Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on October 8, 2025 | 46 Comments
I’ve shared platforms with Westminster parliamentarians twice in the last few months, and more than that in the last few years, who’ve been dismissive in one way or another of my case for agrarian localism. Given that that case is itself quite dismissive of the ability of parliaments and centralized politics to deal with the problems of our times, perhaps it’s not surprising that I tend to find myself at loggerheads with such folks.
Generally on these occasions, I’ve been on the receiving end of a mini-lecture along the lines that (1) the present world is one of mass urbanism, globalism and intensive trade; (2) that these are good things; and, (3) that this isn’t going to change in the future. To which my replies would have been (I’ve rarely had the chance to make them on the occasions in question – professional politicians are good at having the last word): (1) Yes, that’s true; (2) Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that; and, (3) Yes it is. The ignorance and complacency of the political class on this last point, the precariousness of the existing global political economy, is one reason why I find it hard to see the kind of renewal that’s needed emerging from centralized mainstream politics. It’s also a reason why the global political economy is so precarious.
Anyway, here I’m going to home in on the most interesting of my recent sword-crossings with a politician, namely with Clive Lewis MP at a panel we were both on along with Simon Fairlie at the Green Gathering in July.
Let me first say that I think Clive is one of the most incisive, thoughtful and honourable members of parliament in Britain right now. The bar isn’t high, I know, but I still want to record my appreciation in case what I’m about to say seems aimed over-critically at him. That isn’t the purpose of this post.
And in truth, our sword-crossing wasn’t much of a sword-crossing. An audience member asked about building agrarian communities, to which I replied with an anodyne remark about the need in this present historical moment for people to be experimenting with exactly this, but in doing so to draw from the lessons of existing agrarian societies past and present. Whereupon, if my memory serves me correctly (which it may not), Clive interjected something along the lines that we had to be careful with that kind of thinking in view of the fact that it had little relevance to the lives of the urban poor such as some of his constituents, and that there was a danger of the far-right appropriating such narratives.
That was basically it. And, as I said, I may have misremembered his comment or misunderstood his meaning. Still, I hear these points – the urban poor, and far-right appropriation – raised against the case for agrarian localism with monotonous (and increasing) frequency. In my opinion, they badly miss the political challenge of present times. Since I didn’t get the chance to respond at the session itself, I’m going to use the leisure of my own website to explain why.
So, to start, while it’s true that the case for a future involving widespread, small-scale, local agrarianism probably doesn’t seem relevant to the lives of urban poor people today (or to the lives of most other people, for that matter), at least in the rich countries, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen or that people shouldn’t prepare for it as best they can.
Often, these ‘my constituents…’ or ‘yes, but the urban poor…’ remarks seem to be based on a status claim about having knowledge of real people’s hard lives. If nothing else, at least this ‘hard lives of the urban poor’ narrative punctures that other hackneyed objection to agrarian localism, that city streets are paved with gold in contrast to the impoverished and miserable countryside.
I suspect Clive’s remarks also draw strength from the residual notion on the political left, originating in one of the more fanciful aspects of Marxism, that poor, landless, urban-industrial workers are the key agents of history who will bring about political redemption.
Another widespread take sees such people not as the solution but as a problem – and particularly as a problem for approaches to present problems based on ruralism or agrarianism. A small farm future is all very nice, the argument goes, but how will it work when so many millions or billions are stuck living in urban poverty? It’s a fair question, provided it’s also asked of modernism or urbanism-as-usual politics: how will the millions or billions of urban poor be kept housed, fed and quiescent as the ecocidal and genocidal logic of commodification and economic growth grinds on? The answers I’ve heard usually invoke technofixes just as fanciful as Marxist theories about industrial labourers as political redeemers.
My approach to the urban poor is that while they’re not the agents of history, they – along with every other kind of person – are agents of history all the same, rather than being a problem for somebody else to solve. As the welfare capitalist state offers people increasingly little in the way of welfare, they will start seeking ways to generate more welfare for themselves. Possibly, in view of their urban location and their poverty the urban poor will be at a disadvantage in this. Then again, the typical comfortably off middle-class professional is also generally urban, clueless about how to create a material livelihood, and wealthy only in respect of salaries or property ownerships that will be melting away. So the disadvantage may be less than some think.
I play a little bit with these possibilities in my new book, not least with my foray into climate fiction at the end. For now, I’ll just say that when politicians or others invoke the urban poor as if their existence is a counterargument to the case for agrarian localism, I think they misunderstand the nature of the world we’re entering. The concepts of ‘the urban poor’ or ‘my constituents’ invoked by leftwing politicians become ironically conservative thought-stoppers harking back to a managerial capitalist politics rapidly fading into history. The key idea of this managerial capitalism is that we should stop electing idiots or malefactors to high political office and we should share wealth more equitably, and then the meta-crisis will be averted. I agree with everything in that previous sentence up to the words ‘and then’.
Yet despite its sporadic successes, the popularity of leftwing politics among its favoured groups of poor and working-class urban workers often considerably trails the popularity of nationalism and right-wing populism. It’s easy and perhaps fair to some extent to invoke the Machiavellian political arts, propaganda, false consciousness and dark money to explain this, but I don’t think these get far in accounting for why right-wing nationalism so regularly bests left-wing rationalism – another topic that I consider in my new book (Chapter 11). It’s not just the medium, it’s the message itself.
