar legal issues around rights over land here in England.
I tried to make this point recently to the writer Guy Shrubsole when he weighed in on social media asking for the numbers to justify my position vis-à-vis George. Guy has written a good book about the tangled story of how so much land in England is owned by so few. Frankly, I was astonished to have him lecture me about the need for me to make “claims based on numbers rather than vibes”. Numbers over vibes is the language of enclosure, dispossession and land concentration par excellence. More on that another time too.
Again as briefly outlined in my companion essay, George’s response reveals more clearly than in Regenesis his neo-Malthusianism in relation to hunger and poverty. He seems to think the way to tackle these is to produce more food at lower prices, and he ridicules my argument that higher food prices can help alleviate global hunger, arguing that the reverse is obviously the case: “Is it really possible that you can write a book on food and farming and fail to grasp this basic fact?”
I wonder if he’ll come to regret that sentence. I aim to say more about this soon, drawing on various authorities and lines of evidence – not least one G. Monbiot, who correctly wrote: “Food is too cheap to provide sufficient income for small farmers, among whom number many of the world’s hungriest people” (Regenesis, p.129).
In addressing the question, it’s important to distinguish between situations where food prices rise at a given moment without any other significant changes to prices or social structures, which certainly would tend to make things harder for the poor and hungry (oh wait), and situations where long-term downward pressure on food prices pushes people into precarity. Anyway, more on that to come.
I have, as I mentioned, been reading Ludovic Slimak’s book The Naked Neanderthal. In the face of George’s outrage at my argument that a pattern of urbanism scarcely in existence for more than a few decades may not be a wise long-term bet, it’s been quite a tonic to learn about another kind of humanity who occupied what’s now Europe over hundreds of millennia, an unimaginable span relative to modern society, and then rapidly became extinct some tens of millennia ago.
Slimak is in no doubt about the cause of that extinction – the arrival of modern sapiens with superior projectile hunting technologies, which, he says, were technologies of mind as well as weaponry, involving social standardization, intolerance of difference and cultural self-absorption.
Whereas no two Neanderthal tools were entirely alike, when it comes to modern sapiens “If we look at a hundred flints, we can easily grasp the techniques involved, and we know the next 100,000 will be exactly the same”. We sapiens, says Slimak, “are not very good at embracing difference”. We live in “over-normative” societies where “difference is frowned upon and only superficially tolerated at the periphery” and where our crafts are “all about us … our societies … our ways of being”. Neanderthal craft, on the other hand, “does not speak about the person, the individual, the ego, but exclusively about the ways of being in the world of the group as a whole” (Slimak, pp.177-85).
No doubt their societies changed over time, but on Slimak’s account it looks like it never occurred to Neanderthals to say ‘if we just jazzed up these weapons a bit we could kill a lot more game per acre and save ourselves a lot of labour input’. It seems their large, intelligent, human brains were oriented to other things. For a long time.
How ironic it would be against that background if the sapiens urge for standardization and modularity, for projecting ourselves into ever more instrumental control of our surroundings, led to the demise of our vast, ordered and regularized modern civilization, if not of our species itself, in such short order compared to the Neanderthals. I believe it well might.
No doubt ‘people of George’s persuasion’ will dismiss this as more romanticism on my (or Slimak’s) part. Well, I’m not arguing that we can or should try to ‘go back’. I’ve expended so many words over the years on distinguishing the case for low energy agrarian localism from simple nostalgic yearning – including in pages of my book that George has clearly read and in the pages of another one he clearly hasn’t. I suspect his attempt to position me thus is partly about him seeking the easiest means of ridiculing me. What I find useful in Slimak is the way he shows how meta this approach is, a silly but effective strategy coded deep in our sapiens soul – ‘forget that Mousterian crap, look at the length of my projection’. With modernism and its apologists, this has reached its pathological apogee.
So I guess I’m pushing a boulder uphill trying to argue otherwise. It seems to be my chosen lot. We can’t turn ourselves into Neanderthals but we could at least try to evince a bit of cultural wisdom, take our foot off the pedal just a smidge, and try to place ourselves within our landscapes as local keystone species rather than dematerialized gods, as I argue in Chapter 7 of Saying NO… It’s not all about us, and the more we try to make it so the further along the ecomodernist death spiral we hurtle.
As I see it, modernist politics, while still dominant, is exhausted. Its radicalisms of left and right have both devolved to a state-corporate gigantism clutching after magical remedies. Its thought leaders try to ridicule other voices bubbling up from the depths of civil society by using their social status and their amplified platforms, another form of projectile technology perfected by sapiens. The trouble is, as the physicist Richard Feynman put it, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
I understand why George cautions against approaches like mine that in his view embrace the unravelling of modernism and its cultures of growth. He thinks it’s self-indulgent. But to my mind, the real self-indulgence occurs when the demise of that global settlement is already baked in, yet mainstream political traditions are so incapable of thinking beyond it that everyone working within them converges around the manifestly inadequate blandishments of technocratic welfare capitalism as a proposed solution. I believe George has succumbed to this self-indulgence.
We need to stop trying to fool nature, and ourselves, and instead seek ways to place ourselves within nature again on the other side of modernism or ecomodernism, perhaps its only remaining variant. George defines ecomodernism as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change” and I believe that precisely describes his current approach. Which is why this joker on the left is urgently seeking a different way of doing things. Despite the ridicule, there are more of us on this path than you might suppose.
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I think it’s notable, politically, that the review of “Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future” which calls Chris “another joker on the left” ends up giving this unequivocal recommendation:
“…buy the book, it’s worth it”.
I read that review too, and…
… well, let’s just say it’s a good thing I don’t feel I have to agree with everything someone says if I agree with some of it. Wow.
Thanks Chris.
…’We live in “over-normative” societies where “difference is frowned upon and only superficially tolerated at the periphery”’…
Aint that the truth, brother!
I was so happy when I graduated from Junior High School.
I thought – “Maybe now people won’t give me such trouble for simply existing.
Alas, it was not to be. It turns out that we can never leave Junior High School.
I continue to be amazed at the explanatory power of the ‘Permanent Junior High School Theorem.’
I have no doubt this is an element of your current arguments with the powers of ‘over-normativeness’.
Sometimes when I find myself in another of those situations, it helps to mutter “Ape behavior…”
I don’t want to go down a Neanderthal rabbit hole but………….
The sapiens killing of neanderthals is a common perception but quite simplistic. If sapiens had a 2% better survival rate then they would eventually “replace” Neanderthals without an arrow being fired. Something as simple as a 10 month pregnancy rather than a 9 month one, could make all the difference. We lived side by side and interbred for thousands of years. They where no mugs.
(Rhesus positive/negative blood types is also an interesting avenue of thought)
There is a tendency to “project” 21st century thinking onto neanderthals.
And don’t forget the Denisovans!!!!!!
There was a time when “Middle Earth” kinda existed.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
is a good read on all things Neanderthal.
It’s a constantly changing field of research but the neanderthals have had a bad press.
Sorry , got a bit carried away there!!!!
From the initial linked blog post in the first paragraph.:
“Smaje pleads for “agrarian localism”, in a wonderful celebratory example of the academic-lefty-globalist-prescriptive-proscriptive fascist turning towards humanity rather than away.”
Well, with praise like that who needs enemies?
Enemies?? I think that quoted sentence illustrates how community can form beyond labels and preconceptions/misconceptions. “Turning towards humanity” seems like common ground that’s indeed worthy of celebration.
As Chris wrote in his recent “New worlds to build” essay,
“The new politics involves a slow unravelling of old left-right distinctions. Technocratic welfare capitalism of the kind George now favours has become mainstream on the erstwhile radical left…”
These lines from Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock speaks directly to your point about “how community can form beyond labels and preconceptions/misconceptions”, Steve:
“There was an odd bending around in back at the extreme limits of culture and politics where back-to-the-land hippies and radical survivalists ended up being the same people, since they spent 90 percent of their lives doing the same stuff. You had to have a story you could tell yourself about why living this way made more sense than moving to the suburbs of Dallas and getting a job at Walmart. The hippies and the preppers had different stores, but in practice it didn’t come up very often.”
When I first read them a couple of weeks ago, those lines jumped off the page at me because of some the things that Chris has written in recent months about the unraveling of left/right distinctions. In particular, this observation in July’s “Two Lefts” post made quite an impression on me:
“…I do think there’s an interesting anti-government homesteading space in the USA which might prefigure a wider global politics – and it occurs to me that there’s more political diversity within this numerically tiny group than there is in the multitudes still invested in modern consumer society and its forms of governance.”
That being said, the writer of this particular substack review is really…well, to borrow the adjective that Chris used to describe her review, “interesting.” I suspect that the stories that she tells herself are going to make it difficult for her to work especially well with anyone who doesn’t tell themselves the same stories.
Thanks Ernie, for that passage relating how “they spent 90 percent of their lives doing the same stuff,” while the different stories they may have, about why they were doing it, were secondary or irrelevant.
I believe this could apply to the author of that review, Elizabeth Nickson. She published another article today, with a somewhat unifying theme:
“In fact, anyone with sense and a little extra money buys organic food. And farmer/thinkers on both the right and left, see, argue, agitate for, and write about the drawing down of Big Ag, combined with a deliberate, policy-led revitalization of the country. Regenerative farming is a growth industry on both the right and the left, because rural people understand the depletion of the soil, the poisoning of the waters and air. Joel Salatin and Wendell Berry, natural political opponents, both want the same thing, which is to say a revitalizing of farming country and a hardening of property rights, the opposite of current policy on both sides of the fence.”
(The “hardening of property rights” could be similar to Chris’s stance against “the new politics of enclosure” he discusses in “New worlds to build”.)
Chris is mentioned in Nickson’s new article:
“Another recent entry is Saying No to a Farm-Free Future, the Case For an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods. Chris Smaje, a Brit, argues from the left for a nation of small farmers, spread across the land, engaged in deep stewardship of both land, animals and adjacent community.”
Uniting for a Conservative Environmental Policy
Elizabeth Nickson • 25 Oct, 2023
https://the-pipeline.org/uniting-for-a-conservative-environmental-policy/
Some really great work Chris, it feels like a solid move through a crux point, kind of cathartic. Like you say, it has cleared the view.
I loved The Inheritors by William Golding, a beautiful telling of the same story.
We were fleshing some deer hides on the weekend, over looking the mountains in Wales, stretching them out over a hazel pole frame and working them with a bone tool. We threw the flesh and membrane onto the roof for the red kites that were circling. We tended a fire and boiled the oak bark that we chipped with an axe to make a tea for the tannins.
When you do that work, outside with the weather passing as you process through the actions, the world falls into place, and our place in it.
@Joel
I think The Inheritors said less about neanderthals are more about William Golding
Though, I too, enjoyed the narrative.
Im sure your right, I’ll certainly be looking at your recommendation – it sounds excellent, thank you!
@Joel
Your talk of processing deer hides got me thinking.
Have you ever been on a flint knapping workshop/course?
I’ve done a couple and can recommend them.
Fascinating skill to learn. Far more complex than I realised.
Came away thinking that it would be almost impossible to teach without language.
Which opens up an interesting line of thought, seeing that the earliest lithics are over 3.3 million years old!!!!!!!!!
The lithic in the photo below is neanderthal.
Was the shell an accidental or is there an aesthetic going on there?
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=VBBaS9rs&id=AE33462A8D1D8D828FA0547AD6C2BF49D5635C84&thid=OIP.VBBaS9rsUW4C94ua54lnjwHaJT&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F1d%2Ff6%2Fd0%2F1df6d09e9ee87642747ad0822b53ef0c–september-.jpg&cdnurl=https%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FR.54105a4bdaec516e02f78b9ae789678f%3Frik%3DhFxj1Um%252fwtZ6VA%26pid%3DImgRaw%26r%3D0&exph=621&expw=494&q=Neanderthal+lithic+with+shell&simid=608000793673467418&form=IRPRST&ck=04D870EFA9C572D14C74E20165EC1ECA&selectedindex=2&pc=XIBA&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0&vt=4&sim=11
Sorry not to get back to you John Adams – what a beautiful piece – I’m absolutely sure that they enjoyed the shell in the flint. I’m not so sure about language because it is ‘only’ another tool – and akin with Tyson Yunkaporta, I feel materials and bodies have an energetic link which can be perceived by other bodies (without language). Like everything – there has got to be bit of both, eh? The discussion of aesthetics is a long one but I think it is again, an embodied (feeling) position that’s been colonised and hijacked. In this way the cultural work of SFF is to wrestle back the enjoyment of work, craft and objects (and making sense of them historically) back into the a human, people space – from academic expertise and colonial framing. Your not doing that but it is the dominant position.
For info, Jim Thomas has just published a great essay critiquing Monbiot’s ‘Regenesis’ & his ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece, further unpicking some of Monbiot’s evidence, including the 2,200km figure I mention above. It’s long, but well worth a read (disclosure: I feature in it, but that’s not why I’m recommending!)
https://www.scanthehorizon.org/p/george-and-the-food-system-dragon
On other matters, I’m interested in the discussion on the twists & turns of changing political allegiances in the light of Elizabeth’s review. More on that another time, no doubt.
On the Neanderthals, I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole either. The main point is that people have lived for long periods without overly accumulative, economistic and instrumental ideologies, and I suspect they can and will again.
But for what it’s worth, Slimak’s book isn’t a technical tome and he leaves a few questions hanging in the air, but he is a Neanderthal expert and I find his arguments quite compelling in the main. One of his points is that the vastness of Eurasia was sparsely populated by humans of all kinds at that time, and the archaeological record is very fragmentary so we really know very little about the nature of the contact between sapiens & Neanderthals, or even if there was any in most places. His key evidence for replacement is a cave where analysis of the soot shows rapid replacement from one year to the next by sapiens after a long period of Neanderthal occupation. I don’t think he’s necessarily suggesting direct violent conflict so much as probable avoidance, retreat and loss of game by Neanderthals. Anyway, I’d strongly recommend his book and would be interested to hear thoughts about it here if anyone reads it.
I enjoyed the Inheritors too. Seems like Golding may have got a few things right after all … although yes it speaks to him and his times too (as writing generally does).
Thanks for comments
Below is a small section of that recent article by Jim Thomas:
——————————
‘Back to what makes a good disagreement, it is notable that Georges 5500 word defence is absolutely silent on one of Chris Smaje’s two central points: – that brewing bacterial protein for the masses is energetically infeasible and unwise in the context of the necessary green energy transition. George reserves some of his most sneering huff and puffery to accusing Chris and other food sovereignty advocates of being unable to deal in hard numbers: “If there is one habit that incites fury more reliably than any others” he writes. “ it is to put numbers on the problem. Hectares, yields, nutrients, calories, inputs, outputs, costs, emissions, hunger, death: any form of quantification is as welcome in this arena as a tambourine in a Bach sonata.”
‘Yet Chris absolutely DOES put numbers on a problem that George studiously avoids acknowledging – the problem of wishfully thinking that we can bacterially brew our way to food security. In his book and then more fully online Chris carefully lays out the maths for why George’s calculations about the energy input to produce bacterial foodstuff is off by a factor of four. He shows that every kilo of bacterial protein will require at least 65 Kwh of energy – twice the daily energy use of an average US household. This is electricity use which in aggregate would then have to be added on top of expected additional electricity demand for electric vehicles, electric heating of our homes, running an ever-ballooning internet, cloud and AI infrastructure and much more – all from clean energy sources without damaging mining and extraction for the infrastructure build out. Food would seem to be be an unnecessary use of additional electricity generation since for now agroecological land-based food production doesn’t require electricity at all . Incredibly food really does grow on trees.’
George and the Food System Dragon
Jim Thomas
Oct 26, 2023
https://www.scanthehorizon.org/p/george-and-the-food-system-dragon
And on energy .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/profit-chinas-top-wind-firm-slumps-98
Will there be any ?
I haven’t read Slimak’s book, but it sounds like “groups organised in certain ways sometimes have an evolutionary advantage” which is… not exactly new news.
It bears thinking about in terms of how we organise people today, though, while nation-states and large industrial corporations are busy eating themselves.
Something that has been on my mind recently is the concept grain agriculture (at least as we currently practice it) requires more climate stability than some other forms of agriculture; grains basically require a certain amount of coordination and are also very storable (with minimal processing) and transportable, and that means taxation, certain types of trade, and so on. They aren’t necessarily more nutritious, but they allow for a somewhat predictable and controllable energy surplus, and commandeering that is something it is possible to do in a meaningful way.
If we have messed the climate up enough that we don’t have enough stability for large-scale grain production any more, that will change the balance of power very radically — possibly even more radically than the loss of fossil fuels (which only emerged after several millennia of grain agriculture).
