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 March 11, 2026 | 25 Comments
Continuing my stately progress through my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, we come next to the Introduction, entitled ‘An Arc of Future Earth’. But first a couple of quick housekeeping notices. Apologies to a couple of commenters whose comments sat for a long while in the moderation queue without me noticing, now approved. I seem to have become increasingly bad at noticing queued comments, replying to emails etc which certainly isn’t through any intention to ignore people. Please accept my past and future apologies for this. I won’t take offence at gentle reminders.
A heads up that I spoke with Adam Greenfield, author of the interesting book Lifehouse that I’ve previously discussed here and in my new book, on his Lifepod podcast. You can keep up to date with podcasts and articles outside of my usual blog on my publications page here.
Talking of my usual blog, I’m a bit up against it in finding the time to write it for various reasons, not least my growing tendency to go AWOL whenever I can. As the world gets increasingly crazy for reasons long charted here, and as I approach semi-retirement, I find myself slowly less inclined toward online commentary. One of the few ways I still find peace is in the mountains, which is where I was last week – seeing several eagles over fells in Torridon and Assynt, to link to the Seeress’s Prophecy that I mentioned in my previous post. As with the seeress, a portent for the future perhaps – but what kind?
Anyway, let’s get into an arc of future Earth, as promised. A version of the book that I had in mind at the planning stage was a deeper description of a future England of the kind that makes an appearance in the Introduction and Chapter 12. But publishing nowadays generally pivots more internationally, and in any case the book became a hybrid with several strands or themes. Hence, I came up with the idea of present and future satellite flights, an arc over the earth from the western USA to western Europe (which encompasses the locations of most of my readers) in order to anticipate the key themes of the book.
To list those themes briefly here, the first was water. Contemporary progress narratives trumpet our human ability to find superior and less ecocidal substitutes for older technologies and resources. These claims are often exaggerated, but people haven’t come up with many suggestions for alternatives to water – except possibly via the sleight of hand in using a lot of energy to move it from where it is to where people want it to be. Ultimately I think the human population will rearrange its current distribution to conform more closely to where the water is in the first place, as implied in this section of the book. I get more pushback against my view that current population distributions in urban (and arid) areas will have to change in the future than almost anything else I say, but I consider this less an argument with me than an argument with the sun, the climate and the Earth’s hydrology that the people making it are ultimately going to lose. So it seems to me unlikely that the population of, say, Los Angeles will continue at its present circa 4 million long into the future. My arc of future Earth was intended to prompt thinking about such things.
More briefly, other themes I broached in the introduction were export agriculture and its uncertain future, the nature of human economic connections and frontiers, and the extreme political centralisation of modern times in the form of national governments which we hardly notice because we so take them for granted. How is this centralisation maintained? What is its future, and what are the alternatives? All things I discuss in the book.
The arc of future Earth section also pointed to human land use choices and necessities: woodland, grassland, cropland and gardens. How are these distributed and why like this? What are the alternatives? What happens if/when they collapse? Ah yes, collapse. Another important theme in the book.
Climate change and energy constraint also feature in the introduction. I address the point that some people don’t think climate change is happening, seeing it as a ruse by centralised governments to buttress their power. We can be confident that centralised governments can and do use any eventuality to buttress their power, and climate change is no different in this respect. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
It does mean, though, that it’s wise to be sceptical about most of the highfaluting techno-fixes for climate change that we’re promised will keep the business as usual show on the road. In the concluding section of the chapter (‘The Hero Is You’) I argue against the hero-worship we direct toward scientists, engineers, great thinkers and doers, visionary politicians and thought leaders who propound our modern myths of progress and solutionism. The corollary of this are neo-Malthusian views that without contemporary scientific and corporate agriculture people would starve. A lot of people certainly would starve if these kinds of agriculture rapidly disintegrated, which could easily happen – but they’d starve because these kinds of agriculture have razed other kinds to the ground and made themselves the only game in town. I argue in the book that we have to start trying to be the heroes of our own stories – individually, in families and households, in local communities – by rebuilding alternative bases of livelihood and wellbeing.
I don’t think anything is more important than challenging the notion that ‘they’ will solve the current poly-crisis and keep people safe and fed via existing and new technologies, economic policies and political negotiation. They won’t. It’s time for ordinary people to try to do it for themselves.
