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Posted on July 15, 2024 | 96 Comments
This essay continues my anniversary overview of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and the various strands of criticism it’s received that I began in my previous post.
Before I do that, I just want to reprise a point in that previous post where I possibly erred a little. In my discussion of Joel Scott-Halkes’s criticisms of me around his view that small-scale farmers have “awful, awful lives” and don’t want to be farmers, I made the point that it’s not the farming itself that’s the problem so much as the political and economic structures that societies often place around farming. I should have added that when societies remove those impediments, small-scale farming can often prove a dramatically successful route out of poverty. This was the case in the 20th century in various countries – South Korea, Taiwan and China, for example, as argued by the likes of Andro Linklater and Lynn White. And, as argued by the likes of Robert Allen, it was also the case in 17th century England.
Often enough, the result of these successes was that farmers stopped being farmers. But that’s another story. The point is, there’s no reason to suppose that farming per se traps people in misery. I’ve made this point about the economic dynamism of small-scale farming in some of my previous writings, but I’m apt to forget it because it hasn’t been front and centre of my own experience in a contemporary British agricultural economy where the economics and politics around farming aren’t great. And where the siren song of the mainstream farming-is-misery narrative sounds loud. Still, the notion that farming and economic development are strangers is flawed.
The farming-as-economic-development narrative is of less import now, though, than farming as economic de-development. How do we decarbonise and degrow the economy while nourishing ourselves not only physically, but also socially and culturally? I can’t see any plausible answer to that question which doesn’t involve embracing a greater emphasis on diverse small-scale farming to meet local needs – which was part of the point of writing Saying NO…
Another recently published book makes a similar case – Jennifer Grayson’s A Call to Farms, which I’d warmly commend. In it, Jennifer travels the USA and reports firsthand from mostly new entrant farmers who are answering the question in the same way and trying to breathe practical life into it one way or another. I expect I’m about to break some fierce commandment of the literary firmament, but to quote from my own blurb on the back of Jennifer’s book, “Each chapter is its own little jewel, glinting with the joy and energy of people finding connection among land, food and community. Bittersweet jewels they are, though, because Jennifer Grayson knows the painful histories that have sundered these connections and are still shaping our world”.
The challenge, I believe, is finding ways to bear honest witness to both that joy and that pain as we face the future. And on that note, I will return to my overview of Saying NO… and the criticisms that have come its way. I dealt with the first three arenas of criticism in my previous post, so let us now turn to the fourth.
I’ve become so wearily familiar with my case for a small farm future getting dismissed as a romantic yearning for the small farm past by people who in my opinion really aren’t thinking hard enough about the issues that sometimes I’ve played up to it for laughs. A generative event in writing Saying NO… was one of these occasions, when a critic took my light-hearted remarks about the benefits of medieval farm technology as evidence that I had nothing serious to say about agrarian localism. That made me think I probably shouldn’t undermine my case with such levity. I put a lot of work into Saying NO… (and also, previously, into A Small Farm Future) in making a case for agrarian localism grounded in relevant empirical studies.
The ecomodernist response to Saying NO… largely involved ignoring that case and its grounding, and simply asserting there was no quantitative or scientific basis for arguments like mine. So I have come full circle. I now consider such ecomodernist critics non-serious rhetoricians, to which the best response is not still further attempts to gain a hearing for my empirical case, but to laugh. In the future, I hope to further embrace the persona of the jester. It is a serious role and a solemn duty.
Another possible response is mysticism. Two people have called me a ‘mystic’ in recent times – one as an insult, the other as a compliment. How to navigate that? I’m not going to dig deep into what mysticism is here, but I believe there’s a time for maths and science, and there’s a time for mysticism. One of the features of modernist culture is that it’s not very good and knowing when those times are.
Not all mysticism is good, and not all science is good either. But if your maths and science lead you to the conclusion that it’s more efficient to fill a field with solar panels to make electricity to make hydrogen to grow bacteria to make a powder to feed people something that tastes like meat and that therefore this is the correct course of action to take rather than sowing some bean seeds, it’s probable you’ve got your science wrong. It’s even more probable you’ve got your mysteries wrong.
Summary: I accept the mantle of the mystic.
A lot of people have no problem with the idea that the future involves grave challenges, but seem less able to imagine that these challenges might bring the curtain down on the familiar political structures of the contemporary world and associated patterns such as its consumer culture. To me, this indicates a problem in the culture of modernism that needs hard work to transcend.
In the last two chapters of Saying NO… I touched on what an ecological culture rather than this present modernist culture might be, albeit only in barest outline. This prompted a highly charged critical response from some. I won’t retrace that ground, just noting in passing that Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against the Vortex, published a few months after Saying NO…, helped me get a better grasp on the dynamics of modernist culture underlying such outrage. I’ve discussed Anthony’s book here. (Douglas Rushkoff’s diagnoses of present times and Paul Mobbs’s critique of food ecomodernism are also relevant).
But I do want to make a couple of other points about the culture of consumerism. Some of my critics have raised the issue of increased global meat consumption. If everybody in the world ate meat at North American or European levels, the argument goes, the consequences would be environmentally disastrous – hence the case for microbial food as a meat (and dairy) alternative.
Here again we see the sidelining of politics (inequities in income and access to food) in favour of a techno-fix (meat substitutes for the poor) that I mentioned in my previous post. Another problem with the substitution argument is that it fails to demonstrate that consumers will prefer alt-meat to the real thing, simply assuming that they will. In a sense, this parallels ‘land sparing’ arguments in conservation ecology which are also relevant to this debate (discussed in Chapter 3 of Saying NO…), where it’s assumed that higher yielding or lower land-take forms of food production will result in more land left to nature, whereas the reality is that the land is often used for some other nature-disturbing human purpose.
Meat and dairy substitutes already exist anyway in the form of plant-based products (legumes and cereals, mostly) with a lower environmental footprint than microbial analogues (in some cases, even animal products do too). Neglect of these products in the microbial alt-meat narrative seems curious. But this whole meat/alt-meat debate assumes that the future food system will be driven by the existing style of consumerism under the aegis of modernist culture and its preferred forms of economic monopoly. In Saying NO… I suggest instead that the future for many people is likely to be more an agrarian localist one, driven by widespread producerism rather than consumerism.
That view invites some scepticism, understandably. Where, my critics ask, is the impetus in contemporary society for this move to a small farm, localist future? Well, there are moves toward retaining or augmenting agrarianism, and processes of re-peasantisation are happening in many countries that pass entirely beneath the radar of received opinion and media talking points along the lines that farming is an awful life that nobody wants to do any more. But I couldn’t honestly say these are mainstream trends.
Equally, I don’t think the ecomodernists could honestly say that low-carbon alternatives to the prodigious fossil energy powering our present high-energy, urbanized world are a mainstream trend. That doesn’t seem to stop them from saying it anyway, but there we are.
Even if you take the view that we’re too deep in the commodified, high-energy urbanism of modern culture to move smoothly into a small farm future, you could still plot a course toward it via intermediate steps of energy reduction and deurbanization. As I see it, if we don’t try to move towards a lower energy and more local agrarian future as a civilizational choice, we’re likely to get one eventually anyway as a matter of civilizational collapse. I prefer the former option.
But I’ve rarely seen ‘middle way’ arguments of the energy descent/rising localism sort, especially within ecomodernism. The focus of mainstream narratives is resolutely upon retaining present patterns of urbanism, employment, commodification, high-energy consumerism and – it must be said – centralized and inequitable political power.
I first came across a nascent ecomodernism in Stewart Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline (it was called ‘eco-pragmatism’ back then, but ecomodernism fits better – I don’t think ecomodernism is pragmatic, but it’s definitely modernist). Brand’s focus in 2009 was on nuclear power and genetically modified arable crops to keep us urbanised, energised and fed. Nowadays, the technologies du jour have shifted to photovoltaics and factory-based microbial cultivation. Different technologies, same aim. Tech fads come and go, but modernist culture just keeps trying to reinvent itself. It’s funny how old-fashioned this looks given ecomodernism’s self-conception as something new and contemporary. As Anthony Galluzzo puts it “we can detect an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century” (Against the Vortex, p.9).
Another backward-looking aspect of contemporary modernism is the eye-watering levels of public and private debt, which can’t be justified any longer in terms of funding economic activities likely to repay it. It’s more a case of wishful thinking about persisting with the kind of lifestyles that seemed realistically aspirational in the past, and the devil take future generations.
I don’t think ecological culture and agrarian localism stand much of a chance in the face of these latest iterations of a backward-looking modernism. But nor do I think modernism stands much of a chance in the face of these self-destructive dynamics of its own. Hence, I see ecological culture and agrarian localism taking root mostly in the margins and backwaters of the world that modernism made and is now unmaking, in circumstances of crisis.
Which brings me to another arena of critique – according to some of my critics, my analysis of the meta-crisis we’re now in involves a problematic doominess on my part.
I won’t spend long on this, but one line of this critique has been that I’m cruelly hoping for civilizational collapse to rain down its miseries on urbanites and other refuseniks of my beautiful agrarian vision so that my preferred kind of society can emerge.
Even devoting that one sentence to this argument gives it more credence than it deserves.
Another line of critique is that my doomy prognostications for the future sap people’s – especially young people’s – morale. And that my scepticism about a transition to high-energy urban societies powered by renewables gives succour to fossil energy companies.
Devoting those two sentences to that argument likewise gives it rather too much attention.
I find something of a contradiction in the way I get presented as both a romanticist of a glorious rural future and a catastrophist of miserable civilizational collapse. Another fine line to tread, it seems. But the main problem I have with these despair critiques is that the ecomodernist rescue mission for capitalist business as usual looks to me more like a counsel of despair than the world I project does. To put it crudely, would you prefer to wait around in the hope that the industrial technocrats will sort out renewable energy so that you can carry on paying sky-high rent in cramped urban housing while you hope the paymasters of your zero-hours contract job won’t robotize it out of existence, or would you prefer to get busy with gardening, low-impact building, community development, land and economic activism and suchlike?
As well as brickbats for my doominess, I also get messages of appreciation from people for my hopefulness. The way I navigate this contradiction is in thinking that my writing does try to amplify the grounds for hopefulness, but only within an analysis that finds few grounds to think that much we take for granted in the rich countries nowadays – high-energy, consumerist urbanism, secure wage-labour, citizenship within a welfare-capitalist state – will long survive. My doominess consists in doubt that the familiar political world has much more road. Which in many ways is a good thing, but not unless – to press the metaphor – we slow the hell down and prepare ourselves for the bumpy track ahead.
As to my succouring of fossil energy companies – well, I’ll touch on that in another post. Suffice to say for now that I think those companies have a lot more interest in a projected transition to a high-energy urban world of EVs and suchlike than to a distributed world of low-energy, decommodified, self-supporting farmers.
