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Posted on March 5, 2024 | 51 Comments
I’m aiming to wrap up my present blog cycle around my recent book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future shortly. My book critiques George Monbiot’s writing on the food system, specifically his book Regenesis, and I have two essays in which I’m going to further engage critically with aspects of George’s arguments, of which this is one. The other will shortly be published by Front Porch Republic. Apologies if you’re getting bored with this topic, but I’ll be done soon and in my view the issues are important.
George’s highly charged response to Saying NO…, entitled ‘The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People: the astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death’, made my own polemics against him look almost hagiographical by comparison. ‘Cruel fantasies…’ made no mention of my demonstration that in Regenesis George greatly underestimates the energy costs of bacterial protein production – the centrepiece of the food system solutions he suggests in that book. To my knowledge, he still hasn’t explained how his 16.7 kWh per kg bacterial protein can possibly be right.
I don’t think his stonewalling about his data source and calculations are a great look in terms of the basic etiquette of intellectual debate, but there we are. Perhaps the wider politics of our respective food system approaches are ultimately more important, and this is the focus of my closing two essays. In my opinion, there wasn’t an awful lot of substance in ‘Cruel fantasies…’ to engage with in this respect, but George did make some remarks about poverty, hunger and food prices, and this is my focus here.
Originally, I’d planned to write a lengthier piece about this, but I think I can summarize the key points in a few paragraphs. Then I want to put the issues into a wider context with the help of a fine recent book by Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper.
In Regenesis, George criticises the idea that food prices should be higher. The dramatic centre of this argument is a visit to a food bank where he asks its hard-pressed users if they think food is too cheap, with predictable results (pp.130-1). In Saying NO… I briefly laid out the structural case for higher food prices in the global economy, citing various authors who’ve analysed it in depth. I found George’s account of his food bank escapade a dishonourable way of engaging the issue, and my remarks about this in Saying NO… were probably the part of my book where I dug most personally at him. Maybe that’s why he chose to hit back in ‘Cruel fantasies…’ as he did:
…while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it. Is it really possible that you can write a book on food and farming and fail to grasp this basic fact? Yes, it seems it is. 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.
I see this as another of George’s many howlers about the food system which really ought to come back to haunt him, but probably won’t. Quite simply, there are an awful lot of farmers globally – more than any other single occupation – and they are disproportionately at risk of poverty. No surprise, then, that increased food prices really can have net anti-poverty effects.
For all that, this is a complex issue without cut and dried answers, and I’m certainly open to debating it – though probably only with people of sufficiently calm temperament that they don’t lard their rhetoric with phrases like ‘cruel fantasies’ or ‘mass death’. But my argument in the relevant section of my book (‘Improving the poor’ pp.110-14) wasn’t that simply hiking food prices in isolation was a good idea. The point rather is that, historically, there has been a global overproduction of and traffic in artificially cheap commodity crops. Artificially cheap because they’ve been subsidised explicitly by economic programmes in powerful countries – things like the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, and the Farm Bill and PL480 in the USA – and because they’ve been implicitly subsidised by fossil fuels and other non-renewable and inequity-promoting inputs, by the economic dividend of colonialism in the Global North, and by other so-called ‘externalities’. This means that poor, small-scale and agroecological farmers tend to get priced out of the market and/or lead lives of great poverty and precarity driven by the capriciousness of world market prices and the race to the bottom they involve. Structurally, low food prices drive poverty, precarity, overproduction and environmental degradation.
My argument, further, was that the availability of abundant, publicly subsidised, cheap, bad food in global markets helps to entrench chronic poverty and to secure a net flow of income from poor to rich people without directly starving and killing the poor people (at least in the short-term) as is the way with all wise parasitism – a modern version of Steven Stoll’s ‘captured garden’ argument that perhaps I will flesh out in the future. To change this bad dynamic sensibly in the context of the present meta-crisis – climate change, energy squeeze and all the rest – would in many places have to involve increasing the price of food, reducing disparities in the price of labour, increasing the price of energy, increasing the price of capital and decreasing the price of land and housing.
These dysfunctions of the ‘cheaper food paradigm’ – to coin a phrase used in one of the references George cites in his book, and has presumably read – are all pretty basic stuff that’s well understood within the political economy of food, and they’re explained in more detail in the references I gave in the relevant section of my book (reproduced at the end of this post – not all of them necessarily the most encyclopaedic or up to date analyses of the issue, but I think they’ll do). I understand that making a case for higher food prices on anti-poverty grounds may be a bit counterintuitive to people who aren’t versed in this topic, but somebody who’s written a book about the food system really ought to have an inkling.
A related aspect of this is that when it comes to chronic poverty and hunger, or rank starvation and famine, having a global commodity system that produces more food, cheaper food, higher yields or greater market integration doesn’t particularly help – what matters is the social and economic structures around entitlement to food where the famine is occurring, as famously argued by Amartya Sen. One thing I learned from George’s ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece that was less apparent in Regenesis is that he effectively rejects this political economy framing and embraces the kind of depoliticised, Malthusian ‘more food = less hunger’ approach long favoured by enthusiasts for capitalism, industrial agriculture and the dispossession of small-scale local agrarians.
Anyway, long story short is that there are numerous complexities involved in the nexus of food and other commodity prices, poverty, hunger and the structure of society which are worth debating – calmly. And that a defensible general position in this debate is that increased prices for farm produce have their place, alongside other socioeconomic changes, in reducing poverty and hunger.
In Regenesis (pp.187-9), Monbiot instead offers a utopia in which most agriculture is superseded thanks to (energetically implausible) technical developments in manufactured microbial food, which for some reason he believes will be shared fairly across humanity, unlike the present situation with farmed food (one example among many where he fits his own definition of ecomodernism: “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change”). Put that together with his remarks about hunger in ‘Cruel fantasies…’ and you get a kind of Malthusian self-transcendence – a cornucopian conquest of hunger through limitless clean, cheap food.
I think there’s an insatiability here, a modernist fury against limits imposed by nature or, even worse, by people. But in Monbiot’s telling, it’s all upsides:
We could withdraw our dire impacts from great tracts of the planet that we have ploughed and fenced and grazed and doused with toxins. Indigenous people could reclaim and restore their lands; ecosystems could rebound (p.189)
This brings me to Taras Grescoe’s book – a deeply thoughtful, globetrotting detective story in nine episodes that tell of foods lost or nearly lost to modern people, and why they’re still important. Other than thoroughly recommending it, I’m not going to say much here about the book except for a few remarks concerning the ninth chapter, which focuses on Illahee Chuk, where Taras grew up (more widely known as British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province).
In this chapter, Taras discusses camas, a plant with energy-rich edible roots that grows in association with Garry oak. Indigenous people managed it through fire regimes until colonization severely restricted their access to it, and out of this interrupted human ecology Taras weaves a powerful and subtle narrative about the Indigenous people of Illahee Chuk. Many aspects have stayed with me long after finishing the chapter, not least the word that some of the Coast Salish peoples used for the incoming colonisers: hwunitum – ‘the hungry ones’. Taras cites a Tsawout informant thus: “My grandmother used to call them ‘squati hwunitum.’ Crazy white people. They wanted it all. They still do. Their greed is insatiable” (p.273).
I hope to write more about indigeneity in a future post, but for now I just want to remark on the oddly contradictory way it creeps into the contemporary consciousness of many of us hwunitum, including the passage from George I cited above about Indigenous people restoring their lands (see also Saying NO… pp. 119-21).
Taras mentions the oft-cited statistic that Indigenous peoples account for 5 percent of the world’s population, while occupying 20 percent of its land area housing 80 percent of global biodiversity. So why the disparity, other than the fact that these people are living in places that the extractive global capitalist economy hasn’t yet found much use for? Generally, I’d suggest it’s because they’ve made their livelihoods with low impact and low energy methods in which they’ve recognised themselves as local ecological protagonists who are subject to biophysical limits, and have a fine-tuned understanding of their place in the local ecology.
It’s great that George is apparently behind Indigenous people restoring their lands through such approaches. Presumably, the lesson those of us in the other 95 percent of the world’s population might learn from this is that we should likewise try to make ourselves better ecological protagonists by generating low impact local livelihoods. That, at any rate, is basically what I’ve argued in Saying NO… and A Small Farm Future.
But oddly, all hell breaks loose when you argue this. Witness the kind of words that George applies to it, or to me: bucolic, romantic, nostalgia, medieval, “a Neolithic production system to feed a 21st-century population”, a cruel fantasy and so on. Low impact ecological adaptation is okay for Indigenous people, it seems, but apparently not for we hungry ones who need to leave such Neolithic/medieval trappings aside and arrow forwards into the 21st century with higher energy, higher tech, ecologically decontextualized manufactured food.
If it were the case that there simply isn’t enough land for the non-Indigenous portion of humanity to live low-impact lives built around local ecological possibilities, then criticisms of the approach I advocate would be understandable – although the mood I’d expect around this sad news that we, the non-Indigenous majority, cannot hope to restore and reclaim our lands would be rueful or elegiac, not the scornful fury that’s come my way from George and other ecomodernists. But, as I showed in my previous post, there is enough land.
Perhaps the real problem is that there isn’t enough land, or energy, or other resources for us all to keep living the kind of ‘21st century’ lives many of us seem to expect as a birthright for all that much longer in, well, the 21st century. I’d put low odds on mass intercontinental air travel, supermarket shelves groaning with meat or alt-meat and endless other delicacies, pushbutton temperature control, wi-fi connectivity and the whole caboodle by century’s end. And that, I think, is where the fury comes from. They want it all. They still do. Squati hwunitum.
