Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on October 3, 2023 | 212 Comments
In my previous post I tried to show how George Monbiot’s book Regenesis employs a mythic narrative structure that recuperates the positive capacities of modern urban-industrial civilization to overcome the problems it’s created without fundamental social change. I think his book succeeds pretty well in offering this mythic redemption. But I doubt what it’s proposing will work out in practice.
In that previous post I also mentioned a critical if exemplarily polite review of my own book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Jeremy Williams. Now, I know it’s not really the done thing for an author to critique their reviews, but here at Small Farm Future we’ve never been afraid to boldly go… So – I think Williams has succumbed to the same myth as Monbiot, and it’s this myth more than anything else that’s hustling humanity and a sizeable chunk of our fellow organisms down the road to disaster (I mention this on page 55 and page 159 of my book).
Here, then, I’ll further explore this mythic aspect of Regenesis, largely using Williams’ review as my foil. I’ll be moving between the two texts (or three, if you include my own) with a view to clarifying present predicaments and critiquing the tendency to offer largely narrative/mythic resolutions to them.
In Chapter 2 of my book, I show that the energy costs of producing mass human food from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria will always be higher than producing it from plants (along with the default animals they feed). Plants are energised by zero-carbon, zero-cost sunlight, whereas factory-produced microbial biomass is energised by generated electricity at an energetic cost amounting to at least an order of magnitude more. I show that only with a near-immediate breakthrough of the global energy economy into an abundance of low-carbon energy far beyond present levels can microbial biomass work as a mass food solution. There are hard-edged thermodynamics around this that won’t be gainsaid by blithe hopes of future tech breakthroughs.
Williams says that I raise “important questions” here. Well thanks, but what’s more to the point is whether my answers to those questions are plausible. If no, then why not? Nobody to my knowledge has yet refuted them. If yes, then visions for a farm-free future based on mass production of microbial biomass are a dead letter.
This matters because in the absence of magic bullets like microbial biomass and the associated step change in clean energy it implies, it’s hard to see how the existing global settlement pattern of capital-rich, energy-hungry urbanism that’s arisen on the back of abundant cheap fossil energy can survive without destroying itself and a good chunk of the biosphere with it. (Some folks have asked me how I square this with the notion that city life is more energy efficient – to which the short answer is that it isn’t, a slightly longer answer is that just as with manufactured food the key issue is cost rather than efficiency, and a slightly longer answer still can be found on page 53 of my book).
Barring a near-immediate breakthrough into clean energy super-abundance, like it or not humanity’s future is going to be mostly rural, with many or most people devoting a lot of their time to the production of food and fibre for local use with low energy methods.
On this question of agrarian localism, Williams writes of my book:
What the book doesn’t do is prove that this can feed the world, which is what keeps Monbiot up at night. Smaje uses Britain as an example, which is fine. But could you feed Tokyo’s 39 million people with local food? If millions of its residents decided to become farmers, where exactly in the already well-used Japanese countryside would those farms be?
It’s true I haven’t proved that local agrarian systems can feed the world. In fact, nobody has proved that any given food system – any food tech x – can feed the world long-term in the future. Certainly not Monbiot, who makes no serious attempt to show how his preferred approaches could do so – strangely, in view of his stated enthusiasm for quantification, especially if these questions are keeping him up at night.
But let’s take the British example mentioned by Williams that I do work through in my book, before addressing his Tokyo curveball. Britain is one of the most densely populated large countries in the world. Yet I show it could easily feed its existing 67 million population on less farmland than it’s currently using with organic mixed farming and horticulture (the fact that it doesn’t currently feed itself is a policy choice, not an ecological limit). If it can feed its 67 million population, then by definition it can feed the population of its largest city, London (9 million).
Or at least it can in principle. In practice, it’s unlikely that the kind of local food systems I discuss in Saying NO… could furnish the supply chains needed (let alone demanded) by London, especially in the light of shrinking future energy supplies. So, again, by default if not first by design, I think the future will largely be rural.
Where exactly in the ‘well-used’ British countryside will these neo-rural ex-Londoners or their descendants be farming? On existing farmland. But they would be farming it to produce food for themselves or their local communities, not to stay afloat economically by producing commodity crops for global markets. The difference this makes to food self-reliance worldwide is enormous, given the global overproduction I discuss in my book (the wrong crops in the wrong quantities for the wrong purposes).
The Britain vs London comparison I’ve just sketched is more logical than the Britain vs Tokyo one Williams invokes. But for sure it makes sense to run the rule over other parts of the world. Can Japan or some appropriate political subdivision of it feed itself in principle long-term using agroecological or any other farming or food-manufacturing method? Likewise for other places? I don’t know. What I do know is that if they can’t, the people living there will sooner or later have to move to somewhere else with better prospects, or die. Unless they want to put their trust in food imports predicated on the persistence of energetically and geopolitically fragile export agricultures and their associated supply chains. At best, I think that’s likely only to introduce a slight delay to one of the other two options.
This is a truth that food ecomodernism seems incapable of speaking. Now, I’m a great supporter of ecomodernism in the right circumstances, but nowhere is it written that there must be places called Japan or Tokyo, with such-and-such boundaries and such-and-such a population.
So when Williams writes:
With over half the world’s 8 billion people in cities, I’m not convinced small farms serving local markets can provide everything we need and Smaje’s book hasn’t changed my mind.
Or:
To those who keep asking if the answer is low tech or high tech, local or global, agroecology or manufactured, I’m afraid I reserve the right to say ‘both’.
Or:
I was hoping that Chris Smaje’s book would ask probing questions and refine what sustainable food systems look like in our busy world, but ultimately what it does is demand that we pick a side in a false dichotomy.
And when Monbiot writes:
most of our food has to be grown, for simple mathematical reasons, far from where we live1
…well, I’m afraid to me all this just sounds like hubris. The historical figure it brings to mind is King Canute, vainly trying to keep the waves at bay – in the modern case, the ones lapping figuratively and sometimes literally at mega-cities like Tokyo. (According to some variants of the story, the wily old king knew exactly what would happen and was puncturing the myth-making of his fawning courtiers – would that our present leaders and their media enablers had such wisdom).
Now, I do happen to think that most globalisation and high-energy biotech introductions in the food system have been to the detriment of agrarian and rural people. In fact, to most people. I don’t subscribe to the myth of urban promise and agrarian misery, even though all rural-urban transitions from the present look challenging. To me, Williams’s ‘right to say both’ is the voice of unconscious privilege.
But such objections on my part have little political force. The bigger problem the likes of Monbiot and Williams face is that ultimately they’re picking a fight with nature and with thermodynamics. These are sterner foes than me, and they will crush modern dreams of enduring urbanism – Tokyo, London, whatever – in a historical eyeblink. You can ignore it in your writing, but that doesn’t mean it’ll go away.
So as I see it, I’m not asking people to pick sides. Instead, I’m saying it’s wise for us not to succumb to cultural delusions that permit us to sleepwalk into catastrophe. The extraordinary degree of urbanism in modern times suggests a fractal pattern operating far from equilibrium, and such things don’t last, for numerous reasons.
Certainly, I’d like to see a world with some urbanism, but not too much. I’m not as confident as Williams that my right to say what I want has any bearing on events, but as I see it the metropoles have long exercised a presumed right to meet their needs at the expense of rural people and local food systems which is rooted in violence, and I will continue to speak that truth as loudly as I can. I believe the unintended result of Monbiot’s proposals will be to press this violence further. For this and other reasons, his vision is fundamentally anti-agroecological. So let’s turn briefly to agroecology.
Williams writes:
Monbiot has repeatedly clarified that he supports agroecology, and that it’s not an either/or. Smaje acknowledges Monbiot’s words here, and then says “I’m not convinced.” Basically, Smaje doesn’t take Monbiot at his word. Sure, “he’s insisted that manufactured food and agroecology are complementary,” but he doesn’t mean it. What he really wants is to keep people out of the countryside, because “Monbiot’s view is that people and nature don’t mix.”
This is a bit of a deal-breaker for me. You can’t engage constructively with someone’s ideas while accusing them of bad faith.
Leaving aside the rather scrambled rendering of my position here, and the soft-pedalling of Monbiot’s, I find this an odd position to take. If a government minister says “the NHS is safe in our hands”, does that disbar critics from pointing out health service policies of said government that threaten it? The reader might have noticed that earlier I wrote “I’m a great supporter of ecomodernist approaches in the right circumstances”. By Williams’s logic, I can now insist that all claims I oppose ecomodernism are mistaken or in bad faith.
The problem with Monbiot’s statements and positions on agroecology aren’t so much bad faith as incoherence. I’ve written extensively about the numerous anti-agroecological aspects of his wider arguments, not least in my book which Williams has presumably read. When somebody simply states that they support agroecology or offers a few tidbits of faint praise for it in an analysis that otherwise presses in a wholly different direction I don’t see any reason to take it at face value – just as I doubt my stated support for ecomodernism above will convince anyone I’m truly on board with it.
I won’t repeat the anti-agroecological rollcall of Monbiot’s positions here, but I do just want to home in on this from Williams:
Monbiot says the solution that excites him most is perennial grains, not manufactured foods. And he specifically calls for “helping small farmers practice high-yielding agroecology”, which is exactly what Smaje wants.
The concept of “high-yielding agroecology” raises a lot of knotty questions (high-yielding of what, and with what trade-offs and long-term consequences, and in which places – does everywhere have to be ‘high-yielding’? Why?) I very much doubt that it’s exactly what I want. But let’s focus on perennial grains. These generally aren’t high-yielding in terms of human-edible biomass per hectare relative to their annual counterparts, and I suspect they probably never will be, at least in temperate climates. So why do they excite the high-yield-focused Monbiot so much?
I suspect it’s because the narrative around them is basically the alternative agriculture movement’s own version of ecomodernism – a techno-fix ‘solution’ to a weakly specified problem. It’s great of course that the folks at the Land Institute and other plant breeders are trying to improve perennial grain yields. But I find the ‘job done – disaster averted’ narrative around perennial grains problematic, and consonant with the similar great claims being made for other forms of biotech like bacterial biomass.
I’ve often quoted this passage penned by Land Institute researchers, because I think it says something important:
Fundamentally, the problem with annual grains is the scale at which they are grown to meet human food needs. In sparsely distributed garden-sized patches annual grains would have limited negative impact. However, the human population’s demand for cereal grains combined with social and economic pressures will make such an arrangement extremely unlikely in most situations2
Here I can agree with them. Scale matters. How we organise agricultural production socially matters – as much or maybe more in relation to its impacts as the choice of crop or technique.
It seems the Land Institute authors don’t consider a job-rich, small-scale horticulture of ‘garden-sized patches’ a desirable or likely direction for food production to take. Whereas I do – by default if not by design. But note that by dismissing small-scale horticulture with annual grains in favour of the large-scale agricultural status quo with perennial grains, they’re opting for a palliative techno-fix rather than addressing through socioeconomic measures the underlying political ecology that’s generating the problem. This is characteristic of ecomodernist approaches, like the one that Monbiot takes in Regenesis (not so much in many of his other writings). It is not, in my opinion, agroecological.
So, sure, those who want to argue with the title of my book (though there are surely more important things in it to debate) can say “Look – perennial grains. Not farm-free!” but perennial grains feature in Monbiot’s account as an abstracted tech that potentially ticks some chosen performance indicators of yield and ecological benignity. There is no social vision of a farmed future here.
Suppose instead we did go down the route of ‘garden-sized patches’. Monbiot says little in his book about gardening. What he does say is mostly positive, but what of visions for building renewable societies of the future in general around low-energy, job-rich horticultures of ‘garden-sized patches’? Monbiot doesn’t say, but he’s been free with his condemnations of what he’s called ‘neo-peasant bullshit’ and ‘bucolic idylls’. The target isn’t clearly specified, but it seems to me these remarks have a horticultural and agroecological world of gardens, allotments, homesteads and small mixed farms firmly in their sights.
So again you could say “Look – fruit and veg. Not farmfree!” And again I’d reply that there’s no social vision in Monbiot’s book as to what this not-farmfree world could look like. To be honest, there’s not much of a social vision about what a farmfree world would look like either, except that it would probably be urban. Regenesis is a final attempt to rescue urban modernism using whatever abstracted food technologies seem potentially up to the job. Sure, some of them involve farming. Though mostly not. Monbiot does, after all, extol a coming ‘Counter-Agricultural Revolution’ and ‘our liberation from farming’3. What’s for sure is that he has no vision of agrarian, rural or agroecological society. His visioning is farm-free.
To reprise my argument, cities like London or Tokyo aren’t simple mathematical realities. They’re complex historical realities made possible by cheap and abundant energy. If the availability of that energy declines, then so will they, and people will move if they can to places where they can better secure a livelihood. Nowhere is it written that megacities or global food systems must endure. If people are drawn into a cultural myth that encourages them to believe these things must endure regardless of changing social or natural forces, then it’s this commitment to the ‘simple mathematical reality’ of urbanism that risks causing disastrous hunger.
I think it’s time to stop believing in modern mythologies of urbanism and progress before that happens.
Commitment to this modern myth of urbanism is one of the reasons why Monbiot’s book is so incoherent and evasive about energy and agrarian futures. Effectively, Regenesis is about how modern urban civilization can continue to propagate itself outside the lethal contradictions it’s created, while being kind to peasants, indigenous peoples and everyone else Monbiot wants to welcome into his embrace. No doubt the book’s a wonderful success – as a book, and as a myth. But it’s easier to resolve difficult political problems with words in a book than with lines on the ground or signatures on a treaty. Caveat lector. That’s why I called this two-part essay ‘the wholeness of the word’. Human abstractions like words and money can achieve great things. But they’re dangerous.
I’m not expecting ecomodernists to accept my arguments. I daresay some might consider them ‘meaningless waffle’ in the phraseology of one of my recent critics. But I’m hoping I’ve at least clarified why some of us regard the technological boosterism of ecomodernism itself as a kind of meaningless waffle, a technobabble with little bearing on real social and technical questions. Which is why this debate isn’t fundamentally about evidence and numbers, and will not be resolved by endless empirical refinement. It’s about myths and the frightful power of human words to overreach themselves with purported resolutions.
Almost finally, one point of agreement I have with Jeremy Williams is that this debate has become divisive. It’s in the nature of divisiveness for people to be divided about who’s generating the divisiveness, and I daresay it won’t come as a surprise if I say that I find Monbiot’s co-opting of agroecology into corporate-friendly biotech solutionism divisive (a process foretold by other voices in the agroecology movement such as Peter Rosset). As I’ve suggested in recent essays here, I think the ‘debate’ is almost over and is starting to give way to class formation and class conflict in the countryside – the point at which the language of ‘divisiveness’ ends and different versions of the truth with a hard political edge begin.
But from a larger perspective I’d like to add that even though I’ve homed in here on specific writers like Monbiot, it’s not really about him, or me, or any other individual author. Myths speak through individual authors and are given definition by them, but they’re painted on a bigger canvas than any one person. It’s that bigger painting that must somehow now be painstakingly re-crafted through long-term cultural change.
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I don’t get the whole obsession with perennial grains, given that a) we over-produce grains anyway and b) we have plenty of perfectly good perennial grasses which make perfectly good food if we let cows eat them first. (I think sugar cane is also, technically, a perennial grass, thoughI don’t believe its production is particularly agroecologically sensible!)
Chris, I love this. It is purely distilled, and just shows, again and again, how Monbiot and the ecomodernists are just clinging to an absolutely religious faith. They can’t see it or prove it, but they really want there to be a heaven and therefore there must be a heaven and everybody else must get in line.
Well done.
Perennial grains are an interesting side track. In a modern farming system they persist for about three years. And produce about a third of the yield of a well adapted landrace wheat. I think that I can produce as much food and build soil faster with a typical wheat crop and two years of cover cropping.
And if you’re doing non-mechanised farming then having some annual grains and some coppiced perennial chestnut trees gives you two sources of starch instead of one, as well as potentially a source of either fuel or building material.
The Far Allotment doesn’t have chestnuts but it does have two hazels and it’s really very useful, at least for me as a non-driver who doesn’t live all that close, to have such a good source of poles. Okay, they’re a little harder to work with than bamboo poles and they don’t last as long as some treated options, but they are already right there.
I usually grow some corn for seed and we get to keep the less than ideal ears. There are a lot more uses for corn than chestnuts and it doesn’t die of blight. Resistant chestnuts are just starting to show up.
We got about 500 pounds of shelled corn out of (9) 300′ rows using just rye and hairy vetch for fertility. Corn and beans provide nearly all the amino acids you need but no poles..
Have you seen the self-fertilising mucilaginous corn from the Experimental Farm Network seed store? Looks potentially useful.
My most productive use for corn so far has been in using popcorn for aminopyralid bioremediation; I turned the stalks into biochar (after extensive drying; next time, though, I would chop them up before drying them.) But I’m not really allowed to plant big trees on that allotment, so the corn was not competing for space with a tree crop. The tree spinach that was growing in the corn patch did make very woody stems, and this year I am going to experiment with keeping some of those to use as stakes; they were in the midst of squashes this year and I couldn’t easily get to them to pull them without disrupting the tangle, so one or two have gotten quite large.
I don’t think our chestnuts are quite as susceptible to blight as yours are. I wouldn’t want to rely entirely on chestnuts for my starch in any case, but neither would I want to rely entirely on corn, especially as I’m not experienced at nixtamalisation. Both of them are tedious to process by hand, at least compared to spuds. But when processing things by hand, more diversity means more manageable harvest periods and also more resilience against weird weather.
I think nixtamalization is easy and there is no hurry since the corn is dry. A native american chef said ‘sift your wood ashes and boil the corn for an hour. Let it sit over night and rinse it.’ That works really well. It helps if you have a corn sheller.
Have you had much luck keeping some of your potatoes for seed ? I tried it for a second year this year and they came out great. I’m wondering if I was just lucky.
@Greg
We’ve had enough blight most years that I haven’t intentionally kept my own spuds for seed.
This doesn’t stop the ones I planted in the ground and thought I had dug up from sprouting… even with a low of -10ºC at the near allotment I had some volunteers.
This year I’ve been collecting the fruits, with a view to growing some potatoes out from actual seeds rather than tubers. This takes longer (I think I’ll need to start them in January with my peppers) but I might find myself with a new variety on my hands, which would be fun. And having some actual seeds around is good insurance against inflation and the prospect of not being able to get hold of “seed” tubers.
I am also considering grafting a tomato plant onto a potato, just to troll the allotment committee, but probably won’t do it. (I have many ideas for how to troll the allotment committee but most of them do not come to fruition.)
It may take two years to get potatoes from seed but any virus load is not transmitted through the true seed. We have only seen late blight once in 30 years. Maybe you’ll find a cultivar that is resistant.
I’ll see how I get on, anyway. Once they’ve got going I could also propagate them by cuttings, if they’re healthy.
My hope is that fruit from cross-pollination of several different blight-resistant spuds will mean decent genetic diversity in the blight resistance.
I’m doing similar with tomatoes: saving seed from F1 plants of blight resistant varieties (only the ones that don’t taste like cardboard though), with a view to eventually having a pretty diverse tomato landrace with decent blight resistance. It’ll be easier than the spud project as tomatoes make loads of seed.
Do ecomoderists see cities of the future functioning the same as the cities of today?
Even if people in cities are fed on studge, what are they doing for the rest of the time?
Without lots of energy and resources the “discretionary” sector of the economy will disappear.
Non of which is “sustainable”.
The infrastructure to maintain the infrastructure of a city is only possible with fossil fuels. (London underground as an example)
I don’t get why Monbiot see cities as an answer????? They are clearly unsustainable.
But again it goes back to not wanting the modern world to come to an end. And he isn’t alone in that thought.
Yep , as renewables have been found wanting the energy supply for the studge factories will have to come from elsewhere , who decides what closes down to to power those factories .
“I don’t get why Monbiot see cities as an answer. They are clearly unsustainable.”
Apparently, Monbiot has never really grappled with energy topics within the integrated triple E space of Energy, Economy and Ecology, and is therefore ignorant about the topic. I can only guess that he takes it as a given that something similar to today’s industrial economy will be able to function on “renewable” energy sources … which are somehow magically created using “renewable” energy sources. (Only magical thinking makes this seem plausible.)
But the general public, so to speak, is equally ignorant about this implausibility, and everything roughly related to it. So what we have is a mass social phenomenon of a kind which appears to me to amount to a mass delusion. The journalists generally don’t know it’s a delusion, and so cannot inform the public. The public doesn’t know, so cannot inform the journalists. A handful of us know, and almost no one is listening to us.
Behind the scenes are the “pushers” (let’s call them pushers). The pushers are an industry which says it is growing up to replace fossil energy, and that industry is presently one of the fastest growing Big Money industries in the world now. And so they are functioning much like the fossil fuel industry has functioned, as a great power in the propaganda wars of mass delusion formation.
To this day, almost everyone believes we’ll replace all of our internal combustion cars with electric ones that run on sun and wind … which is pure and clean as the driven snow. I mean, really! It’s that nutty and delusional.
I’m holding out for a flying car. When the energy miracle happens and we have abundant, clean, free energy…
I’ve asked the question before and I’ll ask it again…………
If a clean, easily accessible and limitless source of new energy was discovered, would it actually be a good thing?
(Betting on studge seems to be relying on one being discovered)
Our ability to destroy the ecosystem at the accelerating pace that we are, is down to harnessing cheap, abundant fossil fuels.
Limitless energy=limitless eco-destruction.
Tech is also the problem not the solution to our problems.
Those tree felling machines that can cut a tree, debranch it, strip the bark off and chop into equal lengths, then stack the logs, all in under a minute are amazing bits of kit.
But to invest all the time in developing and then manufacturing such a machine, you have to cut down a lot of trees to make it financially worth while.
You don’t go to all that effort to just cut down a couple of trees once in a while.
Once our machines allow us to take from the environment quicker than the environment can replace it, we are in deep trouble!!!!!!
“Even if people in cities are fed on studge, what are they doing for the rest of the time?
Without lots of energy and resources the “discretionary” sector of the economy will disappear.”
While I agree with your points, I also think this one works out within the ecomodernist worldview. From their perspective, the energy will be there (super cheap solar, fusion, thorium, take your pick), so they can just pay out a generous universal basic income and call it a day. Or in other words: the whole studge project kind of implies there will be plenty of energy to go around anyway, which is of course one of its main achilles’ heels, as our host shows.
“If a clean, easily accessible and limitless source of new energy was discovered, would it actually be a good thing?”
Like you said, probably not, no. There’s no way humanity should be trusted with that kind of power. Just look what a hash we’re making of nuclear energy. You’ve probably read it, but if not I think you’d enjoy Tom Murphy’s Do the Math blog. He’s a physicist who works out all the implications of this thought experiment, including one memorable entry where he puts this question to an economist. Hilarity ensues. 🙂
In fact, I’ve long thought someone should write a dystopian novel (or movie, whatever) in a sci-fi setting with an energy source like that, just to show how catastrophic it’d actually be.
@Kim A
I do read Do The Math but have missed the one involving the economist.
I think this is the one:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Thanks
Interesting! Worth pointing out at the start that I was reviewing a book, not setting out my own vision for feeding the world. My opinions are being imputed somewhat. But I’ll respond to some of what you mention.
On the “important questions” you raise – those are about energy use in manufactured food. You’re absolutely right that this gets glossed over in the ‘food from water’ hype. However, you’re running the numbers on a technology that is in its infancy. There’s only one company in the world doing it and it isn’t yet commercial. Monbiot is absolutely jumping the gun when saying this could feed the world, but it’s also premature to say it won’t ever work.
It reminds me of the books I read on climate change 15-20 years ago that wrote off solar power as too expensive. We’re going to have to wait and see, and it’s too early to tell what contribution manufactured food might make. Personally, I suspect it will make a very minor contribution if any, but it could be an important contribution in specific cases.
Like (curveball) Tokyo!
On that, I wasn’t really inviting a Britain and Tokyo comparison, but raising the issue that there are many global population centres that are dependent on fossil fuel agriculture. That is of course a massive trap and cannot be sustained, but we need to keep an open mind about the solutions.
There’s no way to ‘undo’ a huge city back to agrarian ruralism. In Japan we’re dealing with a small island with limited farmland. The Middle East and North Africa offer other examples, where the land is too dry to maintain a population of that size.
