Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on December 7, 2025 | 57 Comments
I’ve been having an interesting offline debate recently with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the excellent Do the Math blog. I’ll write about it in my next post. In essence, Tom is more certain than I am that human agricultural civilization is a busted flush. Since I generally get it in the neck for my doominess on this point, it’s nice to be in discussion with someone who’s further down that line – especially when it’s as interesting and friendly as the one I’ve had with Tom.
But in this post I’m going to mention a different interlocutor – one who now seems to sit on the more usual ‘we can sort this with tech’ side of the line and with whom the ‘debate’, if that’s what you could call it, hasn’t been friendly at all. While I’ve tried swearing off further engagement with the writing of George Monbiot, a recent Guardian article of his is such a perfect microcosm of the difficulties and dangers of ecomodernism (more on that term below) as applied to the food system that I think it merits attention.
For the most part, I’m not going to dive too deeply into the details of George’s argument and evidence here – I’ve done that before, to little avail. It’s more useful, I think, to look at the article as a piece of literature or rhetoric, and tune in to the story it wants to tell.
I’d parse that story as follows. There’s a problem with agriculture – it’s something quite technical, to do with a trade-off between crop yields and environmental impact. There’s a farmer near Oxford called Tolly who miraculously seems to have solved this problem and “found the holy grail of agriculture” – high yields and low impacts. His solution involves soil management which somehow affects the behaviour of soil bacteria, but nobody quite understands how he’s done it. If we could characterise soils more scientifically, then maybe this holy grail could be replicated and scaled up – but how can we do that? George meets a scientist for a drink in a pub in Oxford and it emerges from their conversation that there might be a way. The results are (literally) seismic.
“We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?”
With $4 million of start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund George and two colleagues (a seismologist and a soil scientist) have developed a way of ‘seeing’ soil. The technology they needed for this was initially expensive, but allegedly should ultimately be zero cost, and they’ve started building the AI and machine learning tools they need. So far, George says, they’ve measured the volume of a peat bog more accurately (“The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous”). Eventually they hope that the technology will give farmers an almost instant readout from their soil that will help protect soil health and resilience, and ultimately help everyone find the high yield/low impact holy grail like Tolly.
That, in a nutshell, is the story. I will now comment on some of its elements.
There are essentially no politics or food system economics in this story. There are only apparently technical problems like yields and impacts, which can be addressed through technical means (the frame of analysis is entirely single farm scale, not food system scale). George has elsewhere defined ecomodernism as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change”. If there are political or economic changes that could beneficially be made to improve the food and farming system – and I believe there are many – then this article is squarely ecomodernist in his terms. I believe it’s important to understand the evasion of politics that this kind of ecomodernist writing about food and the food system involves.
I’m not going to get into the detail here of where politics and economics meets the technicalities of farming at the individual farm and the farm system level. I’ve written a lot about it previously, as have many others. Generally, we have to understand the global farming system as a profit-driven one characterized by the overproduction of most food commodities, and global political systems as ones that inflict scarcity and lack of food and other entitlements upon many people. This means that high yields and low food prices often don’t benefit nature or consumers, especially poor consumers.
So it’s a lot more complicated than George implies in his article. The fact that high yields don’t necessarily benefit nature and low food prices don’t necessarily benefit consumers (including poor consumers) may be a bit counterintuitive, but it’s nevertheless well understood within food system scholarship (one clue to how it works is that farmers and food system workers are essentially the largest category of workers globally, and they are disproportionately poor). The people that high yields and low food prices definitely do benefit are the (usually corporate) providers of yield-boosting farm inputs and retail food distribution systems.
I’ve given up trying to have a reasoned debate with George and with ecomodernists generally about these points, although they’re important. I don’t think reasoned understanding of the food system is the name of the ecomodernist game. Whatever the underlying intentions of ecomodernist authors when they write about the food system, which I’m sure are many and varied, I believe their depoliticizations effectively support the status quo of overproduction, hunger and corporate control.
Moving on in the story, we come to Tolly. He’s a brilliant veg grower who’s influenced me a lot, but he hasn’t found the holy grail of agriculture. His approach is essentially the long-established one of mixed or ley farming. Historically, farmers have mostly done this by alternating crops and livestock. Modern farmers like Tolly can do it with tractors and without livestock if they choose. It amounts to much the same thing.
Most thoughtful people who’ve spent any time around the sharp end of food production and its ineluctable trade-offs treat the latest hosannas in the press about having found the holy grail of agriculture with a resigned eye roll. As shown by the likes of food system analyst Glenn Davis Stone (The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World), these hosannas are usually sung loudest by people who have new commercial inputs they want to bring to market, and are ultimately aimed at the governments or venture capitalists they think might fund them.
A few years back, such hosannas were being sung for bacterial protein (“food from thin air”). The prohibitive energetic and other costs of this technology were always going to stymie it as a viable mass food approach, and venture capital now seems to have deserted it for sexier new fields like AI. I can’t help noticing how prominent these fads are in George’s writing on food – from bacterial protein in his book Regenesis, to AI in his latest article. And also how his fiercely expressed opposition to neoliberalism and gloves-off capitalism in his political writing seems to go missing when he writes about food. Money from the Bezos Fund “may cause some discomfort”, George writes “but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want”. This isn’t the hardest-hitting critique of techno-capitalism and the source of its funds you’ll ever hear.
An article on the Bezos Fund’s website about the project suggests that the techniques it’s developing will unlock “new ways to finance climate solutions, allowing transparent measurement and verification for soil carbon markets. This is how we can feed the world without devouring the planet”. That last sentence echoes the subtitle of George’s Regenesis book, while the preceding one reveals a commitment to achieving it through the existing mechanisms of large-scale global capitalism. George builds his article out from a desire to spread the successful practice of a small-scale local veg grower, but perhaps this obscures what the project’s funders are really looking for.
I’ll pass as quickly as possible over the next part of the story, involving men staring at each other meaningfully in Oxford pubs. My guess is that if you could do a rank ordering of the venues historically where white guys have been apt to congratulate themselves for solving the problems of the world, then pubs in Oxford would come pretty high on the list – and I say this as a white guy from near Oxford who loves to put the world to rights over a pint.
Walter Haugen got straight to the point about what guys like us really ought to be doing to solve the problems of the world: “You – the human engine that has a very low energy input/output ratio – need to get off your dead ass and actually grow some food using hand methods driven by the creativity of your grotesquely enlarged primate brain.” Here, Walter touches uncomfortably on my own central contradiction, in which my efforts to grow more food are continually stymied by my Oxford pub syndrome that makes me think I might be more help to the world by writing articles like this about, well, the dangers of the Oxford pub syndrome. Do let me know if you’ve found this post useful so that I can adjust my priorities accordingly.
Anyway, one way or another this brings us to the crux of George’s article. What, practically, does the technology he’s working on actually achieve? He says that it’s measured the volume of a peat bog (called Whixall Moss), although the paper he cites in support of this says only that the bog’s depth was measured across an eighteen metre line using ten sensors, and that “it is not possible to extrapolate from this single line to an alternative peat volume for the entirety of Whixall moss” (George’s implication that his team surpassed in 45 minutes what fifty years of preceding soil science had achieved seems over-hyped in several respects). Still, maybe the technology really will be able to measure soil volumes and estimate carbon stocks in the soil cheaply and accurately someday. But I can’t see how it will tackle the more pressing political problem of reducing carbon stocks in the atmosphere, unless you subscribe to the view that better-evidenced capitalist carbon markets result in less capitalism.
George also says that the tech may eventually be able to give farmers instant readouts about their soils. But how will it help them find the yield/impact holy grail that he claims Tolly has found? By George’s account, this grail has something to do with soil bacteria and their behaviour, which presumably his ‘soilsmology’ technique can’t measure or characterise. Possibly, the technique may give farmers information that will help them protect their soils, though it’s not clear how it will overcome the wider pressures encouraging them toward soil destruction (politics has gone missing here again).