Almost everybody these days is positive about Indigenous lifeways, but in my opinion too often in a kind of essentialised way that implies it’s the indigeneity rather than the low-impact localism that renders the benefit. I find George’s simultaneous approval of Indigenous land reclamation and scorn for agrarian localism flatly contradictory, and I think ultimately revealing of an implicit scorn for Indigenous people too. In any case, the historical precedents for people living high-energy, high economic-connectivity lives peaceably alongside people living low-energy, high ecological-connectivity lives for long aren’t good.
Call it Jevons paradox, call it colonialism, call it cultural supremacism, ultimately the high-energy folk are going to take what they believe they need and deserve from the low-energy ones. Taras quotes from the eighteenth-century Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel’s views about Indigenous foraging peoples: “Those who yet hold to the idle mode of life … cannot complain if other nations, more laborious and pent-up, come and occupy a portion of it” (p.267).
I think you get a sense of how this will play out all over again when you read between the lines of how George (incorrectly, as it happens) represents one of my arguments from Saying NO… in his ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece:
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.
Leaving aside the confusions here about yield and price, beneath George’s voice in this passage I detect the chill tones of Emer de Vattel … can those who yet hold to the idle mode of farming complain if others, more energy-intensive and commercial, come and occupy a portion of their land? George’s remarks have me scrambling for my property deeds to check my legal title … though history tells that’s hardly a defence against expropriation, as many Indigenous people and small farmers have felt to their cost, per Thomas Hobbes “Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all”.
I regret that George now seems to have joined the ranks of the agricultural ‘improvers’ and appropriators (who invariably present themselves as benefactors of the poor) arrayed against those trying to figure out more renewable local livelihoods, those trying to learn to be more indigenous. As I argue in Saying NO… agricultural improvement ideology has a long and ignoble expropriative history. It’s often justified in terms of pseudo-scientific claims about efficiency increase. And it’s often fought tooth and nail by local agrarians and Indigenous people.
It seems as if a new chapter is opening in this fight. Pace Hobbes, the fight will have to be a political matter of covenants more than swords, as all fights ultimately are. And it will have to be plausibly grounded in the social structures and social tensions of innumerable local places worldwide. It’s this lack of any structural politics in favour of context-free techno-fixes and consumer choice blandishments that defines the limitations of ecomodernist visions like George’s.
Taras writes,
…though First Nations cultures were devastated, they were never extirpated. And camas, like the bones of the children buried outside residential schools, never actually disappeared. The bulbs remain in the ground, waiting for the time they can return to the light, and their story will be known … for this, we hwunitum should be grateful. Our survival as a species depends on looking to the past – and for that, we’re going to need all the wisdom and guidance we can get.
Yes, exactly this. And, yes … looking to the past – not worshipping it, or replicating it, or romanticising it, or trying to restore it, but looking to it. This seems to be something that the (eco)modernist mindset cannot bear to do. In that failure, it risks obliterating the future.
Eric Holt-Giménez. 2019. Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It? Polity.
Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart. 2006. A History of World Agriculture. Earthscan.
Peter Robbins. 2003. Stolen Fruit: The Tropical Commodities Disaster. Zed.
Glenn Davis Stone. 2022. The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World. Routledge.
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If George had asked his rich friends if food prices are too low, their answer would be No, of course not. So what does asking at a food shelf prove ?
In 1960 people spent about 10% of their income on food. Now, consumers are spending 5%. If wages had kept up with inflation or productivity, your choice, the minimum wage would be between $21 and $22 dollars an hour rather ha $8. The problem isn’t that food prices are to high, it is that wages are too low. There is a reason for that.
Indeed — maybe George should instead have asked the food bank guests whether wages are too low.
But in an industrial farming paradigm, higher wages don’t help very many people, because not very many people are farmers. (Higher wages would still help a great many people George probably doesn’t think of as producing his food — as I have argued before, nobody human has ever eaten a strawberry that wasn’t picked by a human, no matter how much you pay for the things.)
But surely you have to do *something* for the people at that food bank. They need food, and for all of its political-economic justifications, this blog post does not answer the fundamental question of how they are going to get it if prices rise.
This seems like worrying confirmation of one of the accusations that Monbiot makes against Smaje that Smaje does not appear to attempt to refute in this post, namely that he wants to depopulate cities. I hope that is not in fact what he believes and that he takes some time to disabuse us of that notion soon.
Also as an avid follower of Monbiot (which is how I found this post. I hope my critical comment is not unwelcome!), I have to say that calling him a modernist or a cornucopian misses the mark by quite a lot. As a self-identified degrowther, he gets in quite bitter debates with people who use those kinds of labels. But even in a future with degrowth, we are still going to need to farmers who produce enough surplus food to feed cities.
Hi Cameron, welcome to the discussion. The idea is not to depopulate cities, it is that cities will depopulate as the energy needed to feed the city by brining in food and service all its structures, water, sewage, rubbish, becomes too expensive or unavailable to the majority. People will simply move to where they can be provisioned or provision themselves. The days when, for example London, was fed by its surrounding farms and market gardens was sometime in the 1700s, so the degrowth of the cities to sustainable size and population is possible. The question is can we be relying on energy intensive 6 continent supply chains and equally energy voracious dubious technology?
Is there not some kind of plausible and amicable midpoint between “energy-intensive six-continent supply chains” (which I do object to), and depopulating cities? If Britain can feed itself with 32 percent of its existing farmland, as Smaje claims, then why not just use that land in large part to feed cities? It’s still a radical change, but not one that involves a mass exodus to the countryside.
Thanks for commenting Cameron. As detailed in my latest post, I’m more or less done with this debate now and I believe I’ve covered most of the angles in it, but I’ll respond briefly & include some links to other writings.
With respect, I believe the post above does answer how poor people are going to get food if food prices rise. Firstly, because a large proportion of the global poor are farmers and food system workers so food price rises will be good for them, as even George acknowledges, and will potentially have net positive effects society-wide. And secondly because I argue above that the way to deal structurally with food poverty is to deal structurally with poverty, and the main policy levers there involve housing, employment, social security etc. I’m not arguing there’s no place for food banks. I *am* arguing that there’s no place for the kind of motivated analysis of food prices that George bases around his food bank example.
I don’t understand your leap of logic from these points to your contention that I want to depopulate cities. I’ve been pretty clear about my positions concerning urbanism in various writings – most recently, here: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/02/q-can-small-scale-farming-feed-britain-or-tokyo-or-the-world-a-yes-probably/ – and I don’t feel any need to further justify myself in the face of overheated accusations like George’s. Bottom line is I don’t want multitudes of people to suffer and die in the coming energy squeezes & climate crises. For those who believe that’s avoidable with existing levels of urbanism globally – well, I’d like to see their evidence.
Regarding modernism, I’ve explained at length the modernist nature of George’s positions on this blog, in my book (Chapters 6 and & 7) and in this article – https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/03/doppelganger-me-and-george-monbiot-in-the-mirror-world/. IMO his (eco)modernism is blatant, even by his own definition, and I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already written. A commitment to degrowth is not necessarily non-modernist or anti-modernist.
Regarding cornucopianism, that lies mainly in George’s views on the future of food and energy. How he thinks it will be feasible to provide macronutrients to humanity en masse using clean secondary energy rather than photosynthesis is beyond me, and again I’ve discussed this at length in my book and on this website. His cornucopianism (and ecomodernism) also inheres in his social visioning, eg. in his belief that farm-free food will enable indigenous people to reclaim and restore their land. I find his shortcircuiting of politics here jaw-dropping.
Yes, I’ve read that you want to be done with this debate, which is fair enough. It’s why I replied to Greg rather than directly to you. Thanks for replying anyway.
With respect: Your linked blog post about the UK and Tokyo does, in fact, say that you want to depopulate cities. Or, at least, that you do not think that Tokyo could or should survive in its current form. You also seem to implicitly agree with the premise that any transition from a world with Tokyo as it currently exists to a world without it would be violent and unpleasant. But then you lump anyone who therefore objects to such a scenario into the singular category of ecomodernist or a cornucopian. It seems you’re painting with a bit of a broad brush.
A huge part of your evidence for why Tokyon needs to go seems to rest on the notion of “the coming energy squeezes”, which you take as a given. I’m not sure I see it so clearly that that’s what the future holds for us. In fact we currently have an abundance of energy available to us. Unfortunately most of it happens to come from planet-destroying fossil fuels. As I see it, that leaves us a few conceivable paths forward:
1) We keep using fossil fuels in ever-increasing quantities. We don’t experience an energy squeeze; we experience a climate squeeze. It probably kills most of us.
2) We radically reduce our consumption of energy. This could involve some level of de-urbanization, but (and this is a key point) I’m dubious as to whether the lifestyle you propose is actually as low-energy as you think it is. For food, perhaps. But what about for, say, passenger transportation? Or heating? These things will always be more efficient to provide for concentrated populations than for dispersed ones.
3) We transition our energy system to make use of renewable sources, while keeping energy consumption stable or increasing it. This is the position you accuse George of having, which I think is honestly a straw-man. He has talked at length about the need to reduce energy consumption.
Realistically I think the most pleasant solution is a combination of points 2 and 3. We reduce our consumption of energy, which makes it easier to provide more of it using non-fossil sources. Yes, that includes changing our food system, and probably in a way that makes use of a lot of the ideas you yourself champion. But I see no reason why the kind of farming you promote could not produce food that is simply transported to the nearest city. The energy costs that logistical effort would actually be pretty miniscule compared to, say, the energy costs of a lot of small-scale farmers driving around the countryside in pickup trucks.
Either way, I don’t see a scenario where energy shortages force us out of cities. In fact the track record of climate change has been the opposite. As climate disasters devastate the countryside, farmers move into cities.
