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 21, 2026 | 127 Comments
Diverting briefly from my blog cycle about my recent book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, here I’m going to continue my polite discussion with Tom Murphy about the human condition past, present and future – and, more specifically, about the place of foraging (gathering and hunting) vis-à-vis farming in it. My thanks to Tom for the discussion, which has helped clarify my thinking. I’m still wrestling with the issues, though, and I think Tom makes a lot of good points.
For info, I’m going to be offline during the coming week, but I’ll aim to reply to any comments here during the following one. Talking of comments, another thing I’m wrestling with is keeping comments here adequately polite and conversational. I confess I’ve been combative myself in online debate from time to time, but it’s not really a style I want to encourage or feel much inclined to respond to now. Feedback on this exchange would be welcome.
Anyway, onward to the debate with Tom. Our discussion began here and continued here. One reason it’s been polite is probably that we agree on a lot of things, and one thing we agree on is, in Tom’s words, that “whatever transition lies ahead will certainly continue to involve humans growing food for many generations.”
In a sense, we could end the discussion right there. My overriding concern is precisely with this transition – with how we switch by design or default over the next few generations from our present anti-human and anti-nature practices, including our food-growing practices, toward practices that might cause less damage to human and other lives. But there are some differences between Tom and I which I’ve found intellectually interesting in helping me to clarify my thinking about agrarian history. They also bear on how we might succeed, or fail, to transition out of our present destructive, high-energy ways. And so here I’m going to pick up the trail of this discussion again. Apologies for a rather long essay, but I hope it might hold some interest.
For Tom, any form of agrarianism seems to figure at best as a necessary evil, while for my part I don’t see all its forms (and there are many) as necessarily evil. Tom evinces some suspicions about my standpoint in this respect:
I will disclose the concern that Chris is bodily committed to agrarian pursuits as his life’s purpose—in a way that may make it more difficult to land in a place disparaging agricultural practices entirely. The Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
To make a seemingly nit-picking objection to the appropriateness of the Sinclair quote, which actually is critical to my overall argument: few farmers in the past or still today, including me, receive a ‘salary’. Indeed, relatively few people of any kind worldwide were salaried until a century or so ago. Salaries are creatures of centralised bureaucratic states and empires, and I find Tom and some of his commenters somewhat lacking in their analysis of such states. Instead, they err toward a more generalised opposition to farming writ large. The lack of attention to the difference between agrarianism and agrarian empires – it’s all the same right? The one led to the other. No! It’s more complicated… – seems to me a weakness in their argument, as I shall try to explain shortly.
The persistence of self-employment within global agriculture despite the wider wage-ification of employment is interesting, although perhaps dwindling somewhat in the face of increasing corporate domination. Historically it represents the freeriding of centralised states on farmers’ economic and ecological risk – a separation between statism and agrarianism that’s perhaps easier to see when you don’t command a salary. It’s also relevant to understanding political history and its relation to farming.
As to my personal standpoint, Tom’s objection is a variant of a pushback I often get, along the lines of “Small-scale farmer advocates for more small-scale farming – what a surprise!” But I’m not advocating small-scale farming because I’m a small-scale farmer. It’s the other way around. I came to see small-scale farming as a future necessity whether I liked it or not, so I opted to be, or try to be, a small-scale farmer (I’m still working on it – I’m just a trainee). Inasmuch as all of us, again in Tom’s words, “are stuck on agricultural support” I think it’s a good idea for us to farm, garden or forage for our own food as best we can within the daily practical limitations we face, and my advocacy is geared around trying to reduce those limitations so that more of us can better learn to become native to our places. For the avoidance of doubt, like most farmers of all kinds and scales, I’ve never made much money at it, so I have no skin in that particular game. Salary – I wish!
It’s tempting to turn the tables on this argument. I don’t want to overdo it by presenting myself as a rugged man of action, but I get the sense that some people of the ‘foragers not farmers’ persuasion – not necessarily Tom, I wouldn’t know – don’t have much practical experience of doing either. Foraging and farming then easily become abstractions in a rather rarified debate that modernist philosophy is having with itself. I believe it would be better to ground it in a more practical ecology, and I’ll come back to this.
Anyway, moving now to the meat of the discussion, I’m going to organise it under four headings: (1) Historical timelines (2) Foraging and Farming (3) The agrarian-imperial state (4) Ecology and localism.
Tom, and some of his commenters, take the view that humans lived as foragers for hundreds of thousands of years with no major global impacts, then around 10,000 years ago came up with agriculture and – bang! – almost before we knew it, we’re here in the 21st century facing apocalypse. Hence, the burden of suspicion for our present woes falls on agriculture.
I think there’s some merit to this view. Agriculture has certainly been a big push downstream during our time on the river and has been a necessary if not sufficient condition for some of the other pushes.
I don’t know if Tom would accept the concept of ‘necessary but not sufficient condition’. He invokes various arguments about dualism, determinism and deep history that I’m not sure I fully understand and that aren’t really my thing. I’ve learned a lot from his physics, but I’m not so sure about his metaphysics. I do admire his willingness to shift gears between them in his thinking, though – so many of us get stuck in received worldviews.
Anyway, Tom criticises the human brain’s overestimation of its capacity to understand things, but I wonder if his own philosophy falls foul of this. If I’ve understood correctly, he opposes a dualism that separates human mind from the physical universe and manifests in ideas like a godlike human ability to escape biophysical and ecological constraints and to become the masters of our own story. I agree those ideas are problematic, but I’m not convinced that to criticise them it’s necessary to opt for a radical monism where there’s only a kind of ‘all-ness’ to the universe in which humans can raise no claims. As I see it, we have choices – always under constraints, and always in ignorance of their full consequences – but choices all the same.
Tom’s general position seems to be that we humans don’t get to arbitrate what works and what’s true or right – only the universe gets to do that, over deep time. Hence, we can’t come to any conclusions about the long-term plausibility of agriculture, with its current paltry 10,000-year datapoint. Fair enough, I guess. But then we certainly can’t yet make firm conclusions about its implausibility. We probably can make some at least tentative conclusions that contemporary fossil-fuelled, agro-chemical enabled agriculture is implausible in the long-term. Tom’s view seems to be that if you have any kind of agriculture, then eventually you’ll get that kind of agriculture – it’s an almost Calvinist, albeit secular, sense of predetermination and the Fall in which the course of future human depravity is always already set by that which preceded it. What is, is all. This seems axiomatic for him, but he doesn’t really justify it.
About that 10,000-year datapoint. And about determinism too … In my previous comment I mentioned the archaeological site of Ohalo, which arguably pushes agricultural origins back at least to 23,000 years ago. Tom is dismissive of its relevance, calling it an ‘extreme outlier’. I doubt it. Given the patchiness of the archaeological record and the impermanence of organic remains, it seems to me unlikely that Ohalo is a unique outlier or represents the oldest example of agriculture. This matters because it may help point to the overly deterministic or teleological bent in Tom’s and some of his commenters’ view of agriculture – along the lines that once somebody had figured out how to save and select seeds it was only a matter of before we had nuclear weapons, the Burj Khalifa, dangerous climate change or whatever.
But why? People seem to have had a suite of techniques available to them for selectively favouring their preferred habitats for a pretty long time without fouling their own nest in the way we’ve done in recent decades. I’m not saying it’s impossible to draw a line from agricultural origins to our present predicaments, but it surely needs to be drawn with finer detail than a simple identity of agriculture with ultimate overshoot and collapse.
Another example: sugarcane was probably domesticated in New Guinea about 10,000 years ago by people whose descendants continued to forage wild food as well as to garden and raise livestock. Their societies – while quite violent and predatory in their own way – remained politically localised and never became violently expansionist polities oriented to economic growth. The domesticated sugarcane that they’d developed did, however, expand globally. Its cultivation in the Caribbean by enslaved people violently expropriated from West Africa was arguably a key condition for the emergence of the modern capitalist world system initially anchored in Europe via its slave trade. But given the more innocent history of sugarcane in New Guinea, you can’t really put this down to the crop itself. The ecology of human political relationships is a more important historical driver than the ecology of crop domestication.
People often approach such examples by trying to identify why the development of capitalism and the modern state was ‘blocked’ in places like New Guinea. But this teleological approach begs the question. Instead of asking why sugar capitalism didn’t develop in New Guinea – why should it have done? – it’s better to ask why it did develop in the North Atlantic.
One advantage of framing the question this way is that it focuses attention where it most needs focusing. Tom and other commenters suggest that we can’t attribute present troubles only to the capitalism that emerged in the post-medieval world, subsequently turbocharged by fossil fuels. Agreed – there are always antecedents. But let us give discredit where it’s due. In homing in on the fateful decisions made by the hapless first farmers as they messed around with seed selection and stone sickles, there’s a risk of excusing the merchant adventurers, slaveholders, colonial statesmen and fossil energy mavens of later eras as if they were mere followers of fashions long established in the Neolithic. They weren’t.
Still, all that said we come back to fact with which I opened this section – people were around a long time without apparently pulling the rug from under their feet as we’ve done in recent post-foraging times. Surely farming must have something to do with it? Yes, no doubt. But I think we need to probe deeper into exactly what, rather than just blaming farming in general.
Perhaps too we should avoid imputing such prelapsarian innocence to foraging peoples of preagricultural times. Another way of framing the long sojourn of our foraging forebears within Earth’s ecological guardrails might be to suggest it wasn’t because they were particularly respectful of those guardrails. From small ancestral populations in Africa with fairly basic toolkits they fanned out across the world, learning how to prosper in new bioregions, sometimes over-exploiting local niches, facing numerous setbacks including huge ones like ice ages and volcanic winters, only slowly able to build what we now call ‘capital’ – technical and ecological knowledge, forms of social organisation and so on. It’s no surprise that it took a long time before they had much global ecological impact, nor that things speeded up as the capital endowment they’d painstakingly accumulated over millennia grew and solidified.
Let’s now look more closely at these two types we’ve been discussing, the forager and the farmer.
Commenter Kathryn asked Tom, “As a forager and gardener, I am curious where you draw the line between agriculture and gathering.” To which he replied, “This may seem like a cop-out, but I don’t believe any of us have the capacity or authority to establish bright lines of the sort you ask me to provide. Any such line would surely be contextual to a locale and how its ecology functions: how nutrients move, how fragile or robust soils are, etc. Judgment comes via evolutionary success or failure, and the sixth mass extinction has my attention.”
With due respect, I do think this is a cop out. If you make a strong distinction between foraging and farming and claim that only the former is a good long-haul bet, then surely you need some working definition of what their differences are, which one might expect to be more than contextual. Yet I think Tom’s right: the differences are basically contextual, which is somewhat undermining of the strong contrast he draws between the two.
I’ll give a few examples of such contexts, starting with my own minor exploits as a forager of animal quarry in my local habitat – quarry that’s limited to a couple of introduced species that cause a lot of damage to trees, crops and/or native wildlife. Sometimes I hunt these species using the high-tech modern contrivance of a gun. When I’m out with it, I often feel attuned differently to my surroundings, albeit I’m sure in a rather pitiful, ersatz, modern way. Nevertheless, my ears are pricked and I’m in the moment, attentive to small signs and sounds. However, I’ve had more success as a trapper than a hunter, using (humane) low-tech live traps of the kind that foraging peoples have used since time immemorial. When trapping, I have more of what I’d call an agrarian mindset – where should I place this, how should I best set it up, how can I as an outsider best understand what’s going on in the surrounding ecology so that I can nudge things in the direction I want.
I learned how to make one successful trap design when somebody showed me how, and then – using nothing but words from my mouth – I taught somebody else how to make it in less than a minute. I mention this because Tom is quite dismissive of my arguments about abstraction being a human superpower that can advantage us over other animals, reserving his contempt for things like writing and money. Yes, these latter are powerful and dangerous forms of abstraction, but so is the spoken word. Tom writes “Most dangerous is the impression of separateness and supremacy (a metaphysical dualism) that can be instilled by the agricultural deviation. The genie escapes from the bottle…” But as I see it that genie escaped long before ‘the agricultural deviation’ and you can see it among those who trap prey or speak words. It’s intrinsic to being human.
I’ll come back to this in a moment, but let’s first consider some other examples. The Inuit developed whale hunting skills using kayaks, detachable harpoons and floats which by any standards other than perhaps our overdeveloped digital modernity is an incredibly sophisticated technology based on a lot of thoughtful abstraction about how a puny human interloper not long arrived from Africa can outwit an indigenous Arctic behemoth. It seems that the Inuit supplanted a prior Arctic society, the mysterious Dorset people, who didn’t have whale hunting technology but had been technological enough to cope with that harshly challenging environment for many preceding centuries.
In recent years, the scholarly term ‘immediate return’ has been applied to foraging societies, as opposed to the supposedly ‘delayed return’ approach of agrarian societies – not that there’s anything very delayed return about agrarian-based modern life. I can’t help feeling that it does a disservice to the complexity of forager thinking, as in the Inuit whaling example. The main way that Inuit whalers were an immediate return society was that if the whalers were successful and returned with meat, they had an immediate problem of what to do with it all. To which the answer was complex social organisation – but again without an expansionary state emerging.
One way in which the ‘immediate return’ idea is used is to distinguish between apparently more complex, hierarchical, internally differentiated and surplus-accumulating forager societies – hence, not immediate return societies – from more egalitarian forager societies less inclined to accumulate much surplus (as I’ve mentioned previously, ‘surplus’ is a tricky word which has to be handled with care – more on that another time, perhaps). I’m not saying there’s no value to the distinction, but when it comes to debates like this one with Tom there’s a risk of invoking these latter societies as the ‘real’, uncorrupted foragers, and the pro-forager argument then becomes a version of the ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy which probably tells us more about the people making the argument than it does about foraging as a way of making a long-term livelihood.
Indeed, there’s a reductio ad absurdum that emerges from strong arguments against human separateness from nature in which we’d have to dispense with language (written or spoken), control of fire (and thence cooking, confounding our attenuated guts), embodied material culture and so on. Whatever its merits, and despite my inveterate enthusiasm for lost causes, that just isn’t going to happen. Homo sapiens was born empty bottle in hand and the genie already at large. We have powers like language and control of fire that are essentially part of our natal human package. They can be used to destructive ends, and we can choose to so use them or not. Choosing not to use them is hard, but not as hard as trying not to have them.
In any case, such arguments seem to me an overreaction to our admittedly wanton present ways. There are times when Tom, and probably more so some of his commenters, write almost as if any discernible ecological impact counts as evidence against agrarian humanity. We don’t hold other keystone species to this standard – we don’t charge elephants, beavers, large wild ungulates or for that matter wildfires with the crime of acting against nature. Along with humans, all these forces tend to act on the woodland-grassland frontier in favour of the latter, but there’s no law of nature that says woodland is better than grassland. Tom writes:
When the world still ran on renewable energy, the forests of Europe and Britain were denuded. The solar/wind-powered British navy could no longer sustain its ship-building requirements using domestic timber, beginning to source prime wood from around the world
…which is true enough. But the British navy was a relative latecomer whose core business was the antithesis of living a sustainable, local, land-based life. More to the point is whether the denudation of British forests by Neolithic farmers – or the denudation of any kind of nature by local livelihood-makers of whatever kind, anywhere – is always intrinsically unsustainable. Not necessarily, I’d argue (incidentally, William Bond’s book Open Ecosystems: Ecology and Evolution Beyond the Forest Edge is a good corrective to the contemporary tendency to equate trees with pristine ecosystems). The answer depends partly upon what kind of alternative biota arises from the denudation, and upon the rate of denudation.
On the latter point, the foraging mode of livelihood-making is no defence per se against the loss of ecological guardrails. For example, many of the frontline workers in the North American fur trade, made possible among other forces by the British navy, were indigenous foraging peoples using their historic skills to supply furs (while some mixed foraging with farming, and switched more into foraging mode with the advent of the fur trade). Their work resulted in huge wildlife declines. I don’t say this to blame these people or throw shade on foraging, but again to emphasise that foraging lifeways aren’t necessarily secured behind an ecological guardrail. Human destructiveness isn’t about foraging vs farming but about how methods of production are articulated within wider relationships. Sure, those wider relationships were agriculturally enabled, but that’s not really relevant if the argument is that foraging represents an enduringly ecological way of being.
Meanwhile, here in Britain there’s been an enormous loss of wildlife diversity and abundance over just the course of my own few decades on Earth, even though the land has been farmed for millennia. There are various reasons for this, but the directly agricultural ones include things like the switch from hay to silage and from spring to autumn cereals, the advent of herbicides like glyphosate and thus the loss of arable ‘weeds’, and the engrossment of fields at the expense of hedges. It would be easy in principle to reverse this, though no doubt politically difficult since it would involve outrages to modernity like more people working the land and higher food prices. Anyway, before we give up on writing, money, seed-saving or language, we could take some baby steps by giving up on glyphosate and silage. The sixth mass extinction rightly holds Tom’s attention, but given that – as he concedes – people are going to have to continue cultivating food crops, it’s surely better to focus more precisely on the specific practices driving that extinction in the here and the now, which are mostly labour-saving ones selected for in the fossil capital present like herbicides. Again, I’m not convinced that holding up ‘farming’ as the generic enemy serves a good purpose.
One reason it doesn’t serve a good purpose is because it risks playing into the hands of ecomodernist narratives that likewise consider farming of any kind a ‘deviation’ and wish to extricate food production as much as possible from any involvement with nature via improbable techno-fixes such as electrolysing water with photovoltaic energy to create bacterial food powders. Tom’s excellent critical writings on the supposed energy ‘transition’ help build the case against this kind of stunt, but I fear his over-generalised critique of agriculture risks letting it in again by the back door. A world of factory-fed urbanism isn’t going to prevent the sixth mass extinction and I know it’s not what Tom wants, but when the lines of radically different schools of thought converge on a common agrarian enemy this can be an unintended consequence of the philosophical choices we make. The manufactured food served up in the ecomodernist imagination isn’t going to replace farming in practice because it’s so energetically implausible. But we can waste precious time trying, and I fear that Tom’s anti-agrarian anti-dualism might have the unfortunate effect of bolstering the anti-agrarian dualism of the ecomodernists.
A final point on foraging peoples. Whereas a century ago they figured in modernist thought as ‘primitives’, living fossils ripe for extirpation by more advanced peoples, the modernist narrative has now (partly) flipped. Nowadays in their capacity as ‘indigenous peoples’ foragers often figure as custodians of wisdom and biodiversity. I don’t necessarily dispute that (indeed, I’d extend it to certain local agrarians too, indigenous and otherwise), though it’s worth bearing in mind the irritation of some contemporary indigenous people living complex modern lives at bearing the weight of these expectations from the non-indigenous (see, for example, Tyson Yunkaporta Right Story, Wrong Story), as well as overinflated claims about their stewardship that help no one, least of all indigenous people themselves. But I don’t really like the way these categories are bandied about as ideal types (farmer/forager, indigenous/non-indigenous) within modernism’s arguments with itself – especially since this is too easily used as a way of excusing ourselves as non-indigenous people from getting on with the job of tending the land in humdrum local ways (You’re into indigenous foraging peoples? Great – go and start looking after the brambles on that vacant lot down the road!)
I’ve noticed a lot of pushback against David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything in such ‘pro-indigenous but not me’ narratives, with a virulence that goes beyond reasonable criticism of their positions (I’m not aiming this remark at Tom, who stays well within the bounds of legitimate critique). Maybe it’s just the desire to knock down a superstar of the kind that Graeber has posthumously become. But it could be because indigenous and foraging peoples emerge from his writing as human beings who mutatis mutandis are prey to the same foibles and general bullshit as the rest of us. This isn’t how ideal types are supposed to be, but I think he had a point. A recent article in the London Review of Books, albeit about something else entirely, mentions “the yearning for a solving unity that shapes the needy monist” and I wonder if foraging peoples are the solving unity favoured by the kind of monists who contemplate human ecological overshoot – hence the fury when their unity is questioned by the likes of Graeber. What’s potentially lost in that fury is the complex humanity and agency of the foragers.
As I mentioned in the previous iteration of the debate, Tom’s main critique of Graeber and Wengrow is that they seem perennially surprised by the domination that centralized states achieve over diverse local forms of society, and they shouldn’t be. I think that’s a fair critique of that book. It’s less applicable to some of Graeber’s other writings, such as Debt: the First 5,000 Years and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology where Graeber advances various arguments against positions like Tom’s that centralized (agricultural) states destroy local diversity and non-state forms of society – because often they don’t. I won’t dwell on the details here. Graeber’s discussion of ‘baseline communism’ in everyday life in the Debt book is relevant (p.99 onwards) and of the nation-statist assumptions clouding our judgments about the possibilities for anarchism in Fragments. Tom sees only wreckage in the aftermath of the centralized agricultural states, whereas Graeber – correctly, I think – sees other kinds of society still operating within them.
Graeber doesn’t talk much about food production methods, but a similar argument applies. Yes, the centralized grain states transformed many people’s food production relationships and possibilities, but nevertheless many of the low-impact local practices that both Tom and I want to amplify are still basically there, including foraging. Less so in the globalized and fossil-fuelled capitalist present than was the case in most places worldwide even a generation or two ago, but that again points to the need not to go overboard in chasing our contemporary demons into the transgressions of the distant past. Even now, potentially renewable local human ecologies sprout all over the place. I think Tom misses this.