I can’t help feeling there’s a kind of spivvy middleman ambience about all this tech-happy food ecomodernism. Take a well-established technique like mixed farming, sex it up as a potential holy grail when accompanied by new tech inputs of a modest usefulness which can be glossed over in the sales patter, sell it to farmers while claiming that it’ll soon be cheap as chips, ignore the contemporary politics that make it so difficult to farm in ecologically wise ways, and on no account support the idea that more farmers and fewer middlemen might be a good way to go. It gets a lot of media airplay, but it doesn’t amount to a good analysis of the food system and it sells most people and most of the biosphere short.
George recently trailed once again his scornful critique of my polemic against his book Regenesis, writing “In any discussion of food and farming, unless your solution can be scaled to feed 8 billion people, you shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, cottagecore fantasies that would feed only the richest consumers, leaving billions to starve, are all too common.” He made no mention in that critique that he’d got his figure for the energetic cost of bacterial protein wrong. It’s abundantly clear that the bacterial solution he was touting won’t scale to feed 8 billion people. The priorities of the new CEO of Solar Foods, the bacterial protein manufacturer George promoted in Regenesis, include “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States” and “increasing product price points”. To me, that sounds uncannily like feeding only the richest consumers.
So I guess it’s good that George seems to have quietly backtracked on bacterial protein and has swung more fully behind mixed farming of the kind that Tolly practices, even if he still wants to bang on about my alleged ‘cruel fantasies’. This ‘cruel fantasy’ of mine is that ordinary people should have access to land to grow food. I can’t see how it’s cruel, and I can’t see how George came to think that a monumentally energy hungry industrial process for growing bacteria to make protein could ever scale better than backyard bean growing.
My approach may nevertheless prove a fantasy inasmuch as it doesn’t suit economic and political elites to allow ordinary people the independent means to produce a modest livelihood. They prefer keeping people dependent on high-energy mass industrial food systems predicated on overproduction, monopoly rent and economic growth of the kind that generates ecological destruction and human poverty and hunger. I think those systems will fall apart from their own internal contradictions, and what happens next will arise out of the ensuing politics. There will be opportunities for agrarian localism and for people to take charge of generating local livelihoods ecologically. It’s very far from guaranteed that those opportunities will proliferate, but what I’d like to hear from those who dismiss agrarian localism as a fantasy is how they think mass industrial food systems will deliver good, population-wide nutrition and nature protection into the future. Food ecomodernism contains fantasies of its own, and a smattering of references to open source and anti-trust practices does not conceal them.
I don’t think I’m going to hear any answers to that question from George. Unfortunately, he now seems to be wrapped up in purveying high-end technologies of questionable benefit and recycling corporate-friendly diatribes against agrarianism. The days when he embraced inclusive local food systems have long passed. I find his political trajectory baffling – it’s definitely not last chance saloon ecomodernism, as I once thought. I understand how a ‘we got this’ technophilia allied to a vaguely radical politics can gain a writer public traction. I just wish our public intellectual culture was a bit more serious.
Ah well, I’ve given up trying to figure out what George is about. I’ve also given up writing data and reference-heavy rebuttals of ecomodernism as I used to, now that I’ve seen how little regard for intellectual integrity there is in the movement. But (sorry Walter!) I haven’t quite given up critiquing its broad intellectual failings and misplaced insouciance. For me, Philip Loring – author of the excellent Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology – nails what’s at stake in this present moment of food ecomodernism:
We can be sure that the greedy eyes of disaster capitalism are peering at us from around every corner, waiting to use the tremendous pain and suffering that is emerging around us to appoint themselves our saviours. I can hear it now: “Only we can solve this problem. Only we can feed the hungry. Only we can keep you safe.” These are the voices of manifest destiny. These are the voices of the white saviour. But in reality, the opportunists making these promises can deliver on none of these promises. Why? Because their approach – indeed, their very culture – is part of the system that creates these problems in the first place.
In this context, I’ve found it refreshing, if sobering, to read a thoughtful person like Tom Murphy taking a long-lens focus on the need for us to climb out of our high-tech modernist boat as it hurtles toward the rocks and try to make for land. That metaphor, and some of Tom’s ideas more generally, will be the subject of my next post.
Before that, a quick meta-comment. With various heavy demands on my time at the moment from farm, family and desk, I’m finding it hard to keep up this blog. I’m hoping things will ease sometime in the new year and I will try to get into blogging about my new book. I might struggle to answer blog comments and, still more, personal email messages in the meantime, but do please keep them coming (especially the former). If you’re looking to find some lights in a dark age or seek a small farm future, I’ve ambled my way through various podcasts recently, as advertised on my research and publications page here, so please do have a listen.
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Regarding Solar Foods, I bet the recent Consumer Reports tests for lead and arsenic in protein powders are a gift to anyone who wants to get into the protein powder market with something else. (see https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/ )
Regarding soil seismology… I wonder what about the impact on soil bacteria (and other soil life, from worms to beetles to moles) of playing noises through the soil to measure it. I don’t think it’s a good idea to assume there won’t be any impact, though whether it accelerates or inhibits bacterial growth isn’t something I’d like to guess about.
Hi Kathryn
Came across this on my YouTube feed.
It article and the other content on the site might be of interest to you?
https://youtu.be/YROVfKt4xb4?si=Z4WRiEtypuixFHag
Ooooh, that was awesome. Gonna plant some.
@Steve C
If you liked that one you might like this one
https://youtu.be/JeWdVR1LoKA?si=jGsDZKg28omKxD3O
Or this one
https://youtu.be/EMQpZz8Kkb4?si=7lfpHwPalHBfszAP
Out of interest, does anyone here grow any of these plants?
It seems like very low maintenance. Too good to be true?
Thanks John.
It’s true, Jerusalem artichokes are indestructible. But I don’t grow them because of the indigestible inulin problem. Though I have friends who love them and don’t complain about the gas.
I don’t plant either purslane or lambs quarters, but they are always around anyway. Purslane is low-growing and shows up in the garden early in the season. I usually eat some fresh, but I haven’t taken to it enough to do an actual harvest. Purslane is fairly small and fleshy, and I’m not sure what I’d do with large quantities of it.
But I love lambs quarters. It doesn’t grow in my garden, but around the edges and fences. Growth habit, harvest (and uses) are much like stinging nettles – without the sting. I pick a fair quantity fresh for greens, and this year I dried some for soup stocks. The leaves have powdery undersides, and the flavor is mild and pleasant, but maybe a little different from our usual Western expectations.
And if we’re talking about edible weeds, don’t forget dandelions (and nettles).
@Eric F
Do you live in the UK or is it a North American thing? Never heard of either Purslane or Lamb’s quarters before.
I’ll have to reference my food for free book and see if I can identify any locally.
I’ve tried nettles for tea but found it made me wee a lot.
Lamb’s quarters are often called fat hen in the UK. I don’t grow them but they turn up anyway. Sometimes I harvest the leaves, but leaf crops that have had more selection applied tend to have better yield and are less fiddly to pick. If we had colder winters with less green stuff available in the winter months, I might be tempted to dry fat hen to rehydrate in soups and stews.
But if you can grow fat hen, but you want a pop of colour and larger plants, Chenopodium giganteum, aka tree spinach or ‘Magentaspreen’ for the one with the hot pink young leaves, also self-seeds readily and is much taller than fat hen; there are multiple UK seed companies you can purchase seed from. I personally think this might have some potential as an annual carbon crop, the stems are quite woody by the end of September.
