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Posted on June 5, 2025 | 46 Comments
I mentioned the new Root and Branch Collective – described here and here – in my last post and said I planned to write something about it. So here goes.
Why write about it? Well, partly because the group (henceforth I’ll call it RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism, which is kinda my bag.
Also because RBC invokes influence from various Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks (in their words ‘critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory’). These frameworks have also influenced me, and still do, particularly in trying to get to grips with how we’ve got into the present mess. But less than before, and less as a means for getting out of it. So it interests me to place my waning commitment to such frameworks against a statement of their value.
My primary influences for navigating out of the present mess these days are distributism, civic republicanism, agrarian populism and Thomism, or maybe immanentism … which not a lot of people have heard of. One reason not a lot of people have heard of them is that we’re so caught up in mainstream modernist politics like neoliberalism and socialism that they get no airtime, which I think is regrettable. My forthcoming book Finding Lights in a Dark Age tries to prepare some ground for these non-modernist and non-socialist but potentially somewhat leftwing-ish positions. So it’s interesting to consider RBC’s intervention, with its more direct modernist-socialist lineage, in that light.
So … the RBC piece on Substack authored by Adam Calo and Alex Heffron begins by referring to a book called Agrarian Dreams which, they say, “effectively pumped the breaks (sic) on the vision of a food system grounded in localized organic production”, due to such things as exploitative labour relations and capitalist property regimes in the sector.
The piece continues, “Over a decade later, the popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism”. This debate, it says, has focused on land use techniques rather than the politics of land. Then it refers to my ‘debate’ with George Monbiot (the ‘debate’ that never really was … though I’m still hoping George will at least recant his erroneous energy figures someday). Calo and Heffron say Monbiot sets up a “bland binary between a romantic view of inefficient niche production via localism versus the “serious” work of feeding the world with the best possible technologies. As if we have to choose between a world of an anachronistic peasantry scratching away in the dirt and a half-earth utopia”.
There’s quite a lot to unpack in all this. Are Calo and Heffron saying that Monbiot and I are in dispute only over techniques? As I see it, Monbiot’s position is intensely – if often rather implicitly – focused on the politics of land. His land politics are bad ones in my opinion, which is why I felt the need to challenge him. But there’s no question that our ‘debate’ is about land politics. It’s also not clear to me whether Calo and Heffron agree with Monbiot that localist production is ‘inefficient’ or ‘niche’. If so, that opens a huge can of worms.
But leaving all that aside, the last sentence I quoted (‘as if we have to choose…’) is, implicit anti-peasantism apart, indeed pretty much what I’ve been arguing for years. We don’t in principle face a stark choice between the latest techno fads in corporate agriculture or miserable hand-to-mouth agrarian toil. A plethora of other options exists.
I’m less inclined to make this point these days, because the potentially catastrophic crises now knocking on the door threaten to make miserable agrarian toil look almost like a best-case scenario. But in principle, yes agreed, we do not face a bald dualism between ‘inefficient niche production’ and the ‘best technologies’ (not that there’s anything ‘best’ or particularly good about bacterial protein powder and other such corporate wheezes).
There are some further puzzles in Calo and Heffron’s opening gambit. First, anyone who sets themselves up as a commercial food or fibre producer in the Global North, or indeed in much of the Global South, with any pretensions toward ecological integrity and just rewards to labour will inevitably be crushed in the capitalist maw of prices – food prices, energy prices, land and housing prices, agri-plastic and agri-chemical prices, labour prices, political patronage prices – which all conspire against them. The whole drift of agroecology is more people doing more work on the land. The whole drift of contemporary capitalism is less people doing less work on the land, with a range of unsustainable inputs substituting for their labour. The problem here is not localized organic production and the people involved in it. The problem is capitalism – and it’s this structural problem which should surely be front and centre of any critical appraisal of the food system, not a critique of organic farming or agrarian localism.
Most of us who’ve tried our hand at local, agroecological, commercial food production give up sooner or later in the face of its desperate economics and try to decommodify our practices as far as we can – which, in a broken political economy, often isn’t far. The kind of frameworks I espouse argue that collectively we need to push that decommodification much further. Generally, I find that Marxist-influenced frameworks aren’t really on board with this, evincing instead a fatal attraction to wage labour and commodity production, albeit somehow shorn of their exploitive, capitalist edge. These differing emphases might be an interesting arena for debate.
Another puzzle is the ambiguous language from Calo and Heffron in phrases like ‘romanticized agrarian localism’ and ‘idealization of the bucolic farmer’. I agree that romanticized agrarian localism and the idealization of the bucolic farmer are problematic. I advocate instead for non-romanticized agrarian localism and non-idealization of non-bucolic farmers. Are Calo and Heffron arguing these things aren’t possible – that agrarian localism is inherently romanticised and the kind of farmers localists wish to promote are inherently idealized and bucolic? I’m not sure, but if so it could be interesting to hear why.
(An aside on that front: I’d like to see more discussion of what people understand by the word ‘romantic’ when they use it pejoratively, and what their understanding of the Romantic intellectual tradition is. In my opinion, while it’s not good to be romantic – except between consenting adults – it’s not inherently bad to be Romantic).
But let me move onto the core RBC principles included in Calo and Heffron’s piece. I wouldn’t myself opt for the kind of language the RBC uses in describing them (but, hey, they’re academics, and as an ex-academic I can sympathise). Still, happily, I find myself mostly in agreement with them. Let’s run through the principles briefly. (Note that for the most part I’m just going to paraphrase parts of them and put my own gloss on them – if you want the full picture verbatim, you’ll have to read them for yourself here. My paraphrases or direct quotes are in normal typeface and my commentary is in italics, by the way).
‘This involves political-economic transformation’ (Yes!)
‘institution building’ (I’d say culture building more generally, but yes)
and ‘struggle over state power’ (for me, it’s largely struggle against state power, but not entirely, so a probable yes).
It also involves ‘abolishing the systems of violence and oppression that constrain our abilities to build a world in common that is not classed, raced, gendered or otherwise structured by oppression’. (It’s hard to disagree with abolishing systems of violence and oppression – so yes – but I find this sentence problematic for reasons I’ll come to. These probably go to the heart of my differences with the RBC project).
So … I have a lot in common with the RBC project, but also some differences. And here, most likely, is another difference: in the comments below the RBC Substack piece – hi Gunnar, and … is that you Joel? (thanks…) – there was an interesting little comment from Adam Calo, “Yet, I do think there is a broader blindspot amongst those who associate with a revitalized localism that relates to the ideology of the “good farmer” and its related structures of the land owning family. I think this is important terrain to struggle with.”