If generic farming isn’t necessarily the problem, then what is? The answer that’s stalked a lot of what I’ve been writing about here via examples like Caribbean sugar, the Atlantic slave trade, the fur trade, and the British navy is expansionary imperial states that turn things produced out of biological processes – whether by farmers or foragers – into tradeable commodities. Of course, these states had their precursors in more ancient times
I believe Tom’s argument is that you don’t get states like this operating at sufficient scale without an agrarian base, and I’d agree. But sufficient scale for what? What was the problem with the ancient precursor states? They could certainly be a problem for people who didn’t want to be enslaved, conscripted, over-taxed, or otherwise coerced but I’d argue that the planetary ecological impact of the ancient agrarian-imperial states was relatively slight until they got fossil fuelled in recent times. Scholars used to think that the ancient grain states collapsed because they exhausted their soils and undermined their ecological base, but this is no longer the mainstream view even though it still enjoys an afterlife in popular writings. Mostly, they collapsed – if indeed ‘collapse’ is the right word – for political and social reasons. And, until recently, in the wide margins around them a lot of people carried on locally adapted forms of both foraging and farming.
Even if fossil-fuelled modernity had never or could never have happened, taking Tom’s deep-time view, it could still have been true that agriculture wouldn’t have proved a good bet in the long-run due to slower ecological burnout. But, in the famous phrase, in the long run we’re all dead and I’m not so concerned about that. The situation we now face is a fossil-fuelled global system of states that’s possibly less prone to short-term collapse because of its fast and tightly interlocked economies, but more prone to medium-term collapse as it rapidly burns out its global ecological base.
I think this is the context in which we must discuss future agrarianism, which I tried to do in my previous commentary by extending Tom’s metaphor of opening up the cages in the menagerie of existing societies. Tom says he had a hard time getting into it, which is probably my fault for massacring his metaphor. Nevertheless, I think it’s important. My point really is that we shouldn’t get overly hoodwinked by dominant narratives about the almighty power of the centralised state. You can look at a map of the British Empire at its height and see an impressive swathe of the world coloured red, but that view from Whitehall must be counterbalanced by the reality on the ground in a plethora of places where foragers, peasants, commercial farmers, landless workers, and all sorts of political and economic intermediaries jostled endlessly for power and autonomy throughout the whole course of Empire – and whose descendants in many ways continue to do so. The Empire relied on them in numerous ways, not least to produce for their own day-to-day needs in relative autonomy from it. Not all of them relied so much on the Empire.
Most of us are in a more parlous situation today than was the case for those more-or-less unwilling subjects of Britain’s old empire, who mostly still had the means for producing their food and local livelihood. They were, to put it bluntly, less salaried, and therefore more able to understand the reality of the situation they were in. Nevertheless, there are remnants of those alternative human ecologies that were co-opted but never fully destroyed by the centralized capitalist state. I think pretty much the only good bet for surviving the future in most places is to build on them and restore local agrarian autonomy as the present global empire collapses. In that sense, I don’t think generalised critiques of agrarianism are all that relevant – especially because the dividing line between foraging and farming is so thin and contextual.
It remains true that predatory agrarian states have risen and fallen now for millennia and swept a lot of people up in their dynamics. But it’s also true that a lot of agrarians have carried on doing their agrarian thing for a long time with no tendency to form large-scale predatory states. Perhaps we should speak of a ‘state deviation’. I’m less convinced we should speak of an ‘agricultural deviation’.
To close, I’d like to suggest a better model for thinking about the past and the future than the forager/farmer dualism – namely the CSR ecological framework developed by ecologist Phil Grime (see P. Grime and J. Peirce The Evolutionary Strategies That Shape Ecosystems). To greatly oversimplify, this framework places organisms broadly in three categories. Competitors are able to cash in on a resource quickly, but aren’t in it for the long haul and aren’t great at surviving disturbance. Stress-tolerators are cautious long-term strategists, adapted to low resource inputs and low disturbance and tending to invest heavily in few offspring. Ruderals are live-fast die-young strategists adapted to frequent disturbance in high-resource situations, mostly by producing a lot of offspring in the hope that some at least might pull through.
In our evolutionary endowment, humans straddle CS possibilities – the C applying particularly to people, whether foragers or farmers, moving in to exploit a new niche or resource. When the resource dwindles or disturbances arise, we need to find a way of retreating to a longer-term S strategy, and that’s what I’m arguing for with a turn to local agrarianism. I don’t know how feasible it will be – probably not very, for many of us – but I don’t think it’s entirely impossible and we have few other plausible options. Currently, within the limitations of our biology, our fossil-fuelled industrial farming civilisation has pushed quite a way into unsustainable ruderal territory (our major crop plants are all weedy ruderals, and unfortunately we’ve built societies that have created and depend upon a lot of effectively ruderal people who are treated as expendable). Rather than looking back upriver and rueing the invention of farming, writing, science, money or whatever, I think we’d be better off looking downriver and trying to S-strategize our way to the banks using whatever means – foraging or farming, speaking or writing – that commend themselves.
In that sense, we can learn from people (both foragers and farmers) who’ve long lived in place, derived most of their livelihood from it, and figured out their local ecological guardrails. As I’ve emphasized repeatedly here, the fundamental problem isn’t the contextual distinction between farming and foraging. It’s the way that predatory states exploit both. But now we need to find more resilient, local, stress-tolerant strategies.
Sophie Pinkham The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires
Annette Kehnel The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability
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There are more missing words in this than usual, to the point that I’m wondering if you accidentally posted a draft.
I will try to write a longer response later in the week. I dropped a pallet on my leg today like some kind of slapstick clown and need to sleep and recover before doing any serious thinking. (I’ll almost certainly be fine, though.)
A significant piece. Will come back to it to fully grasp. One of the things that I’ve thought we (our human ancestors) “could have” made a choice about, and which we could make potentially in the future, is not allowing debt. There is an important history of trying to put that particular genie back in the bottle. Would colonial empires of the past have done the world-spanning-damage they did without that tool? And modern capitalism? Fossil fuelled growth? Maybe not. Going forward can we, or some conglomerates of we, make that choice? I’d like to think so. As I’d like to think we can make the choice to be small farmers (though not really at an individual level right now in New Zealand). We can at least make the choice to remove more of our daily lives from daily commodification. Which is on the path to a small farm future.
Relating to keeping alive the possibility of choice, as much as I’ve enjoyed Tom’s blog for the insights, I am still team-human, and even more team-my-family. I can’t take positions from the perspective of the universe and notions of deep time, which Tom at times writes about. That perspective might offer something in a spiritual, don’t be attached, Buddhist sense, but choices, politics and trade-offs don’t go away. Human lives being lived now and in the near future matter. So the decisions being made at the top of the global political economy of capitalism do rankle. I wish they were different, even if I despair at how those decisions could be unmade. Which I guess is where the “hope” of collapse comes in, which allows space for change and transition to that local, indigenous, small farming future.
On above, but also present in lot of your writing, Chris, is the question of the state. I keep spinning around with that one. Am I anti-state, pro-state, somewhere in between. Might it depend on context? How much can we paint a negative picture of the state based on its origins, its formation, as opposed to what, for instance, the New Zealand state is now. Undoubtedly a capitalist one, where economic growth is embedded through and through, but there have been victories from below that have pressured the capitalist state to provide some universal welfare, if only to keep the nationalist fires burning. There’s just so many contradictions, class and social forces at work. I can’t quite look away.
I wonder in writing about the energy crisis (or maybe the energy absurdity) and advocating a small farm future we can still imagine people, groups of political actors, influencing the state. Is a small farm future simply outside of political parties and the current system of representational politics in New Zealand? And is it possible for the state to transform through some singularity that we can’t fathom to something that takes some of the good stuff about the state through to a less hyper-energised, slower moving, future? And if our current model of the state (again mostly thinking about the New Zealand version) does dissolve and fall apart, its reach retracting so that parts of the landscape become autonomous or semi-autonomous, wouldn’t some with a tendency to violence and status seeking through power and wealth, try to recreate a state-like entities anyway, especially if they’re are a remembered part of the cultural landscape and there’s existing states operating nearby. Are we ever going to be done with charismatic, status-seeking psychopaths with tools of violence? So I swing back to thinking better the state you know, and holding in mind the possibility that the state might allow, even help achieve a small farm future, if there’s enough evidence on the ground, and from the political pressure of a “movement”. Which could, for example, see the formation of a centrist, small farm future party that would only need 5% of the vote in New Zealand to potentially get a few little decisions that might help the future along or at least publicise and educate, providing some legitimacy and confidence if nothing else. I do see this as a genuine possibility, with a whole lot of dangers, contradictions and trade offs. Related to this stuff, I wonder, Chris, if you have read ‘Goliath’s Curse’ by Luke Kemp. All about the collapse of states, but also the conditions that see them remerging (inevitably?) and the possibility that since we’ve got to where we are now, could the national state or regional state (not empires) be made better?
Having a realistic understanding of current energy absurdity and the likelihood that small farming/foraging/craft will be our future would be essential to any project that wished to better the state. Getting the analysis wrong wouldn’t be good, or would mean any attempts to get a “better state” would be marginalised to the advantage of the would be bad state actors (worse ones than New Zealand currently has at least). If we don’t get the analysis of reality right (or rightish) the promises political parties across the spectrum keep making are going to be wrong, as they are mostly now, because none break with capitalist growth. Disenchantment and cynicism then leveraged by some bad actors who sense the possibility of transitioning to a form of the state which is scarier than the liberal one.
Sorry this has gone a bit long. Am thinking about setting up a blog to get my thoughts down in response to some of the writing here and in your books, and those of other thinkers. Small Farm Aotearoa I’ve been thinking. The local chapter perhaps 🙂 We’ll see though.
Kathryn, thanks for pointing out the missing words and phrases, which got stripped out when I transferred the file. Now all restored, I hope. Best wishes for a quick recovery!
Vaughan, thanks for that – a lot of interesting questions and observations. I’ll respond when I’m back online the following week.
For anyone giving Tom Murphy’s ideas even a shred of credibility – especially the half-baked idea he got from a fictional telepathic gorilla (!) that “agriculture is bad,” – I suggest reading about his epiphany moment here:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/12/confessions-of-a-disillusioned-scientist/
Thanks Chris for the long, lucid essay.
I think the point you make at the beginning is key: about going outside and getting your hands dirty with the physical work of making one’s own living from the available natural world.
It’s surprising all the things we discover that we are wrong about. Or more to the point, how much more complicated the situation is than we had imagined. All those airless theories are so much more tidy and manageable!
In that vein, I think that it’s worth mentioning that it is simply not possible in today’s world to actually live as a small family band of foraging humans. Certainly not without relying on industrial products like guns and other steel tools. And even more certainly not with an internet connection wherewith to dispense your hard-won wisdom to all we other unfortunate moderns.
For the record, if I hadn’t made this obvious before, I’m pretty thoroughly anti-statist. My view is that the primary motive for aggregation of large human social structures boils down to theft – usually by the new elites, and often in the form of slavery.
Having just read Christopher Boehm’s “Heirarchy in the Forest”, I can’t escape the depressing conclusion that it is inevitable that (to paraphrase Vaughn above) “[charismatic, status-seeking psychopaths with tools of violence] through power and wealth, try to recreate a state-like entities…”
The only bright note in Boehm’s book was that of the social apes, our species is slightly less awful than the others. Oh, good.
Side note: I recently read the Annette Kehnel book. I was disappointed. It seemed that she left out much of what I was interested in, and she put in a lot of pre-capitalist stuff that she spun as sustainable because it hadn’t gotten fully overblown yet. Like the normalization of usury, for instance.
the denudation of any kind of nature by local livelihood-makers of whatever kind
Every human activity, including foraging, affects nature. Indeed, every living thing impacts other living things in the biosphere. But how much impact can the biosphere tolerate and retain its long term suitability for primates, including us?
If one takes a snapshot of the biosphere at historical intervals and compares its ability to retain enough integrity to support animals like us, I think it becomes pretty clear that the biosphere can tolerate some amount of agriculture.
If we look at what the world was like 10,000 years ago, virtually everyone, including Tom, would agree that the biosphere was just fine. But what about 5,000 years ago? Are we willing to say that the world was ruined for indefinite human occupation at that time? I think not, despite the fact that there was plenty of agriculture by then. If Tom thinks that freezing human activity levels at those found 5,000 years ago was already far too damaging for the natural world, he has some explaining to do.
Even when we look at the earth during the Middle Ages, when there was plenty of agriculture, I think it is safe to say that the earth was tolerating that level of human activity just fine. All nine planetary boundaries of maximum disruption weren’t even being approached at that time. CO2 levels were fine, the oceans were unacidified and full of life, biodiversity was still great, etc. In fact, a case can be made that human activity was just enough to keep CO2 levels from gradually declining into causing another ice age. We may have been good for the biosphere.
So, sometime between the Middle Ages and now the impact of human activity may have become unsupportable. I don’t know if it has really happened that the natural world has been so damaged that primate extinction is looming in the next few centuries, but it’s possible. If so, the tipping point was probably the industrial revolution.
My view is that a rapid return to pre-industrial life for humans would go a long way to ensuring that the earth remains habitable for primates. I just don’t see any way for that to happen deliberately. Chris has certainly tried to lay out a path to that world, but I am still skeptical that we can collectively take that path.
Chris wrote: “…one thing we agree on is, in Tom’s words, that ‘whatever transition lies ahead will certainly continue to involve humans growing food for many generations.’ My overriding concern is precisely with this transition – with how we switch by design or default over the next few generations…”
I think the “next few generations” part is important, and often overlooked in criticisms of Chris’s writings. Policy makers are looking ahead to the next election, while a Small Farm Future is more like a medieval cathedral project. The generation starting to work on it, and possibly their children’s generation, won’t live to see the end result. It’s humbling. Is it too humbling for the predominant modern mentality to support?
Chris wrote: “When the resource dwindles or disturbances arise, we need to find a way of retreating to a longer-term S [Stress-tolerators] strategy, and that’s what I’m arguing for with a turn to local agrarianism. I don’t know how feasible it will be – probably not very, for many of us – but I don’t think it’s entirely impossible and we have few other plausible options.”
That quote includes a key acknowledgement: “I don’t know how feasible it will be – probably not very, for many of us…” Unfortunately, this is grounds for dismissal by critics wanting the reassurance of a proposed “solution”. Another incompatibility with the predominant modern mentality?
This ties in with the multi-generational aspects of such a project. People may be anxious about personally surviving situation where “many of us” would not survive, but in a few generations time we’ll personally be gone anyway, and the population could be much lower then.
An article from 2025 describes how fertility rates could drastically reduce a population over two generations, even without some type of “dieoff” event. In the example given, for every 100 people of a present-day generation (about half males and half females), there would be only 12 grandchildren!
“South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population-implosion
People may be anxious about personally surviving situation where “many of us” would not survive,
You’d think so, but given the way most people went “back to normal” despite continued COVID infection, and with shockingly little mitigation against airborne transmission, I think a lot of that anxiety might be ignored, or possibly transformed into getting angry at the people who are willing to say “hey, wait a minute, business as usual is pretty terrible for most people and it will lead a lot of us to an early grave”.
What would need to change for that *not* to be the response to increasingly severe climate events and global geopolitical disruption?
Hello Chris!
It is very difficult to comment on something that has such a long and poorly structured compilation, sorry for the criticism…
In general, unfortunately, the important nuances and important details you described still do not touch on what you have postponed for future debates, among the many factors I mentioned in previous posts, the main one is surpluses. So, if you would please, focusing on this, how with a massively developed agricultural system (as a theoretical and traditional knowledge base, as well as practices), as well as surpluses, can one avoid: social stratification, growing inequality, specialization of labor, population growth, concentration of power, invention of debt, competition, etc.? Yes, I know about festivals, egalitarian practices, etc., but if at least one society in a competitive struggle applies the above, over time it will supplant all other practices. This has happened thousands of times around the world.
Yes, the Incas did not have traditional grain agriculture and other attributes of ordinary empires or expansionist states, but they were still an empire, the Maori did not know agriculture but committed genocide, and other cultures did the same. The point is, why, with such a base of agriculture (thousands of years, and experience of capitalism, markets, etc.), should everything go the other way – peaceful, inclusive, democratic, etc.?
Courtesy and the subtleties of dialogue within a specific cultural frame are obviously not requirements for online engagement! Although bluntness looks very different within a thoughtful community orientated around regular blog posts in contrast to the chaos and brutality of a twitter post.
The strengths and blindspots of a particular socio-ecological position one assumes are made clearer via dialogue, particularly between individuals who assume differing positions that are likely in the end ultimately incompatible.
Chris is a writer who takes great care with his words. And he has skin in the game as a food producer trying to encourage and support others to explore food production opportunities in their own local contexts.
Thank you for letting me know about this.
Does Chris actually argue that with an agrarian system everything will be peaceful, inclusive, democratic etc?
I don’t think he does, so it isn’t really fair for you or anyone else to expect him to defend a utopian vision.
I do think there’s a strong argument that with slower and more sparse global trade networks, the kind of concentration of power you describe will happen more slowly than it has with fossil fuels. That doesn’t mean it will go away, but it does mean it’s that little bit easier for people to resist.
I already live in such conditions, with no chance of surviving in the future. These are all subtleties of the translator, not my language. Obviously, small-scale farming requires community, social contract, and some level of security. I do not believe that any of this will appear before the serf-like exploitative systems of the past are formed. Where the means of production, land, and labor can minimally serve the well-being of ordinary people. Obviously, systems where they fully serve and are realized must be inclusive, plural, and peaceful.
I find it strange that Tom, that is so occupied by the mass extinction, doesn’t recognize that it was foragers and not farmers that supposedly terminated most of the megafauna.
I am totally in agreement on that there can be no strict dividing line between foraging and farming and there are so many cultures that have practised both simultaneous. And a lot of people have “managed” wild resources as to stimulate what they wanted and suppressed what they didn’t want. The use of fire is just one of many methods.
I would consider pastoralism as a kind of symbiotic foraging, as humans let their symbionts collect and transform grasses into food.
I also find the very deep (future) time perspective irrelevant. I mean, in the very long term perspective all species, bigger than microbes, will go extinct and humans certainly will. Life has recovered from worse mass extinctions than the possible sixth that we are causing. In that perspective, it really doesn’t matter.
How we will transform our societal metabolism from a fossil fuel driven capitalist commodity economy to an agrarian economy is hard enough to envision? Perhaps we will fail and become foragers again, but honestly it is and will be purely speculative.
On the philosophical level, I find the human supremacy argument irrelevant. It sounds good to oppose human supremacy, but I don’t see how you operationalise it, what does it really mean for our daily life. If Tom wants to interact on an equal level with all other species, why is he blogging?
Your comment introduced me to your blog, which was bookmarked for future viewing. Immediately read the last several articles and found them refreshingly honest, courageously direct, succinct and informative.
Your latest on “Decoupling” reminded me of the debates I had in Sweden with Karl Henrik Robert twenty years ago where I attempted to explain the same points – but was met with denial and self-deception. But like to think the exchange eventually had some impact on The Natural Step leadership. TNS became almost a “cult religion” in the sustainability movement of the early 2000’s, (even supported by Swedish royalty) before it finally and thankfully dissolved into irrelevance.
By the way, your remarks on Murphy’s inconsistencies and contradictions underscore his increasingly weak analysis. Appreciated Tom’s early work and presentations when he was a pony-tailed rebel prof at ucsd (see video of the conference hosted by Ira Flatow). But alas, no longer, not since he jumped the shark.
Cheers.
Thanks for persisting with this important train of thought, Chris. Like Walter, I stopped taking Tom’s blog posts seriously (even reading them) when he started treating ‘Ishmael’ as a credible guide to anything. Those of us trained in the social sciences and history know why and how it is not, and wish Tom would go back to his actual lane of expertise, where he has useful material to offer.
In terms of strengthening your argument regarding the post Middle Ages rise in ecologically harmful forms of farming, which are now a significant contributor to the overuse of fossil fuels, synthetic chemicals, etc. in today’s world, I think you would find Timothy Mitchell’s just released book ‘The Alibi of Capital’ useful.
I do not know where a previous commenter got the idea that Maori did not practise agriculture (they grew root vegetables which they brought with them from the Pacific Islands, and some other crops – see Helen Leach ‘1000 Years of Gardening in New Zealand’) or committed genocide. (Nasty inter-tribal violence yes; genocide no.)
I guess we all need to take lots of care when it comes to our sources. Before that – and always – we need to eat. So like you and other readers of your blog, I am most interested in how good food sources and supplies can be produced and secured most reliably in the uniquely challenging circumstances we all face this century.
The comment was more along the lines of: “It doesn’t matter if a tiger is trained, it’s still a predator and can kill.” Neither the Inca nor the Maori had commodity agricultural markets and did not produce products to support violence, expansion and conquest, but only for self-sufficiency, but in the end they did it. Why shouldn’t this happen in places where agriculture is more efficient and there is experience of the conventional path 1000-2070?
The Maori committed genocide against the Moriari, or rather, so writes the historiography in my region.
