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Posted on February 13, 2025 | 45 Comments
Apologies for my silence here – the book-writing has been in overdrive, and I’ve also been trying (with limited success) to keep up with the winter’s woodland work.
Anyway, some moments of respite today. Time enough for a blog post with brief notes on three things, viz.
So, I now have a final title and subtitle for my new book after much discussion with my publisher – Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. Not sure of an exact publication date yet but in the autumn.
I’ve had my struggles with the writing, but I’m feeling quite happy with where it’s at now. It’s a more accessible read than my previous offerings, with a bit more personal backstory. Thanks to everyone who’s given me reading suggestions and other help, which has been very useful and much appreciated.
A paper published recently in the journal Nature Communications has definitively settled the debate on the energy costs of microbial protein that I’ve been involved in. In his book Regenesis, George Monbiot claimed that a kilogram of microbial protein manufactured by the Finnish company Solar Foods could be manufactured at an electrical energy cost of 16.7 kWh. Even that energy-hungry figure seemed to me improbably low. I calculated an energy consumption figure of at least 65.3 kWh – see here and here.
The new paper – co-authored by the outgoing CEO of Solar Foods, Pasi Vainikka, who features heavily in the key Chapter 7 of Monbiot’s book – gives a similar figure to mine at 69.3 to 73 MWh per tonne of protein (this equates to 69.3 to 73 kWh per kilo of protein). This figure, by the way, covers only the direct energy costs of the manufacturing process itself, not things like building factories or solar panels, nor the energy costs for other inputs like water and minerals (a tonne of mineral inputs is required for every 12 tonnes of protein produced). Anyway, it’s more than four times higher than Monbiot’s figure, and about seventy times higher than the energy cost of producing the protein in industrially farmed soybeans.
There’s more to say about the new paper. Hopefully, I’ll take a deeper dive into it in a post later in the year. But for now I’ll just conclude that the uncertainty about the real energy figure for producing bacterial protein powder is over. The 16.7 kWh/kg figure is erroneous, and should be corrected.
Solar Foods’ new CEO’s first priorities reportedly include “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States” and “increasing product price points”. It seemed clear to me when I published Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future that this technology wasn’t going to feature in any brave new world of cheap mass-produced protein to feed humanity. That now seems certain. I got quite some blowback for my book, a lot of it from people who really wanted the 16.7 kWh/kg figure to be true, even though they didn’t have any evidence to show why my figure was wrong.
Ah well, shooting the messenger is a hallowed tradition. Unfortunately, while the hype around bacterial protein powder will dim, there’ll undoubtedly be some new supposedly ass-saving corporate product hitting the newsstands – but not the streets – any day now. And so it goes on. I can only hope that more people will see this ecomodernist merry-go-round for the distraction it is and will stop invoking technology as a substitute for the real work of building resilient local communities.
One person who’s already on board with this, or perhaps I should say who’s already off the merry-go-round, is Adam Greenfield in his interesting recent book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. Or sort of off the merry-go-round anyway. There are a lot of resonances between his book and my own books, not least my forthcoming one. I align with Adam around the ideas that tech won’t save us, the modern nation-state won’t save us, we’ll have to try saving ourselves through grassroots politics, through practice, through community, through building refugia etc.
Now, I’m not one of those dreadful authors who comes across a book in their own field and pathetically starts leafing through the pages to see if their name … oh, all right, all right, it’s on page 181 – “The influential farmer and agroecologist Chris Smaje…”
I’ve often wondered who I am and whether anyone has noticed me, so … thanks Adam.
But alas that sentence is about as good as it gets for Dr Smaje. Over the next few pages, Adam proceeds to pour cold water on “Smaje’s vision”. He does it with a rare graciousness that I’ll try to reciprocate here, but it’s at this point and onwards in his text that some of its weaknesses start to coalesce … and I’m not convinced that his vision of Smaje’s vision is clear of obstructions.
I’ll start with this point of divergence between us – Adam writes “I think 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” (p.182). Whereas I think it’s a reasonable bet that fewer of us will do so.
I have no idea how many fewer – I do not, as Adam implies, espouse any schemes involving “the decantation of billions into [the] countryside” (p.184). Partly because it’s not about ‘decantation’, and partly because the numbers are unknowable. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about ‘billions’ moving to the countryside – definitely not in my two recent books, anyway. I usually only specify numbers when I’m fairly sure about them, like ‘more than 65.3 kWh/kg’ – but if I’ve talked anywhere about billions moving to the countryside I’ll happily recant it. What I certainly have done is objected to the organisation formerly known as RePlanet, which has been supported by various prominent journalists and scientists, in its vision of 90 percent urban residence globally by the year 2100. Now that would likely involve the decanting of billions.
As I see it, people generally seek peace, health and prosperity where they can. They care less whether those things are to be found in the city or the country. It’s the things themselves that matter. In recent history, the locations best able to deliver those good things have often been urban (leaving aside the history of coercing or ‘decanting’ people from the countryside). In future history, I think those locations will more often be rural. Why? Well, Adam does a pretty good job of explaining it in his book – urbanism is a high-energy, high-capital, high political order settlement pattern, and the shocks to it in the world to come will impose high costs that governments either won’t wish to or won’t be able to maintain. In which case “the electric power, water, gas and sewerage infrastructures that support high-density habitation will swiftly fall into disrepair” (p.31). And with them will fall many of the opportunities for peace, health and prosperity. Possibly, he’s projecting urbanism to fall apart in the more climate-challenged parts of the world to come, but not elsewhere. I’m sure it’s true that some cities will do better than others, but I don’t find much logic in that wider assumption.
In critiquing my case for ruralism, Adam invokes the rather tired old ‘Ruralism! What, you mean like the Cultural Revolution?’ cliché. No, not like the Cultural Revolution. Believe me, when the electricity, water, gas and sewerage goes offline, people won’t need Maoist ‘persuasion’ to want to leave town. There may be any number of reasons why they can’t or don’t leave town, but the way this will shake out long-term is in poorer living conditions in places like New York City than in, say, rural New England. Ultimately, this will have demographic consequences. We can do this in easier ways now or harder ways later.