But the main problem with this anti-doom critique is that it assumes energy decarbonisation is all that’s needed to secure a stable future modernist civilisation. I think this is mistaken. In his impressive book Navigating the Polycrisis, Mike Albert shows that a likely outcome in this energy transition scenario is what he calls ‘volatile techno-leviathan’. As the name implies, this isn’t something to look forward to. In the unlikely event that a clean energy transition occurs, it probably just gives us doom delayed – maybe even doom amplified.
I didn’t focus much in Saying NO… on the health implications of bacterial protein powder, but with the publication of Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People such issues have loomed larger. I think there are real concerns about the long-term health implications of diets in which they form a significant part, for example in relation to their PHB content. There are concerns too in the rapidity with which these foods are being rushed through regulatory approval.
My post-publication experiences with Saying NO… have raised other concerns for me about health, broadly conceived. For one thing, the health of the media in its openness to genuine debate and alternatives to business-as-usual narratives. I suppose it’s naïve to imagine otherwise, but I felt the chill winds of media hostility to those alternatives more keenly when I was on the sharp end of it personally.
I also became more aware of the unhealthy ways that op-ed style books and journalism lean on scholarly research as a rhetorical strategy to build the apparent legitimacy of their case. This is prompting me to rethink the way I draw on research and use referencing in my own writing, which is a healthy thing I suppose. Cherry-picking evidence is almost inevitable in op-ed style writing, including my own, but I think we all need to do a better collective job of acknowledging it. For my part, I plan to reduce the amount of referencing I do and try to avoid invoking scholarly research in support of wider opinions that the research doesn’t directly support.
Finally, the matter of my own health arose as an issue for me in the aftermath of publication, especially in the light of other things going on in my personal life. I’d been a little worried ahead of publication that the book might bring a storm down upon me. In the event I suppose it wasn’t too bad, if only perhaps because it didn’t gain all that much attention. Anyway, I only got a couple of emails likening me to a mass murderer, and no actual death threats. But some of the general chatter has been a bit aggravating, and I’ve realised my constitution isn’t really suited to this kind of thing. On the upside, it’s finally led me to appreciate that negative comments on platforms like Twitter really shouldn’t be taken seriously, as commenters here have long been wisely counselling me. I’ve found that all too often debate is fruitless and not really what the interlocutor is looking for, and there’s much to be said for liberal use of the mute option.
Happily, this has given me more time to plan my next book.
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There is something around crisis, agency, community and culture that seems important here, and which I’m probably too tired to articulate well (not that that has ever stopped me attempting it before).
I certainly agree that doing what I can where I am to start moving toward resilience is a much more hopeful position than waiting for industrial technocrats to electrify everything. The remedy for despair is not reassuring optimism but agency. So I was glad of having a pantry full of produce when my spouse was unemployed for three months last year. I was glad (and also angry — numbers that in 2022 would have been a busy week are, now, a “quiet” week, and I know I don’t need to rehearse the way exponential growth works here) Sunday morning, when it turned out the soup kitchen was low on donated veg and I was able to augment that by harvesting a few kilos of spuds (which I had offered in previous weeks but they had loads of spuds then) and some extra greens beyond what I would have otherwise harvested from the Soup Garden. But a move toward a congenial future (small farm or otherwise, though I’m with you on this) requires more than individuals like me (or the soup kitchen volunteers, or donors) responding to obvious, immediate crises. Disrupting the hegemony of industrial modernity, in which people are expected to serve profit while disempowered and alienated from their ability to support themselves and their communities, is a much deeper project than that, but also one in which we must act without being certain of outcomes.
Any artist, any writer or any farmer is familiar with that position, though. We make our art and write our words and sow our seeds and we know that maybe there will be outcomes that we like and maybe there won’t; maybe we will see evidence of the outcomes and maybe we won’t. We also know that no change and very little immediate risk can come of keeping our paints in boxes, our stories in our heads or our seeds in a jar. There is a profound courage and defiant hope in sowing seeds anyway.
@Kathryn
“The remedy for despair is not reassuring optimism but agency”
I’m with you on that one.
I’ve realised my constitution isn’t really suited to this kind of thing.
Few people’s are. Mine certainly isn’t either. Pre-internet, I think non-mainstream views were less bruising to hold and argue for: abuse from a newspaper, or in the form of physical letters would have felt held-at-a-distance, in the way that online hassle, with it’s faux-intimacy, does not.
and also …
the unhealthy ways that op-ed style books and journalism lean on scholarly research as a rhetorical strategy to build the apparent legitimacy of their case.
This is something else that grew up with the internet-web. I’ve noticed that older books aimed at the “educated reader” (holds up hand) don’t beat you over the head with references in the way that is now the norm. On the face of, citing your sources has to be good … doesn’t it? But, as you say, it often is rhetorical aggression rather than anything else.
Yelp! where’s the edit button gone1 misplaced apostrophe alert (hangs head in shame)
I am often agitated by putting up a comment, worrying over it, and to have a reply or riposte is like a question of my very being! So to write a book in criticism of the ‘great and good’; you are a brave man, sir, and let’s not forget it.
I’m glad your over all that noise and have got the signal back, exciting times. I hope Mystic Jester Farmer will be your official title for the next book.
I do rather like the tradition of the Holy Fool…
The ” holy fools ” saved western civilization after the fall of Rome , they saved the books that the barbarians used for starting fires .
Cecchini explained: “We start from an input which is basically CO2 and green hydrogen in the form of paraffin and then we take those paraffin waxes and we basically oxidize them.
https://slaynews.com/news/bill-gates-launches.
Not on subject but I thought ya would like to know .
There is a great inability to look beyond ” technology will fix it ” what if it doesn’t ?
The anti small farmer “is “not “could” cause global food catastrophe the idea that a unknown power source as dense as fossil fuels is hiding out there somewhere and we only need to find it on this finite planet , nuclear was the last big possible breakthrough and that’s 70 years old , wood to coal to oil and gas to nuclear took less than a century , good luck with finding anything else , solar is comparatively new but wind is centuries old .
I like your term “producerism” even though a quick search on the net showed that it has been in you for quite a while – with varying meaning. I believe the consumerism argument has a totally flawed basis as it implies that the consumers are the masters of the economy. But that is more like a justification (myth) for capitalism and market economy to give us the idea that the consumers direct the system, which was never the case, and particularly not in agriculture. When I say that people often object, but then I mostly ask how many new food raw materials have been developed the last couple of hundred years and we normally end up with sugar beet quorn. Essentially all the eight billion are bound by the choices of our ancestors made many thousand years ago when they chose, wheat, potatoes, cattle and sheep and hundred other species. Almost all that is consumed today is made out of these domesticated species and there is no room for consumers demanding other species. The industry then reformulate these limited number of agriculture raw materials, and create consumer demand. Corn flakes, oat milk, broilers and fast noodles or iphones where not demanded by any consumer, but demand was created. Even the market for organic products are to a large extent created by the producers.
Perhaps a bit on the side of your themes Chris. but I have noted that in many countries (both in Europe and in developing countries) there has for a long time been a flow of (rich) people from other industries and trades establishing themselves as farmers. And I don’t mean rich people buying up farm land to convert into golf courses or resorts but people actually doing farming. Even the former PM of Sweden Göran Person runs a farm. In Africa, there is no chance for peasants to accumulate capital for investment in machinery, not even for a tractor, from the farm itself (Did you ever read Mazoyer and Roudart’s A History of World Agriculture?). This means that it is mostly rich people that “plow” new money into farming and develop the sector (for the better and the worse).
The ” mostly rich ” are the ones destroying the small farmers , muscle can’t compete with diesel .
hoping for civilizational collapse to rain down its miseries on urbanites
This is one of those things that is difficult to explain. I actually do hope for civilizational collapse to rain down its miseries, but not because I like misery. The misery is coming, it’s inevitable, so the only question is how to accommodate it and when. The when part is easy; the sooner the better.
Keeping modernity going is keeping massive human population overshoot going at the expense of future carrying capacity. The sooner modernity goes away, the better, if one is concerned about global environmental health.
But modernity going away means a lot of misery unto death whenever it happens, so almost everyone either pushes environmental health to the bottom of the priority list, or, like ecomodernists, engages in fantasies of a rapid change in the operation of modern civilization in order to somehow promote environmental health and still keep the misery at bay.
I don’t really blame the ecomodernists. They see what is coming and are grasping at straws to keep modernity afloat, even as it continues to exponentially flood the world with a deluge of destruction. When someone points out the flimsiness of their proposed straw, the response is “what other choice do we have to prevent mass death. If you don’t like our choice, you must be in favor of mass death”. No one is in favor of mass death, but that doesn’t mean it can be prevented, it can’t.
Regenerative small farms are the best thing for the world. They are sustainable, modernity is not. As you say, small farms will likely only be created at the margins, but widening the margin as much as possible is still worth the effort. It won’t prevent the vast majority of urban misery, but the simple truth is that nothing really can. Small farms are the best way of accommodating the inevitable transition to a non-modern world. Let’s get it over with as soon as possible.
Thanks for the comments. Briefly:
Yes, agree with Kathryn that disrupting the hegemony of industrial modernity requires more than the disempowered responding to immediate crisis. And yet we scarcely have any mature political positions with which to shape such a response – even the main critiques of industrialism and disempowerment are basically internal to modernity, as a good many of the responses to ‘Saying NO…’ demonstrated. I’m not sure what to do about this except keep trying to articulate agrarian alternatives to modernism and hope they will eventually catch on before whether they catch on or not has become redundant.
But unless a mature politics around this forms quickly, I regret that Joe is right, they will become redunant and there will be a lot of unavoidable misery (I wouldn’t necessarily frame it in overpopulation/overshoot terms, but maybe that’s splitting hairs). I’m a little less forgiving of the ecomodernists than Joe – yes, I agree that ecomodernism can be steel manned as a last chance saloon techno-fixing gambit in the face of the not entirely unreasonable conviction that degrowth & localization is an impossible stretch, but where is the steel manning on the part of the ecomodernists? They give no consideration to the possibility their own formulations will prove impossible, and scornfully dismiss low-input/localist alternatives out of hand (per some of the ecomodernist responses to my book). Ultimately, I think they’re defenders of privilege and business-as-usual elite power – the radical but empty rhetoric of some of them veiled that from me for too long. Anyway, I agree with Joe that widening the margin as much as possible is worth the effort – which I guess brings me back to trying to articulate agrarian alternatives to modernism.
Gunnar’s observations about rich people buying farmland and actually farming it chime with mine, certainly here in the south of England – although there’s also an element of buying it and ‘rewilding’ it, or planting trees for corporate carbon offsets. I might write something more about this in due course. Meanwhile, I’d be interested in people’s views. Generally, I’d rather see a 500-acre farm split into a hundred smallholdings than become another mould-breaking moneyed agrarian experiment, although some of those experiments sometimes pay off.
Re Martin’s observations, a writer friend told me that the new normal for op-ed style non-fiction books in a time when fewer people are reading such books (or any books) is to lard it with references and a tortuous intellectual journey so that the reader feels they’ve achieved some kind of enlightenment and expertise. Maybe there’s something in that. It may also have to do with the rise of scientism, and some of the science wars around issues like climate change.