Then we end up in a paradox, because growing food that allows for a somewhat predictable, transportable and storable energy surplus is certainly good for individual households in the shorter term (I expect my winter squash to last longer than my spuds and neither of those to outlast my corn and dried beans… all crops from the Americas, incidentally) but also leaves those households more vulnerable to their produce being commandeered by force.
But if we optimise instead for greater diversity and shorter-term storage, we leave ourselves with very little to fall back on in the event of local famine caused by drought, flooding, fire, or whatever other phenomena our global climate catastrophe might bring.
I want to say that a focus on crops where you can store, transport and trade the seeds, but not really eat the seeds as a staple food in their own right without growing them out, might be one way around this problem. However, most of the crops I can think of that fall into this category are biennial root crops, where your seed production is going to be pretty vulnerable to One Really Bad Winter (or whatever). I’m not sure the distinction will matter in my lifetime, compared to the distinction between, say, winter squash and wheat.
Additionally, it seems likely that at least some regions in some parts of the world will have climate and hydrology stable enough to grow grains and pulses in substantial quantity. They may not be the same regions that have this now. Control of such regions, rather than control of oil-producing regions, seems like it might become very politically important; but I am not sure I would want to be a peasant there rather than a peasant somewhere that won’t support wheat but might support amaranth (okay, you *can* eat the seed, but it’s awfully tiny), somewhere I could be obliged to sow a wide variety of seed every year and then watch half of it fail, and be prepared to move elsewhere (with the rest of my seeds) if the entire plot of land I have access to is underwater, or there’s just no water to be had.
But if I’m doing that, then microclimate starts to matter — a lot. At that point, it makes sense to do something I’m already doing: growing in a low-lying, windswept frost pocket in one part of the city, and a higher elevation plot which is a little further from the central London heat island effect but also far more sheltered from wind in another part, as well as my suntrap of a back garden where I can be more responsive to immediate conditions. The distances would need to be fairly short… so I think hill country may have something going for it after all.
@Kathryn
Your thoughts on grains has also got me thinking.
Tying in with my thoughts on the pros and cons of tractors…………
The planting of grains apposed to mixed crop planting (such as The Three Sisters) might have been “imposed” rather than “adopted”.
For hierarchical social structures, grains are very useful to those in charge, for the reasons you describe. Storage, transport etc. (Though, perhaps not the most nutritional.)
I know that The Inca had big grain (quinoa ) stores spread around the empire. It prevented localised food shortages, if/when crops failed.
Hungry bellies are one of the primary causes of social unrest, after all!!!
For the growers, grains may not have been the most productive use of their farming time, but maybe they didn’t have a choice?
In Edo Japan, taxes were payable in rice, so farmers were forced to grow it. With relatively little agricultural land, livestock farming, even if desirable for the reasons you and Chris emphasize in comments below, took a back seat.
Taxes due in sacks of grain, with non-payment of taxes resulting in getting your head chopped off, is quite an incentive to grow grains.
Mono-cropping whole fields with a plough may have ultimately been a “political” decision?
As you say, if the Holocene is coming to an end and grain crops will become less viable, the political/social fallout could be interesting!!!
Yes, that’s what I’m getting at.
I think it’s fair to say that growing in regions that don’t support grains (or not very well) is probably more precarious but also less likely to result in the type of hierarchical societies that developed where grain agriculture was dominant. But regions that are adjacent to grain-cultivating regions are also pretty vulnerable to invasion by armies fed on (transportable, long-keeping) grain-based diets, so it isn’t quite as simple as “don’t grow grains, and then you can’t be enslaved”.
@Kathryn
Graeber and Wengrow touch on some of these ideas in The Dawn of Everything.
The upside of small grains, corn and legumes is that they are simple to store and keep indefinitely at room temperature once they are dry.
Yes, that’s why it’s worth using them as taxes, feeding them to standing armies, and so on.
Wow. Thomas’ essay is excellent—and Monbiot does not look good.
@Chris
Sorry, I can’t resist going down the neanderthal rabbit hole a little deeper……..!!!!!
“Slimak is in no doubt about the cause of that extinction – the arrival of modern sapiens with superior projectile hunting technologies, which, he says, were technologies of mind as well as weaponry, involving social standardization, intolerance of difference and cultural self-absorption.”
This narrative framing is something that I have difficulty with.
The idea that we (Sapiens) caused the demise of neanderthals because of some different cognitive processes, I find questionable.
That Sapiens “out thought” neanderthals or our social organisation was better. In short, that we “out-smarted” them we were more “intelligent”.
After all, we are academically described as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, meaning “twice wise”.
Neanderthals are called Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis.
This is the basic narrative of William Golding’s The Inheritors.
It’s a narrative that goes back to the beginnings of paleontology in the 1800’s. The “Ascents of Man” illustration and all that.
Slimak extrapolating a whole theory based around one set of deposits in one cave, is questionable.
The only neanderthal tools/crafts/ etc that have survived to today are lithics. No baskets, wood, bone, textile, cordage or cave paintings. But it doesn’t mean they weren’t doing them.
Infact, there is very little Sapiens material from the same period either!!!!!!
All the intricate Sapien lithic arrow heads, cave paintings etc are much more recent.
Having read around the subject over a number of years, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of experts out there that don’t agree with eachother!!!!!
The idea of standardisation of tool making amongst Sapiens, I also find questionable. A short trip around the Pitt-Rivers museum would suggest otherwise!!!!
There are other possible narratives around the “extinction” of neanderthals that are biology based rather than intelligence.
As I said previously, it only takes a 2% better survival rate, for one population to eventually supplant another. That 2% could be caused by an number of factors other than cognition. 2% better survival rate during child birth for example (which only becomes an issue for Neaderthals when Sapiens show up on the scene)
Then there is the interbreeding. We all contain at least 2-3% neanderthal DNA. Sapiens and neanderthals lived side by side for thousands of years. The replacement wasn’t immediate.
Can all of those sexual encounters have been un-consensual?
It’s arguable, that we are a hybrid of Sapiens and Neanderthals anyway and there wasn’t any replacement going on. Just a slow “dominance ” of one set of DNA over another. (Hinny and Mules or rhesus positive/negative blood types springs to mind)
The whole “Ascent of Man” due to superior technology/intelligence narrative has a parallel with 1800’s notions of “racial superiority”.
Both theories intertwined.
The idea that European domination of much of the world was due to greater intelligence manifest in technology, was the narrative of those times. We are still living with the legacy of the categorisation of “races” through their supposed level of “technology”. The Darwinism that leads the the idea of the “inevitable dominance of the white man”
Bringing it back to a SFF, learning to flint knap may come back in fashion.
(Interesting to note, that even in the iron age, there was still a lot of flint knapping going on. Steel was a luxury only for the very wealthy forr quite some time)
This article, quoted below, gives an overview of recent research findings about Neanderthals:
Worldwide research trends on Neanderthals
José Luis Guil-Guerrero, Francisco Manzano-Agugliaro
Journal of Quaternary Science
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jqs.3476
——————–
“The hypotheses formulated for such an extinction are diverse (Madison, 2021): competitive exclusion (Dusseldorp & Lombard, 2021), assimilation, demographic weakness (Page & French, 2020), abrupt climate and vegetation change, pathogens and volcanic eruptions. The proposed mechanisms might be complementary, and their influence on the process may have varied temporally and regionally (Timmermann, 2020)…
“Genetics provides information on interbreeding events between Neanderthals and [anatomically modern humans] AMH (Lalueza-Fox, 2021). The study of the Neanderthal’s genome reveals that their populations were already declining before their encounters with AMH, while the latter experienced a continuous expansion after their dispersal from Africa about 65 000 years bp (Sankararaman et al., 2014). There is also evidence indicating that Neanderthal groups were small and, thus, their remains show signals of marked consanguinity (Prüfer et al., 2014). Conversely, AMH do not show signs of inbreeding (e.g. Petr et al., 2020), and there is evidence that AMH lived in larger groups and had more extensive social networks than Neanderthals.
“The new Late Pleistocene AMH had very recent Neanderthal ancestors and, thus, introgression of Neanderthal DNA in such AMH genomes is evident (Fu et al., 2015). Interestingly, gene flow from the new arrivals, Late Pleistocene AMH, into later Neanderthals remains undetected. Overall, genome analyses indicated that the later Neanderthals were probably not replaced by AMH, but genetically absorbed by them, and then the Neanderthal genes were progressively diluted from the Upper Palaeolithic gene pool due to their lower reproductive rate and later by progressive population replacements with lower Neanderthal ancestry (Lalueza-Fox, 2021). Either way, there is evidence of coexistence and hybridisation between AMH and Neanderthals in the Near and Middle East, as well as a hybridisation with Denisovan hominins (Navazo Ruiz et al., 2021).
“On the other hand, the cultural information exchange between Neanderthals and AMH is a hot topic, but all discoveries suggest that Neanderthals developed similar behaviour to that of AMH…”
@Steve L
SORRY, EVERYONE ELSE!
I guess Neanderthals were at a disadvantage when AMHs turn up on their patch, because neanderthals had had to endure/survive a European ice age.
The Ice Age must have had an accumulative negative effect on general neanderthal population size and subsequent health and vitality. Inbreeding is never a good long term option for general health.
Not the first time that neanderthals had endured an ice age and recovered though.
But this time, AMHs (from Africa) with a healthier, larger gene pool, show up and are just in better shape and more numerous.
The 2% survival rate, then comes into play.
John, some more details are given in this book review (quoted below). Compared to Neanderthals, some later AMH populations seemed ‘better adapted to colder conditions and perhaps a more highly mobile lifeway’, and could have ‘had access to better insulation or other behavioral modiications compared to Neandertals’.
‘Neanderthals and Modern Humans in the European Landscape During the Last Glaciation’
Tjeerd H. Van Andel and William Davies (eds.)
Reviewed by Deborah I. Olszewski
https://paleoanthro.org/static/journal/content/PA20060116.pdf
‘Across this broad [European] region, the responses of Neandertals and early AMHs are relatively similar. Both seem to have site distributions that contract toward the south during the lead-up to cold intervals—for Aurignacians this pattern is only after 45,000 cal bp, with Neandertals showing a similar response in earlier cold climatic intervals as well as during this period when they presumably coexist with Aurignacian populations. The contraction of Neandertal and early AMH populations efectively creates areas isolated from each other, and opens up the potential for extinction of local groups. Interestingly, it is only the Gravetian (later AMH) populations that seem better adapted to colder conditions and perhaps a more highly mobile lifeway…’
‘There is no real resolution regarding Neandertal extinction, other than the possibility that Neandertals were less flexible in their responses to climatic changes, reaching a point of no return…’
‘In comparing Neandertals, early AMHs, and late AMHs, Aiello and Wheeler conclude that Neandertals tended to select sites with the warmest winter temperatures/wind chills, while Aurignacian and Gravetian groups could (and did) occupy considerably colder sites… Aurignacian and Gravetian groups, especially the later, had access to better insulation or other behavioral modiications compared to Neandertals.’
‘The fact that many Aurignacian sites follow similar patterns to those of Neandertals, particularly prior to 30,000 cal bp, should generate a host of “red flags” for those interpretations of AMH expansion into Europe as the result of their alleged advantages (i.e., symbolic behavior or new organic technologies). While it may be true that symbolism or new technologies in some part eventually proved advantageous to AMH survival in glacial Europe, the fact that they do not seem to have been an advantage for 10,000 or more years is a quite compelling signal that we should perhaps be thinking “outside the symbolism/technology box”…’
@Steve L
Thanks for the book link and quotes.
“In comparing Neandertals, early AMHs, and late AMHs, Aiello and Wheeler conclude that Neandertals tended to select sites with the warmest winter temperatures/wind chills, while Aurignacian and Gravetian groups could (and did) occupy considerably colder sites…”
If true, it’s an interesting observation. If AMH were the “apex predictors”, wouldn’t they have kicked the Neaderthals out of all the warmer spots? Or perhaps all the best hunting was to be had where it was coldest?
All interesting stuff but perhaps a little off topic for this blog. Thanks for the engagement though
Intermediation- So much of the act of living is intermediated and the default pattern in the first world, so we don’t even think about it. Food is grown by someone else, processed and transported in multiple steps. Financial transactions between individuals goes through banks, internet apps, smart phones, etc… maintaining and fixing the various trappings of modern life are farmed out to service companies. Who still uses a sewing machine?
Any culture will have a certain amount of specialization, but we westerners generally operate as small cogs in a big machine. I think the slow melding of left and right viewpoints in the crucible of rural life makes sense. They are both dealing with nature and solving the same challenges of self provisioning. My crotchety old neighbor and I don’t talk politics, but we both monitor rain totals, pest indications, and soil moisture the same.
More than protein- From the Solar food website, it “easily vanishes into foods”. Umm, so what is the rest of the food and where is it coming from? A healthy diet is much more than protein. We will still have agriculture, and the challenge of doing it in sustainable ways.
I chuckled at their touting Solein as space food. Another strong indication of the concept of complete disconnection from an ecosystem. I guess their advertising wonks know who their audience is.
All in all, I agree with Chris’ point in his fourth paragraph that it might be time to move on………..to brainstorming over more wicked and intractable problems like societal structures, governance schemes and possible cultural tipping points that optimize the chance for a least painful path to a small farm future.
Monbiot seems to see everything as a commodity everything has its price but like many more that feed from the trough of global capitalism , they know the price of everything and the value of nothing .
There are two distinct systems running together finance ( fiat money printing press )and the finite planet / commodities ,, talking to a oil man he said to me we will never run out of oil , there’s deeper / offshore fields untapped , my answer was yes but can we afford it ? No answer .
Renewables are failing wherever they are tried , here in TX with the largest number of wind turbines in the country we barely scraped thru last summer ,only then by turning coal plants up to flat out and boosting power with gas turbines ( jet type engines hooked to a generator ), There is not enough energy for goop factories ,period , would be except people starving when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine ? .
As for long distance transport I am waiting for the first sailing bulk carrier , that would be a sight to see with lots of sails the size of football fields , towing them in and out of dock with rowing boats as they did before steam would find a lot of work .
To Diogenes. Have you read “The Last Grain Race” by Eric Newby?
Now I’m my reading list . It was a little tongue in celebrating that bulk carriers could be converted to sail and I doubt there will be 100,000 tones of grain to fill one of them never mind a fleet .
Globalism dies with diesel / bunker oil shortages / price .
Travel Notes from The Road to Nowhere
https://rword.substack.com/p/some-rough-sketch-notes-on-disabstraction
So, who is saying nice things about George’s latest book ? There must be someone. Are they kooks ? Business as usual, delusional endless growth advocates ? Dreamy technophiles hoping they won’t have to do anything to deal with climate change and the end of consumer culture ? Sincere people living in cities who are just scared of the future ?
George has had some pretty big holes torn in his arguments that technology and ‘renewable’ energy are going to save us. He doesn’t have to do anything but to be intellectually honest, at a minimum, he needs to either rebut the numbers or have another think about his assumptions.
Confirmation bias is real. Offering facts to counter the points raised by Chris, Jim and others could be difficult. It may be even harder to challenge his own beliefs and hopes. This has to affect him. Sliding into the realm of alternative facts is not a good look for anyone.
And who is Elizabeth Nickson writing to ? I have only read the two articles referenced above but the comments sound kind of paranoid. Big Brother is real and he is coming for me. With a dose of fear of the other thrown in for good measure. I do see that she has upgraded Chris from a joker on the left to a Brit.
Clearly there are some similar themes on both sides. Maybe left and right don’t mean anything anymore. How do we make community with people who share some of our values but who seem to be living in a very different reality ?
I’ll give it a listen when I have time to really pay attention to what he is saying. Do you know of anything written online that covers the same ground ? Reading is easier for me.
In the history I have seen, the organizational systems are different but fascism leads to authoritarianism and communism leads to authoritarianism.
In a practical sense, both systems appear to be about accumulating power and wielding power over. I doubt that anyone who claims to be on the far right or the far left is all that excited about authoritarianism once they realize they are not going to be in a position of power.
@ Greg –
“In the history I have seen, the organizational systems are different but fascism leads to authoritarianism and communism leads to authoritarianism.”
Many people (e.g. Noam Chomsky and myself) don’t believe there has ever been a communist society anywhere in modern history. And we would say that if it is authoritarian it isn’t really communism at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
I’d be fine living in an anarcho-communist society. But it would have to be created voluntarily, not imposed by violent force (which is the usual way of conceiving of ‘revolution’. In my view, anarcho-communism could gradually replace the dominant culture organically through non-violent revolution. This vision has nothing to do with the sudden replacement of the dominant systems, but has everything to do with people coming together to collaboratively create local communities which practice communism.