I dont think it’s good enough to say “nowhere is it written” that these places must exist, “with such-and-such boundaries and such-and-such a population.” They do exist, real people live in them, and the modern world takes a dim view of those who cross borders. We’re going to need some imaginative solutions here, and maybe – maybe – manufactured food has a role to play. Not to techno-fix the status quo and carry on high energy lifestyles forever, but to mitigate the inevitable unwinding of those lifestyles and avoid a humanitarian crisis.
This is where I reserve the right to say ‘both’. I didn’t intend that to be an arrogant claim about how the world should be – it’s me reserving the right to keep an open mind. I won’t pick sides.
I’m sure you and your readers will want to tell me why that’s wrong and impossible. But I don’t think anyone wants a ‘farm free future’, it’s not the message I saw in Regenesis, and in my view that’s a framing that polarises the debate unhelpfully. Things are not as irreconcilable as many seem to think.
Thanks for responding, Jeremy. I appreciate your even temper. I’ll probably come back to you and other commenters in due course, as is my way on this site.
Hi Jeremy
I’ve certainly seen some unhelpful framing from Monbiot that seems pretty anti-farm from my position (as a resident of East London who has allotments and no livestock, but would love to have a homestead some day if it were possible to get access to suitable land). I also think it’s fair to say that Monbiot has a much wider audience and influence than Chris does, or indeed that most small farmers do. So I’m reluctant to take too much issue with Chris’s approach to framing the conversation as it doesn’t really feel like a conversation of people on an equal footing with equal access to power. For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think Chris is the party with more power here, and if Monbiot wants to be clear about a pro-agroecology framing, he could start by being considerably more polite when the ideas he is championing are challenged. What he and Monbiot do have in common is a recognition that “business as usual” won’t work.
Fossil fuel industrial-scale monoculture agriculture is indeed unsustainable, and rather brittle to the vagaries of global supply chains, as we are seeing with various countries reducing or banning exports of either grain or fertiliser as climate catastrophe and political strife reduces harvests and increases demand. But it’s also a very low-yield use of land on a per acre basis when compared with small mixed farms, whether you’re measuring calories or micronutrients (and we do need both to live). It’s also not a great yield in terms of the energy inputs, which are huge, though this is at least partly because it takes a lot more energy to make a tractor and move it across a field than a hoe or a scythe. I thnk many things we are told are economies of scale are actually economies of cheap fossil energy. In situations where farmland is scarce, small-scale agroecology actually makes more sense than industrial monoculture.
Cities as we know them now are only possible because we use fossil fuels to produce, store and transport food. Cities are not energy neutral in terms of food consumption; our human energy needs come from vast areas. My understanding is that precision fermentation aims to meet protein needs rather than energy needs, but energy needs are actually a pretty big deal if we take fossil fuels out of the picture.
If we have an abundant supply of affordable or even very cheap green energy, is there really a good reason not to turn to small mixed farming, and move around the produce of that? It would require more human labour, yes, but there are eight billion of us and counting (and major problems with unemployment in many parts of the world). It would make for a more complex, less centralised shipping economy, but containerisation and palletisation are not difficult concepts and we don’t necessarily need a high degree of centralisation for good shipping, especially if we do have abundant energy available. And technologies such as the FarmBot growing module (a small, modular, robotic seeder/weeder/irrigator using already-existing off-the-shelf parts and compatible with a very wide variety of existing seeds) could hugely reduce the amount of human labour involved in intensive horticulture, with only marginal energy increases compared to using hand tools powered by humans. So to my mind, if we solve the problem of not having enough energy to move things around in trucks, there isn’t really any good reason to eat food made from precision fermentation. I’m pretty sure FarmBot can cope with most grains, too, though harvest and storage of grain crops do have some economies of scale that would probably be addressed by autonomous lightweight electric tractors — the equivalent of a large Roomba (or a fleet of them) for your barley field.
On the other hand, if we don’t solve the problem of energy for transport then I’m not sure precision fermentation works either, because of the amount of energy it requires. Yes, this is a technology in its infancy, but there are some hard thermodynamic limits about how much energy goes into a system and how much energy comes out which we will have to reckon with if we are using anything other than sunlight as the main energy input. Technology like FarmBot is quite a bit more efficient because when placed outside it does use sunlight as the main energy input for the food (and it is possible to run it on solar panels, too).
All that said, cities have been around for about as long as grain agriculture has, and I don’t think we’re going to see the end of them anytime soon. But the challenges of transporting edible calories from the site of production to the site of consumption aren’t going to go away, and neither are the nutrient cycling issues that arise from using drinking water to flush toilets. I think only a truly catastrophic climate event would wipe London off the map, but I can easily imagine it shrinking.
While we don’t have very many modern examples of cities shrinking, I think there are some situations that are worth looking toward for the sort of shape a transition might take; Detroit always springs to mind here. I also think that in the case of acute shocks, people will just get on with planting potatoes — this is exactly what happened in Russia in runaway inflation of the early 1990s, for example, and while I would like to avoid that level of suffering for anyone, it isn’t unthinkable to me that it might happen. I’m aware that the area of London I live in now used to be considered countryside, it was one of the places rich London socialites came to spend the summer away from the heat and stink of the city. I will be unsurprised if, between people being unable to afford food here, and demand for agricultural labour further away, my bit of London reverts back to being thought of as a bit more rural and also to producing more of its own food, even if the railways that opened it up to urban and suburban settlement patterns continue to exist (I really hope that they will; a scenario where they don’t is considerably more distopian than my current risk estimates). None of this will happen overnight, though some changes might happen faster than others.
As for solar power, 15-20 years ago I was using it to charge my mobile phone… slowly. (I had a phone with removable batteries and a separate charger, and a 1.2 watt 12V solar panel.) Previous discussions in comments here have touched on issues of scaling up vs scaling down, and the differences between precision fermentation and, say, traditional winemaking or sauerkraut. I think precision fermentation is closer to the manufacturing processes used for pharmaceuticals.
I think there’s a case for being careful when examining the cost of solar power. The price of panels has certainly come down and the efficiency of panels improved – and I believe is now close to its theoretical maximum. But the prices quoted per KWH are marginal and so assume base-load capacity within the grid which covers periods when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. That base-load is currently supplied mostly by gas and nuclear. Were you to seek to replace base-load with renewables you’d need massively increased capacity to cover intermittency of supply and grid scale storage. With both those included in the cost of renewable electricity the cost per KWH might look very different.
My partner works for a charity called the Centre for Sustainable Energy – they do all sorts of stuff – from working with Govt. to running an advice line for people struggling with fuel poverty. One of the current projects is looking at how heat pumps might be rolled out as gas boilers are phased out. I was thinking about this – there are three types of heat transfer which are, in declining order of efficiency: conduction, radiation and convection. Heat pumps are used to run a heating system that works by convection – but if you’re going to change how homes are heated in order to improve the energy efficiency why would you stick with the least efficient means of transferring heat?
I think there are a number of reasons – some of its to do with the difficulty in changing behaviour and some of its to do with how, in the space of a generation its become normal to believe one should be able to wear just a t shirt inside in the winter. The speed at which things become ‘normal’ to us is frightening (imagine life without being able to ‘Google’ things) and once things are normal its very hard for us to imagine anything different or to see clearly the structures underlying ‘normal’. I think this dynamic is present in many of our solutions to the ecological crises that we face – for instance electric cars as a solution to the problems caused by petrol cars – private cars are the ‘normal’ that the solution must accept and everything else, material use, energy requirements are subordinate to that. I suspect looking at these things from the other end create more lasting solutions – i.e. given these material and energy constraints what’s the best way we could organise a transport system.
I’m not claiming great personal insight here – mostly I go about my day assuming all the luxuries that 21st century living offers me are to some extent permanent even while I think I’m pretty well informed about the challenges they face.
I’ve read that the price of solar and wind are going up.
The raw materials are becoming scarce and the energy costs of energy (ECoE) are on the rise.
I don’t think I know anyone under 30 who thinks it’s “normal” to just wear a t-shirt indoors in winter. The people I know who keep their homes very warm are almost entirely older; the one exception is a household of 40-sonethings who keep their home at 23°C and wear thermals and jumpers. Thankfully they live in an ex-council flat which is reasonably insulated, has south-facing windows and benefits from the heat of the two floors below,so their winter energy costs are high for their situation but not actually astronomical.
Could be a peer selection effect, of course.
Low-tech magazine did a nice little series on heating at one point. It’s pretty nifty, but no matter how many hot water bottles I use and no matter how many warm blankets are on my bed, I will start waking up in the middle of the night with asthma attacks if the air temperature in my bedroom is below about 14°C. As I wish to keep waking up in the morning, and as I don’t want the (Victorian) terraced house we rent to harbour too much mould, this means that at some point in December we usually cave in and put the heating on.
It’s ok for you to say we can wait and see, but when a person like Monbiot comes out with his holy sword of numbers and we find out he is off by orders of magnitude it’s hard to take him seriously. I don’t believe Smaje is sayin technology will never advance things. I take his tone to be, let’s not get so excited- we have seen this story before.
I am an electrician and not a scholar, but I can tell you, I have no attraction to slick, arrogant salesmen selling the latest technology. It’s actually getting old. I have been lied to over and over again by these types. The latest lie in my area, Massachusetts, is the free removal of gas appliances for “clean” heat pumps. Considering refrigeration/AC is 3 times worse than shipping and aviation why would you call it “CLEAN”. (I repair refrigeration units so I know how often they leak)
At this point I want to hear the voices who are drawing from the past. I discovered Wendell Berry a couple of years ago, and it was a breath of fresh air.
Chris, I thank you for your book. It also is encouraging me to move the fam to a rural place with land.
I will end with my own book review of – Saying no to a farm free future. emphasis is mine
pg 138 “SO WHAT if a possible solution to contemporary problems has resemblances to ways certain things were done in the past?”
You nailed it!
If you need any other book reviews just let me know. lol, cheers.
page 3 https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-eps/energy/Publications/Clean-Cold-and-the-Global-Goals.pdf
Some news: a response to my book from Mr Monbiot –
https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/
I guess I’ll write a response, as is the way of these things. I’d be interested in thoughts from commenters here.
I tried but I couldn’t finish that piece.
The thing I kept coming back to was that 9% of the US corn crop is eaten directly by people. Two thirds of the wheat crop is consumed as food and only 7% of the soybeans.
Want to feed the people ? Stop feeding livestock grain. Stop making biofuels from food. That frees up 65% of the corn crop and 75% of the soybeans.
Maybe I’ll have another go at it after I finish converting our granary into a boutique cheese shop.
From a rural TX view the numbers on cattle grain use are extremely high , when my beef animals get to the sale point they are mostly bought by cafco and fed grain for the last month before slaughter to put some fat on them , they are grass fed up to that point , then the cafco feeds ” grain ” most of which is a waste product of something else , such as high fructose corn syrup , ethanol production ,brewing , poor quality grains that have no other use plus orange peel pulp , basicly anything that comes from a factory food plant ,that it is inedible for human consumption and used to go to landfill before cafco was invented , so IMHO grain use is a highly inflated number , cherry picked to bolster a weak argument .
The same goes for ” cattle are drinking all the water” , they seem to miss that cattle piss as well .
As my former boss ( animal nutritionists ) told me humans are now eating what cattle did and cattle are eating what used to be burnt ! ( weevil infested corn and other grains were burned to generate steam )
I don’t know about corn and wheat but the 7% figure for soya eaten is wrong. Its been spouted as fact by activists for years now so everyone thinks it’s true, but it’s only half true.
7% of WHOLE soya is directly eaten by humans. Another 18% is consumed as soya oil after processing
Activists leave that bit out.
In fact, 99% of the oil is for humans as food or fuel.
In value terms, humans directly consume about 45% of the crop value
Well, I read Monbiot’s rebuttal.
First gloss: forget about the ‘arguing in good faith’ thing. Just acknowledge the rift and move on.
My second impression was that there was no specific mention of fossil fuels and their extraction. Odd, since the much-mentioned human population curve fits so exactly with the petroleum extraction curve.
I was also struck by this bit where Monbiot quoted Smaje:
“’there’s no point labouring for next to nothing on someone else’s behalf when you’ve already grown enough to eat for yourself.’
This is why farmers who do not share his worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people.”
Clearly Monbiot hasn’t talked to any actual commodity grain farmers. They aren’t pursuing higher yields because they are virtuous patriots. They are doing it because government farm policies and corporate control of the food stream would bankrupt them if they didn’t.
Every single commodity grain farmer I have ever talked to has complained about how every year they have to work harder and they get paid less. This is not because of their lack of farming ability, it is because they are trapped by powerful forces in our society that take away the majority of the profit that they grow.
Then there are these snippets:
[Smaje suggests that] “ …the question of how urban people should be fed is not worth answering, because cities are soon going to collapse, and their people will have no choice but to “spread themselves out in the landscape”, growing their own “food and fibre, building shelter, producing a modest livelihood from the local ecological base.” (Never mind that in many places the “local ecological base” could support only a small fraction of the region’s people).
When your solution is societal collapse, you should ask yourself some hard questions about what you are trying to solve.”
Which, to me confuses the ideas of ‘solution’ and ‘inevitability’, but never mind, because later, Monbiot says, apparently sincerely:
“Ecological and social collapse will find us, wherever we go.”
Okay then.
And finally, Monbiot suggests a reading of Smajes view:
“All we now need do is nothing: let the corporations, the oligarchs and the rising consumer demand that are breaking Earth systems have their way, and some form of collapse is likely to occur, with or without God’s wrath. By deliberately stepping back from the struggle to contain these forces, and even seeking in some cases to dissuade others from participating, they make this possibility more likely.
Earth system whose planetary boundaries have already been breached, to a large extent as a result of food production.”
Food production has produced our current catastrophe?
What about the billions of automobiles? And the Millions of cubic kilometers of concrete that they ride upon? And the billions of tonnes of petroleum that they consume to do it? Just to pick on one corner of the urban material culture.
But does anyone ever ask themselves what useful purpose all those private automobiles serve? In fully realized urban areas like New York, a car is an expensive luxury, because there is other viable transport infrastructure.
In just about every other American city, a car is a necessary nuisance, because the urban planners decided it must be so.
But in all cases, a private car’s highest and best use is as an expensive and wasteful toy. But we love them, and there is ample documentation that building a national automotive industry is one of the most efficient ways to industrialize your nation.
A choice, in other words. A choice just like the choices that were made to push the rural populations of the US into cities. Those choices were made by the powerful for their own reasons, and those reasons had nothing to do with the well-being of the little people.
So now it is somehow the responsibility of we little people to solve the catastrophe that was brought to us by those corporate sponsors?
It seems much more appropriate to simply abandon the corporate/capitalist mindset and find ways that with a little luck we little people might be able to survive by our own wits. At the very least, we could stop making excuses for those corporate sponsors. And maybe start calling those who persist with the excuses by their true name.
That urban catastrophe? I was just born into it, and it was inevitable, given the persistent greed of the people who created it.
Thanks Chris for keeping on…
George Monbiot exceeded my expectations for how much he would distort what Chris wrote in “Saying NO…”
This example might take the cake (or biscuit), as if Chris was presenting his solution, and the solution is societal collapse:
“When your solution is societal collapse, you should ask yourself some hard questions about what you are trying to solve.”
I’m struck by how George didn’t really engage with Chris’s main critiques of Regenesis, such as the energy implications, which is telling. Instead, George’s focus seems more personal. Some of George’s critiques make me wonder whether George would like Chris to be “cancelled” and ignored:
Chris’s position is “utterly perverse and ludicrous”.
Chris used a term that is “grotesque and dehumanising”.
Chris yearns for a catastrophe, or so it appears sometimes.
Chris’s “plan” is part of the “Great Cruelty”, in Monbiot’s opinion.
The physical requirements of other humans are secondary to “people of Chris’s persuasion”.
“Some writers” (presumably including Chris) “appear to treat billions of people as disposable”.
In the interest of not distorting what George wrote, here are the full quotes:
“Saying No to a Farm-Free Future is a powerful lesson in how motivated reasoning can lead you to an utterly perverse and ludicrous position.”
“He describes them as “human feedlots”, a term I find grotesque and dehumanising. They “consume everything around them and then themselves”. They are “built on cheap and abundant energy and models of globalised trade that aren’t destined to endure.”
“If a catastrophe of the kind Chris envisages – and sometimes appears to yearn – were to materialise, people everywhere are likely to become more desperate.”
“To me, Chris’s long-standing plan – to move the people to the food, rather than the food to the people – is a further instance of the Great Cruelty of the past two centuries.”
“The particular “mysteries and passions” that appeal to people of Chris’s persuasion come first, and the physical requirements of other humans are secondary: they must either fit in somehow, or fall aside.”
“When some writers and campaigners, prioritising their own mysteries and passions, appear to treat billions of people as disposable, it should tell us something important: we need to check ourselves.”
There is much more I could say about Monbiot’s above-linked article, and maybe I eventually will say it, but for the moment I’ll make just one point. Monbiot blithely assumes that cities will be economically viable into the indefinite future, which suggests to me that he lacks a basic understanding of the three E’s — energy, economy and ecology in relation to one another. It never occurs to him that livelihood in cities is made possible by a luxury-based, luxury dependent (discretionary spending) material culture and economy, and that such an economy depends on cheap and abundant energy, which epoch is rapidly ending (measured in two types of cost, monetary end environmental / ecological). He claims not to be an ecomodernist, but he appears to unwittingly subscribe to the key ecomodern premise, which is that technology can and will enable industrial civilization to live on indefinitely.
Once again, it appears we need (in part) to quantify the energy costs of “energy transition,” with “energy transition” ultimately meaning maintaining something approximating BAU. Other things need calculating, too, such as how long such a transition would likely take to happen. And Simon Michaux is pretty persuasive to me in revealing that there simply aren’t enough metals and minerals for such an “energy transition”. In short, “energy transition” has come to mean a full replacement of current energy use through “renewable energy” replacement — which replacement process hasn’t even begun, because we’re burning more fossil fuels today than at any time in history, despite having emplaced an immense amount of solar, wind and other ostensibly ‘renewable” energy tech.
Monbiot utterly and completely avoids ALL of this framing, and all of these topics, and thus appears to me to be either naive or disingenuous.
Sadly, of the two people (equally qualified Ph.D’s) I’ve formally invited to join the project to quantify the energy costs of energy transition, neither wanted to take the project on. And none have yet to respond to my broader call to the EEE “community” to get to work on this. So we’re all sort of flying by the seats of our pants in the dark here. As Richard Heinberg has said, we collectively don’t really know how much energy cost would be entailed in a full renewable replacement, were that otherwise possible to begin with. This means we can’t simpy point to this data to dismiss those who are playing Make Believe with the future of life on Earth.
But let’s get honest here. A dramatic increase in the manufacture of this ‘renewable’ tech would require massive fossil energy inputs. That’s for certain. And so far zero global net energy has been replaced with ‘renewables’. Zero. And fossil energy consumption grows each year. So we have no plan or intention to replace fossil energy with ‘renewables’. Period.
Meanwhile, we have every reason to believe that we’re truly past any plausible boundary marker for a “carbon budget” as it was originally defined as a basis of establishing the parameters of “safe” levels of atmospheric carbon. That is, clearly we’re well past the safe stage of the game, and into the dangerous to catastrophic already. So there simply isn’t any carbon budget to spend! — despite the fact that some will claim otherwise, but their arguments have not a leg to stand on.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/wind-farm-projects-implode-over-high-costs-inflation-community-backlash/
Cheap and reliable energy … Not …
They can’t finance the building of offshore wind farms , so I take this as the economy is in such a dire straits that future energy supply can’t be afforded .
Hmm. Offshore wind farms are in competition with onshore wind farms. Certainly the former is much more expensive per unit than the latter. So that offshore is slow to emerge is no surprise to me at all!
Offshore wind farms are desirable, mostly, because of aesthetic and land-use considerations? I may be wrong. My expertise is limited! I’m expert mostly in navel gazing. LOL.
Thanks James.
Yes, the energy budget was part of what I was trying to get at in my comment above, but you did it much more explicitly.
As for quantification, Tom Murphy is really good. He has a number of years worth of articles and calculations on his site:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
Tom was the second to turn down my invitation. Sigh.
“And Simon Michaux is pretty persuasive to me in revealing that there simply aren’t enough metals and minerals for such an “energy transition”.
Who is not peer reviewed, assuming we still think that counts for something, and even then his research has been demolished.
https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/
Within this worldview, replacing the existing fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a new one based on renewable energy technologies is a fantasy, and therefore the world is heading for an unavoidable contraction that will result in the demise of modern civilisation.
In this post, however, I will prove that while this analysis contains important insights, this conclusion is overly simplistic and scientifically flawed because it ignores some of the most robust empirical data. Far from being a sober, scientific perspective, this view is itself an ideological reaction that represents a ‘fight or flight’ response to the current crisis convergence.
In fact, the proponents of this view are often as dogmatically committed to their views as those they criticise.
AGAIN:
In fact, the proponents of this view are often as dogmatically committed to their views as those they criticise.
@ Rupert Newton –
James: “And Simon Michaux is pretty persuasive to me in revealing that there simply aren’t enough metals and minerals for such an “energy transition”.
Rupert: “Who is not peer reviewed, assuming we still think that counts for something, and even then his research has been demolished.”
https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/
I don’t know whether all of Michaux’s papers have been left out of what folks take to be the peer review process (meaning reviewed within the pages of ‘respectable’ scientific journals), or whether indeed his research has been “demolished”. That’s a strong claims! And I’ll read the material at your link…. But I doubt it’s been demolished in its entirety — though perhaps some of it doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny. There is formal peer review process, and there are less formal peer review processes, and it seems to me that Michaux’s work has been mostly embraced by the informal peer review process. Almost no one would claim that his work has been — generally — “demolished”.
All that said, what about what has sometimes been called the “Heinberg pulse”? Have you looked into that? Google that phrase to find some writings which indicate what has been meant by the phrase. Basically, Richard Heinberg has said on a number of occasions that it is very likely that a rapid build-out of renewable energy devices and infrastructure would result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the near term (he didn’t identify the duration of this near term). He is talking about the additional mining, smelting, manufacturing, transporting and installation (and use) of these technologies. They have an “energy cost,” and 84% of current global energy use is fossil sourced, so the energy cost of such a build-out would be mostly fossil energy.
Now, if we accept what climate scientist Kevin Anderson has to say on the matter, we should have been reducing GHG emissions each year by a very significant amount, but instead we’ve been doing quite the opposite. And today we should be reducing GHG each year by a sizable amount, but instead we’re increasing GHG emissions each year. Anderson basically says we cannot wait until a decade or two down the road to begin very significant emissions reductions.
But the standard version of the “energy transition” narrative has it that we’ll have to wait until we’ve built a giant capacity for “renewable energy production” before we can start reducing GHG emissions. They say we’ll have to have a rapid energy transition which can only result in a “Heinberg Pulse,” and then we can rest assured that GHG will begin to decline.
But hey, wait a minute.
And you can read this article to get more of why I think this makes no sense at all.
2023 – 2033, The Decisive Decade
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-02/2023-2033-the-decisive-decade/
Rupert: “Within this worldview, replacing the existing fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a new one based on renewable energy technologies is a fantasy, and therefore the world is heading for an unavoidable contraction that will result in the demise of modern civilisation.
In this post, however, I will prove that while this analysis contains important insights, this conclusion is overly simplistic and scientifically flawed because it ignores some of the most robust empirical data. Far from being a sober, scientific perspective, this view is itself an ideological reaction that represents a ‘fight or flight’ response to the current crisis convergence.
In fact, the proponents of this view are often as dogmatically committed to their views as those they criticise.”
We have our reasons for appearing to be dogmatic, and it’s perhaps more an appearance than you realize. We want our objections to get a hearing in the public, and they are generally not. The renewable energy transition narrative of “full replacement” goes almost entirely unquestioned as the principal, if not exclusive, approach to “climate action”. That’s why hardly anyone ever even talks about what “climate action” actually would amount to in biophysical terms, as contrasted with strictly or merely political engagement terms.
“Climate action” is almost never spelled out, in other words. It’s an empty phrase pointing at nothing. And some of us want us to actually have a public conversation about what “climate action” might actually mean in biophysical, economic and material culture terms.
Personally, I’m fully prepared to be shown that a contradictory “Heinberg Pulse” would not happen, and that even if it were it would be fully within our “carbon budget”. That would come as quite a relief. But I don’t believe it is so, and I can’t imagine why anyone would.
@Rupert Newtown
It’s ot just material scarcity that is an issue with “renewables”.
All the existing “renewables” to date have been made using fossil fuels.
“Renewables” have a shelf life of about 25 years.
They will need replacing using 100% “renewal” energy.