Of course, settlement patterns are more complex than a rural-urban binary. As city populations thin, then it potentially becomes easier to grow food and generate other services, to create livelihoods within them. Hence, the situation more resembles a population density continuum.
A whole other set of variables here is real estate pricing. Consider the price of a roof over urban heads compared to the price of all the other stuff like food, energy and sewerage those urban heads and bodies need, and that they typically outsource to the global countryside. The outsourcing arises partly because there isn’t enough space to furnish them in the city itself, but partly also because urban land prices at present levels can’t support the production of affordable food, energy, water and waste treatment in situ. Those prices and that outsourcing rely on abundant energy and abundant political order. That reliance is time limited.
Food systems don’t seem to be Adam’s specialism, so I’ll gloss over his discussions of vertical rice farming, protein production, the propinquity of agricultural land to cities and countries, and the ease of trade with “federated agroecological communities in our arable near-hinterlands” (p.182). In short, I don’t think his food systems analysis is credible. Where I do agree with him is that, in our challenged future, “achieving any meaningful yield to speak of will clearly require massive investments of a community’s time and effort” (p.184). That means a lot of people will be spending a lot of their time producing food. Urban-rural settlement patterns currently rest on the fact that not many urban people spend much time producing food, while more rural ones do – and the whole thing is (literally) oiled by cheap energy. In situations involving massive investments of people’s time to produce food, the basis of contemporary urbanism dissolves.
A vibe I get from Adam’s book is a kind of urban anxiety at the thought of a rural and agrarian life. It’s this, I think, that underlies a lot of the enthusiasm for energetically unaffordable and ecologically disintegrative ideas like urban vertical rice farming (or indeed manufactured microbial food) that distract people from the necessary path. And also, in his criticism of me, that leads Adam to seek “some workable balance between the naive techno-optimism of the ecomodernists and the isolationism of rugged-individualist homesteaders” (p.184). That’s a false duality – agrarianism implies learning some level of livelihood-making skill but not necessarily any commitment to isolationism or rugged individualism. Here, I think Adam is projecting an urban anxiety onto my arguments that prevents him from really seeing what I’m saying.
I sympathise. It’d be good to find ways to demystify ruralism and agrarianism for urban people to ease the journey, but there are various political and mental obstacles. One of them is the idea that urbanism is somehow non-negotiable, a given of modern life.
Hence the curiosity of Adam’s idea of ‘lifehouses’ – local places built bottom-up where people can go for food, water, energy and community when systemic shocks destroy the capacities of their own households to furnish these things. Doubtless such local cornucopias as alternatives to the modern centralized state will be a godsend in emergency situations wherever they can be coaxed into existence. But where we’re talking about what Adam calls ‘the long emergency’ – a state of chronic system shock – resilience has to be built into every household in its capacities for livelihood making. Hence, low energy agrarianism. To me, Adam’s lifehouses look like a somewhat improbable effort to recreate the best aspects of the modern state (rational politics) with the best aspects of the modern countryside (tinned food) in order to save an everyday urbanism that can’t really be saved.
The examples that Adam builds his lifehouse approach on are mostly responses to relatively sudden and acute emergencies, like Storm Sandy and the Greek financial crisis. Or else situations of sharp conflict – the Black Panthers and Rojava. And always ones involving an agenda of wider political transformation clearly routed through left-wing political traditions. He writes of this carework that “Its politically transformational qualities only begin to appear when care is consciously thought of as a matter of collective self-provision, outside the obligations of the family, the impersonal structures of state and market or the vertical relations implied by charity”. He goes on to say “The first steps on the way toward mutual care were taken by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) in the Bay Area of the late 1960s” (pp.79-80).
The most generous way I can respond to this is to say that seeking political transformation is definitely important in the contemporary context of the disaster zombie liberal state, and that those examples are informative. But the first steps toward mutual care weren’t taken by the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area of the late 1960s. They were taken by many peoples numberless millennia ago. The main modalities of them have been family, kinship, ancestors, spirits, gods and local livelihood-making communities. If you talk about carework only “outside the obligations of the family” and these other structures, then you miss something that I’m willing to quantify as somewhere between ‘a lot’ and ‘almost everything’. And, again, you implicitly vaunt the urban over the rural. Coming from a basically urban and left-wing background myself, it pains me to see how the contemporary left limits itself and its potential base by talking largely to itself and its own urban, professional-managerial class concerns, albeit sometimes illumined with exotic examples like Rojava or the Zapatistas. I think it needs to get more real, more locally. And if we do want to draw on wider examples, why not Gandhi? Or maybe Zapata, as well as the Zapatistas…
A final point I’d make about this is that while there’s much to learn from people who’ve self-organised rapidly in modern times to deal with acute crises, there’s even more to learn from peoples who’ve made their livelihoods long-term over generations in the substantial absence of top-down power providing for them in day-to-day life. I get the sense from Adam’s book that he was energised by participating in the grassroots response to Storm Sandy – which is great, but such examples of ‘paradises built in hell’ aren’t organised around long-haul human relationships, as Adam himself acknowledges. So, for example, I’d suggest the thought of a collective workshop in the Lifehouse well-stocked with tools for people to use that Adam seems to imply on page 188 will make those who use tools on an everyday basis break into a cold sweat. A construction site is a huge testament to people’s skills at collaborative working, but the fact that its individual workers typically own their own tools is not a trivial point when it comes to thinking about robust organisation to survive the long emergency.
There’s a lot of other interesting stuff in Adam’s book about things like decision-making structures and whether people in the countryside are “unprepared to greet newcomers” (p.184). Happily, these are discussed in Finding Lights in a Dark Age, saving me the need to discuss them here.
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Thank you, I enjoyed this and I am looking forward to the book, great title. I clearly am excited by the inclusion of Craft! I have been reading ‘Lifehouse’ which clearly comes out of Adam’s transformative experience of mutual aid in Occupy Sandy. As you say, there is never a question of whether we should be living in structures like his beloved New York, or the deep roots of ‘mutual aid’. Perhaps the urban ‘Lifehouse’ is the gateway to the local agrarian reality beyond for the metropolitan?