But I’d not call it communism, as that word has become so profoundly associated with authoritarianism, bureaucracy, and violent revolution, all of which do not appeal to me in the least.
It seems to me that distributism would — or could — achieve many of the same benefits as anarcho-communism would or could. But the trick would be enabling land access to people who presently cannot afford to purchase land. That’s a very tricky problem!
It’s important to keep in mind that socialism and communism has generally been conceived as a means of organizing an industrial society, not an agrarian localist one. But there is certainly no reason it has to be conceived in this way.
A little anecdote relating to left/right politics:
I was at my friend’s house the other day – he is our local State Representative, and he showed me a book that he’d been sent by allies of the Koch brothers.
The book title was ‘Love Your Enemies’
For those not familiar with the swamp that is Kansas politics, the Koch brothers are billionaire far-right kleptocrats, and they have been incredibly successful here and nationwide, effectively owning the Kansas legislature.
And I thought “Hmm, is it possible that all the energy my friends have spent hating Trump has somehow depleted their ability to do anything else?”
My friend, who is an excellent human, and almost incapable of hating anyone, while also requiring rigorous evidence to support an argument, wouldn’t agree to that thought right away.
Reading the Elizabeth Nickson piece made me suddenly feel very tired!
“Maybe left and right don’t mean anything anymore.”
I believe they probably do mean something.
Check this out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cmjNrXWms
Going back to a previous debate about the pros and cons of tractors…………..
Spent a day last week walking round University of Bristol Botanical Gardens and came across a display of this for the first time….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
I guess tractors lead to planting/harvesting of mono-crops. Whether mono-crops are preferably, both in yields and soil fertility, is open to question.
As Kathryn has pointed out previously, mono-crops allow for all sorts of social power dynamics, “markets” and hierarchies to develope.
I think that you are painting with a bit of a broad brush to say ” tractors lead to planting/harvesting of mono-crops.”
The tractors I have were designed to work a farm of up to about 200 acres, at the time when the modern concept of monoculture agriculture did not exist. The 1970s, when Get Big or Get Out became government policy, spelled the end of most small diversified farms.
There have always been areas where the soil and climate were conducive to growing small grains. But the first planters, drills, harvesters and threshing machines were all horse powered. The milling industry in MInneapolis boomed from 1880 until 1930 with the peak year being 1916, still well within the horse powered era of farming.
“mono-crops allow for all sorts of social power dynamics, “markets” and hierarchies to develope.”
Those all developed long before tractors were invented.
“Whether mono-crops are preferably, both in yields and soil fertility, is open to question.”
That depends on the scale. Modern monoculture cropping is driven by the thin margins for farm products. It is a little like the Red Queen’s problem, when farm gate prices go up so do land rents, fertilizer and seed prices. The solution is to grow more crops to have enough left over to pay off your start up loans. Productivity gains have never stayed with the farmer.
A simple corn bean rotation on fields that are 1000s of acres in size are normal now. All the fertility inputs are purchased and brought on to the farm. Those inputs are either removed with the crop or leach into the ground water. That is not good for soil fertility.
The entire food system is a mess. Besides Get Big or Get Out, a cheap food policy has caused a lot of the problems. Monoculture agriculture and $250,000 tractors are symptoms of the problem.
@ Greg –
Very informative! Thanks!
Over the last decade or so fertiliser and weed killer inputs have been focused on minimising them , combines through gps and instant weighing by the combine have cut inputs by up to 40% , data from the combine is transferred to the fertilizer spreader which automatically adjust the amount delivered , technology has allowed the farmer to know exactly how much each square yard of land needs for maximum crop and no more , using this system fertilizer run off is near zero . The
And yes it costs an arm and a leg and the sacrifice of your first born son !
@Greg Reynolds
I guess the point I was making (and by the way, I no farmer!) wasn’t just particular to tractors but could apply to horses pulling ploughs as well.
Planting 3 crops together (three sisters) at the same time prohibits mechanical planting or harvesting of any kind.
Does using ploughs/combines etc necessitate a single crop type?
In a SFF, will a plough be more effort than it’s worth?
A plow is a much faster way of turning or tilling soil than doing it by hand. Not to mention that hand digging even a relatively small garden (~ 5000 sq ft) is back breaking work. The use of a plow does not require a monocrop. I typically plant 30 or more different crops in plowed ground. In a SFF a plow would definitely be worth the effort.
A combine will do a cleaner job of harvesting a single crop but can easily do wheat and peas or beans if they are dry. Combining winter squash would be a huge mess.
There are machines called Pixalls ( an brand name. may be Oxbo now) that will pick fresh corn and green beans. https://oxbo.com/products/oxbo-bh100/ I don’t think that they can do both at the same time.
A couple more articles bearing more and less directly on my current engagements:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-27/chris-smaje-vs-george-monbiot-and-the-debate-on-the-future-of-farming/
https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/can-agriculture-and-biodiversity-coexist/
Some quick comments in relation to other themes above:
I only listened to a part of the left-right piece, but I didn’t find it that convincing – very much from a traditional left-wing perspective. Part of the present difficulty is that we have the likes of George speaking a left-wing language but in practice positioning themselves around a corporatized state-private technocracy, and then we have what perhaps I might call smalltown conservatives advocating for a much more egalitarian, less hierarchical and human-scale approach, which I largely endorse … except around a few culture war type points where I lean more traditional left. But some of the culture war type stuff raises interesting issues in itself.
On distributism, I wrote this piece a while back – https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/neo-distributist-proposal.
James is right that nothing much has (yet) happened with the Distributist Congress. It was cooked up by Sean Domencic, me and a few others but I think Sean has moved onto other things and ultimately I don’t have much energy for political organising of that kind. I trailed it on Twitter and got some heavy pushback from traditional Catholics and conservative distributists – Kathryn was a witness! I’ve been meaning to get back to this issue but got distracted by the Saying NO book. I do want to come back to it soon, though I’m not sure about organising a congress.
Agree with the drift of the discussion about staples and grains. I’ll be making the case for mixed farming here shortly – I think there’s a need to get away from the idea of ‘protein crops’ in that context. And for thinking about agrarian resistance to centralizing power.
Well, a lot of people seem to love Regenesis, but maybe not so many who are really appraised of food and farming issues. Michael Mos beneath this post seems to be a fan of George, and not of me: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-23/new-worlds-to-build/. However, a lot of George’s evidence does seem to be unravelling somewhat…
I sat here an thought what about taste can goop make my favourite double gloucester cheese , or westmoreland sausage , the plethora of local foods lost to globalist goop , no brie for the French , German bratwurst ? Somehow I think there will be pushback .
I do remember some of the pushback you got, and I think some of it might have been a reaction to rather pointed questions I asked about strategies to ensure that such a congress wouldn’t be co-opted by fascists… not an easy thing to answer, and I am sorry, on one level, for drawing fire at such an early stage of that conversation.
On the other hand, if certain people can’t handle someone with purple hair and specified pronouns in their twitter profile being part of a conversation then I guess that says quite a lot about them, and finding that out sooner rather than later seems like a good thing to me.
I think in the current and coming transition we are going to need as many different people working together as possible, and while I remain extremely wary of the capacity of groups of human beings to find (or invent) scapegoats, I certainly don’t want to try to apply any kind of ideological purity test.
Sorry to bang on again, but………
The debate around the destructive nature (or not) of livestock farming that Regenesis and Just Say No debate, wasn’t really an issue in Edo Japan, as there was virtually no livestock farming going on.
Not enough available land to indulge in the “luxury” of eating (land based) meat.
Pastoralism (based on grazing livestock) is a pretty low-labour way to get lots of protein and calories, in a form that is fairly easily stored for winter/the dry season/whatever, but it does generally require a larger land area than horticulture.
The neat thing about mixed farming, though, is that animals (various ungulates, as well as poultry and pigs) can hugely improve the productivity of existing horticulture, by transforming plants we can’t eat (and a certain amount of food waste from our kitchens) into manure for our vegetable gardens. Chickens and ducks can also do good work keeping weeds and/or bugs-‘n-slugs in check, and pigs even help in preparing areas of pasture for intensive horticulture. And in some areas of the world, livestock (especially mammals) also historically contributed to keeping homes warm in winter. (I think this is not always a great idea in terms of disease transmission, but I would probably feel differently about it if I had not-quite-enough firewood to get me through the winter.)
A mixed farm approach would likely mean eating substantially less meat than most meat-eaters today consume, and eating things like dairy and eggs much more seasonally than we do now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a vegetarian or pescatarian diet for everyone. It could also include a much broader range of vegetables for human consumption. My own experience is that when I eat meat produced in a more traditional manner and not fattened up on surplus corn etc I find it more satisfying and get full much faster.
The current situation of over-producing cereal grains using fossil fuels, and then feeding livestock exclusively on those grains, is an extremely land-intensive way to eat meat, but it isn’t the only production method available.
You can not feed animals ” exclusively on grains ” dairy cows get anything from 5 to 20 pounds of grains a day at around 20% protein and the high end burns cattle out fast (3 years) , they need at least 30 pounds of grass in some form to keep their rumen going , too much grain has mostly fatal consequences , they bloat , at one of the worst scenarios their feet rot off . Keeping a herd healthy is not a simple matter .
Thanks for the correction, Diogenes. I was thinking of chickens when I wrote that sentence, but I suspect they also aren’t healthy on a grain-only diet.
So: feeding too much grain to livestock is bad for their health, as well as unsustainable.
The closest I come to mixed farming myself is the worms in my compost. I don’t fancy eating them, but I am very glad they are there!
Well, just to follow up on further discussions about Neanderthals, Edo Japan, communism and distributism.
First, just to reiterate that understanding what ultimately befell the Neanderthals isn’t entirely relevant to the larger point I’m making in the OP by referring to them. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting question.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Slimak’s position, I feel I must defend him from the implication in John’s comment that he’s celebrating the superiority of modern sapiens. Far from it – he’s rooting for the Neanderthals all the way, and he doesn’t consider modern sapiens more intelligent or more successful. In some ways, this debate mirrors more contemporary ones about indigeneity and primitivism which are relevant to my engagements with Monbiot’s position and I hope to discuss this soon.
One point Slimak does emphasize is the paucity of the evidence for ANY interpretation. I studied anthropology in the 1980s and kind of lost interest in the palaeoanthropology side of things for this reason … mountains of conjecture built on a few fragmentary bones. There’s a lot more evidence around now, but I was interested to learn reading Slimak that no new Neanderthal bones have been discovered in Europe since I was studying this back in the 80s. One of his points is that we’re talking about very small populations spread over very big areas, so even if they were contemporaneous we don’t know if they actually met. Carbon dating isn’t accurate enough to fix time at the level of possible human encounters, whereas his soot from cave evidence is … I agree it’s not an awful lot to go on, but it’s suggestive.
My understanding of the evidence about the Neanderthal parts of the modern human genome is that that didn’t necessarily happen in Europe, which was kind of a frontier region, and you don’t necessarily need long coexistence and lots of sexual encounters to get that result. As to coercion … well, who knows? I think there’s evidence from various times in European history of asymmetric mating between incoming males and indigenous females, but no doubt that can be interpreted in different ways. Interesting issues anyway, to which maybe I’ll return sometime. Thanks Steve for the reference.
Regarding livestock farming, it’s true that with very heavy human population density it gets difficult – but people have been ingenious at finding ways to fit it around intensive cultivation including in E Asia – Netting discusses it in ‘Smallholders, Householders’ (and maybe King in ‘Farmer’s of Forty Centuries’?) The key point is that it’s not fundamentally about producing meat but about doing ecological work that people have to do themselves if they don’t have livestock to do it. In Northern Europe, ploughing heavy soils was an important task, achieved with livestock by sharing ox or horse teams.
Regarding communism and socialism, my take is that there have been plenty of examples of successful socialist politics (as successful as politics ever is, at any rate, i.e. not very) but yes modern communism is essentially authoritarian. It’s fine to hold in mind communist utopias where that doesn’t happen, but it’s also important to think about why communism tends to devolve to authoritarianism. One key reason IMO is that real ornery human beings just can’t operate consistently within a generalized ‘from abilities/to needs’ framework, and this systemic failure gets represented as a form of class reaction, with numerous entrepreneurs of social status willing to climb on the bandwagon of class politics to enforce it for their own reasons.
I agree with James about the difficulties of distributism in keeping economic means distributed, which I think has happened historically mainly just in small and ephemeral defensive republics. My difficulty with some kinds of right-wing distributism is that they’re not very generous regarding who decides and who receives the distribution.
Thinking more about livestock — another property they have is that they breed a lot faster than humans do, for the most part. If you don’t have enough people to do your farm labour you might be waiting a lot of years for your kids to get big enough and competent enough to do much; but chickens are voracious predators of bugs and producers of fertilizer pretty much as soon as they’re hatched, and oxen definitely take less time to reach full strength than a human does.
Given this, I might expect to see more livestock in situations of scarcity of human labour relative to available land, and less (but probably still some) where there is a human labour surplus relative to available land (i.e. overcrowding).
Industrial farming with fossil fuels turns that on its head, with livestock used as a sort of sink for overproduction of grain, rather than as farm labour or an intermediate step in turning sunlight into food.
@Chris
“Whatever the rights and wrongs of Slimak’s position, I feel I must defend him from the implication in John’s comment that he’s celebrating the superiority of modern sapiens. Far from it – he’s rooting for the Neanderthals all the way, and he doesn’t consider modern sapiens more intelligent or more successful.”
That’s a fair comment, considering that I haven’t actually read his book. And I’m not suggesting that he is a White Supremacist.
Just that some of his ideas draw on a long tradition of “extinction” and “superior technology” theories that can drift into ideas of “the primitive”.
In popular culture, “neanderthal” is still used to imply stupidity/backwardness.
It’s a subject that I find fascinating but……. ultimately, we will never know for sure.
Yes it certainly does drift into ideas of ‘the primitive’, but those ideas are more subtle and complex than they might at first appear, as I hope to show in a future post.
@ Chris –
“Regarding communism and socialism, my take is that there have been plenty of examples of successful socialist politics (as successful as politics ever is, at any rate, i.e. not very) but yes modern communism is essentially authoritarian.”
I’m curious to know what you mean by “successful” here, and also whether the successful forms of this which you are thinking of existed prior to (or otherwise outside of) modernity.
And now I’m wanting to read a good book on the history of socialism / communism, but one not loaded down with an enormous amount of the usual biases (which would not be truly informative at all). Partly, what I mean by “the usual biases” is the tendency to think of Karl Marx (and his ideas, beyond Marx himself) as the starting place and framing focus for this history. What this does is frame everything within Marx’s industrializing framework (and his pro-industrialism ethos). But I have a hunch that there must have been strong socialist / communist tendencies in various cultures prior to the explosive phase of industrial capitalism. No?
I don’t know how strong their communist or socialist tendencies were but the Grange and Co-op movements were popular in the midwest in the 1860s – 1930. Farmers Union still has elevators and co-ops in the Dakotas. Food co-ops are particularly prevalent in Minnesota.
I think it basically took Cargill to break the various Canadian wheat pools and co-ops; they were very much in operation in my childhood in the 1980s.
Saskatchewan farmers traditionally voted NDP, and it was the first province in Canada to have socialist-model health care.
“The term “socialism” was first used in the early 19th century to designate what later became known as the socialist movement. The word “socialism” is often attributed to the French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who is believed to have coined it in the early 19th century. Saint-Simon used the term to describe his vision of a society in which productive individuals would manage the economy for the benefit of all. He advocated for industrial planning and a reorganization of society to address class conflict and inequality.
Saint-Simon’s ideas, which he called “industrial socialism,” laid the groundwork for what would become the broader socialist movement. His work was influential in the development of socialist thought, even though the term “socialism” itself had not yet acquired the specific political and ideological connotations it would later have.” — from ChatGPT (the free version)
* * * * *
What’s interesting me at the moment is the question of antecedents to socialism which predate the naming of “socialism” … and especially those which predate the emergence of industrial capitalism. To find these, we have to both consider what the “essence” of socialism might be (if such a thing exists) and also consider various strains of thought and practice, culture and ethos, which may perhaps either constitute this essence or (at least) strongly resonate with the ideas and ethos of what we now call socialism.
I’m also interested — very much — in looking deeply into why “socialism” (and communism) became (in my view) co-opted by authoritarianism in most or all places where “socialism/communism” appears as (supposedly) “actually existing” (as contrasted with merely theorized and conceptualized as a possibility).
By now most folks reading these words will know I have a lot of anarchist influence in my political thought and attitudes. That is, I’m pretty intensely opposed to authoritarianism and I tend strongly to favor localized, small scaled direct democracy.