Mining, transportation , ore refining, construction, installation and disposal will all need to be electrified. Not viable for lots of those processes.
This isn’t dogma, it’s looking at the facts and drawing conclusions.
Trying to fairly address what I take to be George’s position (whether or not George’s criticisms are correctly applied to what Chris wrote), I think there are some potentially sensitive ethical issues concerning the global situation, with billions of people living in cities while various catastrophes seem to be brewing and threatening their ability to remain living there.
The ethical questions include:
At what point do we make the call to “abandon ship” and leave the cities? And, until that time, should our limited resources be spent on building as many lifeboats as possible (keeping the ship analogy), or should the limited resources be spent on unproven technology which is hoped to prevent catastrophe (like an “unsinkable” ship design, in my imperfect analogy)?
What seems to be Chris’s position is we have a choice between either:
A big catastrophe (with a portion of it being avoidable), or
A smaller unavoidable catastrophe;
and we should try to make the catastrophe as small as possible, saving as many lives as possible.
What seems to be George’s position is we have a choice between either:
A catastrophe (if food supplies to the cities become insufficient for some reason), or
No catastrophe;
and we should try to make the catastrophe avoidable, by doing whatever it takes to ensure enough food can be supplied to the cities, so we can potentially save everyone there and keep them there.
The crux seems to be that George’s position carries the risk (unrecognized by George) of potentially losing more lives than Chris’s approach if the catastrophe still occurs (for reasons foreseen or unforeseen).
“At what point do we make the call to “abandon ship” and leave the cities?”
I’d begin with the philosophical question, are we to try and apply reasons and reasoning to this question?
I say so only because, as it seems to me, contemporary politics isn’t any longer about reason and reasoning, if ever it has been. Sometimes, contemporary politics is about height, or hairstyle. Or it’s about the power a political party has been able to amass, ect., and so reason sits in the back row, raising its unseen hand. Like a school child, it says “Me, me, pick me!” No one hears.
If I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I’m a contender for being right, (or, rather, my perspective is a contender), modern cities depend upon an excess of production of goods and services which are less than entirely necessary to meet basic human needs, and this occurred because machinery and energy was progressively present to replace human labor with machines and techno-energy, and an entire epoch of recent humanity was built and designed around cheap and abundant energy and materials, etc. (including fish in the oceans, soil fertility, and the “sink” capacity of waste absorption of a thousand particular kinds.
Those days are over — in each of these respects.
So if I am right that urban economies are fundamentally “luxury (dependent) economies,? then cities are on their way towards the waste heap of modernity (though there will likely be cities in the future, but entirely and wildly unlike the scale and shape of contemporary cities).
So…, are we going to reason about this. Or are we going to try and approach it in some other way. Because if we’re going to reason about it, I have an argument to make. I’ll say that the urbanization phase of human history just collided with its antithetical force over the last couple of decades, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.
PS –
I used the term “humanity” above. But I’m fully aware that there is no such thing as “humanity,” as if we were all alike, like … — the same. There’s no such thing as “humanity”. Please forgive me. I was over-generalizing. It’s a terrible habit of us contemporaries, whether we are “moderns” or not.
@James R. Martin.
Without trying to sound nitpicky, I beg to differ.
I think there is such a thing as “humanity” and there are characteristics/behaviours that all human cultures have.
1. Language.
2. Visual Art. (Both body art and non body)
3. Use of fire.
4. Dance (why do people dance????)
5. Singing.
6. music.
7. Complex tool making
I’m not aware of any other organisms that share all those behaviours with humans?
Perhaps Neanderthals and Denisovans did, back in the day.
I think that in the UK in particular, (lots of) towns grew into cities as a direct result of the industrial revolution and fossil fuels.
It kinda says it all about the relationship between large urban areas and fossil fuels.
My comment to the effect that “there’s no such thing as humanity,” was nonsense from one point of view and perfectly sensible from another. Very often, when folks say “humanity,” they are generalizing in ways that are just plain wrong, provided that we take a cultural evolutionary perspective on, well, cultural differences. Human behavior is overwhelmingly influenced by cultural history, and differing people in differing cultures behave very differently — and in this sense we are not all “just the same”. It is in this sense that there is no such thing as “humanity” in the common sense of those who are not familiar with cultural evolutionary processes.
Of course, humans are very real and natural. But we can’t really understand human behavior except through a lens which incorporates cultural evolutionary theory. Lots of things typical, average people say about “humanity” just isn’t true, because cultural evolution is not incorporated into their understanding of what “humanity” is.
@James R. Martin.
I take your point and don’t disagree. It’s a big like the idea of “common sense”. It differs depending on one’s point of view.
But there are commonalities across all cultures.
I would also add to the list above….
7. The combining of different foods into new flavours. Cuisine, in short.
“The crux seems to be that George’s position carries the risk (unrecognized by George) of potentially losing more lives than Chris’s approach if the catastrophe still occurs (for reasons foreseen or unforeseen).”
Exactly. Monbiot seems either unwilling to entertain or incapable of comprehending the suggestion that doing more of the same thing that got us into this mess is, at best, a distraction when we can least afford it. Despite his vigorous (and unconvincing) protest to the contrary, he’s planted his flag squarely in the camp of the eco-modernists (as I read his response, I couldn’t help but think that it could just as well have been written by Leigh Phillips).
On further reflection, perhaps the disconnect is even more fundamental — that Monbiot fails to recognize that what he’s proposing is more of the same because technological solutionism can never be otherwise.
All right, I’ll bite… I haven’t read either book, yet, so this should be interesting.
Monbiot talks about restoring the agricultural systems of “60 or 70 years ago” but over-financialised, industrial, monoculture grain farming was pretty solidly entrenched by then, I think?
Monbiot speaks derisively of China’s “Great Leap Backward” and the resulting famine, but… this was not caused by traditional small-scale mixed farming but by attempting to apply contemporary industrial farming techniques (such as deep ploughing), maintaining high grain export quotas to try to save face on the diplomatic scene, and also by diverting agricultural labour to (small-scale) steel production; and while that death toll was high, as a percentage of the population it was small compared to the Irish potato famines of the previous century — also caused by the politics of grain extraction. I understand there is also some question over how many of the deaths were from famine and how many from violence.
I’ll accept that one of the reasons famine is less widespread now than it has been in the past is that we have much faster and more reliable long-distance transport of food, especially of non-perishable food. Unfortunately, this is going to go away if we don’t figure out cheap and plentiful electrical power, which (as previously discussed in comments on this blog) is not an easy problem to solve. So far, I think if Monbiot wants to avert famine, he should be either figuring out how we can do high-tech-but-low-energy supply chains, or figuring out what to do about the way the just-in-time supply chain stuff may have eroded local resilience in the form of granaries and so on (I haven’t looked into the numbers on this as far as states are concerned, but I know that local shops keep much less in stock than they used to, which is fine until you have a pandemic and everyone is told to buy enough food to stay in for two weeks just in case they get sick…)
But I want to add the caveat that this will only ever be part of the solution, because political forces will trump technical ability every time. There is a reason that during the early 1990s in Russia people were planting potatoes at their dachas. International aid is a poor substitute for local resilience, and I suspect Monbiot is also discounting how much famine has been averted by making use of or encouraging development of local food production, especially of high-nutrition foods that aren’t easily mechanised or stored. (Scurvy, anyone?)
Monbiot writes:
The “ecomodernist” and “urbanist” labels could be seen as the usual cut and thrust of debate: by attaching an alienating definition to someone, you might induce people to stop listening to what they’re saying, and to dismiss their evidence and arguments out of hand.
It takes one to know one, I suppose…. okay, I’ll continue. Italics are from Monbiot unless otherwise indicated.
One of the reasons why high yields ensure that more people can be fed is that more supply reduces the price of food, making it more accessible to the poor.
Ah, but who grows the food, George? When food prices are low, who pays the farmers? What happens to small independent farmers in the global south when industrial farmers in the rich west (usually with access to agricultural subsidies) flood the market with cheap grain? I’ll give you a hint: the poor farmer’s neighbour buys the cheap grain, and the farmer, without access to those same international markets… starves. (Later, so does the neighbour, when the price of grain soars.) It seems like Monbiot is citing supply and demand to demonstrate that he doesn’t understand how supply and demand work in a global economy. This is basic class solidarity stuff.
It really isn’t that difficult to see how “Higher food prices might alleviate hunger globally” [Smaje]. If we’re going to have an economy where people sell their labour and also buy food, they need to be paid appropriately for that labour. If the food is too cheap, the labour is too cheap and the labourer can’t buy food.
Yes, the problem is poverty: a gross maldistribution of wealth. Yes, this maldistribution urgently needs to be addressed, which is why we need political and economic change, not just new technologies.
Wait, I thought technical improvements in farming and transport supply chains are how we’ve reduced famine so far. Now you want political and economic change. Well, I can agree we need political and economic change, and I will even say we need to be using vastly different farming technologies for at least some of our food production.
Monbiot goes on to claim Chris doesn’t offer any clear solutions, and then lists the some of the solutions Chris offers, among them predominantly local self-provisioning, spreading out in the landscape, low-energy livelihoods, commercial farmers re-orienting themselves to more autonomous and local needs, boosting urban food provision by increasing the number of allotments, community gardens, market gardens etc.
These seem pretty clear to me. They aren’t easy to implement, but they are clear.
Most of the places where large numbers of people live do not have sufficient fertile land nearby to support them. (The rest of the paragraph gives examples of this.)
Yeah, that’s a problem, George. But this isn’t how we always lived, so I’m not sure why you think it’s permanent.
Discussing his own, proudly low-yield production of wheat and potatoes, Chris states:
“there’s no point labouring for next to nothing on someone else’s behalf when you’ve already grown enough to eat for yourself.”
This is why farmers who do not share his worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people.
I would be interested to compare Chris’s yield of calories per acre, and calories per calorie of labour input (including any mechanisation), to the similar numbers for industrial monoculture grains and indeed for precision fermentation… I bet it isn’t as low yield as all that.
And yet Chris is not starving, at least not from what I can see, and Vallis Veg does grow some food for other people — just not for free. I daresay if food prices in general were higher they could get on a bit better, but on the other hand maybe more people would just take my approach of growing more greens on the windowsill. That’s the thing, you see: if food is expensive enough, growing it yourself starts to look like a pretty good deal.
I don’t know the full context of the “human feedlot” phrase Monbiot takes such exception to. I will say that as someone who lives in a city and absolutely thinks cities are going to continue to exist and has engaged directly with Chris on the matter, I have never felt like he is raining curses on me, or that he hates city-dwellers in general.
If I interpret his airy euphemisms correctly, the question of how urban people should be fed is not worth answering, because cities are soon going to collapse, and their people will have no choice but to “spread themselves out in the landscape”, growing their own “food and fibre, building shelter, producing a modest livelihood from the local ecological base.”
I don’t believe for a second that Chris Smaje thinks the question of how (current) urban people should be fed is not worth answering. I think Monbot doesn’t like the answer: “in a non-urban setting.”
When your solution is societal collapse, you should ask yourself some hard questions about what you are trying to solve.
When you think someone trying to avoid the worst effects of societal collapse actually wants societal collapse, you should ask yourself some hard questions about why you think that collapse isn’t happening.
It might be worth noting that the Old Testament prophets also foresaw the imminent collapse of urban life, two and a half thousand years ago.
I don’t think the writings of the Neviim mean what you think they mean. The phrophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem were about the military conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians (among others) and modern scholarship suggests they were written after the fact, toward the end of the exilic period when Persian victory over the Babylonians allowed for a return to the city (that was actually still there) and region, at least partly order to justify said return and cement together an identity. It’s a narrative, not a prediction. If you’re going to make claims about Scripture please at least do the bare minimum of research.
I’m not sure what the rhetorical function of this throwaway line is, because I don’t know what Monbiot understands as the significance of these bits of Scripture. Is he trying to make Smaje look old-fashioned and superstitious? It’s an odd way to go about it. Is he trying to imply that people predicting disaster have always been wrong? That seems unwise given that Monbiot also predicts disaster if we don’t Act Now To Save The World.
How mild and gentle he makes it sound! Refugees from the cities “spreading themselves out in the landscape”, “producing a modest livelihood from the local ecological base.” When the fugitives disperse into the countryside, the inhabitants will doubtless greet them with open arms, saying, “Welcome sister! Welcome brother! Here, have some fertile land. Oh, and some water, knowledge, skills, tools, traction and all the other means to grow your own food and live happy lives as re-peasants in our agrarian wonderland.”
This doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I hear from Chris. Once again: saying a thing needs to happen, saying “here is a potential way out of the coming disaster,” is not the same as saying it will be easy or straightforward.
If history is any guide, this is not quite how it’s likely to pan out. The more probable outcomes of societal collapse include warlordism or full-scale war, coercion, fascism, slavery, disease, starvation and mass death.
So are the most probable outcomes of putting our fingers in our ears and pretending we can continue on as we have been even though the fossil fuels are either going to run out or make the world uninhabitable by humans.
Moreover, if a cataclysm is sufficient to bring the cities down, it is likely also to destroy the basis of much of rural life. After all, the distinctions between the two are not nearly as crisp as Chris would have us believe. In fact, and horrifyingly, it’s likely that, as a result of environmental disaster, rural life in many parts of the world will collapse before urban life does, as suggested by a highly disturbing recent paper in Nature, showing how and where the “human climate niche” is likely to shrink.
Hmm. “People like to live in places that are nice to live in” is not news. And meanwhile, what do you think is driving the shrinking of the human climate niche? The industrial agriculture and transport you lauded as saviours of humanity earlier in this article are implicated.
If anything, we are likely to become more reliant on long-distance transport to deliver our food – a prospect no one, myself included, relishes.
Where is it going to come from if the niche in which we can survive is shrinking? I’ll tell you something interesting about humans: there’s really not very much for us to eat in climates where we can’t survive because it’s too hot or too cold or too dry. (I’ll grant that “too wet” has historically been a source of plenty in the form of all kinds of seafood and river fish, but given ocean acidification and the difficulty for fish of breathing in warm water, I don’t think we should count on this continuing much longer.) If we all move to the cities because everywhere else has become inhospitable, the “everywhere else” is not going to be providing food for us. And even heavily mechanised industrial monoculture grain farms require someone to visit the site from time to time and ideally live very nearby.
If a catastrophe of the kind Chris envisages – and sometimes appears to yearn – were to materialise,
Again, I don’t think seeing something coming and warning about it is the same as yearning for it.
people everywhere are likely to become more desperate. The remaining fertile land and water would be even more valued and fiercely defended than they are today.
Yes, this is a problem. Interesting, then, that the remaining fertile land is… already rising in price, and already being bought up by the super rich. Working on political solutions to that problem while it’s still possible to address it with political measures would be a good idea.
To me, Chris’s long-standing plan – to move the people to the food, rather than the food to the people – is a further instance of the Great Cruelty of the past two centuries. The Great Cruelty is common to colonialism, capitalism, communism, Nazism, neoliberalism and all the other conquering and interconnected forces that have dominated thought and action during this period. It can be summarised as follows:
People are counters, to be moved in their millions, as interests or ideology dictate, across the board game called Planet Earth.
This is a pretty tenuous connection to try to draw. Chris advocates for people tending land and having some kind of security of usufruct. He is trying to work out how to give people meaningful access to land so that they can provide for themselves (first) and others (if they want to). I don’t think I have ever seen him suggest that we should all become insecure, underpaid, fungible workers, going wherever the whims of the markets or the state demand.
But if you’ve been paying attention, the status quo sees quite a lot of abuse of workers, up to actually meeting the definitions of modern slavery, within agriculture, particularly the sort of food that people can actually grow themselves on a small and local scale with relatively little effort. One of the benefits of growing my own strawberries is that I’m not worried that someone here on a six month agricultural visa (already in debt for their flight to the UK and paying extortionate “rent” for a bed in a caravan shared with 7 other terrified people) picked them.
Whether there is enough food and everyone can afford to eat it is, Chris says, a “secondary goal”. This is because it doesn’t “speak to the mysteries and passions of what animates human (or non-human) life”, which Chris describes as our “primary goals”. In obsessing about “productivity, numbers, yields, costs and so forth”, we “risk missing what makes for the flourishing of humans and other organisms”.
I would probably phrase this differently; I would say that Chris is committed to the true flourishing of human beings and the rest of the web of life, and that “enough food” that everyone can afford to eat is only part of what that flourishing looks like. But I wonder if this is being taken out of context… is producing enough food a secondary goal when we are not producing enough food? Nope. Is producing enough food a secondary goal when we actually produce an agricultural surplus, in such a way that we are irremediably changing the ecosystem which we depend on for our long term survival? Yeah, I think it probably is.
In any hierarchy of human needs, it features close to the top.
If you’re referring to Maslow here, you’ve got it upside down.
I don’t for a moment deny that mysteries and passions are important to us, or that we need meaning and purpose to lead fulfilling lives, but their pursuit can be somewhat hampered if you are starving to death.
But earlier you said that famine is at an all-time low, George…
There is now a wide movement, some of whose leading figures are quoted on or in Chris’s book, that prioritises its mysteries and passions above other people’s survival
This is a gross misrepresentation of the movement I think you’re referring to.
to the point at which it promotes the idea of “withdrawing” and “walking away” from the effort to prevent Earth systems collapse. On behalf of the rest of the world, such people grandly proclaim that it’s futile to try to stop the slide. We should give up and “adapt to”, even embrace, whatever awaits.
I have some sympathy with the argument. Environmentalists have tried asking nicely. They’ve tried writing letters. They’ve tried staying home from school. They’ve tried stopping traffic. None of it is producing the kind of change we need.
At what point should I stop trying to get everyone else to agree with me that we should stop driving, and instead try to learn to live in a world where driving has destroyed the air quality? Personally I got tired of beating my head against that particular brick wall many years ago. I still don’t drive, I still put in a word for cycling and walking and public transit, I still try to make contributions to the world in such a way that I’m not requiring other people to drive… but there’s a limit to what I can do, and I still have, I hope, a few decades left, and if I saw myself as a failure because half the houses on this street have access to a vehicle then I’d be pretty miserable.
But there is no “away” to walk to. Ecological and social collapse will find us, wherever we go. What some people can escape is the shared responsibility for facing our multiple crises, and our duty of care towards others.
There is no “away” to grow our food in, either.
There is no “away” to mine materials from.
The acceptance of – sometimes apparent longing for – collapse is among the greatest self-indulgences in human history. It is peculiar to people who are either relatively wealthy and insulated, or have the land and means to grow their own food (or both).
I would say I accept that we are in a period of rapid transition; I’m not sure collapse is the right word, though catastrophe might be. Certainly, catastrophe is already here for some.
I am probably never going to have land of my own. I work every week with people who can’t even afford to buy food. I do consider myself relatively wealthy, but not “insulated” — nor isolated — from the issue of hunger.
I don’t want catastrophe, but I do want change. Rapid change. And I want it because the current systems we have are unjust and the trajectory we are on is unjust — not because I think I would be happier if I had some chickens or even a pig or cow.
It is a variation of the prepper mentality, whose props in this case are not bunkers, bitcoin, tinned food and AR-15s, but hoes, scythes and leather jerkins. (Though these “repeasantised” folk might discover that if the calamity does occur, they’ll also need some heavy weaponry to defend their land and crops).
I’ve said this before here, but my approach is very much that learning skills is a good thing.
As far as heavy weaponry to defend land and crops is concerned, there are basically two things that can be done in a low energy situation to defend your food supply. One is to share it. If your neighbour isn’t hungry they aren’t going to raid your barn, and they’re a lot more likely to be able to help you with the harvest. The other is, yes, to train people in defence; but attacks and raids are also something that requires quite a lot of energy to pull off. Things could get pretty ugly for a while and I don’t relish that or endorse it. But if you haven’t noticed, George, there’s quite a lot of war about at the moment. I had occasion to look up some very basic stats from the United Nations World Food Programme the other day; they’re currently active in 120 countries and involved in emergency action in fifteen. Eight out of ten of the emergency action they take is needed because of conflict.
While the Old Testament prophets had to rely on God’s wrath being visited upon the human feedlots,
Did you read the bits about the restoration and mercy? Did you read about what the wrath was even said to be for?! It was for mistreating the poor and misusing resources, George. It was for idolatry — the worship of things instead of right relationship with God and people.
All we now need do is nothing: let the corporations, the oligarchs and the rising consumer demand that are breaking Earth systems have their way, and some form of collapse is likely to occur, with or without God’s wrath.
Some form of change is likely to occur. Call it a disequilibrium, if you like. But I don’t need to predict it, because it’s already happening now. And yes, for some people — for people I know and love, even in my wealthy western urban setting — it is a catastrophe.
By deliberately stepping back from the struggle to contain these forces, and even seeking in some cases to dissuade others from participating, they make this possibility more likely.
This is an interesting question, actually. Is it better for me to learn to drive a car or program a computer or whatever, get some kind of high-paying job within the faceless machine, and then donate as much of my money as I can to climate research? Or is it better for me to grow my potatoes and my squashes and my beans and my strawberries and eat them, to convert the churchyard into a garden, to teach others how to grow food, to use whatever resources I have handy within the existing system to feed those who are hungry, to think about how a more just and sustainable system could emerge from all this?
No shade here on people who go the route of earning a lot of money and throwing that at whatever pressing problem speaks to them (though most people with serious wealth spend very, very little of it on philanthropy); for some people this is a satisfying approach, and I do think it’s worthwhile and important. But the thing is, by not driving, by growing some of my food, by learning and teaching skills, I actually AM participating in the struggle to contain the forces that lead to catastrophe.
My belief is that we have no right to grant ourselves this indulgence. Given that rich nations and wealthy people are primarily responsible for the planetary dysbiosis we all face, including the massive burdens the food system imposes on the living world, we all have a duty to engage. Engaging means valuing the lives of others as we value our own. Living on this planet, especially as a member of a privileged society, our lives are intimately bound with the lives of others, including those who live thousands of miles away. We cannot excuse ourselves from the responsibilities we owe to each other.
This seems reasonable enough.
Our aim should be not to use societal collapse as a tool to shape the world to our tastes, but to seek to avert societal collapse.
I am attempting to use shaping the world to my “tastes” (which include a preference for justice, sufficiency, joy, solidarity) as the tool to avert societal collapse.
There are no perfect solutions in an imperfect world. Everything we might propose, including all the ways forward I suggest in Regenesis, has downsides. We are working in a very tight space, one in which 8 billion people and more need to be fed, within an Earth system whose planetary boundaries have already been breached, to a large extent as a result of food production.
There are no remaining comfort zones. There is no longer – if there ever was – scope for ideological congruence, for solutions that fit snugly into any one worldview. We will find ourselves in disconcerting places. We will be assailed by cognitive dissonance.
So why are you so rattled by the solutions Chris Smaje has suggested?
In seeking to address our great predicaments, we should be, as much as is humanly possible, open-minded, open-hearted, receptive to evidence, argument and persuasion. The answers, contradictory, incomplete and inadequate as they will always be, will be social, political, economic, organisational and technological.
I don’t think you’ve answered any of Smaje’s arguments about energy balance.
Whisper it, but agroecology is also a technology.
When some writers and campaigners, prioritising their own mysteries and passions, appear to treat billions of people as disposable, it should tell us something important: we need to check ourselves.
… yes, Monbiot, you need to check yourself.
We need to ask what impulses we are following, whether we are really seeking the best outcomes for humanity and the living planet, or simply avoiding cognitive pain.
I ask myself this every day. I would love to think that high-energy tech would save us. Caveats about the limits of human wisdom aside, I would love to think we could have ever-increasing energy availability, to be able to expand our way out of our current predicament. That would alleviate a great deal of cognitive pain.
We need, as much as we are able, to set our passions aside.
No.
We need to act in that place where our deepest, truest passions and the world’s deepest needs meet. We need to use our passions in the service of all, both humanity and the more-than-human web of life. We need to put our hearts and minds toward finding a way through this that isn’t just more of the same.
We will fail at some of it, we will succeed at some of it, and none of us know how we will meet our end. But only by being fully ourselves, with all our passions and all our hopes and all our desires oriented to and situated within the interconnected system we inhabit and depend on, will we do anything without destroying ourselves.
@Kathryn.
Hats off to you Kathryn..
That’s a pretty comprehensive response to George’s piece.
Can’t find fault in it.
Much better than my one-liners.
I wonder if George is watching?
Thanks John.
Perhaps at some point I should actually read both books…
I’d like to second John Adams here and say that this is a top-notch critique. Your comments here tend to be both insightful and clearly coming from a place of empathy and compassion, and this one is no exception. Well said, and thank you for this.
