Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on December 11, 2024 | 52 Comments
I wrote a long review article that’s just been published in The Land magazine, engaging critically with various books bearing on farming and wildlife in Britain, but hopefully of wider interest. I’m reproducing it here (if I have time I may give a bit of background to it in my next post):
It’s fallen to me to honour the promise in The Land 34 of reviewing Guy Shrubsole’s new book, The Lie of the Land. I can only do this by putting it into a wider context, so this essay considers not only aspects of Guy’s preceding book, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, but also various other recent and recent-ish books bearing on nature, farming and politics.[i]
Along with the likes of Eoghan Daltun, George Monbiot and Joel Scott-Hawkes, Guy is a prominent advocate for increasing the cover of temperate rainforest in the wet, western parts of the British Isles. This fits within a wider project laid out in his other books, which I’d summarise as follows: too much land in Britain is concentrated in too few hands, nature is in a mess due to human activities (farming critical among them), and something needs to be done about it – we need a different politics around farming and land use.
I agree with all this, and have argued along similar lines in my own books, where I’ve made the case for low-input local agrarianism. Yet while in the past I’ve interacted positively with some among the tribe of rainforest writers, I’ve more recently found myself publicly at loggerheads with most of them, including Guy.
I mention this by way of disclosure: I’m not an unbiased observer in this discussion. Nobody is ever an unbiased observer, a point that’s relevant to my argument. However much we agree on the headline issues, there are differences between agrarianism and the approaches of the rainforest writers which I explain in this article in the hope it serves wider debate. More than that, in the hope it helps mitigate against emerging political conflicts over land that serve few interests except an accumulative and extractive capitalism.
The Lie of the Land begins with two quotations. One is from former Tory MP, Matthew Parris: “Land needs to be owned if it’s to be looked after”. The other is from Gerrard Winstanley, well-known as a seventeenth-century land rights activist (less well-known as a merchant and landowner): “The earth … shall be a common treasury for all”.
Guy’s book proceeds from the notion that these two quotations are inherently incompatible. This isn’t a hard argument to press when so few people own so much land and do such a bad job of looking after it, while so many people own nothing. The most compelling parts of Guy’s book are when he deploys his formidable research skills to let rip with both barrels of his full-choked metaphorical twelve gauge at the socially exclusive and ecologically destructive gamebird industry servicing the rich-listers and associated chumlies who own Britain’s gigantic moorland shooting estates.
Yet much as I admire this spectacle, a single well-aimed shot with an air rifle might have done the job. Ownership can mean different things in different societies, but essentially it’s just the collectively agreed right for the owner to derive an exclusive benefit (not necessarily every conceivable benefit) from the owned thing. This is why peasants and other ordinary folk have historically moved might and main to get ownership of a little patch of land and to nurture it for their own and their household’s benefit, because lack of ownership exposes them to the fickler hand of fate. One way to make the earth a common treasury for all is to create the conditions for widespread small-scale private ownership of productive land.
If landownership rests on collectively agreed rights, that prompts the question of how the collective is formed – who’s in the room, doing the agreeing? Historically in Britain the answer is large-scale landowners, and few others. Guy ably shows how Tory MPs, landowner organisations, right-wing thinktanks and associated blowhards have tried to perpetuate this monopoly by fabricating a narrative around the wise stewardship of existing landowners, the need to slash red tape, and the threat of the great unwashed public accessing land.
Perhaps now, though, Guy says, “there is a chance for a different conversation. As I write a new government has just taken power. Change is in the air”.[ii]
In its election manifesto, the Labour Party which has formed that government lamented the brake on economic growth caused by the current planning regimen, and promised to forge ahead with new roads and other infrastructure by slashing red tape. Quadrature Capital, an offshore-registered hedge fund with interests in fossil fuels and arms trading, made a sly £4 million donation to the Labour Party at the beginning of the election campaign.[iii] Political analyst Tom Hazeldine’s view that the present Labour leadership is more committed to a Washington-led capitalist world order than any previous Labour administration seems, so to speak, on the money.[iv] Change in the air? Maybe not much.
An issue I have with Guy’s book is that his main solution to the problem of private ownership (by which he generally means concentrated private ownership) is to further concentrate property rights in the hands of the state, whose interests he equates with those of the public’s. Even if it were true that the public and the state’s interest coincide on the occasions when the state is in the hands of the Labour Party, it seems a fair bet that it won’t always be in its hands. Between them, the Conservatives and the Reform Party gained considerably more votes in the 2024 election than Keir Starmer’s red tape-slashing Labour Party, despite its huge but shallow-rooted majority. Reform’s manifesto included scrapping net zero commitments and protecting country sports. For those who want to safeguard nature, putting more power over land into the hands of the state could seriously backfire.
But that’s not the main problem. The old-fangled notion that market failures are corrected by state ownership and regulation misses the fundamental problem of an expansionary global capitalism that coopts both markets and states. All political parties with a realistic chance of power in the Global North know which side their bread is buttered and are committed to this. Capitalism requires a particular alignment of market relations backed by state power to enforce corporate accumulation and profit maximization. Guy’s analysis of the emergence of driven gamebird shoots as an outcome of Victorian-era industrialism implicitly underlines the fact that twenty-first century toffs with shotguns and their ecocidal gamekeepers are merely a symptom of a deeper problem.
In The Agricultural Dilemma, Glenn Davis Stone shows how these capitalist relations operate in the global food system.[v] They involve the overproduction of a restricted range of commodity crops (whatever a given region can most advantageously sell into global markets), typically orchestrated by a flow of public money to the private corporations that control the necessary input commodities, and thence a race to the bottom for farmers and ex-farmers caught in the price hammer of global markets – plus an awful lot of nature destruction. If we’re to extricate ourselves from this global economy of death, we need a deeper analysis than Guy offers of what ‘the government’ or ‘the state’ is, and also of what ‘the public’ is. It’s unwise to think a bit more housetraining can shore up the state as public guardian.
This is a different discussion in the 2020s to what it was in the 1980s. Guy writes that “four decades of neoliberalism have wrecked our faith in the power of the state to do good”.[vi] That’s true, but there’s a risk of progressives nostalgically trying to recreate their 1940s-1970s Keynesian happy place in a now vastly more debt-leveraged and growth-constrained world where the ability of states to even survive the political, economic and biophysical tensions they’re under can’t be assumed. I’d argue that a convincing contemporary analysis of the state’s power to do good in the future needs to explain what that future state will look like. If the assumption is it’ll be much like contemporary ones, how so? What we call ‘the state’ as if it’s an obvious and enduring reality might prove to have been a random historical assemblage of political elements that are now drifting apart.[vii] We need to unlearn assumptions about the state as the ultimate arbiter of the good, and the ultimate seat of legitimate power.
A useful definition of contemporary capitalist society is that it secures its collective reproduction as an unintended side-effect of competitive profit maximization.[viii] ‘Competitive profit maximization’ and ‘unintended side-effect’ are key. It’s not really about private property as such – it’s more about the state as guarantor of the corporate private property that permits profit maximization, and its relative indifference to other kinds of property and relationships. This state-corporate nexus doesn’t care about you and it doesn’t care about the Earth, except inasmuch as it can generate a profitable revenue flow from either.
Governments do have to offer some services to their client populations and some protections from the worst excesses of profit maximization, but they’ve moved into what political economist Wolfgang Streeck calls a ‘consolidation’ phase where their commercial market obligations take precedence over their political citizenship obligations. Guy’s new book fits the ‘return of the state’ narrative recently popular in centre-left circles, but it flies in the face of these geopolitical realities.[ix]
Globally, few people can escape the state-corporate capitalist nexus, but many do try to build relationships and livelihoods as best they can outside it. Which prompts my working definitions of ‘a public’ and ‘a community’ that I’ll use in this article. A public is a group of people claiming long-term rights in respect of a state. A community is a group of people claiming long-term livelihoods in respect of a place.
Like any bald dualism, it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. But my argument is that in the long-term we’ll best serve the interests of human wellbeing and ecological integrity by supporting livelihood communities, not by building publics dependent on the capitalist state and its ambiguous loyalties.
In his fine book Shaping the Wild – a gentle attempt to build bridges between conservation and farming based largely around a single Welsh upland sheep farm – David Elias writes that “the looming threat of environmental collapse” makes his efforts as a conservationist sometimes “seem like fiddling about on the margins”.[x] That resonates with me. In the present state of things, we’re all basically fiddling. Guy proposes various fiddles at the end of The Lie of the Land to democratise the governance of land and make landowners accountable for their claims of stewardship. Most of them are quite sensible fiddles – although, as I’ll argue below, some seem likely to militate against the interests of livelihood communities and in favour of publics who I fear will be disappointed by the paltry practical commitments of Britain’s consolidation state. But they’re still just fiddles. Maybe it’s time to take the ‘looming threat of environmental collapse’ more seriously, and the notion that centralised modern states and their bureaucratic apparatuses are equipped to deal with it less seriously.
The impoverishment of British, and global, nature and wildlife since World War II has been precipitous. A major culprit is farming, along with forestry in some places. What lies behind this is the maturation of the global capitalist agriculture that I mentioned, what some call ‘the cheaper food paradigm’.[xi] The drivers have been processes of labour substitution involving rising use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, the terraforming of the farmed landscape around large-scale machinery and the pursuit of higher yields at lower costs which in Britain has manifested in changes like slurry instead of farmyard manure, silage instead of hay, decline in overwinter stubbles, hedgerow loss and Sitka spruce plantations instead of ‘useless coppice’.[xii] Generally it’s been about the overproduction of cheap commodity crops as part of the global race to the bottom analysed by Stone.
A major focus of critique among the rainforest writers is overproduction of sheep in the ‘sheepwrecked’ British uplands. It’s widely agreed this is a problem, although it’s one instance of a deeper one: global agricultural overproduction and over-specialisation that manifests in wheatwrecked, soywrecked, rapewrecked, chickenwrecked, palmwrecked, coconutwrecked, coffeewrecked and suchlike farmscapes around the world. Maybe the generic term could be nitrogen-wrecked, in reference to ‘nitrogen capitalism’ as the major destroyer of livelihoods and local agrarian communities in the modern period.[xiii] A point of contention I have with the British rainforest writers is that they focus too singularly on upland sheep and not enough on the nitrogen-wrecked lowlands (another wildlife disaster) without appreciating the common thread.