For what it is worth, I do not conflate the presence of appropriate authority with authoritarianism. These are two very different kinds of animal.
Many years ago I read ‘Anasazi America’ by David E. Stuart.
You will doubtless have a better idea than me as to the accuracy of the story he told, but I was quite taken by the picture of a large mercantile empire that was run essentially as an insurance syndicate for the core population that planted corn.
Operated by a priesthood that (of course) eventually became too top-heavy to support.
But my favorite factoid was that they had no standing army.
This probably doesn’t exactly qualify as ‘socialism’, but it’s headed in that direction…
@ Eric –
Actually, although for over a quarter century I’ve lived 3 hours (178.6 mi / 287 km) of road travel from Chaco Canyon’s famous ruins, and have visited a couple of times… and although I live slightly less than an hour’s drive from Bandelier National Monument, which I’ve visited, hiked and camped in many times … I’ve never read much about the speculations of archaeologists about the details and particulars of their culture. It’s not that I’m not at all interested, but that I can only read so many books, and the culture of the ancestral puebloans (also known as “Anasazi”) just haven’t ranked high on my reading list.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25888454-anasazi-america
The book description says “Adding new research findings on caloric flows in prehistoric times and investigating the evolutionary dynamics induced by these forces as well as exploring the consequences of an increasingly detached central Chacoan decision-making structure, Stuart argues that Chaco’s failure was a failure to adapt to the consequences of rapid growth—including problems with the misuse of farmland, malnutrition, loss of community, and inability to deal with climatic catastrophe.”
I can’t help wondering how archaologists could discern from artifacts that there had been an increasingly detached central Chacoan decision-making structure. Maybe they can? I don’t know.
Many people do strongly associate such decision-making structures with socialism, but I do not. I belong to a strand of socialist thought which is defined by profoundly decentralized, non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian forms of group decision-making (politics). This anarchist / decentralism strand was essentially crushed by the authoritarian / statist / hierarchical strand of what I would call pseudo-socialism in places like the USSR and China.
All that said, I do believe cooperation between villages and towns within a bioregion comprised of essentially autonomous (political) communities would be a very fine thing. I’m not at all opposed to organized societies of larger scales than towns and villages, provided local people are able to make their own decisions about, at least, almost everything… and there isn’t a creeping tendency toward big centralized state-like institutions which subsume local politics.
Is it true that an anarchist doesn’t need a policeman to tell them what to do ?
I thought it was Phil Ochs who said that but I can’t find the quote. There maybe more philosophy behind it than just throwing brickbats.
“Is it true that an anarchist doesn’t need a policeman to tell them what to do ?”
Is it true that a student should have to raise her hand in class, get permission to approach the teacher’s desk, and get a “hall pass” so she can use the restroom?
Thanks for the comments … a few too many threads for me to keep up with atm but anyway just on a couple of things –
– You might be interested in Rob Dietz’s article about ‘Smaje vs Monbiot’ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-27/chris-smaje-vs-george-monbiot-and-the-debate-on-the-future-of-farming/
…then again, you might not!
– Regarding communism, I guess I inserted the word ‘successful’ as a defence against the ‘there’s never been a successful communist regime anywhere’ gambit. Which actually I think is probably true, but – my previous caveats aside – no more so than with other kinds of political regime. I thought Eugene McCarraher’s book ‘The Enchantments of Mammon’ gave a good thumbnail of the kind of socialist thinking in 19th century England that Marx brushed aside. There’s also a lot of stuff about the so called ‘utopian’ socialists and anarchists around . Kristin Ross’s book ‘Communal Luxury’ gives some good context. Lots too on ‘peasant communism’, and how different it is from more modernist forms of communism. Eric Wolf’s ‘Peasant Wars of the 20th Century’ is good, as well as a lot of James Scott’s stuff. Then there’s good old Graeber & Wengrow…
– Regarding the Neanderthals, think I’m gonna leave it there for now. Nice to see Leslie Aiello make an appearance in Steve’s account. She was the person who taught me palaeoanthropology. Maybe I’ll come back to this sometime. I’d still recommend reading Slimak. He has his views about all those debates and issues that Steve mentions, but as I said before it’s not a scholarly book so the reader doesn’t get a full appraisal of the issues.
Thanks Chris!
I hope to — eventually — have a chance to read The Enchantments of Mammon. I’ve listened to the author talk on YouTube and podcasts and such. But it’s a big, thick tome. And I’d likely only have the time to read selected portions — which may be a really good idea, anyway. I’m thinking of doing the same with other books, e.g., The Great Transformation by Polanyi.
I’m not exactly an anti-Marxist. Marx had plenty of value to offer, and I only really “know” a bit of it. But it bothers me that Marx generally thought of the only way to enact a revolutionary politics (to the best of my knowledge) was through the use of weapons — through blood. That’s a pretty shitty basic premise, if you ask me.
I think we can do better. But not without engaging folks in actual fresh thinking and feeling… and sensing and intuiting and imagining.
The Meaning of the Paris Commune (w/ Kristen Ross)
The Majority Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xFnTu3ZFek&t=539s
Chris wrote:
“You might be interested in Rob Dietz’s article about ‘Smaje vs Monbiot’
The number of comments under that article has jumped during the past day.
Dietz’s article says, “The Ecologist reposted George’s [Cruel Fantasies] article on October 6th and has declined to publish Chris’s follow-up.”
I think it’s worth noting that while the Ecologist and Monbiot(dot)com both have evidently refused to publish anything about the existence of Chris Smaje’s response to what were arguably smears against him, Resilience and ChrisSmaje(dot)com have both published the link to George’s piece (Cruel Fantasies).
Which makes me wonder why The Ecologist would refuse to publish Chris Smaje’s response (or even mention it with a link). A potential clue? The Ecologist’s “About Us” page gives the name of the full-time editor of that publication, who happened to write an opinion piece in 2021 with the title “Building the Ecomegacities of the Future” which advocated for densely populated megacities instead of rural life:
“The dream of living the rural life remains seductive. But this is not the best way to transition to a sustainable future. It may be counterintuitive, but we may need to make our megacities more densely populated to make them environmentally friendly.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/25/building-ecomegacities-future
Some troubling news for fans of ‘precision fermentation’ being used to produce animal-free dairy protein: A molecular analysis revealed 92 unknown (novel) yeast/fungal compounds which haven’t undergone any FDA testing and aren’t generally recognized as safe.
‘Dr. Fagan said “synbio milk” involves genetically engineered whey genes and yeast/fungal compounds. Precision fermentation creates the milk. HRI, Fairfield, Iowa, found 92 unknown compounds in such milk through HRI’s full spectrum molecular analysis, which detects and quantifies every molecular species in samples… None of the 92 novel yeast/fungal compounds are GRAS or have undergone any FDA testing, he said. “Basically there are 92 compounds identified in synbio milk that are not named by scientists,” he said. “Nobody has looked at them for safety, nutrition, quality.” He said the synbio milk products should have a risk warning on packaging or be taken off the market.’
https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/24918-three-issues-arise-in-animal-free-dairy
92 comounds would take a very, very long time to test for. But if the FDA operates like the EPA has in the “science” around “biosolids”… or how it dealt with the approval process for OxyContin, well, you may know how those stories went. It weren’t pretty.
Thanks for comments … short on time right now, but just wanted to say:
– interesting point from Greg about ploughing vs digging a garden. In an ideal world, local communities would optimise the balance between the two. The trouble nowadays is our inability to realise you can have too much of a good thing, hence ploughing up the whole darned world
– we’ve touched before on the Grange and the populists in N America and I’ve mentioned it passingly in my books. In some ways it’s kind of a N American distributism. Must come back to this.
– …and likewise to anarchism … plus civic republicanism. In all these cases, there’s an attempt to build politics from the bottom up. They often succumb to more centralized power, but I think their time is coming around again. I’m pretty sympathetic to anarchism, though I always think the Oscar Wilde comment about socialism better applies to anarchism – the trouble is, it takes up too many evenings. That’s why it works best in republics of small farmers.
– thanks for the report(s) Steve. The foundations of ‘precision fermentation’ are rocking, but will anybody hear the news?
@ Chris –
“– …and likewise to anarchism … plus civic republicanism. In all these cases, there’s an attempt to build politics from the bottom up. They often succumb to more centralized power, but I think their time is coming around again. I’m pretty sympathetic to anarchism, though I always think the Oscar Wilde comment about socialism better applies to anarchism – the trouble is, it takes up too many evenings. That’s why it works best in republics of small farmers.”
“Classical republicanism, also known as civic republicanism[1] or civic humanism,[2] is a form of republicanism developed in the Renaissance inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity, especially such classical writers as Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. Classical republicanism is built around concepts such as liberty as non-domination, self-government, rule of law, property-based personality, anti-corruption, abolition of monarchy, civics, civil society, common good, civic virtue, popular sovereignty, patriotism and mixed government.[3][4][5]”
— from Wikipedia
I’m less interested in whether it’s called “anarchism” or “civic republicanism” or “distributism,” than in whether it in fact has been designed — and is cultivated and nurtured — as a system (or process, or whatever) which protects “liberty as non-domination”. The keys to this seem to be (a) keeping governance small and local and (b) facilitating the development of an ethos which guards this non-domination ethos.
When Biden recently took the approach of regurgitating Israel’s ludicrous and a-historical propaganda concerning the current outbreak of conflict there, I was — and am — utterly disgusted. Already, I wasn’t wanting to identify as an “American,” even though I’ve lived my whole life in The States.
I think the main reason I lean toward anarchism is that I’ve long had a deepening intuition and insight that “the state” in modernity has an overwhelming tendency to become a servant of what Fabian Scheidler has called “the Megamachine,” which appears to be an obstacle to everything folks like me value and desire (or long for) The Megamachine functions rather like a “paperclip maximizer,” only what it maximizes is the concentration of political and economic power into a dominator hierarchy.
https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine
Libery as non-domination sounds good but “property-based personality”?
If you don’t own property you aren’t a person ?! It can’t mean that you are defined by what you own, i.e. conspicuous consumption. Or at least I hope not.
In that case, is the commons ( the water, the air, the ocean) a person ?
Maybe in the sense that these things are ensouled, or could be considered such?
Re distributism etc, maybe also something along the lines of a personal vow of poverty should be shoehorned (metaphorically, of course) into the mix. On first blush it doesn’t seem that such a vow would take up too many evenings. On further reflection, it just might.
Some good news for Chris Smaje:
Published today by Inc., their Best Books of 2023 list includes “Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje”.
“Every year since 2014, the Non-Obvious Company has reviewed nonfiction books published throughout the year and selected the best of the best — the most insightful, the most impactful, the most “non-obvious” — for their annual book awards. This year, they’re partnering with Inc. to produce the 2023 Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards, showcasing the best business books for entrepreneurs and other business leaders, as selected by Non-Obvious Company founder Rohit Bhargava. Here are all of this year’s winners, listed alphabetically by title…”
https://www.inc.com/inc-staff/non-obvious-book-awards-best-books-2023.html
I highly recommend this essay from Dougald Hine. It’s hot off the press and addresses some topics and themes we discuss here.
Making Bad Ruins (or, How Not to Do It)
https://dougald.substack.com/p/making-bad-ruins-or-how-not-to-do
I never cease to be amazed by Steve L’s web-searching superpower, but he’s right – ‘Saying NO…’ has indeed been longlisted for the 2023 Non-Obvious Book Awards:
https://www.inc.com/inc-staff/non-obvious-book-awards-best-books-2023.html
I didn’t see that coming – obviously.
I’ll second James’s recommendation of Dougald’s piece.
George is continuing to trail his ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece on Twitter/X, though not everyone commenting on it is impressed. Talking of comments, I haven’t looked for a while at the ones under Rob’s piece on Resilience. Dare I venture there? Brickbats or bouquets? There’s only so much commentary about me as a cruel ideologue of mass death that I can put up with at any one time…
Meanwhile, I have two new blog posts almost ready to go. One of them tracks the latest twists & turns of all the arguments and counter-arguments, commentaries and opinions in the Saying NO vs Regenesis battle … including some remarks on Jim Thomas’s very important piece. The other dives into my book with the first in a short-to-middling blog cycle that works its way through the arguments of the book chapter by chapter. I’ll probably end up publishing both of them, but I’d be interested in your preferences. Bored of the Smaje-Monbiot theatrics and hungry for something a bit more grounded? Or still spoiling for the fight? Let me know your views…
On the matter of distributism, civic republicanism and so forth, I’m going to hold off on that and hopefully pick it up again once I’ve put the present blog cycle to bed. But it’s important stuff, so thanks Greg, James & Simon for your comments.
I’m currently reading ‘The Outline of Sanity’ by G.K. Chesterton, one of the original distributists, first published in 1926. It’s a bit of a downer seeing him making his powerful case for a society of small-scale, local, household self-provisioning and fighting the accusation that it’s romantic, nostalgic or unrealistic. History repeating itself, the third time as both tragedy and farce, perhaps…
Personally I am bored of Monbiot’s theatrics, but also aware that if his best (or only?) response is to accuse you of being a terrible bad person who is in favour of mass death, he’s probably going to keep repeating that louder rather than change his mind or admit that his numbers were inaccurate. That sort of attack has a toll on you, as well as not being particularly helpful for the wider discussion around where we are going with food production and how we might get there from here. I think the latter is a much more important topic than the subset of it around whether precision fermentation might be the One Big Solution.
The philosophical issues around technosolutionism *are* worth discussing, but — as with food production — it’s probably hard to work from the general to the specific too much, because so much depends on context. Ruminant livestock can be wonderful tools for building soil and improving horticultural productivity, or agents of desertification, depending on how many there are and how they are managed. Fire can be part of a regenerative practice or part of a destructive or extractive one. And any individual household (or farmer or corporation or state official) is necessarily working with incomplete information, with nobody able to predict all of the future, with policy lagging behind research and with research funded based on potential profit.
I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t necessarily think it is technology, in and of itself, that is problematic; a clay writing tablet is technology, knapped flint arrowheads are technology, fire is technology, a windmill or water wheel for grinding grain is technology, and so is my trowel. But many of the technological “solutions” I see are not necessarily very novel… but rely upon underlying assumptions about the availability of energy or materials which I think make them very unwise for widespread deployment. There seems to be a tendency to take one constraint and then replace it with some other resource which we assume is or will soon be unconstrained.
A lot of the past century or so has been around reducing human labour in food production, as exemplified by how much Greg can do with his tractor Vs how much I manage without one. This is assumed to be a good thing: lower labour costs mean lower food costs, and so on and so forth. But I think a small farm future will mean much higher human labour in food production (and in production of anything else), and I wonder whether there might be an economic argument in favour of transitioning to a system with more agricultural labour, on quite an artificial level: if we assume no climate catastrophe, plentiful cheap electricity, pretend soil depletion isn’t a thing, and so on, is there still a case for employing more people in food production?
I am no economist but I think there might be, actually:
1) employing people directly in agricultural labour, or giving them access to land for some self-provisioning, might turn out to be a *lot* cheaper than Universal Basic Income, and could (if handled well) provide a sort of floor to working conditions and compensation to discourage the kind of extractive exploitation that tends to happen when there is a surplus of labour
2) We are currently in some kind of GDP shell game where increases in property values somehow “count” as part of our economic health measurements despite not being based on production as much as on rent-seeking and playing the market. Employing more people in food production would increase our production of high-value commodities (have you seen the price of artisanal chestnuts these days?!) relative to such ‘false’ economic signals
3) When labour (not land or diesel) is the limiting factor in how much food you can produce, at some point available labour and available food should track each other pretty well. I don’t know exactly where that point is, and I am not anywhere near informed enough to even guess. But before I hear “but who will be a doctor or a teacher if everyone is farming?!” I want to say that it wouldn’t necessarily look like X% of the population farming while Y% are ‘free’ to do something else with their time. It might be more like most people growing at least some food, some people growing food “full time”, some people helping out seasonally, and some people not growing any of their own but still eating mostly from local production.
A rather indulgent tangent, given that the realities of energy scarcity, soil depletion, climate catastrophe and so on do seem like they will be substantial constraints. But our current macroeconomic strategy isn’t exactly working.
Another issue salient, I think, to agrarian localism and labour-intensive food production is the matter of agricultural worker visas. From what I can tell it’s a real mess; the Landworkers Alliance has a report on it from July of this year, available at https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/lwa-report-digs-into-exploitation-of-migrant-workers-in-uk-horticulture/
To me, this is yet another reason to avoid cheap food and grow as much of my own fruit and veg as I can. To an eco-modernist, it is more evidence of how terrible farming is — even though the precision fermentation racket appears to be focused on protein rather than soft fruit. But it seems ridiculous to me that we’ve gotten into a situation where for most people, fresh fruit in season would be unaffordable without relying on such exploitative practices, and I can hardly keep up with my own harvest.