@Kim
Thanks for this.
Answers come there some… And then some!!
Bless you, Kathryn. Your fine-toothed comb approach provides much food for thought for many of the doubts and questions Monbiot’s article raised with me.
PS I noticed that it is possible to email George via his website, and he says he reads them all. Among other things, if you are absolutely sure he has Maslow’s pyramid upside-down, then I believe you would do him a great service to let him know (speaking of comic potential, I think this alone could provide enough material for a sketch along the lines of Python’s immortal ‘Dead Parrot’ skit).
Thanks Simon.
I don’t think I’m up for tangling with Monbiot directly, if I’m honest. From how he has responded to other people attempting to draw his attention to his errors, I suspect he wouldn’t respond at all well. And really, my comment is not all that thorough. I don’t even have citations.,
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is most commonly depicted as a pyramid, with physiological needs such as food and shelter at the bottom, forming the base. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs for a selection of pictures and explanations, as well as some criticisms.
That doesn’t mean that food is less important than, say, self-actualization or companionship or esteem; Monbiot is, at least, correct that without meeting our basic caloric needs we do starve. But if he’s going to talk about needs as being in a static hierarchy then he may as well get his description right.
My first reaction is, gratitude that men like George are going to move mountains to save the masses. Without George rich men like Chris would let us all starve.
I just had a few questions. George points out that famines, caused by warlords and utopian fantasies (great leap forward), are in decline. He goes on to state that the two main causes are abundant food production and better transportation.
My question is, are the warlords the 3rd great cause or the 4th cause of famine?
Cheers
Sandy
Thank you for this. I think this frank acknowledgement that what’s unsustainable actually can’t be sustained is so crucial. Like you point out, it’s such a common pattern for debates in our culture to center around what we want, rather than what’s possible. Or taking some aspect of industrial modernity for granted and assuming there has to be a way to sustain it just because we want one. Sadly there’s no sign that any nation has any inclination to accept natural limits and shape policy accordingly, which leaves us stuck and flailing.
My own country of Norway would probably be in a good position to do so: fairly low population, abundant hydro-power, decent social cohesion and financial resources (for now). Not much farmland, though, but I think we do manage to supply about 50% of our food domestically as of now. Still, the mantra here is eternal growth, just like anywhere.
Sometimes I think about what a relief it’d be to live in a society that took these things seriously. I could disagree with policy, but at least I could support the overall “national project” instead of feeling like the people in power live on a different planet (where time basically hasn’t moved since 2005 or so). Or: where are all the adults with the will to tell it to us straight?
I’ve long thought someone should write a dystopian novel (or movie, whatever) in a sci-fi setting with an energy source like that, just to show how catastrophic it’d actually be.
They already did! This is basically the plot of the film Forbidden planet.
I’ve been noticing the appearance of a term in these pages of “comments” here, lately. That term is “humanity.” It’s a deeply reductive and simplifying term which makes no place for another, the other, otherness, as if “humanity” were singular and not mutiplicitous, multifarious, even beyond mere ‘diversity’. I’m sort of wading into the philosophical ruminations of Byung-Churl Han at the moment, and so I can’t help thinking that perhaps there is something rather narcissistic about this hegemonic imagination of “humanity.” “Humanity” is a repetition of the same, an endless appearance of appearances within sameness, a refusal to meet with and be challenged by “the other”. Otherness is reduced to self-ness, rather narcissistically. We assume we know all that is worthy of knowing. We avail ourselves not to listening, as if the other could intrude upon our self-centered certainties about how the world is. Nothing new or emergent is allowed. The door is shut. We know how it is, do we not?
Let’s be honest. The other makes us a bit nervous, if not terrified. We are incapable of love as Eros. We want our McBurgers, always the same. Always the same. With french fries. But we’ll call them “freedom fries”. With kechup, catsup, … red sauce.
George Monbiot is a radical, principled and scientifically literate environmentalist who has pioneered how we can achieve a socially just and environmentally sustainable world for all.
Sadly, your position is arguably unscientific, unquantified, callous and seemingly happy to condemn billions of people (including my family as city dwellers) to starvation.
Please do reconsider!
https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/
Thanks for commenting Colin. If you could point to where in my writing you think I display a happiness to condemn billions of people to starvation, I’ll gladly amend it to give a more accurate indication of my true view. If you could point to what you find unscientific in my position, I’ll gladly consider if there’s something I can do to make it more scientific. And if you could tell me exactly what it is you want me to reconsider, I’ll certainly consider reconsidering it.
@Chris and Colin.
It’s a draining debate about two perceived “choices”.
But there are no “choices”!!! That’s the bit Monbiot is missing.
There isn’t going to be enough surplus energy (after extraction/harnessing) to create “studge” or fertilizer to feed the masses in cities. And there isn’t going to be enough surplus energy to maintain the infrastructure in those cities either.
What comes next……….? Well my guess is a whole lotta people will begin to grow their own food.
Will it feed 8 Billion souls? Probably not, but there isn’t an alternative.
That’s not me wishing that people starve. It’s just the conclusion I come to when I look at the facts as I see them.
Monbiot tends to “shoot the messenger”.
I’ve heard Douglald Hine talk about how Monbiot’s arguments are like following a path through IKEA. It looks like Colin has obediently followed that path here. He needs to check all the thresholds along that path he’s been led through by Monbiot’s sleight of hand, mischaracterisation and downright nasty projections.
The tenor of your comment suggests that you’re really not looking for engagement, Colin, but, just in case I’m wrong about that, let me ask — are you familiar with Chris Smaje’s work or are you just basing your opinions on Monbiot’s response to Smaje’s book? I ask because the real-world Chris Smaje bears little resemblance to the grotesque caricature that Monbiot conjures in his response to Saying No to a Farm-Free Future. As a long-time reader of both writers, I’m altogether gobsmacked by Monbiot’s intellectually dishonest diatribe. It’s deeply disappointing, to say the least, and I say this as left-wing, vegetarian suburbanite who happens to share a lot of the same values as George Monbiot. So, with that in mind, I heartily recommend that you take the time to glance through Smaje’s long-running blog or, better yet, pick up a copy of his outstanding A Small Farm Future. The writer that you’ll find in those pages is thoughtful, nuanced, rigorous, open-minded, and deeply sympathetic to the plight the humanity faces in the years ahead.
Just skimmed through George’s essay. Some of it I agree with – the use of bucolic stories to sell the products of intensive agriculture is certainly a thing, although its a thing made possible by our distance from the reality of food production.
The fall in world hunger that George celebrates has indeed been remarkable but its been dependent on the very forms of agriculture against which he rails.
Possibly the route to the future that you envisage Chris does lie through catastrophe but I believe you’ve always been clear that your hope was to avoid that by trying to consciously and deliberately make these changes before they are forced upon us by a decline in available energy.
I commented earlier in response to Jeremy and suggested there that often the problem is that we assume normal = permanent and so solutions to our problems are framed around the continuation of normal. But our situation, as in our energy use per person, is far from normal even though we’ve come to see it as being so. I’m worried here I’m going to fall into George’s trap and start indulging in ‘The Cruel Fantasies of Well Fed People’. That’s not my intention – I have two young children and I’d like them to be well fed. My fear is that declines in available energy, climate change, loss of pollinators etc etc may well mean they will inhabit a future in which hunger is once more a real thing – although it is already – we have kids going to school hungry and overwhelmed foodbanks – these may be the result of political choices at this point but that may not always be so. I’d like George to be clearer about the energy implications of what he suggests and also how the creation of a new food industry wouldn’t simply reproduce the corporate/political structures that currently lead to hunger in a world that produces enough food.
I don’t think George is arguing in bad faith – he’s simply trying to find a way through our impossible dilemmas – Paul Kingsnorth said something along the lines of although he disagrees with the direction the environmental movement has taken with its focus on climate and green tech solutionism he accepts it as one possible valid response to our current predicament, even if he felt it would ultimately fail and would continue to argue against it. I feel the same way – George takes issue with “mysteries and passions” but I suspect that its the banishing of such things from the mindset of modernity that in part underlies our current predicament – our inability to see the world as a mystery lying always slightly beyond our comprehension has fueled our hubris and our belief in our ability to control – there a fantasy of a well fed person.
On the wider point of myths – this morning this had me thinking of Brexit and the myths that underpinned the leave and remain campaigns – The leave campaign had better myths – a plucky island nation, a seafaring nation, a trading nation bestride the world. I’m not planning to redo that debate but simply wanted to suggest that from the inside a myth simply appears as truth while from the outside it quite often looks like delusion. I think we all live from within myths, narrative structures that give our understanding of the world shape and two people living from within different myths will experience mutual incomprehension – this is the time in which we live. So maybe George does us a service in offering us a way to examine our own myth – none of them are perfect after all.
“I don’t think George is arguing in bad faith – he’s simply trying to find a way through our impossible dilemmas.”
Several months ago, I said exactly the same thing in reply to a comment on Chris’ s “Can there be an energy transition?” post. However, I’m really struggling to square this with Monbiot’s most recent piece in response Saying No to a Farm-Free Future. At the very least, I’d say that Monbiot is intellectually dishonest in his characterization of the book, that he’s either unwilling (which would imply bad faith) or incapable of engaging with the book that Chris actually wrote as opposed to the one that he’s conjured and then burned in effigy. The best that I can say is that, perhaps, Monbiot has so thoroughly bought into the myth that Chris has so insightfully sketched for us in the last couple of posts that he’s become akin to a horse wearing blinders.
Hi Ernie – I’m not trying to defend anyone’s position in this debate but I’d imagine your characterisation of Monbiot’s response to Chris’ book is exactly what Monbiot would say about Chris’s characterisation of his book.
In ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ Daniel Kahneman has a section on the ‘Halo Effect’ which is, I guess, a cognitive heuristic we all use – essentially it leads us to dismiss costs and overestimate benefits of things/positions that resonate with us emotionally. One of the things this means is that if you got two people read the same text and then questioned them about it afterwards you might conclude they’d read completely different things, because what was most salient to each would be different.
So that is my basis for believing Monbiot isn’t acting in bad faith. No doubt he can’t see how Chris drew the conclusions he did from Regenisis – such as Chris’s point that Monbiot wants to depopulate the countryside which Monbiot refutes – a more useful response might be to ask how someone could conclude that from what he’s written rather than assuming the other is deliberately misconstruing what he wrote – but we seem to be beyond that – which speaks to Chris’s idea that we’re past the point of debate and into something else entirely.
BTW I’d really recommend Kahneman’s book – it’s certainly made me think about my own thinking in ways I hadn’t before.
Hi, Bruce. I broadly agree with your points, and I hope I didn’t come across as combative. Rather, I’m struggling with reconciling this George Monbiot with the one for whom I’ve had the utmost respect and admiration over the years. It ain’t easy. So my remark was more about how my own inclination to see Monbiot as a good faith actor has been challenged by his treatment of Chris’s book. I think Steve L. does a nice job below of pointing to the reason why I’m so taken aback by Monbiot’s response.
@Bruce
I would add that most famines are not due to a lack of food production, but a failure of distribution.
China’s famine in the 1960’s, which Monbiot highlights, was due to administrative cock-ups, not poor farming practices.
Bruce, I haven’t yet read the Monbiot piece and I largely agree with your comment regarding current energy use being far beyond what is normal or sustainable, but I’m going to be a bit stern here:
My fear is that declines in available energy, climate change, loss of pollinators etc etc may well mean they will inhabit a future in which hunger is once more a real thing – although it is already – we have kids going to school hungry and overwhelmed foodbanks – these may be the result of political choices at this point but that may not always be so.
Hunger now is because we have made agricultural policy choices and land use choices and transport strategy choices which favour over-financialised, extractive modes of production over modes of production which would feed everyone well. Hunger now is because we have made energy infrastructure choices that mean people are choosing between paying utility bills and buying food (at the food bank we tend to tell them to pay their bills first and come to us for food if need be, because it’s easier for us to give them food than to pay their bills). Hunger now is because we have made choices around access to housing that favour landlords over tenants and prioritise the right of the rich to make money over the right of the poor to not sleep under bridges. Hunger now is because we subsidise the corporations that extract fossil fuels to the point of fossil fuels being a cheaper way to produce and transport food than using human labour, and labour wants things like good working conditions and to not starve, and so the corporations don’t employ people when they could use petrol to do the same work, and then the workers are not their problem. Hunger now is because we have priorised economic growth over ecological stability to the point of crop failure in many “breadbasket” regions of the world; hunger now is because we have allowed ourselves to become so dependent on industrial petrochemically-derived fertilisers that a price spike in fertiliser leads directly to a drop in food production even if we don’t have climate catastrophe to deal with; hunger now is because the breadbasket regions that aren’t experiencing drought or fire or flooding are mired in conflict but we still aren’t really producing more food locally.
Ecological decisions are not separate from political ones now, and they won’t be in the future. Deciding who goes hungry is always a political decision. Even where the proximate cause of hunger wasn’t forseen or even forseeable, deciding who is able to weather risk in a society and who is not is a political decision.
Did the Leave campaign really have better myths, or did they spend more money on social media advertising?
I also think they were willing to lie more, which I would say is distinct from myth-making in the sense we mean it here. (I’m not even that fond of the EU, neoliberal as it is, but that’s different from thinking leaving was a good idea.)
Thanks for the various comments. Forgive me, I’ll come back to them but it may not be for a day or two.
Take care, Chris.
Chris Smaje and George Monbiot may both be arguing in good faith, but there’s a world of difference in how they disparage (or not disparage) the other, and how they address (or not address) the points made by the other.
Chris wrote this about George and Regenesis (in ‘Saying NO…’)
1. ‘There’s a lot to agree with in Regenesis…’
2. ‘…given the various problems with existing agriculture that Monbiot rightly highlights…’
3. ‘ I don’t think Monbiot is, fundamentally [a bad-faith actor].’
4. ‘The polemic isn’t intended as a personal attack on Monbiot or anyone else. It is intended as an attack on the anti-ecological dystopia he and others now seem intent on summoning.’
George wrote this about Chris (in George’s commentary on ‘Saying NO…’)
1. Chris’s position is “utterly perverse and ludicrous”.
2. Chris used a term that is “grotesque and dehumanising”.
3. Chris yearns for a catastrophe, or so it appears sometimes.
4. Chris’s “plan” is part of the “Great Cruelty”, in Monbiot’s opinion.
5. The physical requirements of other humans are secondary to “people of Chris’s persuasion”.
6. “Some writers” (presumably including Chris) “appear to treat billions of people as disposable”.
7. Chris’s ideas are described as “cruel fantasies” in George’s title.
Perhaps ‘disparage’ was the wrong word to use, and ‘vilify’ is more appropriate.
VILIFY | English meaning – Cambridge Dictionary
to say or write unpleasant things about someone or something, in order to cause other people to have a bad opinion of them
Point taken – language matters and maybe George has always used such language – I just noticed it less when I agreed with him more.
Well….I guess George is primarily a journalist after all.
Why let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Much of Neesons book Commoners trawls through the very dry and tedious works of her predecessors and the historical sources that they, and she, uses for her conclusions.
George’s critique of to Say No starts by situating the very middle class professional view of the world that he inhabits, built upon, as it historically is, genocide, enforced starvation, expulsion, enclosure and slavery. He then proceeds to normalise this position using exactly the same arguments of the enclosers, that the people are malnourished and can only be saved by us, the developers. It is nauseating in its rehearsal. ‘We have saved them from the violence we enacted on them’. It is predicated on its readership being unaware of the historical facts of famine – perfect for its intended audience. We all should know that the very ships that bring food to us take it out of the parts of the world in which people are starving, forcing them to buy food from parts of the world for economic gain. There is a new book ‘the war against the commons’ which should help with this establishment fallacy.
Ultimately, regardless of George’s white saviour position- a kind bespectacled Jesus (more Harry Potter), this is about democracy and people’s right to choose where and how they want to live. For any structural change to occur, in the way he mercifully allows us – social, political, technological – will be based on the acknowledgement of the commons resources, our rights to the land and to self provision.
George’s slick maneuvering is just more corporate sophistry to the people out there getting on with it. For example the Community Sufficiency Network who have identified 21000 farms closed down over the last 12 years, to be opened for regen farming.
To me, the framing and mentality of George’s writing is repugnant- I don’t want his help or that of his friends and benefactors and I am certain much of the world feels the same. His inability to acknowledge the historical responsibility of the situation we find ourselves in makes him illegible – its newspeak or gobbledygook. That the crisis (collapse) is real and present is the underpinning of his own argument and its suddenly biblical mutterings in anyone elses is the best. The very height of the reasonable psychopathy of our time.
I want to find common ground with George, and it would be good to start with the commons- to sketch out a shared understanding of the history of this situation we find ourselves in – to acknowledge the paths of where we go from here. I fear he has more to gain in antagonism.
Thanks for this, Joel.
One of the reasons I grow a lot of my own food is that I know I am not contributing to, say, modern-day slavery, or exposing children to horrific pesticides that would be illegal here.
The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People. In retrospect I think Monbiot comes out swinging from the title, surely a nod to Caesar’s ’It is not the well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and hungry looking’.
My first impressions of his response were that it seemed a little hard-going and discombobulating. Why start on tourism? Oh, I see what he’s doing… give it time, he’ll get around to Smaje eventually. But I couldn’t help getting the feeling (and quickly scanning how long a read I had ahead of me only confirmed this) that Monbiot seemed rattled. Here he writes a much longer piece than his usual dispatch, which I have found interesting to read in The Guardian over the years. It seems this one isn’t destined for that paper’s wider readership. Maybe this time it’s personal?
Several thoughts and wonders: Is he knocking tourism because Smaje is in the rather enviable position perhaps, of making just enough money from his campsite to be able to grow his own and, goddammit, spend the rest of his time carefully researching things like the cool-sounding fantasies of veganic men, only to demolish them? Is Monbiot bugged by images of farming life – the ’autophagous nonsense of The Spectacle’ – in part because Chris has just updated his website and has a few new farming photos on there (whereas Monbiot.com sticks with words and just the one photo of its writer)? IS Monbiot bellyaching again about a local ’peasant’ diet because he’s become hooked on Thai? So many questions (well, three in quick succession), but then Monbiot bangs us round the head with his tambourine and hits us with trends in figures, famine figures to be precise. Hmmm, it seems tech has seriously saved the day… Much to ponder there. But don’t we discard so much food and aren’t there distribution problems to address too, all mired in politics? Note to self: I must re-read Gunnar Rundgren on this, and stop listening to his brother Todd. Then Our World in Data gets a namecheck – must be valid. They’re based in Oxford too. Maybe Monbiot knows the team?
Somewhere there’s the out of place aside that farming writers, influencers and film-makers are basically in it for the money, then finally Monbiot brings us to Smaje and the formula for mass death. He feels othered by labels Smaje uses, except maybe ’urbanist’, on which he is lukewarm. Why? Because Monbiot says you can’t wish urban populations away. But aren’t all populations an endless ebb and flow of people that do occasionally ebb away all of a sudden, like when calamity looms in unwished for ways?
I read on. Kingsnorth gets a reference: Same boat as Smaje (selfish and cruel, closed-mind fools).
By the time I reach the end I feel Smaje has been made to appear more of an ’abandon all hope’ figure, lost in Mysteries and racked by Passions, a one-time academic who now has the temerity to concentrate on knocking others’ beliefs in the same small green clique. I’m seeing a dropout with a paunch. Does he now have long hair, I start to wonder.
Monbiot, on the other hand is continuing the struggle. He’s a fighter. He’s telling hard truths, things people don’t want to hear. A disruptor, often the contrarian. Reserve an open mind, Monbiot tells us, and look again at my stats. For a piece with the closing advice to ’set our passions aside’, it’s quite a passionate response.
It also seems a bit of a shame. Maybe the piece was long enough already without Monbiot explicitly stating that he knows Chris and has even posted on this site in the past. Maybe Chris is meant to come across as a stranger to him? The fact that both of you are (passionately) chasing the same impossible ends by different means… I can almost hear my Mum saying ’You’re both as bad as one another – I’ll knock your bloody heads together in a minute!’.
Still. Shine on – both of you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQptygcz-70&ab_channel=JoniMitchell-Topic
PS Joe’s comment on Resilience is worth a moment (as usual).
The fact that Monbiot has made it personal is a clear indication of its movement into class war. Monbiot’s whole mode of being, to the nature of his perverse caricature of Chris’ work will be rooted in his public school training. For all his ‘what about the children?!’ he still exhibits the unmistakable values instilled by the public schooling system and the traumas he undoubtedly received from it (public school syndrome).
His wish to not only disagree with but to attempt to destroy and besmirch those who challenge him is deeply revealing of this trait. It runs through our public life and our politics, and our society is impoverished by it.
Follow the money , Chris writes books grows food and hopes someone will read / but his efforts and pay for them .
Monbiot works for newspapers who push the technoutopian line funded by technoutopian business ,( print wrong think and advertising ceases ) , he should be treated as the same kind of schill as that are vilified for taking oil money to do ( tainted ) research , his paychecks come from Globalists .
Some excellent points well made there, Joel.
But lots and lots of folks really have no idea that the public school system is as you have portrayed it — for the same reasons that Einstein suggested that (to paraphrase) fish will be the last to discover water.
John Taylor Gatto’s portrait of industrialized “education” has been an influence on my thinking on such matters, but I’m well aware that the topic is controversial. One day I may find time to look into it with scholarly care, but I’m frying other fish at the moment. I found Gato’s picture rather persuasive, though.
Was Gatto an influence on your thinking here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
I’m sure I’d probably agree with Gato, as Marley said, ‘if I was educated, I would be a damn fool’. I am describing the private school system, here weirdly called public schools, as opposed to state schools – equivalent to your public schools.
@James R. Martin
Just to clarify on from Joel’s comment.
Here in the UK, Public schools are fee paying schools, so are actually private schools!
The schools funded by central government are called State schools. This is where the majority of kids go. The general public!
Private schools are called Public Schools because, historically, they were open to the general public (provided you could afford the fees) whereas, the aristocracy were educating their kids by private tutors.
All very confusing but wait till I try explaining the rules of cricket!!!!!
BUY his efforts
I despise spellchecker !
I call it autocarrot.
Autocarrot is really a very clever bit of humor, Kathryn. LOL.
Hi Chris & all – I think Joel was perceptive with his private school comment. George has written about this – How he hated the bullying, the awful represiveness…And yet….The belief that he can’t possibly be wrong, not wanting to admit fault & looking to destroy others is entirely symptomatic of this class & sadly this pyschological scarring seems like it could’ve left its mark.
He’s written this diatribe knowing full well the response would be…”aww these awful people, look at these foolish neo malthusians, these dim witted dark greenies”!
And looking at the tweets/comments, he’s got the response he wanted. His piece was calibrated to sure up his ego rather than engage with criticism.
He states elsewhere in responses that he supports agro-ecology being scaled up, doesn’t share RePlanets urbanism & doesn’t want the countryside depopulated & he’s supported land reform in the recent past…Yet this piece & recent writing undermines the organisations & folk (like Chris) trying to do just that.
I’m sure he grasps full well that his “opponents” aren’t saying this stuff because they/we/whoever hate urbanism or city folks but because we fear the system that has supported all this, capitalism is in a death spiral & all these urban people, our family friends and us are at serious risk of mass starvation in the near term. Simply believing we can prop the system up with techno fixes & land sparing organic farming as a bolt on is not enough.
With his framing of “neo peasant bullshit” does he not see that a movement like la via campesina or any other land based movement or anyone else promulgating any kind of sufficiency may now be perceived by well meaning liberal centrist types who’ve read this piece as some kind of green fascists? Does he not wonder why these movements feel like he’s more than abandoned them but set against them? Again the replies say it all, if you’re on Twitter have a look as it’s instructive as to where, sadly, many people are. But if even a few engage on here & buy the book Chris, hey that’s progress…
“With his framing of “neo peasant bullshit” does he not see that a movement like la via campesina or any other land based movement or anyone else promulgating any kind of sufficiency may now be perceived by well meaning liberal centrist types who’ve read this piece as some kind of green fascists? Does he not wonder why these movements feel like he’s more than abandoned them but set against them?”
Very astute questions!
Thanks everyone for opening up all these excellent lines of enquiry in relation to Monbiot’s intervention. And I’m touched by the supportive comments from Ernie, Kathryn and others – thank you.
IMO Monbiot’s piece is a veritable treasure trove of dangerous delusions about food, hunger and human society which would take years for me to unpick in full. Kathryn has done a great initial job, though. I daresay I’ll follow up on some of his themes until I get too exhausted.