This industrial land use needs to change – but how, and who needs to do the changing? Well, obviously farmers need to farm differently, but there’s a tendency among the rainforest writers to pin the blame on them, as if the decision to shed labour from agriculture and embrace the nitrogen-wrecking cheaper food paradigm was some mad decision farmers collectively chose in the teeth of public protest and government resistance. It’s a bit like blaming factory workers for industrial capitalism.
In The Lie of the Land, Guy pushes this blame game pretty hard. He advocates for public access to farmland so that people can act as whistleblowers for destructive farm practices. I appreciate the case for it, although I fear the false positives and cultural negatives of ignorant-blunderer-meets-struggling-farmer could have bad political consequences. Guy gets to the crux in a quotation from former MP, Gordon Prentice: “…walkers and ramblers have not poisoned the countryside with pesticides. We have not polluted the water courses. We have not silenced the countryside as the birds have perished”.[xiv] No, but have they bought cheap food at the supermarket, availed themselves of BOGOF offers or bought petrol at the garage? Can farmers lurk at these citadels of cut-price consumerism and be whistleblowers for this public malfeasance, the other side of the coin to their own misdeeds?
Most people in Britain aren’t Tory MPs, posh estate owners or farmers of any stripe, so it’s easy to stand with ‘the public’ against these malefactors (and certainly they can be malefactors) without turning the gaze back on oneself. The petrol at the garage I mentioned is a case in point. Currently, I can buy as much of it as I like for around £1.40 per litre, no questions asked. Globally, most greenhouse gas emissions come directly from fossil fuel combustion, and a good deal of the rest are indirectly enabled by it. In the UK, emissions from domestic transport are more than double those from agriculture.[xv] Guy rightly emphasises the responsibility of landowners and managers to do their bit for carbon sequestration, but it would be nice to at least occasionally turn the gaze from the land as a carbon sink to the bigger question of the wider energy economy as a carbon source, bringing a broader spectrum of society into the sights.
I think we – ‘the public’ – need to own this. Countries get the farmers they deserve, and are willing to support. The problem is structural and it needs to be addressed collectively with less blame and shame, fewer erroneous narratives of farmers as subsidy-junkies. The economic implications are profound, encompassing the need for cheaper housing, greater social equity, dearer food, dearer energy, dearer money and more labour in farming. Ultimately, the best way the public can hold landowners to account is by holding themselves to account, possibly by being landowners themselves. A lot of the hard political work that needs doing is missed in a landowner versus public framing.
As to how to change land use for wildlife benefit, this is a surprisingly tricky question. Do we try to boost individual species that come to our attention? That might involve tilting the odds against other species. Farmers sometimes kill foxes and crows with the aim of selectively favouring their preferred species, and so do conservationists. Or do we try to maintain given habitats – species assemblages – that we consider important? Nowadays, that often means using grazing livestock to maintain habitat diversity – especially, in the British uplands, cattle rather than sheep, with the associated implication of giving farmers greater financial support to keep them. Or do we fence out the livestock and let nature take its course – an approach often, if misleadingly, called ‘rewilding’? Alternatively, do we rewild with specific goals in mind involving ongoing human management, for example trying to prevent the spread of unwanted species or building in carbon sequestration or flood abatement?
Two important books by Carwyn Graves and Sophie Yeo to go alongside the previously mentioned one from David Elias discuss these intractable issues in detail.[xvi] They converge on four points. First, high-input, top-down, government-sponsored efforts at ‘agricultural improvement’ have often been bad for nature. Second, low-input, small-scale, locally oriented farming has often been good for nature, not usually because its practitioners particularly care about it but because the diverse and minutely jumbled landscapes they create have that unintended consequence. Thus, what Sophie calls the ‘practical entanglement’ of people with the land brings benefits for nature. Third, we know very little in detail about most organisms, and how to secure their interests: there’s a need to avoid the hubris of overconfident general prescriptions for land management. And fourth, our modern human bias toward tree fetishism – ‘trees good, grass bad’ – is, precisely, a bias.
Sophie’s book offers lovely vignettes of these issues, for example on the latter front in her analysis of how low-input livestock husbandry in Transylvania has preserved herbaceous biodiversity. The ecologist William Bond has likewise critiqued via a more formal scientific analysis the modern overemphasis on the naturalness of tree-covered landscapes, and the implicit value judgments involved in words like ‘overgrazing’ and ‘degraded’.[xvii] ‘Undergrazing’ is now identified as a problem in some conservation landscapes in the UK. It’s complicated!
Guy’s books traverse much of this ground with similar ecological sophistication. Mercifully, he doesn’t subscribe to the full-bore anti-livestock positions of some among the rainforest tribe. Nevertheless, his references to grazing livestock are generally negative, and its role in his writings is largely consigned to that of servant to nature restoration, not as a feature of the farmed landscape in itself. His writing about woodlands inclines to the sublime – “Immersing myself in the dripping, viridian fastness of an Atlantic rainforest is the closest I’ve ever come to a spiritual experience”[xviii] – whereas his pastoral vocabulary is more profane: “knackered farmland”, “apocalyptically bleak”, grass bitten “to the quick”.
He’s got a point. The agricultural overproduction analysed by Stone is everywhere. But this does look like something of an anti-pastoral axe to grind. Carwyn’s eye for the complexities of the woodland-grassland spectrum in the Welsh landscape in his chapters on coed, cloddiau, cae, ffridd, mynydd and rhos is refreshingly nuanced in comparison. There’s a need for better integration of future farming options in this conversation, which David’s and Carwyn’s books offer – for example, in the possibility of both nature recovery and significant stocking of cattle and sheep in Wales’s scrubby rhos agroecosystems, and in the possibility of reintroducing landscape-based shepherding.
But to make these a reality would involve challenging the cheaper food paradigm, what Carwyn calls “narrow metrics of feeding more mouths, more cheaply and as quickly as possible”. He muses about what could have happened in agriculture over the last sixty years without the cheaper food paradigm, the heavy inputs of fossil fuels, the decoupling of livestock from arable and the indiscriminate pushing of productivity.[xix]
Such thinking around livelihood communities and small-scale farming doesn’t get much of a look-in in the rewilding and rainforest literatures. The cover blurb of The Lie of the Land says that the book features, among others, small farmers who are restoring our lost wildlife, but I found little systematic vision within its pages of locally scaled agrarianism. One of the few explicit references to small-scale farmers veers into caricature: “the stereotypical Old Macdonald leaning on a farm gate sucking on a straw”.[xx]
It would be good to stop consigning local agrarianism to the bucolic nostalgia slot, and instead to start thinking of it as a vehicle for nature recovery. Time for less talk about rewilding and more about refarming and community-building?
In The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Guy sometimes mentions in passing that a remnant rainforest he’s discussing was once coppiced, but he says little about the people who were managing the woods in this way and what they were up to. I was hoping he’d spill the beans in Chapter 9 (‘Forest People’), but this turned out to be a chapter mostly about efforts in contemporary Scotland to purchase land from the large estates via the Scottish community right to buy provisions.
He develops this theme further in The Lie of the Land, discussing a community buyout of one of the Duke of Buccleuch’s grouse moors. He explains that the new community-owned nature reserve replacing it will make ends meet via farm payments, the sale of timber from the existing non-native tree plantations, rents from buildings on the estate, and income from courses and eco-tourism.[xxi]
Which is all great, but it relies on tapping the flow of wider abstract capital rather than generating any direct livelihood from the land itself. The only person who does seem to be doing that under the new regimen is a sheep grazier who’s damned with faint praise because … well … sheep.
Few of us today can extricate ourselves from the flow of abstract capital so I don’t intend this as a criticism of the project. But it does raise wider questions, which get back to my earlier distinction between publics and communities. The community involved in the community buyout is more public than community in those terms. Now that it’s wrested landownership from the duke, might it become a community in time? Is that desirable?
In his rainforest book, Guy discusses an interesting iteration of this in relation to the tangled tale of a regenerated rainforest in Devon, Lustleigh Cleave, which had once been grazed by livestock owned by a motley collection of latter-day commoners. The upshot is that the site was both overgrazed then undergrazed (hence the rainforest) by the commoners’ livestock, essentially because the commoners weren’t a community but a public, locked into contested relationships with the state. Guy’s analysis gets close to the welcome admission that Garrett Hardin’s infamous ‘tragedy of the commons’ really does happen sometimes (as his critic Elinor Ostrom readily accepted), but usually in circumstances when common property has degenerated into a kind of private property right held by a public which is not relying on a livelihood from it. Writ large, that kind of situation – degenerated private rights held by publics backed by capitalist governments like Britain’s – is basically the neoliberal world we now live in, complete with agrarian overproduction and a damaged natural world.
So to answer my own question – yes, I believe it’s desirable for publics to become communities.
Maybe that same dynamic explains past livelihood-making in the rainforest. Guy mentions Glasdrum National Nature Reserve in Scotland as one of the wonders of the world for its temperate rainforest. On a recent visit, I noticed the reserve signage reports it was coppiced in the 17th century for charcoal to fire local ironworks and grazed by Highland cattle until the end of the 18th. It states that coppicing is great for the health of the woodland: the practice is maintained nowadays by school groups and local volunteers.
It’s often claimed that industries like ironworking caused deforestation, but apparently not here – and not generally in premodern Britain.[xxii] The problem seems to be when excess, abstract and extractive capital from outside penetrates existing human ecologies that can’t contain or absorb it on their own terms locally. Glasdrum wood survived, but a lot of the Highlands didn’t. Indigenous farming communities cleared for sheep, thence deer, moor, great estates – finally, in some places, buyouts from local publics. But not yet communities.
It makes sense that the Highlands are the centrepiece of re-rainforesting – not only ecologically, but also historically. Post-Clearances, they’re about as close as it’s possible to get in Britain to supposedly pristine terra nullis – a colonially cleared zone ripe for terraforming according to the whims of its postcolonial publics. In his rainforests book, Guy discusses a rainforest blessing in Argyll where Indigenous rainforest people from Brazil had been invited. We don’t learn anything about how they make their livelihoods in their home forests. Earlier we’re told that rainforests in both Britain and the Amazon fell to ‘slash and burn agriculture’,[xxiii] a contention that needs an awful lot of unpacking. But it seems that rainforests are now just places to visit (‘take only photographs’ as Guy wisely admonishes his readers), or at best to volunteer in, not places to work or live in (‘take only a sustainable livelihood’).