I thought Clive Lewis got close to what this message is in his comments about his friend who attended the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march that I quoted in my previous post, along the lines of wanting to belong and to ‘feel proud of my country again’.
Referring to the poet Holly McNish, a commenter under that previous post of mine on Substack wrote this interesting response:
Her refrain was – in your search for ‘belonging’ did you participate in anything? Did you run a youth club, join a Men’s Shed group, volunteer for anything in your community? Her point, and it seemed reasonable was that ‘belonging’ isn’t a passive affair, and if your only action to seek ‘belonging’ was to go on a Tommy Robinson march then that is highly questionable.
I think this is true and wise, but it potentially also misses something. People don’t just want the immediate and tangible, the inevitably messy reality of local human life with the screaming adolescents at the youth club or having to deal with that numbskull you met at the last community meeting. They also want something grander and purer. Wherein danger lies – you’d better be sure that this grander, purer thing you want to worship isn’t going to eat you or somebody else that it targets alive. I discuss this in my new book too in relation to religion. Nationalism has been called the religion of modernity. It’s a false god and it eats those who worship it and those it targets alive, but there’s no virtue in just dismissing it and arguing that better pay and conditions or the end of capitalism are worthier goals. Instead, it’s necessary to get into the logic of the grander, purer things that people desire, and seek worthier goals within that logic itself.
This is why I’ve become a bit tired of the concept of ‘far-right appropriation’, which I’ve heard increasingly often this year, especially in the context of farming. I’ve used it myself in the past, while my writing has also even been accused of courting it. Unquestionably, there is a growing threat of far-right politics, which I would define as a politics of racist nationalism and violent authoritarianism. However, there seemed to be some implication in Clive Lewis’s comments on our panel that the very idea of building material wellbeing on a local and sustainable ecological base involved courting this far-right wolf. I strongly disagree.
Perhaps the waters have been muddied by far-right mobilisation not so much around the kind of agrarian localism I advocate, with its mashup of broadly egalitarian left-wing libertarianism and small c/smalltown conservatism, but the way that genuinely far-right ideologues are courting farmers and the farming sector in the context of the latter’s desperate search for political allies that they’re not finding in mainstream politics. I abhor the violence, racism and authoritarianism of this kind of far-right activism – the real kind, that is, not the mirage danger of ‘far-right appropriation’ supposedly arising when people like me talk about the need to build local agrarianism on a sustainable ecological base. But I do wish mainstream politicians across the spectrum would take a look at their farming policies, at the misery in the sector, and at their fantasy desire for producing food and fibre that’s simultaneously healthy, cheap and environmentally friendly yet without fundamental political and economic change. It’s pretty easy for far-right ideas to get a hearing among farmers when every other shade of politics fiddles while their sector burns. Indeed, I’d generalise that point. It’s pretty easy for far-right ideas to get a hearing among wider publics when every other shade of politics fiddles while the wider meta-crisis burns.
People in mainstream politics often suggest that the far-right is cynical and manipulative in using the present crisis to push its messages of hate. Maybe so, although I see a lot of cynicism and manipulation in mainstream politics. The real problem with the far-right is more the hate than the tactics. And the real problem with mainstream politics is the business-as-usual hopium, which is quite unequal to the task of staving off the crisis that the far-right exploits. For the time being, I expect people like me will have to endure many more mini-lectures about the virtues of urbanism, globalism and international trade. But while we’re all yelling at each other about how our favoured politics are the best, the more important political story might lie with constituents, including the urban poor, who are quietly innovating their own welfare, perhaps by leaving town.
This, by the way, is my last post before official UK publication of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age next Tuesday (14 October). Tickets for the book launch in Frome are now sold out, which is a good start (though it probably helped that they were free, thanks to Frome Town Council and Chelsea Green). I’ll publish a post here next week about the book. Meanwhile, you can hear me talking about it on podcasts with David Bollier and Lucy Ridge. Do keep an eye on my publications and events pages for notices about this sort of thing.
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Um, yes I left booking my ticket too late………………
I’m on a bit of a roll this year. Got tickets to the women’s rugby world cup final and to the Frome book launch.
I’m not usually so quick out of the starting blocks.
Having said that, I’m not sure where the confirmation email has gone!!!!!?????
The term “ground game” comes from American football. It means that a team can make spectacular gains by forward passes, but if you cannot consistently move the ball forward on the ground (i.e. rushing) you will not be successful over the long term.
The reason “right-wing nationalism so regularly bests left-wing rationalism” is that the right-wingers have a ground game. They go to council meetings and raise hell, they build up constituencies that address basic issues, they build local organizations that work together, they commit to issues rather than identities, they align with the police and other paramilitary groups AND – most importantly – they do they hard physical labor that is needed.
Fly-by-night cancel culture cannot compete. As an example, which I guarantee will anger the progressives; consider the massive mistake of focusing on identity instead of issues. In my opinion, this is where “the Left” went wrong in the 1970s. And of course, the liberals and progressives have been arguing at a surface level about this since the 1970s, instead of actually considering it and doing the grunt work of making change.