I’m not entirely sure what Adam means about the ideology of the good farmer, but I agree such an ideology is likely to be problematic – except perhaps in a rather specific sense that I hope to discuss in another post. I do, however, believe that an ideology – or at least a practice and a tradition – of good farming, good ecology, and good livelihood-making is essential. The catastrophic crisis that the RBC highlights seems to me to stem largely from their lack.
Things get stickier around the question of ‘the land-owning family’. Every enduring human ecology I can think of has involved the collective allocation of restricted rights of appropriation to small groups of people evincing structured mutualisms – or, in plainer English, it’s involved landowning families. More specifically, it’s involved a lot of families, each owning only a little land. For sure, this is set within wider collective relationships (often also involving kinship, or family, albeit not exclusively so) that both constrain and enable family-level organisation. But the landownership bit and the family bit remain important. I’d argue that socialist-leaning attempts to do away with this structuring of local human ecology – for example, in Russia, in China, in Vietnam, in Israel, in Tanzania, in Nicaragua, by the MST in Brazil, and so on – generally haven’t worked out too well, and have often caused a lot of misery along the way.
Here, we come to the radical individualism within socialism, which it shares with its capitalist adversary – each, despite their apparent opposition, different versions of the same modernism and its vaunting of the sovereign individual. The idea that socialism, too, is individualist perhaps runs counter to the collective/communal vibes accompanying the way it’s normally represented. The clue is in its antipathy to family, religious, localist and other identities that claim people’s collective allegiance and potentially limit their individual self-realisation. In strong versions of socialism, the state or the socialist political community is the only permissible collective allowed to mediate the relationship between effectively disembedded sovereign individuals and collective identity. This is why I think the language in the core principle I mentioned earlier around building ‘a world in common that is not classed, raced, gendered or otherwise structured by oppression’ is a bit tricksy. Taking, for example, gender or ‘class’ in its widest sense, such identities clearly have been structured by oppression, and I endorse the need to oppose that. But that’s not the same as abolishing those identities themselves, apparently as something unbecoming of the liberated individual.
A lot of non-modern societies have found subtler ways of accommodating the desire of some people to abolish extant social identities without taking the kind of totalising and authoritarian abolitionist stance characteristic of modernism – abolish all identities that have ever been structured by oppression or local exclusion to leave purified individuals in relation to a purified state! I disagree. Question them, for sure. Mitigate their negative consequences. Seek to generate alternatives. So yes, I believe Adam is right that the landowning family is important terrain to struggle with. But not necessarily to struggle against. Here, I think socialism reveals a blindspot of its own in its modernist-individualist tendency to proceed too hastily from the former to the latter.
Tyson Yunkaporta writes, “Aboriginal people don’t have to choose between the individual and the collective, left and right, because we are both at once. We are unique individuals with no boss, bound in dense and complex systems of relational obligation” (Right Story, Wrong Story p.41) … and a lot of that relational obligation manifests in the form of kinship, or family, and access to knowledge and resources that are not universally shared (i.e. private property). Yet we don’t seem to be able to take this both-and thinking in our stride in modernist society, preferring all-or-nothing dualities. If socialist approaches to agrarianism, or economic life generally, offer non-family and non-landownership models for people who want to live in that way, I’m absolutely supportive. The crunch for me comes if those models are imposed society-wide, under the guise of fairness or some other criterion which does not adequately justify such a totalising position. In that case, I’m opposed. Given how far away we are from such socialist scenarios currently in a country like Britain, perhaps it’s a bit academic. But I do think it’s worth considering and learning from the models and the mistakes of the past.
In summary, the kind of distributist and agrarian populist or localist approaches that influence me have a lot in common with the RBC approach – much more in common, I think, than each of them has with mainstream political positions. But there are some points of difference. While strongly socialist approaches are more radical in means than my position (revolutionary politics, family abolition etc.), I think they’re usually less radical, less root and branch, in their ends (dallying with statism, colonial extractivism, the self-creation of the modernist individual etc).
These differences could make for an interesting debate, but I’m probably not going to debate them. I’ve had some good and friendly interactions with people espousing more straightforwardly Marxist/modernist positions than me. But also some bad and unfriendly ones, and life’s too short for that. Still, we need some radical change for sure, so – caveats above excepted – I wish RBC well in trying to effect it.
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As usual, a very thoughtful (and detailed) response. And, respectful, of course. That emphasis they seem to place on the revolutionary and radical solutions does seem to always end with blood and tears. Curious how we have both have migrated away from finding such poses thrilling. Although you have made the journey with more rigor, Chris, than my more aimless drift.
One thought (and I’m cherry-picking here) about your comment “And, I’d add, specifically land widely distributed to local agrarians, a large group of people that somehow needs to be quickly conjured into existence because…” In the US, and I’m not sure about the UK, there has been a significant movement back to the country since the pandemic. It has been accompanied, unfortunately, by the breaking up of larger farms, the building of more development, greater impacts on limited infrastructure. Still, large numbers of these new incomers are purposefully trying to live some version of a homestead/farmstead life. While this movement of people is not a Movement (thankfully), nor agrarian in a way we might define, it does put a large number of people back where they might need to be with intentions that might be compatible with a small-farm future. This is not a “romantic” view, just a practical observation.
Cheers,
Brian
PS really looking forward to the new book.
“We recognise the existence of biophysical limits and thresholds in terms of agricultural possibility, whilst rejecting any form of Malthusianism, populationism or engineered asceticism. ” Umm, no I don’t think you do recognize biophysical limits.
“abundance”- hah, it is to laugh. The underlying support of all our energy slaves can be hard to see, but it is real, and needs to be acknowledged by anyone trying to put forth a serious response to our predicament. Let’s hope we manage sufficiency. Of course, we will at some population level.
These guys, bless their hearts, mean well, but “radical land reforms” will simply not be a thing while nation states continue to control their boundaries with panem et circenses.
A central strategy to maintaining state legitimacy is cheap food. It will become increasingly paramount as the increasing ECOE continues to bite into the economies of all nations, but especially the “developed” world. This will require maintaining bulk cheap calorie commodities as long as possible. Not compatible with a small farm future.
The coming transition struggles will be as much about the rural urban / divide as much as the centralized control / localization divide. Lots of grey scale to the concept of ownership as you’ve explored in many essays.
While I would prefer to live in a world where distributism and civic republicanism reigns instead of warlords and roving bands , I still come back to your supersedure analogy, and what happens to me and descendants ( and everyone!) will be to a large extent depend on luck at how things play out right here. That said, keep preaching.
You tacked on immanence there, and am curious to see how you tie that in. Being an agnostic, that concept strikes a nice middle ground possibility for me.
Interesting article Chris.
“we do not face a bald dualism between ‘inefficient niche production’ and the ‘best technologies’”
True, but most of those non-niche methodologies are going to be temporary. Their form will follow the functionality of the technologies involved in farming, but as exogenous energy supplies continue to decline machines will become less and less present in the “food production space” until they finally disappear. The end state will be ‘inefficient niche production’, people in concert with their animals using muscles to grow and gather food.