The place in Britain that probably comes closest to a continuous tradition of community livelihood-making is upland Wales. Carwyn Graves contrasts the Welsh situation where “stone walls snake up the slopes, and the valley bottoms are dotted with farms, cottages, fields and woodlands” with the Highlands where the land “has been emptied of almost all that matters: people, trees, wildlife and culture”.[xxiv]
It’s instructive to see how Guy handles the Welsh case. The chapter about it in his rainforest book offers woody tales from The Mabinogion and references to Tolkien, Alan Garner, medieval green men and suchlike. It’s enchanting in its own way, but the only contemporary Welsh voice Guy interacts with in the chapter is poet Gwyneth Lewis: “Oh don’t fall for any Celtic bullshit!” she admonishes him, “we’re not the original Brythonic Celts, we’re all immigrants, too”.[xxv]
Thus authorised to treat Welshness more or less as a modern construct, Guy visits some Welsh rainforests, swears at the sight of bleak sheep pastures, represents sheep farming as a largely recent intrusion into Welsh land use, sees a ‘NO TO REWILDING’ sign on a farmer’s field, laments the polarisation of the rewilding debate, and states that there needs to be a different kind of farming in Wales with fewer sheep and more space for nature, but Wales first needs to be inspired and re-enchanted with the magic of rainforests.
To this Englishman’s ears, that sounds a bit patronising. Given the parlous economic state of British farming in general and Welsh upland farming in particular, and given the grounding of Welsh language and culture in its persisting livelihood communities of upland farming, there’s surely a danger that a successful push for substantial rewilding and re-rainforesting will turn those communities into mere publics, with only a distanced, modern connection to a historical woodland tradition. David Elias writes
Anyone with an urge to repopulate the hills with wildlife by depopulating them of people should pause and know that there is more at stake than agri-culture and biodiversity. Language and its cultural expression represent a way of looking at the world, which is an expression of being human, and deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with biological diversity[xxvi]
My sense is that some re-rainforesters might agree with that, yet they lack proposals for maintaining rural livelihood communities. Not every upland farmer can diversify into property rentals and eco-courses. And even if they could, something critical would be lost.
David writes that farmers usually speak about land issues in Welsh while English tends to command the wider discourse, with English speakers from outside the community “louder about generalised concepts and lines on maps”.[xxvii] Carwyn makes a similar criticism about the Welsh government, with “policies that want measurable tree-planting results and laudable CO2 reductions, but prefer to borrow from global discourse rather than sensitively understand place and its dynamics. Governance in Wales remains, from a biophysical point of view, insufficiently Welsh”.[xxviii]
The pity is that there’s a lot of agreement on agroecological goals like cutting sheep numbers in the Welsh uplands, and the need to diversify production for local food needs – Carwyn shows how reclaiming Wales’s ‘lost rainforest orchards’ could provide fruit for people and habitat for an astonishing diversity of wildlife. In a sense, all the pieces of the jigsaw are there in Guy’s books. But those speaking from the divergent perspectives of local communities and of wider publics can often find themselves at odds with one another, even when they share similar ideas.
In The Lie of the Land, Guy says that he could easily have written about enlightened farmers and landowners doing good things on their properties. He lists a few of them, but then says, “But the plural of anecdote is not data”.[xxix]
What a can of worms opens with those eight words! An anecdote or a story is data, and more anecdotes are more data. A sign in a farmer’s field that says NO TO REWILDING is data, and if you find that sentiment is widespread, that’s yet more data. Guy’s books – everybody’s books – are concatenations of anecdote and story. Carwyn writes that for many Welsh speakers, for reasons of both etymology and cultural history, the word ‘rewilding’ is redolent of killing a culture.[xxx] That’s a powerful story to set against any data purporting to prove its importance.
On page 205 of The Lie of the Land Guy cites a figure from the National Food Strategy that the least productive 21 percent of England’s land produces 3 percent of our calories. By page 222 this has become 3 percent of food. Guy says these numbers show that if this land wasn’t farmed at all this would be a sensible trade-off of food for nature. Well, there might be some sensible trade-offs to negotiate there but, no, the numbers don’t ‘show’ this. There’s a kind of spreadsheet-brained London conference centre vibe here: map says rewild. Yet there are so many possible stories – anecdotes? – that could be told to put context around such figures.
One story is the interconnected historical farm ecology of upland pastoralism and lowland mixed farming that an unecological focus on calories misses. Another story is England itself and its relationship to other stories like the United States, and that country’s story of export agriculture that’s conditioned in turn the story of so many other country’s farmscapes – stories with an awful lot of political, historical, cultural and cartographical labour behind them to make them real. Upland areas have ‘unproductive’ agricultures partly because they’re integrated into national and international food commodity markets, which hobble their ability to be more diverse and fruitful. There’s a geographical or cartographical determinism in Guy’s analysis which may not serve the residents of England’s ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ places well if the stories of England or other countries change in the future.
A huge literature in the social sciences, sometimes going under the unlovely term ‘colonial governmentality’ after the influential work of Michel Foucault, has shown how ideas of hard data, science, maths and agricultural ‘improvement’ are so often used colonially as a means of removing people from their lands for wider state purposes justified in supposedly unarguable mathematics.[xxxi] It’s to Guy’s credit that he usually puts agricultural ‘improvement’ in inverted commas, but the land sparing food ecologies he apparently favours and the rhetorical burnishing of data over story seems cut from similar cloth. More than the ‘data’ pertaining to this place or that, what’s required is a structural understanding of how the global political economy conditions land use and access to land for agrarian communities.
Land sparing, the idea that we should concentrate food production and other human activities on as small an area as possible and leave the rest to nature, contrasts with land sharing, the idea that we should produce food in nature-friendly ways that enable us to coexist with wildlife. Some ecologists endorse the need for land sparing while others consider the sparing/sharing framework an uninformative dualism.[xxxii] All agree that to speak of land sparing, land does actually need to be spared for nature. It’s not enough simply to point to some technique that supposedly cuts the land-take of food production. You also have to identify the land that’s been spared.
This issue is currently playing out in the British uplands around pressure on livestock farmers to sell up to corporations for carbon-offsetting tree plantations. Generally, this doesn’t involve land sparing, or rewilding. We’re talking plantations, not rainforests, and land ‘spared’ from farming only to be swallowed up into corporate greenwashing. Another case of overemphasising carbon sinks at the expense of its sources. Guy touches on this in his books, but doesn’t really confront it.
The holy grail of land sparing is food production with ostensibly almost no land footprint at all, a dream George Monbiot hailed in his book Regenesis in the form of manufactured microbial food. The debate about this, such as it’s been, has echoed around recent issues of The Land.[xxxiii] A brief update is relevant to my theme here.
Microbial food can be land efficient, but energy intensive, so there’s a potential land/energy trade-off. In Regenesis, Monbiot claimed that data from Solar Foods, a pioneering Finnish microbial food company, showed that microbial protein can be produced at 16.7 kWh of electricity consumption per kg.[xxxiv] But it struck me that even that hefty 16.7 kWh figure was implausibly low for the total energy consumption. I calculated a low-end estimate of around 65 kWh per kg, nearly four times as high, and tried to get to the bottom of the discrepancy. Eventually, it emerged that Monbiot’s source was a literature review paper, not industrial data – a paper with questionable energy figures whose full energy specification Monbiot hadn’t included in his estimate. It’s now clear, among other things from actual company data, that my figure of 65 kWh per kg is a more accurate estimate.[xxxv]
That is an enormous amount of paid-for energy to devote to producing food. As an alternative to manufacturing just 1kg of microbial protein, 65 kWh could produce over 50 kg of hot-rolled steel from cold scrap.[xxxvi] To meet global human protein requirements with this microbial food would use about nine times the existing global solar electricity production, calculated with my more realistic bottom-end figure and other generous assumptions in favour of microbial food. To meet global human calorific requirements would use about forty-five times that amount.[xxxvii] There are better things to do with our precious renewable energy than use it in vain attempts to replace the free sunlight tapped by farming.
Monbiot fronted a campaign by the self-described ecomodernist organisation RePlanet (now renamed WePlanet), an organisation largely funded by the charitable arm of Quadrature Capital, the same offshore hedge fund I mentioned earlier that’s been bankrolling the Labour Party.[xxxviii] WePlanet favours breakneck ‘land-sparing’ urbanisation; its vision for the year 2100 involves 90 percent urban residence, globally.[xxxix] The campaign aimed among other things at securing public money to subsidise microbial food. This bore fruit when the EU announced a €50 million package of support for startups in the sector.[xl] Meanwhile, corporate concentration in the microbial food sector has continued apace.
My criticisms of Monbiot have prompted a lot of bluster about the inability of we ‘food nostalgia’ folk to deal in numbers, and accusations that our visions for food localism are a ‘formula for mass death’, but no retraction to my knowledge of the incorrect energy figure, no acknowledgement of the rampant corporate concentration occurring in the sector, and no justification of the mass death jibe – the latter an example of what Glenn Davis Stone calls “neo-Malthusianism and the dogma that scientists might be able to keep the world fed, if only we got out of their way and let them devise technologies that corporations could roll out”.[xli]
So I found it revealing when Guy weighed in with me on social media, asking how an agrarian localist approach could feed the global population and for the facts of my disagreements with Monbiot, then expressing his lack of interest in the facts of Monbiot’s energy underestimate and in what I’ve called here colonial governmentality around quantified metrics of agricultural ‘improvement’. Behind the veil of an ostensibly radical agenda around land access lurks, it seems to me, a neo-Malthusian affinity with the industrial food paradigm, and no real interest in agrarian communities. Stone again:
Our real dilemma is how to unthink the entrenched belief that we will starve without new tricks from scientists and input industries when in reality we have been locked on a treadmill of subsidized overproduction for over the last century. When agriculture is industrialized – driven by those input industries and the perennial support and subsidy they need from the public purse – it grows inexorably at the expense of our economy, environment and health[xlii]
I believe this industrial colonization and undermining of livelihood communities must be fought. But the fight involves a whole lot of unthinking, and it’s all too easy for the proponents of the industrial food system to present themselves as saviours bringing prosperity, decolonization, wildlife benefits, hard data and other good things. To present, too, their critics as divisive ideologues rather than as people pointing to difficulties in their own rather divisive and implicitly pro-capitalist forms of supposed anti-capitalism.[xliii]
Bluntly, the industrial food paradigm is more likely to cause mass death because its food solutionism doesn’t offer real solutions – as is apparent in the unpayable energy costs of microbial food – and its main interest is in capturing public money and intellectual property rights, not in feeding people. It doesn’t care about you.