On the matter of referencing, my take is that if you say something along the lines that protein powder from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria uses 16.7 kWh of energy per kg of protein, you should give a clear indication of exactly where that figure came from. Whereas if you say something more generalized and intellectually contestable along the lines that farming is the greatest cause of nature destruction, and then cite various references which don’t fully align with that contention, I think it’s better not to cite the references but to find a different way of steering the reader through your opinions. Hopefully editors might learn to be more supportive of that approach.
I think my current understanding of the spectrum of land use goes something like:
Best:
– Smallholdings run on low-impact, agro-ecological.principles with some areas of commons, including uses such as recreation, education etc where those facilitate rather than hinder the production of food, fuel and fibre
– Ecologically managed parkland in particularly fragile or sensitive habitats (one of the few remaining nesting grounds for skylarks is walking distance from where I live, and so far I am happier for this to be managed by the Corporation of London than by some guy — though the only reason it wasn’t enclosed was massive public protest by Londoners.)
Somewhere in the middle:
– very tidy formal gardens
– golf courses
– small scale reforestation or afforestation projects; parkland that is allowed to “go wild” where that means neglect rather than having active management
– dedicated wind and/or solar installations (I am aware that these can vary quite widely in their impact; personally I still think distributed micro-generation is better than on-grid renewables, despite some obvious drawbacks, because it is by definition much more decentralised, though there might be an argument for village-scale installations for light industry)
Pretty bad:
Land owned by corporations or aristocrats, leased to a) farmers doing industrial monocropping to grow feed for CAFO operations or similar b) highly polluting industries c) some other highly financialised, highly damaging things
– Land owned by corporations or aristocrats for the sole purpose of carbon offsets
Worst:
– Land that is paved over for the convenience of consumers, e.g. airports, car parks, six lane motorways. warehouses full of stuff made halfway around the world that we could have produced locally instead
– Land that *could* be laid to lawn, at least, but isn’t because someone would have to cut it or someone else wants to park a car there.
This last item may be somewhat influenced by my evening, in which I trod in fox poo just before leaving the Far Allotment, only realised it once I got to the train platform, and then had to take the train, walk 15 minutes between stations, and take another train before encountering a small patch of extremely straggly grass that I could wipe my boots on. On the bright side, I had no trouble getting a seat on either train, and the plum tree I removed a huge amount of rootstock growth from in the autumn is doing reasonably well. It’s still tall and spindly (I removed about three times as much as I left), but it looks healthy otherwise and the plums are the size of hens’ eggs.
Back to the land use question, I think in cases where I don’t have direct control over it, it’s not really worth worrying too much about which of the “somewhere in the middle” bits are best. If rich people want to buy ten acres and plant a bunch of trees on it out of a misguided sense that this will somehow save us from climate catastrophe, that’s a better starting point for transitioning to a smallholding than than a carpark would be, and it’s doing less damage in the meantime.
Land preservation and future transitioning to smallholdings is why I don’t have nearly as much heartburn over ‘hobby farms’ and ‘gentrification’ than a lot of people (not that you do Kathryn, since it looks like you would put them in the “middle” or lower “best”).
Mowed lawn gradually builds soil fertility, if the clippings aren’t removed, and a rich person’s country McMansion is vital infrastructure for housing refugee families when they eventually try to leave the city. And even these obvious non-farms usually contain a number of fruit trees and a small garden.
The county I live in is undertaking a misguided attempt to force rural landowners to engage in commercial agriculture if they want to keep their agricultural land assessment (very low property tax on ag land, but the use guidlines are pretty strict). Subsistence farms will now be overtly discouraged.
Here in Hawaii, commercial agriculture is of the import-nutrients-export-production model, since there is no nutrient recycling. Since the sugar industry shut down throughout the state, there isn’t a lot of commodity agriculture, but the economics of ocean freight means that most diversified agriculture has a tough time competing against imports from low-wage agricultural powerhouses, like Mexico, Central American countries and California. Until global trade disappears, commercial agriculture here will always be a marginal activity.
The end result of these factors is that one of the principle uses agricultural land has been smallholdings for people who want to enjoy life in the country. If hobby farmers and subsistence farmers are driven off the land by high property taxes, only wealthy people will be able to live here.
That won’t hurt the land, but it’s bad for local families who need to work off their rural land to survive and will prevent local retirees from moving out of the city to a modest country home where they can enjoy the serenity and beauty of country living (this is a pretty big percentage of the population in my neighborhood). The vast majority of this ‘gentry’ take excellent care of their land and often dabble in farming, gardening or native tree planting. This will now probably go out of fashion in favor of mowed estates and landscape plants.
So, here in Hawaii, the margin is contracting a little.
Hobby farms are fine, as long as we’re honest that they often aren’t economically viable. But commodity farming is not exactly a route to stable wealth either; the problem isn’t the farming but the low food prices etc, which I know I don’t have to rehearse in comments here.
Rural gentrification isn’t something I can easily comment on too much because I don’t live rurally and I don’t live with the effects, but urban gentrification is, I think, closely related to rent-seeking. McMansions built out of the proceeds of buy-to-let landlording are problematic, for sure, but in my view (and with the caveat that I don’t live rurally) not necessarily so much because of the land use (I’m sure they vary in their impact) but the exploitation. The “second home” nature of many such dwellings, where people don’t live there year round or make any effort to contribute to local economies, is also something I see as somewhat grating when the tenants providing the actual funds for their purchase don’t even have a secure first home — but again, this is not strictly a land use thing. The less populated rural areas are, the harder it is to contribute to local economies. If your neighbour only grows grains, pulses and oilseeds you can’t purchase milk or eggs from them anyway.
In the UK we have a system where owning a plot of land is not all that expensive (though still beyond my means), but owning land you can actually build housing on requires either a lot of cash or a lot of patience or both. Ostensibly this is to prevent suburban sprawl from destroying the countryside, but I’m sure it has the knock-on effect of keeping urban rents high enough that saving up for a home (not even a house, just a flat that you actually own) is impossible for most renters.
In any case, you are right that I don’t lose too much sleep over any of the stuff I put in the middle category of my list. At best, small landholders who aren’t engaged in mixed farming or other local production could be great allies of small farmers and an increased customer base for agrarian localist economies; at worst, well, at least they aren’t paving the sites or wrecking the soil with industrial poisons. It’s not how I would choose to order the economy, but I don’t think “pass laws that benefit the poor at the expense of landlords” is a realistic short or medium term political expectation.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so, but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
From the same song, but about the land:
The law locks up the hapless felon
who steals the goose from off the common
but lets the greater felon loose
who steals the common from the goose
And geese will still a common lack
Until they go and steal it back
Roger Hallam and the Whole Truth 5, have been sentenced to 5 years and 4 years respectively, showing nothings changed since that song was first sung:
https://realmedia.press/law-what-is-it-good-for/
For me, Hallam’s strategy for change has always under estimated the cohesion of the communities that founded it, Ghandi’s India and MLK’s Black America was very different to the fatally compromised societies of the west today, holding real power in vertical and horizontal structure.
This guys analysis here, on Planet Critical is related and relevant:
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/climate-change-as-class-war-matt
Local agrarian refugia are the building blocks of the cohesion and power base from which actual change can be enacted.
The issue I have with Just Stop Oil is that………if we did “Just Stop Oil”, society would collapse.
I don’t think people fully appreciate the central/pivotal role fossil fuels make in our lives.
I have a degree/education because of fossil fuels.
I’m alive due to modern medicine, made possible by fossil fuels.
I have choices made possible by fossil fuels.
Concepts like democracy, feminism, equality and made possible by fossil fuels.
We are all “playing” at living whilst fossil fuels are doing all the hard work.
Which is why we find ourselves in such a hard place. Between a rock and a hard place.
Between the world we have created through fossil fuels and the climate we are destroying through fossil fuels.
But I’m not sure the actorvists at JSO fully appreciate this.
In relation to Ghandi and MLK it’s interesting to swap out ‘fossil fuels’ for ‘white supremacy’ or ‘colonialsim’ and read it back. As these ‘realities’ are synonymous.
I don’t think the people taking part in protest are not aware of how compromised our lives are by fossil fuels, just that we need to begin the process of facing our addictions, our over extension beyond bioregional capacities – which I know you get and I think they get it too.
I’m suggesting that the building of local agrarian farm communities is a stronger strategy for more effective change.
I think that calling the movement Just Stop Oil is in itself a sign of a lack of clarity of their objectives.
If the goal is to “stop oil”, as the name suggests, it would lead to chaos, mass starvation and death.
If the movement was called “Let’s Use The Remaing Available Fossil Fuels To Try and Transition To a Sustainable Agrarian Future” then I might agree. (Or even A Small Farm Future!!!!!)But then I guess it isn’t very catchy.
I’m not convinced that gluing oneself to a train is really doing anything much???
We all know that climate catastrophy is on the horizon (or for those who don’t, JSO isn’t going to change their minds) but how exactly are JSO showing a way forward??? What’s the plan?
I do wonder how much change JSO members are actually contemplating???
Are they expecting to give up on…….
Regular hot showers?
Regular cold showers?
Toilet Paper?
Avocados?
Private Transport?
Public Transport?
Flushable Toilets?
Running Water at the kitchen sink? (Potable or not)
Municipal sewage systems?
Holidays in Tuscany?
Internet?
Bicycle tyres?
Mobile Phones?
Central Heating?
Super glue?
Antibiotics?
Old Age?
Pensions?
Cinema?
Internal lighting during those long winter nights?
Glass Windows?
Microsoft Windows?
etc
etc
etc………..
My worry is that the JSO answer is Ecomodenism. Much like lab meat. Tech will save the day.
Renewables will replace fossil fuels, if we just start building them and we can keep all the above and everything else besides.
Not a million miles from Monbiot’s position.
On the subject of JSO and jesters…
Perhaps JSO is similar to court jesters insofar as they provide/provided quasi-subversive outlets for the ruled, while the rulers stay in power and continue their empire building and exploitation?
The court jesters were essentially dependent on royalty for their livelihoods, and JSO members are presumably still dependent on fossil fuels and the spoils of empire (to some extent) for some aspects of their lives.
I wonder how much of a role fossil fuels had with creating “colonialism” and “white supremacy”.
I know that the Conquistadors were pre-industrial but colonialism was limited then (though still devastating for the Mechica)
The technological advantages that Europeans enjoyed were restricted up until 1776.
Could Britain have totally ruled India without the railways, telegraph and rapid fire guns?
Or Britain win the Opium Wars without HMS Nemesis?
Or penetrate into Central Africa or Australia?
It was The Industrial Revolution the supercharged the colonial project and the white supremacy that went with it.
Typo. Correction. Mexica
We are all “playing” at living whilst fossil fuels are doing all the hard work.”
Yep and before ( and after ) fossil fuels slave labour will be doing the heavy lifting , maybe not in ” the west ” but elsewhere its almost a certainty .
Local agrarian refugia are the building blocks of the cohesion and power base from which actual change can be enacted.
