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Posted on February 18, 2025 | 88 Comments
I thought I’d write a follow up to my previous post by way of replying to the various interesting comments it received. But I won’t mention any commenters by name in case they’d prefer not to be so publicly identified.
So, first – I was possibly a bit negative about Adam Greenfield’s book Lifehouse in my previous post. It has many strengths. I like it that he’s not overly wowed by techno-fixes or the idea of a renewables transition’. On the latter point, there’ve been two interesting reviews of books I need to read recently in The London Review of Books. Energy market expert Brett Christophers on Malm and Carton’s Overshoot, and all-round expert Adam Tooze on Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. Seems like the answers to the question ‘how’s the energy transition doing?’ in these two books are either (1) Badly, or (2) There isn’t and never has been any ‘energy transition’. And to think of the time I’ve wasted debating things like S-curves with true believers. No more!
A quick digression on food techno-fixes in relation to this. It now seems likely that to meet global human protein requirements through manufactured microbial matter would require more than the entire world’s electricity supply, and almost certainly more than its low-carbon electricity supply. Electricity is the easiest thing to decarbonize, and we’re not even succeeding at that. Honestly, it’s time to lay the manufactured food fantasy to rest.
But back to Adam Greenfield’s book. Adam’s idea of lifehouses built out of existing forms of social organisation is another good feature of his book. Though one point of difference I have is that I don’t think those forms should be confined only to ones acceptable to orthodox left-wing opinion. Hence, as mentioned by commenters under my previous post, pubs and churches are also worthy of consideration. I’m always glad to hear it for the good old British pub. Historically, I don’t know how inclusive they’ve been, but maybe things have moved on. Still, in tune with the general privatisation and gentrification of modern life, they’re perhaps not the community hubs they once were?
Regarding churches, Adam does in fact mention them in his book, but only in the form of empty buildings with the potential to be repurposed physically as lifehouses. It’s perhaps significant that churches appear in his index as ‘Church buildings’. Adam talks about the precipitous decline in the profession of the Christian faith and the decrepitude of the buildings. In my view, churches on the contrary become important as lifehouses the more they have active congregations. Churches and other places of worship do still have active congregations, especially outside western Europe. The role of religion and spirituality is something of a blind spot of the left – I hope to say more about that soon.
The main problem with churches, though, is that despite the mighty efforts of some of their members, they can only be nodes of distribution to meet people’s material needs, not major long-term producers of them. As one commenter pointed out under my previous post, a more obvious candidate in that respect, and a more obvious form of lifehouse, is a farm. That led to an interesting discussion about whether and what kinds of farm could be lifehouses.
Is there a sufficiently strong alternative/agroecological farm sector ready to step into the role of lifehouses in rich parts of the world like North America and Western Europe? I’d have to say no (shoutout here for Matthew Ingram’s new book The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture, which provides a detailed history). But that’s what I’d be looking to strengthen. The idea of getting local investors to buy land to establish local food enterprises was mentioned – something I’ve also discussed with various people, including Nate Hagens. There are various initiatives I know of in the UK and the USA – some with a strong public profile like the Ecological Land Co-op and some a bit more under the radar.
I think this is a good way to go, provided the farmers are protected from investor self-interest and from commodity food prices. Both these things are possible, but not easy. Perhaps a discussion for another time. At the moment, though, these developments are nowhere near where they need to be.
Building from the present low base, I’d suggest that farmers could do worse than asking these six questions in respect of the lifehouse potential of their land:
It bugs me that I can’t really offer a strong yes to some of those questions in respect of my own little spread. But this is what we need to be working on.
This focus on resilient agrarianism underlines the point that ‘taking care of ourselves in a world on fire’ – to invoke the subtitle of Adam’s book – is going to be a heavily rural affair. And this is my main beef with his book. As I said before, while Adam thinks “it’s a reasonable bet that whatever else happens, most of us will continue to live in densely settled urban places even amid the worst conditions of the Long Emergency” (p.182) I think this is a very poor punt indeed.
I’ve written and spoken copiously about the overemphasis on urbanism in modern times, and I’m almost done with it. I’m not planning to write any more ‘The cruel fantasies of the well platformed’ articles about our kneejerk modern urbanism, but I do think people are selling themselves and others short with our inability to even contemplate a more rural future. Honestly, I’m tempted to call it Of Mice and Men in modern garb: ‘Tell me about the cities, George’. But, for the record, I’m not writing myself into the ending of that story. I’m not George. There are so many ways in which I’m not George.
There was an interesting discussion about the romanticisation of the rural and the urban under my previous post. It’s something I’ve mentioned here before. Why do we police so vigorously anything that smacks of rural romanticism (like … even mentioning the possibility of future ruralisation) while giving romanticisations of the urban a free pass? Possibly because the people whose voices get heard are so thoroughly imbued with urbanism (the point I made in my previous post about urban anxiety at the thought of a rural and agrarian life), or possibly even because squashing ideas of rural autonomy suits contemporary power structures. Maybe it has to do with the bad historical memories of the hollowed out small farm communities that were mentioned, though I’m not sure memories stretch back that far in Britain at any rate. As was pointed out in the discussion, urban areas are usually pretty hollowed out too.
Sometimes I think people just project the rural as the mirror image of the urban, for which read ‘modern’ or ‘prosperous’. In his review of Patrick Joyce’s book Remembering Peasants (I reviewed it here) Colm Tóibín mentions an account of peasants in Extremadura who “lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by malnutrition, malaria and inbreeding, and almost without a culture.” It’s the ‘almost without a culture’ that bugs me here, unless the point is that extreme poverty leads to extreme degradation. In which case why not just say that – it’s true in cities too.
More recently in Brazil, recruitment activists of the landless workers movement report “It’s always more difficult in the cities … people have lost hope”. How do we deepen this discussion?
Indigeneity is often presented as modernity’s other too. Is it just me, or does this report that was mentioned of the Kogi read a bit oddly?
Anyway, we somehow need to be having more sophisticated conversations about all this.
One thing the discussion under my previous post touched on was the unpleasant matter of violent social collapse, population die-offs and related nasties like enslavement. I have a few questions about this. First, people can be quite committed to their chosen position on the doom vs ‘optimism’ spectrum and dismissive of others who they view as either too doomy or not doomy enough. Having been accused of both these crimes quite often, I don’t really know how best to navigate this or to have good conversations with people that transcend where we place ourselves on this spectrum. Thoughts?
Second, if we turn the dial to the doomy end of the spectrum, is there anything worth saying about this? We can probably agree that wars, major climate or weather disasters and economic crashes may happen and if they do they will cause suffering and death of potentially catastrophic proportions. Are there productive conversations we can be having about these outcomes, other than hoping they don’t happen and speaking up for whatever heroic efforts we believe will prevent them? Is there anything to say except all bets are off in a disaster scenario?
Writing this, the case of Gaza springs to mind. I haven’t said anything about it on this site because I don’t really have anything to say that more informed people can’t say better than me. But I fear this is a wave of the future – a world of deathhouses as well as lifehouses, with people separated between them by various militarised walls and borders. Life proceeding tolerably on one side, utter misery and destruction on the other. How do we talk about this? There will be some of Adam’s lifehouses even within the larger deathhouses, but is that the point to focus on?
Third, there’s a spectrum of labour disciplining and coercion. Full blown, systematic slavery seems to me mostly a project of functioning centralized and monetized imperial states and their peripheries. It’s not uppermost among my concerns in the context of collapse scenarios, although as the peripheries grow I guess its probability increases. To some extent, that applies also to the king-warlord-feudalism dynamic. I talk quite a bit about this latter one in my new book. Basically, I think we’re poorly equipped with theories of demodernisation that can help understand how this will play out and what we can do to try to mitigate against the worst outcomes. I’m interested in any thoughts.
On a somewhat related note, as President Trump amps up his bull-in-a-china shop act I’m wondering about how to orient to that too. There are those who think his presidency is an existential threat to liberty and peace. Which I think is probably true, but I’ve also come to think his presidency is not some aberration of modernist politics but a logical development of it long presaged in the panoply of less monstrous leaders. If we rage against the likes of Trump, but don’t rage against the likes of Joe Biden or Keir Starmer (or even Jeremy, Bernie and AOC), then I think we’re missing the bigger picture (I confess to doing that in the past). One aspect of this per recent discussions here is that I’m not overly persuaded about holding tight to states and governments and their legal frameworks as deliverers of justice. There might be ‘right sides of history’ but if you believe in the state as the entity to deliver it you’re probably backing the wrong horse. There are of course a million viewpoints out there about all this. Here’s one I found interesting. And here’s another. And here’s just one more. I hope to contribute my own at some point, so I’m interested in people’s views.
Finally, a bit of expectation management. My book does say a little bit about ‘craft’, but not all that much. Hopefully we can have some crafty conversations here on this site in the light of it, though. Likewise with many other topics that it touches lightly on. One thing I’ve learned in recent years about writing books is that you usually have much less space in them to develop ideas than you do on a blog.
I’m now going to be wrapped up with the final editing stage of the book for the next month or so (along with some tree planting – hope springs eternal), but do feel free to drop in on this little corner of the virtual world in the interim.