Chris’ comment from the article:
“Adam writes “I think 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” (p.182). Whereas I think it’s a reasonable bet that fewer of us will do so.”
It sounds to me like Adam is presuming we can continue to have an overshot, overpopulated world in the future, albeit with a more degraded lifestyle. This is a false assumption and contrary to basic biology and ecology. I have become increasingly critical of those people who do not have a dieoff scenario in their model-building. As the financialization and war-mongering of the US, UK and other developed countries continues on its merry way towards an all-encompassing hell of slavery and violence, there will be famine, pestilence and dieoff as people find it more and more difficult to simply live hand to mouth.
So . . . for everyone building models or even thinking about multiple scenarios and what their responses will be: I suggest including AT LEAST one scenario where human population crashes. For a more sophisticated model-building exercise, consider the population crash on a sliding scale that “pulses” in its acceleration and deceleration. Think of the Black Death. It didn’t kill off one-third of Europe’s population in one fell swoop. There were pulses within the larger dieoff and it took some time. My next book to read is: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman (1978). I read parts of it years ago and just finished The Guns of August by Tuchman (1962).
The end of modernity is simply unimaginable for lots of people. To consume less, much less of everything is never considered. Recycling is not going to cut it. Mr Adams may not have thought about what it would be like to live anywhere, much less a big city without electric power, water, gas, or a working waste disposal system.
This morning it is 39F (+4C) and drizzling in NYC, lovely weather to be out foraging for rats and firewood. Tuesday it will not get above freezing. Our furnace has been struggling all winter, but working. It is 61F in the house (-8F, -21C outside) and it is kind of chilly, but we are not facing hypothermia. Without gas or electricity, or our wood stove, it would be brutal.
Maybe hardy New Yorkers will be dipping buckets of of water out of the Hudson River and carrying them a mile to their third floor walk up. And then, what do they do with it ? There isn’t enough wood to boil it, but with all the sewer systems broken down the water could be cleaner. You might even be able to touch it without needing a tetanus shot.
Food ? It is winter. They could walk through the Lincoln Tunnel and find that it is even colder in New Jersey. When we lived out east 30+ years ago there were farms in New Jersey. They were all 20 miles or more from Manhattan.
Maybe your next book could be fiction – life in 2050 New York City when electricity, potable water, gas, a working sewer system are but memories, the subways are full of salt water, and the 2.5 million residents are welcoming wave after wave of migrants seeking a better life…
Hence the curiosity of Adam’s idea of ‘lifehouses’ – local places built bottom-up where people can go for food, water, energy and community when systemic shocks destroy the capacities of their own households to furnish these things.
*cough* churches *cough cough cough*
Not that churches have a monopoly on mutual aid (and in many cases our charitable work is, of necessity under neoliberal capitalism, much more top-down than we’d like, as is our spiritual work), but… the systemic shocks are already here for a lot of people and some of those people are coming to my church for “food, water, energy and community” already.
A final point I’d make about this is that while there’s much to learn from people who’ve self-organised rapidly in modern times to deal with acute crises, there’s even more to learn from peoples who’ve made their livelihoods long-term over generations in the substantial absence of top-down power providing for them in day-to-day life. I get the sense from Adam’s book that he was energised by participating in the grassroots response to Storm Sandy – which is great, but such examples of ‘paradises built in hell’ aren’t organised around long-haul human relationships, as Adam himself acknowledges.
One of my favourite podcasts is Margaret Killjoy’s “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” which goes into detail about lots of different people who have fought oppression of one sort or another, with admittedly mixed results. But while rapid self-organisation of mutual aid in response to acute crises does exist, I think it’s important to note that it also very often arises out of longer-term relationships. The food bank and soup kitchen at our church used to be tiny, and grew to its current form largely during the first of the SARS-CoV-2 lockdowns in 2020 because our parish priest was well enough known in the community (including in online spaces of local interest) to tap into the burgeoning mutual aid networks of the time. And then there’s Jen Wang’s experience in Los Angeles, where being on the PTA of a school that burned to the ground has turned… quite involved. Her Bluesky thread detailing some of the experience is here: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fjenwang.com%2Fpost%2F3lhiezomth223&viewtype=tree
None of this is to discount the reality of things like activist burnout, or the importance of building networks and movements that are sustainable in the longer-term (for every possible value of sustainable). But the soup kitchen exists because the church was already here; the extraordinary flow of resources Jen Wang is experiencing exists because the PTA already existed. Of course, after a point it can be hard to tell whether you start a soup kitchen and end up with a church, or the other way around, but often enough it’s relationships first.
Mushrooms don’t arise in the forest (or the grassland) out of thin air, they arise when the mycorrhizal networks have the right conditions for fruiting, including maturity of the network itself.
I’d suggest the thought of a collective workshop in the Lifehouse well-stocked with tools for people to use that Adam seems to imply on page 188 will make those who use tools on an everyday basis break into a cold sweat.
A number of years ago I was a member of something called the London Hackspace. My considered opinion is that such schemes can work, but require a large amount of administrative labour and relationship management, compared to just using your own stuff (much the way running an allotment or having some other kind of commons requires administrative labour and relationship management). Under industrial conditions where materials are still relatively cheap and mass-produced tools are available, it absolutely makes sense to have your own tools, and it also makes sense to share some of them and not others. I’ll loan anyone a broom or a crummy pen, and I won’t loan just anyone my secateurs or fountain pen. But I’m also trained as a performing musician, and at least in the classical world where instruments can cost many thousands of pounds and still have a fair amount of artisanal craft in their making, it is not a light thing at all to loan someone else your violin, flute or harp, both because the instruments might be damaged by an unwitting player and because the person who plays those instruments the most will usually play them best… and even largely stationary instruments like pipe organs tend to come with restricted access. So I can well imagine a situation where I would rather lay someone’s hedge for them than loan them my billhook (or whatever), but might be willing to let them use my bicycle or washboard.