Back when I was a migrant worker in the 1970s, I used to frequent the Roundup Cafe in Tonasket, Washington. In the men’s bathroom was a quite cogent snippet of graffiti on the wall: Root hog or die. This is still good advice and it dates back to the days of Daniel Boone.
Most “lefties” think talking to people is enough. It isn’t. You have to do the grunt work. The “righties” know this. They have a ground game.
I spent most of the 1970s hitchhiking all over the western US, promoting revolutionary change one-on-one. It didn’t do much. I got more change done by picking fruit.
That’s an interesting, but I think inaccurate, characterisation of left Vs right — at least from my position as someone who is broadly left and also does a lot of work (including physical labour) at local community level.
I do think some of the allegedly left-wing politicians are rather disconnected from the real world, as you describe, but honestly the right in the UK doesn’t actually look better in that respect, they just have more ownership of mainstream and tabloid media.
Back in 1973, I picked up a book published that year titled How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry E. Browne. This became the blueprint and founding vision of the Libertarian Movement in the US. While reading it, I was struck by how many ideas he had stolen from us “Lefties.” From his Wikipedia entry:
” . . . his influential work How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973), which provided a blueprint for achieving individual liberation by rejecting societal constraints and embracing self-reliance. Through his presidential campaigns, writings, and public appearances, Browne articulated a vision of a society free from coercion, inspiring generations of libertarians to challenge political and cultural orthodoxy.
The dialogue between us “snaggle-toothed old hippies” and the Libertarian wannabees is ongoing and still provides fertile ground for discussion. (And occasionaly rapprochement! Some of my best friends are Libertarians.) However, what the righwingers did with their ground game sprang from their own strategy and tactics. The Tea Party was the result of an ongoing ground game that stretches back to the John Birch Society, of which Fred C. Koch (Charles and David’s father) was a founding member in 1958. The Tea Party seized the narrative in 2009 and Barack Obama tried to ignore them. They didn’t go away, however, and took over the Republican Party in the US. Donald Trump was able to finesse this shift and leverage the Tea Party ground game into a path to the Presidency. In other words, without the Tea Party and the John Birch Society before it, we would not be burdened by Trump. And of course the ground game was how they did it. To wit: stolen, co-opted ideologies but home-grown strategy and tactics.
Rick Perlstein did a very good job of explaining how Nixon played his part in this after the 1964 debacle of Barry Goldwater in his book Nixonland (2008). Jeff Nesbit did a very good job explaining the ground game of the Tea Party in Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP (2016). Laura Flanders warned everyone in her book At the Tea Party: The Wing Nuts, Whack Jobs and Whitey-Whiteness of the New Republican Right… And Why We Should Take It Seriously (2010). Finally, here are a couple of articles that make the point concisely. 1) How the Tea Party Paved the Way for Donald Trump by the Niskanen Center (a liberal think tank). 2) Trump 2.0 is the final victory of the John Birch Society, published by The Hill in June 2025.
Here are a couple of URLs if anyone wants to dive deeper.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5326284-birchers-conspiracies-trump-legacy/
https://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/
I continue to focus on the US in my social science research because it is STILL the biggest problem in the world. Especially as Macron tries so hard to mimic US failures (tax cuts for the rich, heavy-handed police tactics, increase in budget-to-GDP ratios, increase in arms production and sales, military Keynesianism, raising retirement ages, etc.)
I might add that I am more than a little distressed to find out France is turning into USA-Lite. Bummer.
Our community work here in Brixton, South London, has brought us into contact with many other projects – the resounding call is for land to grow food, food sovereignty specifically, and affordable decent housing. Clive’s always had a reputation for being a slick player with a toe (nail?) hold on radical/relevant ideas but he clearly isn’t listening to his constituents.
The Right wing shizzle is just a cheap smear; banal and stab your own eyes out boring.
On another note, I’ve been hearing the chime of lyrics in the last 2 posts:
‘Why can’t we Roam, this open country,
And why can’t we be, who we wanna be?
We want to be free!’.
And of course
‘No I just can’t hang around,
I’m a leaving town!’
“the more important political story might lie with constituents, including the urban poor, who are quietly innovating their own welfare, perhaps by leaving town”.
That’s a pretty dubious “perhaps”… because what I’ve said before.
Both left and right will be found wanting in a few decades and less if you are tied to policies born when oil was $1.25 A barrel . the first two answers were right fifty years ago the third is ignored by both sides as there are not enough pitchforks in the small farm future to bother about .
Many things loom on the horizon for all politicians of every colour , one of the possible earliest is Germany has two months of reserves of Nat gas ((25%) of normal for this time of year , they have been over here begging for more supply at any price which Texas can’t supply .
My friends over there are telling me that local rural councils are looking to stop fixing one lane country roads and returning them to gravel , A farmer friend now drives a extra six miles to get around a damaged bridge that the roads authority have decided not to fix ( use a alternative route ) another says his electric bill is now for the first time higher than his labour bill . Another has been advised to get out of milk (800cowdairy )as they see no profits in ” the foreseeable future ”
Being small you only see snippets of the possible problems , like reading the Guardian and ignoring the financial times , its out there but its only being corilated by those in and behind power and they decide which can gets kicked down the road first !