I disagree. Local agrarian refugia are the actual change needed, but to exist they must deliberately separate themselves from centers of political power, which exist almost entirely in the halls of urban institutions.
They can’t even lead by example, since most urban residents have no path to rural agrarianism or any ability to engage with the land even if a path presented itself.
Subsistence agriculture represents a flight from modernity, a disengagement from almost everything that modern urbanites are doing. No matter how cohesive the subsistence community might become, it has little chance of changing public policy, since subsistence agriculture is in direct opposition to the way modern urbanism is organized and supported.
Back-to-the-land and small-is-beautiful have consistently been rejected as alternatives to industrialism by modern society, simply because they aren’t relevant to the needs of modern cities. I don’t expect that to change, ever.
The task Chris has set out for himself is therefore beyond Sisyphean, even harder than the task of the folks at Just Stop Oil, who can at least point to plausible alternative energy sources that just might keep a modern civilization going. Proponents of small agrarian refugia can’t even do that.
They (the local agrarian refugia) are decentralised by definition, being local and shifting emphasis to bioregional sustainability and resilience (away from centralised profiteering), and yes they embody the change that is needed, and they will be more powerful by being less compromised by the need for fossil fuels, and will have local agrarian forms of energy unique to the respective bioregions.
Well I don’t know how you all out there are faring but here in mid Texas the sky is clear , no jet exhausts , no rumble of high flying jets , someone somewhere royalty screwed Microsoft and we are having a foretaste of what it will be like when jet fuel runs out .
I didn’t even notice, but I think the IT department at my spouse’s work was having a pretty bad day.
Some interesting new comments here on topics close to my heart, or else close to the bone. Forgive me if my replies are at all grouchy. I’ll blame it on my visit to the dentist today. Now there’s something I’ll be sorry to see go in an agrarian localist future – though to be fair a lot of dental needs are iatrogenic.
Anyway, some thoughts on Just Stop Oil, Matt Huber, geese, commons, gentrification and rent-seeking.
First, a prayer for the four people spending the next few years of their lives in jail for having a Zoom meeting to discuss recruitment for a peaceful road blockade. And for those jailed by judge Silas Reid simply for mentioning the words ‘climate change’ in court. The UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders said the sentences “should shock the conscience of any member of the public” and “put us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom”.
Quite so. And when in opposition, Keir Starmer supported tougher sanctions against climate protest than even the Tories were proposing…
My own involvement with the likes of XR and JSO has been peripheral and has pretty much stopped at the level of a few hours in police cells, but I feel solidarity with these folks. I have my own criticisms of some of the actions – per Steve’s point, the jester role isn’t an easy one to play – but by and large I’m thankful for the climate protest movement. Too little too late is better than nothing at all and repent after the event. I believe Joel is right that there’s a lack of community cohesion in contemporary society that differentiates the prospects for climate protest from the protests led by Gandhi, MLK etc (though climate change is also in some ways an even more intractable issue than those they were dealing with). However, I’ve sometimes seen this point made as a criticism of those involved in the climate protest movement. I see it as a bigger criticism of those not involved in it.
I disagree with John that concepts like democracy, feminism and equality are made possible by fossil fuels. Sheesh, I could write a book about that. In fact, I’m hoping to.
But I do agree with John’s implicit point that fossil fuels are pivotal to contemporary lives across the spectrum of wealth and income, notwithstanding the outsize footprints of the wealthy. I think there’s an interesting tension between this and Joel’s channelling of Matt Huber on climate change as class war. Disclosure – I’ve locked horns with Huber online after he rubbished my ‘Small Farm Future’ book on the basis of looking at the cover alone, so forgive me for not listening to his own piece. I think he’s a regrettably typical academic left-ecomodernist who wants to squeeze the contemporary crisis into simplistic quasi-Marxist dualisms with a happy techno ending and I don’t have much time for him tbh.
To frame it in terms of the last lines of the poem Kathryn supplied, I basically agree with left positions (also left-populist positions) that “And geese will still a common lack, until they go and steal it back” and that this will involve class conflict. Yes, agreed. The problem is that the likes of Huber don’t have the first clue what the geese will realistically be able to do with the common once they’ve got it back. What’s for sure is that he doesn’t like the idea that anybody should actually farm it, as the commoners of old did. That’s where I part company with his techno-growth agenda.
To make a living without farming, as most people do in the wealthy countries, involves economic rent – rent from nature and rent from exploited people worldwide in past and present generations. What’s close to the bone for me here as a small landowner/farmer/writer who – like most landowner/farmers – makes more of a living from rent than from ‘productive’ activities (though it’s important to distinguish between economic rent and rent as payment for services rendered … few comprehend this, but it becomes quite obvious when you create a farm out of nothing) is that the rentier basis of my livelihood is very apparent to everyone, whereas the rentier basis of the livelihood of, say, a doctor, nurse or teacher isn’t.
For these kind of reasons, I have a problem with the way that things like gentrification are often discussed – unless it’s a deliberate collective political strategy to expropriate the poor – because it too easily becomes a form of scapegoating that doesn’t address the underlying structural issue. Likewise with a lot of the narratives around hobby farming. As I said in my previous post, most farmers now are basically hobby farmers, and they make most of their livelihood from rent, like most other people.
The result of these traditional leftwing narratives is at best the kind of policy that Joe mentions, which often ironically squeezes the margin of the more sustainable local small farm to the benefit of the less sustainable rich, or at worst a bureaucratic Bolshevik-style horror show.
All that said, I’m personally lucky and comfortable and I absolutely support much greater fairness in access to land and wealth – I tried to bang the drum on that in this recent podcast with Josh Hamilton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZR4143YvjU&ab_channel=TheJist. It’s just that I’m out of sympathy with standard socialist programmes to achieve it, which I think will be disastrous (it’s hard to espouse standard socialism without espousing modernism, and it’s hard to espouse modernism these days without espousing ecomodernism…). Left-populism, agrarian localism and distributism is the way to go IMO.
And to achieve that is, I agree with Joe, a Sisyphean task. I’m possibly slightly more optimistic than him that there may be circumstances in which the balance of power and population between agrarian refugia and metropolitan cores don’t entirely militate against the former. But it’s a fine needle to thread. Still, I don’t see too many other tasks worth trying.
Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening.
Forgot to add that probably the more interesting to thing to watch in relation to Roger Hallam’s activism prior to his jailing is the work he helped establish on creating decentralized political circles, which I’m hoping may start gaining some traction as a better alternative to the charade of mainstream politics
If I say that gentrification is an emergent phenomenon within a system in which wealth accumulation is prioritised over the common good, is that any better?
I also think some fine tuning of how we think of rent might be helpful. As you say, economic rents and rents for services rendered aren’t the same. The fact remains that my landlord will own a house when our contractual arrangement is over and I will not, despite having covered mortgage payments (and maintenance costs, and the fees that go to the letting agents) for over a decade. That wouldn’t in and of itself be such a problem if I had the option to purchase some land (that I can realistically travel to without fossil fuels) and build a house on it — create my own farm out of nothing — without exposing myself to even greater precarity; that I cannot do so is not the direct fault of my landlord, but my landlord still benefits from a system in which I am somewhat trapped (and I am aware that I am still hugely privileged compared to many people). I am grateful that my actual landlord is supportive of my gardening efforts, even though the back garden sometimes looks like a bit of a disaster. I think rents are not in and of themselves problematic, but I do think that the role of rents in our current society is more often than not extractive and exploitative.
I don’t think there are easy solutions for this predicament; I think a lot of the democratic socialist solutions, even the ones I broadly like (such as the NHS existing at all, or Finland’s ‘housing first’ policy on street homelessness) are really selective mitigations. The powerful will share just enough wealth to keep people as dissatisfied consumers instead of rioting or building truly alternative structures of governance. The prioritisation of criminalising protest rather than funding social services seems to me like a signal that the powerful are, at least, concerned that the geese have their eye on the common.
Similarly I think it is important to distinguish between interest and usury. The Islamic profit-sharing model of investment in order to avoid usury is something I keep meaning to look into more.
I think the idea that concepts such as equality, feminism and democracy are made possible by fossil fuels is an understandable (if largely incorrect) conclusion. When we accept modern Western democracy as being the only place and time where these have been possible, and then look at areas of the world where women are widely oppressed or disadvantaged, racial strife is widespread and democracy is extremely selective at best, and we think those are the less industrially developed nations. But the UK, or indeed the good ol’ USA, is not exactly a bastion of feminism, equality or democracy these days despite being an ample consumer of fossil fuels; it just feels uncomfortable to showcase things like domestic violence or media control of political narratives in the places we think of as “civilised”. Likewise it’s easy to ignore things like indigenous Ugandan people performing Caesarean section (without killing the mother) or the extensive crop breeding that took place in the Americas prior to colonial intervention.
Further, I think there are a lot of goods and services currently provided by financialisation which could reasonably be achieved under other models of economic organisation. Modern dentistry is heavily dependent on gadgets and training, but… we aren’t actually very good at basic oral hygiene despite roughly understanding how S. mutans works. Making herbal mouthwash might seem a lot more worthwhile when anaesthetic is less available, though, and there’s no good reason for dental floss to be made of plastic (though my drop spindle skills are admittedly not up to making it from nettle fibre). I know I have argued before that just because we currently use fossil fuels to do things does not mean we will magically forget things like germ theory or sterile processes; if we are producing enough surplus food then it should be possible for some people to specialise, and ultimately it is people who make things. It’s just that the “things” involved will be extremely expensive compared to now, and we’ll have to make do with more locally sourced materials in many cases. Specialisation, like cities, existed before fossil fuels and can reasonably be expected to continue after them, if to a somewhat lesser extent than today’s hyper-specialised world.
There are other areas where modernism isn’t great, really. It took us a long time to understand scurvy or pellagra but traditional diets often had effective mitigations against them, whereas my GP cannot figure out why I keep ending up with folate deficiency anaemia no matter how many blood tests they do (not that many) or how many fresh vegetables I eat (which is… a lot). I recognise the symptoms now enough to run my own experiments on dietary rather than supplemental interventions, but in terms of nutritional science we’re somewhere behind the era of leeches and bloodletting.
More broadly, I do wonder:
– do governance structures (like democratic states, feudalism, standing armies, city councils, etc etc) emerge in situations where there is a surplus of energy (perhaps previously largely in the form of grain agriculture, though I suspect oilseeds and other storable staples have a role to play), and wealth can therefore be accumulated and must be managed? Is there a relationship between the degree of surplus energy and the degree of centralisation of governance?
– Are we messing up the climate badly enough that storable staple agriculture is going to disappear? If so, how does that impact governance, given my previous question?
– If we do come out the other side of the Great Crumbling with a climate where storable staple agriculture is still possible in at least some places, what mitigations can we put into place to guard against excess accumulation of wealth? How do we decide what excess is, and who decides?
– If long-term storage of staple drops stops being viable in most parts of the world, and we also can’t force it into viability using fossil fuels (via diesel tractors and fossil fertilisers and pre-harvest dessicant herbicides and giant grain drying machines…), what are the growing techniques we should be looking to, and what types of governance structures will support those?