Note: I amended this post after publishing the first version to correct a couple of typos and to express greater uncertainty about the manufactured food energy data – which I think is warranted until I’ve had a chance to do a proper work through of the figures.
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As I shall mention to many other bloggers, there is something vital missing in most discussions about the next decade – what are the factors that lead you [them] to postulate such outcomes versus what the vast majority of so-called ‘first world’ hear (and want to hear!); that all will be well! Those on any political spectrum position are still convinced that their ‘leaders’ will deliver BAU, or, indeed, even better!!
Even though it is still -30C here, I am looking forward to planting season in my little garden world too. Maybe this year I can have home-grown carrots last until March until merely January.
Home grown carrots lasting until March are absolutely the dream! I’m afraid I didn’t achieve that this year either, between the slugs (we had a really bad year for them) and the carrot root fly (I did net some of the carrots, and hadn’t grown carrots or related crops on that spot in four years, and… there were the carrot root flies under the netting, protected from predators, living their best life… blast.)
Curt Schicter says it nicely .
” I do not think the Germans understand the damage they have done to themselves embracing their fascist roots.
They literally have no conception that Americans might not be willing to pay for or die for their ability to throw people in jail for saying things.
If you support NATO, you better get
them to unscrew their stuff, because this will kill NATO.
Just a heads up over how the USA is thinking .
Chris, don’t worry about being off for a month writing, it’s going to take me a month to read all the things you’ve linked to in this post, and longer to check out some of the books… so I’ll try to keep this comment on the short side.
I think you’re correct that churches currently are more able to distribute goods to meet people’s needs than actual produce much in the way of materials. But I also think that a) remaining church land is under-utilised (though it’s trendy now to have ecological plantings etc in churchyards, which I certainly welcome) and b) churches do produce some goods that meet people’s needs, they just aren’t always tangible goods. The erosion of public spaces that aren’t commercial spaces (and I would include probably include many pubs in this, as well as churches) is arguably just another form of capitalist enclosure, though. Most churches in the UK are largely run by volunteers and we are in big trouble as the last generation of people who had any chance at a meaningful retirement continue to age out and/or die off: younger generations are often working too many jobs or uncertain hours to get involved on a longer-term basis. I’m able to make the efforts I do because my spouse is able to support both of us and we have no children, but this is a relatively rare situation (and it does mean we have more precarity than we would if I went out and got a day job). Our soup kitchen volunteers are phenomenal, but there is also high turnover.
Regarding memory, I don’t think I meant that most urban people have any real lived memory of rural immiseration. The closest I can come to that is my 95-year-old father-in-law, who never did finish reading your book (I think he had a good go but his short-term memory hasn’t really been up to it for a while), but said “it’s just impossible to make these small farms work economically any more” — he really did grow up on a farm in rural Ireland (which was largely fossil-free in his childhood), and he really did get out and move to the city, though his family were bitterly disappointed that he went into engineering rather than the priesthood. Rather, though, I meant that our urban collective cultural “memory” or narrative is of rural immiseration (without examining the causes of that), or of the romantic “bucolic idyll” that we know can’t quite be a true picture.
I like your six questions, but I would be interested in how the balance of self-provisioning and cash crops works, and I might well put community connectedness higher on the list if there’s a hierarchy here — if nothing else, because of the potential impact on managing water. (And of course, resilient water management might look different in rain-shadowed East London than it does in Wales.) Perhaps these aren’t questions to be answered in order as a yes/no, but rather areas of consideration, re-written as follows:
1. What does resilient water management look like here?
2. How can we produce food and/or fibre here with no or limited fossil fuels?
3. How can we fertilise food crops here without major external inputs?
4. What quantity, quality and type of timber or other durable building material can we produce here?
5. How can we use the products of this land to keep a good range of residential and agricultural buildings in repair?
6. What are the needs of the surrounding community that we can meet, and what are our other points of connection with that community?
And I might presume to add one more:
7. How does our community negotiate matters of governance between ourselves, and how do we negotiate with other communities about decisions that have wider impacts?
It would be very interesting to see other commenters here answer these questions — either your version or mine. I might have a go myself in the next few days but for now it is late and I am tired, and so I am going to stop typing before I say something stupid.
Nothing original here but at distance where cities are cart hours or days distant peasants can maintain hoe farming on small multigenerational farms where farm size is small because that is all you can maintain with muscle power. Farmers will cooperate for planting and festivals but each farmhouse will be largely independent .
Near the cities horse teams will maintain cereals on large farms and estates while sharecroppers grow vegetables on what ground they can .
The market driven farming near cities will not need or use most of what distant peasants produce. Small trade for forged tools with peasants.
So kinda two sets of farming, one market driven the other subsistence.
One human power the other draft animal powered. Almost like the power used constrains size and scale so the small farmers are both independent but also advantaged by group efforts around harvest windows. That is governance and survival favor cooperation around harvest with labor debts reciprocated.
Anyway in the long haul some step down to a former low energy system that worked for a long period of the past seems a reasonable guess. But in any low energy system distance takes its toll.
Most of this fairly easy with solar/ battery electrics and lifetime of twenty years means we can at least transition stepwise , but mostly wishful thinking unless somebody makes a more reliable electric tractor. For now anyway it works. Biodiesel tractors also have decades of life still in them .
There might be ‘right sides of history’
No, I don’t think there are – that phrase is just a rhetorical attempt to bully people into agreeing with whatever the speaker favours. ‘History’ is not a person, it doesn’t have a ‘side’.
What there is, though, is that there have certainly been places and times where it would have been far, far better for the average person to live than others. But some of what has created those circumstances is bound to be random. To think we can “shape the future” other than in the vaguest, this-seems-a good-idea- let’s-hope-for-the-best sort of way is unhelpful.
On the various shades of Doomerism – Dougald Hine talks about Engaged Surrender towards the end of his conversation with Nate Hagens on a recent podcast. He will explain it much better that I can. https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/163-dougald-hine
Greg! The flying car awaits!
https://faircompanies.com/videos/special-operations-vet-commutes-by-flying-car-from-rural-off-grid-home/
Thanks Chris.
Apropos to this conversation, I’m finally reading Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror”.
And while I had been roughly aware of the outline of the story of the plague century of the 1300s, what continues to strike me in her telling is the endless greed of the powerful. The peasants, who were at the base of the human food production pyramid were treated as a commodity to be squeezed for all the wealth that could be taken from them. Taken from them by the lords whose supposed job was to ‘protect’ the people of their fiefs. Brutally taken.
It got to the point that the kings couldn’t even fight their wars anymore because there wasn’t anything left in the countryside to steal.
This leads me to believe that working out the technical details of how to set up a Small Farm Future is not the primary concern. What we need is a whole new culture. A culture that recognizes what great wealth is embodied in a harmonious society. A culture that penalizes greed and the accumulation of wealth, where status is gotten by generosity and bringing people together for the common good.
In other words, a complete inversion of the last (at least) 1,000 years of ‘Western’ values.
It’s easy to idealize the native (pre-contact) cultures of North America, but some of those cultures had experienced the kind of desolation that covered Europe in the 1300s, except that some of the North American native cultures actually learned something from their experiences, and took measures to build societies that really did work for the majority of their people. Some of the cultures.
But what we see when the Europeans arrive is that the looters win. The only workable solution would have been to kill all of the newcomers. And nobody wants to live in a society that is capable of that.
It’s our values that are the problem. Fix that and the governance and the technology will follow.
I wonder whether the looters would have won on Turtle Island if not for smallpox.
I wonder whether the looters would have won in 1300s Europe if not for the Black Death.
Of course, we’re arguably not much better at dealing with pandemics now, either — SARS-CoV-2 is mild (at least in its short term effects) compared to smallpox or measles in unvaccinated, unexposed populations, was handled incredibly badly, and has burned through most of the willingness to actually take preventive measures that we might need for whatever the next pandemic might be.
“But what we see when the Europeans arrive is that the looters win. The only workable solution would have been to kill all of the newcomers. And nobody wants to live in a society that is capable of that.”
“I wonder whether the looters would have won on Turtle Island if not for smallpox.”
One thing worth remembering is that there were many cases of Europeans “going native” in the early generations of the settlement of Turtle Island, and very few cases of “natives” going European. In 1838, at the time of the Trail of Tears, many of the Cherokee were of mixed Scottish Highland blood, and those in whom this was most evident were given the option to remain and avoid the deportation to Oklahoma. That the offer was not taken up is remembered to this day.
Even among the newcomers, in other words, the pull of the living culture of those already on the land seems to have been stronger than that of the looting culture. The contingencies of smallpox, fossil fuels, or the Sheffield steel that Mark Firth sold to Sam Colt, allowing him to make a reliable revolver (the turning point in “the winning of the West”, or so the guides at Sheffield General Cemetery will tell you) shouldn’t be hardened into some kind of historical law by which “looting” will always trump “living”.
All of which to affirm what you say about the importance of culture, Eric.
I don’t have anything to add regarding future agrarianism. Your questions and Kathryn’s version of them are both good. I’m pleasantly surprised that I can answer “yes” to all of them.