In Finding Our Niche, a hard-hitting defence of a decolonial, land-sharing human ecology, Philip Loring mimics the siren song of this disaster capitalism: “Only we can solve this problem. Only we can feed the hungry. Only we can keep you safe.” He goes on to say: “These are the voices of manifest destiny. These are the voices of the white saviour. But in reality, the opportunists making these promises can deliver on none of these promises. Why? Because their approach – indeed, their very culture – is part of the system that creates these problems in the first place”.[xliv]
I agree with Loring’s view that to save the world we need to stop trying to save the world. Which is one reason I’m not inclined to answer Guy’s question to me about how agrarian localism can feed the world. It’s not for me to determine how small-scale local farmers in places I’ve never visited should go about things – they’re the experts. What I will say is that, bearing in mind the ecocidal overproduction of bad food in the present industrial system, it’s not difficult for such farmers to do a better job worldwide of securing human health and ecological integrity. Their main problem isn’t usually how to secure enough per acre productivity, but how to secure enough acres in the first place from agro-industrial players.
A presumption against the productivity of peasant or local agricultures is common among the rainforest writers and other land-sparers. But it’s odd in the face of much contrary evidence from many times and places.[xlv] I think this points to a difficulty in their position. Loss of community access to land due to enclosure and engrossment of farmland into fewer hands is an important historical reference point for arguments to restore land to the public. Despite its numerous complexities enclosure at root involves extinguishing the livelihood autonomy of productive small-scale farmers and their communities through appropriating their private property rights. Yet restoring these rights so that people and communities can earn a local livelihood isn’t part of the rewilding/land-sparing agenda. Its vision is top-down: giving the public access to recreation in rewilded spaces, with food needs ideally being taken care of by the industrial food system – probably in a factory somewhere – and rural property in the hands of the state or heavily-regulated landowners.
This involves accepting a key plank of the enclosers’ arguments – that small-scale farming is unproductive – while nevertheless speaking against enclosure. Radical land sparing is appealing in this sense: the land can be made more accessible to the public, while the food system can remain enclosed in the state-corporate industrial nexus. This only hangs together with questionable arguments about the poor returns of local food systems and the trustworthiness of the state-corporate nexus. It’s not a radical vision for land distribution as a means to livelihood and political autonomy.
This last point struck me when I read Guy’s proposal for a new ecological Domesday survey mandating all who own over a thousand acres to be accountable to ‘the wider public’ (that p-word again) for sequestering carbon, restoring habitats and aiding wildlife recovery. I don’t object to it in principle, but framing it as a ‘Domesday’ survey is revealing. The original Domesday survey was a colonial document whose main interest in local matters was how to extract maximum value from the land for the incoming Norman rulers.[xlvi] Describing it as Guy does in neutral terms as a survey to determine “who owned land, and how much tax they owed to William the Conqueror”[xlvii] evades important questions about the relationship of citizenries to the states that rule over them (there’s surely a clue in that surname of William’s). No doubt some will consider it a sign of progress that a new Domesday survey would be concerned with extracting maximum nature value rather than maximum tax value, but the shared extractive framing points to more than just a problem of nomenclature. The problem is, as Loring says, a solutionism born of the system that’s creating the problems in the first place.
My proposal instead would be to start moving as quickly as possible to a situation where thousand-acre estates were mostly broken up and distributed among ‘the wider public’ for low-impact agrarianism. Not too quickly – no mass death! – but broadly I’m with Guy in his view that we should trust ordinary people with the land. Possibly, my suggestion would be less popular in the short term than his, both with the owners of large estates and with the wider public, who would no longer be able to complain so easily about careless landowners because they would be the landowners, and would have to take care. However, in the long term I don’t see any other way to deliver real climate, nature, food, economic and land justice than turning client publics into functional communities, and getting people off their computers and onto the land as the preferred space for problem-solving.
It’s a commonplace in the rewilding debate to say that humans also need to rewild themselves, but there’s not much discussion of what that means. In his rainforest book, Guy quotes Henry David Thoreau – “in wilderness is the preservation of the world” – and his books nicely extrapolate these words in framing wilderness as places we need to experience reverentially and regularly, but not residentially, not occupationally, as we live out the rest of our lives in non-wilderness spaces like the nitrogen-wrecked landscapes of lowland England. Take nothing but photographs.
Except what Thoreau actually wrote was “in wildness is the preservation of the world”.[xlviii] This suggests something radically different and much more inclusive of humans as participants within an enveloping wild ecology. I think that intent is clear in Thoreau’s text, even though not everything else is. There’s a lot of reverential wilderness wandering in it – Thoreau was the pioneer of what Kathleen Jamie has called the ‘lone enraptured male’ school of nature writing, a trap that the British rainforest writers sometimes fall into.[xlix]
Indigenous people had walked those woods long before Thoreau did. I think Philip Loring is right when he says that words like ‘wild’ and ‘pristine’ are excluding, colonial words. How can we rewild ourselves non-colonially?
Sophie Yeo’s book gives some clues. I admire the way she draws in nuanced ways on scientific research but is also willing to emphasise the animal and spiritual aspects of being human. She writes beautifully at the end of the book about giving birth to her daughter – a female, embodied, animal experience of connection and separation that to my mind brings home spiritual insight more successfully than most of the enraptured men of the forests.
But ultimately she retreats to tamer ground, arguing that contact with nature can now only be a deeply personal (and therefore implicitly not a collective, society-wide) mission, and that it’s unrealistic and undesirable for us all to revert to hunter-gathering or small-scale farming. All of us, yes – but few argue that. Why not more of us? She doesn’t say, but she’s right when she suggests “there can be no locking the door when modernity comes knocking”.[l] The problem is that most of the doors were unlocked long ago, and modernity is now dead on its feet, blocking the entrance to other ways of thinking.
Maybe her reluctance stems from fear of ridicule from the powerful modernity-mongers still clinging to the neo-Malthusian progress narrative. Heralding the death of modernity implies no commitment to returning to what came before, but contemporary political culture bristles with the ever-ready charge of rural romanticism. I wish more writers were willing to stare down this facile accusation.
Whether a small farm future is desirable or not, I suspect it’s what a lot of people will get, and the sooner we face up to that the less undesirable it will be (remember also that there are probably still more small-scale farmers worldwide than any other single employment, and their prospects for changing that aren’t great – for many, it’s not a case of ‘reverting’). As I see it, the wildness we need to cultivate at this stage in the human game and the wildness that will be the preservation of the world is like the wildness of most wild organisms. It involves using our natal skills to learn how to live and thrive mostly within local ecologies and their limits. In practice, this mostly means developing local agrarian communities against the grain of the modernist state. I fear the rainforest writers, rewilders and land sparers, despite their good intentions, have chosen the wrong way to frame the politics of food and nature, contributing to an emerging agrarian class conflict that ill serves this task.
If a small farm future arises, it will most likely occur quite chaotically as the contradictions of the consolidation state in trying to serve the interests of its various publics and the larger interests of profit maximisation intensify and begin tearing it apart. This is amplified by the fact that the circle of acceptable public debate is so tightly cinched around right-wing market neoliberalism and left-wing state neoliberalism that agrarianism can’t get a look in. Another birthing metaphor seems apt: Antonio Gramsci’s remark that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. I’d argue the morbid symptoms in this case are things like the ecomodernist solutionism of manufactured food, inordinate faith in neobliberal administrations like Keir Starmer’s, and in modern state gigantism generally. Those of us opposed to this can’t just snap our fingers and birth alternatives. At present, we can only try to shape the emergence of resilient livelihood communities as best we can and speak up for agrarianism and against the industrial food system and its processes of corporate enclosure.
[i] Guy Shrubsole. 2024. The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins; Guy Shrubsole. 2022. The Lost Rainforests of Britain. William Collins.
[ii] Lie of the Land, p.32
[iii] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-given-4m-from-tax-haven-based-hedge-fund-with-shares-in-oil-and-arms/; see also, Mike Hannis. 2023. ‘No time for hedging’. The Land. 33, p.13.
[iv] Tom Hazeldine. 2024. ‘Neo-Labourism in the saddle’ New Left Review. 148, p.20.
[v] Glenn Davis Stone. 2022. The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World. Earthscan.
[vi] Lie of the Land, p.100
[vii] David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins. On Kings. Hau, p.22.
[viii] Paraphrasing Wolfgang Streeck. 2016. How Will Capitalism End? Verso.
[ix] Ibid. p.124; cf. Graeme Garrard. 2022. The Return of the State: And Why It Is Essential for Our Health, Wealth and Happiness. Yale.
[x] David Elias. 2023. Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a Welsh Hill Farm. Calon, p.192
[xi] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/02/food-system-impacts-biodiversity-loss
[xii] Cited in Lost Rainforests, p.158
[xiii] Aaron Benanav. 2020. Automation and the Future of Work. Verso.
[xiv] Lie of the Land, p.156
[xv] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6604460f91a320001a82b0fd/uk-greenhouse-gas-emissions-provisional-figures-statistical-release-2023.pdf
[xvi] David Elias. 2023. Shaping the Wild; Carwyn Graves. 2024. Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape. Calon; Sophie Yeo. 2024. Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back. Harper North.
[xvii] William Bond. 2019. Open Ecosystems: Ecology and Evolution Beyond the Forest Edge. Oxford University Press.
[xviii] Lost Rainforests, p.234
[xix] Tir, p.141, p.177, p.183
[xx] Lie of the Land, p.172
[xxi] Ibid. pp.61-7
[xxii] Oliver Rackham. 2010. Woodlands. Harper Collins.
[xxiii] Lost Rainforests, p.17
[xxiv] Tir, p.99
[xxv] Lost Rainforests, p.108
[xxvi] Shaping the Wild p.140
[xxvii] Ibid. p.141
[xxviii] Tir, p.172
[xxix] Lie of the Land, p.8
[xxx] Tir, p.12
[xxxi] For example, Stone, Agricultural Dilemma; Tania Murray Li. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics. Duke University Press.