Therefore, before the people can organize themselves, the elites organize them in a terrible exploitative system where, I highly doubt the possibility of having any means of production or even managing the land for the benefit of the community, and not the elites or other classes.
This may be somewhat tangential, but regarding salaries…
If you have ten farming households who are producing the majority of their own food, fuel and fibre, and they each give ten percent of what they produce to an eleventh household, they can support that household, even if that household is not a farming household.
In reality the arithmetic is probably more complicated: maybe one household has a way with cheese, and another has a knack (and the tools) for smithing, and both of those households still produce a lot of their own food, but they also sell skills and products.
I think maybe one of the mental traps we can fall into when imagining a more agrarian future is believing that specialisation can only happen in the context of huge scale. But even on my own allotment I am better at composting, weeding, and building structures, while my spouse is better at digging and mowing. I make better scones and lasagne and stir fry, my housemate makes much better chilli and pies and curry, my spouse is by far the best of the three of us at a traditional roast dinner and most likely to remember to make crumble while the oven is hot anyway. In my voluntary work, too, there are tasks I take on because I am the best person available to do those particular tasks, and tasks I delegate because I am not going up a ladder rated for well below my weight.
The portion of my (meagre) income that I donate does go directly towards supporting our parish priest to not need a day job (through a certain amount of bureaucracy, but Church of England stipends ultimately are funded by congregations, we don’t receive government funding for it); the produce I tithe (probably worth more than the income I can donate!) goes directly towards feeding people who don’t have my access to land, and some of those people are actually doing pretty important work themselves, it just isn’t work it’s easy to extract value from in a capitalist system.
I am not claiming, here, that in a non-capitalist agrarian system there would be no exploitation or extraction. Rather, I suspect that even in the smallest and most impoverished subsistence farming contexts there is a certain amount of specialisation, and a certain amount of supporting people who cannot farm or whose skills are better employed elsewhere. If there were less rapacious capitalist accumulation of, well, capital — if more of the value created by labour were retained by those doing the labour rather than going towards rich people’s yachts — then we might see more opportunity than we do now for what I think of as “part time specialisation”, where someone who has an interest in, say, writing music or textile art or herbal medicine or plant breeding or woodcarving or whatever could have time and space to pursue that around the labour needed for their basic livelihood.
We are so accustomed to cheap food that we mostly do not think about the labour required to produce it. At the same time, we are so accustomed to the value of our own labour being taken away before we ever see it that we have no real sense of how much we could do for ourselves and our local communities if we weren’t spending 60 hours/week (or whatever) labouring for the benefit of someone else.
Thanks Kathryn.
I don’t think your comment is tangential.
I think you have named the core and root of how to have a more human society: One works at what one is good at for the good of themselves and their neighbors, and they all do it together.
Really, is that so hard?
I mean… yes, it is a lot harder than a lot of people think.
But it’s not an all-or-nothing question, at least once you take the fossil fuels out of the picture.
I think that those who have no experience in a truly poor peasant economy, without fossil fuels and with high self-sufficiency, where there are few ways to accumulate capital (even for marginal repairs of a road or bridge, let alone some “production”), may be mistaken in pointing to a public basis and some “activism”. These are all innovations. Do you know what the experience of life in the USSR and the memories of my ancestors about its early stages is? Stealing, distrusting, reporting, killing. Common means nobody’s, not to mention other aspects: status, the relationship between value and labor, etc. Do you know what a high level of equality in the marginal environment and the attitude towards those who have simple things: boots or a whiter shirt means?
Everything you list is nothing but utopia.
As a rural marginal, I will tell you that the world described by Chris is death, death, death, and the only desire of those who live in such conditions is to minimize risks, accumulate all possible resources for survival or future crises, superstitious distrust and merciless malicious envy of any manifestations of happiness or success in others. The greatest advantages, on the contrary, are life right now – a life of marginal life on self-sufficiency in the era of antibiotics and drugs, mass selection, access to world markets and an abundance of discarded useful objects/clothes/free access points to knowledge and books, minimal unemployment benefits, pensions, etc. This is the blissful life.
Ted Traynor understood this wisdom long ago, no one prevents anyone from repeating his path; only some disgust or other rejection of yourself as you are: a living being who has the choice to live your own life, forgetting about the opinions of others.
I hope you don’t see and feel all the beauty of the romantic utopia that people like to talk about in books without feeling even a fraction of what the hints of the collapse of organized society actually feel like.
I certainly wouldn’t classify the early USSR as an example of any kind of agrarian utopia. Nor would I classify frontier North America as such — some of my ancestors, like yours, knew hunger and violence and death.
It remains the case that without fossil fuels we will almost certainly need to provide for our needs from our labour in the local area, though. Do let me know if you think there’s a better way.
In the meantime, I’m not sure my “good life” now, dependent on fossil fuels (and all the wars to keep them available) is morally any better than a “good life” built on the back of enslaving people to grow cotton or sugarcane or a “good life” built on charging extortionate rents to farmers who produced plenty of food but weren’t allowed to eat it. It might be comfortable but that doesn’t make it right. I don’t think it’s delusional or wrongheaded to want to try something else.
Analogic to the criticism “nothing but utopia” is “nothing but nihilism.” I often feel inclined to respond to darker analyses as of history as “nothing but nihilism.” Yet in doing so I would be dismissing outright something I could otherwise take some valuable learnings from.
I understand projects like Chris’s as pragmatic responses to deep reflection on the darker aspects of history and the potential futures they foreshadow. Defining the good life has a long-standing lineage within Western philosophy and politics. Agrarianism is another example of this philosophical and political work; it’s not the same thing as agriculture per se.
Yevhenii, It sounds like your definition of the good life relates to a modern liberal world order, including the technological and bureaucratic advancements associated with this form of society. This seems entirely reasonable to me, and fortunately, as it currently stands, this society doesn’t prohibit free digital communication (indeed, it encourages it), or dabbling in small-scale food production.
Is the glass half full – or half empty? Those of us who choose to live a simpler and more community-oriented life now (like Ted Trainer and Kathryn) (and me) can mostly choose to do so, albeit still within the opportunities and limits of the places and times life has put them in. (Australia and England are very different places, and New Zealand is different again.) Actually, reading up on Ted’s background and what he has established at Pigface Point, it looks pretty much like what Kathryn and others of us would like to see develop more widely to me. I’m guessing he’s 30 or more years older than Kathryn, and suitable land near London is much harder to come by than it is near Sydney – but where there’s a will, ways can be found.
Yevhenii may also be pleased to learn that the Moriori (not Moriari) were not completely wiped out by the so-called ‘genocide’ of the early 19th century (which was only possible because of the guns and boats which North Island Maori had acquired from the ‘civilised’ Europeans who turned up in the late 18th century and just kept coming). Also that restitution has been/is being made – see the Wikipedia entry.
“ the Moriori were not completely wiped out by the so-called “genocide”… see the Wikipedia entry.” – C. Dann
Not sure why you wrote “so-called”.
The Wikipedia entry “Moriori” states “… making the Moriori genocide one of the deadliest in history …”
Furthermore, the Wikipedia entry “Moriori Genocide” states that “The last individual of sole-Moriori ancestry died in 1933.”
Yevhenii, at least on this point, is entirely correct.
By the way, you appear to understand the word “genocide” as action resulting in extinction, which is incorrect. See any dictionary.
Cheers.
The salary comment really rankles (if only it were possible), it might be more accurate to replace salary with livelihood I suppose, but I’m in the same boat, attempting to become a small farmer as the only way forward I can see. As a farmer/gardener first I prefer foraging! But I don’t know if that’s because it’s so much easier to not have to handle the entire lifecycle of my food, or if it’s because foraging opened the door to a wider ecological awareness that farming helped me see but wasn’t sufficient to experience on it’s own.
I’m glad you brought up the biological decline of England which has been farmed for a long time as being fairly recent. That’s a point that doesn’t stick as well in the US I don’t think, but as best I can tell species extinction / bio diversity decline really starts to accelerate in the 1950s or so. So despite all the evils of modernity/industrializing/grain farming/etc aside from the megafauna extinction it doesn’t appear to have put the more than human world on the edge till very recently.
Certainly for the last few years my gardening has contributed substantially to my livelihood.
Oh yes agreed, but ““It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends upon his not understanding it” drains the quote of it’s snap and makes it a little absurd, and also highlights the contrast between livelihood and salary, as a livelihood is derived from understanding the sources of life while a salary is derived from separation or ignorance. But maybe I’m getting too caught up in the wordplay.
I could go into detail about how I live and what my values are. I would say that I would give a head start to many of those who think they can imagine a life without fossil fuels, and who think they understand what real constraints are, both externally imposed and self-imposed.
The early USSR in the lives of people, not in the stories written about leaders and Lenin. That makes a big difference, as does the context of where exactly in this “prison of peoples” you lived. My ancestors, in one line, come mostly from an area limited to 50 miles in diameter, and lived in one place for hundreds of years, so the context of local life is literally imbued with me.
The question is not so much how to organize, it is not rocket science, the question is not how to resist authority, it is not how to live. The question is how to make the transition to what is called local agrarianism. How to ruralize society, preserving the best social and life values, avoiding the mistakes of the past, if possible.
Why a mill in every village, if you can grind in front of two stones? Why a road and its support? A dam and a culvert, a bridge? Who will support the traditions of masonry, complex woodworking, engineering understanding? Why bricks and the support of people who burn them, and people who cut down the forest, transport the forest, maintain roads and graze horses, make carts, etc.? If you can weave chimneys and stoves from vines and clay? When the basic installation is lost, the transition to a lower level is not as difficult as restoring and supporting what was lost.
And we haven’t even mentioned brucellosis and glanders, anthrax, fires and metalworking. Where will we get oxen, who will castrate them? Harness, supplies, infrastructure? And we haven’t even started talking about clothes and crops.
The vast majority of successful societies of the past were based on cheap imports of essentials: from livestock (for example, the Podolsk breed, which has an ancient folk selection in my region where it was distilled to Europe), as well as wood, grain to potash, saltpeter and cloth in exchange for finished products of unequal cost, quality and value. For example: pots, distillation cubes, gears, ready-made clothing, wooden products, tools and other mechanical simple devices, for which a fortune in food equivalent was asked.
Of course, with such an unequal exchange it is possible to prosper and expand specialization, but it will not work everywhere and for everyone.
So it is one thing to discuss tomatoes grown and sold at the local market, and quite another to grow and harvest one’s own food and rely as much as possible on the non-professional production of household goods, limiting the inclusion of external (at most non-local) ones, while maintaining a certain humanity.
I argue that it is easier to do this now than it will be after the final collapse.
I would be happy to talk to someone who once kept a few cows and a bull, and also tried to grow enough food for himself and his family, and also sowed weeds for the chickens, and was engaged in preparing apple and acorn panage for the boars and pigs, having at their disposal only a few braids with pitchforks and rakes and an exploited minor child. When someone goes at least a year at this pace in addition to the standard requirements of the state, then the conversation will make more sense. This is the reality where I live.
“…having at their disposal only a few braids with pitchforks and rakes and an exploited minor child.”
The translator should have used the word “scythes” here instead of “braids”.
I argue that it is easier to do this now than it will be after the final collapse.
Yes, of course. Life will be very hard all the way down and thereafter, but it will continue in those places where it is possible for it to continue. Those places can only be small farms, pastoral range lands and wild lands where foraging is possible.
Cities, suburbs and industrial ag land will be wastelands.
This is the message that people need to take to heart and try to do something about.
I’m not allowed livestock in my current situation, but I did grow over 600kg of food last year, and foraged another ~116kg. And not all of this is leaves and tomatoes, either: we still have potatoes in the pantry (though they are getting pretty sprouty now) and there were a lot of apples this year, we only just finished the dried beans, I still have almonds and hazelnuts and pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds, the freezer still has a layer of plums that haven’t made it into wine or jam or crumble yet. So it isn’t just about micronutrients and salad; I am growing and foraging at least some decent calories in the form of starches and fats, and there is at least some protein in there too. I’m not attempting to have a completely local agrarian diet, but 716kg is nothing to sneeze at. I probably couldn’t eat all of that myself.
Would it have been harder to do this without the tools and inputs I have access to? Yes, of course. But I’m still making a substantial contribution to my household’s livelihood, and I still have time after that for really quite a lot of voluntary work, and also a bit of paid work, and I’m not even roping in any children, on account of not having any.
I am not discounting the suffering in past iterations of agrarian localism! I am particularly grateful for having been vaccinated against tetanus, among other things. However, if it had been so very impossible for my agrarian ancestors to grow food, I wouldn’t be here, on account of not having any ancestors at all.
Similarly, I understand very well that agrarian localism in the future may well be harder than it was in the past, largely because of the damage done by industrial activities. Nevertheless there are some things we have learned in the last few hundred years which might well turn out to be useful (things like understanding that cholera comes from contaminated drinking water and not from miasma; things like how to avoid botulism in food preservation; things like what diabetes is and how to manage it, sterile techniques for surgery, how to avoid scurvy… sure, all these things will be harder in a violent collapse scenario, but we might not lose all the knowledge we have gained.)
Chris has explained, repeatedly, that he is not claiming that agrarian localism will be a utopian paradise. I am also well aware that it won’t be. But our present situation is also very far from perfect, and is doing extreme amounts of damage to the ecosystem that keeps us alive, to the point that it simply isn’t sustainable in the near term, never mind the longer term.
Can agrarian localism be sustainable? I doubt any of us commenting here will live long enough to find out for sure; just as my ancestors did, I will eventually die. Is agrarian localism probably going to be important in at least some locations, as the current political and economic systems and structures crumble and re-orient themselves? Almost certainly.
Tom Murphy – Agriculture is bad. I know this because I thought about it after I read a novel about a telepathic gorilla who somehow knew the secrets of the universe. Besides, I am now retired and have plenty of money and a nice house because I worked in the System for years and made good money after selling my soul.
Walter Haugen – Here’s a bag of onions. Let me know when you need some more. If you come out to the farm I will show you how to grow food.
“…aside from the megafauna extinction…” – bluejay
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
It’s well known that the removal of any keystone species can radically alter an ecosystem, resulting in cascading effects that cause biological extirpation and the unraveling of ecological processes – leading to further environmental decline.
Human exploitation of the environment began when we became bipedal and looked over the grass at endless herds of food – restrained only by limited technology and small group size.
But yes, the 6ME dramatically accelerated in the 50’s as global human population growth accelerated. And that’s clearly not coincidental.
It took 300,000 years for humans to reach a population level of 1 billion.
The next 1 billion was added in 130 years.
Beginning in the 1950’s, 1 billion humans were being added every 15 years.
Anyone who hasn’t already done so should probably pause and reflect on that for a moment.
We’re over 8 billion now and adding 70 million more voracious consumers to the biosphere every year.
With a suggested global carrying capacity of 2 billion – a level reached just before the 50’s – it’s no mystery that the tragic loss of biodiversity, habitat, and topsoil, and the relentless terrestrial and marine resource exploitation, dramatic increase in energy consumption, alarming changes in atmospheric chemistry, and massive environmental degradation – all consequences of this overshoot – began to accelerate concomitantly.
My analysis suggests that post collapse (or simplification, unraveling, descent, devolution, long emergency…. choose your preferred term) global human population will decrease to several million (that’s million with an M), mainly from the impact of resource wars, and of course the four horsemen. But then with tenacity and a bit of luck, slowly rebound (as the biosphere slowly regenerates over several millennia) and stabilize at less than 100 million. That number might be too optimistic.
A rebound like this, however, is not without precedent. Recall that after the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago when human population was reduced to maybe a couple thousand breeding pairs we made a remarkable comeback!!
Too remarkable it seems.
Cheers.
Do you have a link to where you have published this analysis, or are you basically spitballing?
No shade intended — I do a fair amount of spitballing here myself, though I tend not to attach numbers to my predictions about the future when I do.
My understanding is that human activity was necessary, but not sufficient on its own, for the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. A key difference between that process and the one we are experiencing now is that we have a fairly sophisticated scientific understanding of how human-driven rapid climate change works, and we are carrying right on with it anyway, largely so that rich people can continue to get richer.
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that human-driven climate catastrophe is not causing loss of life (human and otherwise) already. I think most of us believe it will continue to do so, potentially at the very large scales you suggest.
The question isn’t whose fault all this is, or whether human nature is inherently flawed (I think it probably is) or entirely evil (I think it probably isn’t). It’s important to understand how we got here, for sure! But ultimately if you are convinced that all human activity is damage and destruction to the “natural” order of things, then perhaps you are making a philosophical (or possibly theological) statement, not a scientific one, no matter how much analysis you throw at justifying it.
The question is how, given the near and medium term conditions of rapid change in both politics and environmental conditions, any surviving humans might obtain a relatively sustainable livelihood, and even find our way to living some kind of life we could identify as good. If you believe that humans are imperfect but still capable of taking actions that help humanity and also help the more than human world, it’s a very pertinent question indeed.
Chris Smaje argues for agrarian localism as one of the best ways (and I think he would say very probably the only way) for surviving humans to obtain a sustainable, ecologically integrated livelihood, now and in the future, while also acknowledging the huge challenges of getting there from here. I think his arguments work whether we are looking at a true carrying capacity of eight billion, two billion or one hundred million, though obviously the challenges of agrarian localism would be very different in each case. As I said in another comment, I’m probably not going to.live long enough to find out.
The people who read and comment on this site constitute a biased self-selected sample. But there is a broader view available that encompasses people from deep in the energy industry to small farmers to finance guys to US government intelligence workers to academics working in climate science to economics experts to neurological science experts to spiritual leaders to airy-fairy purveyors of bullshit. Nate Hagens, after four years of The Great Simplification podcast and over twenty years of being involved with the Energy Bulletin and Resilience, has finally shifted from, “I have no solutions” to “Do something.” B – The Honest Sorcerer provides an engineering perspective and is clearly worried at a new level. Well-known academics like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer provide a grounded applied economics and political realist perspective. Both of them are scared shitless. Then there is the anthropological perspective coupled with street-level politics. David Graeber provided a window into that perspective, and is popular with many of the people on this site. There are many others that see what’s coming and are at a heightened awareness.
I have had over fifty-five years to prepare and am ensconced in a little village at 500 meters in the Pyrenees. We have a year-round stream at the bottom of our property and several springs in the village if the water mains stop working. Both of us have experience getting by without electricity back in the 1970s. We heat with wood that is available locally. I have good soil to work with because I have been building it up for years. I have potatoes already in the ground and will be doing my main planting in a couple of weeks. I have wheat, rye and barley growing. My favas are doing nicely and I have plentiful fruit trees that are well-shaped and blossoming nicely. Everything I do in the garden can be done with hand tools if necessary, but I have the availability to do more with just a trickle of gasoline. We have friends nearby with similar resources. Our neighbors will help us because I give them food. I have gold and silver buried in the ground so I can still trade and barter if the fiat money is worth nothing. Finally, I don’t care if I die soon. I am 76 and have done what I could to make the world a better place.
Most of the people who read and comment on Small Farm Future are somewhere along the preparedness continuum. My suggestion is to move farther down the line. The people with their fingers on the nuclear trigger in the US and Israel are insane AND senile. This weekend and next weekend (March 28-29th and April 4-5) may well be tipping points in the Iran War. If you live in London or New York or some other big city, it would be a wise move to take a holiday in the country. Don’t forget your essential bug out gear. Just in case. If nothing happens – GREAT! But we are still in deep shit. Remember that.
Mid- to long-term, you should ramp up your preparedness for nuclear disaster and collapse in general. Remember, I speak from a social science background and fifty-five years of studying this problem. This is nothing to sneeze at. My partner and I had a trip planned to Istanbul right now (March 27 – April 3) which we canceled. Turkish Airlines allowed us to take the credit on our airfares for a later trip and we were able to cancel our hotel booking with no cost. We did this at my insistence. Have you clocked that I think this disaster has been bumped up to a new level of seriousness?
Thanks for this, Walter — both for making your little corner of the world better and for your care in coming here to sound an alarm.
I can tell you that someone I know who works in energy trading is similarly jumpy. It’s not good news when traders are basing business decisions on what they read on a president’s social media feed.
I do, however, have a major religious festival this coming week. Easter Day has been the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox for quite some time now and it isn’t the kind of thing we can postpone easily. So I won’t be bugging out to anywhere, but instead standing with and caring for my ragtag little community as best I can. That isn’t the right decision for everyone, but it is the right decision for me.
you should ramp up your preparedness for nuclear disaster and collapse in general
KI4U.com is a good site for nuclear disaster preparedness, but even they don’t have much to say about preparing for a severe nuclear winter. Nobody does.
My family is pretty prepared, but it’s hard to prepare for everything. The sad part is most people do almost nothing to prepare for what’s coming.
Checked out their site. Thanks, Joe.
Too much to say about the post and the comments, so just a couple brief notes:
Agriculture or foraging? A moot point in those vast swaths of the globe that have been modified too much. Foraging won’t work well in the degraded and fossil fuel enabled monocultures. Small farms it is till some biosphere rebounding happens, as well as human population adjusts to the natural carrying capacity. Just remember, foraging has to consist mostly of calories, not just salad ingredients.