Perhaps one of the reasons that some urban people are so attached to urbanism is that it is all they have ever known. As you know, I’m not always happy about living in London, but I also recognise that the place I inhabit in London wasn’t really “urban” as recently as, say, two hundred years ago; and my actual life is not so different from a rural one in some ways (I go to the allotments, to church, and… out for walks with friends, sometimes? I do make use of urban amenities like public transport and a decent takeaway, but I’m not under the impression that my life would be over if they evaporated. I would be much less happy about the loss of the multiple urban parks I visit each week.)
One of my hobbies used to be singing in the London Gallery Quire, which performs West Gallery music — that music which would have been heard in village churches and non-conformist chapels from about 1700 to 1850. This music was accompanied by an often ragtag selection of wind and string instruments, one playing each vocal part — probably the same people who had played for the village dance the night before. Some West Gallery enthusiasts like to claim that this music was then “suppressed by the authorities” and “driven out of the churches”, but I think a more accurate explanation of its demise is that progressive urbanisation made it harder and harder to have good quality WG music in the countryside: if you only have a clarinet and a violin it’s hard to cover all four vocal parts, and quality suffers. The Victorian conception of one person playing an organ or keyboard, directing a unison group of schoolchidren with maybe some semi-professional singers on the lower parts, was certainly more sombre and easier to control (control the organist and you effectively control the choir) — but it was also easier to achieve a passable quality with minimal resources. (And this was still far, far better than the barrel-organ.) Was WG music replaced by sombre Victorian hymnody for aesthetic and political reasons, or was sombre Victorian hymnody carted in to try to salvage a musical tradition that had been sapped by depopulation?
This may seem like another “peak Kathryn” tangent, but bear with me: many urban conceptions of what rural life is like seem to be based on what rural life was like during or after the enclosure of the commons. They seem to be based on rural life where resource extraction is under way or, worse, has run its course. They seem to be based on rural life at its worst. And since urban dwellers almost by definition are usually not directly engaged in self-provisioning, or in labouring to directly provide the immediate needs of our neighbours, it’s hard to imagine what a vivid and flourishing rural life might look like, without resorting to the romantic nostalgia of the bucolic idyll. The (very real) immiseration of rural people only feels meaningful as something to be escaped; the romantic nostalgia of the bucolic idyll is only meaningful as fantasy.
In practice, the romantic nostalgia will also only go so far, partly because nostalgia is something of an exercise in selective memory, and partly because the climate conditions and political conditions of that past are not exactly the same as those of the future. But it also only goes so far because many urban dwellers do have real lives that are meaningful and interconnected, and the flat stories of immiseration-that-was-escaped or romantic nostalgia just can’t compare to those meaningful and interconnected lives.
This is one reason that I think it’s good for urban dwellers to begin to take on some local provisioning. When I tell people I spend so much time per week gardening they imagine it as drudgery; when I feed people they are astounded at the abundance; few make the connection between the two. But even the microcosm of growing and foraging 500kg of fresh produce over the course of nine months gives me the capacity to imagine a number of possibilities for locally grounded futures. It prompts me to share my excess rather than waste it (and I’m still not always getting this right.) It nudges me to adapt my working patterns to those of the seasons, rather than the other way around. It teaches me that what I plan to eat and what actually grows may not always match, but that instead, the abundance I revel in is deeply contingent. It forces me to slow down and challenges me to find stamina I didn’t know I had. Compared to the immiseration-that-was-escaped, or to the romantic nostalgia, this too is deeply meaningful, and I have found connections and relationships I didn’t know I lacked, while losing very little.
And so I don’t know where I will end up — where we will end up — politically, or physically. But as I’ve said so many times before, I know that when I get there, I’ll probably want to eat.
I would just like to add, there is another ‘Public House’ that provides drink, food, toilets and a warm place to stay, at least for a few hours, namely the Pub. Now a pub charges a small fee in that you are expected to buy at least one drink, but you can buy a very cheap drink (Black currant and soda) and make it last a very long time!. One advantage of the Pub is that it is generally open more hours than a church, and later into an evening, though there can be disadvantage too, notably the anti-social behaviour of some attendees.
Pubs are also closing due to the compression in discretionary spending, but some will survive.
Pubs are certainly important as community gathering places, but I’m not aware of very many that are hosting food banks or night shelters.
I can understand the urge of “the left” to defend the liberty and prosperity of the urban as that is where most people’s experiences are and the political energy and organizing is (or was) but even on its own merits I would question the wisdom of it. Is urban life really that great for most people in the US?
I may not be the most travelled but the only urban environment I’ve genuinely loved is Tokyo. That was mostly a consequence of 1. It was quiet since no one can afford to drive, 2. There were frequent enough tiny parks, shrines or other public spaces to exist in. 3. Every subway stop is essentially a self-contained neighbourhood with food and services all available within a few blocks and you can get anywhere by train.
But for every walkable urban space in the US there’s a thousand urban/suburban places where you drive your car the 2 miles to the store in constant traffic.
The trade with the “federated agroecological communities in our arable near-hinterlands” really needs to be explored more for any urban vision (and I do support eco-aware urban visions). Who will make up those communities? How will they be provided with rational politics and liberties? And more directly, what will they be offered in “trade” (or will it just be taken?) in exchange for their hard won food? I suspect that the blacksmiths, doctors, surgeons, and repairmen of plastic irrigation equipment will do just fine in the new urban areas, things might go less well for the marketing managers and insurance case managers. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
“local places built bottom-up where people can go for food, water, energy and community” That sounds like a farm! Or at the least a garden.
Congratulations on finishing that big chunk of work, Chris. I am looking forward to reading your next book.
I am two days away from moving back to the land I grew up on, where my parents still live. It definitely stands out that the moderns who insist on urbanism frequently love the anonymity of the city.
Perhaps the idea of carework obligations *inside* the family would be less distressing if they spent more time in therapy.