Also a larger plant in the same genus as fat hen is quinoa, which has much more worthwhile seeds. I will let you know whether it self-seeds successfully in due course… if I can tell the young plants apart from the fat hen! The tree spinach at least should be easy to identify. I don’t know whether the three plants are likely to cross and hybridise.
I haven’t had much luck with purslane, myself. I did have some sea purslane growing from cuttings for a while, but accidentally cleared them out one winter (sigh), and haven’t managed to get hold of any more. I do now have some Atriplex halimus, saltbush, in a pot in the back garden.
If you’re interested in tuber crops you might also like to try Oxalis tuberosa aka oca. Do be aware that the plants look a lot like wood sorrel, and don’t pull them up like my allotment neighbour did or you’ll get no crop! I tried growing oca and Jerusalem artichokes in a polyculture, but the artichokes completely swamped the oca and yield of the latter was low.
That video (about sunchokes) includes a clip from an old film showing 6 seconds of what looks like at least 24 horses pulling one combine to harvest wheat (3:29-3:35).
I keep (as insurance) a 60′ long low-maintenance bed of sunchokes along a backyard fence. I haven’t been eating them lately, since all that inulin content can cause a lot of farting, and there has always been something else to eat.
Jerusalem farty chokes!
Tom Murphy draws the line at agriculture, thinking that foraging is self-limiting at a level that protects the health of the global ecosystem, whereas agriculture is not. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t draw the line at the use of fire, which foragers have used to greatly affect large swaths of nature. No other animals have fire, why should we?
I draw the line at heat engines. Without them, agriculture would have never industrialized (not much at all would have industrialized) and agriculture would have been self-limiting at levels that would have protected the global ecosystem. Local areas might be devastated by excess agriculture, but the global rate of devastation would be low enough that a balance would be established between damage and recovery.
Anyway, it’s too late now to pine for the days of pre-agriculture. We are stuck with industrial agriculture for a while, until industrialism as a whole collapses. After that collapse we will either see small scale agriculture as a transition to a return to foraging, or a balance will be struck between localized environmental damage from agriculture and recovery from that damage.
In any case, while modernity will end soon (though not soon enough), small farms are part of our post-modern future, at least for a while.
“Even if we could extract every ounce of copper in the ground in the coming decades, we could only replace 22% of our ageing fossil fuel energy system with an all electric one, then would be left wondering what to do with the remaining 78%… We clearly have a serious math problem here”
From The Honest Sorcerer .
The end of industrialtisation could well be closer than most think , technology needs , energy and materials , and time which it does not have , the finite planet is beginning to bite back .
Chris wrote, “Anyway, one way or another this brings us to the crux of George’s article. What, practically, does the technology he’s working on actually achieve?”
There’s a great comment below George’s article in the Guardian, exposing the huge plot hole in Monbiot’s story:
Duebeni, 5 Dec 2025 8.46
“I’m missing something here. How will soil seismology assess the soil biome, and help to “train” (your term) those helpful bacteria?”
George’s story about soil seismology strikes me as being similar to other ecomodernist pitches, typically overhyped and overpromised, like reading an glowing advertisement but worse since it’s for a non-existent product. Monbiot’s bacterial protein “solution” he gushed about in Regenesis is a good example. In this latest scheme, Monbiot is one of the founders of the new venture, and may have even stronger motivations to overhype it.
About the $4 million funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, the Bezos site says it a grant, but the stated purpose of the grant is specifically for soil carbon measurement: “to develop sensors using seismology for soil carbon measurement.”
https://www.bezosearthfund.org/news-and-insights/bezos-earth-fund-announces-57-million-future-of-food-bold-action-food-systems-transformation
This other article (which Chris linked above) from the Bezos Earth Fund gives a seemingly typical ecomodernist timeframe, scope, and priorities: “Over the next few years” they’ll create a research network, which will work to someday “create the world’s first digital twin of the Earth’s soils” (marketable information for global investors?); and then, eventually “in time, the tools will be simple enough” for farmers.
www. bezosearthfund. org/news-and-insights/if-soils-could-talk-earth-rover-program
Wonder if you can eat digital potatoes ?
They make tolerable chips…………….
The reverse, actually: chips make good digital potatoes…
“Sequencing the Potato Genome… to more fully exploit the genetic potential of potato.”
Paper from 2009
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12230-009-9097-8
George Monbiot has been a shill for the nuclear industry for years. Then he moved on to shilling for ecomodernism. Now he has regressed to shilling for capitalism itself. This is not surprising. As a trained journalist, we should expect him to follow a research thread to it’s logical conclusion. However, he still hasn’t followed the logic thread far enough. If he did, he would have the same position as Chris. This is where being a social scientist provides a firm foundation. It really IS important to be able to integrate “la longue durée” and culture into your analysis. It also helps to have done field work, whether ethnography or archaeological digs. In my opinion, one of the reasons Amy Goodman is heads and tails above the George Monbiots of the world is because she has a degree in anthropology from Harvard (1984). In the future, George will likely adopt the Nate Hagens concept of a superorganism that cannot be controlled because no one is in charge. This is reification rubbish, of course, and I have been critical of Nate on this point in many comments on his YouTube podcasts. There are quite a few elites in control of multiple interlocked systems that make the world a bad place for the majority of poor people and for the physical environment. Just saying it is a superorganism which is beyond our control is a copout. George Monbiot has copped out too. He could use some paradigm shifting.
George makes the point, “In any discussion of food and farming, unless your solution can be scaled to feed 8 billion people, you shouldn’t be taken seriously.” This is rubbish too. As I have said many times and in various iterations over the last 55+ years, “If your model doesn’t contain at least one dieoff scenario, it is intellectually bankrupt.” Several people have pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union featured a dieoff but you had to be a medical professional to see it at the time. Now we see that Russia is still underpopulated, which is another reason for the land grab in the Donbas. It is a people grab too. (As well as a soils grab, minerals grab, etc. And don’t get me wrong. I am still critical of NATO, Obama’s Maidan coup, Ukraine’s Banderas, and all the reasons Putin was provoked. There are no “good guys” here.) Whether or not well-meaning people can actually pull off their reform agenda, we are STILL headed for recession, depression and collapse. Biological overshoot is a harsh master. Dieoff is just one component in the collapse of western civilization. Therefore your sustainable agriculture solutions/adaptations do NOT have to be scaled UP to the current level of overpopulation. George Monbiot is a fool to think otherwise.
The Chernozem soils extend from Ukraine into Hungary. A year ago, we spent a week in Budapest and Vienna. You can see the rich black Chernozem soils from the train between the two cities. It reminded me of the rich black soils of southern Minnesota where I grew up. One time I was doing some fall plowing for my brother and the low western sun glinting on the newly turned earth highlighted a lovely shade of dark blue. There is a town in Minnesota called Blue Earth for this very reason. Ukraine is an important prize, especially in a world that will need more food.
We already overproduce food (though distribution leaves something to be desired in terms of accessibility and equity) and you are talking about a die-off scenario as extremely likely, so what is this world that will need more food?
You are correct that we now have enough food to feed 8 billion people; it is just distributed unequally. Frances Moore Lappé said the same thing in Diet for a Small Planet (1971). But, as Vanguard often says in its primary advice to investors, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Of course smart investors use past performance anyway, but add a healthy dose of skepticism. One of the mistakes people make is that they only look at it in one way. In other words, they accept the economies of scale when the economies come from getting bigger, but they don’t accept economies of scale when the economies come from getting smaller. The same failure to look at both ends of a continuum applies to food production. It is not a truism that we will be able to keep the same yields and same volumes of food per capita deliverable to markets with a dieoff happening.