And secondly- ……”The situation we now face is a fossil-fuelled global system of states that’s possibly less prone to short-term collapse because of its fast and tightly interlocked economies”
I’d actually say the opposite. The complex six continent just in time supply chains and interdependence means that collapse could be/will be much faster. Currently we are daily seeing large new impacts from events on the other side of the globe, and one waterway being blocked. The ripple effects are just starting.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/iran-war-the-road-to-ruin
I think the almonds and hazelnuts I foraged in 2025 and the walnuts from 2024 are some pretty good calories, and so are plums and apples…. but in fairness urban street trees aren’t exactly a wild ecosystem. But my point on the distinction between farming and foraging being somewhat blurry is quite well illustrated by this, I think; and many of the ecosystems we tend to think of as pristine or wild were, in fact, carefully maintained.
Acorns and chestnuts can also be pretty good for calories.
Which is not to say that places subject to industrial monoculture won’t need some rehabilitation before becoming fruitful foraging range; but they’d need rehab before being used for horticulture, too.
Permaculture plantings and food forests are what we might call “enhanced foraging” systems. It would be nice if there were a concerted effort to create them on public lands so that the public could forage during periods of food shortage.
In tropical and subtropical regions its possible to establish food-bearing plants that continue to produce for long periods with little effort besides nutrient cycling. Bananas, citrus, nuts, and avocados are examples. I have some fantasies of people planting thousands of these plants in groves all over the place, Johnny Appleseed style.
Once pasture land is fenced, animal populations can do the foraging and the farmer just harvests the resulting increase in herd population. Fenced pastures do take some maintenance, though.
Foraging in the style of indigenous bands is, as you note, Steve, impossible in modern countries, not only because the land is degraded, but because there are limited common lands on which foraging is legal.
Seasonal hunting and fishing in national forests and range lands is allowed, and wild berries can be collected there, too, but it woud be tough to gather a complete diet over the course of a year without breaking numerous laws.
We are soon going to find out how resilient global supply chains actually are. If the closing of the Strait continues much longer, the disruption of energy supply, especially to Asia and SE Asia is going to have even more dramatic impacts than we have already seen. The disruption to synthetic fertilizer supply is also going to have huge impacts everywhere. Thank you Donald Trump, for getting collapse started early.
Someone in a certain borough in London certainly seems to have been treating the street trees as a food forest for quite some time, now, and I certainly reap the benefit of their work. In this one borough I have foraged:
– Holm oak acorns
– walnuts
– mulberries
– sloes
– plums
– greengages
– apples
– pears
– medlars
– quinces
– feijoas
– almonds
– Cornelian cherries
– apricots
– cherries
– a larger-than-usual hawthorn variety I can’t remember the name of right now
– Japanese persimmons
– chestnuts, though I can get nicer ones closer to home
– elderberries
– Trifoliate oranges (not particularly nice ones, sadly, too much poncirin in the fruit for it to be very useful)
There are some pecan trees too but I think they might be too young to bear anything just yet, and some unusual things I haven’t tried (kousa cornels, I think?), and I haven’t really managed to get to the olives at the right time of year, but I do know they exist.
And that’s just tree fruits and nuts in parks and on residential streets. There are also some pretty good fungi in some of the parks, and the usual assortment of greens, and a fair selection of cane fruit if you know where to look, and occasionally grapes that have gotten out of someone’s garden.
I don’t actually live in this borough but I cycle through it a couple of times per week, which gives me plenty of opportunity to enjoy the bounty. The limiting factor is not the availability of the fruit, but rather the time and space to.process it. Of course, that would change drastically if everyone in London started foraging from street trees for as much of their fruit and nuts as I do; the advantage I would have in that situation is a folding scrumping pole, a good mental map of what is where, a bicycle, and over two decades of experience.
Holm oaks! I wish they were cold tolerant. I have planted white oak, which has lower tannins than the red and black, but still require leaching.
We’ve been blessed to be able to acquire 40 acres ( 16 hectares) of land, and have planted hundreds of chestnut, hazelnut, and fruit trees. Might be a nice place to “forage” a bit in a few decades. We’ve been harvesting the hazels for a few years now, and the chestnuts (hybrid American/Chinese) are just coming on.
I have no idea how I would manage 40 acres, I can barely keep on top of a tenth of an acre! I’d have to get some friends to help, I guess. (Maybe the four-legged kind.)
“I’d actually say the opposite.” – steve c
Indeed, “…less prone to short-term collapse…” lacks real world understanding.
And, “Mostly, they collapsed… for political and social reasons.” lacks basic systems thinking.
Ponder this template:
An extended drought reduces food production and lowers the carrying capacity of a community. The dry weather continues and the quantity of stored food quickly decreases. The community is now in overshoot.
If population and consumption levels are adjusted voluntarily with carefully managed rationing and de-growth programs, the community might survive the drought – then increased food production may allow a partial return to the previous state of complexity.
If population and consumption levels are not adjusted voluntarily then they will be harshly lowered involuntarily and nature will do what it has always done – ruthlessly and without prejudice – resulting in rapid collapse.
But people and leaders won’t sit around and watch their families and kingdoms starve to death. They become desperate and their actions have “political and social” consequences – price controls, higher taxes, more debt, confiscation, rebellion, brutal suppression, civil war, damaged infrastructure, cultural breakdown, and the use of military force to take remaining stores of food from neighboring communities (resource wars).
But the cart should not go before the horse here. Drought caused the reduction in carrying capacity, which plunged the community into overshoot, and ignited their desperate behavior. Only then did “political and social reasons” contribute to decline and collapse.
So is it correct to say in this case that collapse occurred because of “political and social reasons”? Or is it more useful to say it happened because too many people were consuming too few resources, i.e., carrying capacity overshoot?
A systems thinking approach would first acknowledge the overshoot and then examine the consequences in order to better understand what happened and learn how to prevent it in the future. To look at the collapse in reverse chronology, however, focusing on symptoms instead of causes, is to misunderstand the concatenation of events and ensure that wrong lessons will be learned.
Bad decision-making (unwittingly copied by succeeding empires) is thus doomed to repeat. Similar decision-making will result in similar collapse scenarios – at larger and larger scales of empire (larger scales over time because some lessons – how to organize, manage, administer large bureaucracies – WERE effectively learned).
If ancient communities that are said to have collapsed because of internal “political and social reasons” are examined NOT by looking through the microscope of fashionable “modern view” narratives that use defective “silo” thinking, but instead through the telescope of “systems thinking”, using big picture analysis to see the dynamic play of interdependent and interactive parts and forces, we will likely gain a greater understanding of, and find the deeper reasons for, collapse.
The most important thing we learn from history, it seems, is that we don’t learn from history. This is a clarifying paraphrase of Santayana’s observation – except in this case societies DO remember the past, but inherit the wrong lessons, and repeat the same mistakes over and over, empire after empire, collapse after collapse.
And today, having reached the scale of a planet devouring machine, it appears we will do the same.
Cheers.
Let’s go back to consideration of whether the complexity of six-continent supply chains make short-term collapse more, or less, likely. The complexity of the global market is great enough that a case can easily be made for either likelihood.
There are many redundancies in this market, many sources of the same raw materials, many manufacturers making the same, or similar, products and many ways of moving things around. This is why economists always tout the availability of substitutes for a shortfall of anything and say that price signals can quickly result in alternative sources of supply for everything. Supply chains and market forces in a globalized market are so complex that it’s impossible to keep track of everything, but if it’s worked so far, why not expect it to just keep on working?
But that complexity takes effort to manage. Even the “invisible hand” has a metabolic load. Tainter examined this load at length in his “Collapse of Complex Societies” and suggested that it was the cost of managing complexity that eventually caused societies to collapse. It’s just that the people living in the midst of that complexity have a very hard time seeing where the limits are. If we looked at a systems dynamics chart of all the nodes and feedbacks of our existing global market it would look more complex than a Jackson Pollock painting. It’s so complex and got so many hidden single points of failure that it might just collapse in a heap at any time; perhaps tomorrow?
Since I have nothing but intuition to gauge whether, at this point in time, this extreme complexity is a strength or a weakness, I like to go back to first principles, the most important of which is the supply of energy. Everything everyone does, including participating in a global market, takes energy. If a source of energy is short, nothing else will substitute for it except for another source.
The global market now depends on finite fossil fuels for about 80% of its primary energy. This means that a substitute for fossil fuels must be found before they begin their inevitable decline. But when we look at the history of energy supply over recent decades, very little substitution has taken place, and since we know it takes energy to build out the substitute energy supply, we need to conserve enough fossil fuels to build their replacement before they run out. This is the “energy trap” that Tom Murphy described in his classic 2011 post: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
It takes energy to manage complexity. Insufficiently managed complexity can lead to collapse. We are on the cusp of a significant hit to the global energy supply and we know that complexity will also take a hit as a result. Will the loss of complexity be enough to trigger systemic collapse? I don’t know, but I think it is prudent to be prepared for collapse to happen soon. If it doesn’t, keep preparing. If it does, hope for the best.
Good post, thanks.
Except for one sentence:
“The complexity of the global market is great enough that a case can easily be made for either likelihood.”
The case for less likelihood of short term collapse cannot be “easily” made. (Assuming here you mean “convincingly” or “seriously”.)
In fact, your entire post confirms this. Pull out a single jenga block (labeled “FF”) from the bottom of the tower and voila, collapse. In real time. FF energy sustains 8 billion humans. Remove it and ind civ collapses, locally, regionally, globally.
And that single jenga block will not be pulled out completely without things getting more than a little, how should we say it, kinetic. Decisions and actions which will of course accelerate the collapse timeline. That’s what resource wars do. That’s what humans do.
Yes, a case could be made based on redundancy and substitution but it would be non-sensical – redundancy and substitution are based entirely on FF!
The fragility of a six continent supply chain, because of FF dependency, is part of a systems thinking approach to collapse that you clearly understand. Which is why your sentence above is at odds with the rest of your post.
Cheers.
The question was not about long-term collapse, which is inevitable, but short-term collapse, which I take to mean sometime in the next few years. Under normal circumstances, a prediction of collapse in the next few years is likely to fail, even with energy and other resource stresses building up in our complex global market. So my comment was directed to the issue of collapse due to problems managing complexity.
In any event, something will eventually bring down industrial modernity, we just don’t know when or exactly how. That eventuality should concentrate the mind, but it somehow slides right by most people. Even though Chris’s take on the probability of short-term collapse can be batted back and forth, he still sees it likely to happen in the medium term.
The closing of the Strait of Hormuz may indeed precipitate short-term collapse due to the sudden withdrawal of a significant percentage of fossil energy and other products from the market, but maybe it won’t. We’ll find out soon. Whatever happens, the closure will probably move up the medium-term timeline significantly.
I’ve been more or less prepared for collapse since the mid-1970s, so some would say my preparation has been very premature. Perhaps so, but since living in the country is far preferable to living in a city, there hasn’t been any price at all to pay for doing so. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Interesting angle(s) on current conflicts, hard to determine the veracity.
https://escapekey.substack.com/p/iran
Simon,
I think the Escape Key author is imputing a far more sophisticated strategy to Trump, Witkoff and Kushner than is justified by the facts. The conspiritorial subtext is bordering on tinfoil-hat territory. These people aren’t that smart and using war as a tool for financial control seems a little heavy-handed’
Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, all part of a “master plan” to control countries by first destroying them? Wouldn’t plain ol’ bribery be a lot easier?
“The question was not about long-term collapse…” – J. Clarkson
Didn’t say it was. We were discussing the likelihood of short-term collapse.
“So my comment was directed to the issue of collapse due to problems managing complexity.” – J. Clarkson
That’s about long-term collapse. So not sure what your point is.
Again, the likelihood of short-term collapse is dependent on FF availability. The claim that it’s “less likely” because of redundancy and substitution is non-sensical. Redundancy and substitution are as dependent on FF as the products and resources they replace.
And anyone who says we are “less prone to short-term collapse” while Hormuz is blockaded, oil tankers seized and on fire, and major oil refineries bombed and burning… is not paying attention and lacks real world understanding. Boots on the ground clearly makes short-term collapse “more likely” not “less”.
I had the same feeling Joe, by and large, but I’m not sure bribery works every time in such situations.
Another eye-opener from Honest Sorceror:
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/iran-war-light-at-the-end-of-the
Thanks for this interesting and sometimes sparky set of comments while I’ve been offline – not all of them sparky in a good way, in my opinion. So, I’m going to write three comments below. First, a comment on commenting on this site. Second, an invitation to a particular commenter to change tack. Finally, a long comment in which I try to navigate around various themes of substance raised in the comments. I’m quite short on time at the moment, and may not respond much further, but thanks to everyone for keeping things ticking.
A comment on comments, which falls into five parts –
1. What do we talk about on this blog?
2. How do we talk about it?
3. What kind of comments aren’t welcome here?
4. What happens if these comment rules are broken?
5. Who gets to decide and determine all this?
1. What do we talk about on this blog? Primarily (and broadly) human ecology, politics and agrarian history, with a view to understanding the contemporary poly-crisis or meta-crisis, and what to do about it. A lot of people, including me, who comment here have a hand in practical food production and other aspects of generating a local livelihood. People’s stories about how they’re doing this are welcome here too, but practical ‘how to’ stuff isn’t the prime focus of this site – and, while it’s undeniably important, for the record I don’t consider it the most important thing for everyone to be discussing. How such local efforts may be able to survive and/or proliferate in the face of contrary social forces as the poly-crisis ramps up is a prime focus of this site. As I see it, nobody has good answers to this – certainly including me. Approaching the discussions on this site with a sense that you don’t have good answers but it’s nevertheless worth seeking them might help you find your feet with discussions here.
2. How do we talk about it? Politely. With the passing years, I’ve increasingly come to emphasize this. A lot of the positive comments I get about this site emphasize it too – people like the fact that there’s a good level of discussion and a range of different voices here who largely avoid the yelling and cheap putdowns that are all too common in online debate. The problem with the latter is that over time it tends to select for people who like yelling and self-aggrandizement and it filters out people who don’t like it – the latter, in my judgment, often having more wisdom and more interesting things to say.
So, I’m fairly intolerant of impoliteness and, apropos recent comments here about the need for a thick skin to have productive conversations, I disagree. I think productive conversations emerge when people listen and can get through to each other. Cutting remarks and thick skins are a barrier to this.
3. What kind of comments aren’t welcome here?
(a) Impolite ones.
(b) Direct threats or celebrations/exhortations of violence against other people.
(c) Negative portrayals or stereotypes about whole categories of people, e.g. by religion, ethnicity etc.
(d) ‘I’m smarter/have more understanding than you’, ‘I’m better prepared for collapse than you’ and other putdowns or status flexes of that sort. A lot of us here have a broadly anarchist distrust of status hierarchies and political power claims. This is where they start, folks. Historically, people have tried to put a stop to other people’s status flexes by making fun of them, allying against them, ignoring them, banishing them or killing them. Somehow, these mostly seem inappropriate for this website, but I do reserve the option of banishment (see Point 4 below).
(e) Polite and specific critiques of the substance of my writing here are fine, but I don’t welcome generalized critiques, especially of my writing style or its literary quality, along the lines of ‘what you’ve written is wrong/annoying/badly written/badly structured’. This gives me no useful information. It does prompt a mild curiosity in me about what need in themselves people are meeting by taking the time to tell me that they don’t like my writing (peak pointlessness in this respect was the person who emailed me to say “I’m not going to read your book because I won’t like it, and by the way I think you’re wrong about a lot of stuff”). But not usually enough curiosity to make me want to follow up. What I write comes to you for free out of my own spare time, and nothing obliges you to read it.
(f) Implying that somebody needs to read such-and-such an author or publication before their opinion on something counts. What people have read or said usually matters more than what they haven’t. Suggested readings are welcome, but not in the form of a status flex.
(g) Comments from people using their real names are more welcome than comments from people using pseudonyms. If you feel you must use a pseudonym that’s okay, but then everything above about how to comment well applies with extra force.
4. What happens if these comment rules are broken? Usually, I will try to let the relevant commenter know and suggest they change their tack. I request that they accept this feedback rather than hitting back at me. I have limited patience for ongoing engagements of this kind. Ultimately, I will ban people from the site if I feel it’s warranted. I’ve only done this twice in thirteen years of blogging, but my blacklist finger has become twitchier of late, and it’s quite twitchy at the moment.
Possibly, I will ask the wider community of established commenters here their opinion – privately or publicly – about a commenter before banning them. And I’ll probably give a bit more leeway to someone for whom English isn’t their first language or who’s outside my usual N America/W Europe/Australasia commenter zone, or whom I’m finding intellectually interesting. But I don’t guarantee it.
5. Who gets to decide and determine all this? Well, that would be me – my site, my rules. You’re in my front parlour here, and you’re welcome to stay here so long as you stick to its rules. You may have different rules in your own one, and that’s fine by me. But these are the rules I have here. I will attempt to apply them fairly, but I’m just a flawed human being. I’m open to (polite) feedback up to a point if you think I’m not applying them fairly, but ultimately I’ll do what I do.
Thank you
Chris
Following on from my previous comment on commenting, there’s more than one commenter above pushing at my boundaries but particularly Gunnar (not Gunnar Rundgren, the other Gunnar). Gunnar, I find your manner of engagement with me and with some of the other commenters here under this post and under other recent ones (for example here: https://chrissmaje.com/2026/01/by-the-rivers-of-babylon-debating-agrarianism-with-tom-murphy/#comment-268970) needlessly provocative and dismissive, and not conducive to good discussion. If other people here find the style and content of your contributions amenable I might keep the door open, but I don’t think you’re adding much to the conversations here – in fact, diminishing them in ways that tend to make people walk. If you continue in this vein, I’m minded to ban you from the site. I’ve tried working with you to improve the dialogue without success, and from my point of view life’s too short for these kinds of interactions here.
Now for some comments on the substance of comments above, which also fall into five parts:
1. Population, limits & collapse
2. The state … and more collapse
3. Foraging and farming
4. Hierarchy, equality & agrarianism
5. Genocide
Apologies for not engaging with everyone individually in this comment, but I’ve read all the comments and done my best to work my way through the issues you’ve raised. I’m sure there are many things I’ve missed, and there’s definitely much more to say but I regret this will have to do from me for now.
1. POPULATION, LIMITS & COLLAPSE
Steve C challenged my remark that ‘The situation we now face is a fossil-fuelled global system of states that’s possibly less prone to short-term collapse because of its fast and tightly interlocked economies’. Here, as Joe correctly identified, I was channelling Joseph Tainter’s ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ in relation to Tom Murphy’s long-termism, where Tainter argues that collapse is attenuated when there’s nowhere easy for people to collapse to (and no easy model for how to collapse), but yes I agree that things could unravel fast with present tight and non-resilient fossil-fuelled systems. Indeed, as long-term commenters here will know, I’ve long argued this – collapse is pretty much baked in now. My qualification of it in respect of the Tainter-style argument doesn’t negate Steve C’s larger point.
Still, Gunnar, that doesn’t stop you piling on with your ‘lacks real world understanding’ and ‘lacks basic systems thinking’ remarks. By ‘systems thinking’ you usually seem to mean an unmediated determinism of social outcomes by population numbers or biophysical limits. I find this unpersuasive. I’m not arguing that these factors have no independent impact – biophysical limits are decisive in the final instance – but I don’t think you pay enough attention to the way that human systems have their own internal trajectories and can also independently condition outcomes. On the question of human population, I (and others) argue that for the most part population levels are less cause than consequence of the factors impelling overshoot, which I will discuss in more detail in a forthcoming post (thanks Steve L for the comments on declining fertility in this regard). Meanwhile, like Kathryn, I find speculative number games about the exact level of post-collapse human populations pointless. In relation to the ‘political and social reasons’ I mention, I remain persuaded by the current academic orthodoxy – older arguments that the supposed collapse of Mayan and Mesopotamian societies was due to environmental overshoot were exaggerated, and I don’t find your drought example to the point in this regard.
All that said, while claims that ancient states collapsed for biophysical reasons are often exaggerated, it seems to me that our contemporary fossil-fuelled global system of states will certainly collapse soon or fairly soon for biophysical reasons, as well as for internal political-economic ones. I think I’ve been pretty clear about that in my writings over the years.
2. THE STATE – AND MORE COLLAPSE
Vaughan poses some great questions about the state and how to orient to it, and I like the vibe of appropriate uncertainty and baffling complexity in his comment. My first blush attempt to answer it would be to say yes, I accept that there have been many gains from modern welfare capitalism, indeed largely through victories from below but sometimes also through forms of civic consciousness, even civic nationalism, which possibly I tend to deprecate over-hastily. There’s a bottom-up aspect of all states and especially contemporary states that shouldn’t be entirely sidelined, although ultimately I’m more in sympathy with Eric’s anti-statism. Generally, I think dominant narratives are good at noticing the gains from modern welfare capitalism and bad at noticing the losses. Meanwhile, the gains and the political legacy of how they were won are becoming increasingly problematic and anachronistic as processes of collapse both internal and external to the structure of the state begin to bite. The drive to economic growth, industrially-generated profit and state-corporate centralization has brought benefits in various times and places but has now become pathological.