What is rarely mentioned is pestilence , clean water has been the biggest boon to health in human history , loose the pumps and it becomes the third world very quickly . People freaked out about the flu I wonder how they would deal with a typhoid epidemic .
Electricity . I read recently that the UK is second to dead last behind Ireland for solar efficiency due to cloud and latitude . Then there are problems with wind mills that are ignored ( For obvious political, Net Zero reasons, insect decimation is not a well-funded research area, but work in Germany in 2016 put the loss across the country at 1,200 tonnes a year.) 1200 tonnes of bugs that must be billions of bugs I wonder how much the Bee problem is caused by wind turbines
( https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/11/the-devastating-ecological-carnage-wrought-by-wind-turbines/ )
Renewable is only green if you ignore the downside !
A good critique, Chris. Saves me reading the book. I started reading what a friend of mine dubbed the ‘collapsitarian’ literature in the 2010s (when it started appearing) but I have become increasingly disenchanted with what are all basically WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – and dare I add white and male?) proposals for alternatives to the current catastrophe. On re-reading JM Greer’s ‘The Long Descent’ (2011) I can see that he has always had some problematic ideas, as noted in one of your previous posts. But one thing he may have got right in that book is that the best place to survive and even thrive the worst that is now, and has yet to come, is in a large town or small city (c. 250,000 – 750,000 people) with a rich agricultural hinterland. Which describes the town where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, where most of our food came from that hinterland and from suburban gardens. That town (Christchurch, NZ) is still there, and although the city took a hammering from a big earthquake in 2011, and the hinterland has since been hammered by urban sprawl, roads, industrial agriculture, etc., etc., it still offers the upsides of urban life (the arts, good health and education services, etc.) with the option of good fresh food close by for those who know what to look for. So as NYC empties out, it will probably be Kansas City and other smaller cities and larger towns which will grow. I have moved a mere 40 km from my home town, and enjoy living in the country while still having access to ‘the city’. Which a New Yorker would scoff at, but hey – that’s their problem!
1.- I will be watching for announcements. More backstory? Good, minds seem to be more often swayed by a good story rather than facts, funny enough. Just keep some facts in there for folks like me!
2. Yeah, the bloom seems to be off that lilly. GMO and ultra processed foods had their day of novelty, but pretty hard to beat bio-energetic systems that have been honed in the race to survive of evolutionary competitive pressures for millions of years. More hubris.
3. bifurcations, divergences, polite disagreements- What I see in much of the discussion of the poly crisis/collapse, is varying degrees of energy blindness. The energy and complexity it requires will simply not be there for urban concentration. While there are a few websites where discussion revolves around this fact, many think we just have to do an energy transition or buy green tech products. CO2 is NOT the problem.
As mentioned upthread, population reduction will address the issue to a possibly large extent. One more dilemma we have is that a move to the country to take up farming will not accommodate very many, because of the sheer amount of infrastructure and logistics required, not to speak of the adjudication of such a shift. Joe Clarkson has pointed that out many times here.
The cities that exist in the future will be the size that local carrying capacity permits, and will be on logical trade routes or near unique resources. And that’s ok.
I just hope the model you are trying to advocate will catch on enough to be a template that just might keep us from sliding back to the king/warlord model where most of us are scraping by and has repeated endlessly in history.
Oh yeah, are you aware of the Kogi people in Columbia? A culture that seems to have moved past their lineage of empire builders and appears stable with respect to their habitat. Doesn’t sound so bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kogi_people
Might be some useful info there on how they have arranged themselves and how they preserve and pass on their learnings. They have warned us “younger brothers” a couple times, but the lesson did not take.
“a tonne of mineral inputs is required for every 12 tonnes of [bacterial] protein produced”
Yes, and 100 kg of bacterial protein requires 35 kg of Ammonia+Minerals (potassium, phosphorus, etc.), in addition to a heckuva lot of energy. The much hyped “Food from thin air” descriptor is apparently not true.
That new paper allows a better peek into the process for feeding the bacteria and making bacterial protein powder. Figure 1 (linked below) shows the inputs and waste flows for manufacturing 12.67 tonnes of bacterial protein.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56364-1/figures/1
Scaling down those numbers for a smaller output results in the following for bacterial protein…
100 kg of bacterial protein requires (in addition to “thin air”):
35 kg of Ammonia+Minerals (potassium, phosphorus, etc.)
6,930 kWh of electricity (equivalent to around 22 months of the average total electricity consumption for a dwelling in the EU, according to ODYSSEE-MURE)
2,542 kg of piped freshwater supply
2,162 kg of dumped liquid waste treatment
(rounded to the nearest kg)
Soybeans, on the other hand…
100 kg of protein in soybeans requires (US farm averages):
4 kg of fertilizer (N+P+K)
93 kWh of energy (life-cycle equivalent) for all inputs, including fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, fuels, etc.
Zero kg of piped water supply (for 90%+ of US soybean farms relying on rainfall only)
Zero kg of dumped liquid waste treatment
Free sunlight, naturally occurring onsite
Free rainfall, naturally occurring onsite
(based on Table 2. Soybean agriculture system inputs, weighted averages of 19 major soybean‐growing states, from “Energy Life-Cycle Assessment of Soybean Biodiesel Revisited”, Pradhan et al., 2010.)
The land-sparing argument for manufactured food similarly falls apart with a closer look. I did some calculations comparing a hypothetical PV-powered manufactured food factory in England to the farm area required to produce an equivalent annual amount of peas there. Although more hectares were required for the farm, the difference in initial cost between the land for the farm and the factory’s PV equipment is sufficient to purchase at least three times(!) as many hectares (for nature conservation) as were ‘spared’ with the manufactured food factory scenario. And this doesn’t even consider the construction costs of the factory, or the replacement costs of the PV equipment every 25 years.
typo correction:
100 kg of bacterial protein requires *32 kg* of Ammonia+Minerals (potassium, phosphorus, etc.)