– How much can we do now in terms of constructing decentralised agrarian localist refugia, given all the above questions?
I can’t help but feel that JSO are ultimately protesting against themselves.
A bit like a member of the KKK protesting against White Supremacy 🙂
(I wrote the KKK comment in jest but….. on reflection, and with White Fragility by Robin Diangelo in mind, perhaps not….?)
All protests go the same way , as soon as they start to annoy the powers that be the full weight of the state falls on them , if protests win the powers that be loose , the only protests that win end up like Romania , the powers that be stood against a wall and machine gunned .
Maybe I’m too critical of the folks at JSO.
Perhaps all they are ultimately trying to do is wrestle some “agency” from our environmental predicament?
Is that really any different to me with my biochar retort, rocket stove and attempts to compost my own turds? All, probably pointless/futile in the face of coming events but give me a calming sense of control/agency.
Doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I guess the difference is that I don’t feel need or have the courage, self belief or moral authority to glue myself and my biochar retort to the middle lane of the M25 to draw people’s attention to the wonders and benefits of making beautiful, black, biochar.
I too, had a tooth removed recently.
Was the best £110 I’ve spent in a long time.
It’s strange how the permanent removal of a part of my body can be a source of such, pleasure/relief/satisfaction.
I’ve spent more on eating out and with less lasting enjoyment!!!
I keep running my tongue over the gap where the tooth used to be , and feeling a sense of contentment. The tooth has been a source of irritation for 5 years or more. (Why didn’t I think of getting it sorted earlier?????!!!)
I feel lucky that someone else has spent the time and effort to learn how to take the thing out with minimum fuss and very little pain and that I had the surplus cash to be able to afford it.
@Chris
“I disagree with John that concepts like democracy, feminism and equality are made possible by fossil fuels. Sheesh, I could write a book about that. In fact, I’m hoping to.”
Granted, my comment wasn’t particularly nuanced. (Very few of them are 🙂 )
What I was getting at was the idea that we need time and space for deep thinking.
The Ancient Greeks had time to think of things like democracy because they had slaves to provision them with their basic needs. We have fossil fuels.
I know, I wouldn’t have been able to go on the “deep dive” on my Fine Art Degree, if I was also doing and 8 hour shift in a supermarket 5 days a week.
This isn’t to say that, say, folks in Australia 10,000 years ago, weren’t able to go on their own “deep dives” because they had no slaves or fossil fuels. They obviously did.
But maybe hunter-gathering allowed for lots of time for contemplation.?
On feminism (l’m not going to pretend I’m up to speed on the subject. I ask my daughter, if I have a questions 🙂 ) but perhaps feminism is a result of fossil fuels because…………. the devisions of labour and gender roles, that feminism is trying to challenge/address came about due to industrialization in the first place.
Prior to modernity, gender roles and attitudes were very different????
Would those Australian folks 10,000 years ago, be completely baffled by 21st century feminist debate, or democracy, or……….?
I fully agree Huber’s final analysis fails, as many on the ‘fully automated communism’ left do. The analysis of the present problems, however, is pretty sound, especially in relation to his native US situation, but its nothing really ground breaking. He articulates the class structure of the ecological movements being made up of the professional classes who are unable to understand the material needs of the working class – which is relevant to discussions here. That was the first time I’d heard him, so my interest was piqued. I clearly do not condone his dismissal of your work – it is a real shame that self confessed advocates of Marx have not read his work in relation to the Russian peasantry.
The social tech of direct democracy through peoples assemblies is, as you say, a lasting legacy from the last nearly decade of largely successful ecological protest. Maybe that is where some hope for an agrarian localism here in the UK is arising from, where as the US, perhaps because of its scale as much as anything else, is less hopeful. I think increasingly that the peculiarities of the bioregions will have some sway in the local agrarian emergence.
I agree re: bioregions being important; the vital context of the material reality of what is possible in a particular place (and the way that context will shift with further climate catastrophe) is part of why it is so difficult to point to One True Way to Fix Everything. Even within the UK, I have to treat things like rainwater collection very differently than someone in, say, Manchester, which gets quite a bit more rain than east London does. On an even smaller scale, each of my five official growing sites has its own microclimate. Seeds sown the same week in each will grow at different rates, face different pest pressures and so on, and I am still learning what does best in each (though variation from year to year is also a factor).
Thanks for the good-natured responses to my comment. To respond briefly to a few points –
To Kathryn’s points about gentrification, I can go along with framing it in terms of a property of a system where wealth creation is prioritised over the common good (or where the reproduction of society is an unintended side effect of the private accumulation of capital, as I’m wont to put it). But that’s a more general framing, usefully encompassing the numerous hidden ways that economic rent conditions the wider social world. Is there something more specific that the word ‘gentrification’ better captures … economic inequality? Bad housing policy? The loss of working class cultures?
I agree with Kathryn that “the role of rents in our current society is more often than not extractive and exploitative”. I’d add that this goes way deeper than people often imagine, and the extractivism touches many people whose income on the face of it derives purely from a salary. I’d like to see an end to speculative gain from property and other asset ownership, but this has to be accompanied by just returns for work. The hissy fits my ‘Saying NO…’ book prompted in some quarters for its call for higher food prices (and lower housing costs) was quite telling IMO.
Some good questions to chew on at the end of Kathryn’s comment. Is there a relationship between the degree of surplus energy and the degree of centralisation of governance? Yes, I think so. But governance structures as such, including relatively egalitarian ones, are universal and not tied to energy or surplus.
To John’s related points, yes I accept that much of the specific form of modern feminism, democracy etc is conditioned by cheap and abundant energy … but not really the egalitarian impulse itself. I’m not sure it’s a case of moderns having time for deep thinking – many modern people probably have less. But it may be that there are some kinds of work that prompt different kinds of deep political and spiritual thinking … again of a kind that’s probably in shorter supply generally nowadays.
Regarding JSO protesting against themselves … well, yes I agree – against themselves and on behalf of everyone. One G. Monbiot (the Mark I version) wrote twenty-odd years ago “the campaign against climate change is an odd one …. it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves”.
But I’m not sure about the KKK parallel. It may be more fruitful to consider the ways in which the campaigns by Gandhi and MLK were also in some respects campaigns “against ourselves” that drew on spiritual traditions of humility. I’ve found the XR analysis that we’re all a product of a toxic culture and to avoid blaming and shaming ourselves and others for this potentially quite transformative, although it’s easy to deploy it in self-justificatory ways Maybe it all comes back to Steve’s point – jesters have a useful function in pointing out the faultlines of a culture, but they’re still a part of that culture.
To Joel’s points, I’d be interested to hear more about ‘the material needs of the working class’. I acknowledge the class-unawareness of much middle-class progressive activism, but maybe you’re saying something else? I’m particularly interested in considering what kinds of class activism and class alliance might result in the goose stealing the common back in present times, and what forms the recovered commons might take.
“Some good questions to chew on at the end of Kathryn’s comment. Is there a relationship between the degree of surplus energy and the degree of centralisation of governance? Yes, I think so. But governance structures as such, including relatively egalitarian ones, are universal and not tied to energy or surplus.”
I would say that it’s is probably difficult to have centralised governance without an energy surplus.
But that an energy surplus doesn’t necessarily always lead to centralised governance.
I’m in the Wengrow/Graeber camp on this one. Choice does/can play a part.
Regarding John’s KKK point — if the only people who can legitimately protest against a system are people who can survive entirely apart from from said system then we get nowhere fast, especially in a system where there is any power imbalance.
I can choose not to drive, but there is a fairly high personal cost to this. I can’t really choose not to pay rent, except in the “poor and rich alike are welcome to sleep underneath bridges” sense, no matter how unfair that might be, and nor (more problematically) can my spouse refuse paid employment. And… well, protests are often about raising awareness and getting people talking, and they usually happen when more polite means haven’t worked. So I have no real problem with people throwing soup on the glass covering a painting, or stopping motorway traffic. The best way to not have disruptive protests isn’t for the powerful to criminalise the act of protesting, but to actually make some changes.
But sending protesters to jail when things start to get real is also nothing new. The podcast “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” is excellent if you want to hear more about the history of protest; the host does not shy away from the messy and compromised nature of human beings doing human stuff.
The KKK comment was a little bit mischievous of me. I kinda new it might be a bit controversial.
But…… Do I elaborate or let it go? Hmmmm?????
OK. Just to add. In the light of reading White Fragility, I can see how a person of colour might find seeing “white” people on a BLM march, problematic.
(Robin Diangelo is “White” by the way)
Or I can see how watching a JSO protester drive home in 4×4 also problematic.
I’m all for public protest and civil disobedience.
Watching Colston getting dumped in Bristol harbour was a joyous moment.
But that is different to blocking a motorway or throwing soup on a painting.
Putting a slave trader on a metaphorical plinth by having him on an actual plinth has been controversial for a long time. Getting him removed through other means had always failed, so pulling him down as a last resort, gets my approval.
(And for those who say that it’s erasing our history, I would say. Colston is now more well known than before he was removed/dumped. I knew about Colston from childhood, because we were taught about him at school. (I grew up about 10 miles from Bristol) but his history and that of Bristol and slavery is now known nationally and internationally.)
The fact that there hasn’t been any groundswell of public opinion to have him reinstated suggests that most people agree with his removal (or don’t care either way) if not the methods.
On the other hand, what is chucking soup at a painting all about??????
I’m guessing the reason JSO haven’t vandalised oil tankers (lorries not ships 🙂 ) or refineries is because they know that they would end up in jail if they did.
But could they not see that blocking motorways was going to eventually get them in jail?
The “optics” aren’t great either. People who have the privilege/money/time to prevent other people of going to work to earn a living but who’s carbon footprint is just as big if not bigger.
I think JSO (or Insulate Britain, or whoever) knew they might end up in jail, knew the right-wing media would play up the disruption to “ordinary people trying to get to work”, and blocked traffic (or threw soup, or whatever) anyway.
Have you ever felt so strongly about something that you think it’s worth going to jail for?
@kathryn
“Have you ever felt so strongly about something that you think it’s worth going to jail for?”
No.
I have responsibilities to other people other than just myself.
Plus….
I’m a coward:)
“Have you ever felt so strongly about something that you think it’s worth going to jail for?”
Nor to set fire to myself 🙂
@Chris
Out of interest……
During your interactions with JSO/XR did you ever get a sense of a consensus of what to do?
Are JSO/XR thinking along ecomodernists lines? Renewables, EVs, heat pumps etc etc
or is it more along SFF lines?
“To make a living without farming, as most people do in the wealthy countries, involves economic rent – rent from nature and rent from exploited people worldwide in past and present generations. What’s close to the bone for me here as a small landowner/farmer/writer who – like most landowner/farmers – makes more of a living from rent than from ‘productive’ activities (though it’s important to distinguish between economic rent and rent as payment for services rendered … few comprehend this, but it becomes quite obvious when you create a farm out of nothing) is that the rentier basis of my livelihood is very apparent to everyone, whereas the rentier basis of the livelihood of, say, a doctor, nurse or teacher isn’t.”
