In this post, I intend to pick up where I left off last time with my review of George Monbiot’s Regenesis, mostly in reference to his urbanism theme (there’s also a bit of tidying up and an apology at the end).
But first, since it’s a proposal, a few brief observations about the trip I took last week, which involved me cycling from Frome to Chepstow and back, among other things for a pleasant chat session with the eco-philosopher and activist Rupert Read at Green Gathering (a recording of most is here).
Much of the southern part of my route followed tree-lined bike paths repurposed from abandoned railroads, flanked by large arable fields. Then a stroll through central Bristol, swerving to miss an addicted drug user on the lane, took me to another tree-lined bike path through the Avon Gorge – once a site of heavy industry and transport, but now too small for the modern incarnations of these trades.
I crossed Avon on a bridge that I shared with the M5 – the first of several highways that intertwine my route. These roads seem calm enough when you’re inside a car, but suddenly arriving over them on my bike, I was shocked each time by the volume of the traffic, its furious speed and sound, and the concrete-intensive brutalism of all this. hurry intercity. A sign on the Prince of Wales Bridge later in my trip reported that 25 million vehicles cross it annually. That’s a lot of kinetic energy to pack into three miles of road.
There were Samaritan phones on every major bridge I crossed, with their melancholy signage – “Whatever you’re going through, you don’t have to face it alone.” Back on Avon, the suburb across the M5 bridge looked in ruins. I skirted the Nos cans, passed underground passages littered with fly-tipped garbage and eerie graffiti, then passed a giant industrial zone of landfills, warehouses, sewage works, construction sites, and huge wind turbines.
Thus, a journey from the leafy rural paths that do not hide their industrial cradle well, passing through the mostly healthy urban centers and then through the rougher suburbs that house their day-to-day workers, to the new industrial areas that power them, accompanied by the ever-present roar of vehicles and people moving at speed to sustain it all. And gangs, drugs, loneliness in crowds and suicide. Of course, this is just one way of representing what George Monbiot calls the given distribution of the world’s population, but I would very much like him and others to question their nature a little more skeptically, and not be so satisfied with what they see. During my walk, even in the wooded countryside, it sometimes seemed as if the entire fabric of this corner of southwest England was some sort of dysfunctional, ecocidal industrial machine, supported by its hurried human workers, with only a thin green veneer here and there hiding -O.
Anyway, back to George’s book. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t seriously dabbled in criticism from the more intellectually thoughtful side of the spectrum, preferring to post online some of the most foul-smelling threats he’s received, which provoke no small number of ‘Go get ’em,’ George’s responses from supporters. showing considerable disdain for rural and agrarian life.
And so, another deep culture war, benefiting no one, is shaken in life. The argument for ruralism over urbanism, as I see it, is simply that the dynamics of climate, energy, water, soil, and political economy are going to drive multitudes of people into the world’s cultivable regions sooner or later. The question we really should be addressing globally, although unfortunately we are not, is how to manage this process in the most humane and least disruptive way.
One of the best criticisms of my argument for this agrarian localist future that emerged following my review of Regenesis was that it would be energetically expensive to establish it. This, I think, is true. But it is also true of all other proposals to put humanity on a safer long-term footing. The great advantage of agrarian localism is that, once its basic structures are established, its recurring energy costs can be low. While schemes to preserve the urban-industrial status quo invariably have high recurring energy costs. This certainly applies to George Monbiot’s no-farm future, as Steve showed in his calculations in my previous post.
It is obvious, in fact, that a proposal to replace extensive areas of agricultural land using free solar radiation to power production for highly concentrated industrial spaces using electricity transformed from other energy inputs by other human industries is unlikely to do well energetically. George’s vision of manufactured food, like many other ecomodernist schemes, assumes that there will be abundant and cheap clean energy at humanity’s command in the future.
It seems to me more likely that concentrated energy is scarce and expensive compared to the fossil fuel bonanza experienced by current generations, and it makes no sense to waste it producing food when free solar energy metabolized by plants can do the job. The diffusion of this solar energy will be a driving force of human biogeography in the future. Today’s world is one of urban concentration built on a legacy of mining energy stocks. Tomorrow will be mostly one of rural deconcentration oriented towards the skimming of renewable energy flows.