Here’s a query for anyone who has bought seeds from Ireland. I am sick and tired of the poor quality garden seed in France and I cannot produce my own seed for all the things I want to grow. I also want to develop some more seed lines. I am thinking Brown Envelope seeds out of Cork. The UK is not an option because of the mail problems and the French douane incompetency. I had a seed order from the US sit in a hot warehouse for several months a few years ago. I finally got them after I sent a nasty letter with twenty bullet points on the incompetence of the French bureaucracy. Since Ireland is still in the EU, I am hoping for fewer shipping problems. Germany is another option. Any suggestions?
Vreeken’s Zaden in the Netherlands is a very good supplier
Thanks. I will check it out.
Hi, you might try Seed Savers in Co. Clare or The Organic Center in Rossinver, Co. Leitrim (both recommended to me by an actual Irishman).
Great! Thanks for the heads up. I used to belong to the Seed Savers Exchange when I lived in the USA.
Pre-Brexit I ordered from Brown Envelope Seeds, and they were good.
I’ve heard good things about Kokopelli seeds in France but haven’t ordered from them myself.
https://franchisementi.it/ are pretty good and you get a lot of seed per packet. I’ve had mixed results, some of their varieties just don’t do well for me, but the ones that do are excellent.
Thanks for the Italian seed company tip and the feedback on Brown Envelope. Kokopelli is near us in Le Mas-d’Azil. I have had mixed results with their seed. We went to their annual open house two years ago. They are an aggregator of different seed producers. They do have testing facilities on site. Le Mas-d’Azil is one of the places we considered settling in and they have an important archaeological site there. The grotto is the type site for the Azilian tool industry, 12,500-10,000 BP. Fascinating place.
A brief response to comments:
– Yes, I agree with Walter’s remarks about the ground game. In the Global North right now, the right-wing is playing a better ground game. Historically, the left – especially Marxist movements – have also done that pretty well in some places, and indeed some on the right claim inspiration from the left in that respect. At the same time, there do seem to be individual politicians who hold it together – Trump in the USA, Farage in the UK, the Le Pen dynasty in France. What does MAGA look like without Trump? Anyway, despite all that I still hold to my argument in the post: the right also does a better job at finding grand, pure, mystical narratives like the nation. But unfortunately ones that don’t serve anyone well ultimately. Sometimes the left has done that too with ideas like the dictatorship of the proletariat, which are equally disastrous.
– To Joe’s comment about my dubious ‘perhaps’ … well yes, perhaps. Certainly, I agree that there’s unlikely to be a smooth exit from cities across all social classes followed by a joint turn to agrarianism. At the same time, I’m not convinced that current dividing lines of class and wealth will map neatly onto future ones, and in the same way everywhere. Where I think I agree with Joe is that the chances of misery, violence and chaos are high. My key point is that this is still true, in fact even more true, if one invokes the case of the urban poor as an argument against experiments with agrarian localism. Here, I think Joel is bang on: many among the urban poor are already thinking about and acting on agrarian localism.
– To Diogenes point that both left and right will be found wanting in a few decades, yes I agree. In Britain, I think the mainstream versions of those respective politics are both harking back to a comfort zone situated somewhere between the 1940s and the 1980s which have little relevance to the future.
– Sorry, can’t really help with Walter’s seed query. I’d be interested in any answers. Franchi Seeds?
“many among the urban poor are already thinking about and acting on agrarian localism”
I have seen no sign of the “acting” where I live. The only urbanites moving in around my rural area are wealthy, mostly retirees, and they are just replacing those who leave for family or health reasons.
When elderly landowners die, the land is usually sold off by the heirs, but sometimes they leave the property vacant for years. There are three vacant homes like that within a mile of where I live. No one has lived in them for over a decade now.
If there is a nascent trend towards agarian localism in your part of the UK, Chris, how is it happening? Are they getting their own land or just leaving a job in the city for a similar job in a rural area?
While there is still a rule of law supporting land ownership rights (and markets), I don’t see how the land access problem for urban poor will be solved, but maybe it’s different where you live.
Here’s a study (from 2023) about “people from primarily non-agrarian backgrounds that voluntarily move from urban areas to rural areas to cultivate the land and adopt an agrarian and rural lifestyle often based on principles of self-sufficiency.”
These people weren’t necessarily part of the “urban poor” when they left, but even if they were wealthy, they were still dissatisfied enough with city life to leave it for rural agrarian lives. I imagine there is even more dissatisfaction and desire to leave (but obviously less opportunities to access rural land, currently) among the urban poor.
The study says that increases in such back-to-the-land migration have been reported in Sweden, Italy, Greece, Spain, Canada, Finland, and the UK!
“Back-to-the-land migration is back! In Sweden… the number of small holdings (0—2 hectares) has increased in recent years according to official statistics… Furthermore, since 2013, there are more people moving into sparsely populated municipalities than moving out according to Swedish official statistics… Similar tendencies of an upswing in back-to-land migration have also been reported in Italy (Wilbur, 2013, 2014a, 2014b), Greece (Benessaiah, 2018), Spain (Calvário, 2017), Canada (Ngo & Brklacich, 2014), UK (Halfacree, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008; Halfacree & Rivera, 2012) and Finland (Backa, 2018).”