Yes, we will have economies of small scale post-collapse. But will people use targeted techniques and strategies, especially if they are used to a fossil fueled system? I don’t know but it seems unlikely. Are people actually going to use my system of starting small farmers markets within a 10-mile radius? They will have to of course, but the learning curve is very steep nowadays. Will people adopt an objective EROI energy measure based on kilojoules or kilocalories or even watts/hour? Seems unlikely. People don’t even listen to what I say nowadays and they have the time and money to do their own experiments. They are not likely to listen when they cannot communicate at a distance with people who are doing the research. To crib a line from Gil Scott-Heron in 1971, “The dieoff will not be televised.” Nor will it be on an internet that no longer exists.
As I said in a previous post, if you are a small-scale sustainable farmer outside of the capital-intensive fossil fuel loop, you will be able to absorb downturns in your yield because of climate change. The average wheat yield in the US is now 54.9 bushels/acre. It was 46.4 bushels/acre in 2017. Clearly wheat yields in the US are going up BUT would you be content with 40 bushels/acre and its equivalent on a small plot? Of course you would! You would still be doing better than medieval farmers. But what if you still depend on a transport system that has collapsed into a localized shell of its former glory.
The collapse of transportation networks will likely have a bigger effect on city people’s ability to get a decent loaf of bread. Or even to get a loaf of bread at all. If you cannot walk or bicycle to the pop-up market or even to the farmer who grows wheat, you might starve, even if there is plenty available. Oops.
And I didn’t even touch on the fertilizer issue.
I’m not sure that collapse of current transport networks necessarily means everyone will be limited to what they can get in a ten-mile radius (or some other arbitrary distance), or at least not for very long; we’ve had global trade for a lot longer than we’ve had fossil fuels, it’s just been a lot faster in the last few centuries. Would it take some time to re-opened old trade routes and learn to sail again? Yes, absolutely. We haven’t even re-grown the trees we used to build the ships in the previous expansions of sail, if I understand correctly. But I also know a thing or two about how quickly someone can learn to produce substantial quantities of food on a relatively small plot.
I do think that in a sufficiently large or fast die-off we could end up with localised famines as a result of insufficient labour to grow and harvest the food. I am not sure where to start with evaluating whether these would impact more people than the present inequity in food distribution. I feel it’s important to note that we aren’t going from a system that mostly works to a system that doesn’t: we’re going from a system that is inherently unfair and harms people, to a system that will have to function under very different conditions.
My instinct is that Putin’s designs on Ukraine have more to do with oil and energy exports than with land for food production. I could be wrong, it could be that Russia is not producing enough calories for its (relatively low, I think?) population and Putin wants to obtain those richer soils for industrial extractive farming. I suppose the strategy is to hold the land and decide how to profit later.
You make some good points Kathryn. But keep in mind the common prepper mantra. “After people miss nine meals, anarchy arises.” Also remember that I am not dealing in certainty. “Everyone will be limited . . . ” is not the kind of thing I say.
As I have said many times in the last few years, Homo erectus probably engaged in trade, which allows them to push right up to the periglacial environment near the ice sheets. So trade will likely continue, but not in the same fashion. But will it be localized? I think so. The adaptation to sail will probably arise again and a new version of the Cutty Sark will likely transport single malt Scotch to New York, but that is years down the road. This kind of thing is well-explicated in the Dies the Fire series (or Emberverse series) by S. M. Stirling (2004-2018). Stirling is a good writer too so these books are pleasant to read. Collapse is not a monolithic process. This is probably why most people cannot get their heads around it and struggle and disrespect those of us who point out that an unsustainable system will stop. The nuances of variable speed of collapse, transition strategies and tactical alternatives are just lost on them – BECAUSE they are simplistic and look for certainty.
As for fast-learning, you yourself are an exception to the rule and I salute you. But try teaching volunteers for awhile – or even people who pay for classes! – and THEN consider that those few fast-learners who make some progress are so few they are essentially random data points.
Just to be clear. Statements like ” . . . another reason for the land grab in the Donbas . . . ” are NOT statements that there is only one driver. How big is the lust for Chernozem soils? How about 50%. I deal in fluidity, but the cream rises to the top. When I was a boy I would go down to the barn and scoop up the raw cream in the 10-gallon cans from the previous night’s milking and put it on my breakfast cereal. That is probably why I have high cholesterol and hardened arteries to this day.
If I may ask…when do you think the transport networks will collapse approximately and where do you have this info from?
Rachael – I am not a psychic. The idea of variable speed of collapse builds on the idea of variable modes but does not predict specific dates. Market orders at the speed of light (fiber optic cable) will collapse faster than phone orders or coordination between drivers and home base of the semis actually hauling the goods bought and sold. The harvesting of crops will be slower still because of the labor and time involved. The slowest level will be crops planted on a seasonal timeline. There are ways to finesse and do an end run around each mode.
Diesel will be the last to fail, in my estimation. Wall Street brokers will be throwing themselves out of windows well before trucks stop hauling goods.
Allow me to make another point to Kathryn’s question vis-a-vis Ukraine. Good black dirt gives you many more options than limey brown clay. It also gives you more power because you can cram more peasants onto it. In other words, the black soil capital enhances your human capital. You also don’t have to have a years-long program to build up the soil by compost, green manures and cover crops. The US did not only lust for Ukraine’s and Russia’s rare earths, oil, natural gas, forests, etc. They also lusted for the good black dirt.
First job whoever wins is cleaning up all the unexploded ordnance and land mines , that’s a couple of decades at least, hell they are still finding it in France from a century ago .
They raise their eyebrows and look at me
HOW LONG DID IT TAKE
Time isn’t the problem
Energy is
And go back to hoeing a long row
COULDN’T YOU JUST USE A TRACTOR AND SELL SOMETHING IN TOWN
I could but
the fuel is a problem my good hoe resolves
competing with fuel and tractors
Is a younger mans fantasy
Cooking mostly what I grow is mine
You can live either one
I’d rather garden
Thank you, reading the said piece in the Guardian, my first thought after the eye roll was ‘I’d love to hear what Chris Smaje has to say to this’, and here it appeared in my RSS feed, so thank you again, your writing is much appreciated.
Brilliant and funny as ever. The first thing I saw, in this article, was a diagnostic tool for measuring the value of soil – an enclosure, a component of the rentier economy. Apparently the roll out has been paused in Kenya because the tenant farmers there spotted it too – they don’t want their landlords to see the results! Of course – the landlords will have the siesmic gizmo first!
I went in hard on this in ‘hardart’ who were singing its praises. The whole EarthRover concept is deeply questionable.
Also, loving the book! Enjoyed the podcast with Rachel, it has been heart warming witnessing her position shift over the 3 conversations and bodes well.
As you and Steve point out the roll out of this technology, if it would work, would not dramatically change how people farm or which yields they would get.
Changes in organic matter are slow and the positive results derived from it will be visible for any farmer interested in how their soils behave. And, there is even no guarantee that high organic matter contents (SOM) always is the best. On my farm, I have a lot of land that is former lake bottom or swamp with organic matter contents over 20 percent. Those lands are certainly not better than those with a still nice SOM content of 5-6. Coincidentally, I just made a round of soil analysis. On some fields the analysis showed dramatic increase in SOM, in one field from 11% to 24%. Considering that the field is in permanent ley cut for hay (and has been for the last 40-50 years I guess) and that I just have given it one low load of cow manure since 2014 (when we bought the farm), the result is nonsensical. I had the lab make a renewed analysis, this time with a chemical method as opposed to the physical methods they normally use for SOM measurements. The new results showed 15% lower SOM for the samples with high SOM content, but where fairly accurate for those with lower SOM. But even those lower values are certainly far too high. So either the old analysis was wrong or the sampling wasn’t dense enough (as soils are no).
I doubt that Georges trinket will be more reliable.
My second thought in reading the article was that I found it bad press ethics to let a columnist use the page to promote a commercial venture in which he seems to be quite involved.