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“I argue in the book that we have to start trying to be the heroes of our own stories – individually, in families and households, in local communities – by rebuilding alternative bases of livelihood and wellbeing.”
Yes! It’s a lot of work, but somebody’s got to do it, and there’s nobody better suited for the role.
Work can be rewarding, of course, but today there are many non-work options for rewards in the dominant culture. The opportunities for natural releases of dopamine and oxytocin (for example) would need to transition back to real life work, from online activities and video games.
I bring up video games because I’m sort of familiar with a popular series of farm simulation role-playing games known as “Story of Seasons” or “Harvest Moon”. The premise of the game is that the player inherits a farm.
“The primary objective is to restore and maintain a farm that has fallen into disrepair. The player decides how to allocate time between daily tasks, such as clearing land, planting crops, selling harvests, raising livestock, attending festivals, building relationships with villagers, and foraging.”
“For vegetables to develop, they must receive water each day; lack of water does not kill crops, but prevents them from growing. Animals must be fed once a day to keep them producing. Although the only care that chickens require is feeding, cows must be talked to frequently, brushed, and milked to retain their health. A cow may become sick if it is not fed for one day, which may lead to death if ignored. Chickens may die if left outside, where they can be blown away in a storm or eaten by wild dogs. After dark, the only business in town that the player can access is the bar, where a number of non-player characters gather to drink and talk.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_(video_game)
[first version, released 1996]
Living in a city, I’ve seen a teenager play this game on a near-daily basis, keeping the virtual farm going, and moving on to upgraded versions as they became available. Real life garden beds were not so appealing at the time.
The most popular “Harvest Moon” variant for awhile now has been Stardew Valley which is probably what you saw. I did try playing it and while I liked the farming loop I don’t find it challenging/realistic enough. One of my many ideas was try to make a version that would keep the addictive gameplay loop but with a more gritty feel and maybe even some education thrown in. It’s not exactly in my technical wheelhouse to make, but the main limiting factor is time…
I don’t think I wished you a happy new year – please let me do so now!
I argue in the book that we have to start trying to be the heroes of our own stories
Y’know you really do sound like John Michael Greer when you say that kind of thing …
Just teasing of course, but many of your themes and their takeup in the commentary are now long familiar to me from multiple sources. Reading them is starting to feel like a form of procrastination. I’m only a few years older than yourself and am horribly aware that I’ve got to use the years that are probably left to me carefully. Even though I’m not excessively online, relatively speaking, I still think I spend too much time on the internet, so I’m giving blog commenting a rest for now and wanted to say “au revoir”. And on that point, here’s a final thought:
You yourself said I find myself slowly less inclined toward online commentary and you apologised for the intermittency of your posts. I think the problem with the blog form, unlike the traditional book, is that it has no logical endpoint. But blogs do have an end, I’ve noticed, even if it’s just gradual attentuation.
I argue in the book that we have to start trying to be the heroes of our own stories – individually, in families and households, in local communities – by rebuilding alternative bases of livelihood and wellbeing.
I’m going to be a bit difficult about this and say that we don’t necessarily need to be heroes, but we do need to reclaim agency, and to ask whether the hero archetype is really the one we should be attempting to inhabit.
I strongly agree about rebuilding local bases of livelihood and wellbeing! I am just wondering if you think other archetypes might better serve our communities. Possibly this is more relevant to conversations I’ve been having about rest and Sabbath and sufficiency and work and heroism in my own context than it is to your book… possibly not.
As the ratchet tightens, I am watching a lot of would-be heroes get burned out, sometimes for causes that seem to me to be of no great consequence in the grand scheme of things. That doesn’t mean there is no place for heroism or that we aren’t called, at times, to make sacrifices; but I think that rushing in, cape flying in the breeze and a silly brass fanfare playing in the background, can sometimes do more harm than good.
“I argue in the book that we have to start trying to be the heroes of our own stories – individually, in families and households, in local communities – by rebuilding alternative bases of livelihood and wellbeing.”
Does this mean that you have given up on collective political action and reform? If not, the workload is going to be impressive – create an alternative base of livelihood and also devote time and energy to political persuasion and action.
I’m of an age where farm, family obligations and energy levels limit my political participation to making the occasional donation and writing the occasional blog comment. I’ll never do what you have already done by writing your books.