Thanks for that Cameron. If George had been willing to have the kind of debate with me that you’re opening up we might have got somewhere. Anyway, I’ll make a few quick points.
– It depends what you mean by ‘wanting to depopulate cities’. An argument for deurbanization relative to the present degree of global urbanism to mitigate human suffering is different from wanting to do away with towns and cities entirely for some quixotic ideological reason. It’d be great to be having a real public debate about what a sustainable level of urbanism could be, and what kinds of urban work would serve the wider human ecology long-term. I’d hoped my books might help stimulate one.
– I think we differ on some key points re the urban/rural issue, particularly around energy. Absenting fossil fuels I think we’re looking at very low energy availabilities as a general rule worldwide long-term, and this isn’t compatible with mass urbanism because cities are huge energy/water/material sinks (William Rees: ‘entropic black holes’). In low energy situations, cities just aren’t efficient providers of services, whereas dispersed rural living is more efficient. Yes, high-energy modern lives can be lived more efficiently in cities than high-energy modern rural lives, but I don’t think that’s going to be the future reality for most people. I’m not imagining a world of small farmers driving around in pickup trucks. Again, I’d have liked to have been able to debate this issue calmly. I don’t see any simple solutions, but I just can’t see how existing levels of urbanism worldwide will survive the energetic, climatic, political-economic, food, water & sewerage issues that are beginning to bite.
– On your point 3, George says almost nothing about energy production & consumption in Regenesis. He incorrectly calculates that bacterial protein powder would increase the world’s electricity demand by 11%. The full energy costs of the ‘farm-free’ world he projects would use the world’s clean energy many times over – and we’re not even decarbonising the existing energy system. No doubt he’s talked about the need to cut energy consumption – his writing these days is a mass of wrenching contradictions – but his food analysis points in the exact opposite direction.
– Cities rely substantially on the countryside for food (& many other resources). Rural to urban climate migration – which is fantastically complex socially – is at a summary level a short-term bet driven by urban political-economic power. It seems to me vanishingly unlikely to be a long-term reality in most places, though I’m sure the richer countries will hang on to their urbanism at the expense of everyone else for as long as they possibly can.
Anyway, thanks for raising a bunch of interesting and important issues. I wish it were possible to have a proper public debate about them.
I think continued urbanisation in the context of climate disasters might be more complex than, “As climate disasters devastate the countryside, farmers move into cities.”
My stepmother used to tell a joke about a farmer who won the lottery and was asked what he planned to do with his millions. “Well now, I dunno, but I guess I’ll just keep farming until the money runs out.”
Chris has written before here about the difficulty of actually earning a living as a farmer. One of the prime difficulties for the last century or so (probably longer) has been that “economies of scale” (from the industrialisation, over-financialisation and globalisation of arable and other cash crops) have tended to put smaller operators into more and more precarious positions, such that one bad drought year can finish them off. I’m not sure it’s totally fair to blame climate change rather than this sort of corporate enclosure for urbanisation in such a context. I suspect that farmers who aren’t utterly dependent on maximising cash crops tend to take steps to mitigate the worst effects of climate change (through things like improving soil structure and microbial health, use of cover crops, increased crop diversity, increased wildlife habitat etc).
However, I do tend to agree that making food more expensive won’t, in and of itself, automatically benefit farmers. Supermarket prices have soared over the last few years here and I seriously doubt that very much of that is going to the people who actually grow the food; it seems more likely that most of it is going to supermarket shareholders. Meanwhile my own food bills have gone down in the same time, because I grow so much of my own food (on a tenth of an acre of rented land across three locations, some of which has been pretty badly treated by previous tenants; yield is improving as I improve soil health).
But I don’t think Chris is saying “making food more expensive will definitely result in reduced poverty” so much as “increasing wages for the lowest-paid people will necessarily also increase the cost of food”.
@ Cameron Roberts
Welcome. Now a few questions:
Hopefully you are not visiting a food shelf regularly. And maybe you don’t even count yourself as one of George’s rich friends. Do you think food prices are too low ?
No ? Then I would guess that you have not made your living farming. Even our conventional neighbors need government supports to continue farming. They aren’t getting rich and their kids will never (really, never) be able to afford to buy a farm. Is that because food prices are too high ?
If I recall correctly, George’s theoretical vats of studge don’t compare very well energetically with real food. They are not simple nor low tech products, meaning the infrastructure costs will also be high and the resulting price will reflect that. Currently clean ground beef is between $8-9 dollars per pound at the local coop. Industrial ground beef is $5 per pound. Beyond Beef is $10.50 per pound. How is that feeding the hungry without a lot of wishful thinking ?
On the subject of reducing energy consumption – imagine any big city without cars. Transportation is the the number one contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, a big energy user. Without building a lot more stuff, how does that work ?
Heating and cooling a city also consumes a lot of energy. How much electrical capacity does it take to replace the fossil fuels used for that ? What are the energetic and material costs of creating that capacity ? Where does it come from ? Can we afford that ?
Hope to hear from you soon
Greg
Hi Greg,
Apologies for the late reply. But I remembered this thread and that I had not checked up on it.
I want to call particular attention to your comment inviting me to “imagine any big cities without cars”. In fact, as a sustainable mobility researcher and advocate, I do precisely this kind of imagining every day for a living. I imagine vibrant, thriving, creative, fun, interesting, and sustainable cities that people navigate using bikes, trams, trains, and pleasant scenic paths through downtown parks. This vision is so well-developed in sustainable urbanist discussions that I’m pretty surprised that you are not already familiar with it. It is a vision that people are actively pursuing on the ground, and are winning victories towards, in places like Barcelona, Montreal, and Paris.
Can this vision be extended into the countryside? I certainly hope so! And there are some ideas about how that might be done. But it’s a lot harder to accomplish in that kind of setting than it is in a city. Rural areas as they currently exist are far more dependent on motor vehicles than cities are. A rural person might have to drive several miles to access the same services that an urban person just has to take an elevator down to the ground floor of their apartment building to reach.
I focus on this because I think it is a major flaw in the thinking that underpins Smaje’s thinking. The assumption that cities are inherently energy-inefficient is counter-intuitive and runs against most energy and climate scholarship. When people live closer together, it is easier to move goods and services around without using as much fuel or power.
Of course this does not mean I object to people living in the countryside. In fact, that’s precisely where I think our pretty scarce supply of batteries for electric vehicles should be allocated, rather than to fancy Teslas for accountants living downtown. But for anyone who is not involved in the rural economy in some way (i.e., a farmer, someone who supports farmers, etc.), I don’t see how it can be more efficient to have them living in a rural area than in an urban one.
“is vision is so well-developed in sustainable urbanist discussions that I’m pretty surprised that you are not already familiar with it.”
Yes, that is one of my many short comings. I’m impressed that you can keep up with all of that and new ideas in regenerative agriculture, selecting tomatoes for disease resistance and improving the performance of flat head Ford V8s…
The urbanist vision works great if you keep a narrow frame around the city. People living in apartment buildings only consume the necessities for their daily lives. They don’t produce any food, fiber or fuel. All that stuff has to come from somewhere else. People in cities can’t close the loop on their own consumption. You need to widen the frame to include food production, clothing (plastic or natural fiber), and energy, at a minimum. Concrete and steel ? Etc.
Since I’m not keeping up on car free cities, how do they come to be ?
We were in Montreal a few years ago and there were plenty of cars. So many in fact that it was easier to get where we needed to go by walking.
The Big Dig in Boston was a project that was going to transform the city. The cost went from $3 billion to $24 billion and took 20 years to complete 8 miles of urban highway. Closer to home, the 14.5 mile Southwest light rail line is $1.5 billion over budget (approx 2X the original cost estimate) and will take 16 years to complete (it is not done yet). I’m sure there are more examples.
It appears that big urban construction projects are Expensive (with a capital E) and complicated. What is the current thinking around how ideas of a car free city come to be when you are working in an existing city ? Use a wide frame and sketch out the externalized costs too.
@Greg Reynolds
Apologies, I didn’t intend to imply ignorance on your part. Obviously we are both knowledgeable about different things. Obviously that’s fine. Perhaps I’ve overestimated the extent to which sustainable urbanism and sustainable mobility discussions have spilled over into broader discussions about sustainability. I would politely suggest that if you want to suggest that cities in their current form are inherently unsustainable, you should take a bit of time to consider the efforts being undertaken to make them more sustainable.
You do raise good practical questions. And, yes, Montreal still has a lot of cars. But that’s because the transition (and the often quite bitter fight to make that transition happen) has only just started. Automobility is a powerful socio-technical regime that will not go down without a fight. The good news is that walkable, bikeable, transit-able environments are overwhelmingly popular with the people who live in them, even if those people were skeptical prior to the changes being made. I will also note that many of the cars (and much of the political support for the cars) actually do not come from the city at all, but from the suburbs surrounding it. Surely that’s something that urbanites and back-to-the-landers can unite on: Our mutual dislike of suburbs.
In any case: Every version of a sustainable future has the same unanswered question of how you actually get there. Certainly a transition to Smaje’s small farm future is difficult to envision without a lot of violence in the interim. But then Smaje’s proposal also requires most people to give up cars! They just have to do it while living in a more dispersed settlement pattern, which makes it harder.
On your other point, I struggle to see that as anything other than just a bland observation that division of labour exists. Yes, people in cities generally do not produce their own food (although this could be improved considerably if we ploughed some of the parking lots). But they produce other things which are also important. Urbanites work in factories building stuff that farmers need. They maintain and administer the transportation and distribution networks that everyone (rural or urban) relies on. They do medical research and administer treatments at large, advanced facilities which you could not maintain in a rural area.