I wouldn’t mind a pint in Oxford now and then. I believe I had one around 2003. It is a bit far though.
I am looking forward to your dialogue with Tom M. I have some problems with how he define modernism and his view of agriculture as the fall of man. Which makes me think about George M and his statement that agriculture itself is the problem, where did that go?
Per Tom Murphy and his position – as reported by Chris – that human agricultural civilization is a “busted flush.” As a long-time poker player I like the terminology, but the context is wrong. It would be more like drawing to a flush. In other words, the hand is not over and the pot odds favor staying in the pot to see the next card. For those unfamiliar with pot odds, these are simply the ratio of the current size of the pot to the cost of a contemplated call. For example, if you are playing hold ’em and your two down cards are of the same suit with two of the common cards of the same suit (i.e. four cards to a flush), your odds of filling your flush on the river are 52 – 4 -2 = 46 divided by the 9 cards of that same suit remaining in the deck, or a 5.11 ratio against filling your flush. However, if you can get a better positive ratio by winning the pot, it is a good decision to call the bet to see if you actually get one of the cards you want. [Sidenote: If your cannot get your head around the looseness of flipping positive and negative ratios, just think about absolute values.] For example, if you can put in a $10 bet to win only $50, you should not make the call. But if you can put in $10 to make $60 to win the pot, you should make the call. This view is based on positive expectations and the modern paradigm of poker as “one long game for the rest of your life.” This paradigm has also been extended into blackjack by Eliot Jacobson in his book The Blackjack Zone: Lessons in Winning at Blackjack and Life (2023). Jacobson was a mathematics and computer science professor before he became a blackjack consultant and collapsenik. I fully corroborate this “one long game” paradigm in my own gambling experience in poker and blackjack. It has been around for decades in the poker world.
On this same thread, it sometimes IS justified to draw to an inside straight, one of the tropes of poker being, “Never draw to an inside straight.” However, if you are playing hold ’em and you have better pot odds than the drawing odds, you should indeed draw to an inside straight. As a side note, consider the famous Jerry Garcia song Loser on his first single album (1972). Along with THE BEST opening lines in any rock song:
“If I had a gun for every ace I have drawn
I could arm a town the size of Abilene”
There are the following lines
“Everybody’s breakin’ and drinkin’ that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on an inside straight
Well, I’ve got no chance of losin’ this time”
The song is called Loser because the protagonist has a habit of drawing to inside straights. However because he can see that the card he needs has a certain shine from being used that he has previously noticed (this happens, especially in private games), he knows that he’s “Got no chance of losin’ this time.”
The odds of getting the card you need on an inside straight are 46 divided by the 4 cards in the deck that can make your hand, or 11.5 against. In this instance, if it costs you $10 to make the call, you need to win a pot of $115 to justify the call. This is not an unusual occurrence, especially in highly volatile betting games like hold ’em. But you need to actually count up the chips in the center of the table. If you ask the dealer to make a count for you, you are tipping off the rest of the players that you are a more savvy player than you have let on plus it signals a straight or flush draw. Most professionals develop the ability to keep a running count of the chips in the pot. This also helps keep you sharp by the way.
So why all this talk of poker logic based on actual mathematics? Simply put, agriculture is a good bet. If I can grow five pounds of potatoes with an hour’s worth of my time, I get 1750 kilocalories of food energy output (350 x 5 = 1750) for 125 kilocalories of my input for an advantageous ratio of 1750 / 125 = 14 to 1. Wow! I will take that bet every day! In fact, I have been playing this “one long game” all my life. The occasional poker and blackjack wins using the same paradigm are just icing on the cake.
In Tom Murphy’s case, he would not have had a distinguished and lucrative career as a researcher and prof at San Diego for many years without the surplus built up on the beneficial ratio of food output to human agricultural labor inputs. He is now retired in Seattle, which is a good choice. If I was still living in the US, I would still be in the Pacific Northwest (water, sea, mountains, diversified agriculture, blue state, etc.). But I would NOT be in Seattle. Compared to what it was, it has gone waaaay downhill. My partner goes there every Christmas to see her grandchildren, but it is extremely stressful each time.
Bottom line: Someone who has a popular blog called Do the Math should not be dissing agriculture. It has given him his cushy life.
Walter, I am sure Tom Murphy is well aware of that “conflict”, and I don’t think it invalidates his opinion or argument.
I would say most people are in that same boat, one way or the other, even all the collpasniks on the internet. In the end, IF The Collapse will be as deep as they predict there will be no internet.
Hopefull, still some poker.
Gunnar – Whether or not Tom Murphy sees the contradiction between his cushy job and his advocacy is irrelevant. A person should not disrespect what puts food into his mouth. Literally puts food into his mouth. That said, Tom Murphy’s cushy job does not make his arguments invalid. His arguments are invalid because they don’t stand up to scrutiny. I may have more to say on this after Chris’ post on Murphy’s ideas are posted.
You might want to consider the damage done by simplifying the argument from a continuum of Çatalhöyük (early non-elite agriculture) to Tyson Foods (industrial agriculture) over a 5000 year timeline versus a static bright line argument of “agriculture is bad.” Murphy got this cracked idea from Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (1992) and the subsequent books in the series. Quinn was attempting a new kind of heuristic, thus the talking gorilla. I tried reading it years ago, but it simply failed to impress me, either in intent or in execution. Nevertheless, the book has become wildly popular. However, popularity does NOT equal validity. [Sidenote: I am considering a trip to Çatalhöyük in September so I can get a feel for the terrain. It has always intrigued me.]
The investigation into the downsides of agriculture is not new. Back in the 1970s – at least in the US – many of us back-to-the-landers were questioning agriculture but weighed all the options and settled on a mix of small-scale agriculture, small-scale horticulture, hunting and foraging. There is a very good reason Stalking the Wild Asparagus (Euell Gibbons, 1962) became a best-seller. Richard Manning wrote the first book entitled Against the Grain in 2004, well before James C. Scott’s book of the same name in 2017. I read Manning’s book but have not read Scott’s book yet. (It is on my list.) It sounds as if you were on a similar journey.
A real discussion of the damage done to the environment and the social structure would have to be done on a continuum – not only by place but by time. It would have to distinguish between small-scale and industrial agriculture. It would have to measure the effects by thermodynamic equivalents, example kilojoules, kilocalories, kilowatts/hr, BTUs, etc. It would have to discuss the co-evolution of wheat and corn with humans. I have spent over 50 years researching this and doing experiments. As far as I can see, Tom Murphy has done none of this. He simply bought into a “cool idea.”
I get soooo tired of people who promulgate and proselytize without dirt under their fingernails.
well, I think you know I agree with the general picture. I have written a piece or two “in defence of farming”, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-farming
I wonder, is there really that much difference between foraging and farming? Walter rightly points out that there is a continuum in our interactions with the world we use to secure food, but the basics of those interactions are the same from one end of the continuum to the other: all animal species use their mental (decision-making) and physical capabilities to disturb or kill other species in pursuit of food. Whether it’s knocking fruit out of a tree with a stick, or driving a tractor across a field, we disturb and appropriate other lives to support our own. We have to do it or die.
I think what matters is the scale of the disturbance on that continuum. Scale it up to a high enough level and the ability of the affected area to recover is severely degraded. Industrial agriculture is almost certainly over the limit. Whether muscle powered agriculture is too much is an open question, but I think it is likely OK, based on the state of the natural world prior to industrial agriculture. If Murphy were promoting his argument against agriculture in 1600, he would have had a much tougher time convincing people that they were destroying the world’s ecosystem. That 1600’s ecosystem was nearly pristine compared with today.