I think it’s also a personal hit job that he’s trying to spread far and wide to strip me of credibility along ‘nothing to see here’ lines. His piece was replicated in Resurgence this week, for crying out loud. But I guess it suggests that perhaps somebody is rattled?
On the question of bad faith and a lack of intellectual probity, there’s no question whatsoever in my mind about that any more, but I daresay it’s harder to appreciate unless you’re sufficiently grounded in the details of my book to see how disingenuously Monbiot renders them (as one seasoned observer wrote to me of his essay “Goodness me, that’s fantastically dishonest, even for him”). But I shall have to do my best to rise above all that. One reason I decided to write the book and try to counter Monbiot’s dangerous arguments was because unlike many I’m kind of a lone hand operator with no institutional allegiances or paymaster, so although by those lights I don’t have much of a platform it’s also easy for me to keep on keeping on. Which I guess I’ll now have to do, at least for a while. Because per Steve I think the stakes are high in terms of trying to build a survivable future beyond the business-as-usual complacency of the ecomodernists (a charge I’ll further examine soon).
I’ll just make three quick points of substance here, but of course will be exploring in more detail in future posts.
1. Agrarian economics. Kathryn neatly exposes some of Monbiot’s muddled economics. I’d go quite a bit further, not least in respect of his neo-Malthusian framing of postwar development and hunger alleviation, which is problematic at several levels. More on that in due course. An interesting aspect of it is the extent to which better transport connections actually increase the risk of hunger, because they make it easier to move food to the buyers able to pay the highest market price. Colonial transport networks funnelling food from interiors to export gateways are one example.
2. Yields. Monbiot writes:
“Discussing his own, proudly low-yield production of wheat and potatoes, Chris states: “there’s no point labouring for next to nothing on someone else’s behalf when you’ve already grown enough to eat for yourself.” This is why farmers who do not share his worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people.”
Actually, I say nothing at all about our wheat and potato yields in that section (pp.75-6). The only thing I say about yields in it is that we’re not yield blind. Eric nicely picked up on the way Monbiot makes, shall we say, a ‘bucolic idyll’ of commercial arable farming here. His slip about yields is pretty important in understanding why agrarian localism is a better option than global food commodity markets.
3. Disparagement of peasants. Ian is spot on when he writes “With his framing of “neo peasant bullshit” does he not see that a movement like la via campesina or any other land based movement or anyone else promulgating any kind of sufficiency may now be perceived by well meaning liberal centrist types who’ve read this piece as some kind of green fascists?”
In the discussions I had with people in the wider food sovereignty movement while I was writing the book, phrases like ‘white saviour mentality’ and ‘neo-colonialist’ in respect of Monbiot often came up. I chose not to use such words in my book. I’ll find it harder not to in the future. I fear the oh-so-tiresome consignment of peasants or local agrarians into the nostalgia/yesterday’s people box could considerably increase suffering in future societies. And Monbiot is cheerleading it.
I’ll try to pick up on a few of the other points above not related to Monbiot’s piece soon.
An interesting aspect of it is the extent to which better transport connections actually increase the risk of hunger, because they make it easier to move food to the buyers able to pay the highest market price. Colonial transport networks funnelling food from interiors to export gateways are one example.
So if I understand correctly, transport makes hunger more likely because it allows overproduction to flood global markets to the detriment of smaller farmers (as I outlined), and also allows local production that would ordinarily be sufficient to be diverted to global markets instead of earmarked for local consumption; and it makes severe acute hunger easier to alleviate (in the short term when the political will is there) because you can “just” fly in a bunch of survival rations.
That’s exactly what happened in Ireland during the potato famine in Ireland – people starved due to the failure of the potato crop wholegrain and livestock continued to be exported from Anglo-Irish estates.
I feel I was too easy on Mr Monbiot in my earlier comments but I still can’t get myself particularly worked up about such things – I really don’t believe anyone’s minds are going to be changed much by rational argument – you’re either a poet/peasant or into the ‘Brave New World’ – the side on which one falls seems to have much to do with emotional affinity and little to do with rational argument – both sides of so many debates put forward arguments that look water tight to them and like deceptive nonsense to the other side – mutual incomprehension ensues closely followed by animosity – The class struggle of which Chris speaks.
So I’d rather not engage in such debates anymore – being upset by people isn’t good for me – the minds I might change are those of my neighbours, not by arguement but by example (not claiming to be a good one). As to Monbiot I see someone motivated by a fear for the future of the world – how that’s expressed might be distasteful to me, it obviously isn’t to many others – I don’t see there’s much to be done about that.
I really don’t believe anyone’s minds are going to be changed much by rational argument
Let’s just say there is a reason I wrote my own response to Monbiot’s piece here, rather than, say, emailing him about it. (Not that I think he would read my email, either…)
But I don’t think it’s entirely poets and peasants vs technocrats, either; that’s the sort of binary caricature Monbiot might fall into in his characterisation of people who disagree with his stance.
I don’t think technology is going away. I think high energy availability is going away. And while it’s true that there is a huge amount of technology which is absolutely dependent on high energy, I’m also aware that we are going into this transition with a much more sophisticated and complex understanding of both biology and physics than was available to our pre-modern ancestors. So the clock truly cannot be turned back: but that doesn’t mean that the trajectory of increased mechanisation, industrialisation, and depersonalisation is inevitable; and given how much of that trajectory has been reliant on fossil fuels, it is highly unlikely that it can continue.
I believe we know much less about what comes next than we like to think. But to me, that is a very good reason to put our current resources into increasing resilience in the things we know we do need: air, water, food, clothing, shelter, health, education, fellowship (with one another; with all Creation; with the divine, whatever that might be for us). So I have solar panels and a bicycle and allotments, because that increases my resilience now and probably for several decades, and I save seeds from tree fruits and get them growing, because that increases the resilience of my local area to support human life (and insect, mammalian, etc life) for about half a century, and I use my industrially-produced computer to transmit words invisibly through the internet to people who may or may not read them, and I hope that improves some resilience somewhere too.
I am not sure that “A Small Farm Future” changed my mind about much, really; it felt, while I was reading the book, as if I was being reminded about some things I really already knew (I remember doing quite a bit of reading and internet commenting around peak oil communities in the mid-00s but tailed off around 2008) but had been ignoring for a while. But I had gotten the allotment and started the Soup Garden before that, so perhaps I was simply already in the right headspace to receive it.
OK. Bike trailer. Allotment. Winter Squash! We’ve done well this year, which means we have some space issues at home.
“I feel I was too easy on Mr Monbiot in my earlier comments but I still can’t get myself particularly worked up about such things – I really don’t believe anyone’s minds are going to be changed much by rational argument – you’re either a poet/peasant or into the ‘Brave New World’ – the side on which one falls seems to have much to do with emotional affinity and little to do with rational argument – both sides of so many debates put forward arguments that look water tight to them and like deceptive nonsense to the other side – mutual incomprehension ensues closely followed by animosity – The class struggle of which Chris speaks.”
As I see it, the key framing for all of these matters comes down to whether or not the mainstream / conventional / popular / orthodox version of “energy transition” is even possible. I believe it is extremely implausible, at best. But nevertheless it is the story which mainstream media, politicians and politics revolves around. It’s the central motif of the story of our times, and it’s a story about How We Can Continue Living Pretty Much How We’ve Been Living, with no major changes necessary. Basically, this narrative has it that we will fully replace our present fosssil energy-intensive mode of economy with an economy just as energy intensive (and more so!) with “renewable” energy. That is, there will not, by this narrative, be major (or even significant) energy descent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_descent
If there is to be no energy descent, then there is no need for the sort of thing Chris Smaje is calling for.
Now, if we were to agree that rational or reasonable arguments against this narrative are not helpful or useful, then it would appear to me that this narrative will remain in place, even though upon very careful investigation the narrative appears highly implausible, even to many or most experts on the topics involved.
If we don’t shift the narrative in time, it seems to me, industrial civilization as we know it will become, in essence, the Machine which stops in E. M. Forster’s short (science fiction) story, The Machine Stops. The result will be a complete collapse of social order, mass hunger / famine and … well, mad chaos.
So my intention will be to reach as many people as possible with the reasons why this popular narrative of “energy transition” is extremely unlikely to turn out as advertised.
James, you might want to look at Rupert Newton’s new reply to your comment above. I aim to come on to the energy futures issue and Simon Michaux’s work a bit further down the line in this blog cycle.
Regarding the future, if there were to be a successful and rapid 100% RE transition, clearly that would make present predicaments a lot less desperate. However, I’m not convinced it would necessarily vitiate a small farm future. It’s in the nature of the meta-crisis that other problems then loom large – wildlife & biodiversity, water, phosphates & other minerals, wastes, inequality & capital loss, geopolitical conflict. Unpopular view with the ecomodernists I know, but I consider all the proximal crises as manifestations of a deeper cultural crisis which ultimately must be addressed.
@Kathryn
“So if I understand correctly, transport makes hunger more likely because it allows overproduction to flood global markets to the detriment of smaller farmers (as I outlined), and also allows local production that would ordinarily be sufficient to be diverted to global markets instead of earmarked for local consumption; and it makes severe acute hunger easier to alleviate (in the short term when the political will is there) because you can “just” fly in a bunch of survival rations.”
Not to mention the IMF and World Bank imposing debt on countries that force those countries to grow crops for export.
But as you say, it’s the ability to transport said crops round the world cheaply, that makes it all possible.
And ultimately it is fossil fuels the underpins the whole process. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and there is no global food market.
I was chatting to my allotment neighbour yesterday and she mentioned a recent visit to Kenya (her sister lives there) and seeing small farms (a couple of acres maybe) with enormous shiny new tractors; the farmers are in debt to whoever sold them the tractor, of course, and the debt forces them to cultivate more and more of their land in cash crops and less and less in the subsistence crops they would otherwise live on. What an awful trap.
@Kathryn
Indeed.
Debt is a powerful tool of “control”.
Two historical examples which I know a little about, but haven’t researched in great depth and detail, are …
Chiapas, Mexico, 1994 (The Zapatistas) – https://chat.openai.com/share/130c77aa-df68-4f40-b762-2f31832820ac
The Irish Potato Famine, also known as the Great Famine or the Great Hunger, Ireland, 1845 – 1852. https://chat.openai.com/share/a7a2cc53-06e7-4e53-8da2-e0aab13fa4a5
Sorry to keep banging on with the same point but………….
It’s not like there is a choice here!
It’s not a battle between a SFF or Studge. Winner takes all.
When available surplus energy starts to decline, techno-fixes become impossible.
It’s a SFF (whatever that might look like?) or bust.
Hey John – I absolutely agree – as energy becomes scarce it looks like some form of SFF becomes increasingly inevitable (BTW I can think of a number of very unpleasant ways that could pan out) – I just think arguing with those determined there must be an alternative is a waste of energy – I was thinking about George’s take on the reduction in world hunger associated with the increased crop yields that the green revolution brought while also railing against the environmental destructiveness of that sort of agriculture – it occurred to me he wants the effect but not the cause but the two are inseparable – to want one without accepting the other is magical thinking – I see this sort of thinking all over the place in environmental debates – the idea that there are ‘green’ technologies that have no environmental costs only benefits – comforting ideas in a collapsing world and people are unlikely to let go of what’s familiar and comforting until forced to do so – rational arguement or berating the proponents of comforting illusions won’t change that.
“His piece was replicated in Resurgence this week, for crying out loud.”
Ack! Of all publications! I’ve not been a regular reader of Resurgence, recently, but I assumed they were better than that.
It certainly does have the quality of a personal hit piece.
I found it in The Ecologist. I know the print version of Resurgence and Ecologist are combined, but apparently it isn’t so with the digital version.
The cruel fantasies of well-fed people
by George Monbiot
https://theecologist.org/2023/oct/06/cruel-fantasies-well-fed-people
I don’t often poke around in The Ecologist, because it no longer seems to speak to people like me.
Whilst Monbiot’s studge CEOs Scrabble their pitch decks together, our local urban food organisers are planning trips to soulfire farm.
I’m sure loads of dudes in finance etc will happily guzzle down these new ‘wonder foods’ but Monbiot’s assumptions about how communities closer to hunger really view food, doesn’t match up to my experience.
I see the mindset shift back to the land happening around me, with or without the Guardians blessing.
My understanding is that hunger is much more closely linked to distribution than it ever is to supply. The kings demanded taxes be paid in grain, forcing the peasants to monocrop, this causes hunger. The Irish are forced off their land so they can only get enough calories per acre from farming potatoes- this causes hunger. Prices go up alongside people lose their jobs or wages decrease- this causes hunger.
Studge is a market based solution. As prices become further and further out of reach studge will become irrelevant. If we can map routes to the land that can speak to the distribution issue, we will deal with the real cause and win the argument in practice.
I know that many people on the ground are grateful to Chris for providing the data that helps us feel that we’re not just mad. Having spent a few weeks at Henbant Permaculture this summer with a beautiful team of lively volunteers, and some of the best produce I’ve ever tasted (also being filmed for hairy bikers lol), I don’t feel threatened by Monbiot’s nonsense at all.
In my mind, the Agrarian movement is dispersed and local, it might look a bit vulnerable on twitter, but Monbiot’s going to get a shock at the love and passion that is bubbling up for nutritious food, and for being in nature, and for combining these two things into agroecology. The theory is the basis for the taste of it! For the peacefulness and the pride of it!
I have so much positive regard for my urban neighbours. I think the question isn’t so much whether they’d prefer a small farm future, but whether they can dare to dream that they could have one.
I suppose a lot of people here think that policy is crucial in that dream. But I’m noticing how One Planet Development is getting rolled out outside of Wales, how local groups are being supported by councils to try new ideas. We should probably start on the mental health work to be able to handle closely knit communities ASAP because I feel like it’s not that long til we’re really in them!
I see the mindset shift back to the land happening around me, with or without the Guardians blessing.
This is my experience too, and it is such an encouragement, even though it can be somewhat piecemeal and haphazard.
We should probably start on the mental health work to be able to handle closely knit communities ASAP because I feel like it’s not that long til we’re really in them!
So much of this gets easier when we aren’t terrified of running out of food.
So much of this gets easier when we have secure housing.
After that? I quite like the idea of mental health care being something people are empowered to do for one another. To this end my reading list includes books on non-violent communication, trauma, and pastoral care, in amongst the permaculture and so on. I’m particularly looking forward to “Mutual Aid Self/Social Therapy” by the Jane Addams collective.
But so much of this is less about knowledge than about practice: about taking the time to care for one another: to listen without judgement, to spend time together in activities that soothe the soul (which needn’t be expensive), to give people the space and time they need to know who they really are and decide how they want to show up in the world. I do bits of that in my voluntary work, too, and have some layperson training in same.
And what I can say is that it’s slow work, but that’s okay. It’s discouraging sometimes, but that’s okay too.
Like you say, if we establish ways to alleviate the basic pressures of living, we have a better chance of rubbing along.
In terms of mental health, we should cover the very real trauma that we carry as a people to have been violently forced from the land, and the emasculation that has caused especially in relation to men. It is common knowledge that suicide is highest among men and that the wounded male is among the most dangerous of animals.
As I said before, our whole society is disfigured by the institutional emasculation that is the private schooling system, which all subsequent institutions are modelled on, and peopled by.
This is especially poignant in this current discussion because of the odious charge of fascism. What is fascism? It is men. Men hating women and other men. Why do they hate?
Fascism (and all totalitarian regimes) is the wounded male writ large. We have to concentrate on healing, really focus on common ground and bring people into relation.
Quick further comments –
Kathryn & others – yes, succinct summaries there of the way that transport connections often create hunger, as well as sometimes combating it (sorry, I hadn’t noticed that people had made those points in my bleary-eyed late night trawl through the comments). Of course, as Joel is excellent at reminding us, it’s not really about the transport connections but the unequal social power they (literally) mobilise.
Joel also importantly reminds us of the dodgy periodisations and depoliticisations involved in the narrative of modern famine reduction. It’s a fantastically complex story, but absolutely important to make the point that people organised against the horrors of famines caused by modernist political regimes, and it’s not okay to simply chalk that up as a victory to modernist political regimes.
Lovely and uplifting comment from Alice, full of truth – thank you. I need reminding sometimes that Twitter is not ‘the town square’. I suspect there’s a direct relation between the number of tweets a person has sent and the state of their mental ill health and disconnection from reality.
On localism & conflict, I agree with Kathryn on the importance of basic security but I think there’s also a need for more active conflict resolution. I wrote a while back about the non violent communication framework, which I’ve found quite a transformative way of thinking. I’m not the best at it. Don’t think I’m the worst either… But we need more of it.
Bruce – not going to pick a fight with you … I have enough of those going on 🙂 As per recent discussions, I think your approach is eminently sensible, and one day I hope to join you there. In the short-term, having just poked the bear I think I need to front up to it rather than running away, if only so as not to further provoke its predatory instincts. All I’ll say is that while arguing may be pointless, I think there are more and less honourable ways of arguing. As rehearsed here recently, I’m not out imagining I’ll change Monbiot’s mind, but there are other reasons for doing it. The positive I’ll take from your comment is to try not to take it all too personally, hard though that is when one is likened to a Nazi harbinger of mass death. There’s quite a lot of comic potential in the whole business, really.
And John, Bruce … plus Steve’s point from earlier – yes, absolutely key point to focus on, what are the likely outcomes & probabilities.
This is the most well rounded, constructive and insightful comment section I’ve ever seen. Learning a lot about the particular perspectives shared in the article.
@ Chris –
“Regarding the future, if there were to be a successful and rapid 100% RE transition, clearly that would make present predicaments a lot less desperate. However, I’m not convinced it would necessarily vitiate a small farm future. It’s in the nature of the meta-crisis that other problems then loom large – wildlife & biodiversity, water, phosphates & other minerals, wastes, inequality & capital loss, geopolitical conflict. Unpopular view with the ecomodernists I know, but I consider all the proximal crises as manifestations of a deeper cultural crisis which ultimately must be addressed.”
This is actually precisely how I see it, each of these items precisely. And it’s a real delight that we share the same understanding, as so few people appear to share this perspective with us. And that, for me, is a very lonely situation to be in!
I was being sloppy, fast and loose when I said, “If there is to be no energy descent, then there is no need for the sort of thing Chris Smaje is calling for.” I didn’t believe that in the per se form when I wrote it, and I don’t believe it now in the strict sense. I really meant only that if there is to be no energy descent there will not be the emergency level crisis for which a small farm future is our best possible response. But even that’s too rough around the edges. I like the way you put it very much!
The unmet needs are many and diverse! The pathologies of urban industrial capitalism are many, and they include the basic ecological faults of that system, but also the social, psychological and spiritual ones. All of these relate to unmet human (and non-human) needs, and you and I share a perspective in which much smaller and more rural communities are far better suited to well-being in all of its aspects — or at least can be. There’s no guarantee that they will be. I know wonderful people here in the States who live rurally and have to be neighbors with very ignorant and rather rude and nasty Trump-cult members, some of whom only know how to use violence (often with guns) to solve what they regard as social problems. Why rural people are more apt to be like this isn’t entirely clear to me, but there you have it.
https://theecologist.org/2020/jan/24/rewilding-food-rewilding-farming
Also from the ecologist from Vandana Shiva, in a related article.
A quote from that article by Vandana Shiva:
“We are part of nature, not separate from and outside of nature.”
The motto from George Monbiot’s website:
“I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
https://www.monbiot.com/
I noticed that George’s recent article which vilifies Chris has something at the bottom of the page which George’s other articles do not have:
“Please feel free to republish this essay, without asking my permission…”
“I noticed that George’s recent article which vilifies Chris has something at the bottom of the page which George’s other articles do not have:
‘Please feel free to republish this essay, without asking my permission…’
I wondered whether that was the case! LOL. How pathetic. How sad. And, worst of all, how mean.
Well spotted!
Another thing that may be hiding in plain sight is that Monbiot’s response makes no mention of precision pancakes, except to allude to them by writing that all solutions, including those he proposes in Regenesis, ‘have downsides’. Perhaps he is sweeping them under the carpet?
The Tasmanian Times accepted George’s offer of free content for their publication:
https://tasmaniantimes.com/2023/10/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/
Regarding the Simon Michaux – Nafeez Ahmed discussions, debates, etc.
No, Ahmed did not “demolish” Michaux, and actually the two for them are actually on very friendly terms. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Ga3UNp3vE )
Most, if not all, of the questions and inquires which these two fine fellows are engaged with are still unfolding and ongoing, and these are not necessarily THE most crucial topics which these fellows are directly addressing when it comes to the Thee E’s (energy, economy, ecology).
Note that in the right hand sidebar here (Table of Contents) —
https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/ —
Energy Costs of Energy Transition isn’t included. And, no, that’s NOT a matter reducible to EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Rather, the relevancies of Energy Costs of Energy Transition are made most saliently meaningful in relation to other crucial factors, such as Actual Carbon Budget considerations, which may have little or nothing to do with “Estimated Carbon Budget,” as in the estimations put forth by (e.g., the IPCC). Hopefully, readers here will have noticed that real world climate consequences are occurring much more rapidly than the IPCC had predicted was likely(?). Carbon Budget Estimates are just that, estimates. And when the carbon budget idea first emerged it was very tightly associate with one word: safety. Carbon budgets were originally designed around the premise that they could serve to facilitate staying within a “safe” climate, but current climate science clearly shows that the world has left a safe zone of climate some several years ago. So now we’re trying to starve off absolute worst case scenarios, knowing that safety is in the rear view mirror.
What all of this means is that the only sensible way to evaluate the use of fossil fuels for building out “renewable” energy infrastructure is in relation to our being over-budget with regard to current greenhouse gas concentrations. If we’re not longer in a “safe” climate regime, ANY additional emissions are over budget. Period. Full stop.
What this means is that we can’t be increasing current and near term future emissions for the sake of having lower emissions ten or twenty years from now, and expect that we’re making the best possible choice in the present. There are very nearby potent tipping points on climate, and some of them may be blown past regardless of what we choose now. And others might possibly be averted if we dramatically reduced emissions immediately, and each year moving forward beginning today.
Ahmed and Michaux’s “debates” and discussions haven’t addressed any of this, as far as I can recall. Show me to be wrong, if you can.
If we don’t address what some are calling the “Heinberg Pulse” — or the energy costs of energy transition — in relation to the real carbon budget (zero), what are we doing, and why? Why are we unwilling to look at this as a “civilization”? Why have we no adequate studies addressing these topics?
I think I have an answer to that last question. People are just too scared to take it on — for several good and some less good reasons.
Stave, not starve, sorry.
Hi Chris – I’m really not trying to have an argument either ( I seem to have become far too apathetic for that ) – and they do seem to quite rapidly descend into accusations of belonging to Nazi death cults ;-), or biocidal technophilia, or being part of the sheeple, or of being deplorable, or…. (insert appropriate insult here). Personally I’d be quite affronted should someone accuse me of belonging to a Nazi death cult (the certainty of it happening is one reason I don’t wish to play) and I’d not deny anyone the right of response to such an accusation.
To me it seems we inhabit a time in which there’s an awful lot of righteous anger (and an awful lot to be angry about) but it makes me think that if anger could make the world a better place heaven would surely have arrived on earth by now.
That’s a sadly insightful commentary, Bruce. Very sad indeed.
As if we didn’t have enough to be sad about! But it’s not your fault to point out the obvious! I’m not blaming you. You’re not my new enemy. It’s Chris. He’s the Bad Guy! Let’s gang up on Chris!
Shoot the messenger , ignore the message , typical of the powers that be …. How many times have we heard “there is no alternative ” from the establishment then a year or so on they loudly deny they said it . Usually when the wheels fall of their prized scheme .
The complexity (or complicatedness — take your pick) of energy topics is a wilderness of bewilderment even to those of us who take the questions seriously enough to be utterly perplexed by them.
Take, for example, this inquiry into “Myth 3: We have to replace the vast bulk of the primary energy supply”.
https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/#myth-3-we-have-to-replace-the-vast-bulk-of-the-primary-energy-supply
Ahmed says, “Primary energy refers to the total energy embedded in fossil fuel production prior to its conversion by human activity into useful ‘final energy’. But the global economy doesn’t run on primary energy: it runs on the ‘final energy’ actually delivered to consumers to power our cars, keep the lights on and heat our homes. The difference between primary and final energy is in what the fossil fuel sector itself requires to keep itself going, along with huge transformation and distribution losses, all related specifically to the fossil fuel system.”
