Food ecomodernism and the emptying of politics, Part II: or, jesters and mystics

This essay continues my anniversary overview of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and the various strands of criticism it’s received that I began in my previous post.

Before I do that, I just want to reprise a point in that previous post where I possibly erred a little. In my discussion of Joel Scott-Halkes’s criticisms of me around his view that small-scale farmers have “awful, awful lives” and don’t want to be farmers, I made the point that it’s not the farming itself that’s the problem so much as the political and economic structures that societies often place around farming. I should have added that when societies remove those impediments, small-scale farming can often prove a dramatically successful route out of poverty. This was the case in the 20^th century in various countries – South Korea, Taiwan and China, for example, as argued by the likes of Andro Linklater and Lynn White. And, as argued by the likes of Robert Allen, it was also the case in 17^th century England.

Often enough, the result of these successes was that farmers stopped being farmers. But that’s another story. The point is, there’s no reason to suppose that farming per se traps people in misery. I’ve made this point about the economic dynamism of small-scale farming in some of my previous writings, but I’m apt to forget it because it hasn’t been front and centre of my own experience in a contemporary British agricultural economy where the economics and politics around farming aren’t great. And where the siren song of the mainstream farming-is-misery narrative sounds loud. Still, the notion that farming and economic development are strangers is flawed.

The farming-as-economic-development narrative is of less import now, though, than farming as economic de-development. How do we decarbonise and degrow the economy while nourishing ourselves not only physically, but also socially and culturally? I can’t see any plausible answer to that question which doesn’t involve embracing a greater emphasis on diverse small-scale farming to meet local needs – which was part of the point of writing Saying NO…

Another recently published book makes a similar case – Jennifer Grayson’s A Call to Farms, which I’d warmly commend. In it, Jennifer travels the USA and reports firsthand from mostly new entrant farmers who are answering the question in the same way and trying to breathe practical life into it one way or another. I expect I’m about to break some fierce commandment of the literary firmament, but to quote from my own blurb on the back of Jennifer’s book, “Each chapter is its own little jewel, glinting with the joy and energy of people finding connection among land, food and community. Bittersweet jewels they are, though, because Jennifer Grayson knows the painful histories that have sundered these connections and are still shaping our world”.

The challenge, I believe, is finding ways to bear honest witness to both that joy and that pain as we face the future. And on that note, I will return to my overview of Saying NO… and the criticisms that have come its way. I dealt with the first three arenas of criticism in my previous post, so let us now turn to the fourth.

4. Mystic maths

I’ve become so wearily familiar with my case for a small farm future getting dismissed as a romantic yearning for the small farm past by people who in my opinion really aren’t thinking hard enough about the issues that sometimes I’ve played up to it for laughs. A generative event in writing Saying NO… was one of these occasions, when a critic took my light-hearted remarks about the benefits of medieval farm technology as evidence that I had nothing serious to say about agrarian localism. That made me think I probably shouldn’t undermine my case with such levity. I put a lot of work into Saying NO… (and also, previously, into A Small Farm Future) in making a case for agrarian localism grounded in relevant empirical studies.

The ecomodernist response to Saying NO… largely involved ignoring that case and its grounding, and simply asserting there was no quantitative or scientific basis for arguments like mine. So I have come full circle. I now consider such ecomodernist critics non-serious rhetoricians, to which the best response is not still further attempts to gain a hearing for my empirical case, but to laugh. In the future, I hope to further embrace the persona of the jester. It is a serious role and a solemn duty.

Another possible response is mysticism. Two people have called me a ‘mystic’ in recent times – one as an insult, the other as a compliment. How to navigate that? I’m not going to dig deep into what mysticism is here, but I believe there’s a time for maths and science, and there’s a time for mysticism. One of the features of modernist culture is that it’s not very good and knowing when those times are.

Not all mysticism is good, and not all science is good either. But if your maths and science lead you to the conclusion that it’s more efficient to fill a field with solar panels to make electricity to make hydrogen to grow bacteria to make a powder to feed people something that tastes like meat and that therefore this is the correct course of action to take rather than sowing some bean seeds, it’s probable you’ve got your science wrong. It’s even more probable you’ve got your mysteries wrong.

Summary: I accept the mantle of the mystic.

5. Consumerism and (eco)modernism

A lot of people have no problem with the idea that the future involves grave challenges, but seem less able to imagine that these challenges might bring the curtain down on the familiar political structures of the contemporary world and associated patterns such as its consumer culture. To me, this indicates a problem in the culture of modernism that needs hard work to transcend.