Now, I will pre-emptively agree with you that cities probably have a larger proportion of bullshit jobs than the countryside does. Plenty of advertisers, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, etc., useless bureaucrats, and random C-suite flunkies make their homes in cities. In my version of utopia, those wasted-person hours are reinvested so that we have more hands doing the actually essential work, which means lighter work for all. Perhaps that means that some people move from cities to rural areas. But it won’t change the fundamental fact that there are economic advantages to having a lot of people living close together, just as there are different economic advantages to having different people living dispersed on the land so that they can farm it.
Anyway, this stuff is interesting but it doesn’t really address my initial point that cities are generally more energy efficient than rural areas, despite Smaje claiming the opposite.
Cameron, since you keep asserting that I’m wrong about the relative energy efficiency of urban & rural areas, I wonder if we can get to some agreement about what we’re talking about – and ideally find some data to illuminate it.
As I stated above, my view is NOT that contemporary, high-energy urban life is less energy-efficient than contemporary, high-energy rural life. It’s that rural life is more energy efficient than urban life in situations of low energy availability. Or at least that at given low levels of energy availability it’s possible to live a more congenial life – or more possible to live at all – in rural areas than in urban ones. If you have data to disprove that, I’d be interested to see it. There’s quite a bit of historical evidence in its favour.
If you think that the present fossil-fuel based global energy system can quickly transition to low carbon alternatives that can do the same work, then my views about this may be moot in terms of actual global futures – though maybe not, as I’ll argue in a forthcoming post. But I don’t think that’s likely, and so I consider it important to draw attention to this problem to try to lessen the potential violence that you rightly mention. Existing extreme levels of urbanism suggest to me an organic system operating far from equilibrium and in danger of moving into self-organised criticality – which is also likely to involve intense violence. As you rightly say, every version of a sustainable future has the same unanswered question of how you actually get there. Most fundamental system change arises out of crisis and systemic collapse.
For the record, I’m not at all arguing that there is no place for towns or cities. But I doubt present levels of urbanism globally will be sustainable. Which, as I’ve said before, is a problem that will probably only intensify if we refuse to even consider it.
@Chris Smaje
Sure. I’m happy to get more specific. Here’s roughly my thinking:
First, I understand your contention, and that you are not talking about ModCiv1.1 levels of energy consumption per capita. That’s fine, so far as it goes. I’ll leave aside any debates about the future potential of renewables. My contention is that the gross amount of energy consumed per household shouldn’t matter all that much when it comes to the efficiency per unit energy consumed. The same principles that make urban living more efficient today would still make urban living more efficient even at radically lower levels of energy consumption.
The point I’d love to understand from you is, what exactly you see changing in the basic math of energy efficiency as total demand for energy services scales down.
Let’s break it down by energy use sector:
Space heating and cooling: Electric heat pumps are more efficient than anything else by leaps and bounds. And air conditioning (which we WILL need in the future given the level of climate change currently locked in) can only be electric. That means we need electrical grids, which are more efficient if they serve a denser population (fewer line losses, etc.). There’s also just the fundamental thermodynamic fact that it is more efficient to heat or cool an apartment building than it is to heat or cool many separate dwellings. I can see a case for direct solar heating as an alternative for electric heating in some cases, but that is very context-dependent. The other alternative is traditional biomass (i.e. woodstoves), which is fine for BnBs in the Lake District, but would be an ecological and climate catstrophe if used en masse.
Cooking: Like heating, but simpler. Electricity vs. traditional biomass. Electricity is better, and electricity is more efficient when people live closer together.
Light: Same as cooking. I suppose the alternative is that people simply go to sleep when it gets dark?
Communication and appliances: Presumably you would do away with a lot of these (dishwashers, washing machines, computers, telephones, etc.) But we’ll still need a few (some of them serve critical medical functions), and, as before, they will need to be electric.
Transportation: This one is the really big one for me. In this case, our options are electricity (i.e., electric cars, electrified public transit, or e-bikes), human muscle power (walking or cycling), or animal muscle power (riding horses). I think horses are mostly out due to the additional energy costs and land requirements for fodder crops. In this case I’m actually quite a lot more in your camp of favouring human muscle power, at least where passenger transportation is concerned. But there’s a reason why most cyclists and habitual pedestrians live in cities. The distances are shorter! It’s also much easier to maintain safe, efficient networks for that kind of transportation in a more dense environment. Same goes for any kind of efficient public transit. I do believe that we can have good public transit for rural areas. But it will rely on a lot of buses, which are less energy efficient than trains, trams, or metros. The big rule for transportation is that efficiency is closely correlated with population density, and this goes double for any kind of transportation that does not rely on fossil fuels.
Happy to hear your thoughts on any one of these categories, or any category that I have left out.
@ Cameron Roberts, my tuppence:
I’m all for keeping energy use low, but I do struggle to see how city life can beat rural village life from my own experience in this regard.
Space heating and cooling: I think we should first look to insulation, and also terracing, wherever we live. The preponderance heat pumps on the exterior of buildings is lamentable, being prone to depredation by the elements (plastic bodies made increasingly brittle by sunlight, the whole thing vulnerable to large hail and high winds. It’s a design joke, but a dream for guaranteed consumption and obsolescence). Air-con is a con in that it’s completely unnecessary if a building is built right in the first place, though yes, you might want to fan yourself on the hottest days, and do lots of cooking and baking on the coldest.
Cooking. I’ll grant you the induction hob, like the microwave, is great for time-saving when heating things up, but I wouldn’t want to be without a back-up woodstove. Again, I can see the fuel for that, in the garden and surrounds, but I can’t be as certain about power cuts, usually during a storm or heavy snowfall. The wood smoke can’t be seen because there isn’t any once the properly dried firewood is burning in a tiled stove. No doubt there will be particulates in the exhaust, but power stations aren’t ‘clean’ either, though they tend to be largely out of sight, and out of mind.
Lights: there are some great little solar-powered battery desk lamps suitable for nighttime reading, but I don’t flinch at using a few watts via a few LED bulbs around the house. How is that latter scenario less efficient than if I was using the same mains electricity to power LED lights in a city setting (though with the amount of extra ambient evening lighting in dense cities – sadly disastrous for many pollinating nocturnal insects – maybe I could read by the glow of the kingdom?
Communication and appliances: As you rightly say, we’ll still need a few (and want a few more).
Transportation: I often hear an argument from my father-in-law that it’s a boon to live in a city when one gets old and infirm as the doctors and hospitals are nearby. Ditto ‘the conveniences’. But in the village we have a visiting doctor and daily surgery for dispensing drugs – I can’t see the surgery from here but I could walk there in two minutes, whereas in the city, for my father-in-law, that journey involves public transport as it’s too far for him to walk or cycle (having said that, when I lived in another city I did live very close to a surgery, chemist’s and a dentist). Nevertheless, it seems cities are often oversold on their ‘efficiencies’, plus you might need a doctor more in the city owing to the greater pollution from all that toing and froing, the stress, and the noise. There is another argument that people use personal motor-powered transport to travel greater distances while living in a rural setting, but much depends on the rural setting and also the people involved. Here, we do have a family car (main justification being what if the kids need rushing to a hospital – how fear can rule us! – even though there are ambulances that take of that) but the older generation by and large do not own their own cars as they use the bus every couple of weeks on average, for up to ninety minutes each way (takes an hour in a car) to the largest nearby city, or 60 minutes to the biggest nearby town, or 30 for the nearby bigger village (pop. a few thousand). Should they all move into the city just so they can go shopping? You use the word safe for the city transport network but from living and cycling in a city it’s clearly much less safe on the roads there, which is why you seldom see old people cycling through cities (here they at least still use their bikes to get to and from shops and friends). In London it’s often joked that a cycle courier has the same life expectancy as a WWII fighter pilot. Many a true word is said in jest. I think the reason you perhaps see more flaneurs walking in the city might also be because the thought of public transport can be dire, it’s uniquely interesting to walk around a vast man-made environment, and it’s also good for your mental health if you are otherwise cooped up in a city flat with no garden, no cool cellar, no tool shed, after being cooped up in the office cubicle most of your waking hours. Brrrr! Show me to the nearest pub, please!?
For a water supply, which you left out though it does use energy, I can see the village ‘waterworks’ on the hillsides (for the mains supply), while the treatment plant is 2km away. More importantly, our dug well is within view, in the garden, where the greywater goes. The garden is also where the compost toilet is situated. How can any conventionally plumbed system beat that for energy efficiency?
I think it is an important question to ask, how will cities find an equilibrium with ecological capacity. We have to start from the fact that they are not, I live in London and from the work done by William E Rees (Sustainable Cities, Chapter 6 download as a pdf); London in its current state cannot be supported by the land of the whole of the UK, which is sobering thought.
We all know that electricity comes from coal, and that solar and wind are built by coal – and that one day it might get built by solar and wind – but that will need to be replaced and the fibre glass and easter junked. We are looking at the Lake District B and B problem of environmental disaster again, accept with micro plastics and toxic run off. I think this blog is trying to inch through these issues with an eye on the wicked problems.
One of those is that often gets air brushed over by the an overly technologically invested position is the social context that this all happens in. There are people living well enough and well within they’re ecological capacity, in they’re bioregion and our cities are destroying that. The neo Liberal capitalist mind set has become a common sense within the urban population, to the point that the idea that taking part in provisioning yourself, your family and your community from your bioregion is your responsibility, is anathema and a petulant attack on civilised values.
The answer to many of your questions is less, it’s degrowth, it’s people moving out of the cities to allow the green corridors to allow the villages that cities were to re emerge.
Thanks for that Cameron. The problem is that what you’re describing is a high energy, grid-connected society, and we’re already in agreement that residential density enhances energy efficiency in such a society.