As to the hypocrisy of being part of the modern world and also railing against it: none of us can avoid modernity and continuing to live within it makes us all prone to hypocrisy. All we can do is prepare to live without it once it’s gone. Like Murphy, I hope it is gone very soon for the sake of the thousands of generations of humans (and other species) to come after us.
Certainly the more I forage the more my foraging resembles gardening, and the more I garden the more my gardening resembles foraging… the lines get blurry. But if I am doing this despite my rather urban setting and all the modern conveniences I enjoy, I find it hard to imagine that my Stone Age ancestors didn’t.
It isn’t rocket science to prune a bramble patch for better access or fruiting, or to scatter seeds of various desirable annuals on a bit of otherwise untended waste ground. It isn’t conceptually difficult to save and replant the seeds from the best fruit and nuts that I forage.
I think it was Gareth Lewis’s work on hoe farming where I most strongly noticed an argument that keeping production on a human-accessible scale is generally less damaging to the wider environment: hoe rather than horse and plough or tractor; footpaths rather than roads.
And let’s not forget feral vegetables and grain. This year’s list on my place includes: rye, wheat, barley, buckwheat, amaranth, potatoes, sunchokes, pumpkins, various C. pepo summer squash hybrids, Butternut squash (C. moschata), Buttercup squash (C. maxima), chard, beets, mustard, lettuce, kale, sweet corn, rogue flint corn, popcorn, tomatillos, tomatoes, leeks, burdock and various herbs like borage, shiso, etc. I have a very nice new tomato mutation this year that I am excited to plant out in 2026. It is an orange Coeur de Boeuf (Cuor di Bue in Italian). I am also going to mix the feral popcorn with my established seed line for 2026. It had nice big yellow kernels and popped up nicely.
Just briefly on a few points among the many interesting ones made here –
Good to see people already discussing Tom Murphy. I’ll pitch into that soon, but in brief I’m in tune with Joe’s last comment above. I think Tom might say you can draw a line from early agriculture through the sustainable 1600s to where we now are. I’m not so sure.
On the idea of ‘scalability’, I’d add that localism almost by definition doesn’t scale and doesn’t need to. I suppose it might be worth discussing the implications further in the light of the ecomodernist impetus to ‘feed the world’.
On black soils and their American counterparts, it’s interesting that it was only in fairly recent times that they were extensively (and intensively) farmed, having mostly been the preserve of pastoralists or foragers prior to that. The intensive farming got going only when they were connected essentially to a colonial empire (respectively Russian and American). I’m interested in thoughts on that.
Lots of other informative comments, lessons in poker, prose-poems and concern for our cousins in the soil here. Thanks!
Okey-dokey. A couple of years ago, I read Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World by Scott Reynolds Nelson (2022) Here is a quote from page 41.
“In the 1760s the relationship between empire and grain changed again under the reign of tsarina Catherine II, who embraced an unprecedented policy of selling unprocessed grain to increase the size of the Russian Empire. Before Catherine’s rule, empires seized agricultural land, expanded ports, and moved grain inward to feed cities and outward to feed armies and navies. But Catherine was influenced by the physiocrats, a group of French economists and imperial advisors. Imagining the economy as an exchange of goods between farmers, landlords, artisans, and merchants, the physiocrats believed that merchants who exported grain benefited an empire by trading excess grain for scarce foreign goods.”
The physiocrats looked at the economy as if it were a body (i.e. physiologically), with tubes, wires, connections between organs, etc. Steve Keen, a crack Australian economist who is the leading light in postmodern economic theory, has waxed eloquently on the physiocrats more than once on YouTube videos. The basic paradigm of the physiocrats was that the land was the source of all wealth; something I share with them. (The longer I live in France, the more impressed I am with the French intellectual tradition and the less impressed I am with the French government and bureaucracy.)
Per Oceans of Grain, the Americans were able to supplant the Russian grain supply coming out of Odessa after the invention of nitroglycerin allowed the Dutch government to blast out the Port of Rotterdam. This port then rivaled Antwerp in allowing more grain to flow from America to Europe.
“In European cities, grain prices would drop about 40 percent between 1870 and 1900, the greatest long-term drop in the price of food in recorded history.” (Nelson, 2022:14) The shipping distance from Odessa to Rotterdam is 3503 nautical miles and from New York to Rotterdam 3383 nautical miles. With the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes providing cheap transport from the Midwestern states to New York, America could provide cheaper wheat to Europe and undercut the Russian empire’s revenues. Cheap American wheat probably had more to do with the decline of the Russian Empire than the Crimean War or incompetent tsarist administration.
And of course, after John Deere invented the steel moldboard plow in 1837, the heavy fertile soils of Illinois and the rest of the Midwest could be broken up and produce lots and lots of cheap grain. Fun fact: A couple of years ago, we were having a glass of blanquette at the Café du Pont in Esperaza and the waitress was wearing a shirt that was black and green (the John Deere colors) with the date 1837 on it. She had no idea that this shirt was a signifier of the “plow that broke the plains.” She had just bought it because she liked it.
My people moved to the Midwest from Norway in the 1830s and got in on the resulting boom based on plowing up untouched fertile soils. By 1855, Deere’s factory in Moline, Illinois had sold more than 10,000 plows. This was four years before Colonel Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859.
Oops The reference should be (Nelson, 2022:128 Kindle version). My bad.
A few things and then I’ll get to black soils as that’s directly relevant to me.
Locality was already top of mind with the mention of the Holy Grail, yes maybe he’s found one there, but you can’t just take it elsewhere, there’s a grail to be found on every farm and they’re all little different.
Regarding Tom: I really appreciate his articulation of materialistic animism, it’s very closely paralleled my own thought process. To wrap it together you can find high yields and low impacts if you pick a native plant that either wants to sustain mammals, i.e. oaks or root crop that thrives on disturbance, yampah, yams? To agree with Katherine the longer I’m at this the more gardening, farming and foraging mix together. The economics are dreadful but the food is delicious. I look forward to the line being set once and for all at what exactly farming is and when exactly it went wrong though! (If that’s what your debate has been)
The black soils I know something about are those of the tallgrass prairie which I live either in or on the edge of depending on which map you check. I have my thoughts about their lack of cultivation probably based on their very high clay content, good for minerals but hard to work when it’s wet or dry which is quite often in a variable grassland environment. The deep and dense grass sod probably also posed obstacles., unlike a temperate woodland where you can girdle or burn and then plant burning the grassland won’t remove the existing vegetation. The other side of this argument is that they were cultivated, Cahokia was on a river confluence where the tallgrass abuts the eastern woodland and based around corn. I’ve also mentioned before that there were native villages along some of the smaller rivers with pottery (so settled in place). Presumably only cultivating the river bottomlands though. That’s where the trees are currently but the biomass yield can easily be double the adjoining hilltops and much easier soil to work. The image of them as empty grasslands I think might be dependent on the drastic decline of the native population (Relying on 1491 by Charles Mann for that one) and the adoption of horses pre and immediately post contact that drastically tips the scales in favor of pastoralism and nomadic life, why farm in an unstable world with a low population when you could just burn and have all the bison and elk imaginable and you now have a way to carry your stuff? And there were still gardens with corn, squash, beans, and presumably sunflower at some points along the way. There are areas where pastoralism is probably the only viable survival strategy usually indicated as west of the 100th Meridian or sometimes the 30inch precipitation line where trees really give up, but as with all such things there’s no one boundary. Grassland by Richard Manning is good reading on this. I’m still really trying to explore the forage plants of the tallgrass prairie since I wonder if there were any wild tended or semi domesticated plants we’ve neglected. Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region by Melvin R. Gilmore indicates that the Osage or Omaha called goldenrod “Corn Flower”. They would plant their gardens in the Kansas River area (tallgrass prairie) in May then head off to the Smokey Hills (mixed grass prairie now the edge of the wheat vs corn line) to return to their crops in August when the goldenrod flowered telling them corn was ready. I would really love to know how they made that all work because it seems like they got a farm vacation in summer! Interestingly the corn belt is already shifting north and west as higher temperatures limit yield even with adequate water. It’s very funny to read about in the agriculture news because they never say climate change and just pretend it’s just a thing that’s happening somehow and affecting land prices.