I’d like to also, once again, suggest that the social organization of those end-state people doing low-energy food production will manifest in a wide variety of “isms”, from communism to feudalism, depending on local conditions, including population density, the nature of the terrain and who controls the guns.
It won’t be possible to do much in the way of advance political structuring, no matter how hard we try. The demise of modernity, industrial agriculture and much of the human population will be too traumatic and chaotic. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men ..” are no match for what’s coming.
Still, here in the present, we can lay the literal “ground-work” of things that will be useful to those muscle-farmers who will come after us, no matter how they organize themselves. Fertile soil, strong fences, orchards and food forests, woodlots, human and animal shelters, and reliable water supplies will all be core assets of future societies, no matter where they are or how they are structured.
How we can best promote this kind of asset-building is the most important thing to be discovered. Good books about it will surely help, at least a little, and you’ve certainly done your part, Chris. Somehow getting governments involved would be good, too, but how to do that?
Radical land reform sounds so good but for some reason I’ve never met or heard of anyone who actually works on this problem directly in some way? Please correct me if I’m wrong or you know somebody who has achieved actual results in the field. Writing books and articles/academic papers can only get us so far obviously.
In the rich world, land fertility restoration (one type of land reform) is only being practiced by small scale homesteaders and some commercial regenerative and organic farmers. The other infrastructure needed for sustainable rural households, or collectives of various types, isn’t being done by anyone as far as I know. There are a few land ownership cooperatives and intentional communities here and there but nothing widespread.
Major land restoration projects are being attempted in sub-Saharan Africa and India. Andrew Millison has posted numerous videos on these projects. Land ownership isn’t being changed much if at all and most of the work is hand labor by the residents of the area.
I know of billionaires who are purchasing vast amounts of land (Larry Ellison bought the whole of Lanai, an island in Hawaii, for example), but they don’t seem to be intent on changing the current paradigm of industrial agriculture and sparse population. Maybe Chris can talk some sense into them.
There are a few countries like Japan, Spain, Switzerland and Italy that are using financial incentives to try and halt or reverse migration from rural areas into cities, but I’m not aware of anything that involves changing patterns of land ownership. In Italy, existing abandoned properties are being offered for one euro, but all the cost of rehabilitation is paid by the new owner.
I, too, would be interested in any examples of governments attempting to convert industrial ag land into small homesteads for new farmers, especially subsistence farmers. Maybe this is happening in some places in the Global South, but I know of nothing in the industrial Global North.
I think it’s still rather important to have good knowledge of farming and farming techniques. Very few farmers these days seem to know what those techniques are and without knowledge there is no action. With every farmer using the best possible “techniques”/farming approach for their farmland I don’t think there would this big debate around land reform and such. Of course that isn’t a very realistic scenario, because most farmers are locked in to an overly industrial mode of production. Hence the bold rhetoric around land reform which has not yet materialised into anything in particular. I hope it does, but I’m just not very optimistic on that front.
Yes, that was me Chris. Adam’s reply was interesting, especially “the need to roll back primitive accumulation”, proper fighting talk! I think overall they are putting forward a serious attempt to make radical land reform a fundamental component of a liveable future. Unsurprisingly I agree with all your caveats and like you say, I put that down to academic language and a stylistic fashion of the moment – but also expressing a wish to experiment outside of and be aware of what have been stifling patriarchal capitalist structures masquerading as familial and kinship relations.
To the creative work of forming new frameworks of self/other symbols please see Alice’s latest post on Clothing;
https://alicesuzanneholloway.substack.com/p/care-home-farm-5-fibre-and-clothes?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
I look forward to learning about immanentism and Thomism, which in my mind is like a concept I called Isness, as in, it is what it is!
You identify the need for a sense of humour in this space and I think it is so important, it is deadly seriously important to understand the utter hilarious futility of being really sure about ‘the world’, and what ‘it’ is or ‘we’ are, going to do. In our house it is called ‘Old Gittery’ and acagemic jargon is known as ‘the waffle iron’. Jokes must underpin everything! Forgiveness and humour. It’s what The Man is missing. It’s what we got.
‘So … the RBC piece on Substack authored by Adam Calo and Alex Heffron begins by referring to a book called Agrarian Dreams which, they say, “effectively pumped the breaks (sic) on the vision of a food system grounded in localized organic production”, due to such things as exploitative labour relations and capitalist property regimes in the sector. . . The piece continues, “Over a decade later, the popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism”. ‘
A couple of criticisms on the RBC piece. First, “exploitative labor relations” certainly did slow down localized organic production, especially the use of interns. Use and abuse of interns was a hot topic at one small farm conference I went to years ago, with no hint of a resolution. I never used interns myself because of this conundrum. I have been especially sensitive to this topic since I was exploited right along with the undocumented Mexican workers back when I was a migrant worker myself. On my farm, I tried a couple of alternatives, such as farm bucks and “halfsies.” Farm bucks are just scrip for farm produce, although one usually just keeps track in a accounts journal or spreadsheet. The farmer can up the hourly wage to a fair price because he/she is only paying 30-40% in actual capital costs. (And if your costs are higher than 40% of your gate receipts, you might want to re-examine your business plan. By the way, this difference between actual costs and gate receipts in dollars/sterling/euros is where you get paid for your labor so you can take a hit here. This can be finessed in mutiple ways too.) “Halfsies” was having people work on harvesting and keeping half of what they picked. This turned out to be waaaay too good for the harvesters, especially if they actually paid attention to how I showed them to do the work efficiently. Neither of these alternatives worked well. What actually worked was when I just took in volunteers and fed them a meal after a couple of hours and gave them extra produce. They ended up getting more in value than the work they did, learned a valuable skill, and the work atmosphere was much more pleasant.
As for a “reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism,” this is just a false argument. The authors seem to be sneering at both “artisan” AND “localism,” both of which have proven to be much needed, especially if one wants to lower their energy and carbon footprints. Likewise in their sneering use of “techno-utopian productivism.” I think my research on landraces would probably fit into this misshapen box category. Or should I say “dustbin category?” As I am wont to say often, “Fer chrissakes! I produce a good product and I only live a couple of miles from you. Get a clue!” As for reductionism, it has its uses. Yes, you can go down the chain to the subatomic level and use the probabilities of gravitational attraction between particles; or go up to the stars and quarks level and use a holistic method to determine behavior of celestial bodies. But in the middle term, where we actually live, gravity as a force works well enough. So if you want to be reductionist in analyzing why in the hell people cannot make a living producing good food, it is more than acceptable. It is the rigorous approach. A better way to address the problem would be to teach the wiry 20-year-olds organizational skills and efficent body movement techniques. Right now, they are working themselves into the ground because they have a lot of energy. If they adopt some of the organizational skills and body movement efficiency of us “snaggle-toothed oldsters, they could produce two-to-four times the amount of food they are producing now. Believe me, a season working alongside undocumented workers would be a wake-up call for many aspiring agriculturalists.