Regarding doomerism: I am on the extreme end of the doom spectrum simply based on the extent of population overshoot (somewhere between 40 to 80 times the number of humans the earth can support long term), but the recent shift in geopolitical alliances by the US adds another fillip of doom to the current situation. The risk of nuclear war, already very high, will increase even more.
I read a recent and convincing analysis that suggests that the US abandoning Europe and building an alliance with Russia will require many countries in Europe and East Asia to acquire nuclear weapons now that the security umbrella of NATO and similar alliances in Asia are gone. Nuclear proliferation will thus be the result of Trump’s desire to carve up the world into autocratic fiefs, one of which he intends to control.
The example of Ukraine shows that nuclear weapons have become the only way to ensure national security. Expect any country that has the technical and industrial capacity to build nuclear weapons to race to acquire them, including Germany, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Turkey and others.
But the more countries that have these weapons the more likely that they will be used, either deliberately or by mistake. Also, the shift to rapid proliferation will be very dangerous in itself. Existing nuclear powers may take dramatic steps to prevent other countries from joining them.
Elections have consequences. The recent, and probably final, US national election has already resulted in a dramatic destabilization of world order. Nuclear war may well be an additional consequence.
The first 30 minutes of this should be of interest to folks outside the US. These three are really astute observers of politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O27EGKa4rk
The 3 commentators seemed to have believed in the mythology of the USA. (have they never read any Chomsky!!!!)
The “Shining Citadel on the Hill” and all that. A force for good etc etc.
Trump has just lifted the vail and the ugly spectre of “realpolitik” is there for all to see.
Shocking for some but……….. for people of colour or First Nation Americans, is it any surprise?
Much of the world has come up against the hard reality of “American Exceptionalism” over the last 80 years and before that The British Empire.
Trump is only really a shock to us in the “West”, who delude ourselves, that we are a force for good.
It’s always been about national self interest. (Or the self interests of elites within nations)
A further thought about churches and the production of material needs — there is a strong tradition of monasteries as having substantial kitchen gardens, in order to not be as dependent on outside sources of food in the communities they served. My understanding is that some also maintained important medicinal gardens. The de-nationalisation of the monasteries that came with the Reformation in England (and elsewhere) damaged a lot of that production (through the usual methods of appropriating the land and giving it to private individuals) as well as changing the balance of power considerably (this is also very much tied up with education and literacy). I am not saying here that all monasteries were self-supporting farms, because I don’t believe that is the case; but some of them were productive, nonetheless, and embedded in the production systems of their local communities in ways beyond the funding of chantries by rich aristocrats trying to get out of purgatory faster. So the idea of churches as farms, or at least farm-adjacent, is not completely far-fetched.
Of course, if the future is made up of what’s already lying around, we *are* left now with a lot of difficult-to-maintain church buildings, and small, struggling congregations that are not really oriented towards self-provisioning within their local communities and not as inclusive as we try or hope to be. Even a lot of the charitable redistribution is inextricably linked to modern industrial capitalist models of production; we do not have a tithe barn, so most of the food for our soup kitchen and food bank gets delivered most weeks by a lorry, and occasionally by e-assist bicycle with trailer when I have a glut.
What is true to some extent of churches, at least Church of England ones, is that they are places where you might well meet a very broad spectrum of the people who are present in a local place. My own social life would perhaps not be as likely to put me in contact with families with young children, or elderly people living on their own, other than my immediate neighbours. My own social life would be less likely to put me in contact with people experiencing acute food poverty, though there is a fair amount of informal mutual aid going on among my friends to keep people housed.
I don’t know how much this is also true of pubs. Have pubs historically been associated with farms? I know of a cider farm in Somerset that has a shop and a restaurant, which we used to visit when in the area for other reasons, but I cannot for the life of me remember if they also serve cider (it would be a bit weird not to, but I guess licensing laws might limit them to apple juice: note for North American readers, “cider” here is a fermented product, the brown stuff you call apple cider is just freshly pressed apple juice). The London pubs I’ve been to have not been anywhere near as inclusive as the churches I’ve been to. The poor drink at home or not at all, though historically when ale was cheaper and water more dangerous that may not have been the case.
Or maybe this is all fiddling about with details: just because churches and pubs alike in a small farm future will be supported by local farms if they exist at all doesn’t mean that every church and every pub must be a farm. Small house churches exist now, and so do hobby brewers and people who have a still somewhere and always have something to bring to a party. Nevertheless, I’m intrigued by the historical combinations and by what they might tell us about the future.
(As usual, I’m working at the fuzzy edges of my actual understanding of history, here, so apologies for any hand-waving or inaccuracy.)
Kathryn, to your thread about gardening monasteries and struggling churches, which nonetheless represent rare islands of class and cultural mixing and rare pockets of land not wholly governed by market logic, I would like to braid in the image of the forest churches of Ethiopia, which illuminates the imagination of the Orthodox writer Graham Pardun. Here’s a passage which may speak to you, as well, a prophetic utopia:
“That’s how I read the prophets, anyway: A return together to an archipelago of blossoming temple-homes—unified by a common life together in the main temple—sprawled across the Machine’s worldwide oceans of asphalt and concrete—a retraction, when necessary, to quiet resting places enveloped in Edenic gardens from which we’d feed ourselves, and also our suffering neighbors, perhaps even grow our own wheat and grapes by our own human hands, transforming them into bread and wine for the Eucharist with our human hands, also, living as a deeply embodied, Earth-connected communion of love: This could already be a way of living in the age to come—as both a prophetic witness to its arrival, and perhaps also one of the means by which it does so.”
https://sabbathempire.substack.com/p/essay-6-the-lily-archipelago
Curiously enough, as I went looking for that in response to the discussion here, I was waylaid by John Michael Greer’s latest post at Ecosophia, which includes a digression on how the mythic shape of Christianity resonates with the wider, older pattern of the seasonal myth, discerned by comparative mythographers of the 19th century across the Indo-European cultures:
“John the Baptist, born at midsummer, has picked up some of the symbolic ambience of the spirit of the waning year, which is why he dies by the sword in the autumn in an underground dungeon and his head goes on a platter. Jesus, born at midwinter, correspondingly carries some of the ambience of the spirit of the waxing year, which is why he is pierced by a spear while suspended above the earth in the spring, and a cup or chalice plays such an essential role in the rituals commemorating him as well as the legends that clustered around him. The two don’t kill each other in an endlessly repeating cycle, as their mythic equivalents do in other stories, but the emblems of the old year-twins are still present and accounted for.
“The sword, the disc, the spear, and the cup that play so vivid a role in Christian narrative will be familiar to some; those who know their way around symbolism will recognize those, just as they won’t be surprised that the town where Jesus was traditionally born, Bethlehem, literally means “house of bread.” When the god born in the house of bread says “this is my body,” again, the mythologically literate will recognize the theme. It’s very explicit in some places: “I must decrease,” says John the Baptist, “and he must increase.””
https://www.ecosophia.net/intermezzo-the-ring-and-the-grail-i/
My hunch is that life-houses need more than a utilitarian logic, to thrive in the hard times around and ahead, and that a spiritual quickening is going to be called for – whether within the cracked vessels of existing religious institutions, or outside, or in some dance between the two. An ekklesia that remembered its mythic connection to the seasonal and took seriously the material implications of gathering around bread and wine might have this kind of life in it. How to tell such a story, and weave it together with examples like yours, as a counter to the civilisational Christianity on show at ARC this week – well, as I write this, I realise that I may have found the theme I need to speak to in a few weeks’ time, when I’m due to address the Church of Sweden’s spring meeting on the theme of ‘A New Heaven and a New Earth’.
Dougald,
Thanks for this beautifully poetic response, and even more reading for me to catch up on!
I did attempt to make communion wine this year from the allotment grapes, but left it too long before getting it into the demijohn and got vinegar instead; the allotment grapes are, from what I can tell, a vine leaf cultivar rather than one grown for quality fruit. I have grown wheat in the churchyard and used it as a sermon illustration at our Harvest festival (a relatively recent addition to our calendar, but when you scratch the surface you find all kinds of agrarian stuff all the way through Christianity, really.) We didn’t, in the end, use it for communion wafers, but it did go to the soup kitchen, which has a sacramental character even if it isn’t an “official” sacrament.
I think church at its spiritual best is always engaged in being cracked open and dancing with what arises, both inside and outside the nominal boundaries of good order and deep tradition. What that looks like will necessarily vary by context, but the risen body of Christ bears the marks of the Crucifixion: our wounds are transformed, rather than erased, in the new heaven and earth.
“If we turn the dial to the doomy end of the spectrum, is there anything worth saying about this?”