Following along is the US, I think there is a difference in language for the word rent (along the lines of hood/bonnet or fries/crisp). My autocarrot doesn’t even recognize rentier as a word.
Can you phrase the rentier basis of your livelihood in american english ?
Here the definition of a rentier is someone who does not work, who lives off income from investments. A small farmer ? Images of rentier show reindeer…
Fries/chips
Potato chips/crisps
I think Chris means simply that part of someone’s income is based on rent.
I understand he rents out part of his land to other farmers.
As for doctors, nurses and teachers … well, over here they get paid by the government, and the government gets some of that money as interest on debt. Further, they eventually retire and receive pensions. Pension funds are often heavily involved in property markets, though my impression is that this is more along the lines of mortgages (i.e. renting money to people) than, say, owning and running a block of flats. I could be wrong about that, of course, and it may be that Chris had some other examples of enmeshment within rent-based systems in mind here.
http://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
Worth a read , Competence in technology when the old people who invented and worked it retire , we expect people to be competent , many are not , Goop food will be one of the problems when second raters design , build and run manufacturing ( thinking of Hinckley point here , decades behind schedule )
John raises some points of interest and points of fact regarding climate protest. I’ll try to address them in this reply.
TARGETS OF CLIMATE ACTION
I share the “Who do I think I am to block these innocent people?” qualms that John raises – one reason I’ve not been up to much as a climate activist.
But you could raise the same objections toward, say, striking train drivers or a formally organised legal march involving road closures. So there are questions about why such objections are made so forcefully in the case of direct climate action.
On a point of fact, JSO absolutely has targeted oil depots and oil tankers. I’m not so much in touch with what it’s been doing recently, but one thing I’ve learned from climate action (and from book writing!) is that what you read in the press about what’s going on and what’s actually going on are two different things.
There has been quite a lot of genuine anger among members of the public blocked by climate protests, understandably. There’s also quite a bit of confected media anger – even up to the point of ‘angry motorists’ turning out to be journalists. Yet there has also been a good deal of support, even from people who have been blocked, and this rarely gets reported.
I understand the narrative about people with the time/money/privilege to protest, though the ‘driving away in a 4×4’ point overdoes it a bit IMO. The other side of that coin is that if you’ve got the time/money/privilege to do it that others haven’t, then maybe there’s a responsibility to use it.
It’s hard to predict the consequences of actions. I know of some actions where those carrying them out have cut them short when it became apparent that they were basically just holding up ordinary working people to no great effect. What’s ‘a good look’ will probably look different to different people, and over different time periods, and in the light of different narratives that can be built around it.
One important aspect of these actions is that you make yourself vulnerable. It’s your body in front of a car. It’s you as a person who faces another person’s anger.
Another important aspect is that it shouldn’t be about personal virtue. You are not claiming that your personal environmental impact is necessarily lower than anyone else’s. That’s not the point. But maybe protesting helps you to look more critically at yourself on that front.
Typical media narratives around climate protestors are built along the lines of arrogant/entitled/selfish/fanatic. My experience of the movement, at least at its best, is more along the lines of vulnerable/humble/loving/realistic.
Responsibility to other people is important, and has been a big issue in my household. It can be a valid reason not to engage in protest. It can also be a valid reason to protest.
The point of many ‘blocking’ actions isn’t just to block people. Sometimes it’s been to get jailed in an effort to embarrass the government (for example here in the UK while it was hosting the international COP talks – this failed because the government resolutely avoided jailing people in this period despite having ample grounds to do so). Or to bring infrastructure grinding to a halt in order to force the government’s hand. This has largely failed due to insufficient numbers of protestors … but blaming the people who did step up to protest seems unfair.
JAIL
People know their actions might land them in jail – often enough, it’s what they want. But I doubt they want harshly punitive sentences – and I don’t understand why anyone of conscience should want that for them either.
More troubling to me than the sentencing is the way that people have been prevented from mentioning climate change in their defence, and juries have been threatened by judges for not returning guilty verdicts. These are hard won freedoms from autocracy and if we shrug when they’re waived in respect of defendants with whom we lack sympathy … well, we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves when they’re waived permanently in respect of all of us.
BLACK LIVES MATTER/EDWARD COLSTON
My sense is that many people of colour have welcomed white people on BLM marches. Black lives surely shouldn’t only matter to black people? I don’t see the white person/4×4 examples as analogous. Of course, if white people sought to assume leadership of BLM protests it would be different.
Regarding the Colston protest, sure it’s good his statue was removed from its pedestal. But I’m a bit uncomfortable with the way he now gets demonised as a person – as if the vast transatlantic slave trade was the work of a few bad apples. Colston used some of his riches philanthropically to the benefit of people in Bristol, and by extension, Britain. This is one example of the historic economic rent I mentioned. Suppose instead of all the focus on statues Britain paid reparations for the benefits it’s derived from slavery and colonialism. Well, that’s a whole can of worms, but it surely needs discussing … one reason for my advocacy of agrarian localism is that I think we need to better understand and bear the consequences of our actions on each other, and on nature.
The modern climate movement has drawn quite a lot of inspiration from the historic fight against racism and for civil rights in the USA. But so far it seems that the latter was more successful in recruiting activist long-term. Back to Joel’s point, maybe. But also perhaps when you have more skin immediately and directly in the game, when you want to overturn laws or practices that directly discriminate against you because of who you are, the stakes are clearer. A big problem with addressing climate change is this very lack of direct relatability, despite the fact that ultimately everybody has skin in the game.
XR/JSO/ECOMODERNISM
There are a wide range of views within the movement, especially given its basically leaderless nature. I mean, even George Monbiot has been arrested at an XR protest … so there’s definitely an ecomodernist strand! I do think that the ecomodernist tendency needs to be kept in check, and that there’s not enough focus on agrarian localist possibilities. But there’s definitely fertile ground for more radical futuring within the movement.
I was in touch with Gail Bradbrook a while back and sent her a copy of A Small Farm Future. Not sure if she read it… She got me an invitation to speak about my book at a women’s climate protest action in which I learned late on that the women were planning to be topless (emphasizing that vulnerability point again). Both my editor and my wife were far more delighted by this prospect than I was, but it was cancelled at the last moment. Just think – XR might have been fully Small Farm Future compliant now if only it had gone ahead. As I said – it’s hard to predict the consequences of actions…
I guess for me the difference with train driver strikes is that they planned in advance so that people can make/change their plans.
The JSO activists have the privilege of knowing where and when the action is taking place and can clear their diaries accordingly.
Put off those hospital appointments, take a day off work etc.
The inconvenience is then transferred to those unfortunate to be caught up in the protest.
It seems an odd strategy if the goal is to build a groundswell of public support?
And if it is to draw the public’s attention to the climate crisis, is there actually anyone left in the country who doesn’t now know?
I like to think that I have enough about me to know when I am being “played” by the right wing media 🙂
Train drivers also have a clear set of demands when striking.
I might not have been paying enough attention, but what are the government policy changes that JSO are calling for?
I’m sure that there are people of colour who approve of “white” folks attending BLM marches. And lots of other opinions in between.
It’s not like people of colour are on some basic level, all the same and have the same views, after all.!!!!!
Thanks for this comment, Chris — coherent and nuanced, as usual!
Regarding the civil rights movement in the US, the first thing I think of when I hear about it is the Black Panthers and their breakfast programmes.
Regarding reparations, there are a lot of mixed feelings flying around about the Church of England’s moves in this direction (see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/04/church-of-england-told-to-boost-size-of-fund-to-address-legacy-of-slavery ) but it is happening. I’m sure it won’t be perfect, and I would prefer a less capitalist approach, but it’s something. The focus of discussion around it at Deanery Synod has been along the lines of acknowledgement that a lot of the current poverty faced by black people in our (urban) communities is directly linked to historic injustice. We can’t erase that history with any amount of reparations, but pretending the playing field is level now is also simply not good enough.
Yes, Kathryn, the point at which the US government got really upset with the Black Panthers is when they started rolling out the breakfasts.
This relates to the Chris’s question about the material needs of the working class, itself a term used to describe people who are being extracted from – in relation to the rent discussion. I think that these are the material needs of people in general, the objects of care needed for a good life, starting with clean water, healthy food and safe shelter. This places agrarian localism into a powerful place for meeting these needs as we watch the state recede from provisioning the lower classes. The lower classes are also less burdened by the addictions of status and adjacence to oligarchy – they’re never gonna have an electric car and house with solar panels – to enter into the ‘suffering’ if farm life. Everyone I speak to from the ‘lower classes’, state educated, non professionals with regional accents, loves the idea of piece of land.
We see the ecological movement reverting to type as it clutches its pearls over the sentencing of the Whole Truth Five, and don’t get me wrong, Alice and I are active supporters of this movement, and unlike John have both been arrested (at different times – so someone could look after the kids etc.) in XR protests. Again, as the prejudice of society and its attendant judicial and prison system now turns on white middle class educated environmentalists we hear outrage. This prejudice has been omnipresent in the lives of lower classes forever. Hallam and the rest of these brave souls will never serve those full sentences, none of them will die in custody, and the poor souls languishing on circumstantial evidence with sentences without end continue to rot. Even the church is being asked to pray for this courageous five!
So, I think if we separate off ecological concerns from social, it will fail. Mutually assured destruction or mutually assured thriving (Indy Johar). We all go, or no one goes, there’s no partiality. John, be brave, you can do this!
I think there is a space for people who are, like John, somewhat averse to seeking out direct conflict with authorities. I myself noped out of street protesting a long time ago on the grounds that my skills are better used in actions that won’t get me deported, or indeed get someone else sent to jail because I messed something up. Risk assessments of this sort are just part and parcel of the project of offering some alternative to the current situation.
We are going to need everyone. (Or, in theological language, the imago Dei is so far beyond our individual abilities that it can only be borne by the whole embodied diversity of humanity and indeed creation.) But this means we have to do the hard work of engaging with one another without applying purity tests, either in terms of who is so energetic that their strategies might backfire (and I’m really not sure that JSO strategies are doing that, exactly, if public opinion can be so easily swayed against environmental action then we have yet deeper problems), or so cautious that they risk making no difference at all. And once we’ve decided not to engage in the circular firing squad, and learned not to shoot one another down for zealousness or cowardice, we then have to do the hard work of discerning what actions we should actually take.
Personally I find something akin to Ignatian spirituality helpful in this respect, but I’m sure there are other frameworks available.
Well said, I heartily agree, there is no in group/out group if we’re to tackle this.
I’ll look up the Ignation spiritual framework. It sounds most intriguing.
Its not only the black panthers breakfast they get pisses at , your soup kitchen would be suspect over here and you could expect to spend some time being investigated as church food stations are regularly harassed in Texas democrat run metro areas .
Now for another point , the governments can only employ large numbers because of fossil fuels , in Chris’s future there will not be enough excess food to keep them , 2% of the population working 24/7 /365 could not feed the rest , as in days of old the government would employ 2 % the rest would be growing food , only when there is excess food can there be excess government .