By the way, the numbers in that recent paper are estimated for a theoretical factory that is much larger and more efficient than Solar Foods’ new factory in Helsinki. The theoretical factory has 120 bioreactors (each 200 cubic meters), while the existing factory has 1 bioreactor (only 20 cubic meters). The theoretical factory has a better optimized layout, using more of the otherwise wasted heat and taking advantage of process improvements hoped to result from the larger scale.
Thus, the actual total energy requirement for bacterial protein manufactured in the existing new factory is presumably higher than the theoretical numbers in that paper.
I wonder when we will see the first really serious attempt at building and populating sustainable rural communities for a small farm future? Surely there must be some philanthropists that would like to create some lifeboats against the dieoff (I doubt that governments will ever be so bold).
Just think what Musk’s money could do if only a few percent were devoted to small scale agrarianism rather than preparing for colonizing Mars. Bill Gates and others like him have bought up a lot of farmland, but I don’t think any of them are investing in re-ruralization or small scale agrarianism.
I asked Nate Hagens about this possibility many years ago after a lecture by him in Hilo. He said then that there were indeed a few wealthy people who could foresee the end of modernity and that they might fund some rural projects. But as far as I can tell nothing has been done.
But maybe there are projects I don’t know about. Does anyone else have any info about this?
Unfortunately, the organizations I know about are mostly focussing on climate change, and changes to agriculture that will mitigate that risk. Overshoot, true carrying capacity- no one wants to face it. It’s on the radar at the fringes (like us!) but the vast majority wants the easy solution, when we are really in a predicament.
Sure, permaculture, local food webs, better alignment with natural nutrient cycles are good, but no one seems to be tackling the huge physical metamorphosis that needs to happen. Some of the current efforts will help get new farming practice templates up and ready to be replicated, but the tension between private ownership and the needs of the overall system will be tough to solve.
The other snag is that a small farm arrangement does nor easily survive in the current economic commodity ag scheme we live in. Still need money to engage with the wider world.
“a small farm arrangement does nor easily survive in the current economic commodity ag scheme we live in”
Yes. I think it would require the construction of a small farm/village ecosystem entirely separate from the broader economy, with the ongoing monetary costs (property and other taxes) subsidized by the wealth behind the original land purchase and infrastructure development. It would be much like the economics and legalities of a nature reserve but with people included.
@steve c Are you going to the Organic Conference next week ? I’ll be there as a volunteer and plan on bringing seeds to the Seed Swap.
Hi Greg;
Not this year. No question there is a nice energy to experience there. I’ve been several times in the past, and peruse the conference guide each year, but as we have kind of locked in the strategies for our land, less of the sessions are needed. If we go ahead and add sheep or goats to the mix, we have neighbors that are a resource we’ll reach out to, but would go to the conference as well.
Didn’t know there was a seed swap. It’s always frustrating each year when you have more seeds than will fit in the garden, and I hate to waste. Some seeds reduce viability pretty quickly. We do informal swaps with a few of our neighbors.
Thanks for asking.
“I wonder when we will see the first really serious attempt at building and populating sustainable rural communities for a small farm future?”
Perhaps you haven’t looked hard enough!
There’s a long-standing tradition in the ecovillage and intentional community movement, including The Farm in Tennessee, Earthaven in North Carolina, Dancing Rabbit in Missouri, and many, many others.
Many of them purposely keep a low profile. I imagine for every one listed at https://www.ic.org/directory/ or https://ecovillage.org/ecovillages/, there are probably ten or more others.
But the “solution” isn’t to have some big pockets plunk down funds to move a bunch of urbanites onto the land — I call that a “fiefdom”, and no matter how good the intentions, its residents always live at the pleasure of the deep pockets behind it.
Rather, the successful ones are the ones that are self-funded and egalitarian.
So, go find some others of like mind, and get started!
None of the intentional communities you cite are even close to self-sustaining agraian cultures. All of them require participants to independently earn their living and much of the economic activity of Dancing Rabbit and Earthhaven consists of classes, tours and other benefits offered to outsiders for money. The Farm is now mostly a very nice retirement community for many of the boomers that have lived there for decades.
These intentional communities are certainly much more prepared than urban apartment blocks to cope with life after modernity, but they aren’t really demonstrating that kind of life. Any agrarian community of small farms, even “gentleman farms”, has a decent chance of making a transition to post-modern life, but I think you would have to go to remote areas of the Amazon or New Guinea to find the real thing. I still don’t know of any examples in the Global North. In rich countries the Amish are about the closest to doing it, but even in Amish communities there is a lot of economic dependence on the outside world.
When I see a self-sustaining cluster of farms and villages that can exist with no inputs from, and no outputs to, the surrounding economy, I’ll be more convinced. I’m sure it can be done, but it just hasn’t been done yet as far as I know. It would be a nice proof-of-concept for a small farm future.
Don’t let the “ideal” be the enemy of “much better than most of society”.
“When I see a self-sustaining cluster of farms and villages that can exist with no inputs from, and no outputs to, the surrounding economy, I’ll be more convinced.”
Do you really understand what you are asking of people? You even discount the humble Amish as being too “economically connected” to the “outside world”. What you’re demanding is enough to intimidate people from even trying!
Even pre-contact indigenous people in North America had extensive trade routes. You can find Zuni turquoise that originated in modern-day Arizona in middens in modern-day British Columbia. The pre-contact Haudenosaunee confederation spanned from modern-day Maine to Kentucky to Michigan.
There was an extensive filbert culture that spanned a thousand kilometres in BC, pre-dating the dawn of wheat-based culture in the Middle East, more than 7,000 years ago. There are filbert varieties in Hazelton, BC, that are endemic only at the other end of the province.
I see no evidence that trade is incompatible with sustainability.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that long-distance trading networks may be crucial to our continued survival in an uncertain future.
On a scale of 0 (perfectly sustainable) to 10 (grossly unsustainable), you only need to be at 4 or 5 to be able to understand what it will take to get to zero.
“…there were indeed a few wealthy people who could foresee the end of modernity and that they might fund some rural projects. But as far as I can tell nothing has been done. But maybe there are projects I don’t know about. Does anyone else have any info about this?”