Kathryn’s point about post-Covid normality is also important here. I think we’ll see crises and problems of increasing duration and severity, but people’s ability to imagine a return to ‘normality’ beyond them is profound, and problematic.
Nevertheless, ultimately I think we’ll see legitimacy crises of existing states as the balance sheet of what they’re giving and taking becomes plainer to growing numbers of people. We need to pay attention to what might arise out of those crises, and how to try shaping it for the best.
Another point of interest in all this is the very concept of ‘the state’. What is ‘the state’? What happens if we replace it with the term ‘the government’, or – more to the point – just ‘government’ or ‘governance’?
All fertile ground for further discussion!
3. FARMING, FORAGING & THE FUTURE
Coming back to the original focus of this post, I find much to agree with in the remarks by various commenters about the limitations of Tom Murphy’s take on farming vis-à-vis foraging, but nevertheless I found my exchange with him thought-provoking and clarifying of some issues. I don’t have much objection to his academic epiphany that Walter linked, which is similar if somewhat more dramatic to my own one, but I agree there are some problems with where he now is.
Joe’s pinpointing of the medieval to early modern period as the key point of human impact take-off is plausible to me – I’ve written about this before in respect of capitalism, colonialism and fossil fuels. Tom would say that the worm was already long in the bud by this point, but that’s where his determinism gets too heavy in my opinion.
On the medieval transition point, I’m interested in Eric’s disappointment with the Kehnel book, which I’ve now nearly finished, and also in Vaughan’s strictures against debt as a fundamental problem. I’ve found the book illuminating, especially when she gets into more detail in later chapters rather than the more superficial introductory material (even so, I loved her case against Steven Pinker in the earlier part). Is any kind of debt, oath, securitisation or potentially productive circulation of resources problematic and/or usurious? If so, then maybe Tom’s right and the worm really was in the bud long ago (though, as I argued in the original post, then we’d have to go way back, probably beyond the origins of H. sapiens, to excise the worm).
Kathryn’s points about specialisation are relevant here – although the more I read about late medieval and early modern history, the more aware I become of how much even modestly wealthy and/or specialised people were involved in the production of basic livelihood (especially women, of course…). The points above prompted by Vaughan about the extent to which local governance had broader civic and non-accumulative or exploitative goals are also relevant. Can there be complex, differentiated, commercial and monetised but non-capitalist societies of the kind found worldwide in medieval times that don’t devolve into a logic of pathological capitalist (or state capitalist/communist) growth? I hope to say a bit more about that soon.
One lead into that is Bluejay’s comment – nicely picking up not only on the salary point but also on the differences between relatively sustainable British/European farming and relatively unsustainable American farming – the latter a deeply colonial project from the get-go. I thought Amitav Ghosh nailed this well in the chapter on terraforming in his excellent book ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’.
Talking of terraforming, Joe’s and Kathryn’s remarks about food forests and about forage trees in London are interesting. By their nature, food forests need setting up quite some time ahead, in the present circumstances usually before decision-makers and local people think they need them, which is often a stumbling block in my experience – salutations, then, to the unknown local heroes in Kathryn’s ‘certain borough in London’. How people organise themselves around existing opportunities when the need for them becomes apparent is an interesting question on which I’d welcome people’s views – the situation is ripe for commons formation and peer learning, but also for conflict and control of access/knowledge.
Various interesting comments here also on humanity’s future direction – Joe writes “Chris has certainly tried to lay out a path to that world, but I am still skeptical that we can collectively take that path.”
I am too, but I think we need to make our most realistic appraisal of present realities and future possibilities and aim for the least-worst options. That doesn’t satisfy everyone, as Steve L points out, but in my opinion there’s too much wishful thinking and hopium around. I mean, I know I get accused of it myself, but if you think I’m guilty of it, then definitely don’t read any contemporary news journalism.
On which note…
4. HIERARCHY, EQUALITY & AGRARIANISM
Yevhenii, although you transgress my comment policy at times and I don’t always understand the exact point you’re making, I find your perspectives and your grounding in pre and post Soviet history interesting. Kathryn and Tim B have sketched some context for understanding my position in respect of your question – my thanks to them. You ask “why, with such a base of agriculture (thousands of years, and experience of capitalism, markets, etc.), should everything go the other way – peaceful, inclusive, democratic, etc.?” to which my reply is ‘it won’t’, and nor did it in pre-agricultural society. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth charting possible ground for more rather than less peaceful, inclusive etc societies.
But I think you construct too strong a dualism between freedom and ‘serf-like exploitative systems’, as does Tom Murphy. As I argued above in relation to David Graeber’s writing, there are numerous gradations of freedom and exploitation within systems of hierarchy – James Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ arguments are also relevant, and so is much of the aforementioned book by Annette Kehnel. I appreciate that things must look bleak in a post-Soviet or Russian empire context, but that isn’t the only reality in the world, and even there it seems to me that gradations exist. Rather than generalising the Russian context as a global truth, I’d be interested to hear more about how the bleak specifics of Tsarist serfdom, Soviet anti-peasantism and post-Soviet autocracy have been generated.
Yevhenii, I confess I don’t really get your “the world described by Chris is death, death, death” comment – sounds a bit like the kind of putdowns I get from the likes of George Monbiot and the ecomodernists, but as I see it their world, this present world with its structuring of global power and its empty techno-fixes, is a world of death, in numerous ways. Death is, of course, a certainty for all of us. I think many contemporary problems involve at root a conceit that we can escape it, which only tightens its grip. Maybe we can reframe the discussion in terms of how to die as well as possible.
Eric mentioned Christopher Boehm’s book ‘Hierarchy in the Forest’. I read it a long time ago and I guess I’ve forgotten most of it, but I found his reverse-dominance thesis powerful and not entirely depressing – people can’t help making pecking orders and status plays (there are a few going on in this comments section), but they also can’t help knocking them down. It’s an endless game, and the bullies don’t win all the time. Which is why it’s still worth playing.
5. GENOCIDE
Regarding the discussion about genocide, as I see it it’s a modern term arising in the context of a postwar global system of states and international law – and even then, what gets defined as a genocide is intensely political, as we’ve seen recently in the case of Gaza. It seems clear in the Moriori case that you can’t just look at it as a Māori perpetrated genocide with no links to British colonial power – it’s not a good example of some forager-on-forager precolonial analogue to modern genocides. Which is not to say that precolonial forager peoples necessarily lacked the desire to wipe out other peoples – but also not necessarily in ways that map contemporary contexts. Thanks to Christine for raising some of these complexities.
Thanks, Chris!
Regarding serfdom, anti-peasantry and post-Soviet autocracies. Are you interested in the historical perspective. Or from the point of view of family experience?
In general, serfdom, as in Europe, is associated with protection agreements. But the Russian experience is less clear, because Russia came to this territory (where I live) only in the 1790s. And bureaucratically it was organized closer to the 1820s.
Before that, there was quite strict Polish serfdom here. Due to the constant pressure of nomads (Tatars) until the 1750s, the territories south of 48°N were quite dangerous for settling villages or farming in general. Because during raids, everything was burned, and people, especially women, were taken to the yasir. Therefore, since ancient times, the state has given settlements for a certain number of years, which means that this period was tax-free, for the settlement of the village and its resettlement, and after this period it is necessary to pay a certain amount of taxes and duties. Over time, their number increased both in time and in quantity. There was state land and land granted for life (to landowners for military merit). State land had fixed standard sets of serf duties, but private land, here everything could reach an absurd 6(!) days of work from “dawn to sunset” and only one day for one’s own rest and one’s own cultivation of the land, which was also Sunday, that is, the day of attending church. As can be seen from the history of unrest and uprisings, arbitrariness and looting, escapes, etc., standard methods of struggle, which, unfortunately, did not contribute much to success.
Regarding Soviet anti-peasantry. So it was mostly not anti-peasantry, but pro-industrial urbanism. The Holodomor became a collective trauma and is still present in the routine habits of ordinary people. If Lenin had not died prematurely, perhaps such extraordinary victims and senseless repressions could have been avoided (without diminishing the senselessness of the ideology itself). In general, everything was decided by local government and local affairs – the fulfillment of the tasks set. And this varied greatly from village to village and from region to region. My ancestors survived because they knew wild herbs and squeezed oil from buckwheat, red clover, dry ryabolishche and other herbs and exchanged the oil for other products or grain in others. As for autocracy, here it is mostly connected with the one-man ontology of managing affairs from ancient times until 1991. But this does not apply, for example, to Ukraine or Moldova, Georgia and several other countries where there is a transit of power (albeit minimal). In general, I have no direct experience in this regard. Daniel Beauvois brilliantly covers some of these issues in his trilogy. And it is worth noting that the territory of Ukraine belonged to different political entities, as well as had autonomies and anarchic entities at different times. If any specific issue is of great interest (for example, what was the form of land ownership in *insert time*, or what taxes and duties were imposed on peasants, etc.), then I can briefly describe it. Your questions are very complex and extensive, and my time is limited both by the supply of electricity and by work on sowing and planting, etc. 🙂
Chris wrote: “Nevertheless, ultimately I think we’ll see legitimacy crises of existing states as the balance sheet of what they’re giving and taking becomes plainer to growing numbers of people. We need to pay attention to what might arise out of those crises, and how to try shaping it for the best.”
Unfortunately, it seems that the states (or governments) are trying to become more authoritarian, centralized and controlling in anticipation of such crises.
In my view, “shaping it for the best” would include resisting moves toward further centralization because of the potentials for authoritarian abuses. Central Bank Digital Currencies and cashless societies come to mind as examples of things to avoid.
Well I think we are entering the preamble to the end of fossil fuels net zero it will be interesting to watch , fuel shortages are beginning especially for the far east and Europe , Russia an the US have enough to keep going Europe has twenty days or so until the last loaded tanker gets there .
The fertiliser shortage is beginning to bite , TX farmers are getting about 25% of what they ordered which is less than 5years ago because of price . Grain exports will be down .
European industry is on the rocks now BASF has built its new factory in China and will close euro plants , VW is closing 8 out of 10 plants , Nissan is bancrupt , and lloyds shiping insurance market is now replaced by Tampa Florida backed by the us treasury . ( that was a nice earner it cost $600000 to insure a tanker for each trip from the mid east ) .
Trump has today called NATO a paper tiger and is thinking of withdrawal , that’s probably the fist of many post war agreement either put on hold or deleted , the world order is changing and all we can do is watch .
There is a bifurcation on this site that does not seem to be appreciated. Tom Murphy REIFIES agriculture. He paints it as a “thing.” This is a trick which allows him to say, “It’s bad.” He is still on this jag, as you can see in his latest post called, “Dream Presentation.” It is on both his site and the Resilience site. Meanwhile, many of the posters on this site, including myself, paint agriculture as a PROCESS. In other words, foraging is not a “thing” as distinct from agriculture as a “thing.” There is a process of getting food that proceeds along a continuum from just harvesting what nature provides (foraging, hunting, gathering), to a process of preparing the ground, planting the desired crops, taking care of the crops (and the soil!), and harvesting (agriculture). And if you clocked my use of a process that is itself in process – Bravo! You are on a continuum of paradigm shifts, just by understanding the interior process itself.
When the commenters here talk about their foraging experiences, they are not shoehorning themselves into a “thing” called “foraging.” Nor are they in a “thing” called agriculture if they scavenge some holm oaks or other wild plants and put them in their garden/orchard and take care of them. The problem (at least one of them) with Murphy’s naive view of agriculture is his reification of a process that is ongoing – and has been for 12,000 years. All you have to do is read a little about the origins of agriculture to see that people were after something to eat, not some sort of life-changing category that was comfortable. C’mon, have some respect for these very smart people! I have done a lot of research on the origins of agriculture, both in the library and in the field. My best theory is that ancient humans realized they could get more yield by putting in labor BEFORE the harvest. And the energy return was quite favorable. It is all well and good to get several bands together to run some bison over a cliff so everybody eats. But if the giant bison herds are not around at the moment, more people on the hunt doesn’t do you any good. But you can take your labor, which is plentiful, and do a bunch of actions which set the stage for later harvest. Fer chrissakes, people were already in a seasonal round in time and space. Thinking of a seasonal round in labor allocation is not a big step.
As I have said for over fifty-five years, “You don’t have to be a farmer. You just have to grow food.” If you can get your food by foraging some of it – Great! But the whole food getting process is on a continuum, not segmented by some sort of categorization scheme. Tom Murphy is très naïve. The people on this site actually ENGAGED in the foraging-to-agriculture continuum are more sophisticated.
By the way, it is likely grains were already being grown – not just harvested – in the Fertile Crescent before the Younger Dryas cooling period. It is also likely that populations dispersed and small amounts of grain were grown in isolated pockets and the seed lines kept alive until the warming trend came back around 11,700 BP. Then people could assemble in bigger bands and tribes for efficiencies of scale. But it is hard to make assessments about settlement patterns when bands are dispersed throughout the landscape. This is the kind of thing I saw when I was an archaeologist doing work in Wyoming and Montana many years ago. What some of us are doing in landrace research and keeping heritage seed lines going is similar. We might need these “odd” crops.
Another point. I could eat more wild foods. But I really, really like the onions and potatoes and beans and other stuff that I grow. J’adore les oignons !
Agree, which is not to say that there are no dangerous tipping points on the continuum. The most prominent of those tipping points I can think of are mechanization and Haber-Bosch fertilization. I leave it to others to decide which of the two is worse.
Both of those powerful and malign influences on land use came during the fossil fuel era and almost certainly could not exist outside it. If so, the real problem is not growing food, but using fossil fuels to grow food. The same “fossil fuel problem” applies to a host of other human actvities, too.
Humans are the only animals intelligent enough to use fossil fuels, so maybe the problem is the level of human intelligence: smart enough to figure out how to use fossil fuels, but not smart enough to know better than to use them.
PS I wrote that last sentence before reading Murphy’s “Dream Presentation”, which covers the same ground. I disagree with Murphy’s implication that there might be something we could do about it. After all, we evolved to be the way we are and there is probably no way to cast off our current intelligence level except via extinction.
Chris, I appreciate your very clear and assertive response to the “swerving toward the unruly” comments that have percolated over the last few weeks. I think there’s a tension in the air that is manifesting in a lot of chaotic online commentary. It’s nice to have someone reign things in, without being a bossy dick about it.
My background is in ethnomusicology (vaguely related to anthropology) and in recent years the discipline has been very focused on methodology and the reflexivity that can help (and sometimes destabilise) actual research outputs. I thus find the time spent reflecting on the function and value of blog posts like this quite interesting and worthwhile. That being said, it’s nice not to get lost in reflections on methodology per se, and I’ll refrain from commenting on these aspects of the blog/blogging for a while at least.
I’m intrigued by the circulating ideas that seem to be cropping up here around pre-industrial farming and subsistence livelihoods, particular in various historical contexts. I am one of the select few NewZealanders who comment on this blog (!) so the reference to New Zealand colonial history was interesting to note. It’s eye opening to see the genocide of moriori come up as a topic here as it’s barely mentioned in public discourse around these parts. Whether it’s considered genocide in the postwar sense is another matter, but it’s important to realize that there was a lot of violent disruption throughout the early history of New Zealand – a relatively “new” country by global standards. Indeed, I don’t thi k most New Zealanders really appreciate the novelty of our historical positionality.
New Zealand was thought of by some European settlers (and possibly Māori settlers too) as a utopian escape from the depleted societies they left behind. I’m thus probs my inclined to orientate my future thinking (or my theories of change) within a utopian framework – for better or worse. I would like to know what others think about utopian thought as a way to imagine future opportunities for less fossil-fuel dominated livestyles and economies. I realise someone’s utopia can be someone else’s distopia. That doesn’t stop me thinking through opportunities that freedom from current social and economic constraints might afford in the future.
As a sometimes fisherman, I’ll throw some new bait into the watery blogosphere with the following: I think a technocratic serfdom (with all the digital bells and whistles) might not be the worst outcome of the next step down the staircase of collapse. This would be a world in which one is required to grow a certain amount of calories for the ruling class, at local scales but with a digitally enhanced governance – whether it turns out to be a socialist utopia or an anarcho-capitalist one is not determined by the technology or the demand to grow local produce for a broader collective/marketplace. If technological governance systems (whether AI driven or not) can put pressure on more people to grow food, I don’t think this would be the worst possible outcome from such a disruption. Less robot farmers, more digital serfs.
Tim
How does the digitally enhanced governance of your technocratic serfdom work? What is the physical infrastructure, and legal and social infrastructure, required to maintain such a system?
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I do think it would need very different dynamics in terms of computer hardware than the current extractive capitalist model. Our current forays into digital communications (including this blog and the comments on it) and computation are heavily dependent on the energy (and to some extent the materials) to make the hardware being massively under-priced compared to the impacts of the manufacturing process, and it isn’t clear how we get out of that.
Thanks for these questions Kathryn. I am very naive when it comes to the nuts and bolts of digital tech and infrastructure. My speculations are based on nothing more than an inkling that some kind of decaying digital infrastructure will be functional for several decades following the next big shift in a collapse trajectory. If it’s not powerful enough to manage robot soldiers (and farmers), it might have enough grunt to organise people to grow and raise food for a shared system of exchange. I’m curious now to learn how things like the internet and iPhones can function with diminishing fossil-fuel input.
I want to think more about what kinds of existing social and legal infrastructure would support (or prevent) a transition to a more digitally-coordinated local food system. Taxes come to mind right now. What if the local government demanded I pay a proportion of my property tax through potatoes grown in my backyard?
So, one big issue with decaying computer infrastructure is that after a point it’s quite difficult to cobble together the hardware from spare parts, and we can’t currently mine the materials for new ones, or run the factories to make them, without fossil fuels. I am a big fan of the idea that we might be able to do some of this, but in a severe enough collapse, or even just a particular enough one, it simply won’t be tenable. Simon Michaux (I think?) has done some work on sustainable locally-produced tech, though, which may interest you.
Taxes paid in potatoes would go sprouty within a year, if the rats didn’t get them in the warehouse. It’s also really difficult to evaluate a potato crop before harvest as you can’t see what’s under the ground. Potatoes are fairly bulky and heavy for the amount of energy they contain. So any entity collecting tax in the form of potatoes would need to be very, very local indeed; at some point this begins to look more like a mutually collaborative arrangement than an imposed tax.
Grains are much easier to transport. If properly dried they will keep for a decade. If you send an inspector to the fields pre-harvest, you can also get a pretty good idea of how much was actually grown. Collecting rents or taxes or tithes in the form of grain, or based on the price of grain, has been a fairly common practice.
Why pay taxes ?
Here in the US there is a strange dichotomy in action .
The left howls about the pilgrim fathers stealing the land from the indigenous people , yet at the same time they are fighting to allow birthright citizenship for anyone who happens to be born within us territorial limits .
I don’t see a dichotomy here. Perhaps my logic skills are failing, so let me parse it out.
A) The Left (of which I am a member) is “howling” about people being pushed off the land in which they were born. {European colonialism in the 16th-18th centuries, American colonialism in the 19th century]
B) The Left (of which I am a member) is “howling” that people should not be pushed off the land in which they were born. {Trump’s push to deport people born within US borders]
Sorry, I just don’t get it. It seems like a consistent argument to me. Of course one could disagree on the actual argument about whether the constitutional amendment should be changed, but that is not a dichotomy.
Per Tim’s speculation on the nuts and bolts of digital infrastructure in a declining economic system on its way towards collapse:
All of the commenters here are using a fiat currency for day-to-day transactions, whether USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, NZD, SEK, etc. This could change in the future. In fact, I am betting on it. But Tim has highlighted that this is a work-in-progress. In other words, a waypoint on the continuum. [Remember, we don’t need to see the end point of the continuum to recognize the process.] What I would like to propose is that IF any of the commenters on this site are interested “enough” in this digitization, they could investigate how the newest attempts are being played out. It is a boring subject and I myself have little interest. To analogize, I play Hold ’em but have no time or interest in Omaha Hi-Lo.
For instance, the Genius Act in the US was a thinly-veiled way to prop up the US bond market using stable coins like Tether, which must be backed by US treasuries. Leveraging interest in crypto for newbies, so to speak, as well as diversification for Bitcoin holders. So far, this has not compensated for the panic-selling of US treasuries because of wars and the weaponization of foreign-held assets in 2022, so more US intervention is needed – like the Clarity Act. I recently did a Substack post on how the increase in the price of oil suppresses the spot price of gold in the short-term, using Turkey’s 10% selloff of their gold reserves as an example. But I am already at the limits of my interest in this narrow Strait of Obfuscation. And it is deep water too!
The starting point would be KYC and KYT. KYC is “know your client” and is part of financial regulation in Minnesota and probably other states. KYT is “know your transaction” and is part of the whole move towards the blockchain paradigm that many corporations are integrating into their finances. The precedent is the move towards putting everything on the Web for efficiencies of scale (ordering, customer service, payments, even inside house communications) over the last several decades. The blockchain paradigm is becoming more and more prevalent in the same manner. And of course, the libertarian types are so focused on governmental control they cannot see the deeper ramifications in how this is played out locally. The 50,000 foot view is important, yes. But the 5-foot view is even more important. This is sorta like Tom Murphy’s paradigm. Agriculture is “bad” so he cannot see the continuum of foraging to industrial agriculture and all the waypoints in between. [In this case the endpoint of the continuum is known.]