Planting the corn and coming back when it’s ripe and dry isn’t that different to the way I plant drying beans, squash and potatoes at the Far Allotment. In a very dry year the yield will suffer, and you have to either protect crops from mice, deer, birds etc or be prepared to share the harvest, but once they’re established they really don’t need regular care and continuous harvesting the way, say, tomatoes do, and they outgrow the weeds enough not to be too bothered on that front either as long as they get a good start. Maybe I should add some dent corn or flint corn to my Far Allotment lineup.
Sadly I am not allowed to shoot and eat the walking venison that demolished my beans this year; they even went after the fairly prickly squash plants, so must have been struggling some in the heat and lack of rain, I think. But in a society with hunting, if you sow corn you’ll get food either way.
Thanks – really interesting!
Some devastating news out of Washington state in the US. An atmospheric river has dropped tremendous amounts of rain on northwestern Washington and Skagit County is flooding. The Skagit River floodplain lies between Seattle and the Canadian border and is an important farming area. A lot of the brassica seed for the US comes from Skagit County for instance. The Washington State University Experimental Station lies on this floodplain outside of Mount Vernon. This is the premier ag station for heritage grain breeding in the United States and also houses the Bread Lab, for encouraging small-scale growers, millers and bakers. There is also a research focus on malting barley for artisanal brewing. The director is Dr. Steven Jones, who is internationally famous for his work on preserving heritage wheats and other grains. By necessity, the large scale of grain varieties tested results in “postage stamp-sized plots.” When I was there for a Visitors Day years ago, there were 5000 little test plots for barley, 8000 for wheat, etc. All this is going to be wiped out.
This devastation of heritage germplasm is not a new phenomenon. In 2003, a fire at a historic market also destroyed the offices and storage facility of Abundant Life Seed Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington. In 2017, unseasonably warm weather caused flooding at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, putting heritage and wild seed at risk. These are just two that I know about. There may be others. This vulnerability puts the “preserve germplasm” paradigm in sharp focus.
What is the solution? Individual farmers need to: 1) plant out their seed lines year after year and 2) trade them with their neighbors. It is also a good idea to join a seed-sharing organization like Seed Savers Exchange. You can find all kinds of them with a Web search. The added bonus of seed-saving to preserve germplasm for future generations is that you get landrace adaptation.
As the physical environment degrades and collapse accelerates, it will be beneficial to already have localized seed collections and landrace adaptation “in the pipeline.” Your grandchildren will thank you.
Hi Walter
I went on a school trip to the soviet union in 1982. It was a two city visit, first to Moscow and second to Leningrad. The first part of the trip was red square, opera, and museums. Very little was told to us of the communism or the revolution, which we thought odd. Maybe in Leningrad we will get the propaganda of the revolution. No, everything was about Peter the great, we saw his palaces, forts, and a museum dedicated to him. Not a word about Lenin or the revolution. What I got from this odd journey into the heart of Russia is that the Russians are immensely proud of Peter the Great (the tour guides especially). He changed their country from an backwater on the outer fringe of Europe to a major power with an empire and a navy to be reconned with. Every Russian leader since then has measured themselves against him and the Russia he created. Putin is no different, he can’t be or he would be promptly replaced. If NATO had stayed in western Europe, and the ring of buffer states that had formerly been Russian territory left as satellite states of Russia, a stasis could have been maintained, but nothing stays the same for long in human politics.
The eastern European states wanted into the EU for economic prosperity and into NATO for political security, they had had 45 years of Russian occupation and repeated invasions and conquests in previous centuries by Russia, no more!
Russia after the soviet collapse could tolerate former territories being semi – independent to independent but to become part of another power block was to lose face. It was to lose part of the heritage of Peter the Great, for which many Russia’s would have felt shame. To lose Ukraine led to even greater feelings of shame as the city of Kiev is seen as the origin of the Russian people.
In turn the bear has said no more and struck back. It will not let part of the heritage of Peter the great be lost to the west. Black soils, minerals and the heavy industry located in the Donbas are bonuses. It’s all really about Peter the Great and his legacy.
@philip
A bit off topic of the podcast but………
I agree.
The “Special Military Operation” and Putin’s motives, in my opinion, are quite simple.
NATO troops in Ukraine was a red line too far.
The eastern expansion of NATO was always a provocation to Russia but Russia was too weak to prevent it. Until now.
The Austrian post war model could be adopted, but that isn’t what The West is really interested in.
The USA has the Monroe Doctrine after all and no-one seems to object to it. Soviet troops in Cuba was a red line for the USA.
Taiwan, for China, is unfinished business from the civil war. Watch this space…….
Philip – I agree with you that the legacy of Peter the Great has a great deal to do with Russian pride and fortitude. I certainly enjoyed studying about him and the other tsars in college. But my reading of George F. Kennan and the perfidy of the West in the late 20th century underweights the 18th century land grab and overweights the post-World War II land grab. [NATO still adheres to Kennan’s containment paradigm, which is why it is outdated and morally bankrupt.] The current land grab by Putin (described by Thomas Friedman as a “good old-fashioned 19th century land grab”) seems to me to be a third pole, neither similar to the expansion and efflorescence of Peter the Great, nor the expansion and dimming of the light of Stalin’s and Kruschev’s Soviet Union. The people I rely on to analyze this new and different expansion are Stephen F. Cohen (now deceased), John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and a host of former military, intelligence, diplomatic and academic analysts on the Judging Freedom channel on YouTube. I also favor Glenn Diesen and his YouTube channel, an academic from Norway who is regarded as a pro-Russian traitor by some Norwegians. I might add that my own biological family regarded me as a traitor too because of my stance against the Vietnam War.
Just to be clear, I am not pro-Russian but I am anti-Ukraine because of the press-ganging of young, middle-aged and even old men who are pulled off the streets and even out of clubs and restaurants to be sent to the front lines as cannon fodder (drone fodder nowadays). If Russia were to use these kinds of tactics, I would be anti-Russia too. I speak as someone who “almost” had to go to prison rather than go off to Vietnam to kill innocent villagers. (I lucked out in the first draft lottery.)
And just in case anyone is still stuck in George W. Bush logic, the trope “If you are not with us, you are against us,” defies even a 5th-grade understanding of basic logic. Someone can be anti-US and anti-Ukraine but still not be pro-Russia. There is a wide gulf here.
If you look at the maps from say 1800 to today Ukraine had no recognisable borders , today’s borders are a soviet invention , Lwov is a polish city full of polish speakers , odessa was part of the Austrian Hungarian empire , the Don Bas was part of the Russian imperial empire , Crimea was a near autonomous country until Britain tried to invade and Russia stopped them . the Ottoman invaded many times .
Letting the people decide which country they want to live in is a non starter hense war .
Europe’s anti Russian war mongering has a long and bloody history , the sooner they get over their imperial past the better it will be for all western countries .
NATO is trying to enforce Soviet borders !