I think it’s likely there are some rural projects like this which are by invitation only, with their full capabilities kept secret like hoarded treasure. That’s not how I’d do it, though.
If I had millions and was prepping to set myself up as a feudal lord I might not make a big deal out of it…
I don’t think such a project ends well for the future villagers, but if you’re serious about protecting your power into the future…
But I wonder how many of the rich could make the mental leap to doing that right now? Having wealth tends to insulate a person from having to actually solve subsistence problems and you really need to know how to do that even if you’re planning to use a lot of money right now to backstop your project. How many rich people would be thinking I’ve got to get dozens of my friends out here with horse-drawn plows vs just thinking oh I’ll just buy this farmland to have food in the future, ignoring that distant ownership depends on existing systems continuing, there being diesel for cheap, tenant farmers with 100HP+ tractors, etc.
Recent interview with Julian Rose, who realises the madness going on at world level:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/finding-the-moral-spine-resistance-to-faceless-modernity-with-sir-julian-rose
UKC was a source of invaluable ‘truths’ during ‘the COVID period’.
Joe C’s comment seems more immediately relevant to the USA. As Julian Rose points out, England has had a draconian system since 1948 called ‘development control’.
Adam Calo is sharing an invitation to discussion on ‘Land Reform in Global North’, using the Scottish laws as a basis;
https://adamcalo.substack.com/p/land-reform-in-the-global-north?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=64539&post_id=156908539&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1gxl5d&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
We are exploring our village project ‘Care Home Farm’ here;https://alicesuzanneholloway.substack.com/p/care-home-farm-1-the-community?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Oh dear. I was hoping Lifehouse was going to be more general. But it seems to be just a hope and a wish for the continuation of something that cannot continue.
Howard Odum taught us that complexity is simply a form of embedded energy (“emergy”), and that complexity requires maintenance, an ongoing energetic cost.
Joseph Tainter taught us that civilizations collapse when their steadily-increasing complexity overwhelms their ability to maintain it.
I just spent an hour, trying to figure out how to file an income tax statement that basically says that I had no income subject to taxation. I could have filled out a paper form faster!
We’re there.
How can we possibly hope to build and maintain Lifehouses in a world of increasing climate change and resource depletion?
Move out of the city and grow food. Not necessarily in that order.
Its not only starting life houses its keeping them going and protecting them from confiscation by the powers that be and the hungry mob , during covid many politicos around the world howled about “hording” ordering shops to allow the sale of only one toilet roll per person , one can of soup per person ,,, they will be quick enough to “liberate” your stored potatoes / cabbages if they find out about them .
“they will be quick enough to “liberate” your stored potatoes / cabbages if they find out about them .”
You seem to think that “they” will still have the power to do such things in a collapsed world. Or perhaps you’re in a densely-populated area. Or perhaps you’re an American, who seem to look at every situation through a “we versus them” lens.
I live in a relatively isolated area where all my neighbours produce a significant amount of food. “They” will be trading with us, potatoes for cabbages, so we all have both.
That’s how civilized people behave in a crisis.
It’s also relatively hard to stockpile either potatoes or cabbages for more than six months or so, which means they aren’t really as valuable to confiscate as, say, cereals are.
That said, oppression and violence certainly existed before industrial modernism and I think they are likely to exist after the collapse or crumbling of modernity as we know it. People who hold power over others now are likely to continue to try to hold it; so getting to know your neighbours and find out how to work well together to meet each other’s needs is a very good move.
Kathryn wrote: It’s also relatively hard to stockpile either potatoes or cabbages for more than six months or so, which means they aren’t really as valuable to confiscate as, say, cereals are.
That’s a feature, not a bug!
There’s evidence that it was grain agriculture that enabled hoarding, withholding, stratification, hierarchy, specialization, and war.
[Ishmael] There’s only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle. [Julie] Yea. You have to lock up the food. — Daniel Quinn, The Teachings That Came Before & After Ishmael p181, excerpted from My Ishmael, A Sequel, p181
Kathryn wrote: oppression and violence certainly existed before industrial modernism and I think they are likely to exist after the collapse or crumbling of modernity as we know it
Of course it will “exist”, but without the ability to withhold food, without “power over”, it won’t be so deadly, and we’ll find more reasons to avoid it.
Tribal law doesn’t punish people for their shortcoming, as our law does. Rather, it makes the management of their shortcomings an easy and ordinary part of life. — Daniel Quinn, If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways, p192
Then there’s lessons from ecology. Creatures in high-energy biomes (moist tropics) tend to be competitive; those in low-energy biomes (arctic, alpine, desert) tend to be cooperative.
There are certainly human examples of this if you dig a bit.
So I’m hopeful that, as subsistence consumes more of our attention and time, strife will be reduced, rather than increased. But we’ve got this huge energy hump to get over before that can happen.
Jan — Yes, I’m hopeful too.
If nothing else, you can kill an awfully lot more people an awfully lot faster with a machine gun than you can with a spear. If industrial society falls apart enough there just won’t be that much ammunition lying around, at which point the metal in such weaponry might be better put to use in gardening. (Though hunting is also much easier with industrial weapons than with, say, handmade arrows and bows, spears, and various snares.)
One of the ideas I keep coming back to is that we may have changed the climate enough that we just won’t have the stability necessary for cereals. If that’s the case it will bring its own problems, of course.
Well this week someone stole 600.000 eggs , a whole semi truck load , eggs have gone from $3 a dozen to $8 a dozen ( flock destruction bird flu ) have the cops found it , nope , Cattle are being stolen around here weekly , and someone managed to steal a whole car load of corn ( 100 tones ) while it was parked in a siding , the thieves are already out there !
If you have independence on a small farm, with energy, water, septic ,heat/ cooling and food all capable to go off grid and sustain a small family how close to lifehouse are you? Is your water table shallow enough to allow a hand dug well ? Is your ground fertile enough to support hoe farming? Are there plentiful forage of acorns nearby? Do you live where winters are mild and a small wood lot can provide heating?