“…it is also possible to distinguish between at least two broad groups of back-to-the-landers, namely, ‘rational back-to-the-landers’ and ‘romantic back-to-the-landers’. Rational back-to-the-landers stress the tangible contributions efficiently managed smallholders can make to the environment and to people’s livelihoods, whilst romantic back-to-the-landers partly following the path trod by Thoreau, emphasising the moral, emotional and spiritual man and nature relationships…”
“This study shows that the unfolding character of back-to-the-land migration builds on ideals and practices that:
i. Rebel [against] payroll work and perceived meaningless city life.
ii. Reconnect people to each other and to the land through benign and resilient ways to how food is being produced, processed and marketed.
iii. Reinvent old smallholding practices that are adapted to both present and perceived future needs.
iv. Resist consumerism and the corporate capitalistic food model…”
“In this light, the rural is no longer just an arena for production and resource extraction (productivism), nor just an arena for rural consumption (e.g., rural tourism) and amenity production (post-productivism). Instead, it is increasingly becoming an arena for people with a desire to bring lasting changes in how one relates with the environment (to land), to food and people in benign ways.”
Sandström, E. (2023) Resurgent back-to-the-land and the cultivation of a renewed countryside. Sociologia Ruralis, 63, 544–563.
https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12406
I’m all for back-to-the-land movements; I’m just not seeing much here.
I tried to dig deeper in the the magnitude of the movement in Sweden (the increase in small parcels, for example), but it was tough wading through the data at the Swedish Board of Agriculture.
I suspect that the interest in, and movement to, small farms waxes and wanes, but has surely been a relatively small movement over the last few decades. It would be wonderful if it becomes a mass movement but I’m not holding my breath.
Steve – Quite a cogent post. Well done. I like the implied synthesis of the rational and romantic as a way forward. Which Chris has probably been saying for years.
Synthesis as mechanism for paradigm shift.
I’m arguably not poor (though certainly not wealthy enough to be able to move out of London), but I do work with the urban poor and some of them are very interested indeed in growing their own food, somehow. What they lack is the space to do so and the political representation that would give them that space. And still — I can think of quite a few guerilla gardens I have happened across in otherwise poorly-tended public spaces, much more intensive and organised than my own seed-scattering efforts.
See if you can find seeds men that use UPS or ,fed ex , that bypasses the mail service ( usps postal is a joke here ) I have had seed come 2 day delivery from Queensland AU on Fed Ex .
Thanks. Good idea.
“their fantasy desire for producing food and fibre that’s simultaneously healthy, cheap and environmentally friendly yet without fundamental political and economic change”
Yes, I think this is the real crux of it for me. Everyone in mainstream politics has such a bedrock conviction that the future will always be like the present, only more. There’s just such a stunning disconnect between the physical realities we’re facing that both you and others have ably sketched out for decades now and their insistence on business as usual no matter what. I know it’s best to focus on our own lives, but I have to admit it’s frustrating sometimes since there’s so much states could do with their resources if they just tried, even now.
As for “far-right appropriation”, meh. Personally I think it’s just another way they try to smear everyone who breaks with the neoliberal consensus as unreasonable, dangerous and even evil. Well, partly that, and partly I guess that’s just where you end up if you spend a few decades defining yourself wholly in terms of academia, managerialism and ever more esoteric language games while denigrating people who do physical labor. So these scare tactics seem like an attempt to prop up the status quo to me, or in the terms of this post, maybe an attempt to persuade those constituents to stay in town a while longer?
Still, while I think most (but not all, I know) of those right-wing agrarians are harmless enough in spite of the scare-mongering, I also agree that their brand of conservatism tends to be unnecessarily rigid and constricting, so I definitely wouldn’t want them to get a monopoly on localism and agrarianism. I’m especially thinking here of some comments you made a while back (or in the SFF book?) about how future populations will probably be so jumbled it’s much more fruitful to look around you at the people actually there and try to build something out of that mixture, rather than get hung up on old ethnicities. Paraphrasing, I know, but I always found that a very hopeful and constructive note. Kind of an elegant synthesis of modern liberal and “folkish” thinking: sure, maybe most of us need to belong to a tribe, but in a low-energy future where our current fixations don’t matter, why can’t we build one from the ground up, and then get on with the practical work?
“In Britain, I think the mainstream versions of those respective politics are both harking back to a comfort zone situated somewhere between the 1940s and the 1980s which have little relevance to the future.”
That’s about where we are here in Norway too, just move the time frame forwards a bit to, say, between 1995 and 2010. Reality seems to be slowly seeping in, but there’ll be a very rude awakening when the mainstream realizes the tower can’t keep growing into the sky with more for everyone forever. On the agrarian front, we’re still losing a lot of farms every year, even after decades of bleeding, and we’re sadly moving in the direction of “go big or go home” here too. We do actually have an agrarian party in mainstream politics, which I might have mentioned before, but in practice they have an odd mix of sensible policies and firm support for big industrial ag.
“the right also does a better job at finding grand, pure, mystical narratives like the nation”
Maybe, but I’d say the left had a very effective one of their own for many years, in the form of Progress. Even now it still has a lot of believers. Latterly they’ve also had at least some success with “Scientism”, as I think you defined it an old post…or “The Science”, if you will, ie. raising academia to be the sole arbiter of divine truth. Maybe it’d be more fair to say the right is better at finding mystical narratives with popular appeal. Not least because they’re less squeamish about religion, which is probably the oldest and purest mystical narrative around.