If I am correct, the name Ukraine means borderlands in Russian. The borders of Ukraine changed several times in the 20th century, even within the Soviet Union the border of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine was moved east to include the Donbas, which was not part of Ukraine in the Czarist era. Even with the very fluid borders there is a core of people who identify as Ukrainian who fought in the Russian civil war, WW2, and today for independence from Russian dominance. You can’t blame them really for wanting to do so, after the artificial famine of the thirties, and treatment by both sides in WW2. If NATO had not gone east, an Austrian or Finnish (before they joined NATO) style settlement could have been worked out with western countries being semi- honest brokers. But regime change was the game of the moment and the intelligence agencies had too much influence, Russia was weak. After Maidan, Russia lost all trust in the west, if it was to restore it’s security zone of the former soviet republics between Russia and NATO, and restore Russia’s standing as a great power (the ghost of Peter the Great). Russia had to act, but how? Putin took a leaf from the old Soviet play book, counter revolution with tanks, as carried out in Hungary in 56, and Czechoslovakia in 68. The first phase, occupation of Crimea went smoothly. If he had pushed on then, hid tanks could have been in Kiev in days and replaced the revolutionary government installed after Maidan relatively bloodlessly, and presented the west with a faint accomple they could do little about. He did not, and that is the tragedy of Ukraine today. When he rolled the tanks again, the Ukrainians were ready. They let the colomns of tanks roll deep into Ukraine, right up to Kiev, and then cut them to pieces from the flanks. Since then it’s been a war of attrition. Most wars of attrition end with a treaty when one side knows it is close to defeat, which will be Ukraine. However Russia has a habit of having revolutions on the home front when wars become too costly in men and wealth. Russia is far from there yet, but Putin has to be aware Russia will suffer for the Ghost of Peter only so far, history tells him so.
The N-P-K (nitrogen – phosphorus – potassium) ratio of blood is 12-0-0. The N-P-K ratio of bone is 3-15-0. The N-P-K ratio of burned forests is 0-1-3. So after all the “blood and thunder” is over and the global population is back down to 1 billion people, the survivors on the black fertile soils of Ukraine will be able to have a good life.
That piece of land has been fought over for centuries and there are deep hatreds amongst the nations , Belarus lost over a million to Napoleon’s escapades there are no numbers from Poland as i can find but they are probably in the same region as Belarus , the Russian capital was moved from Kiev to Moscow because it was to close to the Hungarians and so very vulnerable ,Napoleon actually made it but scorched earth and the winter destroyed his army same thing happened to Germany . Soviet leadership were pernicious bastards doing great harm then for some reason industralising the don basin . Sweden ,Latvia , Poland all held parts of Russia/ Ukraine at some point ya can’t really blame Russia for not trusting NATO .
@Chris
Looking forward to hearing of your debate with Tom Murphy.
I’ve had a few to and frows with him on his blog.
I find him a bit contradictory, but then again, I guess we are all a bit guilty of that.
This morning I listened to Glenn Diesen’s podcast with Jiang Xueqin on “The Chain Reaction Toward World War III Has Begun.” Glenn Diesen is an academic from Norway who I respect quite a bit. Jiang Xuequin is a history professor and one of the current notables in the blogosphere right now because of his intersection of game theory and geopolitics. Much of what he says is crap – in my opinion – but there is some wheat amongst the chaff. I listed the title of the podcast if anyone wants to watch it.
Towards the end of the podcast, Glenn mentioned the famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men (1925).
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
But then Glenn asks the question, “Is that all we have to hope for? That this all ends with only a whimper instead of a big bang?” This is quite an interesting and arresting thought experiment. Those preparing for a small farm future will see the obvious advantages to a whimper scenario.
Personally, I think we are no longer on the path towards World War III. It seems to me that 1) the US military is just too incompetent and overstretched, 2) Russia will be happy with its gains in eastern Ukraine because of demographic consolidation, 3) the EU is too incompetent and too broke to actually follow through on its threats against Russia, 4) Israel will implode when the US cannot keep it propped up at the current level, 5) Iran has a bigger problem with drought/water issues than any attacks by Israel and the US, 6) China is still trying to dig itself out of its real estate mess, and 7) South Korea and Japan will refuse to participate as patsy proxies in a war with China started by the US in the first island chain. The highest probability in my analysis is a US recession by the end of March 2026 followed by increasing civil unrest. I estimate about 54%. (90% chance of a recession x 60% chance of civil unrest)
By the way, one of the benefits of looking at the US as hypercomplex – instead of just complex – is that the hypercomplexity paradigm allows a more nuanced analysis of how civil unrest unfolds, how accelerating gun sales fuel accelerating unrest, how accelerating crop losses fuel accelerating poverty, etc. Velocity of change and acceleration of velocity are not enough. I suggest people look at the acceleration of acceleration of the velocity of social change – the third derivative – whether you regard it as expansive or prohibitive.
As I have said so often, I go back and forth between Kunstler’s Long Emergency vs. Greer’s Long Descent. Now I am about 60/40 in favor of a long descent. Not with a bang but a whimper.
A whimper is the absolute best-case scenario, but I’m skeptical that we’ll get it.
I think a nuclear war is almost inevitable, which means even if blast and and intense fallout are avoided there will be a big impact on the climate and plant growth. Then there is the effect of even light fallout on forage for livestock, although grass might be edible after a heavy, fallout-free rain. Even dormant grass would keep livestock alive if there were enough of it.
https://iiasa.ac.at/blog/may-2025/looming-shadow-of-nuclear-winter
Everyone should have at least a year or two of basic calories in storage in case of war. My suggestion is white rice in aluminized mylar bags (with oxygen absorber) in buckets. Two lbs per day per person, along with scrounging for fats and protein, should prevent starvation when nothing can be grown. Properly stored, white rice should keep for up to 30 years.
Hypersonics,have altered the ballance,of power , now politicians themselves are at risk no matter,how,deep they dig their bunkers they are vulnerable . The whole mad was based on politician’s survival of a war , the pesants,died in their millions but underground they were safe , no more , Orashenk missiles have dug 500 foot holes in Ukrainian bunkers and thats the small one .
Politicos now have skin in the game .
Yep, it certainly changes the game for the warmongers. Now they have to actually consider (gasp!) the consequences of their delusional mismanagement at a structural level. For those who want a deeper dive into why hypersonics are a game changer, consider that
Force = mass X velocity.
If you look up Newton’s Second Law, you will see that it defines force to be equal to change in momentum (mass times velocity) per change in time. Momentum is defined to be the mass m of an object times its velocity V. In simple terms force is the impact you get, mass is the payload (including the missile itself) and velocity is the speed the missile is traveling in the direction of its flight. This means that the greater speed is itself is a force multiplier. Hypersonic missiles travel at an alleged speed of Mach 27 (27 times the speed of sound) for the Avangard, but the more common metric is Mach 12. Even at Mach 12, radar and air defense systems can neither track nor intercept these missiles. The effect of a hypersonic missile is like a nuclear bomb without the radiation. Both China and Russia have hypersonic missiles that are well tested. The US has none. The US considered these missiles in the 1970s but decided they weren’t worth it. Oops.
The US Navy conducted a test on March 24, 2025 off the coast of Hawaii in which a “purported” hypersonic missile was floated down by 5 parachutes and then fired. The 58-second video clip shows it picking up speed but it does not show it being shot out of the sky. The biggest problem with missile defense systems is that firing a missile against another missile is like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. A hypersonic missile is like a really, really fast bullet. A House of Dynamite (2025), Kathryn Bigelow’s latest paranoid thriller, is based on what happens if this fails.
Another aspect which may or may not be true is that the Russian hypersonic missiles are fitted with nuclear fission engines that can turned on or off like a light bulb. This is the real engineering feat if this is true. We are all used to the long time it takes to turn on and turn off nuclear power plants, so this is hard to believe. If it is indeed true, it means that the Oreshnik and other missiles can hang out for a long, long time before turning on the engine and proceeding to target. Bummer.
Somewhat O/T …
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/misadventures-of-an-accidental-activist
If people haven’t spotted the rapid trend towards top-down tyranny, now is the time to wake up.
Actually, 2020 was a better time, but lots of people seemed oblivious to what was going on. Some were still the same in 2021 … a good time to have been aware that measures weren’t aimed at their health.