I don’t want to come across as a complete wimp here 🙂
I have been on street protests and did facilitate/encourage/accompany my daughter on the School Strikes for Climate protests (or whatever they were called) and listened to Greta on College Green. I thought that it was important that my daughter saw that protest was her right and something that was open to her.
It’s all about making judgment calls and if she had been arrested, then I think it was probably a lesson she didn’t need to be learning at 14.
(And there was quite a lot of dickhead behaviour on some of the marches.)
Maybe I just haven’t found the hill I’m prepared to die on yet?
JSO is definitely not that hill for reasons I’ve banged on about for long enough. Or maybe I’m kidding myself, and I’d ultimately run away 🙂 ?
Without wanting to go into my personal circumstances at length……….a custodial sentence would really really put the cat amongst the pigeons and would be a total selfish act on my part!!!!!
Joel’s point about clutching of pearls made me laugh.
And ideas around class make me think about points I made earlier. “Class”, like some other societal structures, are perhaps products of fossil fuels.
A comment regarding JSO, rent and one other thing.
Lots to agree with in comments about climate protest. To John’s question about the demands of JSO, I’m not the best spokesperson but originally it was basically to stop new fossil fuel projects in the UK (so ‘Just Stop New Oil in the UK’), which is now the policy of the new government. Not that it’s going to make a huge difference globally. Insulate Britain was about pressurising the government to keep to its minimal promises about home insulation at the time it was hosting COP, the aim being to have people in jail as prisoners of conscience to embarrass the government while the global media lens was trained on COP. The government dealt with this by not jailing them. And XR’s demands are these: https://www.xrebellion.nyc/demands-principles
As previously discussed, I think the ground up alternative politics formulated by XR may be the most important legacy of the climate protest movement.
I do understand the qualms about disrupting people (and there are various actions that have been done I really don’t support, while others that haven’t been disruptive of ordinary people). But it’s not just about people knowing about climate change, it’s about doing something about it. “We didn’t do enough about climate change because it was too disruptive of everyday life … until it disrupted everyday life” might be our civilization’s epitaph.
I kind of like the XR slogan “Whose streets? Our streets!” I know we all set off down the road on our errands expecting to get from A to B in a certain time. But streets are for protesting on as well as driving down. The bigger challenge is what to do with the streets and the land after the protest…
I like Joel’s pearl-clutching comment. Very true that there can be a kind of entitled ‘this is absolutely outrageous!’ middle class vibe around things that figure more as an inevitable spot of bad weather in many working-class lives. So then hopefully it’s about building solidarity, class alliances and better mutual understanding. Not easy to do, but I’m impressed by what commenters on here are doing
I also agree with Joel on the ubiquitous desire for a little land – for example in the case of the desk sergeant booking in a bunch of us lot at one action. ‘Nobody wants to farm any more/bucolic fantasy’ as a latter-day strategy of elite control and enclosure.
Ah, but herein lies a confession I’m emboldened to make in the light of Kathryn’s purity test point … in a moment.
So, to the matter of rent & Greg’s question.
Three points, that Kathryn nails. First ‘rent’ technically as basically mined/unearned/one-way benefit to a person above and beyond their share in the form of accumulated labour or accumulated destruction taken from the human or natural world and/or externalized somewhere else. I hope to write more about this soon.
So a salary + pension from a university job extracts rent in numerous historic and contemporary ways, even if the university worker never receives any income formally from ‘rent’ as such.
Or rent on my land for people to use it in some way or other – complicated by the fact that we do work to make it rentable in various ways (providing the campsite, buildings, tilled ground etc) and try to take in various waifs and strays on easy terms for them. If only because I am a waif and stray too, or at least I would be if I wasn’t lucky enough to own some land and a house.
Or a kind of implicit rent from owning the land in the first place, even if it’s not paying anything. Land that I have legal rights over and could put to various uses, which other people can’t.
But finally I have to confess (hold off there, purity police!) that I have been a landlord of a more standard kind at times in my life, partly in lieu of an occupational pension that I’ve foregone. Hopefully a good landlord, like Kathryn’s, but as she points out that’s not really the point. I’d like to earn enough money from writing and farming … but few do. When we had a farm business advisor visit here (it was a government freebie in the context of reduced farm subsidies, which tells its own story) the first thing he asked was whether we had buildings which we could gain rental income from. The biggest problem here as I see it is the one Kathryn identifies in terms of the massive inflation of land and housing values that locks most people out of access and puts a vastly overinflated liquid value on land. I’d like to see that ended, and land cyclically distributed, even though it would make me poorer. But I don’t want to see small-time proprietors locked out of possibilities for any kind of liveable income outside the structures of selling their labour to the corporate-capitalist state. So it’s not only income from rents that needs reforming. The weird thing about my finances – similar to a lot of farmers, I guess – is that I have below-average income and above-average wealth.
Finally, the one other thing is that I’m currently writing a long essay about renewable energy (hopefully my last for the time being on this hot topic), meaning that it may be a little while before my next post – unless somebody would care to suggest an open comment topic?
One last foray into JSO from me…..I promise!!!!!
I think in the case of the UK (and eventually the rest of the world) we are in the process of Just Stopping Oil, with or without street protests.
On a global perspective, we have reached “peak oil” in 2018 and are on the downward slope.
The relentless rise of the Energy Costs of Energy are going to result in less and less surplus energy to run modernity. The crumbling of infrastructure (and crumpling politics) are the results.
Here in the UK, things might happen sooner rather than later. We have to buy our fossil fuels from abroad. (Long gone are the days when we used to just go over and take it) but what have we got to offer in exchange? We don’t manufacture anything any more and the financial economy is all smoke and mirrors. Soon no-one will want our worthless currency either.
A life with declining fossil fuels is just round the corner .
How that pans out is anyone’s guess.
As Joel points out, we are all in it together and it will be the ultimate “leveler” of “class”.
Quick thought on your pondering on rent Chris.
Even if you did manage to create a living from writing you would only remove yourself from the rental economy by one point of degree.
The people who consume your writing would still be doing so from the relationships of rent/renter/rentier. It’s everywhere.
Maybe a return to tally sticks is the answer. We would all bound to eachother in complex relationships of credit and debt. Simultaneously the creditor and the debtor.
This is the how an Agrarian localised society must function.
Re rent, yes I agree with that John, which is why the standard view of profit & wages as productive and rent as parasitic is a bit too simplistic. All the same, we’ve created a big problem of debt and land-based speculative gain in contemporary society that gets in the way of people doing more useful and pro-social things.
I think your Crown suggestion has merit, although I’d frame it in more distributist terms. In A Small Farm Future I floated the idea of effectively 100% estate taxes on a dead person’s estate, with the option of their children having first refusal on a mortgage to buy it, which they (or whoever else bought it) could pay off in the course of a farming career. I’m interested in opinions about this and ideas for other ways of keeping land, farms and houses in many hands. Joel’s idea of pooled private capital for community buy-backs is another interesting one that I’ve discussed with various people, but not yet really seen in action. One of the issues is getting people versed in the agrarian localism idea.
I quite like the idea of controls or caps on rent. I have less idea of how to implement them. Perhaps just a simple tax on rental income from housing, that goes up 10% for every property one owns.
Before demonising landlords too much it’s also I quite like the idea of controls or caps on rent. I have less idea of how to implement them. Perhaps just a simple tax on rental income from housing, that goes up 10% for every property one owns. Would a legion of small-time landlords be better than lots of big corporate ones? I don’t know; I have only ever really dealt with the small-time ones, and in all cases it has been the letting agents that caused the most headache.
Before demonising individual landlords too much it’s also important to remember that the mortgages for buy-to-let properties are very profitable for banks. Landlords are not the only parties who benefit from the system as it currently functions, and often what seem like extortionately high rents passed on to tenants are the only way they can get a mortgage (and the associated income security) at all. So I do think it takes active consideration and a conscious commitment to be a good landlord.
Chris, I am certain that you would approach this particular compromise with your usual thoughtfulness and care.
I’m also mindful that while housing prices in my lifetime have only ever gone up (except for some very brief wobbles), this needn’t be the case forever. Like fossil fuels, the issue here is that the further we kick the can down the road — protecting house prices (and land prices) in the interests of the wealthy, and approaching some kind of utilisation where the only way to even approach profitability is to extract maximum rent through measures like AirBnB or leaving three properties empty to maximise scarcity and collect more rent on the fourth — the harder the economic crash will be when the whole house of cards comes down. The situation we’re in now, where I don’t dare move because I doubt we could afford to rent anywhere else even on my spouse’s income, is symptomatic of a wider precarity. (While we’re making confessions: my spouse does own a rather crummy one-bedroom flat, with only a few years left on the mortgage. It currently has a somewhat distressed friend living in it and not yet capable of paying any rent at all, but at least they aren’t sleeping rough, which was looking like their best option at the point we intervened; our current housemate also has a very low income and owes us quite a bit of money for his share of household bills. So there are repercussions for people besides us if we have to move, and my spouse’s three month period of unemployment last year was far more stressful than it would otherwise have been.) And it raises questions about what wage increases will actually do to help: will people truly have more options or will the housing (or mortgage) market, and supermarket profit margins for that matter, merely adjust upwards? Chris, I think you’ve previously suggested something like not taxing income from wages at all, only income from investments, and I think this might be helpful, but as usual I’m not quite sure how we get there from here.
Meanwhile I’ve been tracking how much my allotment and foraged produce would cost if I paid retail prices for it (using the organic and local option wherever possible), and… well, berries are expensive and I certainly wouldn’t have bought 6kg of strawberries if I were paying money for them. I’m also struggling with even finding pricing for things like wild fungi, wild flowers, and some of the less common allotment produce. I feel like my general food situation is closer to that of someone who is very wealthy, albeit one who loves to cook and preserve. And I could really do with a big farmhouse kitchen, but that isn’t happening either. to remember that the mortgages for buy-to-let properties are extremely profitable for banks. Landlords are not the only party who benefit from the system as it currently functions. But I do think it takes active consideration and a conscious commitment to be a good landlord within the current system. Chris, I don’t doubt for a second that you would approach this particular compromise with thoughtfulness and care.
Ugh, I composed a lot of this comment elsewhere and pasted it back here and messed up the process somehow, leading to some unexpected repetition.
(,Also I see I threaded it incorrectly. Ho hum.)
Missing from this thread is taxes , firstly you don’t own anything it is rented from the state , fail to pay the taxes and it is confiscated to pay owed tax .
2, prices are controlled by how much money governments print into existence , if there is a glut of potatoes the price falls , same with currency ,if there is a glut of pounds sterling the price drops against other currencies . no government anywhere balances its budget , the USA is borrowing one Trillion dollars every 100 days to finance its deficit in taxes ,that causes inflation which of course is blamed in those peasants scrambling to keep up with prices . money that is magically born into existence by banks that loan it to governments and charge interest , the USA is paying 1 trillion dollars in interest per annum .