Incidentally, I am pleased to report that at least some of the apples I picked (and felt so overwhelmed by) earlier this year appear to be pretty good keepers. The medlars and the whitty pears (or sorb-apples, or whatever you call the fruits of Cormus domestica) need bletting, but if they work out all right it looks very much like I should get to Christmas before having to rummage around in the freezer for crumble ingredients.
“hungry for something a bit more grounded? Or still spoiling for the fight? Let me know your views…”
Yes and Yes. You know, it is always two things.
Ignoring George makes it look like he was right. He’s not. Grind him with the energy numbers. And after that hammer the unsustainability of ‘renewable energy. It’s great that solar will replace all the fossil fuels used today (it won’t). But what happens in 30 years when the output of today’s panels drop off. Same with nukes. Shall we indulge the fantasy of small clean nuclear power of run straight to FUSION!* and my flying car ? Don’t forget the rewilded mastodons !
Covering the more grounded aspects says that you are confident that you are right and let’s not lose track of the real world. Energy blind, Ivory Tower, eggheads can fantasize about creating food from thin air with just green hydrogen and solar power. Real people gotta eat. This is how they do it…
Now, the easy part is up to you. Meld the two streams together.
*There are several constants in physics, the mass of the proton, the charge of the electron, the speed of light and the number of years before fusion becomes a reality.
The first tranche of solar panels are coming to their demise here in TX , some ( the undamaged ones )are to find their way to the pesantry , the rest to landfill , the problem is that they are not quite sure whose land to fill with them ….. Then there is this blade graveyard
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj_ugf1j0wk
Chris wrote, “Talking of comments, I haven’t looked for a while at the ones under Rob’s piece on Resilience. Dare I venture there?”
Currently at 38 comments, mostly thoughtful, but the commenter Colin (https://chrissmaje.com/2023/10/the-wholeness-of-the-word-regenesis-as-myth-part-ii/#comment-260595) makes some appearances there, showing his ignorance of what Chris actually wrote, and repeatedly demanding even more evidence from Chris while George’s claims remain largely evidence-free.
Chris asked, “Bored of the Smaje-Monbiot theatrics and hungry for something a bit more grounded? Or still spoiling for the fight?”
George Monbiot wrote this about the energy consumption numbers he published in Regenesis:
“Please do feel free to challenge my workings or point out any mistakes. I’m always happy to see figures improved. Thanks.”
(From this thread, number 6:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1710170845224571313.html )
With mathematical clarity, Chris pointed out George’s mistakes, and showed how George’s figures should be improved. As far as I know, George’s response wasn’t to admit his errors and make corrections to the numbers in Regenesis (with “thanks” given to Chris for making George happy by improving his figures).
Instead, George seems to be maintaining his attacks on Chris. So Chris’s pointing out George’s mistakes and distortions is no longer about convincing George so George can adjust his writings accordingly. It’s about showing the people whom George influences that George’s numbers here are not reliable, and his conclusions are flawed.
In my opinion, throughout George’s attacks, Chris has at least one advantage: the “truth” of this matter is on his side. If Chris persists with his resistance (speaking truth to power, in a way), George’s distortions of Chris’s positions should become more obvious to people, along with George’s numerical errors. If Chris drops it, then people’s understandings (or misunderstandings) and opinions on these issues will tend to remain where they are now, potentially based on George’s erroneous numbers and his distortions of Chris’s position. (I think this matters because public opinion does have some connection to policy, and decision makers tend to want the basis for their decisions to be free of obvious errors.)
It seems to me that in response to such resistance, George himself is showing the public that George Monbiot is not a credible writer, as his Tweet #6 (above) suggests, and his Tweet #3 (from the same thread) indicates:
“Solar Foods’ electricity consumption is a real world figure, that the company provided, not a theoretical projection.”
(George later gave a different source for the number he used as the basis of his calculations in Regenesis, which was definitely not a real world figure from Solar Foods.)
Thus, I hope that Chris persists, in some ways, with his resistance to George’s erroneous claims and distortions.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-exits-us-southcoast-wind-farm-contract-agrees-pay-penalty-2023-11-02/
Another company to add to the list of renewable deserters , can’t make renewables work without even bigger subsidies , perhaps the super goop factories should be forced to build their own generator capacity , seems like the main corporate funders of renewable subsidies will not .
I agree with Steve L, keep up the good work. The discussion so far is uncovering the dynamic forces around land use, making it visible and therefore graspable. I think Kathryn’s question of how to keep the fascists out is, you can’t, and all you can hope to do is the cultural work of dissipating the traumas that feed that position. I think the discussion of grazing, and people working on the land is inherently connected with all those other things and it is only by these small incremental steps that we can articulate and embody the SFF. It’s frustrating! The Nate Hagens chat with David Holmgren is good at out lining that – another gentle, humoured person talking common(s) sense forced into a position of radical opposition by unhinged forces!
Sorry not to get back to you John Adams – what a beautiful piece – I’m absolutely sure that they enjoyed the shell in the flint. I’m not so sure about language because it is ‘only’ another tool – and akin with Tyson Yunkaporta, I feel materials and bodies have an energetic link which can be perceived by other bodies (without language). Like everything – there has got to be bit of both, eh? The discussion of aesthetics is a long one but I think it is again, an embodied (feeling) position that’s been colonised and hijacked. In this way the cultural work of SFF is to wrestle back the enjoyment of work, craft and objects (and making sense of them historically) back into the a human, people space – from academic expertise and colonial framing. Your not doing that but it is the dominant position.
Hi Joel
“I feel materials and bodies have an energetic link which can be perceived by other bodies (without language).”
It’s an interesting side thought. Could flint knapping be taught without language? Would be an interesting experiment. The nature of learning. Observation is an important part but is it enough on its own?
There are lots of practical skills/crafts that probably can’t be taught by an instruction manual alone. (Flint knapping being one of them). A bit of “hands on” combined with verbal instruction. Can the instruction be non verbal and convey the necessary “reasons why”????
I guess I’ll never know for sure. I’ve always had language. It’s the way I’ve done most of my learning. I can’t imagine a world without it.
I recommend a flint knapping workshop. It a fascinating skill. It takes a deep understanding of the materials, to get it right.
On aesthetics. A beautifully symmetrical handaxe doesn’t perform any better as a tool than a much more “crude” lithic. A symmetrical hand axe is a case of “form over function”. There are compression arrow heads that are so delicate that they are not practical as arrow heads. They are a show of skill instead.
Painting by Numbers?
https://rword.substack.com/p/painting-by-numbers
On quantifying where quantification may actually be necessary.
Sorry Chris. You and remove this is if you like.
@James
I tried posting a reply to your substack but was defeated by the sign in process. Here is what I wanted to say about the cost of an energy transition:
You are asking for a number that can’t be calculated with any accuracy. Very few people have access to the cost numbers for building a solar panel. Even at that, how wide do you set the boundaries for the calculation ? Any of the online sources (for anything) vary by a factor of 2. Those kind of tolerances add up pretty fast. Mostly the numbers given make no sense.
So, disclaimers aside:
Xcel is planning to build a 460MW solar farm for $575 million. They say it will provide electricity for 100,000 average homes.
https://nationalgridrenewables.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/21-04-108-ShercoSolarInfoSheet.pdf
It should be noted that the coal fired Sherco power plant is rated at 2,238 MW.
There are 2,300,000 households in MN. It would take 23 solar farms like that to supply all the electricity for MN. There are 128.5 million households in the US so, 1285 solar farms for the whole country.
1285 X $575 million = $738,875 million for the whole country. Lets call it $740 billion for just the electricity.
Worldwide coal, oil and natural gas provide 141,500 TWh of energy per year. Or 141,500,000 B(illion)Wh/yr or 141,500,000,000 MWh/yr
We get 4.2 peak sunlight hours per day.
460 MW X 4.2 h/d X 365 d/yr = 705,180 MWh/yr (using average numbers above it comes out to a 1,000,000 MWH/yr so, close enough)
141,500,000,000 MWH/yr / 700,000 MWh/yr = 200,000 Xcel solar farms to replace the energy from coal, oil and gas.
200,000 X $575 million = $115,000,000,000,000 or $115 trillion.
Check my math.
Some Guy on the Internet (SGI) says it takes 200 kWh of energy to produce a 100 W solar panel. Looking at our electric bill we used 825 kWh last month. We could have produced (4) 100 W solar panels ? It doesn’t seem like we could have gotten any amount of silica to 1400°C let alone enough to make a solar panel.
An old fashioned 100W lightbulb burning 24 hours a day for a month uses 72 kWh. Nine 100W bulbs worth of energy to build a 300W solar panel ? Nonsense.
Getting farther into the weeds, what is the EROEI for solar ? Numbers range from 5 to 0.8. It depends on the boundaries you put around the calculation. How do you even calculate the cost ? Is it the cost to extract a barrel of oil ? The replacement cost ? The cost of the damage done to the environment ?
Thanks Greg.
For clarification’s sake, in the context of that Substack article, which context traces back to a question raised in an article by Richard Heinberg, “energy cost” isn’t actually measured in money, but in energy itself — e.g. Joules (J) kilojoules (kJ), megajoules (MJ), gigajoules (GJ), terajoules (TJ).
Richard had pointed out that folks have generally calculated (or sought to calculate) the financial cost of “energy transition” but not its “energy cost” defined as the quantity of energy required. He said to the best of his knowledge no one had even tried to assess this energy cost. And for this reason, we can’t assess the magnitude of the likely “pulse” of greenhouse gas emissions which would result from a “rapid energy transition”.
This leaves aside the question of whether a full replacement rapid energy transition is even possible. I think it is not. But the world is leaping into it as fast as it can — with massive government subsidies, etc. And this means we’re collectively actually making matters worse for the climate, not better.
In any case, that number may also be impossible to calculate. What is needed is a plausibly good attempt. At the moment, we cannot say with any assurance — or degree of certitude — that we simply cannot afford the energy costs of energy transition on the basis of carbon emissions. I want to be able to say this with confidence so we can put an end to the popular narrative on “energy transition” as replacing current energy use with renewables and thus addressing the climate crisis.
My hunch is that Richard Heinberg is correct, and the energy costs of energy transition is such that it would result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the near term, which may be at least for a decade. And that’s the crucial decade we’re talking about — the decade in which we must bring emissions down.
The most recent estimate of annual world energy consumption I’ve seen puts it at 601,200 terajoules.
It would be very interesting to see (calculate) how many current (best technology available) wind turbines and/or solar panels this would require to produce!
Okay.
These guys
https://renew.org.au/renew-magazine/solar-batteries/energy-flows-how-green-is-my-solar/
found that it takes about 4000 kWh to make a grid tied 1 kW system, 4kWh per Watt.
The energy required to replace 141,500 Twh of coal, oil and gas is 566,000 TWh.
Unfathomably large numbers.
These guys
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516307066
found the EROEI for a solar system in Switzerland is 0.8. Not a good payback.
I’m not sure how many days in Switzerland are sunny, shady, or somewhere in between. I happen to live in a place which has sunshine almost every day (Santa Fe, New Mexico, which bears no resemblance to, say Seattle, Washington in this respect. Doing global averaging is another matter altogether! And it may not much matter, really. What matters is if we can apply good sense to these kinds of questions, which til now we have not been (we being people in general, not people in this forum).
@ James
I don’t know if Switzerland is all gloomy gray clouds but we certainly get that kind of weather. Global averages are cherry picking the best case scenario. People selling solar say is that on average the sun is out 10 hours a day. Here at 45° N we have an average of 12 hours of sunlight per day. But the average peak sun hours is 4.2 per day. The average is not going to provide energy we need when we need it most.
https://unboundsolar.com/solar-information/sun-hours-us-map
It is probably still true that liars can figure.
I think this is asking the wrong question, to be honest.
It’s pretty clear that attempting to replace all our current fossil fuel use with renewables is unrealistic, all other things being equal.
But all other things aren’t equal. E-assist bicycles, for example, are so much more energy efficient for transport of humans (and “last mile” local delivery of goods) that they could replace a substantial portion of delivery vehicle use. Can we replace all our current internal combustion engine cars with battery-powered electric cars? Probably not. Can we replace, say, a third or a half of them with e-bikes, and simply do without the rest? Almost certainly, though longer-distance transport would need to decrease somewhat or move to non-ICE means (such as trains). And can those e-bikes be charged from renewable sources? Yes, much much more easily than electric cars would. They’re also much easier on road infrastructure (and many will work just fine on off-road tracks) and have much lower maintenance costs.
That isn’t to say that a transition to e-bikes would solve all of our transport issues: it wouldn’t. And not all e-bikes are created equal, either (steel frames require less energy than aluminium, and are stronger, easier to recycle, and much easier to repair; but they are enough heavier, and more expensive to produce in the current cheap-energy paradigm, that they are relatively rare). A transition to e-bikes for local transport would still require a substantial change in lifestyle for most people in the rich West. It would also probably be a significant improvement in standard of living for many in the global South. And, gloriously, most e-assist bikes still work as normal bikes when you take the battery off, or can be fairly trivially converted to such; so if we do end up with little or no electricity to power our civilisation, we’re far better off with a bunch of old e-bikes than with a bunch of old electric cars.
It’s also not clear to me that the “transitioning to renewables will require even more fossil fuels for building the infrastructure” line is sensible. That argument assumes that if we don’t use fossil fuels for building renewables infrastructure, those fossil fuels will stay in the ground. But I don’t think that’s realistic at all: fossil fuels are so much more convenient than anything else that if we don’t use them for building renewables, we will absolutely use them for running the existing energy system. If we put as much of our current fossil energy into renewables as possible, then that should drive up demand for (and therefore the price of) fossil fuels, simultaneously making renewables more financially attractive, and encouraging a transition away from fossil fuels as a primary energy source.
I think a better question than “can we replace fossil fuels with renewables?” is “given that we have a finite amount of fossil energy left, and we aren’t going to leave it in the ground, what should we be using it for?”
I would argue that the creation of renewable electricity generation tools such as windmills and solar panels is part of the answer to that question, though with some major caveats (I would like to see more standardisation, and more focus on what might be called “distributed micro-generation” — essentially, small, household-sized off-grid systems with interchangeable parts — and I have a long list of other conditions I’d love to see met, but which probably won’t be under the current market system).
@Kathryn
I think the problem is that renewables can’t be made without using fossil fuels. That’s why a “transition” to renewables would cause a spike (above what we use fossil fuels for now) in fossil fuel use in order to make the renewables.
Yes, we can change some of our energy use behaviour and use less energy. E bikes etc but it is only kicking the can a bit further down the road.
“Transitioning” to renewables is not viable/possible. Raw materials etc but also , this generation of renewables will need replacing in 25 years time (using renewables)
I would add to that, that E bikes or any other complex tech/machine can’t be made without fossil fuels.
When fossil fuels are no longer an option, neither is tech/machines.
Just to add to the add. All forms of moving people and materials from one place to another, if not powered by human or animal muscle, are only possible due to fossil fuels. Even the humble bicycle.
I didn’t say that we can or should replace all fossil fuel use with renewables. I said it’s pretty clear that we can’t.
However, I don’t accept that we can’t make any renewable energy infrastructure at all without fossil fuels. Anything we can do with oil could be done with coal (it would just be quite a bit more expensive). And anything we can do with coal could be done with charcoal — it would just be quite a bit more expensive. And I can make reasonable charcoal in my back garden, using such low-tech tools as “a shovel” and “water”. But it takes a lot of time and labour, and that makes it very expensive indeed.
Fossil fuels aren’t magic. They’re just a very concentrated energy source. We are capable of concentrating energy in other ways: but the supply will, necessarily, be very limited. There are almost certainly not enough trees in the world to use charcoal to provide the manufacturing energy for the amount of renewable electricity infrastructure that we would need to replace current fossil fuel use! But — as I said in my previous comment — we do not need to replace all current fossil fuel use. We currently use fossil fuels absolutley profiglately, because for so long they were very cheap to purchase. We could replace some portion of our current fossil fuel use with renewables, let the rest of it stop existing, and lead quite comfortable lives. The faster we have to do this, the harder it will be.
If we’re going to use the fossil fuels anyway — and I have yet to see any convincing argument that we won’t — then we may as well use them to make renewable electricity infrastructure. At worst, this will be “kicking the can” down the road for a few decades (but not really, because we’re not going to replace everything, so we still end up having to find ways to live that use much, much less exogenous energy: food production, transport, and heating/cooling will have to change hugely even on a very optimistic “producing as much renewable stuff as we realistically can” trajectory). That isn’t great, but it’s potentially slightly less destructive than… every other likely fast-collapse trajectory. At best, it will mean having enough renewable electricity infrastructure to maintain the renewable electricity infrastructure without clearing entire forests in order to do it, which could be pretty handy.