Calo and Heffron were quoted: “Over a decade later, the popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism…”
That itself sounds like a “reductionist framing” from Calo and Heffron.
Chris wrote: “There’s quite a lot to unpack in all this. Are Calo and Heffron saying…”
I think they have crafted a narrative which might sound sensible to a certain audience, by leaving enough ambiguity about the details of their positions and critiques. It’s easy to agree with anti-colonialism and anti-exploitation, for example. I appreciate how Chris gets deeper into the details and nuances, such as, “colonialism goes down almost unfathomably deep historically and ecologically… I find it hard to imagine any long-term non-colonial human ecology which is not fundamentally local and largely rural in its orientation and in its engagement with nature.”
“I find it hard to imagine any long-term non-colonial human ecology which is not fundamentally local and largely rural in its orientation and in its engagement with nature.”
This is why “the flow” is moving towards a small farm future. This is why I read this blog.
Thank you Chris for the detailed and articulated article and all the commenters for further elaboration.
It just reminds me how our (mostly Chrise’s) vision of Small Farm Future is marginal in every corner of “alternative”. And I do not need too much evidence for this, after I published the Small Farm Future in Czech, after reading it and regarding it one of the most important books, only to find out it completely DO NOT resonate with any part of ecological, alternative, degrowth movement in Czech.
I am still trying to find out what is the reson for this dismissal, but now I think it offers work and humbleness and not any easy grand vision and easy solution coming from others.
As I see it, the article from C&H comes from the position of collectivism and abundancism, what for me is something I also see between some of the opponents of SFF, I meet in Czech.
To sum it up, it is like, when we break out from the capitalist and individualist present, we will do everything together and because all of us will work happily together, everyone will have abundance of all they need. Unfortunatelly this sounds plausible only on paper, as nobody I know about proved that in real, when trying this on their land or shared housing in our North Western society.
The lure of this approach on paper is that it negates what is percieved as two big ills of today, scarcity and individualism.
An even this is far from todays mainstream, unfortunatelly it is also quite far from SFF, as I understand it.
The fact, that it is not possible to make it work, does not make it less apalling in internet/paper/podcast debate, because no one judges by this metric today.
Just personal on the end of my comment.
In my country we have experience with collectivic solution to farm problems and my grandparents were direct victims of this experiment.
After 1948, when socialist party took over Czech republic, they decided to solve the problem with food production and hard labour in agriculture. The solution was to make cooperatives in the villages, which will own the machines and work the land together to produce abundance and work less.
My grandfather was small farmer on the village at that time having about 6 hectares, simillar to most people in the village. So first there was possibility to join the cooperativ, but as he described that, in the begining only the lazy, bad farmers joined, hoping to get rewards without work. So after few years and despite the state investments in the cooperative, there started HUGE drive to get all farmers in.
First if you did not join the collective, you need to give half of your produce to state for some small money, basically crushing your sustenance and pushing you to money economy.
Next step was to switch your land for some other land, so my grandfathers fertile land near the village was exchanged for land on the outskirts, long abandoned. I remember from my childhood it took us an hour with old tractor to get to our field.
And then around 1965 they said you can have maximum 1 hectar and the rest you need to rent out to the cooperative, so that definitelly pushed last few stubborn farmers to factories.
There is much more about this history, but I do not want to bother you with it here.
I am NOT saying this is what C&H are pushing for, also the current setting is very different so there will be very different caveats, but this makes me just aware of what can also happen.
Thanks for the comments. It’s nice to see some new commenters here – welcome. Unfortunately I’m short on time to respond to comments in much detail at the moment, and it feels like I should probably prioritise writing new posts when I have blog-time to keep the wheels turning. But I very much appreciate people taking the trouble to comment here – this also helps keeps the wheels turning!
Briefly in relation to a few points:
From the whispers that reach the Small Farm Future office from around the world, I believe Brian is right that there are burgeoning back to the land movements all over the place – they just haven’t been discovered by journalists or academics yet, in part no doubt because of the power of the urbanism/progress narrative to blinker us. It’s probably too little, too late, but I agree that at least it’s something. My sense is that it’s quite a middle-class phenomenon, for the usual reasons but also for some more surprising ones. Still, new political developments are often middle-class led – including Marxism, ironically. Worth watching.
I agree with Joe C & Steve C that how the catastrophe unfolds for any individual person or area is out of our hands. Whether we’re trying to build political community or physical farm infrastructure, we can’t control the outcome and there will be all sorts of variants on the general trauma. Nevertheless, I still think it’s worth discussing politics and seeding political ideas. Just as with building physical resilience, the more that people have thought about the challenges of building political resilience for the future the better.
On land reform, there’s much to agree with in the various comments but ultimately I do think ordinary people in their multitudes are going to have to be able to access small areas of land to produce food and fibre for themselves. It’ll happen (in various different ways) because it has to happen, but I agree with commenters here that there’s little in the way of mainstream politics pushing in that direction at the moment. That wasn’t true in the past – there were huge land reforms worldwide in the 19th and 20th centuries. The communist countries are an obvious example, but also small farm-promoting land reforms in SE Asia and Latin America, some of which is still going on, and then the ‘household responsibility’ system in nominally communist modern China. Most places are currently in a neoliberal moment where such ideas have fallen by the wayside, but there are small signs of revival. Again, probably too little too late, but… Anyway, another topic to write about in the future if I can find the time.
One reason governments are ducking this challenge currently is, as Steve C says, the imperative for low food prices, which is in lockstep with the imperative for high land/housing prices – an over-financialisation on which present economies, particularly in the rich countries, depend. Agreed, governments will try to maintain that pattern for as long as they can, but in the end I believe they’ll fail – a major reason why preparing both local physical infrastructures and local politics seems a wise bet.
To Steve C’s scepticism on the matter of recognising biophysical limits – well, I find myself caught between two camps there. Hopefully my upcoming post on overshoot might prompt some interesting discussion.
Thanks Walter for your interesting observations. The fact that abuse of interns was a hot topic at a small farm conference you went to surely points to a different conclusion about the sector to the RBC piece – I don’t think labour exploitation features much at all in most mainstream food industry meetups! Ultimately, as I said above, wise agrarianism in the present world collides with the capitalist profit motive. Individuals might be able to find workarounds that solve the problem well enough for them in their particular circumstances, but the logic of the system as a whole remains an obstacle.