But as I indicated above, things look different if you consider cost instead of efficiency, and this becomes more significant as energy availability decreases. A heat pump may be highly efficient in terms of its input/output ratio, but you need an enormous endowment of energy and a reliable high-energy electric grid before you can even think about using one. Yet if you don’t have such technology – high-energy heating/cooling, transport, roads/rail, construction, bulk food, water & waste disposal etc – urban life becomes increasingly impossible.
Food and water are the missing items from your list that jump out at me. In an ‘efficient’ city apartment block, for example, you need a lot of water (and therefore energy) to deal with sewage. On a small rural spread, all you need is to dig a hole in the ground, or some slightly more glorified version thereof – and it’s also a useful input into food production which is scaled to the requirements of your site, rather than an almighty problem of dealing with contaminated effluent.
Data-wise, what I’d like to see is a comparison of the energy costs necessary for a big city metabolism (food imports, waste exports, building & infrastructure construction, water etc.) versus those of a rural agroecology.
Per capita primary energy use in the USA is 277 gigajoules. The global average is 77. Less than 15% of global energy comes from renewable means. Maybe a useful thought experiment might be to consider what a world of 11 GJ per capita energy use would look like in terms of water, food, transport, construction, heating/cooling, manufacturing etc.
When you throw in all the other dimensions of crisis we’re currently facing worldwide, I can’t see a future for current levels of urbanism. One way this can play out is in the sum of countless individual decisions. Hypothetical example: you’re living in a slum in a sprawling city somewhere in the Global South. You moved there in search of work because it was hard to make ends meet on the small family farm. You were working three jobs and travelling miles by bus across the city every day, albeit earning way more than you could have done on the farm (though also having higher living costs), but with the global economy tanking your income has nosedived. Energy shortages and construction holdups make the transport system increasingly unreliable. You’ve lost two of your jobs. Frequent power brownouts and blackouts make life increasingly unpleasant. Water rationing has been introduced and you have to walk several blocks and stand in a long queue to get water. The sewers are blocked and open defecation has become the norm, with a resulting spike in gastrointestinal illnesses, deaths and disability. After a lot of consideration, you decide to head back to the family farm and try to make things work out there…
Cameron Roberts wrote: “My contention is that the gross amount of energy consumed per household shouldn’t matter all that much when it comes to the efficiency per unit energy consumed. The same principles that make urban living more efficient today would still make urban living more efficient even at radically lower levels of energy consumption.”
That reasoning breaks down if the lower levels of energy consumption prevent the “economies of scale” which provide the purported efficiencies of urban living. And relying on the electrical grid for all aspects of life is not very resilient. What’s your Plan B for water provision and sewage removal to/from skyscraper apartments during extended power outages, for example? I’m guessing it’s not very efficient at all.
Several people have replied to me at once here, often making broadly similar points. So I hope you don’t mind if I reply all at once.
In my previous reply, I tried to provide a comprehensive account of all our options for non-fossil energy provision for every energy service we need. Nobody has really contradicted me on that point (i.e., by suggesting alternative sources of energy for given uses which I did not think of). Nor has anyone really quibbled with my (back-of-the-envelope, admittedly) assessments of which energy sources are the most efficient and least environmentally damaging options for each energy service we need.
I don’t see any reason given to question the following two assertions, which I will reiterate:
a) For most essential energy services, electricity is the most efficient and least environmentally damaging energy carrier.
b) Electrical grids are more efficient in areas with higher population density.
c) Some essential energy services, such as transportation and heating/cooling, benefit from additional efficiencies when people live closer together.
I think that these three points, taken together, are a knockdown argument against the anti-urbanist position. And I think someone trying to claim otherwise has to focus on countering at least one of those three points. Thus far I don’t see anyone having done so.
With that in mind, I’ll address a few of the arguments I do see above.
1) The energy system you are describing consumes X amount of additional energy or has Y amount of additional environmental impact, that you did not account for. The energy costs of building grids for heat pumps, for example. Or for manufacturing them. Or the carbon costs of solar panels. Of course I am aware of this, and cannot account for every impact of every technology in a blog comment. Everything we do as humans has costs and impacts. Small-scale organic farming has costs and impacts. The question is managing those, while still ensuring that people’s basic needs are taken care of. Furthermore, many of these impacts can be improved. There is no reason, for example, why we need to make heat pumps out of plastic when other materials are available. (In fact I think most today are made out of steel).
What I don’t see in this point is a clear articulation of an alternative. If we’re to avoid the embodied emissions of heat pumps, then what exactly do we do instead? Which brings me to the next point.
2) Traditional biomass. There were a few suggestions that wood stoves should handle most of the cooking and heating. I can’t see this as anything other than a recipe for catastrophic global deforestation, with consequent climate-ruining land-use emissions, and ecocidal impacts on habitats. I’m sorry to be blunt, but it is just not a serious proposal.
3) Doing without. The notion that the answer for several of the energy uses I mentioned is to simply not have those things. I’m in fact very much in favour of degrowth. I think we can do without a lot of modern conveniences, regardless of whether we live on a farm or in a city. But some things really are non-negotiable if we care about the health, safety, and dignity of our fellow humans. Air conditioning is one of them. A home without cooling will be a death sentence in many places very soon. Where I live (a Canadian city) there is currently a heat wave with wet bulb temperatures approaching 30 degrees, which is the threshold of lethality for even healthy people. This will get worse, even if we eliminate all carbon emissions tomorrow. Demanding people live without air conditioning is signing their death warrants.
The same goes for heating. Where I live, a building (yes, even a very well-built one) is not liveable in the winter without some form of heating. Earthships do not work in Canada. The ones that do exist use auxiliary gas or electric heaters in the winter. If we are to provide this heating with wood-stoves: See point #2.
4) Food and water. I will defer to Chris’s greater expertise on the energy embodied in food. Obviously it is less energy intensive to eat food that has not been transported into a city than food that has. But of course this only works if you can provide all (or most) of your diet locally. I am aware that this is precisely what Chris is proposing. But he had better be confident about it, because if food is being shipped from dispersed solar citizens in one region to dispersed solar citizens in another, that will involve much more food miles than shipping it into a city, due to the distributional inefficiencies. Furthermore, it’s not like there aren’t opportunities to produce more food locally in cities. No, I’m not talking about hypermodernist nuclear-powered urban farming towers. I’m talking about backyard and balcony gardens, allotments, greenhouses, aquaponics facilities, and the like. This isn’t going to hold a candle to a wheat field in terms of producing bulk calories, but it can make plenty of salad, and some protein.
On water: It seems that the only real advantage that rural living has on this point is in sewage treatment, assuming that composting toilets are viable in all rural places and not in urban ones. For every other way in which water requires energy, I don’t see an advantage. In rural settings, the water still has to be moved around (moved around to more places, in fact!, and purified. Wastewater treatment in 2020 was between an eighth and a quarter of the total energy consumption from water systems (https://www.iea.org/articles/introduction-to-the-water-energy-nexus). So I’m struggling a bit to see how this one point is a decisive advantage in favour of rural living.
5) Transportation. On this point I really just saw a lot of either stereotypes about cities, or references to aspects of current city planning which are bad, but which can be changed (just as intensive monoculture can be changed in rural areas). And I did not see a good account of how exactly a population of small farmers gets around in a way that is equitable and does not rely on fossil fuels.
Generally, to be persuaded of the energy advantages of small farms over apartment blocks, I need to see specific answers to how exactly these energy demands will be met in a small farm future? How will we heat and cool our homes? How will we cook? How will we travel? This stuff needs some brass-tacks answers. If those answers are “we won’t”, then you need to account for the humanitarian costs of removing those services. If the answer is woodstoves, then you need to account for deforestation. If the answer is some third thing that I haven’t thought of, then I’d be happy to hear it.
@Cameron
There is no doubt that delivering goods or services into a denser concentration of demand is more efficient than driving for miles (or stringing electric lines, etc) between stops. Small farms deliver to co-op grocery stores or restaurants in the cities rather than do door to door CSA drops in the countryside because it is much more efficient. 100% true.
The trouble with efficiency is spelled out exactly by Jevon’s Paradox. More efficient use of a product lowers the price and increases demand. Total consumption increases. Real world examples abound. Efficiency gains need to be coupled with reduced consumption to have any benefit. That is a nonstarter in a grow or die economy.
Changing public policy is hard. The corporate colonial economy has been around for so long and it has been so successful the the majority of people are just trying to make ends meet (this week). They don’t have the bandwidth to look over the horizon and adapt to the outcome of a high energy, high consumption economy. They may not have the resources to do it either. So hope for the best, right ?
The people who would be most effective at changing the current system, benefit from it. They are not going to change it. They haven’t decided that they have enough today. They won’t have enough tomorrow. The clean energy transition is simply a means of continuing business as usual. Nobody is talking about reducing consumption.
As long as the business as usual system continues, the destructive externalities are going to get worse faster. I think cities will be hit particularly hard as the high energy, high consumption model plays out. Saying that this is the likely outcome is not advocating for that result.
To look at efficiency from a small farm perspective, I can walk out my door and eat something that grew with direct energy from the sun. No losses in conversion of energy to different forms, no long distance transport, no need to build a lot of new infrastructure, etc. Seems very efficient.
Since we live in the country, we have our own well for water. High pressure pumping may be an issue but wind mills ( 8-10 feet wide rotors on 30 foot towers) were pumping water before rural electrification came through in the 1940s. Hand pumps will do the job too, depends on how much water you need. Less is better…. We could still have a flush toilet but poop is not waste, it is a resource in a circular economy.
If people had to cut their own wood for heat, houses would be a lot smaller. It does not take a lot of land to grow a year’s worth of firewood. It does take time.