[xxxii] Claire Kremen and Ilke Geladi. ‘Land-sparing and sharing: identifying areas of consensus, remaining debate and alternatives’ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128225622000724?via%3Dihub.
[xxxiii] See The Land 32, pp.4-5; The Land 33, pp.12-19; The Land 34, pp.13-18.
[xxxiv] George Monbiot. 2022. Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Allen Lane, p.190.
[xxxv] Full analysis here: https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Energy-Costs-of-Bacterial-Food-Oct-24.pdf
[xxxvi] Author calculations of real-world energy consumption, based on https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/11/f4/theoretical_minimum_energies.pdf
[xxxvii] Author calculation based on https://chrissmaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Energy-Costs-of-Bacterial-Food-Oct-24.pdf and associated references, and Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy Dataset, 2024.
[xxxviii] https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20297-george-monbiot-s-ally-replanet-accused-of-smelling-like-astroturf
[xxxix] https://weplanetnederland.org/visie/faq-ecomodernisme/#
[xl] https://www.weplanet.org/post/a-community-win-european-union-commits-50-million-to-boost-alternative-proteins
[xli] Agricultural Dilemma, p.xiii
[xlii] Ibid, p.xiv
[xliii] See more generally https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/18/capitalisms-in-house-critic-hedges-monbiot-interview/
[xliv] Philip Loring. 2020. Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology. Fernwood, pp.198-9
[xlv] See, for example, Robert Allen. 1992. Enclosure and the Yeoman. Clarendon; Michael Lipton. 2009. Land Reform in Developing Countries. Routledge; Jan van der Ploeg. 2008. The New Peasantries. Earthscan; Stone Agricultural Dilemma.
[xlvi] Rosamund Faith. 202. The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England. Cambridge University Press.
[xlvii] Lie of the Land, p.231
[xlviii] Henry David Thoreau. 1862. Walking.
[xlix] Kathleen Jamie. 2008. ‘A lone enraptured male’ London Review of Books 6 March.
[l] Nature’s Ghosts, p.257, p.265, p.121
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Interestingly enough it seems that historically the Welsh didnt keep sheep but cattle…………….
Probably because there is a little parasite called liver fluke , it thrives in wet areas with high rainfall , cattle are more resilient than sheep to being eaten from the inside out .
I hope you’re right and that a small farm future is what a lot of people will get. How that happens though…
Take nothing but photographs – it’s telling, isn’t it? The dominance in the modern psyche of the captured image, most likely backlit. I don’t know about other parents out there but our kids are always bringing home curious pebbles, colourful leaves, seed heads and more recently bits of moss that they water in a saucer. Still, hopefully that will all change when they get their smartphones this Christmas (I’m joking – over my dead body!)
(Brief aside kinda related – an acquaintance in the village has been studying Mongolia all his adult life. Asking him about the tension between the traditional herders there and the pull of the city, he answered yes the city keeps attracting Mongolians away from herding, meanwhile the herders that are left tend now to stick to areas on the steppes where there is mobile phone coverage, leaving swathes of previously grazed land untouched, and the place where phone coverage is good, overgrazed. Is the ubiquitous mobile phone thus enabling rewilding and overgrazing?)
That’s a tour de force review, Chris, I really enjoyed it. Though I say it myself, I feel it awash with nuance, and I may yet read it again, like a Christmas gift that I may forever be unpacking. I like your definition of community, and often wonder which word to use when I speak about the village where I live. Often ‘community’ feels the more apt word, but it’s not clear-cut. I feel I’m in a community when… I can walk a few yards from home and pick windfallen apples all through autumn into winter, giving the donkey a treat, sometimes the ducks and chooks (they appear to quite like apple skin on occasion), and of course my family can eat apple crumble long into winter, ad nauseum. And all because a member of the community (recently deceased) planted and cared for the fruit trees in his garden. On the same short walk to fetch water for the donkey, I pass a medlar tree, its branches reaching out from another garden, into my path. I confess I meddled with it once, enjoyed its strange fruit (blessedly bletted) and will plant the large seeds sometime soon. Bruised fruit left on the ground has been pecked at by birds and is attracting worms to the surface as it rots. To my left is a designated National Park, mainly beech woodland, for public enjoyment but not for public consumption. Nevertheless a sprightly octogenarian neighbour regularly collects wood for winter fuel, from its largely human-unpopulated woodland shade. This he cuts up and gives to a friendly widow, who cooks some of his meals with it while warming her house. Looking back, I used to think ‘tut-tut’ about anyone benefiting from land that’s supposed to be left largely untouched, ‘for nature’, but unlike the local gatherer, I didn’t grow up here, at a time long before there even was a designated National Park (which appears to trim its people-oriented tourist attractions with each passing year). Yet now, with each passing year, I become a little more like the industrious octogenarian, him with his firewood, me with my carrier bag full of apples, both of us engaging with our shared micro cosmos. Meanwhile down the shop, the price of milk’s just shot up 10 per cent overnight, having previously risen steeply during Covid (along with everything else, not least firewood and fuel) so maybe animals to milk should soon feature in our smallholding future. I’m all for figuring out what right livelihood means exactly, in place, as winds of change buffet everything, including the pocket.
PS. ‘Useless coppice’! That’s so lame. Also, I think I may have slipped into lone enraptured male mode a bit there, so apologies for that. It seems to have become my default setting till the kids get home. Will have to get out more!
Happy Christmas to you and all you love.
The mobile phone thing seems like another bit of evidence for my theory that people the world over put a very high value on communication.
Well done.
Thanks Chris for this thorough and thoughtful review. One wonders if any minds will be changed by it…
I liked your pithy “…getting people off their computers and onto the land”
and “…using our natal skills to learn how to live and thrive mostly within local ecologies and their limits”.
But I also feel the urge to echo Hoon Seong Teo above: “How that happens though…”
I’m picturing a miracle, never mind the mechanism: The big landholdings are all broken up and given over to smallholders to build their Small Farm Future livelihoods. What’s the minimum viable acreage?
But anyway, what’s to prevent those putative smallholders from building their McMansions in the middle of their new patch of ground and then getting a farm tractor to mow 10 acres of lawn every week?
That’s what many people do with rural property here where I live.
Or maybe the land distributors select for people who have the right set of community values to foster a Small Farm Future? We all know not to go there…
It seems to me that the collapse of the capital economy and its attendant values is a necessary precondition if land redistribution is to be anything other than a huge expansion of exurbia.
But anyway, what’s to prevent those putative smallholders from building their McMansions in the middle of their new patch of ground and then getting a farm tractor to mow 10 acres of lawn every week?
Running out of petrol should do the trick.
Ha!
Yes, I,ve been waiting for that for almost twenty years.
But we have electric lawnmowers now!
For the manual mower lover there’s also non-electric, US-made… with a sharpening set if needs be. Christmas coming up fast:
https://www.manufactum.com/reel-mower-manual-operation-a14835/
Eric, Simon H —
I mostly meant that when we run out of petrol, the owners of those McMansions might want one or two acres of that lawn for growing food, and another for firewood, and so on.
I’ve got one of these.
Very good.
https://www.fiskars.com/en-gb/gardening/ranges/fiskars-staysharp#aq=%40collectioncode%20%3D%3D%20(%22STAYSHARP%22)&numberOfResults=20
In the future, a McMansion on ten acres could be the core strutcture of an ecovillage. And the continuous fallowing of expansive lawns will gradually improve soil fertility, making the transition even easier.
I’d rather see 100 McMansions, each with ten acres of lawn or llama pasture, than one 1,000-acre field of industrial farmland. Indeed, if “gentleman farms” are all we get in the way of a near-term small farm future, it’s far better than nothing.
“Guy gets to the crux in a quotation from former MP, Gordon Prentice: “…walkers and ramblers have not poisoned the countryside with pesticides. ”
And why didn’t Mr prentice ban the pesticides ? ……..
This is an excellent post, Chris, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while! My response is somewhat tangentially related, as usual.
It seems to me that some people see that under capitalism, small farms are generally unprofitable and often exploitative, and large farms are profitable only at the catastrophic expense of ecology, and many people are hungry while a few are very wealthy — and then they decide that farming is bad, rather than deciding that capitalism is a bad way to produce and distribute food or land.
There is no magic size of farm that will be both profitable and ecologically responsible under capitalism, because the size of the farms per se is not the primary problem.
But many of what are called economies of scale are actually economies of not having to deal with the externalities. That is true whether we are talking about maize for ethanol, soy for CAFO operations, coffee, banana, sugar or cotton plantations, inappropriate grazing, cheap transport, strawberries in plastic punnets in December, or huge fields full of solar panels. The changes in land management that come with scaling for larger and larger machines are a part of that, I think. So if we take away the One Weird Trick of using fossils or exploitation of human labour, we end up with small farms that are designed to work on human scales. And an advantage of smaller farms is that people with smaller concentrations of finance can’t override as many externalities as, say, Cargill can.
After a few years tending a tenth of an acre I am reaching a point where I either need a bigger kitchen or I need more help or I need my systems to be less productive. If I had an acre to tend I would need to make substantial changes to my processes to tend it well; I have ideas about what some of those could be, especially outside the constraints of allotment growing where cash crops aren’t allowed and neither may I have a woodlot or animals.
I recently surpassed 500kg of homegrown and foraged produce for the year. I start counting on Lady Day (25th March), so there are more than three months to go and still some celeriac, carrots, beets and our one lone parsnip to harvest (I am saving it for Christmas dinner). This is over 100kg more than I grew the previous year, and I was a little surprised because it was sure a difficult year with a damp cool spring requiring multiple re-sowings of many crops followed by a sudden dearth of moisture in summer which was hard on the crops which had survived Spring but didn’t have much root development… but I did better on spuds and winter squash this year than last (and donated a lot of pumpkin to the soup kitchen) and my strategy of sowing watermelons direct in a hotbed paid off, too. I haven’t run any calculations on the calories, protein or whatever produced, but it’s a good thing there are three adults in my household to help eat this stuff. Even with my spouse’s help at the plot, the hours we put in add up to maybe one person working part-time, and we have enough food out of it to feed three adults a pound of produce each, every day, all year. If I were feeding only myself I would struggle to eat it all. So for me, the idea that small parcels of land can be abundantly productive is not a matter of wishful thinking, bucolic fantasy or rose-tinted nostalgia: it is a lived reality, sometimes a bit inconvenient but ultimately leading to a far richer diet, and far deeper relationship with where I live, than would otherwise be possible for me. We’ll see what next year brings, of course.