There is currently no broad-based policy geared towards this emerging reality, certainly in the wealthiest parts of the world with the longest histories of mining and capital concentration, such as the south of England. We are still stuck in the exhausted legacies of modernist politics, with its emphasis on market signals, nationalist symbols, or class struggle as the key to redemption. All of them fix their eyes very firmly on capitals, government mechanisms, political centralization and hurried intercity travel to build the economy. They all take for granted the centrifugal relationship between countryside and city that I discuss in chapter 15 of my book, where the countryside functions as a basically inferior server to the city, albeit dotted with pleasant islands of refuge for the rich who made money in the latter. .
As I said before, I think that ‘simple energy’ or simple biogeography will redistribute populations away from urban and rural areas in the future. In England, the field will no longer be reserved for the rich. Like it or not, people of many types will come to it for prosperity. This creates the potential for people to forge local agrarian autonomies and a genuinely agroecological culture. But this is not a deal made just because of the math of a more populous rural area. It is possible for cities and their elites to retain their centrifugal force.
To prevent this from happening, we need a policy of a kind we do not yet have – a policy in which cities serve the countryside and its inhabitants at least as much as they are served by them. I point this out schematically on page 210 of A Future of Small Farm (Figure 15.1) and discuss it in the last part of Chapter 15 in terms of rural disruptors for the centrifugal pull of the city – disruptors who build local political and economic autonomy, who set them free. own as much as possible, which is to say not entirely, of long-distance trade and geopolitically centered bureaucratic government.
Since, as I said, there is no mass politics around this at the moment, I am currently very supportive of many types of initiatives where people put themselves in the role of disruptors. I support wealthy people who buy homes in the country with large gardens, grow their own vegetables and join community organizations. I support impoverished van residents who park at stops and try to minimize their housing costs. I am in favor of farm shops, independent city councils, guerrilla gardening, allotment associations, people who buy small plots of farmland or forests and live in caravans on them while starting vegetable gardens or charcoal companies, people who occupy (considerably) land in disused or misused, people trespassing on aristocratic estates to (sustainably) harvest edible mushrooms, wealthy smallholders, impoverished peasants, shrewd farmers and so on.
Eventually, all of this will have to merge into a new policy of local autonomy and access to land, which I think will have to be a populist alliance policy. We’ll get into that in more detail when I move on to discussing the final part of my book in this blog cycle. But just as George’s goo factories require a substrate or raw material to ferment their new kinds of food, we also need a substrate or raw material to ferment new kinds of localist agrarian politics. It is from the bottom of our current politics and people trying to survive in the countryside that we need to start creating it.
There are genuine reasons to be concerned that the results of this local political intermediation are not always pleasant. Perhaps they are balanced by equally genuine reasons to worry that centralized national politics no longer offers that certainty either. The liberal-democratic firmament of late 20th century politics has all but disappeared now. Does it seem likely that, locally, nationally, or globally, no one will come to save us – unless there is some other iteration of the centralized state that I have not foreseen to safeguard against the potential tyranny of localism, without becoming a tyranny itself?
Even so, I think the downsides of a new policy aimed at rural disruptors are worth taking seriously. In my session with Rupert Read, someone raised the issue of the conformism of rural society and the greater possibilities of finding a tribe in urban settings, particularly for people with spiritualities, sexualities or other traits at odds with the assumptions of the majority in conservative rural areas. . This has sometimes been true in the past, though it remains a future story that is yet to be written. But rather than delving further into my opinion on this point, I’d like to see what other people think about it in the comments below (note that to be sure to get my attention, comments should be posted on the relevant post on Small Farm Future and not on other sites where this post may be distributed). I will try to formulate a few more thoughts in light of whatever comes to mind.
Finally, and speaking of posting comments, I recently noticed that there were a few comments that were in the moderation queue undetected by me – some from long established commenters and one from a new commenter. Please accept my apologies for the oversight. If you post a comment that doesn’t appear, feel free to poke me through the Contact Form. On the rare occasions that I actively choose not to post a comment, it will be for a reason, and I will contact you to explain what that reason is. So if you post a comment that doesn’t appear and you haven’t heard from me, it’s best to assume simple incompetence on my part and act accordingly (it’s probably better to assume simple incompetence on my part in a wide variety of other circumstances, but don’t let’s digress at this final stage of the post). Also, finally, if you include more than one hyperlink in a comment, it will automatically be held for moderation as an anti-spam measure. So, please refer carefully…