But Ahmed is only partly right, at very best. (In another light, equally valid, he’s completely wrong.)
One source says “Primary energy refers to energy sources that are found in their natural, unconverted form before any transformation or conversion processes. It includes raw energy sources like coal, oil, natural gas, sunlight, wind, and water, which are used as inputs to produce secondary forms of energy like electricity or heat through various conversion processes.”
Not all sources of primary energy are fossil fuel sourced.
And here is the kicker, from the point of view of what Ahmed says in this discussion.:
Only about (roughly) 20% of the world’s energy use is distributed through electricity. That means that at least (roughly) 80% of the energy we’re using today isn’t distributed through electricity!
And that means that roughly 80% of the “final energy” Ahmed is discussing here is NOT transmitted as electricity.
Ahmed goes on to say… “To get from primary to final energy, a huge amount of energy is wasted due to those transmission and heat losses. In converting primary energy to electricity, nearly 70% of energy is lost to waste heat.”
But this is misleading, since 80% of primary energy never gets converted to electricity to begin with.
Whatever percentage of primary energy gets lost in conversion to electricity, it presently amounts to a fraction of a small fraction — which small fraction is roughly 20% of primary energy.
The deeper I go into the mysteries of energy, the more I come to understand that few of us understand at all. So what do we do? Do we allow those with Big Money to translate all of this into usable soundbites for us? Do we simply trust “the experts”?
Yes, I often wonder about these issues.
What I often come back to is the fact that I can get into my $15,000 car and burn about a tenth of a liter of gasoline (it’s an efficient car) and travel 3 miles in less than 10 minutes to my job (there’s traffic).
Or I can get on my bike that I built myself and paid less than $20 in parts and get the same place in 20 minutes.
Or I can walk there for free in less than an hour.
The last two methods powered only by a moderate breakfast, that I would have anyway, and don’t notice the difference whether I ride my bike or not.
How can that energy equation even work?
Thanks.
Eric
Similarly, the energy input when I grow wheat by hand is much, much less than when someone uses a tractor.
This does mean that the amount of energy we need to replace with “clean” or “renewable” or whatever energy might be less than the amount that is currently provided by fossil fuels. When you stop trying to move a two-tonne tractor across a field a hundred times, you can obtain the same yield (or better) with much, much less energy.
However, this is very difficult to quantify. Switching away from internal combustion engine tractors means switching toward something else, but we have a very small number of known options for that something else: horses, oxen, or human muscle power are the ones we know about, but an effective electric tractor could probably be much smaller than an internal combustion engine one., requiring less energy just for moving around.
One potentially useful mode of comparison is to look at the amount of grain and pasture required to power a horse, and calculate what that means for the energy expenditure per acre of wheat (or per bushel or whatever), and to compare that to cultivation of that same acre (or production of that same bushel or whatever) using biodiesel. My understanding is that this makes biodiesel look ridiculously inefficient, but I haven’t run the numbers and I’m certainly not going to do so tonight.
By coincidence, I got around to cleaning out my combine today.
The rule of thumb for horses is that they take 25% of the farmed area for pasture, hay and feed. They also produce their own replacements. My Dad’s Dad was very partial to horses.
I don’t keep track of the fuel (gasoline) I use for most field work. Plowing takes the most, the tractor (1940 Farmall H) is working the hardest. It burns about a (US) gallon and a half per acre. Disking works it pretty hard too but it is covering a 10′ wide area versus 32″ per pass. Pulling the grain drill is easy, it is above idle but in third gear. There is no cultivation for winter wheat. Combining takes a significant amount of fuel because the tractor and the combine both have engines running. The tractor is mostly idling in first to keep the combine from being overwhelmed by the amount of material going through it. The combine burns about a gallon per acre. An acre of winter wheat (combined with a lot of air) in a drought year produces ~25 bushels ( ~1250 pounds) of relatively clean grain in a little over an hour.
Bigger tractors and combines are more fuel efficient because they cover a wider swath in one pass. They are also 2-3 orders of magnitude more expensive.
Presumably there’s a minimum amount of land required to support one horse, so having land less than four times as big as that would be inefficient (unless you can loan out your horse to someone else). Horses also have the advantage that they produce fertiliser, whether or not you use them as draught animals. Tractors not so much.
So the question is:
If you were running your tractor on biodiesel, how much land would it take to grow (and process) the required fuel to run it?
(My understanding is that horses take a lot more feeding than oxen do, but can also go faster and/or pull heavier loads. If there is an area below which this speed/power difference doesn’t really matter (because you’ll have enough time to use the draught animals you have to deal with it all even if they are slow), that might be an interesting optimum size for a small farm… but I am not really a livestock person so this is entirely conjecture on my part! And I have no idea how donkeys fit into all this, I think of them as not strong enough for ploughing but I could be wrong.)
‘They ‘ say corn based ethanol produces 2.8 gallons of E per bushel of (shelled) corn. Ethanol has 80% of the energy of gasoline.
The hand picked seed corn produced about 15 bushels of ear corn, ~7.5 bushels of shelled corn. In theory, producing the equivalent of 17 gallons of gas. Somebody has to make the ethanol from the corn. That was (9) 300’ rows in a dry year with cover crop for inputs. On our row spacing, there are 12 rows in a 1/4 acre.
Picking and husking that corn took 5 of us half a day. Doing the other half with a corn picker takes about an hour due to having to pick going in the same direction. There are seed crops planted on both sides of the corn rows ( a mistake in hindsight ).
Tractors don’t need to be fed or watered during the winter.
I’m struggling to do a good comparison given your numbers; I don’t have any idea how many gallons of fuel it takes to run a tractor with a corn picker for an hour, or indeed how much fuel is involved in seeding. I also don’t know how much extra energy it takes to get from shelled corn to ethanol.
But the internet tells me biodiesel provides around 8kcal/g and 900g/litre, so… a litre of biodiesel is 7200kcal. And a 150hp tractor uses something like 3.5 litres/hour just when idling (i.e. not actually going anywhere). So if I were to vastly underestimate the energy costs of that hour with the picker it would come out somewhere around 25200kcal. I assume actually pulling and operating machinery takes a lot more fuel than that.
Five people working for half a day, though, is going to be under about 5000kcal worth of labour. In fact, 5000 is probably a huge overestimation, since most of the energy people use would have been used whether they were picking corn or reading a book; the marginal increase in energy output is going to be way less than half of daily energy expenditure.
So even comically underestimating tractor power and overestimating human power gives much better results from humans, in terms of the energy output. The yield is the same.
And no, you don’t have to feed and water tractors over the winter, but my experience of much simpler machines (bicycles mostly) is that they do require at least some maintenance and occasional replacement parts. I ride on hub gears with a coaster brake and Kevlar tyres, but I do still get punctures and have to do things like re-truing wheels. And the bicycle, like the tractor, doesn’t produce fertilizer for me from the grass. It is very, very energy efficient though; using only my own muscle power and some gears, wheels and levers, I can move far more per trip than I could reasonably carry, even with a totally unpowered ‘acoustic’ bike. (E-assist bikes are also very efficient, though obviously not as much so as unpowered ones. While people might rightly question whether there will be paved roads in a post-industrial civilization, the right bike is still okay on a grass track.)
I think the great advantage of tractors is not in energy efficiency but in time efficiency. That really starts to matter when you’re trying to get the harvest in before the weather turns.
This hearkens toward wider questions around annual arable farming vs other modes of production in an unstable climate. I’ve grown wheat on a micro scale for two seasons, but I certainly wouldn’t want to put my entire allotment plot to it: if I’m doing the labour by hand it isn’t that much more work to grow a wider variety of crops and have more resilience built in against weird weather. I had decent yields from both French and runner beans this year, direct seeding them on the same day, but it could easily have been too hot for the runners or too cool for the French beans. The pear tree did surprisingly well in last summer’s drought, but the apples were much better this year.
Another thing to chuck into the mix/calculation is that horses are self replicating, tractor are not.
Did somebody say donkey?
I’m no expert but… We have kept one for a couple of years now. Differences to horses? Horses will bolt if scared, whereas donkeys tend to stand their ground and fight if needs be. For this reason, they can be used as guardian animals with other creatures, but you have to do you research there and it may depend on the donkey. They are best suited with others of their own kind – they live in packs in the wild, and evidently get a better night’s sleep this way: studies have shown that, in a pack, a donkey will slip into a deeper REM state of sleep, whereas alone they don’t – psychological strength in numbers, I guess. I would like to address this issue with our lone donkey, as, from the little we know of his past, up to now, poor thing probably hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep for years.
On a farm, they are traditionally the poor man’s draught animal – stronger pound for pound than a horse, but generally smaller, therefore somewhat safer, more stoic, less flighty than most horse breeds, or so the reputation goes. They are surprisingly nimble too, and fast if they feel like it. A similar conversation on here years ago brought up the fact that a mule (male donkey/female horse cross) is stronger still, but they are also sterile, and can be quite – what’s the word? – stubborn.
They say a donkey will live all its life to kick you once. I’m still waiting for that day and letting my guard down more and more as time passes. When we got ours, he was already fully grown, probably middle-aged as donkeys go (they can live to 40 years or so). Age can be gauged by the state of their teeth if you know what to look for. It is recommended to keep more than one donkey and get them young to be able to ’gentle’ and train them properly. Ours initially was a handful. As a larger breed (Hungarian Parlagi type) he soon started throwing his weight around. Like certain big dogs, they sense if you are freaked out by their presence, and then boss you around, even out of their enclosure if they feel like it. I soon realised I had no useful experience with the equine mind, and felt out of my depth against hundreds of pounds of muscle. Even the local farrier suggested sedating him when we came to deal with hoof trimming. The excellent village vet similarly seemed somewhat afraid of the new arrival in the village. I remember he just handed me a tube of wormer paste at arm’s length over the fence – there was no way he was going to climb over and get to know the animal.
I would say as long as you don’t choose a miniature donkey, then farmwork is certainly within their remit. One web page has this to say:
„The Magyar Parlagi Szamár, also known as the Hungarian Half-bred Donkey, is a breed of donkey native to Hungary. It is a medium-sized breed, typically standing between 12 to 14 hands high and weighing between 400 to 550 pounds. The Magyar Parlagi Szamár is known for its strong and sturdy body, as well as its hardworking and intelligent nature. They come in a variety of colors, including grey, black, and brown. The breed is highly valued for its versatility and is used for a variety of tasks, including plowing fields, carrying heavy loads, and serving as a pack animal. Additionally, the breed is known for its adaptability to different terrains and climates, making it a popular choice for farmers in the region. The Magyar Parlagi Szamár is also considered to be an important part of Hungary’s cultural heritage, and it is highly prized for its strength, endurance, and usefulness. Overall, the Magyar Parlagi Szamár is a valued breed known for its versatility, strength, and adaptability.”
I am getting to the point now where I believe he would help me carry the loads that I would normally huff and puff around in a wheelbarrow. I don’t intend to plough, and I think getting hold of that kind of equipment would be a trial nowadays, sadly. It’s been slow going, but after a couple of years I now feel I have his trust. I’ve even managed to trim his hooves this summer, alone, without any sedative (for him or me), in fact I didn’t even have him tethered. I did it through getting to know what makes him tick (it involved his mineral lick – give him that and I think you could do what you like with him for several minutes).
He smells great, he looks good, and you can lose yourself in his eye, never quite grasping what it seems to want to let you know. I remember Chris mentioned some time ago that he has a farming acquaintance who swears by donkeys, and donkeys have been mentioned a time or two on the radio as a great choice for restoration grazing projects. They are more prone to browsing than horses, and generally less demanding in other ways. This can be a drawback – occasionally they can appear ’dull’, yet getting to the heart of any health problem is made that bit harder by their quiet nature, probably a survival tactic.
Ours has been no trouble. He’s on just enough land to satisfy him (0.6 hectare) and in this wetter than usual year he’s got more than enough to graze there. They also appreciate treats in moderation – an apple, banana, a handful of oats, Jerusalem artichoke leaves and stalks, carrot most of all. Ours has become something of a village attraction, drawing adults and children out for a walk to see where that hee-hawing noise is coming from. The nearest donkey neighbour is one village away, and belongs to the rag and bone man, who has been a good source of advice for me, generally along the lines of ’Just get in there and do it, son’.
Odd facts: all donkeys have a crucifix mark on their back, related to a Christian story, but most probably for camouflage (they originate in Africa); donkey milk is nutritionally closest to human milk; they get awfully upset if you go near their manure; and apparently grapevine pruning became a thing when St Vincent’s donkey nibbled a vine which later produced the most abundant fruit.
But that’s probably enough from me. Jeff McFadden, who commented here a while ago, is another source of donkey information for those inspired to look further. He’s in NW Missouri and uses his donkeys to pull a cart. He’s even been dragged down the road by one, so he has much more experience than I do. He has a website and tweets. I can also recommend Dick Courteau’s ’Get Your Ass to Work!’ for anyone thinking of heading down this road, or even just for those who like books with talking point titles. As for songs about donkeys? There’s always the Christmas hymn Little Donkey, the first lyrics that ever brought me close to tears, as a very young boy.
I do know of Jeff McFadden but I’m not really using the social media platform formerly known as Twitter any more. It was lovely to read about your experience with your donkey, though!
Thanks Kathryn. I didn’t want to go into his antics when we got him, suffice to say that early on I sent an SOS to a donkey sanctuary, describing his behaviour, and the answer came back: he sounds very conflicted – don’t let your children near him and wear a helmet when you go near him.
I followed half of that advice. Thankfully over time he seems to have mellowed a lot. I think the first hard winter, when I was forking his breakfast over the fence and serving him buckets of warmish weak chamomile tea, he started to realise where his bread was buttered.
I think a cow would be easier and perhaps more useful, depending on your goal. I guess the lesson is, particularly with regard to keeping large animals, is it’s not a decision to be taken lightly.
The old UK rule of thumb was a 100 acre farm needed 25 extra acres just to feed the horse , 125 acres total . Most farms kept two horses as one could not plough alone especially on heavy land .
Oops, 1/3 liter of gasoline – about 40 miles per gallon.
Sorry for being ISO illiterate.
I am sure Chris will write a response to Monbiot’s latest blog post. Nevertheless I wrote some myself, focussing on the effect of food prices and globalisation. I also found som nice quotes from the younger Monbiots. In particular this: ““A shift from small to large farms will cause a major decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight.” (2008). https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-columnist-in-the-moral-ivory
Thank you, Gunnar.
The Ahmed article from The Journal of Wishful Thinking is mistaken on so many levels I had to switch from tea to coffee to keep going.
To start with, if something is hurtling directly towards you it is exactly the wrong thing to do to run in the opposite direction. Unless you can out run it, you are still going to get plowed over. Step to the side. He picked the example and got it wrong anyway. Not a good start.
Myth 1: Guys from Switzerland say the EROEI for solar is 0.82. Again, not good.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516301379
Myth 2: Yup. there has been a lot of coal mined in the US. Since 1701. The necessary components for the energy transformation will simply be manifested and appear on the shop floor. No digging required. No realistic mention of where the resources come from. Same problem Monbiot has. Could be a trend.
Myth 3: Liquid fuels are hard to replace with electricity. How do you run a heavy truck or train on solar ? I suppose you could electrify the rails and not have to build a bunch of new infrastructure but that could possibly have some drawbacks. Maybe. We live on a dead end dirt road and can’t even get three phase power. Will the (2) 90 year old wires carry enough electricity to heat our house and fuel our cars when it is 20 below (F) ? How about the neighbors too ?
Myth 4: Bloomberg, the business as usual guys, forecast show a 50% reduction in cobalt use in batteries. Umm, first, is it real, is there a 50% reduction in the amount of cobalt in batteries built today ? No mention of what are they substituting for cobalt either. A case of Wishful Thinking for Look Over There ! ?
Five hours of battery storage on average… That’s great news ! It will be dark here for 16 hours a day during the coldest part of the year. Other times of the year we can have a month of cloudy weather. No kidding. It is really gloomy. Five hours of battery storage on average may be true but I don’t think the real world works like that.
Where does the aluminum (aluminium ?) come from. Don’t 25% thicker aluminum wires contain 1.5X as much aluminum ? The extra bauxite, electricity, transportation, etc. aren’t a problem because they too a manifested right on the shop floor.
Myth 5: Pumped hydro has 25% pumping losses. We live in a kind of flat part of the the world. Where is the pumped hydro getting pumped to ? Are rivers going to be dammed up ? The resulting flooding will be a rude surprise to everyone farming for miles around there.
VASTLY less looks to be less than a 10% reduction unless I’m reading the chart wrong. We can double the rate of lithium production every four years. C’mon. What color is the sky on that planet ? Have geologists been looking in all the wrong places for metals ? Are mining companies working the lowest yield deposits first ?
Even the coffee is not enough.
Monbiot is in the same boat as Ahmed. They are afraid the world is changing. I get that. But wishful thinking without considering the obvious consequences isn’t going to help solve the problem.
Specifically with regards to Monbiot (stop reading George), tweek his nose, twist his tail, tell him to Calm Down. Hammer him on where the energy and materials for the do-nothing, ecomodernist, urbanist future are coming from. Until he can realistically answer that, he is running towards the future hurtling towards him.
@ Greg Reynolds –
In a “comment” following Part I of this essay, Chris said,
“Regarding the energy demands of ruralization, I daresay this would present genuine problems in some or many places – but it will unquestionably be less than the energy demands of ongoing urbanism. Putting figures to it is nigh on impossible, and I haven’t seen anyone try. I’d be interested if anyone could point me to any studies that have tried. But only moderately interested – it’s one of those areas where the obsession with quantification easily turns pathological.”
This had a significant influence on my thinking. I realized from this seed of a thought that the level of complexity in evaluating some of the most basic questions around feasibility of “the energy transition” (as a full replacement strategy, or close enough to enable growth and capitalist industrialism to continue) is so great that a good deal of hubris is required to imagine we can put an end to the debates with even the best quantification methodologies. Part of the reason this is so is that there are a great many “moving parts”. Some technological innovations in batteries, for example, are occurring (we are told). Other innovations are occurring here and there in “renewable” tech. And it’s impossible to even pin down the “current state” of the technology.
Tech boosters will, of course, use this to bolster their argument that MagicTech will appear just in time to Save The Day.
But, anyhow, there is a lot more guesswork in all of this than the engineering mindset likes to contend with.
I was going to say more, but maybe I’ll save it for later.
“I realized from this seed of a thought that the level of complexity in evaluating some of the most basic questions around feasibility of “the energy transition” (as a full replacement strategy, or close enough to enable growth and capitalist industrialism to continue) is so great that a good deal of hubris is required to imagine we can put an end to the debates with even the best quantification methodologies. Part of the reason this is so is that there are a great many “moving parts”.”
I really don’t think there’s going to be ‘an energy transition’. I think there are going to be lots of energy transitions (or descents). I have no doubt that that some clever people will come up with clever ways to create/harvest/gather energy, that most of those ways will prove too expensive for most people to make much use of, but that those who can afford them will cling to them for as long as possible regardless of the wider consequences – I for one don’t start worrying about war in the Congo every time I get out my mobile phone (https://www.uky.edu/~tmute2/GEI-Web/password-protect/GEI-readings/Guns-Money-CellPhones.pdf).
I’m not even sure ‘transition’ is a good way to think about this – to me the word conjures up a smooth and seamless move from one state to another and I don’t think that’s what we’re going to get – I think its going to be bumpy with different people experiencing it at different speeds and intensities. For instance we have solar panels on our roof and a battery so should we get winter power cuts our experience would be different to our neighbours – not least because we’d be able to power our boiler a bit. By the time it comes time to replace the panels the price may be beyond us and we might find ourselves taking a step down in terms of our energy use, or paying more for electricity while burning more wood for heat – but none of this can really be known in advance.
I remember years ago when I first saw global energy use and global population plotted on the same graph being amazed at how close the correlation between the two was. So, at the risk of being labelled a nazi harbinger of death, to me it seems very likely that we’ll see reductions in population as available energy declines (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-interrelationship-between-population-growth-and-energy-resources/) – if we do see those reductions then the per capita energy decline might be slower than the absolute decline would otherwise suggest – too many moving parts.
This spring I injured my back – annoyingly just months after finally being able to finally buy a small piece of land close to where we live. The initial excitement has been tempered somewhat by the recognition that I simply can’t do as much as I previously could. We were there at the weekend looking at what we hope to do this winter – an orchard to plant and a hedge to lay – they look like a very different jobs now than they did before I injured my back. It may be that some miracle of modern medicine will fix me – although its not looking likely, not least because I can’t afford to pay for an operation – but the hedge still needs laying and the trees planting – the work will probably be slower and I’ll have to go about it differently – I think its a good analogy for this transition we’re talking about.
Years ago Chris produced some very detailed work showing that theoretically the population of the UK could be fed from the production of small farms working to meet local needs in the way that most of us reading this blog would regard as at the very least as a ‘least worst’ vision of how things might pan out over the next few generations. When I think about this I can’t help feeling that that possibility will be stymied by the politics – Just as those that can will adopt technological solutions to the problems of energy descent without much concern for the wider implications of those technologies (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/06/energy-transition-peak-oil-coal-green-india-china/) I think those with land will very likely use that to maintain their standard of living as far as they can – I think that’s my biggest fear for the future – a return to the sort of rural exploitation detailed by Cobbett – although Jack D Forbes perhaps diagnosed the problem better.
Thanks for the comments, thanks Gunnar for your piece, and thanks everyone for the informative discussion of energy issues.
Regarding Gunnar’s research into the thought of Monbiot MkI, this article is also worth a look: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned
You’ll find references in it to a couple of essays I wrote criticizing ecomodernism, which are here: https://dark-mountain.net/dark-thoughts-on-ecomodernism-2/
These were described by one G. Monbiot respectively as “one of the most interesting essays I’ve read this year” and “devastating”. How times have changed!
Re-reading the essays yesterday, I was struck by how many of their themes – urbanism, crop yields, farm scale and colonialism among them – now count among the issues dividing Monbiot and me. I don’t think I’ve fundamentally changed my way of thinking about them, whereas Monbiot MkII seems to have done. Monbiot MkII also seems to be a less sophisticated thinker about them than the Monbiot Mk1 on show in the article I linked.
George Monbiot’s shifting reminds me a bit of Paul Mason’s.
Used to have a lot of time for Mason’s political viewpoint.
But for a few years now he seems to be more “desperate”, “despairing” and delusional as UK politics lurches fromone fiasco to another.
A look at those links, (and the links to the links), and your replies to Schellenbeger, are a sort of dress rehearsal for the Monbiot rebuttal.
I said on Gunnars blog, I think fame takes its toll. Essentially like any centralisation, the centralisation of attention in broadcast media and the attendant glamour of fame is bad for us. Its corrosive and addictive and creates the illusion of some people being ‘better’ than others, that ‘people’ need saving or educating by the ‘special ones’.
One of the subjects of your blog and books has been the sketching out of structures of status . The professional classes will loose so much of this glamour in an agrarian localism and is surely a factor in the vociferous attack on its credentials.
https://temperature.global/
Live data
Greetings from Saskatchewan, where some of my ancestors lived and current extended family farm, near an oxbow lake that was once part of the South Saskatchewan river.
The first farmland in this area to be irrigated is now so salty it cannot grow anything. Irrigation continues.
Large parts of the area were a literal dust bowl in the 1930s, and formed actual sand dunes; these now have a very thin layer of grass, sagebrush and cacti on top; according to my uncle it isn’t even useful as pasture now. Other parts are still under cultivation. An area that used to be a common pasture on Crown land has been bought by a cooperative of local farmers and is run as a common pasture of sorts.
My attempts at pointing out the option of converting to smaller, mixed farms growing for local markets in a labour-intensive manner fell pretty flat. But common practice now does include leaving as much organic matter in the field as possible and using low-till methods.
https://www.docdroid.net/ZPtk0qA/why-large-cities-wont-survive-the-twenty-first-century-pdf
Interesting …..
Apologies for my silence here. Various things going on. New content arriving soonish!
Reality Roundtable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVeCw-Ljenk&ab_channel=NateHagens
Freaking awesome!
Just listened to it. Glad Chris finally got another avenue of exposure. Earlier this year, Nate Hagens said he might try to shift emphasis at TGS from cerebral root cause speculation and crisis analysis to more practical responses to the predicament. This round table was along those lines. I hope to see more of it.
A good one if you haven’t heard it is his interview with Daniel Zetah from June 2023.
With all the antics right now in Washington, our capital, the supersedure state feels like it is closer by the day.