Also very much looking forward to the book! Wish you much success, and will check out the podcasts too.
People have forgotten in this tecnoutopians world the foundations rest on Victorian engineering ,London’s sewers date to Victoria so does the water system , and its wearing out and will need billions to repair and replace , most infrastructure is in the same hole the money is not there and never will be , cities will become uninhabitable .
Yeah, I think this is an important point that Tom Murphy shows well on his old Do the Math blog too: even if we could find a new, super-concentrated energy source tomorrow, we’d still be stuck with a petroleum-based infrastructure that took most of a century and collossal amounts of energy to build out. And in general, yes, we’re absolutely still benefitting from a lot of 20th century infrastructure we probably won’t be able to replace while largely taking it for granted. Another very uncomfortable sword of Damocles the mainstream isn’t very interested in thinking too hard about, I think.
That said, while you obviously have a point, the historical record seems to indicate that maybe a million people is the upper bound for a non-industrial city. So while most of the present ones will be in big trouble when/if infrastructure like sewers fails, I also think there’s a case to be made that cities as such will be with us for a while, even potentially fairly big ones. Maybe even on the sites of the present ones. (IIRC this has been a bit of a discussion in the comments here before too)
Honestly I can see all western cities being the last places money is spent , that is where the votes are Grants are already being refused to smaller towns they will be cut of from spending and left to rot first , towns of a few thousand citizens will be the first and have to fund their own roads ,schools , healthcare , possibly water / sewage and police service , elderly care will fall back on families , The major metropolitan areas will be last to fall .
People will be moving into cities trying to find services no longer available in the country
Well the ” global housing crisis ” hit Stoke on Trent around 1980 ,that’s when the money ran out , “Slum clearance ” stoped then and there is still tens of thousands of them .No more demolition of back to back Victorian terraced housing , the number of houses without a bathroom is the same as it was in 1980 and has been quietly ignored ever since .
Most if not all northern cities have this problem .
Council house waiting lists is now 30 years , importing more only adds to the problem .
“that maybe a million people is the upper bound for a non-industrial city”
Yes, and your mention of infrastructure failure highlights the fact that a non-industrial city has entirely different infrastructure than a modern industrial city. I suspect that modern cities will never be converted to non-industrial cities but will just be ‘mined’ for materials used elsewhere.
Small farmers and foragers don’t really need cities. Village specialists (like blacksmiths and wheelwrights) are about as much as subsistence farmers would ever need. Left to themselves, subsistence farmers would never do the work of helping build a city.
But cities do have their advantages. They “they facilitate the easier provision of public goods, notably centralized food storage, canals and irrigation- or water-storage systems, safety and protection, the organization of long-distance trade, and (building) activities of religious nature”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046221000375?via%3Dihub
I think the “safety and protection” part is paramount. Farmers are never just left to themselves. I’ve seen a lot of larger towns and cities that have been built around castles or inside defensive walls. Perhaps the efficiencies of building a central castle are greater than building individual Svan Tower type defenses for households, thus becoming the seed of a new city.
In any case, I think we will probably have to start over from scratch when it comes to building new cities. There is likely to be a long period of chaos and turmoil before there is enough food surplus to allow city construction again. And people who now live in modern cities are never going to be able to just move into a newly build non-industrial city.
@Joe Clarkson.
“I think we will probably have to start over from scratch when it comes to building new cities”
The problem with doing that here in the UK is that all the best places to build new cities already have cities on them!
Cities are where they are for a reason. Historically there would have been an expanse of fertile farm land and a large river or coastal frontage to facilitate trade. Occasionally cities have been sited close to mineral resources, but they last only along as the resources do. Or very occasionally a city has grown up around a religious shrine, but are limited by logistics if some distance from bulk food sources or bulk transport. The cities we have are going to be around for the rest of this century, if for no other reason than that they are at the centres of our transport networks. Historically cities charged tolls for goods passing through them, so they may eak out a living. Long term they are going to massively contract due to population loss. Rome lost 90+ of it’s population from its height in the early Roman empire to its lowest point in the dark ages, but remained a city. But many cities are going to be lost entirely to sea level rise, and new ones will be founded up river or on the new coasts once the seas quiet there steady climb. As for rural regeneration now, look to small town Britain in the exindustrial areas, housing is relatively cheap, and you are close enough to land to find some to work. If you are young, an option would be to wait where you are for the rural to come to you. I have seen pictures of American rust belt cities with whole blocks of housing replaced with green space, and factory sites tumbling down to woodland. What ever we do hard times are acoming, so shifting now to access land is the best advice I can give. Ps I took my own advice thirty years ago, and have never regretted it.
There are plenty of examples of relatively poor urban people thinking and acting about local food production (albeit often more thinking than acting, in view of the constraints, but at least it’s a start). I’d agree with Joe that it doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things – too little, too late. But one of the reasons it doesn’t amount to much is precisely because of this thoughtstopping ‘my poor urban constituents don’t have the luxury of thinking about resilient local food systems’ narrative that gets so much airtime. So I think there’s a danger of talking at cross purposes here. There are many things that need to happen to augment back-to-the-land movements. One of them is to challenge narratives that people shouldn’t be augmenting them because of the urban poor.