Digital serfdom is already upon us. That is why I keep very little in my bank accounts and have several cards so I can get a little bit out of each one for a crash event. In the Greek Crisis of 2010, citizens could only get a minimum amount out of their accounts, so they could not buy up cheap goods in the deflationary debt spiral. This is a real nuts-and-bolts worry for the present economic decline. Recently, I stocked up on organic fertilizer, which was still cheap. [Organic fertilizer hasn’t caught up to the rise in chemical fertilizers in the EU – yet.] I was able to pay with my bank card but I could have paid in cash euros if I had to. But forewarned is forearmed. If anyone is willing to investigate the parameters of digital serfdom, I would be appreciative.
Kathryn, potatoes came to mind as a relatively easy staple crop for the average suburbanite to produce. Would make sense to grow a grain for storage purposes, but less practical for average backyard landscape scale? If the digital system could assist in organising the logistics of potato stock for efficient consumption (and no sitting around in stores sprouting) all the better. There’s also perennial crops like nut trees, which take several years to bear fruit but could be more shelf-stable? (I’m not sure though – am dabbling with acorn foraging, in my second year now). You’ll note my imagined future scenario is very much based on current forms of social organisation and stratification, specifically those I’m most familiar with ( for me the suburbs!).
Diogenesis10, I pay taxes because I’m a god-fearing plebeian! But I’m becoming increasingly inclined to find ways to avoid paying more than seems fair to me. I’m quite interested in the Georgist model of land taxation fwiw.
Walter, I appreciated your outline of the various stages of digitisation of an economy. I haven’t paid enough attention to block-chain systems of exchange for it to slip into my armchair futurology, but I think I should.
Perhaps my reference to a “digital serfdom” didn’t quite capture my fuzzy vision of a near future where local food production is encouraged/enforced by a more fragmented yet still dominant state-corporate ruling class who administer the new peasant class via a simplified form of digital commerce. If the AI build-out falls short due to energy and material constraints, I don’t see the existing technology to date becoming redundant overnight. What I’m trying to imagine is a relatively peaceful collapse path in which the peasants-to-be plus their future state-capitalist quasi-lords/tsars realise that in the reduction of fossil-fuel inputs, a society can still hobble along under the guise of national collectives if they reorganise food production into intensive local networks – a permaculturalist solar-punk utopia, but more feudalist (i.e. hierarchical – for better or worse) than left-libertarian.
In a collapse who would you pay taxes too and with what ? Paper currency becomes toilet paper , the UK relies on the financial system for taxes and paper becomes worthless .
Central government can order whatever it likes , but how does it enforce it ?
Following up on new comments…
Thanks Yevhenii for taking the time out from sowing and planting to paint that historical sketch. Interesting that taxation & servility have arisen in a few comments here. Both have often been fantastically complex in many agrarian societies historically (a simple example: sometimes it’s been the tenure rather than the person as such that’s regarded as servile). I often wonder whether it’s worthwhile learning more about this history with a view to getting more clarity about the future – or whether the details of the past are less relevant for the future. Anyone here interested in a deeper dive into agrarian status and taxation systems of the past? Anyway, thanks for that for now Yevenhii – very interesting. My sense is that the Bolsheviks were more anti-peasant, or at least anti-kulak, than you imply? Along the lines of Marxism’s favoured ‘reactionary peasant/progressive proletarian’ duality. Interested in further thoughts on that.
Re Walter’s points on Tom Murphy and foraging vs farming – yes, agreed he reifies the distinction, which was basically one of my points above. I guess Tom would say that the relatively rapid and widespread adoption of agriculture followed by a suite of various dysfunctional aspects of modernity coming in soon after points a finger of suspicion at agriculture. Like most people here, I think that way of framing it begs a lot of questions. Nevertheless, there are some points of interest to ponder in the idea of a headlong rush down the river from agriculture to modernity and its woes.
To Joe’s points about humanity’s smartness or otherwise I’d agree, except to suggest that the human superpower of cooperation and building larger collective structures is an additional factor. We can be smart enough to know not to do things individually or within certain small groups, but unfortunately not within the larger political groupings that really matter, which have enormous institutional inertia and resistance to change.
Tim, thanks for that interesting comment, and for your support about my comment policing. I’d be interested to hear a brief summary of methodological issues in ethnomusicology – not a sentence I previously imagined writing… And likewise I’m all in for hearing people’s utopias, or thrutopias – but not so much dystopias. I enjoyed Rebecca Campbell’s novel ‘Arboreality’, with its depictions of a steady and not especially violent but nevertheless troubling falling apart of modern society.
Regarding your points on technocratic serfdom, I’m interested in the political power balance in such a society. Do the serfs stay serfs for long, and if so why? Is it potential violence against them that the techlords can orchestrate, or are they getting something more positive from them? How does that violence or benefit operate? How does one get to be a tech lord? Can their tech lordliness be sustained by taxing potatoes? Are there competing tech lord jurisdictions, enabling serfs to play the lords off against one another? To what extent might the existing ideology of liberal individualism protect against the emergence of serfdom? (I for one don’t think such political ideologies are necessarily just a thin veneer over the ‘real’ play of naked power). And what makes this a solarpunk utopia rather than a neo-feudalist dystopia?
Perhaps Walter’s points on digital serfdom are relevant here. I’d also be interested in seeing people’s analyses. Monetary economics isn’t really my thing, but I’m always open to learning. Surely all currencies are ultimately fiat currencies to a greater or lesser extent? Money means nothing without a social contract.
Taxation is interesting too. Why pay tax? Because in a well-functioning society it helps to generate positive social benefits and builds solidarity with fellow citizens. But yes in a dysfunctional society it can just look like another form of robbery – hence the legitimation crises I mentioned, and Steve L’s good suggestion of ways to prefigure this. Why have feudal lords or kings? The good king protects people from violence and banditry. The bad king is a violent bandit.
To tax in money, or in potatoes, or in wheat, or in whisky? Important questions touched on in passing in my recent book. Kathryn channels James Scott in her scepticism about a potato tax vis-à-vis wheat. I’m not totally convinced about this, but it’s plausible (Jennifer Pournelle’s critique of Scott is worth a read). It’s possible a potato state would be more localist, mutualist and bottom-up, but maybe not. The Incas and their freeze-dried potatoes spring to mind. Anyway, I think this is a really interesting and important arena of discussion.
Talking of wheat and potatoes, his anti-Irish prejudices aside I stand with William Cobbett and raise a corn dolly of defiance to those who say that wheat isn’t a crop for the small-scale garden!
Then there’s the land value tax that Tim mentions, on which I’ve written previously. I support what LVT is trying to achieve, but – as with universal basic income – I’m not convinced it’s the best way of going about it.
Diogenes adds the small question of ‘what confers citizenship?’ to his other small question of ‘why pay taxes?’. I discuss in ‘Finding Lights…’ the problems of ‘here first’ citizenship ideas, which I agree raise a lot of tricky issues, not least in relation to indigenous peoples in postcolonial countries. I’d argue that ‘born here’ isn’t the same as ‘here first’, and there’s much to be said for retaining the former more relaxed metric.
Finally, here’s hoping we’ll all still be here to debate these issues tomorrow and that Donald Trump doesn’t get the final say.
Chris says, “Money means nothing without a social contract.” Precisely. I am always surprised when some commenters on this site and other websites cannot even fathom the importance of trade in a post-collapse world. Trade is a contract – a bilateral contract in fact. There is bargain, consideration and good faith. If you don’t believe me about the three elements of bilateral contracts, check out the 2nd Restatement of Contracts, which is the first thing you learn about in a law school contracts course. I was quite good in contracts and even won a suit against my former law school when they axed my fellowship. Here is a verbatim quote from the courtroom on that creisp fall day in 1996.
Judge: “That’s your argument? That financial aid is not a contract? If so, Mr. Haugen wins.”
VP of the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland: “Uh, I guess that is my argument.”
Judge: “Well then, Mr. Haugen wins.”
I still get a good chuckle out of this when I think about it.
All bilateral contracts are social. In his 2013 book, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom, Mark S. Weiner – constitutional law scholar and professor – mentions Henry Sumner Maine, the father of legal anthropology. Sumner’s thesis was that societies “progress” from status to contract in societal organization (pages 10-17). Weiner wrote his book because he is worried that we are moving backwards to status as the organizing force. I see that as a good thing because of my views on the inherent negative structure of the state. And of course the idea of a “progression” of cultures is rubbish. But to return to Chris’ point, contract (trade) precedes money. As I have theorized over the years, Homo erectus was probably successful in the first migration out of Africa precisely because of trade.
As I am saying more and more these days, “Most people are trapped in statist thinking. This is a difficult paradigm to shift.”
Thanks Chris and Walter.
I’m in agreement with you on the social nature of money. And the ‘progression’ from trade to money transactions.
I also keep remembering what a friend quoted to me from someone famous(?): “Trade is what you do with your enemies.”
The point being that a gift economy is what you do with friends and family, and that type of accounting is much more diffuse than ‘trade’ per se.
I also read Rebecca Campbell’s ‘Arboreality’. It raised some good points, though I might have preferred more detail on the post-collapse economy. The Pacific Northwest is certainly a fertile region for __topias. I especially liked Premee Mohamed’s ‘Annual Migration of Clouds’.
Also on the book shelf, I’ve just finished Alvaro Enrigue’s ‘Now I Surrender’ which is a deep dive into the last days of Geronimo and the larger Apache world that he was fighting for. Alvaro Enrigue being Mexican made it a very interesting story about indigenousness and colonization.
But in the middle of all that, he drops in a brief bit about the domestication of horses. The story being that there were a number of relatively dense farming settlements in Europe around 10,000 years ago, and they were more or less egalitarian and pedestrian. Then the speakers of (proto) Indo-European west of the Black sea domesticated horses, quit farming and took to vanquishing the majority of Europe.
I don’t know how accurate that story is, but it’s a cautionary tale about our species’ penchant for power.
Also, since you mention taxing whiskey, I’d recommend William Hogeland’s ‘The Hamilton Scheme’.
It covers the Whiskey Rebellion, and makes quite clear the deep anti-democratic beliefs of the founders of the US.
Which reinforces my belief that taxation is not primarily about redistribution of resources, but about social control. I’m with the MMT people who say that the first purpose of taxation is to make the government money necessary and thus worth something.
The older societies did their redistribution by sharing.
Any taxation scheme just puts control of the redistribution in the hands of a small minority, thus allowing them control of those resources. Which minority will inevitably try to muster the force to compel obedience to their taxation scheme…
Hello Chris!
Again, I’m writing from my phone, translating a lot.
I wouldn’t say that the policy was anti-peasant. Against wealthy peasants, owners of capital, gold (priests), aristocrats, yes. The goal was internal hostility in the peasant classes, firstly, and secondly, between the classes (classes).
At first, this was done through the “Committees of the Poor” – Kombids. Then they completely abandoned the war economy and switched to the NEP. The peasantry recovered, even cultural features were encouraged, but Lenin died and the NEP turned into collectivization, which 70% of the rural population did not want. Therefore, the “Committees of Poor Peasants” – Komnezami returned. Repressions and, of course, famine began, both with the aim of disintegrating society in order to attract the liberated deprived to the factories and to destroy the resistance. After the famine, 99% of farms became collectives, and villages lost their population, both due to migration to the cities in search of work and food and due to extinction.
Until 1922, the population in the village was surplus – there was no free land to support such a large number of people, without harm to the army and cities (reduction in supplies). In conditions of relatively low trade, compared to pre-Soviet times, there was simply nowhere to get additional food, and exports provided much-needed gold and machine tools.
That is, it was necessary to increase the efficiency and productivity of labor, carry out industrialization, destroy individual, farm, capitalist cultural and mental desires. Instill the common and collective. And although in the early USSR, this was generally achieved through brutal repression, later it resulted in programs and presentations that lay on paper for decades, and everything was stolen everywhere, underground workshops, corruption, etc.
Another factor was the place, people and time. Somewhere everything could be relatively peaceful and without significant victims, and in other regions, the opposite. The performers mostly always tried to fulfill the task cruelly for the sake of flattery and favor, but there were exceptions.
In general, in the post-Stalin era, public life and well-being cannot be called some kind of totalitarian. In many places, people lived a quiet life of their own, thinking about how to survive as best they could, increasing their own benefits and mostly thinking about the community, but this applies mostly to villages, in cities the population was more modern and individually selfish. The further in time before the collapse, the more the “capitalist” cultural component manifested itself, both in cities and in villages, more in the former. The larger the city or village, the more enterprises, disagreements, thefts, contradictions and the rule “common means nobody’s, state means mine” were in effect.
In small villages in the hinterlands of the country in 1989, ordinary peasants with a lifestyle of the early 20th century lived next to the megaprojects of military structures.
Again, there is a lot of phase literature about this. I have read your books and I completely agree that not everything can be common, referring to Elizabeth Ostrom. That people will be forced to seek the foundations of stability and come to an agreement if they do not want to live in chaos. And that people, no matter how difficult it is, will have to live without fossil fuels and centralized distribution of goods, services and amenities.
As for money, I agree that it is primarily a social construct that has many “facets” and applications. But its power can be stronger the greater the trust, and not the product of labor or resources. That is, money will always be a fictitious sign, speculation and expression of someone’s power, and not an equivalent of exchange or a unit of circulation.
Yevhenii!
Is it true that Ukraine has a largely ‘digital state’ now (Diia), accessible to citizens via smartphone. Is it a new kind of government by algorithm? If so, what is your experience of it, if any? I read that USAID, Switzerland, the EU and UKDev, among others, are key strategic partners. Any thoughts? Thanks.
The ” indigenous argument always seem spurious to me , in Europe the Neanderthal were probably the first , here in the USA there at least two other stone age cultures here before todays indigenous that claim to be here first .
Let’s do a little dive into the “indigenous” argument, which is not what you say it is. The idea of “not pushing indigenous people off their land,” is a MORAL argument. But yet, it is cloaked in political speech. Why? Because the original moral arguments have been squashed and stepped on and jailed. (If you put someone in jail because they are against the Vietnam War or nowadays because they are against genocide in Gaza, you have “jailed the moral argument.”) So after you have been jailed or disrespected or simply ignored because you made a moral argument, the next step is to get some power to change the condition. This is politics in service of morality. And of course, actually making a difference rather than just bloviating about a cause means dealing with borders, volume of immigration, manipulation of citizenship laws, etc. But if you want to make a statement about “citizenship tourism,” this is not a moral argument. It is a structural argument about the logistics of citizenship rules. So all of a sudden, you are in a trap and the moral argument is lost. To recap:
A) It is immoral to steal other people’s land.
B) If you take a moral stance, you will be ignored, disrespected, and even jailed.
C) The moral argument doesn’t work anyway in modern Amerika.
D) Therefore you have to get some power to make changes for moral reasons.
E) This requires a political argument, with classification and clarification.
F) This means specificity.
G) Therefore you have to focus on WHO should be allowed to stay and WHO must go.
H) The idea that you shouldn’t steal other people’s land becomes a side issue.
I) Oops. Now you are in the realm of savvy political operators who are very good at spin.
Keep in mind this is MY formulation. If you don’t agree, it doesn’t matter. I make moral arguments every day and I don’t really care if other people agree. Those who can take a little bit from my arguments gain something, even if it is just clarity in their own counterarguments.
I was not arguing the morality I was pointing out the hypocrisy of those that stand on a platform demanding reparations and at the same time fund the legal arguments of all comers get citizenship , hypocrites all .
Freeze-drying potatoes without a handy mountainside is a lot harder than with one, of course; but potatoes are really quite amazingly nutritious, so it might well be worth the bother.
I will add Jennifer Pournelle to my reading list — and also Rebecca Campbell, for that matter. My reading list only ever seems to get longer.
Meanwhile, I also don’t have much appetite these days for dystopian fiction. There’s quite enough poverty and precarity already, quite enough struggle to survive; I do not need to imagine how bad it might be in a hypothetical future, but I do have a responsibility to do something about the suffering I see right in front of me.
I have a freeze dryer , its energy consumption is horrendous and its as noisy as hell , far better / energy efficient to can potatoes for later use .
Chris, to summarize recent methodological issues in ethnomusicology (as taught in graduate schools): During the 1980s, Western ethnomusicologists observed their colleagues in anthropology departments talking about a “crisis of representation” in the discipline. They wanted to keep up with the postmodern trajectory of the social sciences and humanities so lots of interesting discussions followed and quite a few more musical cultures were accepted into ethnomusicology’s canon of study, but, arguably, the output of useful research declined. I have learnt a lot from immersing myself in that world for several years but no longer have any skin in the game. Still, I take a lot of it with me, and I’m grateful for the insights gleaned.
I’m trying to make sense of my speculations above now within a more reflexive frame, which hasn’t got me much further than: “I’ve enjoy reading various takes on possible futures that orient around small farming societies and now feel compelled to contribute something novel to these discussions.” I’m not clear on whether what I’m writing about is something I think SHOULD happen, or something that COULD happen. I think it appears like I’m speculating based more on the former than the latter. Don’t think I can keep the two apart very neatly – which is ok by me – but I’d prefer to engage imaginatively on what COULD happen and avoid leading my speculations with what I’d prefer happens in the future. With all this heightened angst online around the Middle East right now, I’m seeing an awful lot of speculative takes that are clearly driven by deep misgivings about the present social stratification of human societies, resulting in confused and often contrarian interpretations of current events and their meaning. A bit of reflexivity could very much help these folks in their writing, I would suggest.
For now, I can say I enjoy writing about possible futures and I’m glad to have found a community of like-minded people to share these thoughts with. So in short, my responses to your questions:
– The serfs look more like underemployed millennials and Gen Z’ers than Russian peasants. Those lucky enough to own property leverage their productive potential to gain conditional access to basic public amenities (those without land will have less leverage but might end up working on others’ holdings – including those of larger landowners/boomer farmers, and probably working seasonally)
– Social mobility would be limited due to hard restrictions on resource access and the State’s usual monopoly on violence
– The lords are the same lucky/privileged children of families with inherited real wealth (land, capital for immediate production needs, etc) and given that they still own the lion’s share of the means of production, they’re well positioned to accept/channel taxes in commodity form rather than just money
– What James Scott defined as “weapons of the weak” remain an ordinary part of everyday life for many more people, which continues to create risks for the ruling class to worry over and squabble about amongst themselves
– I have no idea how the ideology of liberal individualism will fare in this future, but if it continues to underperform, I imagine people will look further back in time for ideological resources for repurposing
– I see the utopian aspect of this world reflected in the kind of autonomy it affords individuals and smaller communities, which in my mind is something distinctly utopian to strive for in today’s world of a consumer-driven livelihoods
Something that comes up here from time to time is William Gibson’s adage that the future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Another is the concept of refugia — places where life can remain, like a rock or cave during a forest fire or a small island during a flood, and from which the surrounding area is re-populated after such rapid change.
While we are all more or less at the mercy of global markets and geopolitics, there is some variation in how that affects us. Food price increases affect me less than they affect my friends who are food bank and soup kitchen guests, because I have access to a tenth of an acre of growing space (all rented, but not all in one place). I’ve also been relatively well insulated from rent increases, due to a landlord who has some moral scruples and is genuinely more interested in providing housing than in making enough profit to buy more housing. Dystopian fiction deals in catastrophe but I know an awful lot of people for whom catastrophe is already here. It is always a catastrophe when a parent cannot feed their children or keep the lights on for them to do their homework. It is always a catastrophe when a death certificate says “malnutrition”. I am extremely aware that those two particular events are much less likely to happen to me than to many people I know.
That said, my life here in the UK is all very much more precarious than the life I grew up in (in Canada), and I certainly have much less disposable income and much less property than my teenage self expected I would have.
A lot of the work I do is trying to set a small example of some other way of living. I grow and forage lots of fruit and veg not only because I love doing so and the quality is wildly better than anything I could buy (or so the works attest), but also because I want to show that it’s possible. I tithe my produce to the soup kitchen, and also grow a Soup Garden in the churchyard. My household has become a housing co-op in response to a practical, legal snag. When I compose music I usually release it under a Creative Commons license. I mend my clothing,often in ways that are very visibly obvious. I dabble in dozens of local crafts: making string out of nettles, drying my own herbal tea, home brewing country wines (and occasionally actual grape wine in a good year), and so on. And I teach others to do most of these things (though I don’t teach music much any more).
What a lot of this ends up looking like is… symbolic. The contributions I and the other churchyard gardeners can make to the soup kitchen and food bank are dwarfed many times over by the amount of cheap industrial food we have to buy in just to keep people fed. When I mend my clothes I’m not using a needle I carved myself, and usually not thread I spun myself from nettles. My own diet is certainly not 100% local. Chris is quite right to point out that boasting of being more prepared or having more practical skills than someone else here is a sort of toxicity that isn’t particularly welcome, and I hope I haven’t done that; I mention practicalities of my life a lot because they are what I know, but I do try to relate them to wider concepts that I am grappling with or that (I think) we are grappling with together.