Happy to see engagement between two of my favourite writers, Chris Smaje and Jeremy Williams, amid other very bright minds here. I thought I might see a comment from George Monbiot too, who deserves credit especially in the past for persevering with raising environmental issues when it wasn’t mainstream.
In the text he linked to in his rebuttal, an insightful critique of land ownership, he wrote:
“There’s not enough space for a private luxury, but there is enough space for everyone to enjoy public luxury. If only we use the space more intelligently, there is enough space for everyone to enjoy magnificent public parks and public swimming pools and public museums and public tennis courts and public art galleries and public transport. By creating public space we create more space for everybody, whereas when we create private space, we exclude the majority of people and create less space for others.
Particularly in cities in the poor parts of the world, you see this profound inequality, with huge numbers of people crammed into tiny living quarters under really squalid and impoverished conditions, with no public space at all, with scarcely any public amenities, public transport, and the rest, whereas in other parts of the city, you see enormous villas with huge gardens and their own swimming pools and huge cars which fill up the roads every day. It’s because some people have taken so much that other people have so little.
This is a zero-sum game. Land stopped being made long ago, so if we take more land than is our due, we are excluding other people from that natural wealth. But if we use urban land wisely, and if we ensure that we concentrate primarily on public amenities—on public transport, on public space, on public goods—then we can have public luxury for all. My catchphrase has become “private sufficiency, public luxury.”’ – https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/private-sufficiency-public-luxury-land-is-the-key-to-the-transformation-of-society/
Some other resources:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/, a blog on limited energy and other materials, by a statistician
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/, a beautiful blog on minimising energy use
Cory Doctorow on Yanis Varoufakis’ insights into what is replacing capitalism –
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/living-in-a-technofeudalist-hell/
Ellen Brown’s observations reinforces the trend
https://ellenbrown.com/2023/10/03/the-great-taking-how-they-plan-to-own-it-all/
For anyone keen on nuclear expansion, new research acknowledges how nuclear radiation is cumulative and compound in human tissue
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565#
This, or no studies I know of, doesn’t even mention the interacting impacts from chemical pollution of all kinds doing more damage
An overview of how sustainability targets are not being met
https://www.socialeurope.eu/on-the-road-to-nowhere-the-sdgs-at-half-time
There is no shortage of shocking and concerning material for sure. This was the best, more animated, well-informed and genuine discussion thread I’ve read in a long time. Thanks and best wishes to all.
Some interesting news…
Last week, Chris Smaje managed to get George Monbiot to reveal the actual source of the number George used in his book Regenesis for the electricity consumption required to produce “bacterial mass” for use as food. This resulted in a victory for Chris, and a black eye (or two) for George, when George’s claims crumbled upon further examination.
In Regenesis, George wrote, “Solar Foods’ current rate of electricity consumption is 10 kWh/kg of bacterial mass”, and this figure was the basis for George’s calculations and conclusions about “producing the world’s protein by these means”.
George wrote this on Twitter (Oct 6):
“I’ve been asked by a couple of people to respond to @csmaje’s claim on Twitter that my figures on likely electricity demand for precision fermentation are wrong. So here’s a short thread…”
George’s thread included the following claim about his 10 kWh/kg figure, which later turned out to be absolutely untrue:
“Solar Foods’ electricity consumption is a real world figure, that the company provided, not a theoretical projection.”
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1710170845224571313.html
But that wasn’t the only claim from George which crumbled upon examination…
In a subsequent Twitter exchange, Chris pressed George to properly cite his source for the 10 kWh/kg figure:
Chris: “My calcs are based on real world figures. I’m not convinced yours are, but if you could cite or characterize the basis of your 10 kWh/kg biomass maybe we could move forward.”
George: “As you already know, the figure was provided by Solar Foods. If you want to discuss it with them, I’m sure they’d be happy to.”
Chris: “Sorry, as an author I think you need to be more open about your own data. People can see how I’ve derived my figs, but not yours. If it’s from a SF document, what’s the title, author & date? If a personal contact, who & when? Proper citation info is needed for key data like this”
George: “The figure comes from this paper, two of whose authors are from Solar Foods (though the remaining 10 are not)…”
[George includes a quote from the paper indicating “9.86 kWh per 1 kg of produced biomass”.]
https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1711768986403168733?s=20
The paper which George eventually disclosed as being the actual source of his 10 kWh/kg figure is the “Sillman et al 2019” paper which Chris had already speculated as potentially being George’s source (back in June 2023):
“Possibly it’s based on one of two studies by Jani Sillman and colleagues (Sillman et al 2019; Sillman et al 2020) which report figures close to 10 kWhkg-1 bacterial biomass. But the first of these studies isn’t reporting the full energy costs of the process, while the second, according to another study, was “based on theoretical assumption using currently available but limited literature values” and not on any empirical data…”
https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Energy-Costs-of-Microbial-Food-Manufacture-Jun23.pdf
Chris replied to George’s disclosure of his source with this thread:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1712753605575393292.html
including these highlights:
“George finally gave his source for his 16.7 kWh/kg bacterial protein claim as this paper (‘the Sillman study’)…”
“So his figure isn’t in fact a real world one from Solar Foods as he previously claimed, but from an article (a “quantitative literature review”) involving estimates made using secondary data…”
“George’s 16.7 figure is based on 9.86kWh/kg biomass from the Sillman study, but this isn’t the full energy cost that’s specified in the study (Fig. 3) …”
[George’s source, the Sillman study, thus makes it clear that the number George took from the study is not actually what George claimed it to be in his book Regenesis, and the results of George’s subsequent calculations in Regenesis are therefore incorrect.]
“The Sillman study shows (Fig 3) that George’s energy figure of 9.86 kWh/kg would only provide, at best, a slurry of bacterial biomass at 2.5% concentration (presumably unsafe for humans to eat)… But this result could only occur if the CO2 input is provided with no energy cost, which I don’t think is the real world case for Solar Foods”.
[The Sillman study also underestimated the energy requirements by neglecting to include some other energy costs, such as the energy used to make the ammonia inputs. The study which Chris used in “Saying NO…” is a more recent study, published in a top-tier peer-reviewed journal, which does a much better job of quantifying the energy inputs.]
“So I think my 65kWh/kg protein calculated from the Leger study is a better estimate. Note that neither study includes full energy costs of building, maintaining & replacing infrastructure”
“Notwithstanding its low estimate, the Sillman study nevertheless remarks “The proposed protein production method is highly energy-intensive compared with conventional production practices in agriculture”, which is a key point I’ve been trying to emphasize”
Well, that’s interesting. It looks like ‘where to from here’ for George.
Nate Hagens’ Reality Roundtable with Chris, Dougald and Pella. was great. The start of a discussion of where to from here, for us.
Thanks Steve L – that’s informative for anyone not keeping up with the Xs.
Where to from here for George indeed. Maybe something along the lines of ‘Regenesis Revisited: New Revelations’ is not so far-fetched after all.
Thanks for your reports from the Twitter front lines, Steve. The fact that Monbiot was so inexcusably sloppy with data and citations is especially ironic in light of the fact that he casts himself as the one who “put[s] numbers on the problem” as opposed to his critics for whom “any form of quantification is as welcome…as a tambourine in a Bach sonata.” Well, to be fair, I suppose he does put numbers to the problem…they’re just pie-in-the-sky numbers that he expects his readers to swallow without question or comment. Those lines about numbers and quantification from his response to Chris raised my eyebrows even before these latest revelations. They certainly don’t apply to the Chris Smaje that I’ve read for years, but, then again, much of the opening sections appeared to be animated more by Monbiot’s rancor for the people who wrote blurbs for the cover than for the book itself.
@Steve L and Chris.
That’s that then. Job done.
Time to move on.
Really enjoyed the Nate Hagens’ Reality Roundtable with Chris, Dougald and Pella.
Very uplifting and a much healthier avenue of discussion than the dead end that is “studge”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-67139881
An interesting development here in the UK.
Hopefully a taste of things to come!
Another possible source of land for distribution/accessing in the future, is that held by the M.O.D.
… And even parcels on ‘rewilded’ land:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/19/lets-see-what-we-can-do-the-market-garden-in-a-rewilding-project
Chris makes it onto the reading list in that article.
@Simon H
Thanks for the link. Interesting stuff.
“Small-scale, low-impact market gardening is a Cinderella industry that lacks significant government support and yet it is remarkably productive”.
A 2 hectare market garden can produce more food than a 65 hectare sheep farm!!!!! Wow.
I live in rural Somerset and most of the surrounding fields seem to be used for dairy cows. Not much veg growing going on.
Thanks Steve for reporting the interesting turn of events on Twitter/X. Indeed, from Regenesis to Revelations.
Thanks also for the positive feedback on the podcast with Nate & for other useful bits of information.
I’ve been working on a reply to Monbiot, but also pondering the point of it. With his energy case now in shreds and his essentially non-serious response to my book – plus Godwin’s law of Nazi comparisons pointing to the debate ending in my favour – I’m wondering if it’s time to move on? Ah well, more here soon.
Just a thought…, since once up on a time George was quite friendly toward you and your ideas, maybe that could occur again? Yes, I suspect the odds are against it. But maybe if you go gentle on him and offer him a bridge rather than a bridge burning…?
I’ve been noticing — more and more lately — that anything truly and genuinely “green”, in the old familiar sense of the term (before it was co-opted… or just ridiculed into the trash can) is necessarily countercutural in most societies today. And Big Media (which George works for) is decidedly not countercultural. Nor does it provide much room for the sharing of countercultural narratives.
George became quite famous within the mainstream, conventional, establishment culture which The Guardian largely represents (even though it’s kinder about it than many other newspapers). It’s understandable that he may have gradually lost some courage along the way. Perhaps we can encourage him to courage with kindness? It’s worth a try, perhaps.
Being countercultural always, always, always requires courage.
And by “counterculture” I don’t mean to evoke the image (exclusively, anyway) of hippy drop-outs smoking joints, living in tee-pees and running around naked all the time. The counterculture word retains utility still, I believe — but isn’t helped by stereotypes.
This was my thought too; possibly Chris is capable of a graciousness that we haven’t really seen from George. Even if that doesn’t change George’s mind, it might give some onlookers pause.
One of the points that stuck with me from the podcast with Nate was………
Talking about how the multiple ways that we are up shit creek, isn’t very constructive.
For a lot of people, it is all too overwhelming.
(Reading SFF scared the shit out of me when I first read it!!!!).
The issues are real and do need thinking about but……… For most of us, it’s all just too big to take on.
I liked the way the podcast focused more on “little” people making little decisions to try and improve their local community/environment rather than big collective social projects at the governmental level.
It was all very encouraging and uplifting.
Even a few people deciding to grow a few spuds is a positive starting point.
Chris wrote, “I’ve been working on a reply to Monbiot, but also pondering the point of it.”
I think there’s a newsworthy element, and more people should know about it (especially in light of George’s vilifying article getting recent attention).
Headline and subheadlines for my imagined news story :
“Farmer debunks key calculations in George Monbiot’s book promoting bacteria as protein source. Energy required to manufacture it is at least four times higher than Monbiot claimed. Monbiot misused numbers from an outdated source, and didn’t cite the source in his book.”
George’s numbers were absolutely disproved by Chris. I expect some damage control attempts from George.
Every website which published George’s article (vilifying Chris) should also publish Chris’s response to it.
Jeremy Williams, who wrote the article discussed by Chris in the essay above, published an article today which throws shade on ‘Chris Smaje and his readers’. Isn’t this being divisive?
‘He’s a supporter of rural living, but insists that “cities must not be seen as an impediment to sustainability” and that cities need to be transformed rather than abandoned. Someone tell Chris Smaje and his readers.’
https://earthbound.report/2023/10/19/book-review-radical-love-by-satish-kumar/
George has egg on his face. He needs to be invited to walk back across the bridge that he set on fire.
I have not read all the back and forth but somehow I suspect that Chris has not be such a jerk about their disagreement. I could be wrong but Steve L’s reporting makes Chris seem kind of level headed. Recent arrests not withstanding… How Mr Monbiot handles this will be a clear indication of his character.
Cities will be transformed when no one is willing to carry water up to the 5th floor to flush the toilet and the grocery store shelves are empty. Jeremy Williams must think we are idiots. Nice.
Back to the task at hand, how do we build that resilient community ?
Imagine having an organic farm that you have brought back from continuous corn production.
What incentive do the new users have to maintain the resources (sustainability and all) when they don’t own the land ?
How does the organic farmer get compensated ?
Does a tractor running on alcohol or soybean oil out compete horses when you are trying to feed more than just yourself ?
What about the old and infirm neighbors ?
Regarding tractors — probably not. Think about the weight of machinery required. Why move all that if you don’t have to? A scythe is light by comparison.
But yes: how to build that resilient community is the pressing question, I think.
In the long term tractors will wear out , the newer ones will fail first because of complex electronics so the old ones could soldier on for fifty years or so but even if there is fuel There will be no parts to keep them going , tires can be difficult now , further down the line they will become impossible to get .
Tractors were nearly universally and immediately adopted when they became available. With my 80 year old, 25 horsepower tractor I can harvest 4 times as much food in a couple hours as Kathryn harvests all season. Tractors provide real advantages. I’m sure the adoption of horse power took a little longer but for the same reason.
But Greg — how much of that food, harvested so quickly, do you actually eat?
And how much land is it on? I am managing about a tenth of an acre, but that includes things like the shed and the wheelbarrow parking spot.
And, of course, your wheat presumably takes as long to grow as mine does. My harvesting (and my planting, weed management, compost-making etc) is all very much more labour intensive, since I’m using hand tools. But my fossil fuel inputs are extremely low.
Labour-saving devices are imperative if what you want to do is produce more of your cash crop in order to compete with others in a global market who are using labour-saving devices. Tractors in particular make a lot of sense, financially at least, if labour is expensive and fuel is cheap.
But none of that means they’re better in a context where fuel might be intermittent or expensive, global markets are constrained by serious transport impediments (not only fuel, but security and even the impacts of climate on cebtralised longer-term storage facilities), and pests and diseases are evolving faster than we can engineer the next rust-resistant wheat (or whatever).
Yep my fifty year-old 2000 series ford is still doing the job it was designed for though not the thirty five horses it used to be new but it still moved more cow poop in a morning that I could move in a week with a shovel and spread it too ! And no heat stroke either.
@Kathryn
We don’t eat a lot of the wheat. Some of it get ground into flour for bread and pancake mix. Some of it goes back into cover crop seed. Some of it get given away. Some of it sits in the bin as insurance against tough times in the future. But how much of it we eat is simply a distraction. We can feed a lot more of our community using tractors than we can using a scythe.
Same with corn, beans, planting, tillage, lots of things.
There are technologies that are very useful. You think the internet is one of them. Me, I’m not so sure. We made it a long way with out it. Tractors, on the other hand…
I think we are working on the same problem. You came up with a different answer. That does not make you wrong.
@Greg
I absolutely agree we’re working on the same problem!
You can currently feed more of your community with a tractor than with a scythe. But for the cost of one tractor you could give several community members scythes, hoes, trowels, gloves etc and more of them could, with appropriate access to land and sufficient practice, feed themselves on a wide variety of food — and they could do it without needing to maintain (and put fuel into) a tractor.
Alternately perhaps communal ownership of a tractor is the way to go. In Carol Deppe’s book “The Resilient Gardener” she talks about renting some land and having someone with a tractor come and do an initial till, rather than digging the soil by hand. I tend more toward low-till options myself (though not those that involve glyphosate), but I don’t have any problem with the idea of that kind of labour-saving — just with the idea that we can practice extractive methods indefinitely. We can’t.
You didn’t mention how much land is required to produce the grain you can harvest so fast with your tractor. My uncle said farmers in his region need to have yields of 40 bushels per acre to be competitive on the market, so that would mean 4 bushels of grain on my combined patches. The internet tells me a bushel weighs about 60 pounds, or 27kg, so in terms of harvest weight I’ve already done more than that… but fruits and vegetables are pretty heavy compared to wheat, which is dry. I could go further and look up how many kcals are in a bushel of wheat, but I’m definitely not calculating the energy values of all the different fruit and veg I’ve grown this summer — the spreadsheet is long enough as it is! — and in any case humans need to eat more than just grains.
I think if I had rather more land and a tractor I’d be tempted to continue with the fruit and veg, at least producing as much as I do now, and I’d add some livestock and grow feed for them too, while growing enough grain for sale to meet my other needs. Putting all of my energy and time into a cash crop seems like it would make my survival very dependent on markets that are way beyond my control. Of course, that isn’t possible for everyone — if you’ve had to take on debt in order to get the land in the first place, or indeed for the tractor, it might be that you’re obligated to stick with a cash crop.
“Imagine having an organic farm that you have brought back from continuous corn production.
What incentive do the new users have to maintain the resources (sustainability and all) when they don’t own the land?”
I’d like to offer a conceptual framing to be employed when thinking through questions of this sort.
The present globalized economic (and technological) systems are linear, not circular. These integrated systems strip the soil, ecosystems, biodiversity… everything in an extractive linear way. As Nate Hagens has wisely said recently, (paraphrase) “not a single industry on Earth today would be profitable if it internalized its negative externalities.” (negative externalities defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality )
What I’m getting at here is that the entire system of the Megamachine has the character of cost externalization — which is really mostly just harm to the biotic commuinity, to social health (well-being), most everything of real value. If you don’t know what a paperclip maximizer is, google it. Then consider that the Megamachine is a short term ‘profit’ maximizer.
(Megamachine defined: https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine )
If every industry on Earth would not be profitable if it had to pay its own costs of doing business, rather than externalizing those costs, then the world system (the Megamachine) is designed to wreck everything in the name of “producing wealth”. Keep in mind that in Middle English, the root of our word wealth was wele, which meant well-being. Well-being is synonymous with health.
What the Megamachine creates, for the most part, is not wealth, but illth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth
What we need to do, and fast (!) is facilitate the emergence of an entirely different kind of culture, one which rejects the ideology and ethos of the Megamachine. That means paying the true costs, if money is to be the means of organizing exchange. And that means keeping the soil healthy, not stripping it over time. The soil cannot lose its fertility without externalizing costs — as stripping the soil in the short run is a form of cost externalization.
The political consequences of what I say above are enormous, obviously. Our current world politics is shaped by the ideology and ethos of the Megamachine, as is our entire economy. A small farmer using non- cost-externalizing methods cannot compete in the Market with the Megamachine’s industrial agriculture. It just cannot. Not yet. We’re not that kind of a people, and we don’t have that kind of a politics.
This is largely why I believe we should remove some things from the Market altogether, first among these being basic necessities like food, shelter, medicine…. But let’s begin with FOOD. If we achieve success in removing food from The Megamachine’s Market, by making food exist within a communal and regenerative system, then we’d have a lesson from that as an emerging post Megamachine culture and politics.
Listen to my friend Adam Wilson speaking on this.
The Food Church
https://rword.substack.com/p/the-food-church
What incentive do the new users have to maintain the resources (sustainability and all) when they don’t own the land?”
Starvation ?
“What incentive do the new users have to maintain the resources (sustainability and all) when they don’t own the land?”
Starvation?”
* * * * *
When we truly understand in a whole, felt way that “perverse incentives” of the sort which the Megamachine offers are Just That — perverse — we can begin to imagine what it might be like to reject such perverse incentives.
https://rword.substack.com/p/daniel-schmachtenberger-on-why-the
I wholeheartedly believe that care, not self-seeking, is what we require in order to have a sane political economy and culture. By “care” I am obliquely referring to care ethics, as a broad field of kinds of ethics under the larger umbrella of virtue ethics. Care ethics is rooted in actual care, which is to say real kindness, compassion, generosity … basic human virtues which have been assailed ever since the European Enlightenment combined with the capitalist ideology to form a worldview in which care was to become the enemy of ‘reason’ and ‘good sense’.
I assume that people are ethically inspired by care, but not by obligation, and that our political ethics should be updated to recognize this now rather obvious fact.
What we require now is a politics of commons and commoning.
If people are starving, it is too late. They will eat the seed corn.
Sustainable agriculture is kind of like farming with horses. A portion of the land, 25% ? 50% ?, needs to be set aside to rebuild the soil. Even if there are readily available chemical or organic inputs, the soil needs to be maintained. Adding compost does not provide the same benefits as living plants in the soil. Not everybody gets that.
The reason Kernza is a failure is because they are taking everything, all the seed. It is the same kind of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.
Tractors originally came with steel wheels.
I managed to lose a comment somehow in trying to correct an typo or two, but I think I’ve rescued it from the aether…
A mixed bag of thoughts from me:
On the supersedure state:
I have thought of nation-state and corporate power as something that will ossify and eventually break because its current form is too brittle to work in a world without high energy inputs or at least a climate that supports relatively stable grain agriculture (which arguably we don’t have, we’re just propping it up with fossil fuels to the tune of 40 bushels per acre and whatever number of fossil fuel calories per consumable calorie). But what I see in many governance structures (both corporate and national) isn’t just ossification and embrittlement but cannibalisation, and I think I have tended to underestimate the degree to which this process brings about local and global human catastrophe as well as lesser hardship. Hang onto your butts, it’s getting bumpy out there.
On self-provisioning:
Missing my gardens and my kitchen I spent some time updating my harvest spreadsheet, and this year — since 25th March — I have grown and foraged well over 200kg of food.
We haven’t weighed all the squashes yet, and there are several harvests still to come (Jerusalem artichokes, oca, black salsify, more spuds, carrots, beets, various greens, leeks, hopefully the back garden sweet potatoes, maybe some chestnuts if I’m lucky, hopefully more fungi….) and I also haven’t yet threshed and weighed any of the soup peas, dried beans or wheat, though these were grown in relatively small quantities compared to squashes. While I can’t claim this will support us all winter, and at times during the growing season I have felt quite overwhelmed with work, it seems to me remarkable to be able to print duce so much food on what is essentially a part time schedule. I am sharing that food between three people with regular excess going to the soup kitchen, but if I were feeding only myself I would be well on the way to self-provisioning. I remind readers that I am essentially a city kid who only started vegetable growing in earnest in 2018 and took up my first allotment plot in late 2019; I am not a professional grower and I make loads of mistakes still.
On industrial farming:
It’s very difficult for people who care about feeding people and care about the capacity of the land to do so and who have been told they are providers, told they are preventing starvation, told they are part of the breadbasket of the world, to hear that there is another way. Nobody goes into farming to get rich, not even industrial monoculture subsidy-dependent fossil-fueled farming.
On “how to get there from here”:
I’ve been investigating landrace gardening in a bit more depth (it seems like a good idea if I want to create a tomato landrace, among others), and it feels like a good metaphor for some of how we could or should proceed: lots of people trying different things in different projects. Lots of cross-pollination between similar and wildly diverse projects, to improve resilience and diversity. An understanding that a project that needs drought tolerance might display a different phenotype than one with flood resistance; an understanding that if you want to breed a truly resilient landrace you must first have enough growing success to save some seed, and no amount of ideological purity is going to achieve that if conditions are too harsh for the plants to reproduce. And so on. Perhaps this metaphor isn’t the most accessible to readers who are not gardening geeks. I just think it’s neat.
All of these three areas interact. In my father’s prairie city there is no longer a cheap (or even expensive) Greyhound bus service that can be used as transport from one city to the next. The airlines love this as it means they can operate with such thin margins as to be utterly unreliable and nobody can really complain too much; if you want to get from here to anywhere else by any means other than flying, you’re going to have to drive. The city is surrounded by grain monoculture, with a side of potash mining. The only seeds I saw for sale at a garden centre were flower seeds (RHS-branded from a big seed company). The politics are pretty dire too. At the same time, I’ve seen more front yard vegetable gardens on this trip than ever before, growing a lot of the same kinds of things I like to grow. The city is flat and while there are many fewer cyclists than in London, they do exist, and there is even some decent cycle infrastructure — to the point that next time we are here we will likely try to rent (or just borrow) bicycles. There is a farmer’s market, though the last one of the season was before we arrived; there is also a very posh market in a rapidly gentrifying area of town (…sigh) where I was able to get locally reared bison and various other products from smaller enterprises; this was much harder to do even ten years ago. The water problems are less severe than somewhere like Phoenix, though I still see the beginnings of trouble… but if I had to call it, I would say that small-scale local provisioning is gaining some ground, even here.
Thanks for the comments. Greg – I’ve never felt more level-headed than the times I was arrested at climate protests 🙂
I’ll be publishing a briefish response to Monbiot on another website this week hopefully, with a commentary about it here. As per your discussion, I’ve struggled a bit to find the right tone in response to George’s onslaught. Most important IMO is that it’s not about what he or I think of each other, but our underlying political/ecological positions which easily get lost for the spectacle of these to-and-fros.