Walter’s comments also touched on an issue that I think would be interesting to explore more (I explore it a little in my forthcoming book) – the difference between a volunteer or wage worker who has no overall responsibility for managing and maintaining the farm or the business, and the proprietor, who does. Leftwing politics typically builds out from the exploitation of the worker – but while it’s reasonable to emphasise this and seek to redress it, it doesn’t usually involve a great account of the maintenance/management function, other than through statist managerialism and bureaucracy. This is why I find distributism appealing – making the worker the owner, especially in a situation where we need to shrink the economy.
Hynek – thanks for your thoughts … and I’m sorry my book has failed to resonate in Czech! I remember you telling me the story of your grandfather when you visited me, and it has stuck in my mind. I for one would be very interested to hear more! And also more generally about the agrarian scene and the orientation to essentially Marxist analyses like RBC in post-communist countries. A few years back I chatted with a Romanian small farm activist trying to fight the tide of EU agribusiness. From what you’re saying, it sounds like mass techno-driven solutionism commands the narrative in east Europe as well as western. As per Brian’s comment, it’d be interesting to discuss where the resources for counter-movements might lie in different places.
Thanks also for the other comments – much to think about!
A lot of conversations going on across the last two posts, but this seemed to fit here.
There was a movement of higher paid workers out of the mega cities in the US during the pandemic. It doesn’t seem clear to me where that ended up (especially with return to office), but some balance of gentrifying low cost cities, more suburban housing, and rentals/second/investment homes, but also some people actually ended up on land.
Homesteading is what I would call the current back to the land/self sufficiency movement (such as it is). Yes it’s middle class because land and housing are incredibly expensive, but I would think most social movements more broadly are/were? You have to have both free resources beyond survival and also something to gain from upsetting the social order to benefit from and enact change. There’s a lot of books sold about homesteading, and a lot of interest in the skills, but in my experience less actual work getting done. There’s also a good subset of what I somewhat dismissively call the “me and my 3-tomato plants” homesteading going on. But at least they are living on land or gardening? I’m not familiar with the literature on the topic, but just from experience homesteading ranges from the gunned up ‘libertarians’ through the eco-aware communists and pretty much everyone else (retirees looking for a quiet place is probably a big group).
The last farming meeting I was at wasn’t as concerned about interns, but a big topic was the affordability of our products. In order to farm properly (and keep a business going) the price means that we(organic/small/alternative/local) producers really only feed the elite and so can’t be transformative for the type of farming we would like to see take hold.
While I concede that our idea of land ownership (it’s mine and therefore I can do whatever I like with it) is part of the problem, and also a silly idea if you go outside, (I did nothing to create the land, it was here before and will be here when I’m gone), I nevertheless have gone, and will continue to go to great lengths to “own” my own land and I do think that if you’re going to pour your soul into farming some kind of security is needed. I also have experience with several other forms of ownership to various effects:
1. Business rental/sharing for labor exchange. This works for short term crops, but you have to consider the return or the next lease/period. You’re also not going to spend time on perennials. It also adds some communication overhead, how many hours, who is doing that thing, who fills which order, etc.
2. Family land sharing. This works best if the family in question doesn’t also have their own vision for the land. It preserves your access, but at the ‘cost’ of a high communication overhead. In my case it has worked out as a good spot for perennial crops that need a large amount of work only a few times per year and can otherwise be maintained with minimal effort.
I hadn’t considered knowledge a part of the private property debate before. Makes me wonder if I’ve made a mistake pretty much openly sharing all of mine to anyone who asks? Shout out to Walter for reminding me to include just picking the bugs off the plants in any IPM discussions. Maybe a strategy of largely free access to land (so we can all wander about) but a more controlled access to the knowledge to work that land? I guess I’m picturing more of a foraging type existence now where there’s overlapping niches available to some groups but not others based on information and taboos on what is “good” food.
If there is any land redistribution I think it will mostly be unofficial. There are parcels here that are just held for “investment” and only get mowed (not hayed!) once a year by contractors, and some tracts owned just for hunting. It’s not the bulk of the land at all, but if you’re in the area you know which ones… shelter would be the hard part.
Also, thanks to Joel for raising the issue of ‘old gittery’. This is a phantom that stalks me, and sometimes I think I should give up writing before it consumes me…
The problem I see with Root and Branch is that they are “a group of scholars, based in Europe, whose work coalesces around an interest in the revolutionary potential of the agrarian question of geographies…” and “Theoretically, we draw on concepts, tools and ideas from the fields of critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory among other theoretical traditions.”
What I’m not seeing is any understanding or hands on experience with agriculture or gardening. A theoretical approach to food production is like learning to cook using AI. AI has never so much as fried an egg. Hopefully human scholars are less prone (<30% ?) to hallucinations but without real world experience to check your theories against, how do you know ? Why should I trust their results ?
Land ownership is a problem going forward. A related issue will be fertility. Most of the farm land around us wouldn't produce a decent crop of weeds without added nitrogen. There will have to be some system of durable, long term land tenure. With out it, it will be hard to invest the years of work necessary to build and maintain productive crop land.
Until a community "bound in dense and complex systems of relational obligation" develops, individual ownership will have a role in food production. in a SFF.
I do think they have at least some gardening experience but it’s very difficult to get a proper foothold/farm experience without the land to go with it, which is what this project seems to be all about. Just being a volunteer or intern on a farm wouldn’t seem very satisfying to me anyway. But sadly this is usually the be all and end all these days…
One alternative that is seldom discussed is apprenticeship. This does not have to be a formal arrangement either. I would welcome someone to come by and help out and I could certainly give them lots of food AND teach them viable skills. But times are not hard enough yet for people to get off their dead asses and go out to 1) talk to a farmer and 2) accept that manual labor is the future. Meanwhile, I build up the soil so that “someone” will be able to grow decent crops on our little bit of land in the future. Just as the peasants in the 12th century looked up at the Montsegur Chateau every day, so I look at the ruins now. Someone in the future will look up at these same ruins and maybe he/she will appreciate the job I did.
Once times are hard enough for people to accept a SFF, there will be a lag time as their skills improve and new or recycled land comes back into production. This will be a death time for many.
As I have said for many years, a good approximation of the most plausible future is the Dies the Fire (2004) series of books by S. M. Stirling. He is a good writer and despite a rather flimsy premise, he does a good job of presenting how people cope in a neo-medieval world.
With informal apprenticeships that aren’t paying established wages (even if they’re offering other benefits in kind, possibly more generous ones) we get back to the problem of perceived exploitation. Two of the RBC crew made quite a song and dance on social media about my supposedly exploitive ways along these lines in respect of the learning opportunity on our holding that we briefly trialled, despite clearly not knowing anything much about it.