But suppose I’m wrong and it somehow isn’t worth it, or that (more likely) we don’t get ourselves organised to create enough infrastructure to maintain the infrastructure, because humans operating within the context of global financialised markets are also kindof bad at short term vs long-term decisionmaking and a lot of people making decisions don’t really grasp how much constantly increasing energy has fed our “progress” so far. Suppose the solar panels and wind turbines we already have now are the only ones that will ever exist, and they will have a short life due to the inability to carry out any maintenance at all. Will we then be without any technology at all, without any machines at all?
No. Really, no. I strongly believe that human beings will still use technology and mechanisation to help us in our work and in our leisure wherever and whenever we can gather the resources to do so. That will still look like doing a lot more manual labour than we in the West are used to, but there’s a huge difference between that and the “no technology, no machines” world that you seem to expect.
Windmills (not wind turbines, mills — for grinding grain) and water wheels and sailboats all existed before fossil fuels were in common use. Glassblowing and blacksmithing, too. All of these are examples of technology. Tin and copper mining was already going on for several thousand years before fossil fuels came into the picture; and now we’ve got so much metal already sitting around on the surface of the Earth (in the form of cars, among other things that we won’t have much use for without fossil fuels) that we don’t even have to dig it up. There’s absolutely no reason to think my local smithy or tinker or whatever wouldn’t be capable of building me a pedal-powered threshing machine — or indeed fixing my current (steel-framed) bicycle. Whether I could pay her enough for the time it would take to do it is another matter, of course, but… if she knows I’m going to be able to produce more grain for the local community if I have a thresher, then I imagine she might have some incentive to do the work. (Tyres and inner tubes for a bicycle would be more difficult, for sure, but I doubt I would be the first person to stuff a bike tyre with grass and/or rags when an inner tube failed, and I’m certainly not the first person to have played around with latex from dandelion stems as a kid, and eventually wheels that are more suited to offroad uses would probably be the way forward. Wheelwrights also existed before fossil fuels; I’m not unduly worried.)
The thing about the “without fossil fuels, everything is going to be absolutely terrible” idea is that it plays straight into the eco-modernist narrative that we absolutely must continue within the trajectory of the current financial and political system for as long as possible in hopes that, in doing so, we can figure out some way to preserve the high standards of living currently enjoyed by privileged people in the West. It’s a very binary view: things are great now, and they’ll be catastrophically bad without fossil fuels, and there is nothing, really, in between.
Reality is likely to be quite a bit more nuanced than that. Will life be different without fossil fuels? Yes, absolutely. But that’s guaranteed anyway: life is very different now than when I was growing up, and it hasn’t all been “progress” if you compare, say, my parents generation (who all own their homes) with the people who turn up at the soup kitchen (who, like me, will probably never own their homes, if they’re lucky enough to have housing at all). Will we all need to do more manual labour, and be more generally and directly involved in the livelihood of our local communities in a way we mostly aren’t now? Yes, probably, because some of the fossil fuel use we aren’t likely to replace is currently used to overproduce arable grains, and changing that is going to have huge knock-on effects throughout the whole economy, so growing some food is going to be a very good idea if we want to eat. Does life have to be constant misery? No, or at least, no more than it is now. Much of our current wealth in the West, insecure as it is, comes at great cost of harm to other people, as well as to the ecosystem that ultimately sustains us. The more awareness I have of this the less any of it seems like a good idea, and so the manual labour of tending the plants and soil on the land I have access to, growing from seed and then preparing much of my food from scratch, mending my existing clothing instead of buying new, travelling slowly and under my own steam for the most part — all reviled as drudgery by the eco-modernists — is work that, for me, holds deep meaning and gives me great satisfaction.
I am not saying that the transition to a world without fossil fuels will be easy. It won’t. We are already in deep trouble and we’ve hardly even begun. But I do believe that it won’t be so bad as some would have us think.
@Kathryn
“without fossil fuels, everything is going to be absolutely terrible”
I’m not saying that.
Life can be complex/rich/fruitful without fossil fuels (Edo Japan :))
What I’m saying is that the tech we take for granted won’t be possible without fossil fuels.
Take the humble bicycle. It’s not as complex as a jumbo jet (or renewables) but it is still very complex. The machines that create steel tubing, ball bearings, bicycle chains, sprockets, spokes, rims, rubber moulds etc can not be replaced/replicated by a blacksmith. We are talking precision engineering here. I’m not dissing the skills of a blacksmith, just that it is different to machine tooling.
We are not even getting into electronics here!!!!!!! That’s a whole nother level of complexity!!!!!
There will be lots of “cannibalisation” of bicycles (as well as other things) and repairs, on the downward slop of fossil fuels availablity. But the final destination is no fossil fuels, so no precision engineering, so no new bicycles.
Non of this is viable using charcoal as a substitute. Large scale deforestation began in the bronze age for a reason!
@Kathryn
“Anything we can do with oil could be done with coal (it would just be quite a bit more expensive).”
Hmmmmm. I beg to differ.
You can’t make diesel out of coal. Without diesel, there is no mining industry.
@John
Mining existed for literally thousands of years before diesel came along. And as I’ve mentioned, a lot of the stuff that we would mine, we could probably get more easily by going through various rubbish dumps. The sheer amount of stuff that gets thrown away is absolutely unconscionable. And yes, at some point you have to stop cannibalising stuff, but… I think we can get a lot further on cannibalised parts than most people would expect.
A bicycle is just a sort of cart with wheels where one of the wheels is turned by a chain or axle of some sort attached to pedals; it can definitely be done with a driveshaft rather than a chain. Carts with wheels definitely existed long before steel bicycle frames did, and I see no reason why they would stop existing in a post-fossil world. We might not be able to manage the wire spoked wheels that are so common now, and I’m sure a more traditional wooden wheel would make for a less comfortable ride, but it’s also possible that someone will mess around and develop a style of wooden wheel constructon that’s even better.
My father-in-law used to machine steel sprockets, by hand. A lot of what we’ve been sold as “precision engineering” is, um, highly-skilled people doing highly-skilled work. (Just like an awful lot of “automation” is actually “people in poorer countries being paid peanuts to do repetitive labour” — every seam in every item of clothing you have ever worn was either hand-sewn or fed through a sewing machine by a human being, we simply do not have robots that can do decent cloth handling yet.)
My point isn’t that the technology that we have today is going to continue in the same high-energy form — it clearly can’t. But I don’t think that means that we should expect to just do without technology, either. I think high-energy technology will get very, very expensive, so we won’t be using it as much. And lower-energy technology will become very much more necessary, and so will probably become more widespread. (But most of the low-energy technology that already exists in your life probably goes mostly unnoticed.)
I suppose one question is this:
Do we have a lot of technology because we had a lot of surplus energy, and having the surplus energy enabled us to play around with things and invent new technologies? When we no longer have fossil fuels to throw at problems, will the problems we have solved with high-energy technology seem, or even become, mostly insurmountable?
Or will we continue to be creative and inventive, even in a situation of energy constraint? When we can’t throw fossil fuels at problems any more, will we finally stop using high-energy technology so irresponsibly and find other, more resilient but no less technological ways to solve those same problems? Is necessity, after all, the mother of invention? Will we, out of dire need, find ways to integrate low-energy technology and ecologically coherent ways of life?
Both seem plausible to me.
I suspect that on the nation-state and corporation level, energy constraint combined with transfer of wealth from the general population to the landlords combined with a certain amount of overspecialisation and overfinancialisation (but I repeat myself) is already leading to a sort of collapsing inward. I mean, we had a proper respiratory pandemic and basically flubbed the response — and got off fairly lightly, because COVID-19 doesn’t actually have a very high infection fatality rate (unless there are longer-term health problems as a result of infection that are coming our way, which is entirely possible; but we aren’t really doing the kind of scientific work that would be necessary to find out early). I doubt the next pandemic will be so mild. I doubt our current system is capable of supporting the level of research and investigation that leads to major technological breakthroughs; a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been found.
At the same time, while my labour is meaningful to me, I am certainly always on the lookout for better ways to do it. Small but ingenious tools that make mending my clothes easier and neater are among my most prized possessions, to the point that when my vintage mending loom was stolen I immediately replaced it (with a modern copy, sigh, but the vintage ones are… well, vintage, and not that easy to get hold of). My scrumping stick is also very much wanted, and if it breaks I will mend it, and if I can’t mend it and I can’t purchase another I will make one; I am not highly skilled in willow work, but I have done enough to know it would probably only take me about six tries to get it right. Similarly, I haven’t actually built a drop spindle, but I know roughly how I would go about doing so if I did need to. I didn’t manage to build the solar dehydrator this summer, but it’s still on my list of plans, as are various irrigation systems (though the one I would most like to do — the wind-powered saqiyah — is unlikely without a lot more space). As a child I taught myself to knit, not from a book, but from looking at knitted fabric until I worked out how to do it. I’m not particularly inventive, but I am very good at working out how to do something I want to do with the materials and tools that I have available. And all that low-hanging technological fruit I mentioned is around, and detailed in library books and patents and actual gadgets that already exist, and most people today have amazing access to it… I certainly couldn’t re-create an industrial society from scratch based on what’s in my head, but get together ten or twenty of my friends and I rather suspect we’d have enough knowledge to get quite a bit of the way there, just by putting together the tools we each understand. I’m certain we could get together a pedal-powered washing machine, for example, which would be a lot easier and more efficient to use than a washboard (though washboards really aren’t all that bad for smaller batches of laundry; the challenge is actually the spin cycle to get things dry… but that’s all a matter of gearing, and gearing is really just clockwork, and we’ve had decent clockwork since, what, the 13th century? we just didn’t apply it to very much that wasn’t clocks until later).
So I think that in any uneven transition scenario, people are going to recombine and invent and come up with all kinds of stuff we can’t even imagine yet. What comes next won’t look like the Bronze Age, or like Edo Japan, or like fifteenth century England, though it will probably have some similarities with all of those. It will be its own thing.
@Kathryn
“But most of the low-energy technology that already exists in your life probably goes mostly unnoticed.”
I would argue that……..
“most of the manufacturing technology and energy that goes into the making of most every day items we all use, probably goes mostly unnoticed.”
You say…..
“A bicycle is just a sort of cart with wheels where one of the wheels is turned by a chain or axle of some sort attached to pedals; it can definitely be done with a driveshaft rather than a chain.”
Yes, but a drive shaft has to be manufactured by another precision engineered machine. Cutting the teeth on a drive shaft “dif” can’t be done by hand. Plus a chain is a more efficient means of energy transmission than a drive shaft.
A bicycle that is “a sort of cart with wheels” would be prohibitively heavy, so that it would be practically useless.
“My father-in-law used to machine steel sprockets, by hand”
But was he making them “by hand” or was he working a lathe?
“every seam in every item of clothing you have ever worn was either hand-sewn or fed through a sewing machine by a human being, we simply do not have robots that can do decent cloth handling yet.”
Yes, but the point I am making is that the sewing machine itself is a very complex machine made possible/created by other very complex machines and energy intensive processes. All of which are only possible due to fossil fuels.
I’m not sure that you fully understand the energy inputs and complexities embedded in manufactured, mass produced products that are major parts of our every day lives.
“So I think that in any uneven transition scenario, people are going to recombine and invent and come up with all kinds of stuff we can’t even imagine yet.”
But invention/imagining is not enough. Leonardo da Vinci invented the principles of a helicopter, but no-one had the available technology to make one reality at the time.
I’m not suggesting that there is going to be a choice here. I’m not a luddite. It’s just that when fossil fuels are no more, then lots of technology goes with it.
Not all tech will go. Hand tools for example, will be in greater use. Water wheels etc can power saw mills, but they won’t be as ubiquitous as electric power tools.
Lots of that tech saves us all lots of time. Take your sewing machine example. It’s ultimately a time saving machine. Sewing by hand is very laborious.
I tried to touch on this to Chris regarding collecting fire wood.
Without a chainsaw and vehicle, the enjoyable days activity of collecting, cutting, splitting and stacking of fire wood becomes on a whole new experience. Transforming from an enjoyable days work to an arduous time consuming task. Try doing all of that work with an axe and a hand saw!!!!!
Washing clothes, the same and many other tasks.
It’s not just the time saved, it’s also the physical side. Fossil fuels do so much of the “heavy lifting” in our lives.
@John
You don’t need to convince me (someone who grows food by hand, mends clothes using hand-sewing, etc) that fossil fuel energy contributes to a huge labour saving in our current society. I know this, probably better than most.
But I think you underestimate the degree to which scarcity of fossil energy will make genuinely labour-saving technology more important, rather than less important, in the future.
Converting my (electric) sewing machine to a treadle machine (for easier handling than a hand-crank) is a matter of materials and basic DIY expertise. I have actually run it by hand before, turning the wheel on the end rather than plugging it in, though only for a few minutes to show myself that I could… but the basic design of sewing machines is pretty much the same as that of the treadle machines of the nineteenth century, and converting them to run on treadles again is absolutely trivial compared to trying to convert, say, a car to do the same. Smaller parts (needles and bobbins and feet and tensioners and the interior gearing and the like) are a lot harder for a layperson to manufacture or repair, but there are also quite a lot of them lying about. Domestic looms and spinning wheels of a quality to make the fine cloth we are used to are much rarer these days, though, and when you think of the amount of work that goes into making cloth from scratch, the hand-sewing part of the equation no longer seems like such a huge limiting factor.
No time for more this morning — James I will try to respond at more length over the weekend, but I am really more of an iterative incrementalist than a revolutionary, and perhaps that is the main reason we are so much at odds.
@Kathryn
“But I think you underestimate the degree to which scarcity of fossil energy will make genuinely labour-saving technology more important, rather than less important, in the future.”
I think you miss understand my position.
I’m not anti technology in any way and totally get the importance of labour saving technology.
That’s why I’m building a rocket stove to run off of twigs to reduce the amount of wood I need to collect and process.
(I’ve also come across a way of burning woodchips in my wood stove. I’ll save that for later)
Yes, adaptation of existing machines will be a priority. I’m already looking at converting my sewing machine to run of arm or leg power.
Lots and lots of “cannibalisation”, adaptation, repair etc will be vital.
But……..
The point I am making is that once fossil fuels are no more, we will not be able to make any NEW replacement parts or whole new machines. When the existing machines have gone beyond the repair stage they will stop functioning.
An example is the folks at Tinker’s Bubble. The steam powered, wood fired, saw mill has been condemned by Health and Safety. The pressure boiler had become dangerously corroded.
I’ve heard that they are getting a new one manufactured by the only specialist manufacturer (up North I guess) able to make a replacement.
The point I am making is that in a post fossil fuels world, the saw mill boiler will not be getting replaced. No-one will have the skills or energy to manufacture a new one.
(Charcoal isn’t energy dense enough)
Yes, I think the gap between the current lack of skills to make worthwhile kit locally from simple materials and the imminent need for it is a worry
A couple of further thoughts…..
The “cannibalisation” of machines has already begun. People are already thinking ahead!
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-67309512.amp
(I’m finding it more difficult every year to find the parts to keep my 22 year old van on the road)
Regarding sewing machines. It might not be the mechanics of the machines that is the thing that stopes it working but the availability of thread!
I don’t think it will be possible to hand spin a fine enough thread of consistent thickness and strength to run through a machine without breaking or clogging up the mechanism. Especially in the bobbin.
An update on the Tinker’s Bubble steam engine for anyone who is interested.
http://www.tinkersbubble.org/engine
@John and @Chris
I think I am taking a much longer view here…
I’m not saying there won’t be a time when individual bicycles or sewing machines (or sowing machines, for that matter) no longer work and cannot be repaired using any available low-energy means. I think we are in for a very bumpy ride, in the short term. This is one reason I wish we had more standardisation and modularity in things like small solar systems (and indeed bicycles, which used to be quite a bit more standardised than they are now; a lot of that change has been in my lifetime and it is, I think, deeply unwise, but crapitalism gonna crap).
I am saying that all the technological concepts that are now lying around aren’t necessarily going to just disappear in a low-energy, high-labour society; that the fossil-driven industrial age started with water wheels and windmills, not coal and oil, and that the technology that emerged from it could potentially be used by future societies to build something better which is (necessarily) much less energy-intensive but still looks fairly high-tech compared to, say, the Renaissance. I’m thinking on more of a 500-year scale; in 100 years, I think cannibalisation of existing tools and tech is more likely to be dominant.