This took me back to something Tyson Yunkaporta said in a recent conversation with Emmanuel Vaughan Lee:
“People like you and I are living in the wrong story of hope. I guess the only reason we’re having these conversations, the only reason we’re writing these books, is because we are hoping that there’s a possibility of a soft landing, where billions won’t have to die in horrible ways, where children won’t be harmed, won’t starve, won’t burn. We’re all hoping for this, and it’s probably wrong story because it’s probably not possible. The probability is that, you know, the systems change is and will continue to unfold in ways that are fairly catastrophic. Most of the people in the world right now are really feeling it, and are really in Armageddon, and in incredible suffering and upheaval and fear and death and all the rest. That’s most of the people in the world. You and I don’t notice it, because we’re living in these first world countries. It’s like, most of the world’s already burning, man. We’re past the tipping point. Probably need to start putting together the cautionary tales that are gonna carry everyone forward into the future and make sure this shit doesn’t happen again. With whatever stable system emerges from this, it probably won’t emerge in nice ways.”
https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/deep-time-diligence/
This is along the lines of Vinay Gupta’s famous line at the first Dark Mountain festival: “What you people call collapse is living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.” But what I find striking is the way Tyson turns the dial right out the doomy end of the spectrum and says, so this makes us look like fools, sitting around having these conversations – but this doesn’t just mean there’s nothing coming next, no work worth doing – though it may be that those of us living in soft-world who think hope looks like a soft landing are the ones least equipped for this work. If we’re going to show up to it anyway, then the route that gets us there is going to be painful and humbling. On which note, your six questions are part of what that humbling looks like, I think.
“What you people call collapse is living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.”
“If we’re going to show up to it anyway, then the route that gets us there is going to be painful and humbling.”
Yes. If we know that we could still live a joyful, meaningful life even if we’re living like the coffee growers (for example), then there’s strength, not panic when faced with the prospect. But how do we really “know” that? I think we can “know” that through the experience and endurance of hard work and rough conditions which may seem interminable (continued “practice” helps), through humbling experiences and realizations of the limitations of our individual lives and how much we don’t actually know or control, and by living through painful experiences (including loss and grief), while somehow still being able to tap into the joys of existence and connection.
If someone doesn’t believe they could live a meaningful life and be able to experience joy under such conditions, then the promises of ecomodernism and the energy transition would understandably be appealing, something to latch onto, a salvation.
“My book does say a little bit about ‘craft’, but not all that much. Hopefully we can have some crafty conversations here on this site in the light of it, though.”
On this note, here’s another book to look forward to:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/459780/craftland-by-fox-james/9781847927866
Perhaps we can get you and James in conversation, once both your books are out.
During my long life only Bill Clinton and Trump have asked where is the money going . Musk is finding out , millions of dollars going to western so called media , including BBC , ZDF , a plethora of European ” newspapers ” including the ” Guardian ” and Die Welt ” . western MSM has become the voice of the neocon deep state propaganda machine .
As a doomer , I read much non mainstream media , one interesting piece stated the the UK is losing two millionaires every three minutes , mostly to the UAE and Abu Dhabi . Another interesting statistic is that the UK has over thirteen hundred ” political prisoners ” that dared share mean memes on social media , three times more than Russia . Kathryn may not have heard in Scotland it is illegal to pray in your own house if it is under 200 metres from a abortion clinic .
As for the “native “Americans they stood no chance , a stone age mostly hunter gatherer society that came up against europeans with metal . Small tribal groups with different languages religions and customs Science and archeologists tell us they are the decendants of the third wave of emigration who came over the land bridge from what is now Russia , what happened to the previous waves is unknown but skeleton DNA shows they were genetically different and separate .
Kathryn may not have heard in Scotland it is illegal to pray in your own house if it is under 200 metres from a abortion clinic .
This is not true at all, you need to check where you’re getting your information, and think about who benefits from you believing this kind of far-fetched nonsense.
There was this surprising story from last year, but the praying man was arrested in Bournemouth, ‘too close’ to an abortion clinic:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo
Alot of lonely men out there who can be working a lathe and making wooden bowls for their neighbours. This obsession with women’s bodies and what they do with them is symptom of the rot, if you want people to raise babies you gonna have to do more than pray, and that is what these people will not do.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/praying-at-home-may-be-criminal-offense-in-scotland-under-new-law.html
The “safe access zone” does not include the inside of private homes, though activities inside private homes that are disruptive in the safe access zone could potentially be a problem (shouting, loudspeakers etc). It’s hard to see how silently praying at home would fall into that category, though.
It seems to me this is a pretty clear case of someone over-interpreting laws in order to stir up outrage. Again, I would ask you to think about who benefits from that outrage.
https://theferret.scot/scottish-law-bans-praying-silently-at-home-is-false/ has some information on it.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/02/21/vance-vindicated-74-year-old-woman-charged-after-silent-vigil-outside-abortion-clinic-in-scotland/
Not nonsense .
“Silent vigil outside an abortion clinic” simply isn’t the same thing as praying privately in your own home, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise.
Hope the link works , ” depends on who is passing the window ” Gillian Mackay MSP
There is already ” mission creep ” where laws are concerned .
https://x.com/LoisMcLatch/status/1894434155439563128?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1894434155439563128%7Ctwgr%5E5170bc6327aaeefa3c87a44a8cfb1a7b32c9547e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.infowars.com%2Fposts%2Fscottish-mp-admits-jd-vance-was-right-about-orwellian-home-prayer-crime-depends-on-whos-passing-the-window
Better to use the just the first part of links like that one, keeping everything before the question mark, with the tracking part of the URL removed.
https://x.com/LoisMcLatch/status/1894434155439563128
Alice and I base our theory of change in learning and sharing the skills needed for community provisioning from a land base – craft. We are in the process of gathering and sharing these skills in a converted car park under an estate in South London, a place called The Remakery. Its been going about 12 years, Alice was invited to manage the space about a year ago. It was (mal)functioning under the same illusions as the green transition, that the toxic waste that passes for our present culture was redeemable – hence the name, a place for remaking, recycling the slush of ‘materials’ that comes off forced supply global chains. It soon filled up with rubbish in its early days, and its unending work is in stemming this flow. It is a fascinating microcosm of the world – complete with ‘soveriegn’ nations; the ‘residence’ all dilating between an acknowledgement of their place in a wider community that subsidises their spaces and the sense of privileged rights that comes with ‘ownership’.
For us it is the opportunity to explore the relationships of skills and community, an understanding of materials and resilience. Like Kathryn, alot of this can take place through a voluntary space opened up by more than enough resources elsewhere. This is one relates to the six questions and folds into number 6, in terms of relationships with the community; the ability to hold the space of an autonomous/gift economy within a capitalist economy AND the holding and sharing of SKILLS within that community to uphold and sustain the new life ways.
I have a feeling that these skills and practices underpin and predate language and religion and in this way are a great way to start from first principles and avoid some of the pitfalls and inherent structural problems of existing cultures and ideologies. More than that they are useful, in a more than utilitarian way. So, they are communicated peer to peer and face to face – we need to support practitioners with materials and space to share these skills with local communities, then support them with materials and space to practice them. Quite simple really. I think I needs to be said that this is a practice and not a manifesto. The process of bringing people through without humiliating them or denigrating their sense of status is the delicate work that happens in the workshops.
You probably know the site, but if not there’s a wealth of info here Joel:
https://www.heritagecrafts.org.uk/makers/craft-map/
There is a problem of the fact that the life ways that will allow for a sustainable and resilient future are an inversion of the current way of doing things. Presently these crafts are the privilege of the upper classes, ring fenced by economic barriers and ultimately enclosed by lack of access to land, a state of affairs that is replicated in all institutions of state, corporation and culture – its almost like there is reason that these skills have been ‘lost’! I will be interested to see if James Fox’s book will wrestle with that.
Even the establishment of these practices as foundational to community making and cohesion, becomes an encounter with predatory economic forces as they are annexed for research and funding opportunities, to be managed and mapped, documented and evaluated – leaving little for actual practitioners teaching actual people.
There are a whole class of well meaning people who will happily read, talk and research, write and observe and reify these skills who will not practice them or advocate for their whole scale distribution and the inherent reorganisation of land use that will embody.
Alice is much better at describing what ultimately is a beautiful vision of low carbon luxury and objects of care.
I agree with much of your take on what is viewed as (artisanal) craft today – one look at Crafts Magazine often reveals that a lot of today’s hand craft work has become bespoke, often the work of people who have gone through (the required?) expensive educational channels, who then end up selling objet d’art for pretty pennies, even if it’s a medieval quaich replica.
I don’t begrudge skilled makers asking and getting what they see as a fair price for their work, but a pole-lathed wooden bowl for 65 quid will represent a high-priced luxury for most people. I think the arc of pole-lathe wood turner Robin Wood is interesting. He was on the Heritage Craft council, may still be, and seems to have gone from making and selling mainly bowls to designing and selling mainly tools for other woodworkers to use, and running instructional courses. Ach, we all have to make our way in today’s world.