In the event, we didn’t persist long with that scheme because it was costing us too much. What seems to have happened recently here in England is that a lot of super-rich people are buying farms and setting up retreat centres and cafés with produce from walled gardens and the like, with wages for workers coming out of their deep pockets rather than the business venture as such. I don’t think this is leading anywhere particularly good in the long run, but, hey, it’s a proper wage, so nobody seems to mind. We ended up housing some apprentices from such a scheme when they got summarily turfed out, but that’s another story.
I agree with Joe that just being a volunteer or intern often isn’t very satisfying. People want their own spread to experiment with, make their own decisions and mistakes, be their own boss and, like Greg says, have security of tenure so they can put their soul into a project long-term. In other words, they want private property. I find leftist strictures against private property a bit obtuse in this respect. Quite a few people have passed through our project here with a commitment to collective working that has weakened when they’ve experienced firsthand what’s involved.
I volunteered on a few farms before I got my own place. It was a mixed experience. You can definitely pick up skills and knowledge, but it’s hard to get an overview of a whole farm or enterprise and what’s going on behind the scenes … it’s hard even to know what questions to ask when you’re starting out. This is the other side of the business proprietor or farm owner-occupier vs worker/intern coin. The intern might think they’re being exploited. The proprietor might think they’ve got it easy. Both could be right. Ultimately, I think there’s no substitute for proprietorship, security of tenure, a sense of personal autonomy and local ‘ownership’ in the widest sense.
I don’t know how much farming experience the RBC crew have, but I think Greg’s got a point. I do think direct workplace experience counts for something (a suitably Marxist position?) but it’s easy for boilerplate political philosophies to mess with our heads, even on the job.
Also, thanks Walter for the Stirling recommendation. I’m up for reading a bit of post-collapse fiction. I’ll be interested to find out what people make of my own little contribution to that genre in my new book.
Some interesting experiences you’ve had with the billionaires. I took a quick look at Agrarian Dreams and downloaded a 22-page sample from University of California Press to read further. Guthman’s book came out in 2004 and predates Michael Pollan’s critique of Big Organic by two years in his book Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). Interesting side note: Julie Guthman is currently blasting Silicon Valley’s role in organic agriculture and is featured on a podcast that just came out on the Real Organic Project channel on YouTube. The segment is called Big Tech’s Takeover of Organic and it is over an hour in length. Here is the URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYtD2bD0_0M
Another nuts and bolts comment. Few people seem to have imagined what daily life will be like as the system breaks down, so each cultural shock seems fresh and new and awful. And of course, this is where reading history becomes a comfort. Not just medieval history or the history of the 1960s, but the history of the Great Depression too.
reading history becomes a comfort
Oh very much so. In my own case, nineteenth, eighteenth and even seventeenth centuries.
(btw, I’m not following this post/commentary very closely because the very word “collective” was enough to deter me. “Co-operative” is fine but “collective” – wildly utopian)
Yes, this is exactly it, perfect summary of what I am seeing firsthand on our homestead and on friends small farms around.
One difference from past is that the knowledge can be today acquired by other means than spent at least a year on a farm, ie. from Internet and books. The question is if it is the same knowledge.
But when we were teaching in Sweden on a school, where 10 adult pupils were on a farm for a year, I saw that just time also do not bring the knowledge.
So I just do not see the way through it now …
As long as someone knows what to do, i.e. how to grow food, things can work out with a largely unskilled / untrained labor force. If no one knows what to do, you’re screwed. People who don’t know how to garden and try to go it alone will starve.
That kind of points towards working together to grow food. Which has good and bad features. Two people working together can get three times as much done as working alone. I’m sure that effect plateaus at some small number. The downside is hierarchy that can lead to abuse.
For a different view of the future –
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/praxis-dryden-brown
Thanks Greg.
I looked at the Vanity Fair link. I think I’d also seen a link to this article on FireFox recommendations.
In my view, the US military has done exactly one positive thing in California, and that is the preservation of the only (mostly) unspoiled coastline south of Big Sur. Vandenberg Air Force Base and Camp Pendleton, mainly.
Now some tech bro wants to get a lease from the military to build a utopia at Vandenberg. The utopia is just an excuse. This is simple real estate scam, just like nearly all of the rest of the history of this country.
Now dammit Greg; Why did you go and share that link? I was having a nice mellow day, and then this reminder of the puffed up egos, distended sense of privilege and absolute cluelessness of our alpha male wannabes just got me steaming.
No clue about history, or energy and material flows, or the fragility of the financial/digital world that floats precariously on all that massive but declining infrastructure. On top of that, fictional Galt actually did things, this guy is a simple huckster. The wikipedia entry for Praxis is a riot. A good example of what is wrong with America now.
Andreesen?, Thiel? Might as well have said Sauron or Saruman.
Actually, maybe I hope he does build his seaside Galt’s Gulch/Dark Elysium and fills it with loads of ‘roid raging tech bros. When things go sideways, it will probably turn into a regular Lord of the Flies on steroids. One can dream.
OK, I feel better now.
You could have said Sauron, Theil’s newest company is called Sauron Security because apparently his ability to parse literature is that low, or he’s just advertising the evil at this point.
If you want a good roundup of the tech bros this is one of the more complete: https://www.thenerdreich.com/
Interns are a symptom of how broken the food system is.
How can it be that a product that is so essential, can be worth so little, that the farmer can’t afford to pay the necessary workers a living wage ?!
It makes no sense. The farmer’s share of food prices is pennies on the dollar. Labor is the biggest expense but is a small fraction of the shelf price. Doubling the cost of labor would raise that price of produce a percentage point.
We never used interns and always paid a living wage for the nearby city where most of our workers lived. We couldn’t afford benefits but everyone was always welcome to take what ever they could use. Of course, I always fired the slowest worker.
Hi Chris —
Re Thomism/Immanentism and global systemic collapse:
I too have a great interest in mystical philosophies and how they might help people cope with a post-collapse future. You might be interested in the chat I had with Jem Bendell along these lines recently on my podcast. We discuss the issue of free will in nature in the context of global systemic collapse. We also discuss Buddhist approaches to immanence/consciousness:
https://open.substack.com/pub/whatliesbeyond/p/free-will-in-nature-jem-bendell?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Very interesting post and comments – thanks, all. I looked up Calo and Heffron – Calo is an American academic currently at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Heffron could be a jazz guitarist, but in this instance (the one who wrote the piece with Calo) he is someone with a small farm in Wales who is currently doing a Ph.D. at Lancaster University. He’s also very active on Substack.
My two cents worth on the issues raised above… could trying to find an ‘ism’ that both explains and improves things be part of the problem, not part of the solution? I have cycled through a few of them in my 50 years of thinking about such things, and I can’t say I’ve found any that always work out well. Take feminism, where I started. During the 1970s I saw it split into various factions at war with each other, and now it just seems incoherent. Ditto for socialism, pacifism, enviromentalism, Buddhism, etc., etc. Of course capitalism, colonialism, industrialism, racism, sexism, etc. are ‘the enemy’ – but how could any one ‘ism’ – or a grouping of them – ever be a complete replacement for them, given the great diversity of the world, and of its human cultures?