The differentiated and somewhat unpredictable nature of change (happening at different rates and in different forms in different places, with only some degree of predictability of what happens where and when), along with the possibility of building refugia means that it’s worth trying to build what refugia we can in the communities where we live and work and play. Throughtopian and utopian fiction can be part of that, but so can a housing co-op and a soup garden.
Yeah, for now maybe perceived as symbolic, but think of yourself as a spore, hanging on to the genetics ( skills and knowledge of self provisioning) that will be vital and replicable for when conditions are right.
It’s important work.
And let’s remember, dystopias can be slow to happen as well as through big disasters.
One of James Michael Greer’s admonitions was to be comfortable with dissensus. What he meant was that the general trend is distinct, but the specifics as to time and place are unknowable, so we should NOT all plan the same steps, with the idea that some will be right for conditions, and some will not, but putting all the eggs in one basket risks total failure.
So; you do nettle cordage and country wine, I’ll do cider and hazelnuts. And let’s hope the bottleneck is not too narrow.
Oh, and I made a batch of Chunio ( manually freeze dried potatoes) and it worked pretty well. Amazing how well the water leaves the potato the first few freeze thaw cycles. Do it in winter, and no energy is required at all.
Steve c
You may be making some assumptions about how cold my semi-suburban back garden in London gets in winter! There have been some winters where the nasturtiums overwintered. I suppose I could try making chuño in the greenhouse at the allotment, which certainly isn’t frost free due to being in a frost pocket. I think the mice would enjoy that experiment very much.
Good point about local winter temps. As long and we have freezers, we can also do it that way. I found that letting them thaw mostly, and then actually squeezing by hand, it greatly increased the dehydration cycles. Water would just drip from the spuds.
And how do you make the tilde on top of the n?
‘steve c’ asked “how do you make the tilde on top of the n?”
I improvise by doing an online search for the word manana, for example, then copying and pasting the word mañana from the search results, or copying and pasting just the ñ from mañana to wherever I need it in my text.
Dang, I meant decreased the cycles, or improved the dehydration speed.
Some very interesting points of discussion here, but alas for now I only have time to comment briefly and in haste.
“Trade is what you do with your enemies”. Indeed – although a big part of modernisation has been about making trading partners less overtly hostile (ref Walter on contracts). Walter is also right that trade is inevitable, indispensable – undoubtedly a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing. Where to draw the line, and how to enforce the line once the animal spirits of the market are unleashed are important questions, I think.
They’re also relevant questions in the wake of Trump’s deranged threats leading up to the deadline last night. Scorched earth and naked terror can work in a world of warrior aristocracies built over a local agrarian base. They don’t really work in a fossil fuelled world of global trade. I suspect the civilization that might be ending soon floated by Mr Trump is the one of Western hegemony. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m finding it hard to see how we’ll emerge from the present imbroglio without Iran strengthened and the USA diminished.
I’m broadly sympathetic with the MMT take on tax that Eric mentioned, hence my careful (i.e. vague) word choice in my previous comment. But there are limits to the kind of societies where MMT applies. On the other hand, there are dangers with taking an overly benign view of how gift or sharing societies operate. How to mobilise capital in a post-collapse society for fair social benefit is a big question. I hope we can return to it.
Also, thanks for the book recommendations, Eric. The Apache one sounds interesting. As does the observation on horses, which I want to follow up. I read Reviel Netz’s thought-provoking history of barbed wire. A point he made in it was that enclosure of open fields in Europe, facilitated by wire fencing, put an end to cavalry warfare and hence a certain kind of residually medieval social structure around warfare.
Thanks again Yevhenii for another interesting lesson on Russian history. Perhaps things turn exactly on that fomenting of class conflict within the peasantry and the stability of that concept of ‘rich peasant’. And also on how to generate modernisation and development on a peasant base – wherein I can be slightly sympathetic to the problems the Soviets faced in relation to the wider world. Hynek’s discussion of these points here recently in relation to Czech history has also been informative.
Tim, thanks for that on ethnomusicology. I was also involved in academic anthropology/sociology at the time of that reflexive turn, with no skin in the game any more. Agree with your conclusions – lots of interesting discussions, less useful research. I also like your framing of could and should. I’ve written about this in terms of least worst outcomes. I think it’s useful to ask what’s the best thing that should happen, given the bad things that could happen.
Not enough time right now, but hopefully I’ll be able to come back to your techno-feudal utopia on another occasion. It’s very interesting, and I’m interested to hear other people’s views or their own could/should utopias. I still want to come back to the liberal modernity point. Recall that Weber talked about the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate violence. So what makes it legitimate? Nothing, in my opinion. But our ideologies of progress are powerful and keep people in line, provided they still have some belief in future possibilities. The contemporary world of literate, mobile, non-agrarian citizenries and economic elites who aren’t used to being militarised local lords could make it harder than people often think to revert to older models when the dream of progress dies.
“I think it’s useful to ask what’s the best thing that should happen, given the bad things that could happen.” I really like this framing, it fits the should and could together in a way that is hopeful but realistic, even utopian (?) but still fundamentally pragmatic.
I’ve just been re-reading some of your posts on civic republicanism (https://chrissmaje.com/2018/05/florence-texas/ and https://chrissmaje.com/2018/10/our-political-saviors-the-republicans/ ) as it seems to me this is a possible ideological off-ramp from the modern liberalism that has been molested beyond repair (in my view). And it relates quite neatly to the idea/ideal of autonomy which I mentioned earlier. It’s also intriguing that civic republicanism does not currently seem to have any kind of public-facing movement, at least from what I can find. Rather it’s mostly academic philosophers leading the way – which makes it kind of hard to intuit what civic republican could actually mean for real people! However, this may also be because of its subtle yet important differences from modern liberalism. From what I can tell, it’s more than just a proto-liberalism, rather it’s a kind of political philosophy that liberalism outlived and came to overshadow.
As you note Chris in “Florence, Texas,” civic republicanism differs from liberalism (and libertarianism) in its attention to the interdependent nature of being an individual citizen, which requires deliberating what exactly constitutes the common good for a given political community. To me this means something like this: Working together as a polity has the purpose of shaping the conditions for individuals to flourish as they see fit for themselves: being cooperative for the sake of my own aims and abilities. Chris, you mention the watershed as an example of this, in terms of a common good which can be protected if the cooperating parties recognize and agree on the value to each individual of preventing pollution and soil erosion. Personally I’ve seen this work myself in my own professional life (forest management) where neighbors have come together and planned how best to use and protect the waterway they collectively orientate along (they just don’t call it civic republicanism – yet!).
Later in “Our political saviors: the republicans,” you note Chris that civic republicanism may offer useful resources for imagining a politics that’s compatible with present and future ecological and economic breakdown. The suitability of a civic republicanism for an agrarian society also came up in this article, something which Adam Smith had apparently observed (albeit as a negative), thus making it ineligible for the development of a commercial society. Here I read “commercial” in the more contemporary sense of “consumer.” That’s the thing I find most tangible when it comes to critiquing our modern liberal world and worldview. Life as we’ve known it is not breaking down because we’re too “productive” – it’s because the things we produce are largely optimized for rapid consumption and disposal. Again, watersheds bear the brunt of consumerism, whether it’s plastic pollution or nutrient run-off and soil degradation.
My own futurology/utopian thinking is very much constrained by my local biases and aspirations, so politics – whether in my neighborhood or country and global region – as they best serve me and my family are top of mind. I find it hard to think on such a large time/space scale as a Tom Murphy, but I do gain inspiration and encouragement from localist efforts from across the globe – and I should try to reciprocate by offering some more inspiration from my corner of the South Pacific. As it happens, my local river – the Whanganui – has had a bit of press over the last few years for being one of the first natural entities to receive legal personhood due to it’s important place within the local Māori society. Unfortunately the political work around this change has not yet led to anything resembling a greener(/browner) version of modern liberalism. It will take some time before the potential of this legal change has been realized, although I know many folks are working hard to make this happen. I’ll keep you posted!
On the topic of agriculture versus foraging, context is everything, but I’d also like to offer this essay by Nate Hagens, which is adapted from his earlier work in 2025.
https://natehagens.substack.com/p/essay-key-blindspots-of-the-walrus
My takeaway is that we are Homo sapiens sapiens sitting here typing away because we were better at playing the maximum power game than the Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Habilis, etc.
We are hard wired to have the optimal mix of in group empathy and cooperation, and outgroup aggression. As Darth Vader said, “It is your destiny”. This enables maximum power and so that is why we are now in a single species human on human cage match, where game theory and strategy suited to the specific situation will trump any philosophical preferences for world peace or enlightened self interest.
That said, conditions change, and the world is too big for uniform results all over. Global projection of power is ebbing as we type. One is still stuck trying to mull over:
1. Can there be be some way to navigate the inevitable periods of violence and group-group conflict? (Can you all just leave me alone??)
2. Will the slide down the carbon pulse create conditions where some new, less violent behavior is selected for? ( think shifting from less of an r selected to more of a K selected species).
3. Can Chris, and/or others like him be the progenitor of a societal pattern that sticks, and walks that path of optimal survival ( definitions vary!) to get to a small farm future?
Me, I’ll either forage or farm, no matter, just would rather not have to fight. Would also be nice to hang on to some of the science ( ok, art and humanities too) we’ve scraped together the last few centuries. ( You know, germ theory of disease, stuff like that).
I did make a comment on Nates essay:
“I agree with the critique of the Modern Money Theory with the addition that money is even more a claim on labour than on nature. For sure, nature has limits, but they are primarily bio-physical and money is not really a bio-physical unit, but a social unit. The social claim embedded in money is primarily labour.
I have a different view on Profit and capitalism though:
Profit. It is true, as you write that most species, and in particular humans are looking out for surpluses, even if that might not follow such a solid evolutionary path as you claim. There are plenty of examples from human cultures that people actually don’t strive to get surpluses. The great agrarian economist Chayanov concluded that the non-market integrated peasants of Russia in the end of the 19th century adjusted their work according to the number of mouths to be fed. If there were few mouths they farmed less land and worked a little. If and when, the family grew they tilled more land and worked a lot more.
Be that as it may, the main flaw in the reasoning is to use “profit” and “surplus” as synonyms. I normally store at least 25 percent more potatoes in my root cellar than we consume. It give us a buffer if they start to rot, which they rarely do. In May, we will give the extra potatoes away to a food charity or give them to our cows. It is a surplus, but it is really no point in calling it a profit. Profit is only a meaningful term in economics in my view.
Capitalism. You render no exceptional status to capitalism, but see it only as one of many expressions of underlying forces starting with agriculture already. “The deeper driver of capitalism is the human operating system – our evolved tendency to seek status, surplus, and short-term rewards. Capitalism is just the latest cultural software running on that biological hardware.“ It seems to me even more deterministic than fundamental Marxists. With that logic we can’t blame any of the cultural and societal expressions of humanity. Slavery, nazism, dictatorship (whether Russian, Chinese or Iranian) they are all expressions of the human operating system.
There are differing opinions about if agriculture really should be portrayed as the fall of man, but let us leave that debate for now. For sure, one can trace a certain genealogy backwards to the neolithic revolution or perhaps even further back.
But it is simplistic to just see capitalism as the last expression of human misery. With that perspective, one can’t really analyse our current society and predicament.
“humans collectively self-organize around growth, and in doing so we outsource our wisdom to financial markets. “ In reference to what I wrote above, I find this even much more simplistic than to blame all ills on capitalism. If I have to chose ONE villain, I will chose capitalism. But of course, I don’t have to make that choice, I am perfectly fine in accepting that there are aspects of humans that are pleasant and aspects which are less pleasant. Meanwhile, capitalism is built on – and endorse and augment – most of the characteristics which are less pleasant. And it is not an exaggeration that capitalism is in a synergistic relationship with fossil fuels and industrialism. They are just three sides of the same phenomenon.”
Thanks for resurrecting my old civic republican posts, Tim. As with commons, I’m convinced it’s a form of politics worth reviving, but ultimately it’s how it works on the ground that matters, and this can’t really be prefigured on the page. I touch on this in a couple of places in my new book (including my fictional thrutopia) – it also came up on a podcast I just recorded with Jason Bradford. Thanks also for the NZ watershed news – yes, do keep us posted.
And thanks Steve for pointing to Nate’s Walrus article. I started drafting a blog post about it a while back but didn’t get around to finishing. Perhaps I should have another go. There’s a lot I agree with in Nate’s presentation, but some points of difference. Yes also to diversity of responses.
Kathryn – yes, freezing mountains are good for potato preservation, but presumably the difficulties of tax assessment remain the same? I’m not sure, I’ll have to find out more about it. As to the potential toxicity of being preppier than thou, that’s certainly not something I’d level at you – I find your actively ethical engagement admirable!
My thinking is that the process of freeze drying the potatoes to make chuño, which I understand can take a couple of weeks, doesn’t really make it that much easier to do crop yield assessment on which to base taxes, and the freeze drying process itself cannot easily be exported elsewhere even if you can grow spuds elsewhere pretty trivially (in the back garden I have more trouble not growing spuds than growing them, because I always miss some and am not always great at culling volunteers). But as chuño was indeed eaten by the Incan army there must have been at least some specialisation; I don’t know a whole lot about the economy of the Incan Empire but my understanding was that people had labour obligations rather than tax obligations as we might understand them.
That said, without commercial drying equipment (or pre-harvest dessication treatment with glyohosate), or even a combine harvester, grains are also not particularly quick to process: standing the cut sheaves to dry, then eventually threshing and winnowing, is a bunch of work and also pretty weather dependent. But because it isn’t as temperature dependent, it can be done in a much wider area.
Maybe I’ll try making a small batch of chuño this autumn: into the freezer at night, then the dehydrator by day, and eventually through the food processor. I’m sure it won’t be quite the same as the real thing but it could be fun.
Thanks for posting your comments on Nate’s essay, Gunnar – you’ve basically saved me from having to write that post of my own. I agree with a lot of what Nate says in the essay, but like you I have some issues with it, especially in relation to surplus and capitalism. Just as you say, surplus is not the same as profit, and capitalism is not just a reflection of the ‘human operating system’. I’ve mentioned Wolfgang Streeck’s definition of capitalism on here before, along the lines of a system that requires limitless growth and that makes the reproduction of society an unintended byproduct of profit maximisation that puts productive capital into the hands of a minority. It’s been an incipient feature of merchant economic agency in many pre-capitalist or non-capitalist societies but never previously ran the show, in part because political elites were wise enough not to let it. But now here we are. I agree it’s not the only source of contemporary problems, and in fact fossil fuels would be my No.1 pick (but would they have had their baleful impact without capitalism?). Capitalism is a close-run second.
Thanks also to Steve for the hint about the tilde. Sounds like a lot of work, though. Maybe I’ll get to it manana…
And thanks to Kathyrn regarding chuño … oh, I mean chuno … hope to come back to that anon!
Chris – You might want to consider whether state-level society itself requires a growth economy. Slaves, whether chattel or corvee, must be fed and worked. Soldiers must kill and harrass. Capitalism is just a waypoint on a road already traveled.
As I see it, while pre-capitalist states did have growth economies, they didn’t have limitless growth economies that drove social reproduction as a side effect, the limits usually being geographical and military, prompting collapses that were more manageable than the one now in store. Sometimes these states pushed intensification of production, but they didn’t revolutionise it constantly and create an urbanised global commodity trading/consumer system. In that sense I don’t think capitalism is just a waypoint on a road already travelled – the historical oddness of the system described by Streeck stands out. I daresay the debate about whether it was genuinely new or had its antecedents could go on endlessly – these things can usually be argued both ways. But is there not a danger with the latter position of going too far down Tom Murphy’s route? If you get farming you eventually get states, if you get states you get economic growth, if you get economic growth you get capitalism etc?
“If you get farming you eventually get states, if you get states you get economic growth, if you get economic growth you get capitalism etc?”
Part of the problem with Tom Murphy’s arguments is his love of the fait accompli. Farming does NOT mean states. There certainly were states that did not have farming. Example: the Pacific Northwest tribes. My argument is clearly not the same as the fait accompli argument. I have conjectured that states arise because of a growth economy mindset. You are making a distinction between a growth economy and a “revolutionise it constantly and create an urbanised global commodity trading/consumer system.” That is a false dichotomy because they are still on a continuum of growth. When the Mayor in a small town says, “We must grow the economy,” there is little difference between the hedge fund manager who says the same thing. The volume of money and the political power of each does not sink my argument because the scale does not differentiate. If you want to say there is a new level of complexity, then you are making the same argument of mine that there is a difference between complexity and hypercomplexity. Bravo and welcome on board. But the Mayor and the hedge fund manager are still on the same continuum. If the UK were to take positive steps to wind down their hypercomplexity and actually manage their economic contraction, they would have occupied another waypoint on the continuum, not jump ship onto another continuum. And since they can go back and forth, the 2nd and 3rd derivative are still on the same continuum. If you are on a treadmill that is rising and going faster and faster at the same time, cutting out one of the two does not put you on a different treadmill.
Without better arguments, I will stick to my position that when elites create states they are doing so in order to grow their economy. And make no mistake, it is THEIR economy, not yours and mine.
There have for sure been tendencies to try to accomplish growth in many other kind of systems, but most of them have not been built on growth as such. Most, but not all, have favoured stability over growth. And in most cases were “growth” was an objective, it was basically not economic growth per se, but conquest of other territories, which basically just meant a change of ruler and perhaps becoming a slave.
One could perhaps argue that it would have been much better if countries had pursued economic growth instead of territorial growth. It is interesting to observe that both Germany and Japan had very dynamic economies after losing a lot of territoories. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the poet Tegnér famously wrote that Sweden should conquer Finland again within its (new) border….
With economic growth slowing and resource scarcity kicking in, we might again see an increase in interest in territorial growth. The guy on the other side of the pond (from my vantage point) as well as his model in Moscow seem to move in that direction.
I don’t see a “stability” mindset outside of tribal societies. Herman Daly and Robert Costanza have tried to establish a “steady state economy” for many years without success. I was on board when I first read about it in the Whole Earth Catalogue in 1969. By the mid-1970s, I saw the error of my ways when I realized it would take such a level of micromanagement, it would make MMT and Eugene Debs’ style socialism seem like anarchy.
Interesting side angle. Would a state without farming, like one of the Pacific Northwestern tribes, require a gift economy AND a potlatch-type disbursement/destruction? Does the surplus require it? In other words, do I have the cart before the horse by saying the growth economy comes first?
Left this tab open and came back to it now. I was reminded of this poem from Ursula K Le Guin’s anthropological science fiction novel “Always Coming Home”:
An Exhortation from the Second and Third Houses of the Earth
Listen, you people of the Adobes, you people of the Obsidian!
Listen, you gardeners and farmers, orcharders and vintners, shepherds and drovers!
Your arts are admirable and generous, arts of plenty and increase, and they are dangerous.
Among the tasseled corn the man says, this is my plowing and sowing, this is my land.
Among the grazing sheep the woman says, these are my breeding and caring, these are my sheep.
In the furrow the seed sprouts hunger.
In the fenced pasture the cow calves fear.
The granary is heaped full with poverty.
The foal of the bridled mare is anger.
The fruit of the olive is war.
Take care, you Adobe people, you Obsidian people, and come over onto the wild side,
don’t stay all the time on the farming side; it’s dangerous to live there.
Come among the unsown grasses bearing richly, the oaks heavy with acorns, the sweet roots in unplowed earth.
Come among the deer on the hill, the fish in the river, the quail in the meadows.
You can take them, you can eat them,
like you they are food.
They are with you, not for you.
Who are their owners?
This is the puma’s range,
this hill is the vixen’s,
this is the owl’s tree,
this is the mouse’s run,
this is the minnow’s pool:
it is all one place.
Come take your place.
No fences here, but sanctions.
No war here, but dying; there is dying here.
Come hunt: it is yourself you hunt.
Come gather yourself from the grass, the branch, the earth.
Walk here, sleep well, on the ground that is not yours, but is
yourself.
During a book club years ago, someone challenged me to write a reply to this poem, which I did:
Listen, you people of the Blue Clay, listen, you people of the Serpentine!
Listen, you hunters and fishers and gatherers, you who live on the hunting side!
You look at the farmer and think: he plows like he owns the land.
You look at the shepherd and think: she herds like she owns the flock.
So too may the hunter crow, with mastery over the kill.
The deer may be hunted to scarcity.
The berries may all be picked.
We all may lose the way: us no more than you.
And take care as well, and come once in a while to the planting side.
You speak of equal ground, of running by the side of the deer.
You gather where you may, you hunt and kill, free as cotton seeds on the wind.
But take care you do not make too much of your independence.
The corn in the furrow depends on us, so do we depend on it.
The lambing ewe needs our care, so do we need the lamb’s meat to live.
This is what we know on the planting side: that we are bound to each other, that we are not free.
You have been a babe in arms, did your parents own you?
You will be old and infirm and unable to hunt, will you then starve to death?
Come take your place: tend to the corn and the lambs.
It is yourself you tend.
Wow, our book club needs to up our game.
Nice.
As much as I used to enjoy more typical “space opera” sci-fi, the more nuanced commentaries on our current cultural foibles are more interesting to me these days.
Elin, that’s a great poem and a magnificent response – thanks for sharing it here. I started reading that book a long time ago but got distracted. Maybe I should go back to it.