Part of the reason for being able to class my allotment growing as successful is that it is somewhat protected from the logics of capital. The Allotments Act of whatever year leaves the council with a legal obligation to provide land for allotments; the rules and regulations of these prevent doing much in the way of growing cash crops, though some people do manage to base modest businesses around their allotment growing. I don’t always get on well with the committee, which has all the problems of any voluntary committee, but we are all here to grow food and I think most of us are glad there is someone to do the necessary admin. And so this little pocket of public ownership turns into a community of sorts: we are here to grow food, not somewhere else, and that matters.
The system is not perfect, but it works well enough that I do believe making more allotment land available would be a substantial improvement in local food resilience. I wonder whether a similar model could work for forests: publically-owned coppice, with individuals opting-in to take on some of the maintenance. (As someone living in my postcode I retain the right to gather a certain amount of wood per day from Epping Forest, but with the trees no longer being coppiced it isn’t really in a gatherable state.)
It’s instructive, too, to compare our allotment site, which is self-run and rented from the council, with some of the council-run sites, which tend to fall into disrepair as one tiny part of an understaffed and under-funded “parks and leisure” department.
I think there are probably a lot of ways to combine public and community as you’ve defined them here, and some of them might even work. “Can the people who live here derive some substantial portion of their livelihood from the place they live without being subject to global markets?” is a key question for how to form such a community. And I am thinking very hard about this in terms of how the Church of England is organised into parishes and what that means for our life together, since we aim to be worshipping communities and yet the people who live in our parishes (and therefore fund our ministry) are almost entirely beholden to capitalist interests. We cannot serve God and Mammon, and we have built a society where Mammon decides whether we eat.
It is much harder to combine community and capitalist interests: most of the time they are opposed. And I think we already know what public/capitalist blended initiatives tend to look like — just one more form of enclosure and extraction.
That’s probably enough for one comment.
What an excellent read. I feel that, like Simon H., I may well return to it in future when I am feeling particularly glum. Not that I consider it optimistic. More like realistic. It does inspire in me a dream of exceptionally long life so that I can see how the small farm future arrives and evolves, as it surely will.
Thank you.
“One story is the interconnected historical farm ecology of upland pastoralism and lowland mixed farming that an unecological focus on calories misses.”
On a visit to the UK earlier this year, I was startled to find that all menus now display the calorie content of every dish, as though listing a parallel currency to the cash price. A small thing, perhaps, but the reduction of all food to a measure of fuel to be burned, the assumption of commensurability involved in this, the disregard for nutrition and culture alike, seems emblematic of a particular way of inhabiting the world. Around the same time, I was reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, and struck by her observation that what distinguishes Western modernity (not quite the term she’d use) from previous civilisational projects is its disinterest in making things that last: all previous high civilisations, she says, sought to create buildings, monuments, objects that would outlast their makers, whereas ours is peculiar for its singular focus on production for consumption. I’ve not drawn it out into the shape of an essay, yet, but I can’t help sensing a connection: the world reduced to a great fire into which everything must be fed.
(Incidentally, this thought from Arendt is part of her larger argument about the “economy” as a monstrous extension of the domain of household production – the clue’s in the etymology – swallowing the space in which world-making activities should take place. It’s interesting to put this alongside Illich’s depiction of modernity as founded on a war on the “vernacular”, the household mode of production. Superficially, these seem like opposing narratives, but I think there’s a useful synthesis to be made: the vernacular as destroyed by an explosive expansion, crossing the threshold of counterproductivity, pitching us into the all-consuming fire of the industrial society. What Arendt lacks, in contrast with Illich, is an intercultural frame of reference beyond the classical civilisations on which she tends to rest her argument.)
Anyway, that was a big old digression – but this was an excellent piece and leaves me excited for your next book.
An enervating and gently powerful essay, with the relaxed precision and humorous deftness of a craftsman, a strength that comes from years of thought and experience.
I agree with Dougald, I look forward to the book! The clarity of thought that emerges is astonishing and inspiring, revealing the poor, muddled, compromised and finally corrupted, corporate narrative that is masquerading as common sense in this space. This is a light in a Dark Age!
I can’t help thinking what Nick Hayes makes of Guy’s horse trading. At some point they will have to sit down and reckon with your work or see their cherished visions evaporate into profit.
Wow, lots to read here. I’ll admit I haven’t finished it yet, but the mentions of rewilding gives me an excuse to share this quote from Neil Ansell’s the last wilderness because he articulates something I’ve thought myself about this, but seems to be rarely said – it only a little bit off topic, I think:
I would never argue that we should automatically eliminate anything that we have introduced, and bring back those we have destroyed. Undoing matters is itself another attempt to manipulate the world […]
We have created a new reality, and we can hardly undo the past when we cannot even put a stop to the declines of the present. Our first priority must be to safeguard what we have left before it is too late. As for biodiversity, so it is for climate change; we cannot make things better until we have found a way to stop making things worse.
I am starting to suspect that the drive for “net zero”, while it seems to be – at last! – a recognition of reality, might in practice turn out to be just another way to make things worse.
Thanks for the comments & appreciations which … I appreciate. I was concerned the piece was a bit too negative about the rainforest folks, but I did feel the need to push back. Will it change minds? I dunno. They have a bigger audience than me and a message that more people want to hear.
How it happens? Well, as per the last para of my essay, which is probably familiar to regular readers here. Chaotically, unpredictably & collapsologically, with humans not really in control. Good small farm futures or bad small farm futures? How much is it still in our hands? I’m doing my best in the new book to lay out realistic positives as best I can.
Thanks for the rich descriptions Simon & Kathryn … telling the stories of livelihood-making and livelihood communities is so important. I really must do more pro-community and less anti-public work soon.
Thanks also for words of wisdom from Dougald, Martin & others. I’ve never really read Arendt – another one to add to the list. But not yet.
To clarify ‘useless coppice’ was a phrase used by one of the Dartington estate founders, somewhat ironically, who Guy quotes – not his own take. Though saying that I’m surprised that he glosses over coppicing & the working of woods in his books almost entirely.
Re cattle & sheep in Wales, as per the OP yes relatively more of the former & less (but not none) of the latter historically – the good ol’ cheaper food paradigm again. It’d be good to revert to more cattle but the economics aren’t there.
Even the two hazel stools available to me at the Far Allotment are really very useful coppice. I’m heading up there today to sort out the various beds for their winter dormancy (such as it is) and I’ll be cutting a few hazel poles to make a Christmas tree-shaped wall hanging (we had zero space for a three-dimensional tree indoors well before I took up gardening in any serious way).
Thank you for sharing this. I don’t have all that much to add, but I’d like to join the others praising this review. One of your strongest pieces in my opinion, and a beautiful summary of your/our position with what we might as well call the “sensible agrarian localist-populist” approach as opposed to the neoliberal capitalist one. Confident where it needs to be, but also with an admirable humility that’s far too rare with many pundits.
“Countries get the farmers they deserve, and are willing to support. The problem is structural and it needs to be addressed collectively with less blame and shame, fewer erroneous narratives of farmers as subsidy-junkies. The economic implications are profound, encompassing the need for cheaper housing, greater social equity, dearer food, dearer energy, dearer money and more labour in farming.”
Yes, this is the money quote, isn’t it? The “subsidy-junkie” accusation is kind of bizarre to me. What country in its right mind wouldn’t subsidize its farmers? And of course food needs to be much more expensive relative to incomes. At the same time, though, there are so many staggering injustices and cruelties in our system that would need to be put right for that to happen in a fair way, like the ones you mention in the quote. Sometimes it’s frustrating to discuss political issues like this with people, because everything always ends up being about everything, ie. the whole system is fundamentally misbegotten from the ground up, and you can’t really change one aspect of it to become more sane without changing all the others as well. At the same time, all the centrist politicians and much of the public (that word again!) seem to be firmly convinced modernity is both fated to be everlasting and the best of all possible worlds.
Not that any of this is news to you or anyone else reading this blog, of course. In any case, an excellent review/essay.
you can’t really change one aspect of it to become more sane without changing all the others as well.
This is intensely frustrating if you’re trying to redesign the whole system.
I think it’s rather encouraging, though, if you know you can’t change the whole system, but you think you might be able to change one bit of it.
(If you’re not sure where to start, it’s hard to go too far wrong by feeding people.)
“What country in its right mind wouldn’t subsidize its farmers? ”
You have to have an I come to provide subsidies , the west at the moment has those funds , the pedant farmer in the third world does not hence the third world poverty of there farmers .
In 1985 I trained on spreadsheets, back when Lotus 1-2-3 was the standard and Excel hadn’t been developed. During my working years when I couldn’t find a job and had to do office temp work, I used my spreadsheet skills extensively. Now, I have twenty years of spreadsheet data on the crops I grew as a market gardener and what I am still doing in my retirement. The people Chris mentions that are using spreadsheet analysis as a rationale for their ulterior motives are making a grievous error. I am surprised so many people buy into it. Spreadsheets are a tool, like a hammer. They are NOT drivers for decision making. Using spreadsheet analysis is like upping your hammer to a paradigm and realizing there are many things in the world that need hammering.
Here is an example. Based on the kilocalorie value of 350 kcal/lb for potatoes and a retail value selling direct to the consumer of 1 pound sterling or 1 dollar or 1 euro, the value per kilocalorie is .003 pence or cents or centimes. And can you even get 1 pound sterling or dollar or euro for a pound of your delicious potatoes? Probably not, even in winter and spring. Right now in the supermarkets in France there are scads of potatoes going for about 60 centimes a pound. They are even cheaper if you buy in bulk from the farmers. Compare this to fresh tomatoes, which are easy to sell at 1.60 pound sterling or dollars or euros per pound. The value per kilocalorie here is .02 pence or pennies or centimes per pound at 80 kcal/lb. Yes, you get more yield per acre with potatoes and yes, tomatoes have more disease problems than potatoes, but if you are a market gardener you have to concentrate on: 1) which crops the public will buy and 2) which crops provide more money for your time and space allotted to their production. BTW, this is a simple exercise in how to manipulate thinking using spreadsheet data.