With what’s now going on in the world, I think it’s about time to just hunker down and wait.
PS The greater Los Angeles metro area has over 18 million people. All of them are dependent on distant water sources. Only about 10% of the water used is sourced locally.
Thanks Joe.
I was going to mention the population of southern California being much greater than just the city (or county) of Los Angeles. When I was growing up there, the population was maybe a third or a quarter of what it is now, and even then it seemed crazy. Water has always been the limiting factor.
But the weather is nice.
A professor at UCLA (who grew up in rural California and France) has a vision for California which is similar to Chris Smaje’s Small Farm Future.
“For a Resilient Agriculture in California: Looking Back to Move Forward”
by Stephanie Pincetl, 2022
https://www.spincetl.com/home/2022/7/31/for-a-resilient-agriculture-in-california-looking-back-to-move-forward
Some snippets:
“Fundamental to the kind of transition described above – to low to no hydrocarbon inputs, and low to no irrigation – will need to be a vast change in land holdings. Large corporate farms will be broken up into small units…”
“Going forward, the small farm will be necessary for new reasons beyond the exigencies of the Anthropocene: the small farm is of a scale that is highly productive due to intensive agricultural practices… small farms will enable a peasantry whose dexterity and intelligence supplemented with appropriately scaled machinery, local knowledge and mixed cropping methods, to create a vibrant new agricultural regime in the state.”
“Cities like Los Angeles will continue to exist, but will be considerably smaller, and local land will be reclaimed in places for agriculture”.
I presume of the 18 million folks living in LA, at least a few have considered all the above and made efforts to build some resilience into their lifestyles?
Just a cursory look online turned up this organisation: https://www.lagardencouncil.org. They represent 47 community gardens in Los Angeles County. That seems like a reasonable start. I’d presume more people will become involved in these gardens and set up their own as household budgets come under further pressure. No one wants to feel like they’re struggling alone.
In the coming decades I expect many large North American cities will start to look like Detroit, with the affluent leaving for greener pastures, leaving the suburbs largely vacant for the remaining underclasses. The dried up lawns will offer a half-decent baseline for terraforming the 20th century city.
Yes, many southern Californians have considered the environmental craziness of the place. I know I did, and that’s one of many reasons why I live in Kansas now.
A lifestyle change in place isn’t going to do enough to matter in the long run.
But there’s fun literature about the end game – famously, Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’, but probably my favorite is Claire Vaye Watkins’ “Gold Fame Citrus”
I’m still quite puzzled about why folks are poo-pooing Southern Californian climate. I’ve spent all of 48 hours in LA and most of it at LAX so can’t say I’ve got much first-hand experience, but I thought it was a mediterranean climate, so not inherently unsuitable for subsistence farming? I guess all the modern human activity has disturbed the natural climate somewhat (maybe an understatement) but I expect the wealth will eventually disappear from the region along with all the cars and trucks, leaving an environment similar to pre-modern times (considerably more toxic of course – and then there’s climate change too).
I also gather that indigenous people got on okay in Southern California for some time.
Perhaps I have too romantic an outlook on the place.
In both of those books there is, I think, some acknowledgement that one’s chances are very poor if one is entirely alone, and this is what bothers me about some (not all, and certainly not Chris’s) re-ruralization narratives.
I think a basic tension we rehearse a lot in comments on this blog is that between the appropriate scale at which to calculate local carrying capacity, and the point at which having fewer people within shouting distance means you have fewer labourers, fewer creative agents who can solve problems, fewer people who hold specialist skills, and so on. I think seeing others only as competitors for resources rather than as potential collaborators is partly a side effect of the individualism that crapitalism sells to us.
That said, I have plenty of first hand experience of what happens when someone with some free time and some general skills and a sense of duty to ones fellow humans and the rest of Creation gets involved in an under-resourced community, at least in an urban setting. In my case I consider it a form of transferring wealth from the crapitalists who pay my spouse to fix spreadsheets, and the people affected, albeit somewhat indirectly, by the actions of those crapitalists. But the result is that we need some serious continuity planning to maintain viability if I leave said community (which is on the table, and for the best of reasons; I’ll drop a comment here probably in mid-May with more news if people are interested). If not for the capitalist exploitation then “working myself out of a job because the community resources are developed enough to not need me any more” would be the goal, but as it is any bootstrap-lifting is immediately swallowed up and all we can really do is keep people alive. So my labour is unpaid, and comprises gardening, safeguarding, project management and planning, carpentry (serviceable rather than pretty) and other DIY, fundraising, assisting with bookkeeping, pastoral care, training and management of other volunteers, some management of paid office holders who are not my direct reports, musical leadership, conflict de-escalation, a whole bunch of stuff I will file under “liturgical gubbins” that is invisible to most people (other sacristy mice will understand), and so on and so forth.