When I got into the idea of turning green wood on a pole-lathe, well first you have to make a pole lathe (not too difficult if you can find the lumber) then find a blacksmith who will make the hook tools for cutting green wood (there are a couple at last count in the UK). Getting the hang of it is fun, though a bowl from start to finish could take me the best part of half a day of energetic work, initially. To sell the finished product here in the countryside, I’d be lucky to fetch a tenner, i.e. monetarily it wouldn’t be worthwhile, so as is often the case, ambition (and ego) has to be soberly toned back down to earth, and you end up making gifts for family and friends (then paying the astronomical postage to send said gifts!). I’m OK with coming back down to earth, and creating my humble objet-whatevers out of industrial debris, but it still leaves one wondering occasionally how exactly will one make a bit of money… Which may be one reason people turn to writing books promoting craft and the joys of tactile, tangible knowledge. Of that genre, Tanya Harrod’s The Real Thing – Essays on Making in the Modern World is a great book, superb essays that rightly reify these kinds of creative endeavour and some of their leading proponents:
https://hyphenpress.co.uk/products/books/978-0-907259-50-3/
Thanks Steve, I’ll take a look. Good to hear about your work on the lathe, we bought some wooden bowls and spoons off our mate Steve at Axe and Paddle – an East end geezer gone native! They were a pretty penny but we use them every day, they’re as light and durable as plastic but warm and a real pleasure. I lathed my own a few months back and I love it, the whole process from a bit of tree, to knocking out the blank, setting up and through to a honed surface was about 3 to 4 hours. Tom who taught me can get through a good few in a day.
Like you say, we’ve all got to muddle through some how, but at some point we have to figure out how to stand outside of this economy. We’re working on pedal powered lathe, a sort of pole lathe with a chuck. Inspired by this amazing dude; https://www.harrybryan.com/pages/philosophy-intermediate-technology-in-the-shop
You’re a fast worker, Joel! I read that George Lailey, often cited as England’s last professional pole-lathe bowl maker, who died in 1958, had a record of turning around 30 bowls in a day (from ready blanks, I’d guess) but more often topped out at around 18. That’s some going! But the story I like best about Lailey is when a customer returned her morning porridge bowl, bought 30 years earlier and which now had a hole worn in the bottom, lamenting “I suppose I’ll just have to buy another one then”. For some reason I’ve never fathomed, Lailey used to brush a turmeric root along the bowl’s rim. Maybe it was just for decoration?
Thanks for the link – I was expecting to see something like the pedal-powered (not oscillating) lathe Mr. Chickadee makes (over on yt).
Just as donkeys seem to be having a bit of a moment recently, it’ll be interesting to see if the same might happen with Distributism. I looked in to the Ditchling art and craft community, founded along Catholic and Distributist lines, but couldn’t find much on its latter days in 1989, when the community disbanded, having run its course (there is one interview with loom weaver Jenny KilBride, at museumcrush.org, who recounts her last days living there). Are such piecemeal Distributist movements possible because they are bubbles that can only float in the water of capitalism? Could the inverse be true? There was a non-interventionist Distributist party – the Pirate Party – running in last year’s Romanian election. Alas it was not elected.
Looking into the future it may be appropriate to look into the past , cities were limited to available resources , looking at Manchester UK before around 1850 the population the population was around 125000 if if grew any larger they had outbreaks of dysentery and cholera and other nasties which cut the pollution and population , after around 1850 the invention of steam driven pumps supplied clean water and sewage removal and the population has grown ever since , looking to the future how many cities will survive without clean water ? I have read but I don’t know the truth that every glass of water delivered in London has been drunk three times before .
Your position in the hirachy does not matter , Prince Albert died of dysentery , disease does not care if you are king or pauper, billionaire or busted , it kills with no discrimination .
Thanks for a typically fine crop of comments. I will dip in briefly but then must turn to my book for the next couple of weeks.
– Yes, agree with what Kathryn and Dougald have to say about churches and monasteries. The current problem is the same as the problem with cities, though. Wrong distribution, too many people in the wrong place to adjust. I guess there’s also the possibility of corruption? The cultural memory of Friar Tuck?
– Talking of cultural memory, my question about a cultural memory of rural immiseration is that many people passed through a period of more recent urban immiseration before some achieved urban prosperity. So why a strong cultural memory of specifically rural immiseration? An alternative might be that rural misery narratives are often more recent ideologies doing modern political work?
– No rank order intended in my list. But thanks for the discussion, amendments etc. Makes a lot of sense.
– Appreciate Bruce’s comment about future differentiations of livelihood-making. I’ve been writing along somewhat similar lines in the present book.
– Somewhat agree with Martin about the questionable character of ‘right side of history’ arguments. Although I’m minded to counterpose natural law (where’s Sean when I need him??) So, for example, slave societies can be quite enduring and try to legitimate and stabilise themselves ideologically, but never really succeed.
– Regarding Eric’s point about the 1300s and the interesting discussion around it, I’d say yes to culture change but I wouldn’t go so far as to identify western culture in its entirety as the problem. My sense of the 1300s (I’m no expert of course) is that it was a time when some of the elite privileges of the high middle ages were crumbling due to structural forces, prompting predatory but ultimately unsuccessful elite attempts to preserve the status quo. Some lessons for the present there, I think.
– Great points from Dougald. The looting doesn’t always trump living point resonates. Indeed, looting is parasitic upon living and often burns out. But, back to Martin, that can be small comfort depending on the time & place you happen to be born into.
– Joe, I enjoyed that podcast (first part). I’m not sure how easy it is even for the handful of super-rich countries to acquire their own nuclear weapons, though, without aligning either with the US, Russia or China? Still, I think your broader point holds true. The decline of the US as a/the global superpower has been pretty much written in the stars, but Trump is certainly hastening it. There are some positives to take from that, but also many dangers. I found Peter Heather & John Rapley’s book ‘Why empires fall’ good on the way that power centres usually fall by actively seeding their successors just when it seems they’re at the height of their powers. Trump’s gifts to Russia and China are bizarre. So … history repeating itself with the Huns, the Goths, and Rome in the guise of Russia, China and the USA? Mutatis mutandis as they say.
– Joel’s takes on craft and embodied practice resonate as ever. Likewise the politics that makes craft the preserve of the elite … same applies to food and just about everything else. So … the challenge is how to generalise self livelihood-making via a radical politics that doesn’t just impose dreary communist facsimiles of shoddy capitalism. And the answer, surely, is … distributism!
I do keep wondering what an agrarian distributist anarcho-socialism might look like, other than “different in every watershed”.
The church is a hospital for sick people and as such will strive to be free of corruption –and will probably fail. Just at the moment, the cultural memory of sexual abuse is probably louder than the cultural memory of rich monasteries. But founding a monastery (or an evo-village or a mendicant order or whatever) is not One Weird Trick To Save The World. It’s just one pattern of how people lived in the past which may be relevant in an uncertain future.
I’ve been imagining getting the director Mike Leigh to make a Sci fi of this ‘agrarian distributist anarcho-socialism’ future, him or Terrence Malik who did A Hidden Life, or Andrea Arnold.
The suite of skills, of which farming is subset, that relates to community ‘livelihood making’ that itself patterns into watersheds. Although ‘distributism’ certainly describes the best structure of this, I can’t see a national movement forming that will implement these changes – its almost the nature of it to emerge patchwork and contingent.
I’m also trying to think through whether these skills form the basis of the offer to communty/public as a material offer is what is needed right now, and that the balm/cohesion of religion/belief can emerge from that – creating some space between the heavy baggage of present organised religions and the joys of the celebration of community and being that it is at its best.
Also Joe, your 40-80x overshoot figure – could you elaborate on the basis of that?
I estimate the sustainable population of the earth based on the population well prior to the use of fossil fuels and before the beginnings of widespread deforestation, which was around 300 million in 1100 CE, for example.
This population would imply an overshoot of about 27 times, but carrying capacity has declined significantly since then, with vast tracts of industrial ag land entirely dependent on synthetic fertilizer for fertility and fish populations in the oceans greatly reduced, etc.
When the fast-approaching population bottleneck is past, I therefore expect the sustainable world population to be on the order of 100-200 million people. The race between increasing climate damage and ecosystem recovery allowed by depopulation will determine whether that range goes up or down over the next few thousand years (climate equilibrium takes one thousand years; 1/3 in ten years, 1/3 by 100 years, and the remaining 1/3 by 1000 years).
Another way to estimate overshoot is to look at a region that maintained a stable population for a few thousand years (without much in- or out-migration) and compare that population with the current one. China is just such a region. It maintained a relatively stable population of 50 million for at least two thousand years. Its current population is 1.4 billion, which implies an overshoot of 28x. But considering that much arable land in China is now covered with concrete, the post-bottleneck sustainable population is probably less than 50 million, which would increase the multiplier significantly.
These are just my estimates. Estimates of overshoot are all over the place, depending on assumptions, but even the most generous top out at one or two billion people, which means that 6-7 billion will not make it through the bottleneck. I personally think even one billion is far too high.
It would be interesting to calculate what the ultimate human carrying capacity would be if starting with a pristine earth and optimum land use. Could Farmer’s-of Forty-Centuries techniques spread to cover most of the earth’s land surface area if the oceans were left intact? Perhaps.
Chris, your calculations of how many people England could feed using low-energy agrarian methods come close to calculations of maximum carrying capacity, but I wonder how much untouched land area is needed just to keep the global ecosystem functional? It can’t all be small farms, can it?
In any case, whether overshoot is 8x or 80x, a big dieoff is coming. Every modern city will be virtually empty. Prepare accordingly.
I wonder how much untouched land area is needed just to keep the global ecosystem functional? It can’t all be small farms, can it?