There are certainly a number of paths that would make that future impossible, but also many that would make it possible; and the transition we are going through is, as so often noted, unevenly distributed. The scenario I have in mind doesn’t require simultaneous global emergence of a low-energy high-tech society, it requires emergence and invention of individual tools and techniques in individual contexts, and the means for those to be copied, traded, adapted and spread.
@Kathryn
I agree that people will come up with all kinds of clever inventive ways of saving time and labour.
But returning to James’s points at the start of this particular thread regarding Renewables.
(By renewables I mean wind turbines and PV panels producing electricity or solar thermal, heat pumps, hydro or green hydrogen.
I don’t include windmills or water mills as “renewables” in the debate about “energy transition”. Or even steam powered, wood fired saw mills!!!!)
As James has pointed out, renewable are not possible to manufacture WITHOUT the use of fossil fuels. So in order to ramp up renewables infrastructure, more fossil fuels are going to be consumed above present levels (or we do without some other energy thirsty activities.)
And when all the renewables need replacing in 25 years time, they will need to be created using renewable generated energy. The surplus energy (ECoE) of renewables is too low to replace all the existing infrastructure.
It’s not just creating the PV panels and turbines. It’s also replacing pylons, substations, relays etc. Plus all the machine tooling to make everything. Factories, transport etc etc.
Then there is the lack of raw materials. There just isn’t enough stuff in the ground that is accessable. Recycling existing materials also takes lots of energy.
Using a bicycle as a simple example. Without fossil fuels, the industrial infrastructure that creates new bicycles and spare parts, will not be possible to maintain.
So, once “cannibalisation” and time have exhausted the existing available parts, bicycles will not be viable.
I feel we are going round in circles a bit here.
@John
Another thing that needs maintenance and periodic replacement is fossil fuel electricity generation equipment. I can assure you we aren’t using the same generators we were at the start of the fossil age.
“Things wear out” doesn’t seem to me to be a reason not to use them at all. You absolutely can argue that solar and wind electricity generation equipment should be made much more recyclable than it currently is. But things like coal gasification plants and refineries aren’t substantially better in that front either.
@Kathryn
“”Things wear out” doesn’t seem to me to be a reason not to use them at all. You absolutely can argue that solar and wind electricity generation equipment should be made much more recyclable than it currently is. But things like coal gasification plants and refineries aren’t substantially better in that front either.”
I agree. We should use what we can until we can’t any longer.
But….. an interesting thought is….. Would the fossil fuels used to create renewables that have a 25 year life span, be better spent just creating electricity by conventional means?
The fossil fuels are going to get burnt either way, so is there a net gain in total electricity generated, if the fossil fuels are first converted into renewables?
I’m afraid I can’t do the maths on that one!!!!
@John
If we use fossil fuels to build renewables then we have some chance of still having electricity — and electricity that is on balance much less harmful to use — when we can no longer access fossil fuels to burn. Even a small amount of electricity is potentially extremely useful, especially in a world where we’re cannibalising existing tech to try to keep things limping along and most of the existing tech runs on electricity. I keep seeing “25 years” being thrown around as the replacement lifespan of a solar panel, but I’m willing to bet that they can sometimes last a lot longer than that; it’s just that the newer ones are so very much more efficient (in terms of watts per area) that replacing the entire array when a few of them break makes a lot of sense.
If we use fossil fuels to drive cars around and heat our homes and manufacture cheap plastic trinkets, then after fossil fuels are no longer available we have a bunch of heavy metal-and-glass boxes that won’t go anywhere, a bunch of homes that are uneconomical or downright dangerous to heat with wood, and a bunch of cheap plastic trinkets that will be amusing until they break and then spend 500 years or so releasing microplastics into the environment.
(I think I still have, somewhere, a 12V 1.4 watt solar panel that I used to use to very slowly charge a mobile phone battery in a charging station. It’s about a foot square and weighs well over a kilogram; it’s wired up to a female 12V car charger port, because USB charging cables were only just starting to come in when I set it up in 2005. My father had had it in his basement since sometime in the 1990s, so it was already pretty old when I stopped using it in 2009 — I couldn’t find a phone with removable batteries. I could dig it out again and use it to trickle-charge a backup power brick, I suppose, if I got a car-to-USB adapter; these days a 5V 6W solar panel with a USB output is rather less than a square foot, and weighs around 250g, which is rather more convenient. Arguably this is another cheap plastic trinket, but in terms of the junk currently on the market it’s more useful than some things.)
I’d be curious about the numbers on what our fossil fuel consumption would look like if it were restricted to, say, manufacture of renewable generation and infrastructure (with a focus on small local adaptations — think roofs with solar panels and e-assist bicycles, not huge power stations and electric cars, though I am very fond of our local electric milk float), medically useful plastics (though there is a lot of unnecessary plastic waste in medical equipment, there is a lot that is genuinely much easier to do with plastics than with other materials), and maybe a few other uses that I haven’t thought of now but which probably exist. It would be an interesting exercise… but I also don’t think we have a good way to get there from here.
@ Kathryn –
For what it is worth, the reason I want to calculate the energy costs of energy transition (in units of energy measurement, not money measurement) is fundamentally political. Specifically, I’m concerned with the popular narrative of “energy transition,” which proposes that we ought to — and can — replace current energy use — fully — using so-called renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels. I believe this narrative is false for lots of reasons, one of which is that, contrary to the standard narrative, we no longer have any carbon budget to spend. I explain this in my latest article on this topic, Painting By Numbers? –https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-06/painting-by-numbers/
My very strong hunch is that the popular narrative of “energy transition” is functioning in such as way as to hinder adoption of voluntary energy descent — which is the collective choice to adopt much lower energy modes of economy and material culture. And, to be very honest, I think this is precisely the reason this narrative has gotten such a dramatic push in popular media and in popular politics. It’s not being spread around everywhere, all of the time, because the folks who are doing the spreading actually believe the story. It’s a popular narrative because it’s useful to the powers that be in keeping us from adopting an honest and realistic response to our real situation. It facilitates continuity in BAU, as desired by the large power players who are manipulating us all.
This has everything to do with what Chris Smaje is up to in his small farm future narrative, which acknowledges the necessity of powering down. Precisely how important specifically *voluntary* energy descent fits into Chris’ story of a more desirable future isn’t something I’m completely familiar with. It may be that involuntary energy descent plays a stronger role in Chris’ thinking than voluntary energy descent does. (Chris?) But for a lot of years I’ve been trying to advance voluntary energy descent as an appropriate response to our climate and ecological crisis.
Much of what you said in your above remarks suggested that you do not understand my motivation for wanting to measure the energy costs of energy transition. I hope I have helped you better understand that motivation.
Wikipedia has a good article on energy descent. I know, ’cause I edited it so thoroughly some years ago that most of the words, or at least half of them, are mine! 😉
My very strong hunch is that the popular narrative of “energy transition” is functioning in such as way as to hinder adoption of voluntary energy descent — which is the collective choice to adopt much lower energy modes of economy and material culture.
I think the implication that because we can’t replace all current fossil fuel use with renewables, we shouldn’t bother to try to replace any of it at all plays into that narrative very neatly.
In political terms, I’m not sure there’s a lot of point in trying to debunk “replace all fossil fuel use with renewable electricity” because not even the ecomodernists, to my knowledge, claim that we can do that. Even the ecomodernists and the urbanists are saying we urgently need to insulate our homes better and get used to walking and cycling instead of driving. Does that get elided, in some mainstream media, into “in the future we won’t be using petroleum any more and we’ll have exactly the same standard of living we have now, or better”? Sure it does — perhaps partly because people are forever pointing out how much more pleasant it is to live in a city that isn’t choked with traffic. But anyone who pays for heating oil, natural gas for cooking or heating or diesel for a vehicle knows that fossil fuels are pretty entrenched in our current lives and things are going to have to change a whole lot. And part of the backlash against some top-down fossil fuel use reduction measures (like the wailing and whingeing about how “15-minute cities” are some kind of oppression) is, I think, because people instinctively know it is going to be rather harder than that.
Part of why Chris’s challenge of Monbiot is worthwhile and important is that Monbiot was making particular claims about energy requirements for a specific method of food production, which turned out to be wildly unrealistic. Part of it is becuase Chris actually does have an alternative proposal which, while more labour-intensive, is also more resilient, scaleable and adaptable. It’s a lot harder to do that with a more general “we should de-carbonise electricity, and phase in alternatives to fossil fuels until they aren’t part of our energy production any more” stance.
So if you want to make a political difference on the scale that Chris Smaje is managing (and if nothing else, he clearly has Monbiot rattled, which is honestly a better result than I hoped for), you might try and find someone who is claiming, say, that electric cars will solve our problems, and then show why that isn’t the case; or find someone who is very gung-ho about heat pumps, and show why that won’t work; or similar. You’ll also need to propose resilient, scaleable and adaptable alternatives (that are also not fossil-fuel based). That’s piecemeal and unsatisfying to do, and whoever it is you choose to challenge will probably fight back by calling you names, but it is also more likely to be effective than arguing with something that isn’t being claimed in the first place.
Of course, if someone is actually claiming that we can replace all current fossil fuel use with renewable electricity (rather than replacing some of it and finding other ways to meet the other needs we currently meet with fossil fuels), then making a case against them might well be useful. But… that isn’t a claim I’ve actually seen anywhere. That might be because I spend more time outside than looking at mainstream news, of course.
Kathryn –
I never said that we ought not try and replace *some* energy with renewables. I said the very popular framing on “energy transition” is wrong, because it assumed essentially that a rapid expansion of “renewables” is what we need, with no talk of scaling down energy use.
Usually, I’ve noticed, you tend to respond to what people are actually saying, but on this topic you seem not to be very interested in the actual points I’ve been making.
I explained why a rapid and dramatic increase in renewable decides and infrastructure won’t actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but will instead increase these emissions in the near term — and why the near term is so very important — even crucial.
You’re not even responding to my argument at all here. Perhaps it is a bit to complex to follow?
Typo correction:
” …dramatic increase in renewable DEVICES” — not “decides”.
If I’m being a little too wreckless with my writing here and now it may be because I don’t expect to be understood even if I am very precise and clear in my words.
@ Kathryn
“Of course, if someone is actually claiming that we can replace all current fossil fuel use with renewable electricity (rather than replacing some of it and finding other ways to meet the other needs we currently meet with fossil fuels), then making a case against them might well be useful. But… that isn’t a claim I’ve actually seen anywhere. That might be because I spend more time outside than looking at mainstream news, of course.”
It’s not often a claim made in venues such as this one, or Resilience.org, and similar places. But it is the standard current popular culture concept of “energy transition”. In the conventional, standard narrative on “energy transition” energy descent isn’t even mentioned — at all.
Pretty much every time I see energy transition mentioned, I see the need for reduced energy use mentioned alongside it. The words “energy descent” might not appear, but “driving much less and living in better-insulated homes” or “living a lower-energy lifestyle” is still reducing energy use. Further, the need to use less energy has been part of mainstream advice for pretty much as long as I can remember. I remember learning at school in the 1980s — when global warming was certainly not mainstream knowledge — that we should walk instead of drive (to save fuel and reduce pollution), and that we should turn lights out when not using them, and not overheat our homes, and I remember the switch to compact fluorescent bulbs in domestic settings (schools already used the long fluorescent tubes by the time I was in school). None of that is nearly enough, and it is rather more individually-focused than the broader systemic changes that are needed, but nevertheless it is all part of a narrative of reducing energy use. So… I am not sure where you are getting the idea that energy descent is missing from the mainstream narrative. Do you have a link to an article in the mainstream press that seriously claims we can and should replace all fossil fuel use with renewable electricity, without any mention of reduced energy use as part of the solution?
I did read your article before writing my initial comment. I still think you are asking the wrong question.
I will try framing my thoughts another way, though:
Suppose there were an instant moratorium on building new solar and wind turbine electricity generation facilities, infrastructure and equipment. No new solar panels, not even small ones. No new batteries. No new wind turbines. Do you imagine that would cause a substantial drop in fossil fuel use? Or would “we” (human society) simply use those fossil fuels for something else, like heating our homes and moving around Amazon packages?
What you apear to be arguing is that we shouldn’t use fossil fuels to e.g. build new solar installations because of the carbon cost and cultural impacts of doing so: because a short-term spike in fossil fuel use will do even more harm to the environment than business as usual, at the same time as reassuring people that their lives don’t have to change all that much. You further appear to believe that if we can quantify the carbon and energy impacts of building renewable electricity infrastructure, the political/economic situation will change in some way.
But I believe the comparison of the carbon impacts of building renewable infrastructure to those of leaving the fossil fuels in the ground is, essentially, tilting at windmills. Realistically, “leave it in the ground” isn’t going to happen while fossil fuels are cheaper and more convenient and profitable than other energy sources, and there doesn’t appear to be the political will (more on that next paragraph) to make them more expensive and less convenient and profitable. There is even an argument that the best way to make fossil fuels less preferable is to increase supplies of renewable energy to the point that it is, in fact, cheaper than petroleum products. I’m not sure that’s actually possible (fossil fuels will eventually get too expensive on their own if we do nothing), but movement in that direction will probably be more effective than asking people nicely to reduce energy use, which you may have noticed hasn’t been terribly successful over the past few decades.
I think the correct comparison is to whatever else we might use those fossil fuels for.
The spike isn’t happening because those in power are trying to build more renewables because they think that will save humanity. It’s happening in the service of attempting to bootstrap a faltering economy, hopefully enough to compensate for the effects of the shift to rent-seeking and prevent e.g. bread riots and other unrest. The powerful don’t care much about making the earth uninhabitable, because somehow they don’t really believe that will apply to them, but they sure do want to be certain that the rest of us aren’t so hungry and desperate that we’ll take back our own power. If they weren’t using fossil fuels to build renewables to boost the economy, they would absolutely be using them to do other stuff to boost the economy, because “boost the economy” is the only tool financialised capitalism has to prevent violence.
And as tools go it doesn’t work very well! I don’t actually think building renewable electric infrastructure will achieve the goal of keep the general population well enough fed to prevent unrest (or at least substantial political turbulence); the time for that was probably forty or so years ago, and we’ve missed the window, both in terms of ecology and in terms of who holds power. (Hey, I didn’t say the powerful were particularly intelligent or wise!) But I do think renewable electricity could have a place in a low energy, fossil-free future, and I do think physical infrastructure we build now might well survive political turmoil and change. So I maintain that there are much worse things on which humanity (powerful or not) could spend our remaining fossil fuels.
I don’t think your arguments are too complex to follow. I just think you’re making some incorrect assumptions about how financialised economies work, and about what happens to fossil fuels if we don’t use them for building renewable infrastructure.
Thanks for the further comments & responses to my query, which I’ll bear in mind. I have a lot going on at the moment which is keeping me from this blog unfortunately – unfortunate not least because writing it and discussing here with commenters is one of the things I like doing the most. Anyway, I have a new post I’ll put up in a moment, and will try to keep the blog going as best I can. Apologies in advance if I fail to respond to comments as much as is ideal – but do please keep them coming!
Meanwhile, a friend of mine observing our Neanderthal debate emailed me this, which none of us thought of but is surely correct: “I favour the John Thomas theory of Neanderthal demise which suggests that sapiens females were more than happy to breed Neanderthal men due to their cleverness, artistic/musical nature and anatomical details not available to archaeology. When Mr Sapiens noticed that little Jimmy had surprising brow ridges all hell broke out and the loved up Neanders were ill prepared for the vengeance.”
@ Greg –
“It is probably still true that liars can figure.”
Not to worry, when the sun isn’t shining the wind will be blowing. 😉 So it has always been, and so it shall always be. There will be grey flavored studge enough for all. No problem! Don’t worry. Normal will continue. How could it possibly fail? The Machine has always worked and cannot fail!
@ Kathryn –
“I don’t think your arguments are too complex to follow. I just think you’re making some incorrect assumptions about how financialised economies work, and about what happens to fossil fuels if we don’t use them for building renewable infrastructure.”
To be completely honest, I find your responses a bit annoying, and yet I’m grateful to you for challenging me in such a direct and clear way. You’re essentially forcing me to understand much more fully that I’m writing from within a paradigm which overwhelmingly most people are not dwelling within, and yet I am dwelling within this paradigm. And it’s difficult for people to communicate across — through — paradigmatic sets of premises and assumptions. So thanks for being alloying. 😉 You’re helping me to clarify my framing and my paradigm within my own understanding.
You say I’m making “incorrect assumptions about how financialised economies work.” But that’s actually not at all true. I’m saying something much more profound — I’m saying that if financialised economies work in such a way so as to continue to wreck the climate system and the biosphere, then we ought to be either eliminating or transforming them so that they do not have this effect. And I’m saying of current conventional politics doesn’t enable us to achieve such a transformation, then we ought to be finding other ways of embodying and enacting politics which does have the desired effect.