And in all of this work which I have grown to love dearly, I am acutely aware that I cannot do the work alone, even if my own initiative and agency is invaluable. Some of my reaction against the standard heroism tropes (which, again, are not what Chris meant!) is because when I see that kind of heroism in people in my line of work, whether voluntary or paid, I see communities disempowered and well-meaning people headed for burnout.
I digress (as usual). But I think… catastrophe is not evenly distributed, some places will experience collapse and others merely crumbling, and that collapse and crumbling will look different in different places. That doesn’t mean moving is never the right option, just that it isn’t usually the only viable option; that doesn’t mean all cities will become city-states or collections of villages or entirely empty, but it doesn’t mean none of them will.
I suspect the answer to “how many people in a given settlement is the best number?” is likely something around “as many as the local ecosystem will support”, possibly minus some percentage to avoid the sharp fluctuations that can be brought on my famine, disease and so on when wla given population is too close to carrying capacity (…masting behaviour, if you will). And that absolutely will be driven by things like water and sunlight which are difficult to transport or argue with; but it will also be influenced by trade routes and terrain and soil quality and altitude, by fish die-off and hurricanes and earthquakes, by meteorite impacts and solar flares. It will be influenced by which ideas are lying around and how collapse/crumbling/catastrophe is distributed. It is complex.
That complexity doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to have a good guess, of course; water shortage is more likely than meteorite impact in most localities! But I think it is part of why it is so difficult to decide exactly what to do, so difficult to give prescriptive advice beyond “do what you can with what you have where you are”.
@Tim B:
Have a look at:
– water availability compared to the existing population
– what subsistence farming would look like with much higher summer temperatures
@Tim B,
Ha! Yes, southern California climate is perfect. That’s the problem. Or at least one of the problems. It is indeed a Mediterranean climate – rarely freezing, and with coastal cooling in the summer. The kind of climate our species evolved in. So everybody wants to live there.
And yes, the pre-European natives did quite well there. They were wealthy, with acorns and deer and plentiful fish. But the estimate I remember is that there were less than 100,000 natives in what is now the greater Los Angeles / Orange County area. So the population has multiplied by roughly 200x.
But the thing most people (even those living there) don’t think about is that it doesn’t rain in California during the growing season. Southern California gets less than a half meter of rain per year, and most of that lands in February. Even when I lived in northern California and we got 2 meters of rain per year, it landed between November and March.
That is why the native agriculture centered on perennial oaks. That is also why all of current California agriculture is irrigated.
If you fly into San Francisco, you can look down as you cross the Sierra Nevada, and you will see that every single river and stream flowing west out of the mountains is dammed for a reservoir. What you don’t see is that every stream south of Bishop that flows east out of the mountains is collected into an aqueduct to serve Los Angeles.
As with so many things, it’s a problem of scale.
In his essay The Future of Agriculture, Wendell Berry cautions against action on a heroic scale when asking what can we do in addressing the problems of our time, before going on to underscore the crucial role of localism, among other things. I’m sure this is largely what Chris is pointing to, a kind of Local Heroism, as expertly scored here by Mark Knopfler:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DB-uJ0TxKQ&list=RD3DB-uJ0TxKQ&start_radio=1
There is a report today that says 1/3’rd of americans are expecting some kind of complete disaster in their lifetime , 20% of these expect the second coming , the rest are GW adherents , energy failure and war .