Interesting to hear from Steve about Jeremy Williams … guess if I’m being dismissed in wider circles than before, that’s a gain! I doubt I’m going to win this propaganda war in terms of weight of words. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong, and hopefully I can sow some seeds that might germinate in the future. Thanks to you all for helping me with that.
Glad to get that positive feedback about the pod with Nate et al.
Regarding livestock & market gardens, there’s no doubt that cropping produces more food per acre than livestock. Although livestock provide different kinds of food and other ecological work, so comparisons are hazardous. The downside of greater cropland productivity, though, is greater human or non-human labour input. If Somerset had a self-reliant food economy, there would be a lot more market gardens here. These are critical issues that I discuss in both my books – if only George would engage with them!
To Kathryn’s point about social cannibalism, indeed yes – supersedure situations that create a positive politics will, I fear, be the exception rather than the rule. But hopefully we won’t eat ourselves entirely, and there will be some places left able to chart a new course.
To James’ point about taking food out of the market, my distributist response is to say that indeed we need to get rid of ‘the market’ but not ‘markets’. I’ve just been looking at Timothy Mitchell’s interesting book ‘The Rule of Experts’ where he makes the point that the concept of ‘the economy’ with its preceding definite article only took shape in the middle years of the 20th century. As I argued in ‘A Small Farm Future’ I think there’s a lot to be said for ‘markets’ as places of trade, with money systems or equivalent, albeit dangerous, as means of exchange. This works pretty well if there’s widespread access to land. The problem is when we start thinking along the lines that “this will be good for the economy”, especially when ‘the economy’ largely comprises debt and abstracted credit. More on that another time, perhaps.
And the benefits of the economy are not shared equally. In the US ( IRS numbers), the top 1% of earners took in 21% of the total reported adjusted gross income when the entire bottom 50% got 11%. That’s the way it is set up.
@ Chris –
“To James’ point about taking food out of the market, my distributist response is to say that indeed we need to get rid of ‘the market’ but not ‘markets’.”
I’d not like to ask more of your time than you can offer, Chris, but I’d really like to detail this out — this distinction between markets and The Market. I want a thoroughgoing understanding of this distinction between “the market” and “markets”.
I was just looking (again) at the Wikipedia page on distributism. It’s not the only thing I’ve ever read on distributism, but I’ve not read on the topic extensively.
Here’s a passage from the Wikipedia page:
“Thomas Storck argues: ‘Both socialism and capitalism are products of the European Enlightenment and are thus modernising and anti-traditional forces. In contrast, distributism seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life.'”
I suspect this concept can be reduced down to mean that distributism would subordinate what we now call “the economy” (and its Market) to values and ethe (the plural form of ethos) other than the values and ethe (ideology) of the present economic world order (what shall we call that? Capitalist-industrialism? Globalized consumer capitalist industrialism?)
When I was young and naive, I believed that this thing we call “the economy” could (and should) be ‘regulated’ by “the people” (I bought the lie that America was a ‘democracy’ then), and that the regulations of a government of, by and for the people (LOL!) could subordinate “market forces,” or whatever. Now I know that corporate global industrial technocratic capitalism (CGITC) subordinates what I now call “the state” — not just in the USA, but most anywhere.
And now I understand full well that the General World System (GWS), which is identical with CGITC, through cultural evolution, evolved some design code (rather like DNA) which fundamentally structures the Machine of the GWS to (in economics lingo) “externalize costs” — particularly “negative externalities”. If one unpacks what this ultimately amounts to, it means that the Machine of The Economy (and its Market) is designed to extract what it calls “value” (profit) at the expense of the health and well being of people, the biosphere, ecosystems, the soil, social well-being, etc., ad nauseam.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but the thing folks these days are calling by names like “the metacrisis” and “the polycrisis” is the result of this cost externalization, mostly. If not entirely. This includes, of course, the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, and all of the ecological (and certainly most or all of the social and economic) crises.
So if my framing is basically right, what we all need to be doing, as best (and as quickly) as we can is to put an end to the rape and pillage economy which “externalizes” costs (harms). Which refuses to pay the price of doing business.
I was listening to Raj Patel speak (YouTube) about agriculture yesterday. He mentioned a study which revealed that the negative economic externalities of the global Machine’s mode of agriculture was something like two and a third times the economic benefits of agriculture (measured in the weird abstracting discourse of the Machine’s favored way of speaking about “the economy”. I suspect you’d agree with me that most economic externalities could not be remedied with ANY quantity of currency, so there is a basic ontological error at play here. Sigh. But I have no difficulty understanding that the harms of industrial agriculture are greater than the rewards or benefits of that System.
Anyway, my point is that The Market (as it now stands) is what could be called an “externalizing machine”. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-11/the-externalizing-machine/
Oh, and speaking of Raj Patel…. One of his books (as co-author) is A History of the World in Seven Cheap things. It’s one of the hundred books on my “to read” list, but I understand that Patel and his co-author are discussing in this book the hows and whys of how the Megamachine (global capitalism) functions on the basis of making things as cheap as possible — to gain market share. It does this mainly by externalizing costs (right?).
That is… food from small, local, sustainable and regenerative farms, if sold on the market today, will cost more than the food (should I put “food” in scare quotes?) produced and distributed in The Market. And so if a market, as distinct from The Market, must compete on the basis of price — which is to say that a market must compete with The Market (I’m supposing) — then The Market will subsume a market, rather than the other way around.
So my question is … What can we do to alter this? How can we put up a market that functions wholesomely (toward wholeness and health, well-being)? How do we get from The Market to markets?
… ’cause I have no problem with makers. It’s The Market I wish to replace.
Meanwhile, as we seek to subsume markets beneith The Market, why not take *some* (and a lot, ideally) of food out of The Market … if only because that would be a bold, daring and revolutionary learning opportunity for everyone.
I’m not afraid of the R-word. I rather like it. He’s kind of cute. Or is it a she?
Oops! Typo alert.
“… ’cause I have no problem with makers.”
I meant to say I have no problem with markets.
_____________________
It’s the abject lack of ethical and humane considerations in the functioning of The Market which rubs me entirely the wrong way.
Thanks James.
This isn’t a solution, or even an answer to your question, exactly, but I’m reminded of the times when someone has asked me if they could buy some of my hand-harvested wheat, or some of the pawpaw crop from our yard.
I tell them “No, it’s too valuable, you wouldn’t be able to pay what the crop is really worth, but I’ll give you some.”
Would a gift economy help eliminate externalization of costs?
The externalization of costs is a way of ignoring damage done when producing something or consuming something. Whether we enumerate it (as an amount of money which adds to the cost), or not (as in a gift economy where there is no monetary cost), there is still damage.
Taking no more than we need is a way of minimizing the damage inflicted by our existence. Along with causing as little damage as we can, we can also be trying to repair as much damage as can, as we live our lives.
Steve L –
“The externalization of costs is a way of ignoring damage done when producing something or consuming something. Whether we enumerate it (as an amount of money which adds to the cost), or not (as in a gift economy where there is no monetary cost), there is still damage.”
Yes, there is still damage. But the extent of the damage is proportional to where humanity is on the historical arc of human overshoot. Human overshoot is flatly altogether different from overshoot in all other species of Earth inhabitants, because only humans wildly manipulate their environment at scales which profoundly alter whole ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole — at gigantic scales. Only humans CAN do this, and we can do it because of our technology — coupled with the propensity we have as cultures to absorb everything into what we tend to think of as “productivity” — meaning largely appropriating everything into what is now a global Megamachine. All you have to do is look at any large city to know precisely what I mean. But you have to look intelligently.
So while it is correct to say that all human food production has negative cost externalizations, it’s plain nonsense to treat all ways of food production as if they were equally culpable for the degree and kind of cost externalizations entailed.
What placing food production and distribution into a gift culture can do is to help wake us up to the catastrophic crisis of “cheap things” which folks like Raj Patel (in History of the World in Seven Cheap Things) are getting at. But it can do much more than that. It can also help connect us with our neighbots, with the places in which we dwell, and to facilitate the use of food for education about ecosystems, and the politics thereof.
Why? Because gift moves in a fundamentally different set of cultural frameworks, ethe and values than “the market” — which has just about ruined everything. Gift is a simple and clear enactment of care, and as such it’s not caught in the logic of “the market”. Gift has soul. It has spirit. It has meaningfulness which binds us with one another and the soil, the land, the sun, the atmosphere, and all other species. It isn’t an abstraction. It’s whole.
James replied to my comment with, “…So while it is correct to say that all human food production has negative cost externalizations, it’s plain nonsense to treat all ways of food production as if they were equally culpable for the degree and kind of cost externalizations entailed.”
This seems like a straw man. I was addressing Eric’s question about *eliminating* the externalization of costs, for gift economies in general.
Some foods of course have more environmental costs than some other foods. These environmental costs are still there, regardless of whether the environmental costs are externalized or not (and regardless of whether or not the particular food item is a gift, or is exchanged for money or something else).
@James
I’m not always terribly articulate and carefully spoken. I agree with you on lots of things.
Have you ever tried making a living growing real, good food ?
If so, please tell me more about how gift culture works with that.
If not, it is really hard to do. Eric gives away some of his flour because it is too expensive to sell. That is one of the truest things I have ever heard. But you can’t make a living at it. It is simply not sustainable. How do we make it sustainable ?
Education is important. Making the real cost of food and everything else is crucial to humans’ survival. Not doing that is how we got into this overshoot situation. Wage growth has not kept up with productivity and people are getting squeezed. They owe everything they make and more to the bank. Sketch out an idea or two about how we get them onboard.
“Would a gift economy help eliminate externalization of costs?”
Well, y’know…, I think our polycrisis (and metacrisis) is basically as much a spiritual crisis as an educational, media, politics (etc.) crisis, and that these are all aspects of one and the same damned thing. And when I think real deep with my heart leaning into the thinking, I tend to think that gift culture — and gift economy — is the most profound and direct way to thumb our nose at (and point out what’s wrong with) using money to mediate all of our relationships.
So, yeah. For the near future at least, the most powerful thing I think we can do to alter the politics of our predicament is to give food into community. To give into community is entirely different than to “give ‘away'”. I deeply dislike the phrase “give away”. It’s a phrase which is sort of the inverse of “flush away” or “dump away” — for getting rid of wastes. There is no away. We cannot dump or flush away, therefore. Nor can we — or should we — “give away”. Gifts are supposed to circulate in communities. So when we truly give we’re giving into the community in which we dwell.
Capitalism crushes (and has mostly crushed) the circulation of gifts, and the result is outrageous poverty among the rich and the poor, and all ‘classes’ in between.
So, yeah. If you want to truly join a revolutionary left movement, practice intelligent gift culture! It’s the most powerful lever we have! And if you do…? I’ll give you as much support as I can muster.
For people in today’s culture spaces, in “modern” cultures, the very presence and fact of giving has the POTENTIAL to raise questions about value, meaning, purpose, and all the important stuff. Cost externalization of the sort which essentially IS the modern / contemporary economy of the dominant culture is only possible within a cultural milieu in which we don’t even pause to think about where our food is coming from and at what costs. (Not just food, but I want to emphasize food here because I see it as the most potent of potential levers for the sort of politics I want to enact.)
We need to wake ourselves and those around us up to the truly impossible — literally impossible — costs of externalizing negative externalities — but to do so in such a way as to educate.
Notice what I just did. I raised fundamental questions about what it means to “educate”. I don’t mean anything than involves studying for an exam. That’s not education. That’s regurgitation for a test.
Real education changes people. That’s where I’m going with this. But I don’t want to propagandize or manipulate people. That, too, is not really education.
Food is a means of engaging in education, I think. We have to reconnect food to labor, soil, earthworms, climate, the atmosphere, biology, biodiversity …. everything. That’s SOUL work. Soil work is soul work. Education is soil work. Soul work.
My take on markets vs The Market is roughly that producers trading goods and services using currency to get around the coincidence of wants problem is just fine. The trading of stocks, shares, currencies, futures, options, derivatives, debts and rents is less good, and has huge potential for extractive rather than ecologically prudent modes of production; as such it should be limited.
The issue is that banking services are needed as soon as you have currency; loans (i.e. debts) are a needed service for certain types of production; and rents can lead to better utilisation of resources that would otherwise be unavailable. So it’s difficult to draw a line and say “all finance bad”; context is important. But where market operators become market owners there is potential for abuse: the market operators become rent-seekers and push the operation of markets toward that function instead of a tool for efficient exchange and the resulting creation of value.
There is a further problem that cheap transport and globalisation of markets expose anyone participating in any market to the effects of inequity in any other market in the world: it’s all interconnected.
@ Steve L
“Some foods of course have more environmental costs than some other foods. These environmental costs are still there, regardless of whether the environmental costs are externalized or not (and regardless of whether or not the particular food item is a gift, or is exchanged for money or something else).”
My reply acknowledged what you say here, Steve. And there was no straw man in what I was saying. I was merely pointing out that it’s important that we consider that some methods of growing food are much less harmful to the environment, and have much smaller externalized costs. (And it’s worth saying that generally, in industrial agriculture in especially, almost all of the ‘environmental costs are externalized costs. And even small farm environmental costs are significantly externalized, generally.)
What can happen in a gift economy (or gift culture) around food is that the participants in the alternative system can enter into the system knowing all of this, and choose to support the alternative system through means other than the direct purchase of food — though it may involve purchasing land and tools, etc., communally…. And it would certainly involve giving labor to food production.
More on this sort of thing in an upcoming response to Greg Reynolds.
Throughout the many conversations I’ve seen here in Smaje’s blog (and our forum) I’ve noticed that we all generally understand and agree that the lower harmful impact ways of growing food (with fewer negative externalities) require greater labor per unit of food production, which results in higher prices in a market context if the farmer is going to make ends meet.
@ Greg Reynolds –
Placing food outside of the market, in some variation of gift economy or gift culture, is a profoundly complex topic, and I don’t have time to address that complexity fully at the moment. One key to this practice which I strongly suspect to be necessary in the context of market economies … and people who have been raised within market economies, and dwelled all of their lives in such economies, would be to set things up in such a way that the gifts are circulated within communities of care and trust. So I’m not advocating for setting up grocery stores where folks can come and simply take what they need or want. Rather, I’m proposing the establishment of another kind of system in which gifts enable the system to function. So there is an inside and an outside to the sort of system I imagine as being the most functional one for folks who have spend their lives in market economies. Insiders give to the system in various ways, and insiders benefit from the produce. But everything is not measured — labor, time, money given, tools given, land given…. Gift culture requires actual communities to function well. Members of the community care for one another. And it works out so long as no one is exploiting the system unreasonably.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this very soon, likely tomorrow.
Interesting discussion about food/gift economies. I discuss this in Chapter 14 of A Small Farm Future, where among other things I make a similar point to Eric’s, using the example of pigs rather than wheat. I hope to write more about distributist economics in the future, but I’m short on time right now. My view in a nutshell is that the exchange of things between people is always socially fraught, and whether the medium is money or some other kind of agreement it’s full of potential for status hierarchies and abstraction from the local ecological base to emerge. In practice, the exchange of things is always structured socially – there are always strings attached, there’s always an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. The challenge, and it’s a big one, is to make that structure work long term – which also raises questions about what ‘work’ means.
Also interesting tractor debate. There’s no doubt that tractors have an impressive work rate, but there’s another side to the story as raised by Kathryn and others. Tractors tend to direct the diet towards certain limited kinds of food, and they have high energy costs that may not be payable long-term. They also draw us into positive feedbacks – a 25hp tractor can do a lot of work, but a 50hp one can do a lot more, and so on. A good part of the present mess we’re in… Geoff Cunfer writes in ‘On the Great Plains’ about farmers who resisted the advent of tractors as long as possible because they knew what the consequences would be for the communities they lived in.
You might be interested in the Vallis Veg mowing trial I did some years ago, where I proved conclusively that scythes are better than tractors…
https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2015/07/of-agricultural-efficiency-the-vallis-veg-mowing-trial/
@https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2015/07/of-agricultural-efficiency-the-vallis-veg-mowing-trial/
I can see why you came to your conclusion, unfair as it may be. If your 45 hp Ford could only pull a 5′ mower, it is probably well past its prime.
If you are going to count the embodied energy of the tractor, don’t you have to count the embodied energy of the human ?
I am very much looking forward to your next installment on tillage…
Yes.
I saw a video where a guy with a scythe had a mowing race against a guy with a gas-powered string trimmer and won handily.
My first thought was ‘I couldn’t have done that with my poor scythe skills. How many years did it take the guy to get proficient with that scythe?’
The complete equation is always complicated.
@ Chris –
“I hope to write more about distributist economics in the future, but I’m short on time right now.”
I don’t mind waiting. But is this the same topic as my question about the distinction between “markets” and “the market” you alluded to earlier? I’m hoping not to have to wait very long to at least get a nut shell description on this distinction from you. If the distinction has solid ground that would be a very helpful concept for me to have at this time, given that I’m researching for writing about the topic of alternatives to “the market” in food production and distribution. The motivation for exploring these alternatives is to explore for ways to better address negative economic externalities in food production and distribution while also exploring for ways to more adequately ground local cultures in relation to soil, land, natural systems, ecology… for social, psychological and spiritual well-being.
If there is a way to achieve the same ends, essentially, through a market (as contrasted with “the market” orientation, I’d like to know about it as part of my research.
“My view in a nutshell is that the exchange of things between people is always socially fraught, and whether the medium is money or some other kind of agreement it’s full of potential for status ….”
Boosters and theorists of gift economy (a.k.a. gift culture) generally like to draw a strong distinction between gift and exchange, qualifying gift as something other than exchange. I tend to agree with this framing, though I’m well aware of the fact that the distinction is not at all a simple one, because gift always has a close proximity to exchange, at least. Marcel Mauss’s famous book, “the gift”, apparently argued (or “showed”) … ” … that early exchange systems center around the obligations to give, to receive, and, most importantly, to reciprocate.” (Wikipedia)
What interests me in considering the word “obligation” here is how the concept of “obligation” might become very fluid, dynamic and multiplicitous, rather than singular and simple. I would suppose there to be many variations on the theme of “obligation,” and that the sorts of obligations which those of us solidly embedded in capitalist-industrial societies will tend to associate with that word may be very different from the kind of “obligation” Mauss was observing in his study.
Charles Eisenstein has been one of the more well known advocates for, and commentators upon, gift culture in recent decades, and he says basically that people living in what some now call simply “modernity” (which is largely characterized by capitalist industrialism and market economies of the kind we might call “the market”) have progressively converted most everything which was once a gift into goods and services, and in doing so have basically eliminated “community” — or the sense of belonging together within what I prefer to call “communities of care” (framing my understanding within care ethics of a particular sort — as political ethics).
Beginning around minute five in this relatively short video is Eisenstein sharing his thoughts about how a more gift oriented culture proceeded the starkly mechanical mode of exchange which gradually replaced pre-capitalist cultural forms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs
It is my view that as what had previously been gift gradually became treated as items of exchange within a monetary economy, we gradually lost “communities of care”. Communities of care were basically replaced by communities of a very abstract form of exchange in which it wasn’t necessary to have genuine human relationship/s, which are always rooted in care. So the “loneliness epidemic” is as much a symptom of this as is the extreme form of maldistribution of “wealth” in our contemporary world. That maldistribution requires a collapse of communities of care to exist. As I have put it, “all politics are a politics of an ethos”. The ideologies of capitalist-industrialism form the basis of a politics and a culture, and it’s not one which actually… well… cares. It sucks care right out of our lives. It replaces care with exchange.
Yes, exactly.
‘Modern’ market economies are economies of scarcity.
You only need well-defined exchange terms if you don’t have faith that you will be getting enough.
Or if you want to take more than your share.
@ Eric F –
“‘Modern’ market economies are economies of scarcity.”
I keep hearing this idea stated, but my way of thinking makes it difficult to know what is being claimed with any precision.
I tend to think that the major way in which the modern system — in its most recent dominant iteration (globalized capitalism) — in relation to scarcity, is to determine how scarcity is distributed into the world populations. How it creates real scarcity, for me, is another topic. But how it serves to distribute actual, existing ‘resources’ within a “The Market” system is what I’m more familiar with. It does this through pricing. Those who can afford the price of a product or service have access to that product or service in proportion to their access to money. Those with little or no money have little or no access. So… is this what you mean by scarcity?
This particular kind of scarcity would not exist in the sort of distributism system Chris advocates for. And it would not exist in the kind of anarcho-socialist system I advocate for. And I tend to think that Chris and I are far more aligned in our political thinking than either of us fully realize! The main difference between myself and your typical distributivist type is that I lean more fully in a communalist direction insofar as land access and use goes. BUT Chris has said that he’s not at all fixated on families as THE basis of households, and so we’re fellowtravellors on a slippery slope where small scaled / local communities can be constructed of many variations on the theme of friends and families. And I’m leaning more in the friends direction than the family direction, thinking that the friend/family distinction is far less important in this context than most of us presume.
Of course, this means the world “friend” has got to mean something far more solid, meaningful and real than its usage in the Facebook era, which trivializes ‘friend’.
I think the distinction between the market and markets lies in distance and relationships. Long distances are a feature of the market. If I want to sell cabbage to the local Whole Foods (I don’t) it has to be shipped to Chicago and then come back to Minneapolis.
When I sell cabbages to Petite Leon, I have known Jorge for years and bring them directly to the restaurant. I have a market for cabbages that I grow but do not participate in the market.
That being said, Jorge has a business to run and can’t afford to pay a lot more than the local market price (which is very different than California, Chicago or Kansas City). He does that because he cares about good food and the people who produce it.
The local market price is mainly set by the food co-ops. They pay local growers more than the California market price. They take a smaller mark up on local and higher on produce from the market.
It is not a pure system. As a produce manager once said ‘you can charge anything you want but if your price is too high you will sell a lot less of it.’
If that is what Chris means, I don’t know.
Dammit Greg, you’re right – why didn’t I think of your 5′ mower point? Clearly, I need more tractor-driving folks reading this blog! Then again, what realistically would be the widest mower it could pull at that kind of fuel use – 10′? In which case, my conclusion still holds. So we’re both right, which is nice.
Regarding distributist economics, I’ll get to it as soon as I can, James. As previously mentioned, I discuss a lot of this in Chapter 14 of ‘A Small Farm Future’. You do all know that owning a copy is a condition for commenting on this blog, right? 🙂
Meanwhile, I think Kathryn, Greg & Eric have covered a lot of the salient points about distributist economics between them. I’d add in market optionality – ‘the market’ looks very different if you’re not 100% reliant on it to keep you fed and healthy. A lot of modern history has been about making people 100% reliant on it and then getting the storytellers to convince them it’s been in their best interests (looking at you, George Monbiot).
Steven Stoll’s book on Appalachia ‘Ramp Hollow’ has a nice analysis of local economies & currencies. The currency of Appalachian smallholders was whisky. Hamilton’s whisky tax was an attempt to break that economy and incorporate it into the abstraction of the (inter)national one. The smallholders won that battle, but ultimately lost the war. Some lessons for the present in all that. The smallholder economy was nevertheless always set within the larger one – interesting questions about the kind of economies that aren’t. Also, Kathryn is to the point in identifying the uncertain boundary between credit and usury. The best answer to that is … distribution. But that requires a political power sympathetic to it.
I just read John Medaille’s book ‘Toward A Truly Free Market’, written in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Very good tome on distributist economics.
My response to George Monbiot’s ‘Cruel fantasies…’ essay just published here: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-23/new-worlds-to-build/
A bit more about it later on here at SFF
You beat me to it! Lovely response, that.
Indeed, I have faith in the ability of ordinary people to improvise the relationships that can see them through their day-to-day if they’re given half a chance. If there are ‘solutions’ to the meta-crisis, I think that’s where they’ll come from, not from magic foods pioneered by biotech companies with generous public funding, heralded by journalists looking for ways to save the world. There’s real work of transformative adaptation to do to rise to present challenges – unsung, grassroots and local. It’s time to forget fantasy narratives like Regenesis, and to forget conspiracy-tinged theories about shadowy environmentalist movements with formulas for mass death. It’s time to get on with building new local worlds.
Hear, hear!
It’s time to get on with building new local worlds.
Hear, hear!
I can contain myself no longer. David Fleming said the same thing in a more oblique way:
“If you really want to save the planet, the first thing you should do is join a choir”
David wrote some great zingers!