The idea that there was much substantial “untouched land area” by e.g. 1100CE seems laughable to me. It’s true that an awful lot of it wasn’t under intensive small farm cultivation, but there’s a very broad space between that and untouched wilderness, and that broad space includes things like agroforestry, pastoral transhumance, and other extensive landscape management practices. One reason for those extensive practices is that they require less labour than more intensive cultivation, especially if you also want to maintain biodiversity (and biodiversity is the best hedge against things like the occasional very wet or dry year, crop pests, and so on).
It does seem likely to me that we are over our carrying capacity, but I think we need to be careful not to confuse the carrying capacity of the wider ecological base with the human labour capacity for intensive (rather than extensive) production. Maybe 300 million is how many people it takes to manage the landscape on whatever percentage of the planet it was managed in ~1100CE, but maybe when we also need to do a lot of soil remediation and physically shift lots of concrete and relearn the capacity for extensive (and intensive) management without throwing fossil fuels at the problem, in the context of a much less stable climate, we’ll need a lot closer to a billion.
I can’t tell you exact numbers about the future, of course. What I can tell you is that the more I tend the land I have official access to and forage on the commons that are available to me, the more my foraging and gardening activities seem hard to separate out from one another; some of my tending is of the commons, and some of my foraging is on the allotment or in the garden. While land access remains important, it is increasingly clear to me that the main limitations on my current productivity are not land access as such, but lack of storage and processing space and lack of labour (though I am experimenting with lower-labour techniques off at the Far Allotment).
From what I have gleaned from Chris’s work here, and allied sites is that the majority world is fed by small farmers as we speak. That they are using some fossil fuel inputs, are under enormous pressure from agribusiness, mining, logging and all the rest is without doubt but all the same, as a largely peasant agriculture, it’s business as usual. What is your understanding on this Joe?
Also, it is increasingly clear that the Brazilian rainforest is some kind of gardening project as opposed to untouched, how might this feed into our understanding of carrying capacity? Your figures are certainly alarming and I respect your understanding, I wonder how it corresponds with the ageing populations?
In sub-saharan Africa small farmers rarely provide all their own calories.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-021-01209-0#Tab3
Southeast Asia is hugely dependent on synthetic fertilizer, much of which is imported.
https://www.eco-business.com/opinion/fertiliser-security-for-food-security-in-southeast-asia-going-local-and-circular/
In India, per hectare consumption of synthetic fertilizer reached 139.8 kg last year. That’s a lot.
https://www.faidelhi.org/member/AR-Full-Rep.pdf
Small farmers may produce a lot of food and fiber, but most of them are doing it with a lot of external inputs and most of them are also supplementing their food supply with off-farm income. The percentage that are living off calories produced almost entirely within the carrying capacity of their farmland is very small. We don’t know the exact percentage for those self-sufficient farmers, but they are the ones likeliest to make it through the bottleneck.
The linked article about Southeast Asia notes that peak phosphorus is expected in 2033. Something to think about.
I wonder what the carrying capacity will be if agriculture is no longer a viable/sustainable means of acquiring food?
I think it depends on the varying capacity of each country , some countries are hell bent on cutting farming and rewilding their countries while hoping countries that don’t like the USA / parts of Africa / south America grow it for them .I see at least two problems how are they going to pay for it and without bulk carriers how are they going to get it delivered ?
If you look back to the Irish potato famine no country had a real surplus to send , in England it was known as the hungry ’40’s , the USA was just beginning to ramp up production as railways became available to shift it but ships were small sail powered with a capacity of a thousand tonnes max so ” carrying on as normal ” while destroying your own production is a recipe for desaster .
The Irish potato blight led to famine in Ireland because grain grown in Ireland by Irish people was being exported to England so that the farmers could pay rent to English landowners (who owned that land because of occupation and colonisation). They only relied on potatoes for calories because there wasn’t enough land left over, after growing grains for export, to support their families on anything else. It was absolutely a question of politics and governance, not of ecological overshoot.
That said, I do agree that carrying on as normal while destroying production capacity is a terrible idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_potato_failure.
There was no surplus to send the Irish .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
Europe also faced the same problem , chaos on the streets , starvation and threats of revolution .
I agree the landowners did not help but , if they put the entire country under grain and kept it there they still could not grow enough calories to feed the population they were eating over four pounds. a day . , Now we are in the same position , a uncontrolled problem with grain growing would cause a famine far worse than potato blight .
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/02/european-commission-drops-green-bias-in-new-eu-agriculture-programme/
Maybe Brussels is having a change of heart ?
Chris – long-time reader and I really appreciated this evocative post and the fantastic comments afterward.
As someone who works with churches in the U.S. looking to become something like life houses for their local communities, (www.thebtscenter.org), there are some promising new efforts emerging (a la what both Kathryn and Dougald have suggested in this thread) – mostly on the peripheries of Christian denominations. To name a few:
– There are an emerging set of intentional communities, patterned after ancient monastic practice. One of my favorites is Spring Forest, a “farmastery” in North Carolina, which has about ten residents on site, a much larger dispersed community, and focused on growing food, welcoming immigrants, and helping people heal from trauma. (https://www.springforest.org)
– The black church is far ahead of most white denominations in thinking about this, especially in terms of food sovereignty. There are multiple church-focused food networks, include Dr. Heber Brown’s Black Church Food Security Network (https://blackchurchfoodsecurity.net) on the east coast.
– There is also compelling theological work being done in this area, especially around the concept of refugia – which is a biological term referring to pockets of life that endure when the rest of the ecosystem collapses (such as during a fire) from which life can emerge afterwards. Debra Rienstra, a professor at Calvin College, has called for churches to become refugia for their local communities in her book “Refugia Faith” – a call that has been echoed by others, including Anabaptist theologian Ched Meyer, who works to train people to practice “watershed discipleship.”
In my work, we’ve focused particularly on this concept of refugia as a guiding metaphor for what churches should be in response to our world – and have received a strong positive response, especially from small churches that were often founded at the same time as their towns and are struggling with what old places with deep roots can offer a world that prizes the “new” and the “innovative”.
All of this is not to suggest that faith communities are the only places that these lifehouses can emerge , but my experience is that there are cultural and spiritual technologies (such as the practice of mutual aid or meaning making in the context of open-ended loss) that churches still know how to do and are frequently willing to offer back to their larger communities if given the chance.
Inspiring, thank you for the introduction and links. The bringing together of practical skills, good organisation and a deep regard for life is irresistible.
I guess my big reservation with Churches being Life Houses is……..does the support to the community come with strings attached?
Do you have to have “the faith” in order to be accepted?
Is attending a church service on a Sunday a prerequisite of being part of a mutual support system?
I understand that communities need common values (“glue”) to hold them together. Spirituality/belief systems.
Is the nature of that “glue” going to be decided on, collectively/consensually/collaboratively? And can people opt out and still be part of the community. A place for odd balls and misfits.
Or, as is the case with “The Church”, will it be a dictat from above?
Hi All,
Thanks for these responses.
John – I think your consideration is a good one. In my experience, the answers to your questions will vary significantly from church to church. Like all organizations, “the church” is not a monolith. While there are certainly some congregations that may offer aid with “strings attached”, as it sounds like you may fear; in my experience, there are plenty more that are willing to offer aid (and, in many cases already do) without any strings attached – precisely because they believe the practice of their faith means giving without any expectation of return.
For instance – I think about a church I worked with that discovered that its members had deep knowledge about practices around “simple living”, due to the historic commitments of their denomination. Their vision is to be a “Schoolhouse for Simple Living” for their community and their first effort was a workshop on canning. Most of the people who attended the workshop were not members of their congregation (nor were interested in becoming members.) At the end, the church was incredibly pleased with the response, because it gave them a chance to offer their best gifts back to their wider community.
There are certainly congregations that are too institutionally self-interested to do this work without strings attached. However – my experience is that there are a surprising number of faith communities that are just yearning to offer their gifts and connect with their broader community – without any expectation of institutional return.
Kind of fits here – it’s a book review of Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder, mentioned by McGilchrist in his recent interview with Nate Hagens, that touches upon reenchantment, spirituality. Worth a read:
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/a-great-review-of-living-in-wonder
John
I can only speak for my own church here, but we have never ever turned anyone away from the food bank or soup kitchen based on their religious beliefs or lack of same. We also have people of other faiths who worship with us regularly: you don’t actually have to be a Christian to attend Christian services, in general. And in the Church of England, you also don’t need to be a Christian to get married in your local parish church or to have your funeral there. (Getting married in a church that isn’t your local parish church gets more complicated, you need a “qualifying connection” and this is a whole other ballgame.)
We do ask that people are baptised (to a certain formula, though not necessarily in the Church of England) before receiving Holy Communion, but receiving Holy Communion is not a requirement of attending services and we have some services where it doesn’t happen at all. We do ask that people are baptised in order to be on the electoral roll of the church, which gives them the right to vote at our annual meeting, as well as to stand for election to some church councils.
As for a “dictat from above”, the Church of England (at least) is both top-down and bottom-up, which is frankly messy as all get-out, and sometimes infuriatingly slow. Some months ago I wrote a very long and boring comment about the way the structure of our governance works — I can’t find it now, and I’m not typing all of that again, but maybe Chris knows where it is?