My idea of “heroism” is to gift some garlic to the new neighbour who is setting up a garden, along with a copy of a growing book that I treat as my “bible” (I bought a new one from the local bookstore). Today I volunteered at the local sustainable living festival, mostly moving stuff around. Does that count? But how to encourage other people, beyond just the “humble brag”? I think this stuff can go a long way but maybe not long enough. I stand prepared for a breakdown but not hoping for it, I’m lucky to live in a small city with chances of pulling it together, but it will be hard work. My main preparation has been to build a small library, collect skills, knowledge and tools, build connections but that’s where I’m weakest but probably the most important. There was a talk about precision fermentation today and interesting back and forth later with the “slow food” guy. I think exponentials make it possible, are they heroes too?
Nathan, what’s your growing bible?
Interesting comments as ever, thank you.
To Martin – well, au revoir too and thanks for your funny and thought-provoking, if occasional, comments. I have been thinking a little about the future of this blog and I’ll be seeking some thoughts about it, but I plan to work my way through my posts about ‘Finding Lights…’ first. I agree that blogs can and maybe should have endpoints, and I do have a sense of writing the same kind of stuff on repeat with it now. The counter-position is that globally and locally we’re barely anywhere nearer the kind of societies or even public discussions about them than we were when I started writing it thirteen years ago, so perhaps there’s a case for continuing to fight the good fight. Regarding Greer, it’s a long time since I’ve read him, but yes we share a lot of common ground – perhaps even more so now than when I wrote my critique of him. I still think his Trump issues went to his head in a bad way, however.
Steve L – thanks for the Stephanie Pincentl reminder. And also for the game analysis. The human ability to virtualise our worlds, long predating the video game, may prove our undoing.
Thanks Joe, Kathryn, Nathan and Simon for your remarks about heroes. There’s a more specific model of the hero in the form of the acclaimed war hero, who makes stuff happen in a way that others do not. Our modern versions of science, technology and progress are versions of this. I had in mind a more capacious sense of personal and local agency. I wrote in ‘Finding Lights…’ “The model is that you yourself can learn the skills to live well in the place you call home by working to generate your livelihood and that this work, this way of being, *is* your culture, of which you are an important bearer. If there’s a hero in this story, it’s you. And it’s everyone else at the same time” (p.13).
I illustrated this by comparing a Native American story about an ordinary girl who taught her people how to coexist with salmon with Western hero stories about saviours. Although we do also have literary traditions in which purportedly high up and supposedly heroic people are revealed to be less heroic than ordinary low-born folk. The high-born/low-born ambiguities in the stories of people like Jesus Christ are interesting in that respect. I’ve written previously about different kinds of ‘heroic’ cultural protagonists, one of them being the frugal and self-reliant farmer-householder. Perhaps I’ll come back to this at some point.
Anyway, long story short is that yes Nathan is heroic, and yes Joe I’ve given up on collective political action at the level of centralised government, but definitely not at more local levels. A question I’m often asked when I give talks is ‘if you were president/prime minister/agriculture minister what actions would you take to realise your small farm vision?’ Other than ‘resign’ I don’t always feel I have the best answers to that. Interested in people’s views.
‘if you were president/prime minister/agriculture minister what actions would you take to realise your small farm vision?’
Well, having achieved that position, there must already be significant public support for your political platform or manifesto, so you could spell out what actions that manifesto would entail.
The question of land availability and access is a big issue that’s been brought up here many times, and is probably a good place to start. The aforementioned Stephanie Pincetl described it as a fundamental and challenging issue for California’s agricultural transition, and suggests that corporate landowners could be compensated at pre-(government-funded)-development values, perhaps after deducting the projected costs of remediating any environmental damages.
“One of the most challenging issues, fundamental to the type of transition described above, will be the question of corporate large-scale land holdings and the price of land. With dramatically less water available, and the shift away from hydrocarbon agriculture, land prices may plummet on their own, but it may also be that big farms will break up as they will no longer be viable with no water and the inability to cultivate lands using largescale, fossil fuel intensive machinery. Corporate owners might be compensated, but at the pre-water development land costs, and perhaps subtracting the cost of land and water remediation necessary…”
https://www.spincetl.com/home/2022/7/31/for-a-resilient-agriculture-in-california-looking-back-to-move-forward
Hi Chris
If you were elected Prime minister tomorrow I would propose a policy that you could implement, that of the dissolution of the aristocracy! On similar lines to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. The aristocracy no longer provide any useful military or political function but hold a lot of land that is technically the crown’s, the lords being vassals of the crown. The aristocracy still occupy one third of the UK, usually the best land in England and the worst in Scotland (highland shooting estates). The dissolved estates can be broken up and let out or sold, preferably in small farm parcels. The redundant aristocracy can be given a small pension to live out their days as where the monks in King Henry ‘s time, say in quiet obscurity in Hemel Hempstead. Half in jest Chris.