An abundant, convenient and comfortable future would be great. But we don’t appear to be on a path for that. Neither high tech nor higher efficiency look like they are leading in that direction either (AI anyone ?). The longer we wait to make a switch to a lower consumption model the harder it will be, for everyone. Unfortuneately, there is no money to be made in sustainability or reducing consumption.
In any reasonably foreseeable future, cities are in trouble. Living on a low consumption small farm won’t be easy but it will be a better option. The Doomer label is simply a thought stopper. It isn’t very useful in finding solutions.
Electricity from renewable sources is great, when it’s available, but extended power outages could unexpectedly result from many causes, including the increasing risks of climate related events.
From an article published by Nature in 2024:
“Alarmingly, the future projections under diverse emission pathways signal that climate hazards — especially tropical cyclones and heatwaves — are intensifying and can cause even greater impacts on the power grids. High-penetration renewable power systems under climate change may face escalating challenges, including more severe infrastructure damage, lower grid inertia and flexibility, and longer post-event recovery.”
Xu, L., Feng, K., Lin, N. et al. Resilience of renewable power systems under climate risks. Nat Rev Electr Eng 1, 53–66 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44287-023-00003-8
Cameron Roberts was asked specifically about his Plan B for city living during extended power outages, and his response avoided addressing this. I think this point, in itself, is a knockdown argument against Cameron Robert’s position.
Thanks for your response, Cameron. I find it quite interesting, and I’ll aim to write a full post about it here in due course and invite your comments. But I also find it a bit puzzling.
I’ll just lay out here a few points by way of response, which I’ll hope to address in more detail in the future.
You seem to have a very singular focus on the network efficiency of resource flows, which is fair enough up to a point. But you also seem to be very uncritical about the long-term availability of resource stocks, and the ability to maintain existing resource flows long-term. Hence, you create a rhetorical structure to your comment along the lines of “show me how you’re going to retain the kind of life that’s currently feasible in the Canadian city where I live in an agrarian localist future”.
The problem is, I don’t think that kind of life is going to be feasible for the most part in the future, full stop. I’d venture to say that present lifestyles in your city were built on a colonially engineered ‘peace’, a globally networked political economy and enormously high energy availability. I don’t think any of those things can be banked on in the future in a lot of places, and that’s the impetus to agrarian localism. So I would turn your question to me around – show me how you’re going to create aircon, city heating, urban infrastructures, jobs etc. in your city/most cities in the future. If those things can’t be created, people will leave for more peaceful and prosperous places, or likely die. I think we need to be preparing for that kind of eventuality. And in that kind of eventuality, network efficiency is less to the point than liveability.
By behaving as if resource stocks are unlimited, I believe you’ll only hasten some of the bad outcomes you invoke. Canada happens to be unusual in its low fossil fuel electricity sector, but globally most electricity is generated by fossil fuels. More aircon equals more fossil energy use equals more climate change equals more need for aircon. These kinds of death spirals are already almost beyond our control. I believe my comments in the post above about squati hwunitum are to the point here. What if you can’t get what you’d like to have? Agrarian localism isn’t, for the most part, my idealised vision of a better world – it’s the world I think we’re going to get. I believe the more we can prepare for the reality of it, the less unpleasant it’s likely to be.
At the same time, lower carbon energy creates different kinds of geographies to the pre-renewable world. By network efficiency logic, shouldn’t we be relocating, for example, Britain’s heavily southeastern slanted population to the windier west and north? The notion that there’s some kind of mathematical fixity to existing residence patterns in this debate is problematic.
Also, your focus on the efficiency of resource networks leads you to neglect the effect of the network itself on the quantity and quality of the resource. The food that’s (over)produced in the present global food system is of higher quantity and lower quality than that produced by local systems geared to the same job. This present reality has bad effects on human health and wider biotic integrity. Likewise with water, and various other resources. Your neglect of this is problematic.
In terms of your request for brass tacks answers, I’m interested in this to some degree but (1) after showing in detail the energetic implausibility of manufactured food in my last book only to have this waved away with blandishments about limitless solar energy, I’m only interested in it inasmuch as it’s part of good faith, open enquiry about the enormous predicaments that every future pathway for humanity entails rather than in a discussion that’s pre-designed to terminate in the obvious superiority of business-as-usual techno-fixes (2) I’m becoming more interested in writing about the cultural ideologies obstructing alternatives to business-as-usual techno-fixes than in plotting the more technical details of such alternatives, which people other than me in any case have more expertise, time and resources to do. Still, I’m open to further good discussion around this point…
…on which note, your point about biomass burning interests me. I think you’re probably right that it’s inadequate in the short-term as an energy source (though I don’t think anybody’s arguing it should be the ONLY energy source), but I’m not sure how well grounded empirically your assertions are here, or whether they exemplify the “as everybody knows…” kind of thinking that so often characterizes debates in this field. So I’d be interested to see you substantiating this point. On my holding, for example, I produce all of my space heating, a lot of my hot water heating and some of my constructional needs from my woodlot, while increasing rather than decreasing the woody biomass on my site year by year (the flow is less than the sustainable stock). That’s not necessarily representative of worldwide possibilities, but since you too readily equate woodstoves with deforestation, I wonder how well grounded your assertions are here?
…and finally, there is of course a wide range of possibility for human residence patterns between concentrating all 8+ billion of us in one megacity occupying a tiny fraction of the globe, and distributing us equidistantly across the entire planet. Neither of those extremes is likely. So when it comes to debating urbanism versus ruralism, we probably need to get a bit more granular about what we really mean than we’ve so far been in this debate.
Relevant to this debate about air conditioning, climate change and social geographies, I read this last night in Brett Christophers’ book ‘The Price Is Wrong’:
“In the summer of 2022, much of the Indian subcontinent was roiled by a deepening electricity crisis. The crux of the crisis was insufficient power generation. In parts of Bangladesh, where the government battled to dampen demand through measures such as controls on the use of air conditioning, rolling power blackouts of five, nine or even twelve hours a day were reported … Everywhere, discontent, dissent and, on occasion, demonstration were fuelled by the toxic mix of unstable and deficient electricity supply on the one hand, and, on the other, disruptive state interventions in working and domestic life designed to mitigate the crisis.
The proximate causes of the crisis were easy to identify. Most obviously, there was the heat. India, for instance, recorded its warmest weather in over a century, causing peak electricity demand – driven by tens of millions of air conditioning units being switched to full capacity …. Partly the problem was a simple shortfall of generating capacity, and, in particular, of capacity located close to where demand was concentrated … But more than that, the problem was fuel shortages. All three countries still rely predominantly on fossil fuels to produce power … and all three were faced with acute fuel deficits ….
In Bangladesh … the authorities hurried to ready new coal-fired power plants”
(pp.305-6)
Hi Cameron
I think it’s worth pointing out that nobody here is saying cities are going to disappear entirely. Cities pre-date fossil fuels by some thousands of years, and there will probably continue to be situations where it makes sense to have them. However, I think pretty much all of us agree that modern cities require transport of food and energy from outside the city in order to exist as cities, and that this is currently facilitated by fossil fuels. How much and in what direction cities will change will depend partly on how well we can square the circle of not having enough land within cities to produce all the food (and other commodities, including energy) that cities consume.
Chris has already touched on biomass; I’m not sure if you realise just how efficient a properly-designed woodstove can be, or just how sustainable a properly coppiced woodlot is. Granted, not all current woodstoves are designed well, and a lot of current biomass use is a problem in terms of deforestation (though we probably could get into the weeds on when clear-cutting of a spruce plantation is “deforestation” — I’d rather not). But forests need active management anyway, particularly of smaller brushwood, if you don’t want periodic, devastating, uncontrollable fires. Commuting out to do that management (with heavy equipment) and then carting all of that biomass away to be burned in a power station (which I might call “on-grid biomass”) is definitely silly; using it locally is far more sensible, and can be managed with much lower power expenditure, but then you need local uses for it, and… those local uses are easier to find if there are some people living locally. So maybe having some people living near forests would make sense.
I think to make a fair comparison, you have to compare the best of on-grid renewable electricity to the best of off-grid biomass. And then take into account potential grid instability due to climate warming making extreme weather events more common, and ask whether the increased resilience of off-grid biomass has something to be said for it.
Regarding cooling, this is one area where large cities really fall down very badly. The denser the population (and the less greenery in the form of parks, gardens, and, yes, allotments), the hotter things are. In London, where I live, the effect is quite noticeable: living in an ex-council flat in Zone 2 I used to regularly take the Tube a few stops to a Zone 3 area with more parkland during the hottest summer days, simply to stay a bit cooler, and London has quite a bit of greenery in public parks and so on compared to some cities. That was over a decade ago and as our summers warm, the heat island effect is getting worse. I’m sure that effect would be magnified considerably in the event of more homes and businesses here actually having air conditioning. There are substantial diseconomies of scale in cooling large buildings, and it’s difficult to use evapotranspiration from street trees when you’re ten or twenty stories up. That by itself could scupper increased urbanism as warming continues; lower-tech options like solar chimneys also work better if they aren’t trying to cool a tower block in a sea of asphalt and glass. Perhaps it would make sense for some people to move to where the air is a bit cooler and there is more greenery, and where there is enough space for the relatively low-tech horizontal ground source heat pumps. Air source heat pumps are basically air conditioners, and our existing electricity infrastructure in the rich West is already struggling to accommodate use of them during heat waves.
Potatoes actually hold a pretty good candle to a wheat field in terms of the yield, and can be grown on a small scale quite trivially. It’s true that they don’t keep as long, and more research into breeding various disease-resistant varieties would be good (but that’s also true for grains). Meanwhile, I’ve grown wheat on a micro scale myself and it’s easy enough, though lack of access to industrial drying machines and my refusal to use a pre-harvest defoliant application of glyphosate do mean I need the right weather at the right time. But current mechanised agriculture uses something like 10 kJ of fossil energy to produce 1 kJ of food energy; a lot of that is in moving tractors around. If we are going to get off fossil fuels we must figure out different ways of producing and distributing food, whether intensive horticulture, extensive agriculture or some weird hybrid aided by robots.