So why grow a lot of potatoes? Because I like them and they provide a lot of kilocalories. The whole idea of using spreadsheets to make your business decisions has its limits. Spreadsheets are a tool that provide insight into the policies you have already decided upon. If you actually use them to make policy, you have fallen into the Milton Friedman trap – where economic data drives US foreign and domestic policy. Yes, US foreign and domestic policy was bad before Nixon and Friedman, but it became exponentially worse after their tenure. The “rewilding advocates” have fallen into the same trap as those economists who try to value trees to determine if we should cut down the Amazon rainforest to provide cheap burgers.
“using spreadsheet analysis as a rationale for their ulterior motives”
Yes, and spreadsheets are only as good as their assumptions and scope, which can be majorly lacking.
Because of flawed assumptions and other reasons, sometimes a technology gets pushed commercially when it may not be commercially viable, even with significant government subsidies (supersonic airliners like the Concorde, and dried bacterial slurry protein for human food come to mind).
I tend to do the arithmetic the opposite way:
If I were trying to purchase potatoes that are locally grown without pesticides or industrial inputs, how much would it cost me? If I theoretically pay myself minimum wage for my time, could I buy as many potatoes as I grow?
The answer is almost certainly “no”. It starts to get more complicated with tomatoes (which require more labour, especially if I’m also preserving them) and wild mushrooms or berries (expensive to buy, but not much time to find and harvest if I happen to be passing that way anyway, which honestly is how I do most of my foraging these days).
“From land sparing to land sharing – access to land as livelihood”
A mentor instilled in me the importance of recognizing, developing, and honoring one’s relationship with land, a broad term which includes the plants and animals living there, and the water flowing through it.
It goes beyond occasional immersions in “nature” (which might be felt during holiday times in wild places, for example), it’s more specific to one’s location and daily life. The relationship part is key, and without access a relationship degrades. A daily immersion (ideally a continual immersion?) could strengthen the bonding and and be a good foundation for a sustainable livelihood on the land.
Ownership of the land is the standard way to protect access to the land in our culture. I prefer the community land trust model, which takes land off the market permanently and holds it on behalf on the community living there, with stewardship decisions made collectively.
Thanks to Chris for this rich essay which covers a lot of ground.
Thanks for further comments – Walter, Kathryn, Steve, Kim & others. Also Jeremy – your book about whale hunting has been sitting on my shelf for a long time as part of a project I never seem to get around to … maybe one day …
Briefly, yes agree with Kim & Kathryn about the difficulties of having to change all the parts of a dysfunctional system simultaneously. And with Kathryn about feeding people – though a danger lurks therein, does it not, in the sense that freely feeding people feels like the right thing to do, but risks contributing to the general contemporary cultural undervaluation of food? It gets back to my disagreements with Monbiot and his infernal example of poor people at a food bank that he turns into an argument in favour of low food prices.
Re Steve’s points on land & private property – I’m writing about this in the forthcoming book … we also debated it quite intensively here about a year ago. I agree on the need to decommodify landownership (higher food prices, lower land/housing prices) and that CLTs can be a good way to do this. Collective stewardship decisions – yes, provided people know what they’re talking about (…one of the dangers of collective land use decisions invested in ‘the public’ as per my arguments in the post above is that they often don’t) but IMO it depends on what level of stewardship we’re talking about. However, this doesn’t exhaust the meaning of private rights. But anyway, it’s all in the new book. Or some of it is…
Agree with Walter and Steve on the perils of the spreadsheet, much as I like a good Excel workbook (Walter’s talk of Lotus 123 made me nostalgic). I always liked sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase about the dangers of slipping from the model of reality to the reality of the model (one of the more intelligible things he said).
As I commented, before Monbiot is an idiot – if he had asked his rich friends the same question he would have gotten the same answer. If you have the means. not feeding hungry people is immoral. It has been that way for at least 2000 years.
Food is undervalued because we are competing with an industrial system using hand tools. When we turn down any of the ‘benefits’ of fossil energy, we lose. And I do use fossil fuels to till, plant and harvest. If Trumpelthinskin gets his wish and deports all the undocumented workers in the country, people will get an appreciation of what food really costs.
The system is so broken it beggars belief.
Ah, sorry, what were you saying ?
I agree, the level of stewardship is crucial to working land held in common.
Regarding feeding people:
– there is a whole discourse about mutual aid Vs charity which is important but probably not something I am equipped to represent properly in comments on this blog post
– “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” ignores wider structural issues like “hey, why are there no fish in this river?” and assumes that the man you are teaching to fish doesn’t know how to do it. One of our soup kitchen guests pretty regularly brings me plants he has started from seed.
– the most offended I have ever been at an allotment neighbour was when I explained that food bank use was continuing to go up despite the end of most pandemic restrictions and she said “well, it’s like if you feed foxes, they’ll keep coming back” — as if the availability of the food bank was the reason people were using it, rather than the inability to provide food for their families by other legal means in the current context. No shade on foxes here, but I think she Just Didn’t Get It
– one of the more serious concerns for many food bank guests is getting enough fresh produce (or even preserved fruit and veg) to stay healthy; this is just the kind of food that Monbiotesque factory fermentation cannot provide. It’s also a major part of why we continue to provide a soup kitchen in addition to food bank: a curry followed by a fruit crumble might be more servings of fruit and veg than our guests get in any of their home food preparation (if they have the facilities for home food preparation, which many do not). Most of our veg comes from City Harvest which operates a “food rescue” system using food that would otherwise go to waste; the rest of it comes from the Soup Garden or, very occasionally, the cash-and-carry. I’m not sure how much that contributes to the undervaluation of food, as opposed to being a side effect of it. I am more concerned about the cheap pasta/rice/cereals that we purchase, in that regard, it’s not like we are getting dry goods from Hodmedod’s…
– but we probably can’t change the food system single-handedly, and in the meantime people are hungry. It turns out finance capitalism is a crummy and inequitable way to distribute food, as well as being a crummy and inequitable way to mediate land access.
– it’s very difficult to talk about food costs among precariously-housed or unhoused people without talking about connected issues of land access but an awful lot of people seem set on doing so; a “housing first” approach to street homelessness and better availability of social housing would together knock out a lot of demand for the food we offer, as well as reduce the need to offer things which can be eaten without cooking facilities; if that social housing came with some kind of garden space for growing food, so much the better. Even if only one in ten people used their gardens for growing some food it would be an improvement. (On my street between me and my five nearest neighbours, two of us grow substantial amounts of food in our gardens, three grow a few things to eat most years, and one grew a bit in 2021-ish but hasn’t the time or inclination to do more in this season of his life. I have no idea if this is typical for a zone 3 suburb.)
– Let’s be real: people who argue for further industrialisation of food production on the basis of “cheaper food will feed more people” are not feeding anyone by making that argument. They may well be feeding people in their voluntary work, I don’t know. Corporations that mass produce ecologically expensive “cheap” food are not doing it because they want to feed people, they’re doing it to maximise shareholder profits. They do not care about us.
– Part of why I grow food in the churchyard is that I strongly believe that if I am eating organic local artisanal fruit and veg, the soup kitchen guests deserve at least as good as that. The reality is that I can’t afford to make that happen without growing the food myself. (I do also tithe my allotment produce, though honestly more as a way of managing gluts than anything else.)
It’s rather early here so apologies if this comment is even less cohesive than usual. I maintain that feeding people is a good place to start if you’re not sure what to do, but… I do mean actually feeding people, not buying cheap food and putting it in the food bank bins at the supermarket. I mean growing or cooking the very best food you can manage, the most local and real food that’s available to you where you are now, and feeding it to someone else. That could be a friend or a neighbour or a relative, or it could be that you have a glut of oilseed pumpkin flesh or runner beans or whatever, and a soup kitchen that can use it. The more we realise that these are really the same kind of thing, the better.
Those who grow food to give away – or just give away their surplus – have a tendency to build up their soil. That’s just the way it works.
Kathryn, I think that’s a VERY cohesive comment for 5.47 in the morning. The prospect of you posting one later when you’re fully awake is almost scary. So … nothing to disagree with in it on my part, and to be clear my previous comment wasn’t intended critically. Lots of nuanced points in your comment which I dearly wish were better understood in wider public debate. A key one, which I’ve often raised whenever I get a public platform but feel it’s rarely struck home, is that if we’re going to talk about poverty and food prices then we need to talk a lot more about poverty and land/housing prices.
Thanks also Greg. You have a rare talent for summarising whole books I’ve written in single sentences, viz. my Small Farm Future book: “The system is so broken it beggars belief”, and then my ‘Saying NO to a Farm Free Future’ book: “Monbiot is an idiot”. Please keep commenting…
Later in the day my head is full of whatever podcasts I’ve been listening to!
But honestly I have you, and other commenters here, to thank for my understanding of the relationship between land, food, labour and the prices of each. Well, that and the productivity of the land I tend, as a powerful proof of how abundant small-scale horticulture can be and also how much work it can be.
One giant problem that’s missed is fiber , where are the clothes going to come from in a oil poor net zero world , how many sheep would the world need to provide blankets / clothes for everyone how many acres of flax or cotton , how many cattle to provide leather for shoes ?
Oil production is heading for the Seneca cliff and with it industrial civilisation , Monbiot ideas only work with cheap , plentiful affordable energy , the idea of feeding soy based everything to a population / area that is too cold to grow it is insanity .
I’m less worried about textiles in the next few decades simply because so much already exists. Most clothing can be repaired or repurposed, and mending existing garments takes a lot less work and resources than making them from new.
Boots and gloves do concern me somewhat, I wear those out faster than other clothing and it’s a bigger problem if they don’t fit well.
A great piece that compassionately teases apart the distinctions between ecomodernist deep ecology and eco traditionalist deep ecology.
Regarding land sharing of which I am a passionate advocate, the problem from my point of view is not so much land prices, although that is a problem, but the ability to construct low impact homes on agricultural land so that a low impact livelihood becomes less dependent on the state corporate nexus. In this respect, for me it is planning that is the main barrier to small farming communities.
Of course if planning was more conducive towards low impact dwellings upon agricultural land then there is the danger that people will use this freedom to build low impact holiday homes with little interest in agroecological farming other than grazing animals in order to keep the grass at bay.