That is, I’m speaking of the practice of politics as a practice of ethics — which I suppose is an old fashioned idea. But so it is. I know of no other way to understand politics than this one. No other way of understanding politics makes sense to me.
How current financialised economies “work” is … mechanically — in a machine-like way. Let me just call it by my favorite sobriquet: the Megamachine. Have you ever read about the thought experiment called The Paperclip Maximizer? Here’s the gist of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer
I’m saying that “financialised economies” are a machine — a Megamachine –, and what it does is it accumulates economic and political power into hierarchies of domination and dominance. The Megamachine uses every possible means of doing so, and key to the nature of understanding this Megamachine is that (in economics terminology) it “externalizes” its costs as “negative cost externalties”. That’s what it does. That’s the kind of Machine which it is.
Because it is a Machine, it lacks empathy, compassion and love. All machines lack such qualities. So it cannot care. It is devoid of care.
Humans, on the other hand, can care — and we can love. That’s one way in which we are unlike machines.
In a really bad poem, Ralph Waldo Emerson uttered a most remarkable sentence. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” It’s not entirely clear what he meant by that, by using the poem as a guide to itself (after all, it is a really bad poem). But I love that sentence! It describes humanity in the thrall of the Megamachine.
My greatest fear and worry is that we will allow the Megamachine to actually do our thinking for us. And if we do, we cannot communicate across the paradigmatic divide I think you and I are exploring the crossing of here. I’m trying to offer to you another way of thinking — another paradigm.
I’m trying to evoke the notion of collective agency here. It’s an idea which is as threatened or as endangered as any species, for the Megamachine has been training us humans how to think like itself — and it has been succeeding!
When a horse rides a man, something has gone awry. Perhaps something has gone awry also when a man rides a horse, but that’s probably not something Emerson considered much. When things are in the saddle and riding mankind, perhaps human inventions … techniques and technologies … have in some way subverted and replaced collective human agency (or politics). Man invents machine, then machines (and techniques, methods, techne in ancient Greek) invent “man” (humankind, today, where it was “man” back in Emerson’s day).
I’m going to tell you what is true for me. Institutionalized humans have been progressively losing our agency to the Megamachine, which functions very much like The Borg of the Star Trek television series. The Borg’s ever-repeated mantra and motto is “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.”
The longer version goes like this: “We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”
When humans become assimilated into the Megamachine, those humans think, feel and function as the Megamachine thinks, feels (or refuses to) and functions. They fall in step with the machine’s ethos — its culture and ideology. As such, to the extent that one has been assimilated into the Megamachine one will not be able to perceive the nature of the Megamachine from a critical distance. That critical distance is what “makes us human”. It is our humanity, our ability to engage in culture / ethos / ethics / politics … and collective agency … which has heart — which cares, has empathy and compassion and kindness … and love.
I’m a revolutionary. I strongly believe that only a very specific kind of revolution could liberate humanity from its progressive assimilation into the Megamachine. To resist assimilation into the Megamachine is to choose care, kindness, empathy, love… over every other impulse which would subvert it, crush it, eliminate it. But love isn’t a feeling — it’s a way of being, its closer to an action, or kind of action, than a feeling. It may involve (and it does) feeling. But it isn’t love until it is acted upon. Love is the revolution. The revolution is love.
— to be continued —
@ Kathryn –
We have very, very different perspectives on what I call “the popular energy transition narrative”. From my experience and perspective, “energy transition” — to most everyone, or to the general public — means to replace fossil fuel energy with “renewable” energy. This is done by building all sorts of technological devices and machines, from solar panels to wind turbines and electric automobiles.
When I search the web, or talk to friends, about “energy transition” there is the general sense that what folks mean by “energy transition” is that modern capitalist industrial civilization is in a process of fully replacing fossil fuels with “renewables,” and our material culture and economies require no greater transformation than that. In short, we’ll have just as many cars in the future as today, but most of the cars will be electric … and will be running on solar panels and wind, with maybe a bit of tidal energy, geothermal and hydro in the mix.
The economy will not shrink in this story (narrative). It need not. The American Way of Life (and the way of life in London, etc.) won’t change much, as there is no need for massive or dramatic change with regard to energy, economy and ecology.
This is the story which INDUSTRY has been selling, and in my view they have succeeded in installing this narrative as the default narrative for almost everyone living in the “Global North” or rich world.
Do some people talk about the necessity of including “demand reduction” of primary energy use, or net energy use? Yes, but we are in the decided minority — in my observation and experience. Almost no one says what I say, which is that if we’re sincerely going to address the climate and ecological crises of our time we’ll have to rapidly (and deliberately) replace nearly every aspect of our material and economic culture, and that doing so would require a revolution (albeit a non-violent and non-insurrectionary one).
It would be interesting to hear from others reading our conversation here how they imagine the general public (where they live) speaks (and behaves) in relation to this topic and theme. Where I live, the i.c. cars and trucks have only grown larger and more numerous… and no one — almost no one — is discussing any of these things. They mostly default to the dominant cultural narrative, in which we needn’t be concerned because Market Dynamics alone will assure us of having a fully automated luxury capitalism into the infinite future of infinite prosperity within a high energy, fast paced luxury world.
Maybe it’s different where you live. But that’s how it appears where I live.
@James R Martin
I’m broadly with you on energy transition in the media.
Yes, there is talk about using less energy, being more efficient.
But no real debate about doing with less of the benefits/outputs of energy use.
For example, people are not being told that flying will stop for the majority but rather that planes will use biofuels or be electric.
We aren’t being told that we can’t all own electric cars. There isn’t enough raw materials.
Or that we wont be able to heat our homes. Instead we are all going to have heat pumps (Yeah!!! Right!!! Like that’s possible!)
The narrative is that there will always be a techno-fix to keep the show on the road.
This article touches on Norway’s experience with electrifying the car market (some interesting figs: 83 per cent electric car ownership, 8.3 per cent estimated reduction in pollution from private transport). Basically bolsters the argument for public transport, bikes, and Shanks pony (even though the horse has bolted somewhat).
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23939076/norway-electric-vehicle-cars-evs-tesla-oslo
@ John Adams –
“Or that we wont be able to heat our homes.”
Here in the USA, the thought of heating only one or two rooms in one’s home in winter is unheard of. But that’s where we’re all (except perhaps the very rich) will have to go at some point. My partner and I live in a tiny (by USA standards) little Casita in Santa Fe. It’s about 750 square feet, which is more than we need except that it’s layout design is so poor that we need every inch of it. It’s also very poorly insulated, and the bedroom is the least well insulated. We stay because the rent is less than half of what it would be per square foot most anywhere else, and that means, for example, than I have time to do what I’m doing — thinking and talking. And reading, and studying…. \
Anyway, I think there is about a fifty percent chance that before winter gets fully engaged we will seal off our bedroom from the heated portion of our Casita, allowing it to freeze. Under this scenario, we’d live in what is now our living room and kitchen.
I suspect it will become commonplace, in winter, in places with winters, to seal off some rooms from heating, and heat only those rooms which really require it.
But then, there are homes I know of which rely almost entirely on passive solar energy, which only require additional heating (usually from a wood stove) on a rare occasional night. So it’s always about the unique particulars of specific places and people. But energy costs are going nothing but up and up and up. And I think we ain’t seen nothing yet.
BUT, energy costs are measured only very partially in dollars. That’s the point I keep trying to drive in to the public mind. But the public really doesn’t seem to give a crap about my thoughts on this matter. We are a people of the Megamachine, and price means cost and that’s f***king that.
I suspect it will become commonplace, in winter, in places with winters, to seal off some rooms from heating, and heat only those rooms which really require it.
This is already commonplace here — or at least it is among people I know who have any “spare” rooms (not a large sample). We don’t do this in my household, but we’re three adults working from home and living in a 720 square foot house (with no garage or cellar); we use every room every day. My workroom (the “front room”) also doesn’t have a door, which makes sealing it off from the rest of the house non-trivial, though I do tend to turn the radiator off if I know I’m going to be mostly outside for a few days.
Last year we turned the heating on when the temperature in the bedroom got down to 13ºC. That seems to be the temperature at which we start waking up in the night, coughing and unable to breathe with asthma attacks; I don’t recommend the experience. Probably we could manage cooler temperatures without all the urban air pollution, though that would probably be offset by smoke from heating fires if we were anywhere with a temperature inversion thing going on.
To me it seems more like people do know, on some level, that energy descent has to happen, but they either pretend otherwise, or don’t truly comprehend the scale, especially around things like industrial processes such as arable grain production and goods manufacturing. But part of the reason people don’t comprehend the scale is because fossil energy is still comparatively cheap. They will figure it out pretty fast when fossil energy is truly expensive.
There could well be a peer selection effect there.
As I said in a previous comment to John, I am more of an iterative incrementalist than a revolutionary. The Permaculture principle of “small, slow changes” appeals to me greatly.
Humans are part of and bound by the ecology of this planet that is our only home, so… the Megamachine (or what Nate Hagens would refer to as the human superorganism) emerged from that, too. And ultimately, it is also bound by it.
The ecology of this planet does not care whether humanity lives or dies, though, so we’re perfectly capable of running ourselves off a cliff edge, and causing huge amounts of collateral damage in terms of the habitability of the planet for other species.
I do care; I love this world, this Creation, and I love human beings even though I think we are often unwise. But I am always more interested in creating and holding space for something good to grow on a small/slow/local level than in arguing against what is already happening.
You still haven’t really engaged with one of my other points: do you believe it is possible that you will convince people to use less fossil fuel? Do you really believe that fuel not used for building renewables will simply be left in the ground?
I don’t; as I also said in another comment here, crapitalism gonna crap. I can yell and scream about it, or I can get on with living differently, with making space within the ruins of this world for the development of the next. There is value in the yelling and screaming, there is value in the protest, but I remain skeptical, at this stage, that such protest makes much difference. I think where it does make a difference, it is targeted and specific.
Meanwhile, my compost in the churchyard is heating up again after a period in which it was sad/cold. It’s November and I’m still harvesting veg, and sowed broad beans earlier. I saw two cats yesterday. I have an excellent metal hot water bottle that will last the rest of my life, a spouse who adores me, and broadly supportive community.
I don’t know all of where we are going. There are some very grim goings-on, and my small, iterative, incremental interventions certainly won’t shift all of them.
But there’s a point at which, rather than ends justifying means, the means become the ends. Composting. Veg. Small comforts. Family. Friends.
There is resistance to the status quo and pre-figuration of something better in growing as much of my own food as I can; in using the churchyard to grow veg for the soup kitchen; in stopping to pet a cat; in my spouse meeting me at the train station; in conversing with someone who understands about my (admittedly small-scale) problems, or in being a listening ear for someone doing the same.
This seems like a much better use of my time and energy than trying to figure out exactly how much solar or wind turbine infrastructure is optimal.
@Kathryn
I hear you on the “small incremental steps” approach.
I’m just thinking of the small changes I can make in my own life. Gives me a sense of “agency” (though perhaps naively).
Humanure and compost toilets are my latest focus/obsession!!
I also wonder whether you might enjoy getting involved with a Food Not Bombs near you.
(I would, but I’m already involved in food bank stuff.)
@Kathryn
I’ll check them out, I’ve never heard of them.
Thanks for the interesting debate on energy futures … I hope it’s generating more light than heat, so to speak 🙂
My take in a nutshell is that I do think there’s a public narrative about a 100% renewables transition grounded in the assumption that we can techno-fix our way beyond fossil energy such that little about contemporary society needs to change, albeit that those who tell this story would probably agree that insulation and other energy saving measures are a good idea. I don’t accept this narrative. I do think it would be a good idea to switch to low carbon sources of energy, but I think the narrative around this has to be energy descent, localism, degrowth and agrarianism. And that really isn’t happening in mainstream thinking – witness how one obscure writer gets scorned for his ‘cruel fantasies’ when he raises such issues.
However, I agree with Kathryn that there are a lot of good local technological possibilities in a localist, post-fossil future. In relation to the dicussion with John, perhaps it’s helpful to distinguish between ‘precise’ and ‘modular’. I think there’s potential for local engineers and craftspeople to create sophisticated and precise equipment in a post fossil future – but not in such modular ways as the global fossil fuelled manufacturing industries of today, so that it matches all the other equipment. And at much higher cost, hence a drive towards simplification.
I found Simon Winchester’s book ‘Exactly’ pretty good on this. He talked about 18th century guns being individually crafted by a gunsmith, so that they couldn’t be swapped out on the battlefield with parts from another weapon if they malfunctioned, which considerably slowed down the progress of warmaking. Perhaps we could do with a bit more slow artisanal warfare today… On the other hand, our electric goods trike was also crafted individually by a pioneering visionary, and it’s a real pain when it breaks down.
To answer James’s question, regrettably involuntary energy descent does play a stronger role in my thinking than voluntary energy descent, but I do believe that the more we can make the descent voluntary now the less horrific the involuntary descent will be.
My tuppenceworth anyway…
“To answer James’s question, regrettably involuntary energy descent does play a stronger role in my thinking than voluntary energy descent, but I do believe that the more we can make the descent voluntary now the less horrific the involuntary descent will be.”
I must say, Chris, the more I hang out with you here and talk about stuff the more I come to appreciate you, and feel gratitude to you for offering so much to us all. I have no idea how you can carry on the intellectual workload you carry, which is more than a full time job, and also manage to be a farmer as well. I imagine you have little time for sleep! Or sheep!
I appreciate the gentle way you were with me and Kathryn, here, in which you were sincere and honest … but also taking up a difficult position on a question at hand. You allowed that we’re both partly “right” in your view. And that’s actually a wiser framing than the one in which one of us us completely right and the other completely wrong. Thanks!
When I look at our world in the way I was “trained” by the dominant culture to think and perceive, I tend to agree with your position or framing of the relative probabilities and improbabilities around involuntary versus voluntary energy descent. But I find yours and mine probabilistic framing faulty and unworthy of our precious few hours and days, so I will encourage us both to advocate for voluntary energy descent for political reasons, which are also ethical reasons.
More and more, I find myself drawn, as a philosophical thinker, into the myriad questions concerning how politics might possibly be altered by our engagement with it, rather than our ceding it over to the Megamachine and its ideology, ethos and storytelling.
I know the odds are against folks like me (maybe us), but I sincerely don’t give a flying horseradish if that is so. Let the revolution arise, emerge, glow and flourish! I’d rather die loving than to die fighting! Let’s do as best as we can, and not count the odds!
Hugs, brother. And hugs sister to Kathryn, whom I also love.
Thanks James!
Just to add to the debate about renewables, labour saving tech, and energy.
The other factor that is often overlooked or “externalised” in economics language, is the environmental costs of developing tech.
An E bike, electric bike, electric trike, conventional bicycle, chainsaw, solar panel, wind turbine, car, train, airplane etc etc etc all are very practical at the point of use. Save effort/labour and time.
But………
They all have a huge negative effect on the environment. They all go hand in hand with environmental degradation.
Even from the beginning when humans started making copper and bronze hand tools, the environment was plundered to make it possible. Trees were cut down to fuel the smelting/casting process.
The bronze axes, then made the cutting down of trees less time consuming/labour intensive. (Try cutting down a tree with a flint axe!!!) So, owning a bronze axe was more desirable, so more trees get cut down. Wood became more accessible, so more uses were found for it, so more trees were cut down.
That process has never stopped. Each new tech breakthrough, creates increased levels of environmental damage.
A modern saw mill has got the “costs” of timber down so that we can all benefit/afford cheap timber.
But…….. To recoup the capital investment, you have to cut down an awful lot of trees to make the whole venture possible/viable.
A chainsaw is a great labour/time saving tool. I love mine!!!!
But…….. It comes with an environmental “price tag”. The complex industrial processes that turn raw materials into my shiny chainsaw, has a negative impact on the environment.
The extraction, transportation, refining, distribution and burning of fossil fuels is only one of those destructive processes.
Same goes for the humble bicycle.
It seems like a benign mode of transport at the point of use, but has a “dark history” in its manufacture.
The whole talk about insulating houses makes me laugh. Insulating with what!!!!?????
Foam that is produced using some pretty unpleasant industrial processes and energy inputs
There’s quite a bit of wool insulation available for housing, John, as well as hempcrete (hemp shiv and lime, I think) and other materials which have nothing to do with plastic foams. Cork is also a possibility, though we really need to plant a lot more cork oaks if we’re going to use it on anything like a reasonable scale.
There are zero processes of living which have no environmental impact at all. That doesn’t mean current levels of industrial environmental impact are the only way to have any technology, it just means that the way we do things now is stupid.