But energy is not the only consideration here; if we’re going to stop using fossil fuel-based fertilisers, we probably need to stop flushing the fertiliser our own bodies produce into the sea. Whether sewage requires very much energy to deal with as we deal with it now is less relevant than how much energy it would take to safely convert it into fertiliser, and then transport it to agricultural land. Or maybe transport it first, and then process? That’s how night soil used to work. It’s heavy, though, and smelly, and maybe it would make more sense to grow the food closer to the source of the fertiliser. If you do that you’re also putting people who eat food closer to where the food is grown.
As someone who lives in a city and grows most of my own fresh produce and some of my own staples on various allotments, I absolutely agree that more growing space could and should be found in most cities; however it’s also true that most cities lack the land capacity to be self-sustaining in calories. This has been true for basically the entire history of cities, even with their high rates of death from disease. So there is a hard limit on how populous a city can get, and that limit is related to how much food can be transported. If there is not enough food in a city then people are going to riot or they are going to leave. Or both, of course.
I’m not sure that current efforts to electrify transportation are up to the vast quantities of commodity goods currently being moved into (and out of) cities. Having spent several decades destroying perfectly good rail networks doesn’t help; but think about any week of your own eating, and just how much transport that has required. Fresh produce is probably the worst, because to prevent spoilage it has to be transported quickly, often in climate-controlled conditions, and packaged extensively.
The neighbourhood I currently live in, of course, wasn’t part of London at all until after the railways (and the industrial revolution, and the enclosures) enabled rapid expansion. I live in a terraced house that is over a century old and which was thrown up essentially as an investment for landlords as part of said rapid expansion. It used to be a place of farms, woodland and pasture, where the rich came during the summer to get away from the stink and heat of the city. The main local park (part of Epping Forest) only stayed unenclosed because of massive public protest, but at least is now recognised as important for wildlife habitat (containing, among other things, one of only a handful of nesting grounds for skylarks), cooling, flood mitigation and so on. That means it’s unlikely to be ploughed under for allotments anytime soon, but it also means I have somewhere to go for walks; I probably have better access to woodland and grassland than I would if I lived more rurally.
For various reasons the house I rent isn’t suitable for a ground source heat pump, and an air source heat pump would require substantial top-up heating even in our mild winters as well as worsening the urban heat island effect in summer; using electricity to generate heat (rather than moving it around as it does in a heat pump) is pretty inefficient. Retrofitting the house for biomass would be easier, given that is was built with fireplaces for coal and we do still have one chimney, but even with coppicing, Epping Forest probably wouldn’t support the number of crummy Victorian terraced houses that surround it, so if everyone did this we would need to import biomass from outside the city, which then runs into the problem of transport again.
I think there is probably a strong argument for densely populated villages with both off-grid and on-grid functionality, allowing households to take advantage of the economies of scale from sharing some infrastructure, while deriving the bulk of their livelihood and sustenance far more locally than in a typical modern city and escaping from the worst of the heat island effects. Something like a combined composting and heat pump facility could work very well indeed for heating a building that houses several households, while reducing or even eliminating local reliance on agricultural inputs; winter heating could be supplemented with a biomass boiler that also produces biochar, thereby sequestering carbon, and in summer the system could switch over to a ground source heat pump for cooling, powered by local solar panels which could be either on or off-grid. Communal resources for preserving, storing and preparing locally-produced food (granaries, canneries, bakeries etc) would increase resilience while reducing reliance on transport of goods in and out of the village; wind power for mechanical work like threshing, milling grain or pumping water would also be a possibility and skip the conversion into electricity and back into motion. Pastures, woods and some agricultural land could be managed commons, with people who live and tend the land locally making decisions about how to manage it for long-term soil health, and each village could also be accountable to a wider network for issues like watercourse integrity.
I can’t begin to think about things like compost-based heating in my current urban context: there simply isn’t space. Nor does a large, wind-powered mill make very much sense in the romanticised single remote homestead (though my prairie-dwelling ancestors certainly embraced wind-powered electric well pumps, and there is a family legend about the boy who used to cry when the wind didn’t blow; Living Energy Farms is a good modern counter-example of using solar PV panels to run DC electrical appliances, including power tools). But without having to devote such high material and energy flows into and out of cities, a lot becomes possible in villages and towns.
I don’t know how we get there from here, but further concentration of the population into existing cities in the name of better efficiency for electric grids doesn’t seem like a sensible way to manage it.
Increasing energy efficiency and local resilience within existing cities is of course very worthwhile, just as it is important to look at modern rural living and make it more resilient: jumping in the car and driving an hour to town every time you need to shop is clearly not a viable long-term solution, any more than producing none of your food within walking distance of your apartment block is. But that’s a different question than the future viability of very dense urban populations.
(All this and I didn’t even touch on sea level rise and how that might affect future cities. Ho hum. In London it would eliminate quite a bit of that Victorian slum landlord housing, at least.)
This quoted from the Chapter 6 of the study ‘Sustainable Cities’ by Bill Rees, your fellow Countryman and dweller of a sister city, Vancouver:
Urban biophysical reality
To some analysts, accelerating urbanisation implies that people are becoming
less connected to the land. For example, many economists believe that,
because of a declining GDP to resource use ratio, the economy is decoupling
from ‘the environment’, that the human enterprise is dematerialising.
These beliefs are illusion. As consumer organisms, not only do humans
remain an integral part of the ecosystems that sustain them but, because of
higher incomes and purchasing power, urbanites make significantly greater
demands on the ecosphere than do typical rural dwellers, particularly
impoverished peasants. In other words, despite being spatially separated from‘the land’, urbanites’ functional relationship to ecosystems remains intact (albeit
extended and corrupted). City dwellers necessarily continue to satisfy their bio-
metabolisms by consuming the products of natural and managed ecosystems
and by disposing of their wastes back into surrounding ecosystems.
There is a further consideration. In addition to their human bio-metabolism,
cities have an enormous ‘industrial metabolism’ based largely on the use of fossil
fuels. The construction, operation, and maintenance of buildings and urban
infrastructure account for 40 per cent of the materials used by the world
economy;
9
in the US, almost 39 per cent of total energy consumption and
38 per cent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can be traced to buildings.
10
Indeed, Levin et al. and Levin (1997)11 show that buildings in the US account
for between 15 per cent and 45 per cent of the total environmental burden in
each of eight major categories of impact used for life-cycle assessment. Much of
the remaining 55–85 per cent of urban consumption can be attributed to
urbanites’ personal consumption.
The migration of people to cities has major eco-functional consequences.
Global urbanisation has converted local, vertically integrated, nutrient-
recycling human ecosystems into global, horizontally disintegrated, self-
consuming unidirectional throughput systems. For example, instead of being
re-deposited on farmland, Vancouver’s daily appropriations of mineral
nutrients in food from as far away as Saskatchewan, Ecuador and Thailand are
flushed straight out to sea. Ecological result? Arable lands are being depleted,
critical nutrients dissipated and the oceans over-fertilised.
Urbanites like to think of their cities as cultural incubators, centres of
intense economic activities and producers of wealth. All true, but the forgoing
data emphasise that, in strictly biophysical terms, cities are also massive
‘dissipative structures’. All cities great and small are necessarily nodes of
intense energy/material consumption and waste production; they are also
dependent subsystems of the planetary SOHO hierarchy. Cities’ ever-
increasing scale and complexity (distance from equilibrium) therefore
inevitably imposes an ever-greater entropic load on the ecosphere.
He goes to use Vancouver as an example. It’s really worth a read.
I think you are asking questions built on a false assumption – that the city is and can be sustainable. That you are using a data snap shot to show relatively this is better than this but all within an unsustainable paradigm. You are also extrapolating the writers and readers here as for against things but we are simply interrogating the facts. You may have to sit with the fact that you or anyone else does not have all the answers and we are working it out within our communities and localities, and resist the temptation to universalise, show some humility, together we are trying to work this out.
I do hope we won’t reach a point of violent expropriation of farmland in Somerset, Chris; though exporting that elsewhere, as we have under colonial dynamics, is really no better. And I hope that if it does come to that, your local community will have your back. (A project for communal staple production seems very astute.)
I think the traditional way to ensure profits for industry here has been to impose taxes while keeping prices low, so that people cannot grow enough cash crops to pay their taxes and have to leave the farm entirely to go work in a factory. But I don’t know how that works in an era when factories are also not expanding.
As someone who has missed the boat on acquiring any land of my own I take some comfort from my foraging and guerilla gardening efforts, and from the knowledge that no matter how dire things get, someone will have to produce the food. The more I know about how to do that with whatever materials are lying around, the better off my household and community will be.
The word ‘precision’ cropped up on Farming Today yesterday in a discussion about a wonderful trait in some heritage wheat varieties called biological nitrification inhibition, which regulates available nitrogen via the plant’s interaction with soil bacteria. All modern wheat varieties lack this ability.
One proposed fix is to gene edit this quality into modern wheat, as doing it the older way/conventionally (crossing heritage and modern) would take many years back-crossing out undesirable traits “to get rid of all the dross” (poor disease resistance and yield performance were mentioned) already bred out of modern varieties. The presenter then asked, “What’s the dream, then – self-fertilizing wheat?” to which the reply came that yes, we’re after a “quick and easy way” to that goal.
I mention this as it put me in mind of Monbiot’s ‘precision’ vision, but also Squati hwunitum, wanting it all and then some. Not seeing the wood for the trees also comes to mind. It’s common.