The ” aristocracy ” hold the best land in England because they keep it that way ,they are in it for the long game the land is better with every generation ,not strip mined as it is with corporate ” farming ” . the land is rented out with a hole hat of doo’s and dont’ s with the treat of eviction if they contravene the contract ,
Thanks for the clarification/reiteration of the difference between the hero archetype I had in mind and your more expansive use of the word in ‘Finding Lights’.
I am certainly a fan of learning the skills to live well locally. Perhaps that’s partly a side effect of knowing that I cannot possibly buy my way to any kind of stability: we just can’t afford to purchase suitable land. At least learning how to feed people is an option that’s available to me.
A favorite saying of mine ( of obscure origin) is “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.
I take two things from this. One is that the teacher has always been there, but was not visible to the student, until some event or newly triggered awareness lets them finally see and reach for this source of knowledge.
The second thing is- what must the teacher feel in all that time of waiting, wondering if their chance to share and pass on their hard won knowledge will ever come?
These days, with near daily slaps upside of the head, one wonders why the myriad students have not gotten that trigger. Too much ease and distraction so far in our cosseted nation, but I continue to hope the step change will occur in time to help at least some get to a new level of awareness before it’s pointless.
And- I hope you hang in there at some level to be ready for when the proverbial student perks their head up, and says, “oh s***, I need to change”.
Various comment threads above, thank you. A quick response here to all of them.
An interesting debate initiated by Tim B about California. In my arc of future Earth intro I do talk about water adaptations of local folks in California & the American west generally – but as per Eric’s comments I doubt these will be enough to maintain current population levels, so I think the area is facing population decline, which can manifest in various ways – some nicer than others. Part of my shtick is simply that we should we talking about this kind of thing much more than we are.
Yes, Mediterranean climates are compatible with an agrarian life. Some parts of California and the American west are more desert than Mediterranean, however. And if you add the effects of climate change it could get nasty (already has with the wildfires…) Water is a big issue in any case in Mediterranean climates. Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources are worth a watch! Or Marc Reisner’s book Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water – an old one, but still relevant, I think. Likewise Elinor Ostrom on commons successes and failures around water in the American west.
Premodern cultures achieved some pretty impressive feats of water engineering, but I’m not sure that the likes of the Hoover Dam and the Ogallala aquifer drawdown have a long-term future. In a future of smaller-scale, more localised surface water management I think we’ll see fewer people in the US southwest, and more in parts of the Midwest and northeast. That, at any rate, is a thesis I pursue in the book.
Thanks to Steve L, Philip & Diogenes for the discussion about land and land reform. Yes, I do try to make the case for this in my writing and speaking – although it’s not something that tends to get people elected. Economic growth with everyone getting richer plays more easily with the powerful than the idea of sharing out the existing pie more fairly, but I’m basically in favour of the latter and hence Philip’s suggestion. Diogenes has a point that aristocratic landownership with a long-term stake in the land isn’t necessarily the worst way to steward the land. However, I prefer the distributist approach in which everyone can be their own aristocrat.
The problem with land reform alone as a political programme is that it only fully makes sense within a culture of relatively local agrarian sufficiency, which we don’t have. It’s hard for politicians to legislate about what kind of culture people should have, which is perhaps why I struggle with the question. Ultimately, I think people will come to that kind of culture, but the path to getting there could be unpleasant.
In the meantime, I salute those like Kathryn who are doing what they can within unpropitious present circumstances (I for one am definitely interested to hear your news Kathryn!). Kathryn writes “I cannot possibly buy my way to any kind of stability”. Yes – and I argue explicitly in the book that that holds true at the general societal level, as well as for most individuals.
Thanks also to Steve C for the encouragement to keep on keeping on.
All across the middle east draw down is becoming a problem , Saudi grew wheat for around ten years then the wells ran dry , Egypt has a problem with the Ethiopia daming the blue Nile , Pakistan , Afghanistan have too many people and not enough water ,Iran is rationing , across the MENA at least half a billion people are relying on wells that are running dry .