Also, even if it could happen, it ain’t going to be in my lifetime. So now the only ‘ism’ I think much about is ‘non-capitalism, now’. This is about exploring all the many ways there are of living on and with the land in the present while caring for both humans and non-humans. In this regard I think the conversation above about interns, volunteers, apprentices, etc. is very valuable, because these are exactly the kinds of issues that are not place-specific, but need to be discussed by all those with experience of them so that learning can occur.
It was also very interesting to learn of how the Czech ‘communist’ experience soured things for farmers (and the land?) there, as seems to be the case for all impositions from above. Building from below gets almost no coverage, as noted above, and that’s a bad thing when it comes to scaling it outwards – but maybe it’s a good thing when it comes to avoiding trouble from the overlords.
I would suggest that handbooks on how to grow things and run a small farm well (including the labour and money issues) are probably of a lot more use than theories about the best ‘ism’ to fit the practice. (Let alone about where it could/should/will/might all end up in the future.) More likely to be of use to people wanting to ‘convert’ to it, anyway. I am still learning how to grow things from books, and latterly from on-line materials. (The video I saw on raspberry pruning was VERY helpful.)
I am also, having just been down to Fairlie (a rural town in South Canterbury – population 960) to see my niece and great-nieces perform in the local theatre group’s production of ‘Oliver’, and been very impressed with the standard of the performances and the production generally, feeling very jaded when it comes to academic writing about country matters. Calo and Heffron still seem to think a life in the sticks is for culture-less yokels, and they have better ideas on how to run things. Maybe if they actually got involved in doing things creative, caring and/or productive in a rural town near them, they might buck up their ideas. Here’s hoping?
Yes Chris, the phantom of old gittery is stalking us all, and has had its deadening hand on me, I am in treatment – hence the caustic therapy of extreme piss taking.
For me and Alice (my humour therapist), and I think for you too, we are operating in a space between the idea that academia and governments being able or willing to do anything, the idea that the economic paradigm we are working in ever worked as more than a form of exploitation and the idea that the world is a machine that has been set in motion and has a predestined path to follow.
To cleave to any of these ideas is to invite the phantom of old gittery to feast. Still as you say, important and serious fun can be had hoodwinking those starry eyed cleavers in the crumbling edifice of capitalism that the best thing to do is distribute skills of community provisioning, growing plants, looking after animals, and the local low energy production of things of use and care – to help save money, build cohesion and resilience, and create wealth (which to them is real estate prices and to us is people getting it and engaging).
I agree with Christine – this is where the game is played, getting sweaty and failing magically. On the oneside we have the breakdown of social norms and bandit law, and on the other corporate authoritarianism – again in the ever changing light of these alledgedly immovable facts we can scry Root and Branch’s rule of knowledge, law and science as components of an enlightened collective state level response, and your own rule of a form of property law upheld and structured locally through a collective regional republicanism. It kind of maps. I asked Adam (Calo) about they’re thinking about Commons practice, and he sent a couple of links – to a Summer school programme in Holland and a colleague in the group. I wonder how your son and his Course leader, whose essays and research We’ve discussed here make of this group?
So here was my day and the structural components.
1) Woke up early but spent a couple of hours doing web research before getting out of bed.
2) Made a protein and amino acid shake with some local apple juice which I get in trade for seeds.
3) Drove off to Foix with my partner.
4) Stopped at the market for a couple of items and bought some more gold – 2 ten franc Napoleons this time.
5) Had a nice lunch at a restaurant we hadn’t tried before in Foix.
6) Stopped off at the mechanic’s garage because of a strange noise in our 26-year-old Renault.
7) Did our weekly grocery shopping for things like pot-au-creme, wine and cheese. Also bought a cheap bottle of single malt scotch since I like to have a little bit of firewater now and then.
8) Came back home and checked garden – too hot to work.
9) Watched Democracy Now! and caught up on the episode I missed yesterday.
10) Made fagioli with home-grown cannelinis.
11) Killed a lot of flies with a fly swatter while I was cooking.
So here are the structural components.
1) Do your research early, whether it is in your 20s or at 7:00 in the morning. I find that the research I did in my 20s informs the research I am now doing in my 70s. Think back on what you figured out when you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
2) Adapt your diet to what you need NOW. I wasn’t worried about protein intake for 70 years. Now I realize how important it is for keeping muscle mass and clear thinking. The focus on amino acids and food combining takes the argument to the next level, which is why Francis Moore Lappe’s book Diet for a Small Planet (1971) was so important.
3) We like Foix because it is well laid out and has a beautiful castle. And it is only 40 kilometers away. I like that.
4) One should support local markets. Buying gold has multiple positive aspects but probably the most important is turning euro capital into gold capital which I can redeem in the future for food and materials or pass on to my partner’s children. (I have no children of my own. This is by design.) Just like putting money capital into my land, I focus on the exchange of capital into a different form.
5) Did I mention we like Foix?
6) The cheapest car you will ever have is an old beater you keep fixing.
7) I cannot grow everything we need. Plus, trade is important and it is good to pump our US dollars from social security into the French economy through local businesses.
8) I am retired and I do what I want. I am also smart enough to know when to not work. When I was a migrant worker, I worked from 3:30 am to 12 noon. during cherry season. Then I took the rest of the day off. Most of the Mexicans I worked with quit at 10:00 am.
9) Democracy Now! is my main source of news. I trust Amy and company. You gotta stay in the loop at least a little bit.
10) It is important to cook your own food that you have grown yourself. Fagioli is a good throw-together meal for the early summer that uses simple ingredients: cannelinis, olive oil, sage, garlic, salt and tomatoes.
11) Manual pest control is the first part of IPM, or integrated pest management. Before you consider biological controls or chemical controls, you should do what you can to solve the pest problem with manual methods. This is an established paradigm in organic agriculture, but people forget the gradation aspect and usually just go with the chemical controls (certified by a regulatory agency of course!). The point here is to think about the structure of your pest controls. In fact you should think about everything you do in this structural fashion.
All of us go about our days in prescribed patterns that we have adopted and adapted to. It does a world of good to think about each and every thing we do all day long.
We farm sat for a clown farmer in the Ariege, not too far from you Walter. We were their during August looking after 12 cows, 50 sheep (soon to be halved by blue tongue, which was in the region just we arrived!) and 3 pigs, 40 chickens and mountain dog – and numerous cats and chickens. Absolutely loved it, especially the hot springs in a wood in the foot hills of the Pyrenees. Gorgeous place, we were lucky to be there for Fete du Village which was raucous, with a brass band playing club tracks and grannies and toddlers up on the benches and tables!