My own church is definitely one for oddballs and misfits. I mean, we worship a God who became fully human and was executed by an occupying power, it’s kindof a weird thing to believe, of course we’re oddballs and misfits.
That said: I have definitely been to churches where I’ve felt unwelcome or just that I don’t fit in very well, based on silly things like what I was wearing or not having as much money as other people there. In my experience these tend to be churches that are in more wealthy, suburban areas.
@Kathryn
I’m not against “faith” but see it as a personal choice.
I can see any life houses that are founded around religious beliefs, as potentially problematic. Divisive,exclusive,controlling,dividing, “us and them” etc.
The Founding Fathers deliberately separated Church and State in the US constitution to avoid some of these potential issues.
I can certainly imagine life houses founded around sufficiently strong atheist beliefs being potentially just as problematic! But I think diversity is a strength here. We can have more than one life house. There are certainly communities already working to build networks of mutual care and support without explicit reference to religious belief. A larger problem, from my perspective, is the co-opting of religion into whatever is the prevailing power dynamic — formerly feudalism, but now (and this is especially apparent with conservative evangelicalism in the USA) capitalism. But this is a danger for any institution.
As for the Founding Fathers, I think some of what they were after with separation of church and state was that they didn’t want the state telling them how to practise their religion. As an Anglican with a rather uneasy relationship with being part of an established church, I think I have an inkling of where they were coming from.
I think Kathryn’s point about there being multiple “life houses” is a good one here. No one organization will serve all the life house needs – rather, we will need a multiple organizations, from multiple sectors, who can engage in this work. Faith communities can absolutely be one of them – but should not be the only one. (And, in my experience, the healthiest congregations I work with are all habitually looking to collaborate with secular non-profits to meet the needs of their community and watershed.)
This was precisely my concern with churches as lifehouses as well as a topic of debate for a recent decision I participated in making.
My concern was/is even if the church provides the aid without overt discrimination I can’t support it doing so if the larger institution preaches/beliefs that should discriminate even if it won’t at the food bank door. Here many christian churches believe everyone outside their denomination is evil and condemned to hell so it’s not just the hate group of month in the sermon at risk. I’ve also seen the line between help and proselytizing get very blurred (and blurred it myself when I believed), and even then at the end of the day if none of these concerns do materialize it’s still from a political perspective providing moralwashing for the institution as well as transferring the most basic political power of deciding who eats the religious clergy. (As opposed to in this case a secular non-profit or the state which while both flawed have to be open to everyone by virtue of existing)
But conservative (most) churches in America are very different from the church of England. I don’t think many non-Christian go services of their own accord unless it’s to appease a family member or spouse. You certainly would not be welcome at most of them if it was know you were a nonbeliever not open to conversion, though of course there’s no one actually stopping you from attending. The cults have conceal-carry volunteer door guards, and the mega churches buy security from the cops, so in theory they definitely could stop you I suppose but the social pressure should take care of it first.
That said I don’t think I can oppose churches choosing to spend their resources on something morally good so best to have a lot of lifehouses then.
I do find the idea of an atheist church quite funny. Welcome, we believe in nothing everyone I guess you can go home.
Thanks for a lot of very interesting further comments here, and a welcome to new commenters like Ben Y-D. I’d like to respond but I’m too deep into the endgame with the present book. When I emerge from it, maybe I’ll write another post engaging with some of these points – To the lifehouse, part 3, maybe. A pattern is emerging – am I stuck in an eternal loop?
On loops:
The seasons come and go, more or less in order (and even climate catastrophe won’t change things like having less daylight in winter and more in summer), yet I get older every year; that one big obvious cyclical pattern is not the only pattern I inhabit. I also inhabit daily and monthly cycles and feel the effects of both. Even breathing is repetitive, cyclical. Matter cannot be created or destroyed (with the possible exception of some kind of foundational creation event/Big Bang/whatever), so every atom of my body is part of some other cycle. Of dust we are created, and to dust we shall return.
This cyclical nature of our being does not exclude the possibility of learning, of agency, of metanoia (repentance — but with a true change of direction), even of sanctification, if you don’t mind me being a bit theological about it (and sanctification is not to be confused with salvation — though that is also not excluded by the cyclical nature of our being). Often, engaging with these cycles is how we learn, how we take action, how we repent, and how we build the habits of contemplation and connection that integrate us with all that is divine. But the familiarity of a cycle can feel quite a bit like a loop, a snare even. We do get stuck sometimes, repeating the same actions again and again until we learn how to do them well enough to move to another level.
So: are you stuck in a loop, or engaged in a cycle? Are you bored, disconnected, becoming more self-centred as you wear a deeper groove into the perimeter of your enclosure? Or are you still learning, growing, refining, discovering some aspect of the world anew with every lap? Pot-bound with strangling roots, or circling a hill to reach the summit, or maybe floating in playful circles on a thermal to see what can be surveyed from such a height?
On Sunday I’ll be burning last year’s palm crosses to make ash for our Ash Wednesday services, and around we go again, ashes to ashes. I sowed seed for peppers and aubergines last week, and all being well I will eventually have some more seed for peppers and aubergines out of the experiment. I don’t feel particularly stuck, but at this time of year I take some comfort from the idea that I am but dust.
Thanks for the welcome Chris and I’m really interested to hear your thoughts about this discussion. As I mentioned before, much of work is helping congregations play an actively constructive, intentionally collaborative role in cultivating resilience for their broader communities (especially because so many American “churches” are actively destructive right now.) My hope is not for a “religious revival”, but rather that faith communities can productively cooperate in creating resilient community ecologies in a time of profound disruption, even collapse – such as many of us are experiencing right now – in ways that benefit everyone – religious and non religious – human and other-than-human.
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
Also, I’ve nearly finished Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s stunning book ‘More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy’. I’d be interested to discuss if anyone else has read it? I’ll write a post about it when I can.
Haven’t read it – but I think I’ll get a copy.
Haven’t read it, but I just finished Power to the People by Kander, Malanima and Warde and found it well researched and analytical, My main objection to their story is that ascribe most of the relative decoupling of energy from gdp since 1970 to the emergence of ICT. My perspective is that it is rather the GDP that has increasingly been decoupled from the real, i.e. that it is mostly a question of how GDP is measured in general and even more so how changes in GDP over time are calculated – a lot of technicality here but it goes around deflators and base years and some other stuff.
The GDP seems to be a bit like “carbon oxide equivalents”. You believe it is a very hard and well defined metric, but once you start digging, you just dig deeper and deeper and realize that it is full of subjective judgements.
thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/no-escape-from-fantasy-land
Fantasy is all there is .
An illuminating post on carrying capacity:
https://alysion42.substack.com/p/carrying-capacity
Interesting article and here’s my but , population growth has stalled especially in the west and is below replacement , when the “boomers ” like me die off numbers will drop substantially , emigration is keeping the numbers up now in the UK almost half the babies born come from immigrants (11 % of the population ) if they do manage to increase the population it will be at least twenty years in the future . Only sub Saharan Africa is increasing its population , China is losing one million per year and increasing , India has the same problem , some eastern European countries are offering huge tax breaks to have kids , some statisticians are claiming by 2100 the world population will be the same as in 1950 and that’s ignoring all the energy problems ..
So IMHO the world population problem is solving itself and those worrying about the overpopulation problem should go and find something else to worry about .
My take on this is:
“Having to take care of a child collides with the focus on the individual and her desires that is central in “modernity”. Interestingly, it has an almost contradictory expression in people who want children but (for many different reasons) can’t get children through their own bodies. Many see it more or less as their “right” to get children in many different ways from IVF to surrogate mothers. In addition, the modern project is all about making our life independent of the biological relationships we all come from (this is of course an illusion as we can’t get away from our biological dependencies, just put more layers of technology between them and us). Another such example is all the efforts made to prolong our life, or to freeze bodies in the anticipation of future medical advances. Transhumanism is the ultimate expression of this, with eternal life and no biological functions. There is no room or need for children in this future (unless you believe in a transgalactic civilization which I assume is the rationale for Elon’s twelve).
Many people don’t see their life as part of the bigger biological and social context. Reproduction is seen as an individual choice and not an essential part of being a biological organism. One could argue that one of the main aspects of sustainability is to ensure the continued existence of the human species***. Not caring for the future of humanity can in this way be seen as the ultimate victory for modernism and as such it can also be the seed of its death.”
https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/is-modernity-killing-itself
“Having to take care of a child collides with the focus on the individual and her desires that is central in “modernity”.
It’s just as much about “him” as “her” though.
Many more men “do a runner” than women do.
An anecdote. A mate of mine is a civil engineer who has work all over the world. He had noticed that countries that gave women a good secondary education, the women had small families. From his observation it was so whether the country was capitalist or communist, liberal or conservative, religious or secular. So with this observation we would expect birth rates to be high in countries that have limited education opportunities i.e. poor countries, and countries that repress women.