One thing that’s becoming increasingly clear to me from various sources is that many urban poor people worldwide would absolutely love to have some rural land of their own to grow food – the notion that they don’t is a status quo affirming affectation of mainstream left-wing and right-wing politics that requires dispatch. This paper is one interesting example among several: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002674
Granted, it helps if the urban residents in question are surrounded by abundant unoccupied land, and their occupation of it isn’t necessarily great ecologically. But the wider point remains.
Relating to Kim’s points – glad you find those remarks about building non-folkish ‘who’s here’ communities (yes, in ASFF) of interest. Something to return to perhaps. Good point about progress and science as mystical narratives of the left. But I suppose they’re harder to convince people with in times of economic decay and growing inequality. Whereas the idea of a threatened nation suffering hard times at the hands of outside forces comes into its own at such times. The ‘stop the boats’ narrative in Britain is one example. I think I’m also seeing an uptick right now in discussions of the Norman conquest as Britain’s or England’s own experience of colonial subjection, which is interesting. I touch on this in the new book, but wish I’d homed in on it a little more.
Politicians could really help their poor urban constituents by increasing opportunities for them to move out of the cities. The results of this study showed that urban residents in the UK had lower scores for well-being and satisfaction in their lives, when compared to rural residents, at least for people who are 40+. The findings “raise concern for the psychological well-being of urban residents”.
“Using a robust and objective measure of urbanicity on a sample of 156,000 U.K. residents aged 40 and up, we find that urban living is associated with lower scores across seven dimensions of well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction. In addition, these scores exhibit greater variability within urban areas, revealing increased inequality. Last, we identify optimal distances in the hinterlands of cities with the highest satisfaction and the least variation. Our findings raise concern for the psychological well-being of urban residents…”
“Practically, our study raises a concern for the psychological health of the 56 million Britons residing in urban areas… Moreover, by aligning with existing literature on well-being, global inequality, and global housing crisis, we hypothesize that the urban psychological struggles we identified are likely applicable beyond the United Kingdom.”
The urban desirability paradox: U.K. urban-rural differences in well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction
Finnemann et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eadn1636 (2024) 19 July 2024
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.adn1636
Regarding housing and the 1980s in the north of England: tell me again when right-to-buy came in, and councils were forbidden from using the money from the sale of council housing to build more council housing?! I think that probably had a much bigger impact on council house waiting times than immigration ever could.
The idea that cities will drown in the near future ignores the laws of thermodynamics , Ask a mathematician how fast it would take for all the ice on the planet take to thaw ,they say the earth would have to warm thirty degrees centigrade to melt the ice in fifty years .
As it has taken fifty years to warm the planet 1/2 a degree C I don’t think we have anything to worry about .
Melting all the ice would mean a sea level rise of more than 195 feet; that probably won’t happen in my lifetime or yours.
But even a rise of a few feet would cause serious problems for many cities, and that won’t take as long or require such high temperatures.
Two things- first, Steve L is awesome. Thanks for doing the searching and sharing pertinent snippets from actual source documents to enrich and ground the discussion here. Opinions are fine. Facts and the opinions derived from them are more persuasive to me.
Second- It’s going to come down to land access. In SW Wisconsin, many older back to the landers are in a good situation because they grabbed a few acres years ago. Prices have skyrocketed since then, especially recently, and what farmland that does come available is snapped up by those few large farms that are still in growth mode. Banks seem to favor loaning to someone with lots of collateral……
Only anecdotal, but there is a growing trickle of young folk moving to the area with no more than a desire to just get on the land, watching for any opportunity to buy some while doing gig work or farm labor till the chance presents itself.
For real change, there would need to be a full disruption in BAU. I share Mr. Clarkson’s pessimism for relocalizing at scale, but there will be be scrappy minority that will find a way, and that will have to be enough.
OK- third- I view the left right dichotomy in a very simplified way. It’s either- we are all in this together, things need to change, and we should do things that make all our lives better, or; I and my tribe want things to stay the same, and are going to keep ours, usually at the expense of others. I’ll let you decide which description fits which right / left label.
I know it’s more complicated than that, “What’s the Matter with Kansas” adds the cultural and some other angles at play, but part of it is just short sighted self interest.
Steve, I fully agree that Steve L is awesome. But I’m very suspicious of the idea of opinions derived from facts. I’ve spent way too long in the trenches fighting ecomodernists making these kinds of claims. As well as facts and opinions there are arguments and worldviews, and it’s only within these that facts make much sense. This is how I frame this point in ‘Finding Lights…’ – “while I cite a lot of evidence, I try to avoid the trap of claiming that the evidence lends unambiguous support to my favoured positions. The interpretation of evidence is usually contextual, making sense within the framing of the particular story it illuminates. But many of our current stories ill serve us. Instead, I look in these pages for the light of some different stories to guide us.” (p.14)
Largely agree on the second point, although land prices are a function of fossil energy and monopoly capital. I track in the new book some of the ways they, and land prices, might change.
On left and right, I guess I’d want to press on your point that it *is* more complicated than that. My background is on the left, but I see a lot of short-sighted self-interest on the left too, broadly of the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ variety, a worldview that leads to disastrous policy prescriptions of the keep things the same and keep our privileges variety.