Walter, if we were to take the decision-makers of some iron age town who found a way of growing its industrial or agrarian output, I guess we could say that it’s on a continuum of growth with modern hedge fund managers and that that’s the decisive point, but decisive for what? I don’t see this as some blank ‘out there’ social fact. It depends on what you want to make of it analytically. The iron age town was growing its tangible goods; the hedge fund managers are growing money by betting on quantified market prices. Maybe the former is more complicated and maybe the latter represents a significant break with the former? I’m not sure there’s an end to this debate, but it does raise interesting questions such as what is the state, can we always be sure when we’re looking at one in the historical record, how can we understand the ‘economic’ growth of (non-state) forager societies, are there different cultures of growth, and how can we periodise and demarcate potentially different manifestations of it.
Just to add to my previous on states & growth, I’m not convinced that the contrast between a growth mindset in an agrarian state and the social structure around limitless profit in capitalist states as described by Streeck is a false one, inasmuch as there’s no strong and intrinsic ratchet or driver towards increasing the growth in the former – there’s just a lot of agrarian-based politics that ebbs and flows, which I guess is Gunnar’s point. Derivatives aren’t a necessary or specifically distinguishing feature of capitalist states, but do non-capitalist ones ever have hedge funds, or something similar?
I’m probably being overly simplistic here, but I tend to think that the root of the problem is the human tendency to want to amass wealth and power. This definitely exists in contexts outside what we would identify as capitalism or what we would define as a modern nation-state (debates on what other forms statehood might take notwithstanding).
Non-perishable currency is one tool to do this (but is not in and of itself evil); finding ways to exclude others from land or water sources in order to profit from them is another (but fences are not in and of themselves always bad governance); weapons are another way to do this (but again, are not always bad tools to have). Fossil fuels are such concentrated energy sources that they help us do all of this much faster, which looks like it might be some kind of tipping point, but I’m not going to say we wouldn’t have found some other way to get to a similar place.
But currency doesn’t have to be used to amass wealth, it can instead facilitate trade and distribution; fences don’t have to be for enclosure-for-profit; weapons don’t have to be used to subjugate other people.
Derivatives, on the other hand, are *only* used for amassing wealth and power. As far as I know, they don’t have another purpose at all. The same might be said of interest on loans, and I still wonder what a strict ban on usury would do to our current financial system.
Meanwhile I am only partly agrarian (though remarkably so for a Londoner), and despite having been born and raised in a fairly capitalist context, and despite being very interested in increasing the yields of my foraging and gardening… the fact that I cannot sell my produce (or, in some cases, do not wish to sell it) means that I am only interested in so much growth. This year in particular may hold a lot of change for me, and as a result I am planning more drying beans and fewer tomatoes than last year, partly because we are out of beans but still eating the 2025 passata, but partly because the tomato plants take a lot more ongoing attention and care than the beans will.
First sparrowgrass harvest was last week and I am way behind on building my squash and melon hotbeds. I have more onion beds this year though, and as a result will have more winter carrots (I sow them when the garlic and onions come out, since I have to net my alliums for allium leaf miner and my carrots for root fly).
Just to clear things up, my use of the 2nd and 3rd derivatives is calculus-based. My usage refers to velocity along a curve. It does NOT mean a security that derives its value from an underlying asset. Two very different things. Many words have multiple meanings. I have explained my usage of the calculus term many times.
My bad — I should have read more carefully…
I agree with Kathryn that the root of the problem is the accumulative urge (ultimately a variety of status seeking) and that this isn’t specifically capitalist. What’s specifically capitalist, albeit helped considerably by fossil fuels, is the ability to turn this into the single and limitless driving force of a global society via the strange social innovations implicit in Streeck’s definition.
I’m aware that Walter has used ‘derivative’ in its calculus sense and not in the sense I used it above as a financial instrument. But perhaps this is the crux of the issue – is capitalism just a speeding up of a prior trend, or is that speeding up indicative of qualitative difference and new structures? I’m arguing for the latter. Not that capitalism had no precedents, because everything does. Nevertheless, as I see it the ramification of the innovations involved in capitalism requires its own analysis.
It may be that pre-capitalist societies had their own versions of derivatives, in the financial instrument sense of the term. The idea of betting on bets isn’t all that outlandish, I suppose. I’d be interested to know of any such examples. They wouldn’t necessarily destroy my take on the specificity of capitalism, but I’m sure they could illuminate it interestingly. Modern derivatives are an important part of the worldwide virtualisation of money as an unpayable claim on real resources, which seems like a kind of event horizon preventing the creation of ecological societies.
Chris wrote: “It may be that pre-capitalist societies had their own versions of derivatives, in the financial instrument sense of the term… I’d be interested to know of any such examples.”
Modern-day financial derivatives may have “qualitative differences and new structures” compared to what are called “Ancient Derivatives” in the book cited below, similar to how Streeck’s definition of capitalism is different from merchants sending their “sailing vessels on extended voyages to search for wealth.”
The following quotes are from the book “From Christopher Columbus to the Robber Barons: A Financial History of the United States 1492–1900” by Jerry W. Markham, 2002, pages 5-7.
Those pages are viewable if you click on “Read Sample” at
https://www.amazon.ca/Christopher-Columbus-Robber-Barons-Financial/dp/1032161086
“Ancient Derivatives”
“Futures contracts were used nearly 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Slaves were being sold there for future delivery under transferable contracts that could be settled in silver as an alternative to actual delivery.”
“A form of futures trading was occurring on Bahrain Island in 2000 B.C. through transactions in which merchants took goods on assignment and bartered them for other goods in India.”
“As early as 2000 B.C., Chinese rice producers were selling rice for future delivery, and commodity markets existed in Egypt, Arabia, and India as early as 1200 B.C.”
“The modern futures exchange is said to be a descendant of the medieval trade fairs that were occurring in Europe during the twelfth century.”
“Option contracts were still considered an innovation when they were traded on an exchange in Chicago in 1973, but option transactions have been traced to the Phoenicians, who used options in their trade.”
“Aristotle notes that around 300 B.C. Thales acquired control of all the olive presses in Thios and Miletus through loans that were used to secure option contracts on the presses. This was an early form of the modern margin transaction. A large harvest of olives resulted that year, and Thales profited handsomely because he had control of all the presses and could charge a high fee for their use. Thales was literally able to ‘squeeze’ olive oil prices.”
“Insurance”
“Insurance is an important part of our modern financial structure. It, too, had its beginnings in ancient society.
“The Old Testament has numerous references to suretyships.”
“The annuity concept has been traced back to the Egyptians. The Hindus and Chinese also used annuities, as did the Babylonians.”
“Insurance was used in Babylonia sometime before 3000 B.C., and the Code of Hammurabi set forth rules governing insurance for merchant caravans. From Babylonia, the concept of insurance spread to Phoenicia and was applied to shipping.”
“Lending and Trade”
“The Code of Hammurabi [c. 1753 B.C.] set limits on interest rates, which varied from 20 to 33.33 percent.”
“By 1000 B.C., commercial ships were sailing the Mediterranean. Five hundred years later, Phoenician ships were conducting a regular trade with numerous countries. Latitude and longitude were being measured in 1120 A.D., allowing merchants to send their sailing vessels on extended voyages to search for wealth.”
Regarding derivatives in pre-capitalist economies, this paper references the Markham book I quoted earlier, but says “the role of derivatives in the pre-capitalist economies must not be overemphasized.”
“According to the mainstream financial history narrative, futures and options derivatives can be traced back to ancient societies (Markham, 2002a, pp. 4-5). However, the role of derivatives in the pre-capitalist economies must not be overemphasized. The picture radically changes with the rise and establishment of capitalism and henceforth the development of financial markets has always been associated with the spontaneous emergence of derivatives of different types.”
“For instance, one can refer to many intriguing historical illustrations: primary forms of derivatives on sovereign debt can be found as early as 1390 in Venice; futures contracts were common on the Amsterdam Exchange by 1610, playing crucial role in the famous Tulip Mania that arose around 1636; put options and ‘refusals’ (call options) were being widely traded in London by the end of 17th century; early forms of securitization in Geneva no later than the mid 18th century boosted the indebtedness of the French monarchy (the coming of the French Revolution deranged the established credit channels, spreading financial panic in the banking of Geneva; see Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, & Rosenthal, 2007, pp. 150-1); in 1821, a broker from the London stock exchange complained that the trade in options was “now so frequent as to constitute the greater part of the business done in the House” (cited in Chancellor, 2000, p. 97).”
“Despite all 3 the relevant developments and episodes and despite the fact that at least from the beginnings of the 19th century derivative markets (and especially commodity exchanges) are growing as an important feature of financial transactions, the discussions in political economy failed to touch even marginally upon the issue of the risk trading. Hilferding was one of the exceptions to this long theoretical thread of ignorance. He writes in the beginning of the 20th century where futures markets have been widely established in the developed capitalist economies. As we shall see below, his approach is focused on the futures market for tangible commodities, underestimating somehow the role of derivatives on financial securities. But even with this limitation, his embarking upon an analysis of derivatives remains an exceptional theoretical project, not only in the discussions of the period but also in the political economy in general. He analyzes this development as parallel in importance with the development of the stock exchange.”
[From the abstract:] “Hilferding realized that the development of the stock exchange was parallel to the development of standardized derivative exchanges. Hilferding understood the economic significance that derivative markets have for the organization of capitalism.”
HILFERDING ON DERIVATIVES
Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos
Kingston University London, UK
Economics Discussion Paper 2012-3
https://www.academia.edu/download/46400667/Hilferding_on_derivatives20160611-25522-kyzvod.pdf
To pick up on something Chris gestured towards in his critique of Murphy’s pessimistic determinism (Murphy’s law? Perhaps that’s in poor taste!), there’s an incoherence in the non-dualism he (Tom) argues for: humans do not have any choice in the downward spiral of overshoot, yet they’re also somehow still vaguely responsible for this (moral) trajectory. There’s a shallow irony in the fact that people like Murphy write so eloquently about the lack of agency we humans ultimately could possess. Like arguments for a nihilistic world-view, the vividness of the articulation of such a world seems somehow inconsistent with a world that cannot bear any true meaning.
Which relates to the human urge towards accumulation and related status seeking: in terms of a Christian moral analysis, this is a prime example of our “fallenness” (and I believe there’s plenty of secular psychological and cultural explanations for this phenomenon too). I’ll lean on the logic of the Christian analysis for now and say that this tendency towards greater and greater accumulation of resources reflects a distinctly post-fall human capacity for “greed.” Ultimately it doesn’t seem to be much more complicated than that. And the thing about greed – which I see come up again and again in people’s knee-jerk commentary on capitalism and its follies – is it’s precedented, as a concept, on “free will” (it only makes sense morally as a choice; you don’t call animals that display capacities for resource accumulation “greedy”). Financial derivatives and the like seem to me just technological offshoots of this human fallen tendency – less necessary outcomes of a teleology that sees humans destroy their ecosystems and more a contingent example of fallenness filtered through today’s technological apparatus.
I think we find writing like Tom Murphy’s and Chris’s so compelling because we sense in it the fundamental freedom of human capacity, which exceeds some kind of natural determinism, and which ultimately find exquisitely beautiful – the beautiful rests against the ugly, which together imply a moral capacity for choice and responsibility.
That’s my moralising for the day. I’m off to express my fallenness at the supermarket where I’m going to buy more consumer goods than I really need.
Tim
Guilty as charged, I think — but then, I am a Christian,.if not a very good one.
I am perhaps a bit of an odd duck in that I find the concept of the fall quite comforting, in a way; the idea that it’s not entirely my fault that I am imperfect, that the human tendency towards sin is a collective one, not just my own individual badness, makes it a little more bearable. Add to that the idea that God loves the world (not just humanity, but all creation) and we’re starting to get somewhere. So: I make bad choices, like pretty much everyone else I know, and I feel bad about it, but this doesn’t actually separate me from God’s love. I have agency, and that is important, but… there is not one thing I can do to make God love me any less or any more; sin doesn’t have the last word; love is stronger than death.
Yet the scandal of Christianity is not only that God loves and rescues humanity, but that God does this by dwelling with us in the person of Jesus — the Word, fully divine, present from the beginning of all time, but also made flesh, fully human — perfectly bearing the image of God — and this is who we are called to imitate. The crown of thorns is a difficult one to wear; there is a reason that we speak of baptism in terms of not only cleansing but death and rebirth.
For me there is paradox rather than contradiction in the juxtaposition of all these things: the degree to which I am still bound by and caught up in sin, and the idea that God already loves me even sinful as I am, and the vocation to follow Christ, to embody God’s love for creation in everything I think or say or do.
The tricky bit is not the paradox so much as working out what that embodiment of God’s love for the whole of creation looks like in any particular context or scenario… I might do it by a quiet word of encouragement to a friend or by feeding someone who is hungry or by composing a piece of music or by restoring wildlife habitat or sowing seeds or a thousand other ways. And I fail, repeatedly, and I keep trying. That is all I can do; it is all any of us can do.
Other models, other methods of ascribing meaning to the world and the place of humanity within it, are of course available, and I don’t mean here to imply that my worldview is the only valid one. But it’s the one that, for me, makes a kind of sense of both the contingent and limited nature of my ability to really change anything, and my capacity for agency. The world is a bit messed up because we humans are prone to sin; and the world can be better, because we are image-bearers with agency who are working (however imperfectly) to embody love.
(Chris, if this comment is too religious, or too tangential even for here, feel free to delete it; I promise I won’t be offended!)
Tim wrote: “…this tendency towards greater and greater accumulation of resources reflects a distinctly post-fall human capacity for “greed.” Ultimately it doesn’t seem to be much more complicated than that.”
I think a “greed” explanation for the human accumulation of resources is a bit facile, as the underlying motivations could also be based on “fear” (fear of starving, for example) or “love” (ensuring the well-being of loved ones, for example) and/or some of the psychological conditions and disorders which can affect the human mind.
The scarcity vs. abundance mindset comes to, uh, mind. The Garden is abundant, but there’s a scarcity mindset for the fallen?
Clearly my small household stockpile of bulk dry goods and preserved garden produce is due to my prudence, and someone else’s totally unnecessary second luxury yacht is due to their greed…
More seriously: if I have two coats and someone else needs one, then rightly one of my coats belongs to that person. This is incredibly difficult to live by, for the vast majority of people. I do in fact have two coats, so count me among wretched sinners.
But a society which allows the yacht-havers to dictate the terms of economic engagement is one in which the greed of the rich does much more harm than the greed of the rest of us, and vastly more harm than the anxiety of, say, our soup kitchen guests. It’s certainly plausible that the drive towards accumulation originates from the same general desire for safety whether one is a soup kitchen guest or a weirdo urban semi-agrarian or a rich guy with multiple luxury yachts. But it’s more understandable that I have a spare coat than that someone else has a spare yacht, and it’s arguably doing a lot less damage. (And though I have more than one coat, for most of the autumn, winter and spring I wear the same fifteen-year-old corduroy jacket which I keep mending and mending, so that by now it is almost more patch than original fabric.)
As for gardens… We are told that Adam and Eve are the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because they were hungry, not because they didn’t have enough to eat, not because they were frightened, but because they wanted to be like God. They already had perfect security. They wanted status.
Their fear and vulnerability came after the fall, not before it; the scarcity mindset is a consequence, not a cause, of our fallenness.
“They wanted status.”
I think that’s a better explanation than simply blaming two yachts (for example) on someone’s “greed”. Reminds me of Marshall Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication” which is based on the recognition of “unmet needs” that can look like unmet wants.
Thanks Kathryn.
My read of the tree of knowledge is a little more complicated than just a play for status, but that doesn’t deny the power of the human urge for status, especially as per Steve L.
The small bit of hopefulness that I can muster stems from our human past where (some) people made more or less stable societies where status was given to those who did something useful and beneficial for their (human and otherwise) neighbors. Unlike our current world culture where status seems to accrue to those who manage to steal big piles of stuff or coerce lots of people.
How our current culture got this way, and how it gets over it seems to me one of the most important topics.
Ate, not are! Dratted autocarrot.
Katherine, your nuanced take on the fall resonated with me. The collective quality of sin, as with greed, doesn’t usually register with an individualist secular audience, so I’m hesitant to use these terms in the context of discussions about the social relations that underpin economic inequality. However, I find them rather helpful sometimes, and they can throw conversations that are preoccupied with structural forces under a new light.
Steve, I agree that greed as a complete explanation for global capitalism would be pretty facile. I guess I brought it into the conversation here because an intense focus on structural relationships in economic change can become untethered from human experience quite easily, at which point I personally find their explanatory usefulness starts to diminish.
Interestingly, even figures like Marx who set the table for our discussions about structural inequality found the concept of greed quite helpful when trying to make sense of human choice and responsibility within capitalist ventures. His discussions of colonialism in particular focus on greed as a human cause for the West’s excessive accumulation of resources from across the planet. There’s a long intellectual history of greed as a moral and empirical problem, which is rather fascinating.
I suspect I will be able to test my hypercomplex vs. complex theory soon. Or rather, Mr. Trump and Mr. Starmer will test it for me.
Thanks for further comments – a few quick responses. How to explain the origins of capitalism is a topic that’s energised generations of sociologists and historians, and it’s still quite mysterious.
No need to apologise for getting into the Garden of Eden story … always a particular favourite of mine, as discussed here at length some years ago. Kathryn’s take on it seems plausible to me, and quite similar to Sean Domencic’s here previously. But was the Fall really about status? The serpent wanted it to be so, saying that eating the fruit would make people the equal of gods. But we’re told Eve ate it because it looked good and pleasant, and because she thought it might make her wise. So maybe short-term greed in the sense of fancying something tasty, but also perhaps curiosity or a hunger for agency?
Does it have any relevance to the origins of capitalism? Well, there are consumption-based theories which have some plausibility. The fruit’s good huh? Here, have more. Maybe you could call the motives there greed, but it’s a rather value-laden term. And is the whole development of the global modern economy just about satiating people’s wants? Seems doubtful.
The progress narrative in Genesis is important though, I think. The idea of a forward direction to history.
I think status does also enter into it by way of social frontiers, and the lack of regard for other people as people (indigenous Americans, Africans) in the European seaborne empires that founded capitalism.
But still, the mystery remains. What are all the yachts and wealth and progress for? Like Eric, I find some solace in the ultimate impossibility of answering that. People do like to put themselves over others, but are also quite good at pulling others down again (shades of Christopher Boehm).
Also, thanks to Steve for unearthing precapitalist economic virtualisations. This stuff isn’t really my forte, but it seems to me there’s a progression, starting with the idea of capital accumulation for future projects, mere forward planning, which is a human universal. Then money as another step of virtualisation, always connected with centralised rulers. Not much of a jump to futures markets in respect of slaves – future exchangeability of a person for silver. But that’s still not really a derivative, unless I’m wrong? Really, you’d need someone buying up these slave contracts and selling them on, as some kind of written instrument on the basis of a discrepancy in judgments about the changing future value of what was written down … possibly including derivatives of derivatives that aren’t easily linked back to actual slaves.
Hi Chris and Tom,
first of all I want to express my admiration for both of you, I need to confes that you are my anchors in this “less-than-sane” world of our present. It is interesting to read your debate, even I got to it late, as the spring is here on north-hemisphere and as I the one trying to get my food from my labour and soil around me, this is the time of not so much free time.
But for me each of you is different source of inspiration for me and I as believe we can have some contradictiong views/believes in our head at once, I am not trying to unify your positions.
For me, Chris, is the source of the earthy livelihood inspiration, about what is and what probably will be, and Tom about the more idealistic inspirations, connected to the human supremacy positions and so.
And now I just want to offer few thoughts that get to me reading this post, but I need to admit that I did not go through all the comments, so maybe it was already discussed.
First, we often talk about farming as something clear and straightforward, but this is based a lot on our experience with current factory farming, I know from my life, and from the life of my grandparents, that it is not like this when working small and was not like this most of the agriculture history. The people were trying to farm, but the nature had the last word about success or failure, and so it was not something people had in control, something what they projected to the nature, but rather some complex dance together. So the old farming was much more similar to hunt than we want to believe from our supremacy point of view.
Second, I was interesting to hear your thoughts about non-human farming. I can see with my eyes and it is documented in science, that a lot of other animals farm. Be it ants tending flocks of aphids, carefully carying them from leaf to leaf, or some animals seeding they favourite plants near their habitats. Yes, we can say it is very different that our current farming, but I think, however distant it seems now, the farming for humans started like this.
Third and last, for me the ideas of foraging in our current world can lead to twisted perception of what is possible and how foraging works. There is by many margins not enough land for humans to forage and foraging and hunting was fine, when humans were kept by the big nature in their ecological place, ie. when the nature was so big and powerfull that homans can nevere take too much. But it is not true now, and I am nto sure if it will be true in any foresiable future. And when this is not true, than foraging has huge danger of being too exploitative. How can you find out how much you can take from the outer ecosystem when you do not know all the connections and complexity ?
No answers just more questions 🙂
Hi Hynek
I like your description of pre-industrial farming as humans and nature in a “complex dance together”. As someone who does a reasonable amount of foraging I can say that this is part of the same complex dance.