Yes, I am one of the men who have run from having children. As it turned out that was the right choice. I was diagnosed with a genetic
disease in my early forties after it had nearly killed me. The wider family was tested, with three of us having the mutation. Two of us have not had children, the other already had children, fortunately they did not inherit the mutation. My reasons prior to my acute illness, where periods of poor health, and high work load. I just did not want the extra work load of a relationship. I expect that is common in modern societies today.
Agree, at least to some extent.
@philip
My “doing a runner” comment was really more about men who “father” children, but then remove themselves from parenting process.
In our modern world all the responsibility seems to fall on women.
After all, it’s a village that brings up a child.
Times are tough for those bringing up children. Lots of financial pressures from all sides. Being a “single mum” is that much harder on top of all that.
I can remember all the vilification of “single mums on benefits” in the media.
But perhaps, single mums should be encouraged and supported by the rest of society instead?????
Having said all that, a large drop in the birthrate is no bad thing with regard to overshoot.
https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/inno/stories/news/2025/02/10/biomilq-breast-milk-startup-files-bankruptcy.html
A little good news !
http://www.sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/the-climate-disaster-united-nations-and-the-overstatements?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Swedish national radio
Worth a listen .
The long dark, nigredo – fascinating talk apropos to your new book Chris:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM2sXbmhmao&t=30s
Hi all, on a slight tangent here. I’m a big fan of Chris’s blog and looking for recommendations for related/adjacent blogs to read when Chris is too busy on the farm or with writing. Any suggestions?
Here is Gunnar Rundgren’s substack, along with his recommendations:
https://gardenearth.substack.com/recommendations
Tim Murphy’s blog “Do the math” is pretty good, though I’ll admit I don’t try to keep up with it regularly.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
I find this site interesting.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
https://slaynews.com/news/wef-demands-global-ban-home-grown-food-meet-net-zero/
“WEF Demands Global Ban on Homegrown Food to Meet ‘Net Zero’”
Looks like they are coming after your allotment gardens .
I seem to recall the study this article is based on was pretty thoroughly shown to be erroneous as it was taking the carbon impact of things like purchasing a garden fork and a tonne of compost (peat-based! Yikes) and then assuming you have to do that every year.
I don’t think the WEF is a governance body though, it’s just a talking shop. At the moment I’m more concerned with governments (and the little Musk coup you’ve got going on in the US) detaining innocent people for other reasons.
A better way to look at home growing is: the space is there and if you do nothing it will fill with plants anyway, that’s what plants do. They may as well be plants that we can eat.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cooking-food-generates-much-ozone-volatile-organic-compounds-driving-noaa-research-finds
Cooking is 25 % of the production of ozone in CA
I am looking forward to two books which will soon be available here in Sweden, “We must begin with the land” by Stephen Hunt, which seems to be a great book about the future, and Matthew Ingram’s “The garden” which is about the past. Both are broadly relevant to a small farm future, would be interesting to hear your thoughts on them Chris!
I hope this isn’t too much for a comment on a blog post, I’ve been sitting on this one for awhile but it really cut across much of what I’ve been thinking about for awhile.
Religion is mostly ignored by the left, whether because offering religious freedom means backgrounding religious differences in public, or whether because a large segment of the left is non-religious, or whether it’s academic and the question asked of religion is whether it’s true…
My own experiences would tend to suggest that religion will not be much help in our future. The churches here do not feed the poor, or provide real medical care, and are completely committed to both capitalism and the right -wing political project. Of course, there are always exceptions, but the fact I know the exceptions off-hand only serves to highlight the point. One brief story: I was recently downtown on a winter day (around 20F) and drove by an ornate stone church. It was locked, surrounded by a 6ft high iron (a fortune in metal) fence (also locked) and a homeless man was sleeping on the sidewalk by the door. The notable part was the giant banner he was sleeping under proclaiming in large letters, “Blessed are the poor in spirit!” Perhaps I should have stopped to take a picture, it was a bit surreal.
I think I can offer a simpler explanation for the success of urban romanticism over rural romanticism that doesn’t invoke the urban being more convenient to the powers that be. One, the only zip codes with significant upward social mobility in the US (measured by your tax bracket vs your parents) were a few places in LA and the NY boroughs. If you want a chance to ascend the class ladder that experience is only possible in the urban context. Two, imagination. Even in my agriculture based state only 15% of the population works in agriculture (hard to find data that might be including food service workers too) and something like 75%-80% lives in urban (or suburban or peri-urban) areas. If you have any spare resources that could be devoted to farming, absent any successful small farmers around you or small farmers you know, the entirety of our social system makes it much easier for you to find a nice non-rural spot to live a comfortable life in. Or at least imagine yourself doing so even if you won’t attain it.
Perhaps engaging with doomerism is not so useful. The reality is even if you’re going to be the one to setup yourself as a warlord and conscript your neighbors into a militia, barring a libertarian nightmare where everyone has their personal suitcase nuke, there’s not a lot you can do about being on the wrong end of a predator drone, a 2000lb bomb or a nuke. See Gaza. I think seeing the satellite footage of greenhouses and homes being replaced with bomb craters and tank tracks really centered the SFF aspect. That said, I think the doomerism can be helpful in clarifying one’s own values, and I think why I’ve been engaging(indulging?) in it is that if you know for sure your location will be a deathhouse soon, and you have some means to get out, I don’t think anyone can fault you for doing so.
I tend to view the idea “of right side of history” as meaning that over time demands for justice will be realized. However, even if that is true, it doesn’t mean our modern political structure will deliver it. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything that guarantees that good will prevail over time. (back to an earlier theme the religious would disagree perhaps) However I won’t accept the framing that might makes right either. There have always been people who have called out injustices in their time. They haven’t always succeeded, (back to doom perhaps they often haven’t succeeded) or were written out of the story, but they were/are always there.
And that’s probably why I think Robert Evan’s response was the one that stuck out to me. Wherever we’re going, if it’s going to be somewhere good, it’s not somewhere we’ve been before, but maybe that’s fine. I can only take so many hikes through the city having my nature trail interrupted every mile by another strip mall, roads choked with cars filled with people who command more resources than I ever will, and not wish the whole damn thing would just topple over already so I can get on with just living. Something to be said about culture and what is considered valuable. There are more threads here, about modernity and meaning(to go back to religion) but it seems there might be future discussions here about those. For now I’ll add that I’ve started to think several of our main problems might be more cultural and spiritual than technical despite what I said about religion earlier, and despite my reservations about anything supernatural.
My farming, like my thoughts, is very much a distributed affair currently but these are the questions that keep me up at night so here goes.
Do I have resilient water sources?
The main farm is located about a mile from the confluence of a river and a major creek tributary. A former flood plain (the river hasn’t been on the site in a few million years but increased intense rain events could speed up the return of the past) but a risk to take as broadly speaking arable areas need to flood to be renewed. The most easily reachable water was between 16-20ft down after two consecutive drought years. In a wet year it could be within 8ft and sub irrigation becomes a problem and the neighbors’ basements flood. There is an area with ponding issues that could be dug into a proper pond if needed. Future buildings will have rain catchment setup. The other farming site has a deep well that’s proven reliable so far and is also tapped into a large catchment area.
Can I produce food and/or fibre with no or limited fossil fuels?
I haven’t tried my hand at fibre yet. One of the benefits of farming with little money is only having access to equipment you can beg, borrow or rent is that you tend to not depend on it too much. The high value cash crops are grown in hoop houses so there’s plastic there and the irrigation system. I’ve just started tinkering with a small solar system that should be able to run the well pump. The inventor is probably the weak point. A couple dozen gallons of diesel a year will cover the rest, I have coworkers who waste more than that in a week just driving to the office. Otherwise transport to customers and getting the farmer to the farm sites is a bigger problem than the growing!
Can I fertilise food crops without major external inputs?
Only around 25% of the property will ever be intensive production at a time. That leaves room for fertility accumulation by legumes in pasture. The neighbors also have cows and horses who produce manure that can sometimes be had for the price of showing up and removing it. The clay holds minerals well due the number of cation/anion exchange sites.
Can I produce timber?
To be seen, at least hedgerows will provide some. Other building materials would be clay, straw, and limestone. It’s too cold in winter here for cob and adobe I would think at least for now, but straw building might have a good future if you had a reputation to risk with the building department. In the past sod was used.
Do I have a good range of residential and agricultural buildings that can be kept in repair?
No, I have a gravel pad and a well at one site and hoop houses, well and shed at another site. Borrowing barn space from a neighbor has worked out before but best not to impose too much. Much work to be done here!
Do I have strong connections with the surrounding community?
I know the grumbling locals from the odd community meeting. The immediately adjoining neighbors have been good so far, but honestly I think they’re just glad to not see yet more farmland disappear to development. I let the cattleman neighbor take the hay from the good pasture this year since he offered to cut it with his own equipment. Whether that makes me the generous gentleman farmer or the gullible city slicker who fell for a fast one by the country ‘bumpkin’ I don’t suppose I’ll know till later. Both of my “professional networks” are here, as is most of the family I’m on speaking terms with. Turnover at the workplace is too high to make that really stick. I fit into the old story of grew up here, tried to leave and make good, and ended up coming back, so at some level if I can’t make a go of it here with the plants and the places I know, could I make a go of it anywhere?