“Keep things the same and keep our privileges” absolutely cannot be fully automated luxury communism, or any other kind of communism for that matter, because the status quo is abhorrent inequality, and that kind of privilege and communism cannot coexist. I agree that many narratives on the left ignore this, and instead posit that we can have some kind of Business As Usual Only Without So Much Crapitalism, I just don’t think of these as serious attempts at FALC.
More and more I feel like luxury gained at the expense of violent exploitation is no luxury at all. It’s also kindof pointless. Moving towards a practice of true solidarity with one another and all Creation is a harder project, and a longer one, and I’m aware that there is huge privilege in picking and choosing where and how I do this, but like everyone else I have to start where I am.
Maybe I need to write a longer piece laying out my thinking around this, but I’d argue that FALC and its ilk indeed are versions of ‘keep things the same’ (industrialism, modernity, ‘progress’, materialist mass consumption) and keep our privileges, albeit with the conceit that technological developments will allow those privileges to be universalised.
But I agree with you that “More and more I feel like luxury gained at the expense of violent exploitation is no luxury at all. It’s also kindof pointless.” I argue in ‘Finding Lights…’ that the violent exploitation runs pretty deep, and most of us are complicit with it, but again I agree we have to start where we can.
I think we’re living in an increasingly Orwellian world with political labels. There are strands of conservative thought that aren’t really ‘right wing’ and strands of supposedly socialist thought that I think are. So … if anyone’s interested I might try to write more about this at some point.
I think these are some issues with FALC:
1. The communism part wouldn’t get us out of the climate predicament or the energy shortage predicament; even if an ideologically ideal communism were possible (and real-world experiments so far have… not been good), sharing obligations and resources equally (or according to ability and/or need) among humans at current rates of extraction would not by itself be enough to prevent multiple catastrophic outcomes. We would need re-tooling of pretty much all the current high-tech stuff for it to be sustainable, and… we aren’t really doing that. This is a big assertion to make, because the status quo is horrifically inefficient and many of those inefficiencies are found in over-financialisation, unnecessary competition and so on. I am admittedly arguing on vibes rather than numbers here; but the problem isn’t a spreadsheet comparison so much as a look at the extractive qualities of nearly everything we do. Removing the human exploitation would be good but it would still leave the extraction.
2. We cannot arrive at FALC via neoliberal capitalism and asset inflation, and the FALC proposals I’ve seen are not particularly revolutionary. I think incrementalism has a place but the rate of crumbling I’m seeing suggests that it won’t be able to keep up, let alone make real change.
3. I think proponents of FALC often don’t realise how much actual human labour is involved in production of basic needs. I’ve said before and will say again that any garment you own that has a seam was handled by a human being: we can use laser cutting to make woven cloth the right size for a pattern, though most places just use scissors still I think, but we don’t have robots that can hold two pieces of cloth together and sew them, sewing machine technology that’s been around since the 1800s is still the best we have and still requires a person to handle the fabric, it’s just usually electric drive instead of a treadle these days. Ditto things like harvesting mushrooms or tomatoes. We’re actually quite a long way from the full level of automation that would enable labour to be optional.
FALC is wishful thinking. It’s wishful thinking I have a lot of time for, because it represents an attempt to say “with the tech we already have we could make life better for the vast majority of people” (true) and “we should be improving things even more” (true) and “the current distribution of wealth is iniquitous” (true, so very true). But it isn’t a coherent response to our current predicament.
Chris wrote “There are strands of conservative thought that aren’t really ‘right wing’ and strands of supposedly socialist thought that I think are. So … if anyone’s interested I might try to write more about this at some point.”
Yes, please do. Anything to help undo the divisive team-supporting brainwashing and counter the facile narratives.
Okay Steve, I’ll add that to the in-tray!
thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-mythical-return-to-coal
Worth the time to read .
Chris mentioned Clive Lewis MP, a Labour politician. Props to George Monbiot who published some strong words today about the UK’s current Labour government.
“This Labour government would have banned the Labour movement – alongside all the other protests that secured our freedoms… Mahmood’s proposals, as well as being profoundly illiberal in their own right, add a new storey to the tower of authoritarian measures in whose shadow we live. We suffer the “cumulative impact” of a long succession of anti-protest laws. Labour is waging a concerted attack on the thing that made it…”
“First-past-the-post elections delivering a massive majority on 34% of the vote? One second’s participation in decision-making every five years? Presumed consent in between? Governments claiming to represent us, but responding instead to press barons and corporations? Politics on sale to the highest bidder, through political donations and paid lobbying? This is democracy? This is a system that requires no challenge?…”
“Now the last remaining attribute of effective dissent – persistence – is also to be banned. Protest is allowed, as long as it’s invisible, transient and useless. But the moment protest ceases to be effective is the moment democracy dies.”
https://www.monbiot.com/2025/10/21/die-quietly/
I should probably try to keep my Monbiot-scepticism in check, but I can’t help saying ‘Great sentiments George, but where were you and the Guardian when you had the option of getting behind a non-neoliberal/managerialist Labour leadership?’ I think there’s a pattern of affecting an easy radicalism around the edges but retreating to technocratic business as usual on everything that matters.