Dougald Hine has just been writing about his love of John Berger, and his trilogy about French peasants, do you know them?
Thanks for the info and I am glad you like the Ariege too. Back in 2014 we decided to flee Amerika and I did my Web research over the winter. We flew over to France and did our reconnaissance on the ground in August 2015. I had picked the Ariege as my first choice, but I didn’t tell my partner. We looked at the area around Albi and Cahors and the Aude as well, but she decided the Ariege was the best choice. It was green like Oregon, with plentiful water, even in August. We put our farm up for sale as soon as we got back but it took three years to get our price. We closed on a Monday in May 2018 and were on a plane on Wednesday.
The transhumance finished up last week. My partner has gone along for the last two years and she said the wildflowers this year were especially good. I grew up around cows so I don’t have much time for them. Besides, late May is corn and bean planting time, plus other things to do in the garden. Some of the farmers around here let their horses go up to the high country by themselves. We saw a group of over 50 coming back last fall on the highway and they had several riders with them. I suspect the horses would not come back to the lower altitudes on their own. (We are at 500 meters.)
Thanks for the tip on John Berger. I just ordered Pig Earth from Abe Books. On another note, there is a high village near us called Montaillou and a famous book called Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, which was published in 1975. It is a “multi-layered study of life in a small French village over the course of several years,” using the records of an Inquisitor during the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. My partner is reading it now in French. The Cathars are a big deal for us, especially as we can see Montsegur from our front yard. Montsegur was the last Cathar castle taken by siege in 1244 and 206 people were burned alive after the castle was taken. The ruins are of a later castle on the pog (Occitan for a knoblike hill) but it is still steeped in history, as is the whole region.
By the way, I don’t know what a clown farmer is. Perhaps it is someone who has to have a second income and goes to festivals and the like? All the best.
Berger’s ‘Why look at animals?’ is available here:
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Berger_LookAnimals.pdf
I enjoyed it some time ago but remember little of it now, so will have to reread. I believe it excoriates zoos.
Today’s online Guardian article entitled “A map, a myth and a pre-Incan lagoon: the man who brought water back to a drought-ridden town” is also a good read for anyone interested in restoring water into landscapes.
Guardian again! – a piece by documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis on his new ducumentary series called Shifty, on life in Britain at the end of the 20th century… Thatcher, immigrants, civil unrest, Walker’s cheese and onion crisps – it’s all there on youtube.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jun/13/thatcher-farage-and-toe-sucking-adam-curtis-on-how-britain-came-to-the-brink-of-civil-war
Thanks for the further comments. I’m going to be offline for a few days as of very shortly so no time to reply I’m afraid. I’ll try to listen to that podcast Matt, sounds interesting. I also agree with Christine that ‘isms’ are usually problematic and part of the problem. But maybe there’s a category of exceptions where the ‘ism’ isn’t based around one-size-fits-all solutionism – hence distributism, immanentism, agrarian populism? Thomism may be a borderline case.
All eyes on Gaza from now on
Ah Gaza the bastard child of the Levant , no one wants it no one needs it , just about everybody hates it ..
“The takeaway is simple: no one gets to claim the science is settled when it just got rewritten”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/06/17/the-carbon-isotope-fingerprint-just-got-smudged-and-i-owe-some-of-you-an-apology/
The rivers around here react pretty quickly to rain events. Raindrops contain dissolved CO2 (and other gases) from the atmosphere. How is the source of the CO2 in rivers determined ?
Better brains than mine are needed to figure that one out !
Just goes to show nothing is set in stone …..
I copied your question and pasted it into Google. The top three results were from Eos.org, Nature and Yale School of the Environment. Now, since Google search responses are tailored to each individual user, my results may vary from yours. In the responses I got, there seems to be a buffering difference between sea water and riverine water (not just fresh water) and most CO2 comes from the land around the river, etc. Presence of carbonate is tested in the lab by dropping a few drops of a chemical into a flask filled with water and presence of the carbonate is assessed by color; freshwater rivers and streams release about 5 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world’s lakes and reservoirs combined, and the results go on and on.
Of course, one doesn’t have to be up-to-date on the science and the methods used to realize that polluting rivers and streams will have an effect on our lives AND we shouldn’t do it.
Two things , Henry’s Law . Says gas partial pressures will equalize between a liquid and a gas.
But more CO2 can dissolve in Alkaline freshwater than acidic fresh water. So depending on terrestrial minerals a river shed resides in will change how much CO2 can dissolve in its freshwater .
https://www.google.com/search?q=does+more+CO2+dissolve+in+acidic+or+alkaline+freshwater
So in an alkaline river rain will lower pH and reduce its ability to absorb CO2. So maybe under some conditions a river could change from a sink for CO2 to a source depending on fluctuation of pH due to rain.
Remineralization of organic mater is another variable in how much dissolved CO2 any river shed may carry.
Thanks for sharing this blog Chris, I share much of your concerns about revolutionary visions for food and farming which are theoretical and not adequately rooted in practice. I am probably a Neo-Chayanovian in my practice as I am on a small family owned farm in the UK, growing vegetables for our farmer led CSA. I like a lot of what members of the Root and Branch Collective say, and follow the work of Kai Heron, Paddy Bresnihan and Adam Calo with great appreciation. I also took part in an in person event they held in Ireland last year which was a very positive dialogue between them as theorists and us as practitioner-activists of the agroecology and food sovereignty movement. What I like about what the Rand Branch Collective seem to be trying to do is in developing a vision for a radically different farming and food system. However I agree with what I think is your concern of their fixation on marxist class analysis, focus on commodities. I I right to assume there is an implicit notion of seizing of the means of production that would happen if their revolution happens? I do hope they transition further into the reseacher-activist-practitioner nexus in their work, as dreaming up a better food system, without taking part in the actual stepping stones towards it which we have today (Cooperatives, CSAs, Community Farms, Small Scale Agroecology) risks I fear producing a nasty hungry revolution with a unachieved utopian theory still floating up in the academy…. Keep up the good work Chris, look forward to our Radical Agrarian Reading group tackling your new boom when its published.
Thanks Barry. Yes, I think you encapsulate my concerns exactly. I’ve had positive interactions with Adam, and various very negative ones with Kai. I’ve got no problem with invoking Marxism as a thought-provoking and influential strand of historical thought, but I struggle with those who identify explicitly as Marxists today – I find they typically have a disdain for the basic business of local food production and a taste for vulgar and doctrinaire class analysis, hyper-rationalism and a complacency around historic Marxist regimes which would be troubling if they had any realistic chance of attaining power. Nasty hungry revolution and unachieved utopian theory is bang on. But I’m not saying everyone in the collective necessarily espouses that – I wouldn’t know.