My thoughts are if the cities can’t hold then the things like solar electrics, 3 phase well pumps , A/C , and tractors will fade with the cities. Then your lifehouse better be very low energy in every aspect of living. You might need to choose between a temperate climate with drought risks to a colder environment with predictable precipitation.
Even if you can unplug today which parts of modern infrastructure are you still dependent upon . Those places that can support a long term lifeboat shrink without modern well pumps and A/C or heat.
If Gareth Lewis looks enviable then you are ready.
The street on which I live is on Hawaii Island (Waikaalulu Road). The elevation ranges from 2,100 ft to 3,000 feet, so the climate is sub-tropical. Over Waikaalulu’s length of about 1.5 miles there are 28 homes on parcels of land ranging from 5 acres to 100 acres. Every house is off grid with solar power. Most houses catch their own rainwater for domestic supply. Food can be grown year around and there is lots of pasture for livestock. Even though the demographic of the homeowners skews old, most of us could feed ourselves pretty easily. Firewood is all around us, too. All in all, our community is about as prepared for the end of modernity as people in the rich world can be (without its members shedding a few decades).
After collapse the solar will only last a decade or so. Batteries will probably fail first. This will mean no piped water or electric appliances. But knowing that we all have a decade to get ready for no electricity will make the transition easier. In time the modern homes we all live in will deteriorate, mostly depending on how long the metal roofs last. Our main buildings have aluminum roofs, so that might well be several generations down the road.
Eventually people who live in our area will likely revert to the buildings, tools and infrastructure used by the indigenous people who lived here before contact with Europeans. That will be fine, but I just think it would be cool for at least a modest number of people to try doing it before they absolutely have to, if not here in Hawaii, somewhere in the US or Europe. Who knows, they might start a trend.
PS I have no idea who Gareth Lewis is.
Gareth Lewis
https://hoe-farming.com/contact/
Very low tech and minimal energy …traditional subsistence.
Lifehouses, safe houses, refugia. Joe, is there much talk in Hawaii of the Maui fire’s apparently unusual burn signature, and do you have an opinion on it?
Here’s an arborist discussing his findings for anyone unfamiliar: https://rumble.com/embed/v3xaji9/?pub=m6fb1
And PS re the Gareth and son Samuel Lewis reference, here’s another lovely film of self-reliance in Brittany with some priceless thoughts and observations on the farming year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR0Lb5DaMrY
We are always concerned about fire here and there are a lot of programs to encourage people to do more to fireproof their homes and property. The Lahaina fire is an example of what everyone fears; high winds can sweep through an area and seed fire far ahead of the bulk of the flames. Urbanized places are particularly vulnerable in the event of a fire with strong winds.
This is because extremely high winds carrying embers are the main reason for the kind of destruction you see in areas with numerous homes. Homes do not burn because of the impingement of flames, they burn because embers enter the homes through vents and other openings or start small fires in landscaping around the house.
This is the reason why a fast-moving fire can destroy buildings and leave the trees standing, even alive. Windblown embers start a fire on the inside of the building and cause it to burn, sometimes long after the main flame front has moved on. The Paradise and other fires in the video are examples of this. The trees were left standing because there weren’t enough for a crown fire (a kind of forest fire), but the buildings burn because of blown embers.
In the Lahaina fire, numerous boats were destroyed by fire even though they were anchored several hundred feet away from the shore. Flying embers were the cause.
Thanks for the explanation Joe.
I think the Amish have a lot to teach us how to farm sustainably here in the US , yes they use some modern comforts now but they are still close to their roots .
On Solar Foods: This means that 2/3 of the electricity in the world (just above 3000 kWh per capita) would be needed to supply humanity with the needed protein, calculated by 70 grams per person and day. Then we still need the carbs, the fat (which has higher energy density) and all other essential nutrients.
The annoying thing is that as all the other foods are still needed. This stuff only makes sense if most food is coming from similar processes. If you continue to grow grain for the carbs or oilseeds for fat, you will get a lot of protein anyway.
I totally agree with your statement about “a kind of urban anxiety at the thought of a rural and agrarian life. It’s this, I think, that underlies a lot of the enthusiasm for energetically unaffordable and ecologically disintegrative ideas like urban vertical rice farming (or indeed manufactured microbial food) that distract people from the necessary path.”
Keep up the good work, Chris
“On Solar Foods: This means that 2/3 of the electricity in the world (just above 3000 kWh per capita) would be needed to supply humanity with the needed protein…”
If the bacterial protein powder is only half as digestible (bioaccessible to humans) as soy protein powder, for example, then the required “2/3 of the electricity in the world” would be more like 133% of the electricity in the world.
You can see for yourself the digestibility numbers for Solein from Solar Foods, in the publicly available (redacted) version of a Digestibility study submitted to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA):
“Annex_7_1_Digestibility_TIM…” under “Technical Dossier” at this EFSA page:
https://open.efsa.europa.eu/dossier/NF-2021-1730
click on Technical Dossier (left side of page)
then click on Annexes to the dossier
then click on Study Report – Annex_7_1_Digestibility_TIM_Redacted.pdf
then click on Download link at top right of page
Go to page 19/35: “5.4 Protein quality — Amino acids”
Good point Steve.
Some very interesting comments here – thank you. I’ll aim to post some thoughts in the next day or two, probably in the form of a new post.
Hi Chris —
I do find it baffling how much stick you get for your ideas. Your articles and books are always closely argued, careful and systematic. You’re also good at responding to critiques, point by point. And you’re always courteous to critics. For the record, it was your writing that convinced me that the ‘urban population sink’ idea favoured by Stewart Brand, Kim Stanley Robinson, and latterly George Monbiot was unviable. I also thought your arguments against cultured food, including the energy maths, were far more compelling than George’s arguments in Regenesis. I too have recently been reading Lifehouse, and I was again surprised to see your ideas stiffly critiqued. But I think you’re right — many of these objections are at base cultural as opposed to being strictly factual. But again for the record, you have convinced one ex-ecomodernist that small farm futures are the most plausible and (if done right) the most humanitarian way forward.