So permission to build low impact dwellings upon agricultural land would need to be explicitly tied to agroecological farming practices. This is probably the rationale behind the One Planet Development planning model in Wales. However from a State perspective which has become normalised by a manufactured public perspective, is that a low impact livelihood does not raise sufficient taxes to pay for gold plated State and local authority pensions which perhaps explains the emphasis on diversifying farming income streams in the form of land rewilding eco-tourism for example.
Obviously the business model which seeks to work through this problem of land sharing freeriding is the good work of the ecological land cooperative so it is a shame that land sparers like Monbiot are not on board since the substantial amounts of money donated to and spent by eco-progressive campaign groups would surely be enough to buy substantial areas of agricultural land. So it is a mystery to me why campaign money isn’t used to buy up land whether for land sparing or land sharing.
Since land sharers aren’t lucky enough to be in the pocket of multi billion dollar hedge funds, I wonder if another route is through environmental charities like The Wildlife Trust, RSPB or Natural England. Perhaps the Duchy of Cornwall is interested in experimenting with the low impact agroecological model.
Regarding land sparing and synthetic food rather than sharing the land with hedges and edges reserved for our nonhuman friends, the only rational use of scarce energy to make synthetic food is excess capacity energy which otherwise would mean curtailment. But the idea that synthetic food can exactly biomimic all the minerals and compounds contained in billions of years of evolution is quite frankly ridiculous and so would obviously need to be fortified (and quite possibly bio-engineered) with soluble forms of vitamins and amino acids. And this isn’t taking into consideration class hierarchies which means non-nutritious synthetic food will largely be reserved for the poorest classes.
Overall, in the case of economic collapse at least we still have agricultural land and plenty of it so as long as it is not concreted over to make way for unsustainable population growth and millions of solar panels, in the case of a crisis we know where to go. To the nearest landed gentry estate. So perhaps most importantly is maintaining a sufficient agroecological farming skill base and the required skills to make hardy tools and low impact dwellings.
Stephen
Regarding population growth — my understanding is that many countries in the world now have below-replacement birth rates, and even in places that still have above-replacement rates the birth rates have been falling. The problem we have is not “too many people” so much as “too many demands for high-energy lifestyles” — and these come overwhelmingly from the rich, so far.
Land access is a tough issue. One solution is for the government to simply take all the land and redistribute it. It has been done before in the US. In this part of the country it was around 200 years ago.
This is an unfinished thought, but when the economy collapses and push comes to shove…
Hello again Steve, thanks for that – much to agree with. Yes, the planning system can be a problem – the case for tying permissions to agroecological practices makes sense in principle, but I fear it can turn into a massive bureaucratic boondoggle in practice, which councils lack the funding and expertise to manage. Models like the ELC are good (I was involved with it for a while) but can suffer from the same problems. It’d be good to see people doing this bottom-up & testing the waters as local community projects using pooled local private finance. Ultimately we somehow need to create a world of affordable small farms for small farmers focused on producing for household (& community) needs, but it’s hard to get there when there’s so much loose capital around.
The LWA/ORFC attempted to engage with the Duchy of Cornwall about land access. As I recall, they made positive noises about it, but it didn’t really get anywhere. I’m not sure if the likes of the RSPB would welcome large numbers of small-scale tenants either. But yes this is a direction to push in.
Thanks Chris.
Yes it is a shame a good proportion of loose money wasn’t used to simply pay down national debt since most of the money originates from the State in the first place.
An interesting article tackles some of the issues you highlight regarding stifling bureaucracies with a quote to match.
Philosopher Alex DeToqueville believed that the totalitarian impulse (“despotism”) would manifest in contemporary democracies through a thick, stifling bureaucracy. He described it as:
“…a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence.”
https://steadystate.org/beyond-the-ideological-echo-chamber-a-call-for-intellectual-adaptability-in-times-of-transformation/
It could therefore be interesting to have more devolved local authorities and in turn more devolved planning departments which are informed by democratic engagement in the spirit of the article above.
It was good to hear that the Duchy of Cornwall was at least approached since I think seeding ideas is as important at this stage as realising them. So it might be interesting to seed agroecological ideas within environmental charities too. This perhaps could be done via the Green Alliance.
(disclaimer-haven’t read the comments yet)
As I read through this essay, slowly, but more and more as I went, carrying capacity kept running through my mind. I know the term has been discussed here and elsewhere before, has multiple definitions, and many base assumptions that would need to be carefully set, but in the end, local carrying capacity is central to what will determine the best way forward.
Through iteration and struggle and strife, we will eventually get to a human population distribution that is at balance with the rest of the local biome, but wouldn’t it be nice if we were able to shorten and make that transition less painful?
No one likes to face the fact, but human populations are in overshoot, and while I hope that birthrate trends continue, and it can be a gradual descent, it may well not. Feeding and clothing ourselves locally should be the default assumption, with very minimal distance trade. A very granular mapping of the world carrying capacity would give us a realistic ( and sobering) target.
While we still have technology, what I want for Christmas is a google earth overlay of human long term carrying capacity for the whole world, broken down to the local watershed level, so infrastructure and agrarian transition could maybe be done close to the mark on the expensive repopulation of the land.
Lots of issues with that, and it would be a large task (I think?) but what a tool to have as the advocates for a planned resettlement have a roadmap to help them on the way.
It could even have formulas and variables that an individual watershed could tweak to have a bit more of this and bit less of that within science based ranges.
Your concern that a more chaotic response as things unravel is likely correct, but a guy can dream.
experience reverentially- I do that right here where I live, as we are a melding of unmanaged and lightly managed permaculture arrangements.
I think something to keep in mind when thinking about carrying capacity is that the rate of recovery of an untended ecosystem will be very different from that of a tended one. Many pollarded and coppiced trees,for example, live longer than trees left to their own devices; a woodland with rotational coppices has much higher biodiversity and also higher production of materials for human use than a “peak succession” wild forest. Similarly, a landscape with beavers and wolves is more diverse and healthier than one without either…
That doesn’t mean all interventions are beneficial. Cutting your coppice too often will shorten its life. Damming a river will absolutely affect the fertility of the floodplains.
And just because a landscape is tended does not mean it is completely controlled. A large enough storm can set back your coppicing work; carrying capacity during a drought or a year with a very cool and wet summer will be different than in an ideal year. So carrying capacity needs to take into account periodic crop failures — probably more often than they happened before the modern predilection for mitigating against poor weather by applying fossil energy to the problem.
I like the idea of your map but it would be heavily dependent on an awful lot of context — and could very quickly be inaccurate in a changing and chaotic climate.
Your comment points out how impactful we are to the health of the environment. For good or bad. I’ve mentioned in the past that I view us a a keystone species gone rogue.
Learning from the natural cycles around us and then also adjusting to events is a learned skill, which will take a long time to reacquire, and will be especially needed with climate chaos. There is so much potential for us to be a healing agent.
Both Chris’ examples and the comments from the U.K. readers point out to me the big differences in history on the land that we have. There is virtually no pollarding or coppicing here, and all the native American land management techniques are understood by very few. Not that they would be deployed wide scale any time soon.
Our young nation is still in short sighted extractive soil depleting mode, with just some modest attempts to begin regeneration.
The map- yes, it would likely only be a first cut at land use planning, as the climate patterns are in flux, with little certainty on long term trends. Still want it though, and if nothing else, would be a good education tool, to help support the argument that what is going on now is not sustainable.
On the bio regioning round table hosted by Nate Hagens, they talked about an early map of the US that boundaries the states around the watersheds. I think Indias regions are based on water sheds.
I saw that. They were referring to the recommendation of explorer James Wesley Powell, who explored the unsettled west, but his recommendation was not taken. Too bad.
Today, the USGS has assessed and mapped the watersheds in real detail, so the information is easily accessed, but few know what watershed they are in. The mapping is broken down into pretty granular hydrologic units.
https://water.usgs.gov/themes/hydrologic-units/
My place happens to be in HUC12: 070700060306.
I would imagine the UK has a similar tool?
Yes, there is the Foundation for Water Research, and the Government website, but FWR have info for Europe and other countries.
The rivers here in the UK are a point of political resistance as the privatised water system has been leveraged by global corporate finance and is filling the rivers and seas with raw sewage. A civil movement has emerged around. How is it in US?
I will add that our river basin is the Thames, (our nearest tributary the Effra has been under ground for a hundred years or so), the water company is Thames Water which is owned by an Australian finance entity known as ‘the vampire kangaroo’ because of its voracious leveraging of the companies it ‘owns’. It recently came cap in hand to the government as it skirts bankruptcy. This is happening all over the UK creating crumbling infrastructures. Privatise profits, socialise losses.
This is well understood by the civil movements that are growing, alongside the toxicity of the water, rivers, a undeniable commons. It can well become a basis of regional governance through its abuse like this.
I ought to find out more about the Fillebrook and when it stopped being above ground; the Alders Brook is somewhat seasonal now I think. But I see the Roding and the Lea regularly.
I’m told the Roding has otters now! I haven’t seen them yet.
Utilities in the U.S. is a hodge podge.
Some cities, especially smaller ones, have their own water utility, big cities often outsource to private companies.
I’m rural, on my own well, so am not that familiar on how well things are going. My general impression is that regulation and laws are effective. When I lived in a large suburb, it had its own water utility, and was run well.
It’s not perfect but the if you’re in the US the NRCS web soil survey is a decent starting place:
https://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/app/
You can get basic idea of how much water you can hold in soil once you get the SOM in a good spot as well as importantly how quickly it will infiltrate so how likely you are to really be able to benefit from erratic rains.
If you go to vegetative productivity you can see the native ecosystem type and get results for harvestable biomass for hay or cubic ft of wood depending. It will even give you ranges for good and bad years as well as point out good managers of grass can probably take a good bit more than one cut and done.
I think I see potential in something like this for setting the cap on farm size, obviously it will be prone to abuse but I think a better metric than acre size is biomass production. Farms will need to be larger, or turn into ranches as biomass per acres lowers. Of course climate will over run all of these numbers in the future, but as a place to start I think it’s better than total acreage in an ideal SFF. (also accounts for the fact highlands are less productive than lowlands in general)
Water in the US is mix of public owned and rural coops in my experience. It works well enough until it doesn’t. There are concerns with agriculture runoff and industrial pollution in my area but that’s a very location dependent issue in some respects. Though basically all our waterways have way too much nitrogen and the native mollusk population has been obliterated.