Great post, I like the way you drum it out. It always seemed telling to me that Monbiot, while he didn’t exactly throw the kitchen sink at you in his arguments against Saying NO, he did throw the induction hob at you. Always tickled me, that. Good to see that the reading list has kind of resurfaced too – The Lost Supper sounds like a great book.
I have a great respect for your ability to hold all this research, data and positions and bring them to bare in such a cohesive narrative. Each aspect of this argument is elegantly simple and amounts to common sense. By calmly grounding this view in the world you reveal the inverted lunacy of Monbiot’s hysterical arguments. It really is worth doing, thank you for giving words to what needs to be said. It amounts to a defence of the earth and all that is real.
Alot of thinking in this space still holds to digital networks as being essential to our future (Dark matter labs, socialist bitcoin, planet critical) and I agree, that this is something difficult to imagine. Which brings me to my axe, that so much discussion in this space is conducted by people who have never made, farmed or constructed anything. That is the unique quality of your work, and this blog and its contributors. It is also glaringly obvious in the arguments of Monbiot, his fellow ecomodernist and all those who are perversely opposed to taking our place in the world.
I look forward to read Taras’s book.
“The hungry ones” include corporations (and the people who act like, or act for, corporations) — maximizing profits and externalising costs.
In some cultures, there’s no shared good sense of *enough* and *self-restraint*. Instead, there’s never enough income, never enough savings for retirement, never enough security, never enough whatever to somehow stave off mortality.
“Looking to the past” is avoided by the (eco)modernists because what people had in the past is not *enough* for the (eco)modernists.
What about all the working people who genuinely don’t have enough, though? It’s one thing to say that our society as a whole has enough (it does), or that those at the top have way more than enough (they do). It’s quite another thing to insist that someone who can barely afford a nutritious diet even at current prices has enough. That person needs more. How are we going to give it to them?
We could start with housing people who are currently houseless. (Before you object that you were talking about “working people” — as if those who cannot work are choosing that on purpose — know that quite a few of the homeless people I work with regularly do, in fact, have jobs.)
We did it here in first lockdown, nearly overnight. I won’t say it was good housing, because in a lot of cases it wasn’t, and I won’t say it was universal, because again, I know that it wasn’t; there were people so afraid of the immigration authorities that they hid rather than accepting housing. But there were still very many fewer people sleeping rough. Finland’s “housing first” strategy has also been very successful.
The next thing would be to raise wages substantially, especially in sectors of the economy with a lot of zero-hours work and seasonal work. Raising unconditional benefits like child benefit would also be extremely helpful. (Child benefit in the UK is probably the closest thing there has been to an actual large-scale Universal Basic Income experiment, though it certainly had flaws even before means-testing was brought in.)
Limiting profit margins for supermarkets on staple foods might be a good one too, though I would want someone with a better historical understanding of that kind of price-setting to weigh in on how attempts to do this have gone in the past. Perhaps something like limiting shareholder profit might be better. Yes, this would have knock-on effects in the market for land. No, I don’t think that’s a disaster; speculative investment in land while there are people homeless and hungry is immoral, and I won’t be sad if rich people lose that particular avenue to increasing their wealth.
Rationing could also be an option. (Yes, people still had to pay for their rationed food in the UK during and after WW2 — but rationing did stop some of the price gouging that would likely otherwise have happened.)
As Chris wrote above, ‘…increased prices for farm produce have their place, alongside other socioeconomic changes, in reducing poverty and hunger.’
Other socioeconomic changes are clearly needed. For example, for various political reasons, housing costs are generally too high in relation to wages, while food prices are kept so low (not accounting for externalised costs) that the government provides income support to farmers.
If housing prices weren’t allowed to be bid up by corporations and absentee owners, for example, then rents could be lower. Farmers getting paid more for their crops (grown more sustainably) could eliminate their need for income support, while people who can’t afford higher food prices could get some additional income support.
Your question ‘How are we going to give it to them?’ can, of course, also be addressed at the personal level, through some form of sharing with the less privileged.
Yes, the wages-food prices nexus looks very different depending on which part of the world you’re in – the net effect tells us something, but not everything. I also think it’ll look very different in most parts of the world in the future to the way it looks now.
I often feel like I spend too much time focused on land-based work to write as well as I’d like and too much time writing to farm as well as I’d like, so it’s a comfort to hear from Joel that the two sides come together somehow!
I’m not sure I quite understand the comparison between modern-day cheap food and Stoll’s “captured garden”, which as I interpret it refers to the way e.g. coal miners in parts of the United States were encouraged and expected (by the coal companies) to grow some of their own food, rather than being paid enough to buy what they needed. (But I’ve only read the abstract of his 2014 article, not having access to the journal. Walled gardens are something else entirely.)
“Captured garden” does remind me of the perennial concern I have around the soup kitchen/food bank and the way providing people with food does, in some small way, help hold together a system whereby people don’t receive sufficient wages (or sufficient employment) to purchase the food they need, never mind any access to land to grow it. The difference there is that the church is not setting wages or unemployment benefits at all — but the fact that we will, when push comes to shove, at least try to feed people is certainly something politicians and employers alike take advantage of, whether consciously (“Big Society”) or not.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/europe-alarmed-enough-begin-wargaming-food-crisis
Hmmmm
Sorry.
Slightly off topic but does tie in with talk of “studge” and the energy required……..
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/the-tremendous-material-and-energy-toll-of-the-digital-economy/
Sobering analysis that puts a perspective on the possibility of any kind of digital world as we head towards a SFF.
Looking back, a formative intellectual experience for me was reading Robert Netting’s “Smallholders, Householders” in grad school, seeing his calculations on yield, and realizing modern productivity mostly consisted of just burning more fossil fuels. This set me off on a long intellectual journey to a place roughly in line with a small farm future, with numerous bumps and detours along the way.
When one is still in the ‘improvement’ mindset, it is very difficult to accept that modernity is (mostly) not based on a limitless genius for scientific-technical breakthrough or moral progress, but largely on a time-limited change in human energy ecology. Intellectual and popular culture has worked hard to obscure this for the past 200-odd years, and frankly the implications are indeed terrifying. Perhaps most jarring is the wrenching change it forces on one’s sense of confidence and hope about the future. I don’t blame large swaths of society for continuing to look for some kind of ‘out’ to allow us to continue with the improvement program, but at some point reality will start to bite.
I think the improvers’ reckoning with reality will only come with generational turnover. What people call the pessimism of young people may just be some helpful doses of realism starting to seep in. I just mourn the lost opportunities of the meantime, and worry about what improvers in power will do with their sunset years.
Thanks Chris, for your continued work on this. I got a copy of ‘Saying NO…’ for Christmas, and it is next on my reading pile!
Thanks Evan, nicely put. Netting’s book is a masterpiece … I wish it was more widely known. His student Glenn Davis Stone’s book ‘The Agricultural Dilemma’ is a (slightly) less academically dry update.
Also, my essay in Front Porch Republic that I mentioned above is now out:
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/03/doppelganger-me-and-george-monbiot-in-the-mirror-world/
How is pipiking pronounced ?
Pipik (which is a Yiddish word meaning bellybutton) is pronounced like “pip-pick”, so pipiking is presumably pronounced like “pip-picking”.
https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/447
“new genetics research shows that most small-scale hunter-gatherer groups continued to thrive after the arrival of farmers, rather than being driven to the verge of extinction”
from an essay revising stale theories about anthropological developments, and identifying species advantages of a mobile light way of life
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hunter-gatherers-of-the-21st-century-who-live-on-the-move
One thing that rarely crops up in discussions about the future is population collapse JMG has written about it recently and there is another piece here ( link to JMG )
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-depopulation-bomb
The median age in the USA is 37 , in China 36 , not the best child bearing / rearing age ,China’s population dropped by three million last year , U.S. Farmers average age is 65 , most of the planet is aging .
It is unlikely Monbiot’s future CAN happen as the industrial base of Europe is unable to manufacture the machines needed or has the skilled workers to make them , the UK is worse , in 1936 Crewe railway works made 7 steam boilers a week today the entire UK can not make 1 ! There is no chance of making the fermentation vessels for goop production . A unskilled and a ageing population ultimately must lead to a small farm future !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lai9QhBibk
@Diogenese10
https://youtu.be/A6s8QlIGanA?si=1SU26_y7kLKagp3U
This article addresses the topic of non-kin (human) cooperation in deep historical context. It may be of interest here in SFF, where cooperation has been discussed in relation to kinship.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-12/the-great-archaeological-discovery-of-our-time/
https://archive.org/details/farmingmechanise0000sirr/page/53/mode/1up
I am currently reading this written after the second world war , some numbers,are interesting , over 700,000 horses on British farms in 1939 , Chris you need to start breeding heavy horses .
Thanks for the comments & links. Apologies for my silence … still juggling a few too many things, but I’ll hopefully be back in action here very soon.
Meanwhile, here’s a video & podcast of me trying to string some words together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdAkbCfxJI&ab_channel=LocalFutures
https://www.localfutures.org/programs/global-to-local/local-futures-podcast/agrarian-localism-becoming-ecological-protagonists-chris-smaje/
And a summary in Twitter threads of my discussions with George about the energy requirements of manufactured food:
https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-Persisting-Underestimation-of-Manufactured-Bacterial-Protein-Energy-Costs-new.pdf
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Vattenfall-Ditches-Project-to-Produce-Hydrogen-From-Offshore-Wind.html
And there goes another hydrogen bubble , totally uneconomic even with subsidies .
@Diogenese10
And another……..
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/14/hydrogen-village-plan-in-redcar-abandoned-after-local-oppositiion