As for death duties , after the first world war many landed estates were broken up and sold as the heir had been killed in the trenches , good or bad thing ? Well a lot of country houses are now open to the public to keep the roof on and many lie in ruins after they were abandoned .
If the government took everything I have slogged for all my life I would not have anything to hand on to the family I would sell it now and blow the proceeds in having a good life before I die . No one would work hard there would be no ambition as there would be no point .
@Diogenes10
Your point about the State really owning stuff chimes with my thoughts on the possibility of The Crown owning everything.
Technically, it already does.
It just needs tweeking a bit.
(Removal of the aristocracy and landed gentry for starters.)
With regard to some of your other points on tax.
I’m more in the MMT camp.
That tax is (amongst other things) a mechanism for removing/destroying money from the economy rather than a way of the State raising money.
If the State has the monopoly on money creation (try printing some yourself and see what happens!!!), why does it then need to borrow it back?
That being said, most money is created by private banks (on license) when they make loans.
But……..maybe this is going off on a tangent from the main themes of this blog?
@Chris
Following on from Diogenes 10’s post……..
And I am really going to show my ignorance here!!!!!!!!
As an owner of agricultural land, do you have to pay a form of “land tax” or similar to The State/Crown? If so, is it per acre or something?
Do you have any guest posts to fill the gap?
Ha ha, as a matter of fact I do. But I think I’m waiting for the final draft from its authors, no?
I would be interesting in an open comment topic on economic bubbles. In my lifetime we’ve seen an IT industry bubble and a housing bubble, allegedly, but I think they were comparatively small.
There is something I can’t quite articulate about the difference between a bubble caused by surplus (IT looks profitable, companies invest in IT stuff and people train in it, suddenly there are more qualified people than jobs for them, wages plummet and it’s a bit grim while people re-train) or a bubble caused by scarcity (fossil fuels are profitable, companies invest in fossil fuels extraction, oops it turns out this stuff is both toxic and scarce and we will have to stop using it) or a bubble caused by over-financialisation (the American sub-prime mortgage lending crisis that contributed to the 2008 recession). To me they all seem like types of boom and bust cycles but I lack the vocabulary to differentiate between them without looking at what is actually going on; maybe I should be looking at them in terms of positive feedback Vs negative feedback systems.
I wonder whether other commenters here see bubbles or impending bust periods in other areas. I suspect the “business as usual” crowd assume things as they are can continue indefinitely, or think maybe there are only a small number of easily-contained bubbles waiting to burst. So I suppose what I am wondering is what other people here look at and immediately see as unsustainable in and of itself, what are the signals that something is amiss, what measures are being taken to avoid or delay acknowledgement of such risks and why.
I might not be articulating this very well. Or perhaps comments on such a post would turn into a doom-fest. In the early pages of A Small Farm future you listed several interlocking, difficult crises; I suppose I am wondering if there are any others we have missed so far.
@Kathryn
I think “bubbles” are both complicated and simple at the same time.
In general terms a “bubble” is created when too much capital is injected into a sector that can’t generate the returns. Investors then decide to “get out” causing a rush to the exit.
The housing bubble is complicated though.
A big part of the problem is the need to attract foreign investment into the UK.
As I eluded to in an earlier comment, UK plc needs to buy essentials from abroad. Oil being top of the list.
As we no longer produce/manufacture stuff in any quantity we have to sell off the “family silver” instead.
Rising real estate prices means more foreign cash every time a property changes hands to a foreign investor.
But the knock on effect is rising rents as the cost of “buy to let” mortgages (as well as pretty much everything else) goes up accordingly.
This is also a big part of the privatization of utility companies and infrastructure. To attract foreign capital/money/investment.
But, this is all obviously unsustainable long term and when the foreign investment dries up, we won’t be able to afford the oil to “grease the cogs” of modernity, so to speak.
Or is it “Madernity “??? 🙂
The UK is not the only country circling the drain , the USA is borrowing big time forcing up costs / interest rates world wide .
Interest Payments on US National Debt Will Shatter $1,140,000,000,000 This Year – Eating 76% of All Income Taxes Collected
Those numbers are worse than Zimbabwe .
On and off topic the three big net companies Google, Microsoft , Amazon , have laid off 10,000 tech specialist and replaced them with artificial intelligence , writing code now goes along side lamp lighter and night soil collector .
@Kathryn
You might find this interesting in relation to your questions on bubbles
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/07/22/284-maybe-later/
There is definitely a debt bubble , US banks have reported in the last quarter $1.1 trillion in bad debts they expect never to recover , A considerable amount of these debts is that office blocks are now redundant , people are working from home so those buildings are now useless , Austin TX has over 4 million sq/ft empty . Retail is getting as bad as large shopping malls are dying too . Housing is a real problem , after vivid interest rates fell to near zero so corporations like blackrock bought tens of thousands of homes and rented them out , they paid the asking price and bought them with near free money , they own enough properties and have enough muscle
to force up rents , ($ 2500 A month in our nearest college town ) .
Vivid = covid
To the other part of Chris’s question about how the agrarian localism might emerge in regards to commons, is a question of what coalitions can be made. On the one hand, if we are to believe this government’s talk of devolution and tough against crime then a campaign for ‘County Farms not county lines’, can begin a discussion of town, council and Borough food security and resilience. At the same time pooling private interests to buy back land for community and trust models. All the time with an emphasis on getting healthy organic food to as many people as possible.
Having just listened to Jenny Goodall on Accidental Gods, the scale of toxicity in our food and water is enough to make anyone want to seek healthier alternatives. Sue Pritchard of the food farming and countryside commission (FFCC), has done alot of the leg work of proving the appetite for healthy food grown locally in the UK, and now would be the time to seek out coalitions across the health, care, education and food sectors in to establish real farming techniques as a basis for resilient local food systems. I would include the church in care, and seek to get commitments from these institutions, the great Universities and some kind of consensus from the great aristocratic landowners on how they wish to proceed (including the King!)
Joel.
On land….access, redistribution, ownership, rent……… etc.
Perhaps (I can’t actually believe I am thinking this!!!!) but maybe the answer is for the Crown to take back all land and then “rent” it back out with an equitable distribution and token rents.
It’s a structure that is (in theory) above politics.
I haven’t really got a problem with a figurehead who is above politics but who is also effectively powerless. Hereditary or not. I’m not that bothered.
It’s the rest of the landed gentry that would need to be disenfranchised.
Just thought I’d throw it out there to see how it flies???!!!
Perhaps its time that governments that want net zero should start by example , all capital cities will be net zero by 2040 say , let the problems be worked out where those in control have direct control and can directly see the costs , benefits and problems doing this country wide .
A little good news .
https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change
Thanks, interesting.
A bit late in the comment-cycle to be saying this, so won’t argue it at length but …
The currency of direct-action protest is inherently inflationary – no matter how carefully and mindfully and NVDA-ishly it starts out (and I have no doubt at all that things like JSO start from a good place) each action raises the social temperature, makes it easier for things to ratchet up.
So while I think environmental direct action probably does a bit of good (and I admire, with caveats, people who take part), it seems to me impossible to know how much that good is. And hence legitimate to not take part, without needing to respond to attempts at guilt-tripping. And also, perhaps, difficult to know when to stop.
Thanks for some interesting threads of recent discussion here. I’m probably going to be offline for a couple of days, but I’ll post something or other new up next week, I hope.
Maybe bubbles, that’s a good one. I’m wondering if we can define points of distantiation and financialisation/virtualisation when a bubble becomes more than just a bubble in the sense of a spot of market over-enthusiasm. A trouble bubble. I think we’re in one.
Agree with Martin on the dangers of inflationary activism, which I think is possibly a difficulty JSO has got itself into. But it’s worth looking at some of the quieter behind the scenes stuff that these activist circles generate, like the political stuff I’ve mentioned.
Also agree that nobody needs to justify their involvement or non-involvement in climate protest. But there do come points in history when people are called upon to take sides whether they like it or not and define themselves as A or B. Most people probably hope they won’t experience such times, but I fear they may be coming.
But there do come points in history when people are called upon to take sides whether they like it or not and define themselves as A or B.
Possibly. But only possibly – because that sentence can be read as a blatant rhetorical appeal – one which is used or implied many non-environmental disputes: “agree with us – and our programme and theory – or you are the enemy – if you are not for us you are against us”.
Sometime true, and sometimes not.
Agreed, that’s often exactly the problem – with us or against us as a rhetorical/ideological framing, to which it’s usually possible to say ‘well, it’s a bit more complicated than that’. The problem comes when that response lands you in trouble – either with politically powerful players who frame the choice, or with one’s own conscience.
Off-topic, but… I’ve gone and started a substack myself. It doesn’t have anything as in-depth as you write about here, though: it’s just me, choosing one thing per day that I grew or foraged and ate that day to write about. (Probably mostly food, though nettle fibre might get a look-in at some point I guess.) All the posts are available to “free” subscribers and I currently intend to keep it that way.
http://locavore.substack.com
I’m considering it as a tiny contribution to a culture of, if not agrarian localism, at least local producerism. At the moment I’m aiming to see how many days I can go without repeating a featured ingredient, though I daresay in December the challenge will just be how many days I can go eating my own locally grown stuff.
Great idea Kathryn, well done!
I’m a sub stack virgin, but will check it out.
Congrats Kathryn. Welcome to the world of online horticultural content creation! I hope you’ll still keep us up to date with your activities here too 🙂
Of course I will keep commenting here, Chris, and that will no doubt include the occasional flora and fauna update. (Today’s harvest: another kilo of blackberries from the special secret spot nobody else really visits. I didn’t even bring the stepstool for the high up ones!)
Briefly looking into the history of jesters, I found an old story/play involving a feud between some farmers and a court jester named “Neidhart Fuchs, the historical, musical ‘merry counselor’ of Duke Otto the Merry of Austria [14th century], known as the ‘Farmer’s Enemy’ (Der Baurenfeind) on account of his constant joking at their expense.”
“The play opens innocently enough with Neidhart finding the first violet of spring, which he covers with his hat while he goes to fetch the duchess to show it to her (fig. 29). Three farmers who hate him because he hunts through their fields decide this is their chance to dish out some retribution. They pick the violet, and one of them replaces it with his own freshly deposited turd (fig. 30). The duchess arrives with her retinue to view the violet and is somewhat astonished by what she finds. Neidhart begs forgiveness, assuring her it must be the doing of a farmer. Farmers: 1, jester: 0.”
“There follows a marvelous scene in which the farmers add insult to injury by tying the violet to a stick and singing around it (fig. 31). Neidhart rallies some rabble from the court to fight them, thereby seizing possession of the by now shrinking violet, which he finally presents to the duchess. Farmers: 1, jester 1.”
The farmers respond with another prank (“Farmers: 2, jester 1.”), which the jester later foils (“Farmers: 2, jester 2.”), as described on pages 215-217 of this book:
Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World
By Beatrice K. Otto
University of Chicago Press, 2001
https://books.google.com/books?id=2BglxUD6Q6kC&lpg=PR1&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=false