In the last two chapters of Saying NO… I touched on what an ecological culture rather than this present modernist culture might be, albeit only in barest outline. This prompted a highly charged critical response from some. I won’t retrace that ground, just noting in passing that Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against the Vortex, published a few months after Saying NO…, helped me get a better grasp on the dynamics of modernist culture underlying such outrage. I’ve discussed Anthony’s book here. (Douglas Rushkoff’s diagnoses of present times and Paul Mobbs’s critique of food ecomodernism are also relevant).

But I do want to make a couple of other points about the culture of consumerism. Some of my critics have raised the issue of increased global meat consumption. If everybody in the world ate meat at North American or European levels, the argument goes, the consequences would be environmentally disastrous – hence the case for microbial food as a meat (and dairy) alternative.

Here again we see the sidelining of politics (inequities in income and access to food) in favour of a techno-fix (meat substitutes for the poor) that I mentioned in my previous post. Another problem with the substitution argument is that it fails to demonstrate that consumers will prefer alt-meat to the real thing, simply assuming that they will. In a sense, this parallels ‘land sparing’ arguments in conservation ecology which are also relevant to this debate (discussed in Chapter 3 of Saying NO…), where it’s assumed that higher yielding or lower land-take forms of food production will result in more land left to nature, whereas the reality is that the land is often used for some other nature-disturbing human purpose.

Meat and dairy substitutes already exist anyway in the form of plant-based products (legumes and cereals, mostly) with a lower environmental footprint than microbial analogues (in some cases, even animal products do too). Neglect of these products in the microbial alt-meat narrative seems curious. But this whole meat/alt-meat debate assumes that the future food system will be driven by the existing style of consumerism under the aegis of modernist culture and its preferred forms of economic monopoly. In Saying NO… I suggest instead that the future for many people is likely to be more an agrarian localist one, driven by widespread producerism rather than consumerism.

That view invites some scepticism, understandably. Where, my critics ask, is the impetus in contemporary society for this move to a small farm, localist future? Well, there are moves toward retaining or augmenting agrarianism, and processes of re-peasantisation are happening in many countries that pass entirely beneath the radar of received opinion and media talking points along the lines that farming is an awful life that nobody wants to do any more. But I couldn’t honestly say these are mainstream trends.

Equally, I don’t think the ecomodernists could honestly say that low-carbon alternatives to the prodigious fossil energy powering our present high-energy, urbanized world are a mainstream trend. That doesn’t seem to stop them from saying it anyway, but there we are.

Even if you take the view that we’re too deep in the commodified, high-energy urbanism of modern culture to move smoothly into a small farm future, you could still plot a course toward it via intermediate steps of energy reduction and deurbanization. As I see it, if we don’t try to move towards a lower energy and more local agrarian future as a civilizational choice, we’re likely to get one eventually anyway as a matter of civilizational collapse. I prefer the former option.

But I’ve rarely seen ‘middle way’ arguments of the energy descent/rising localism sort, especially within ecomodernism. The focus of mainstream narratives is resolutely upon retaining present patterns of urbanism, employment, commodification, high-energy consumerism and – it must be said – centralized and inequitable political power.

I first came across a nascent ecomodernism in Stewart Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline (it was called ‘eco-pragmatism’ back then, but ecomodernism fits better – I don’t think ecomodernism is pragmatic, but it’s definitely modernist). Brand’s focus in 2009 was on nuclear power and genetically modified arable crops to keep us urbanised, energised and fed. Nowadays, the technologies du jour have shifted to photovoltaics and factory-based microbial cultivation. Different technologies, same aim. Tech fads come and go, but modernist culture just keeps trying to reinvent itself. It’s funny how old-fashioned this looks given ecomodernism’s self-conception as something new and contemporary. As Anthony Galluzzo puts it “we can detect an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century” (Against the Vortex, p.9).

Another backward-looking aspect of contemporary modernism is the eye-watering levels of public and private debt, which can’t be justified any longer in terms of funding economic activities likely to repay it. It’s more a case of wishful thinking about persisting with the kind of lifestyles that seemed realistically aspirational in the past, and the devil take future generations.

I don’t think ecological culture and agrarian localism stand much of a chance in the face of these latest iterations of a backward-looking modernism. But nor do I think modernism stands much of a chance in the face of these self-destructive dynamics of its own. Hence, I see ecological culture and agrarian localism taking root mostly in the margins and backwaters of the world that modernism made and is now unmaking, in circumstances of crisis.

6. How do you like your doom?

Which brings me to another arena of critique – according to some of my critics, my analysis of the meta-crisis we’re now in involves a problematic doominess on my part.

I won’t spend long on this, but one line of this critique has been that I’m cruelly hoping for civilizational collapse to rain down its miseries on urbanites and other refuseniks of my beautiful agrarian vision so that my preferred kind of society can emerge.

Even devoting that one sentence to this argument gives it more credence than it deserves.

Another line of critique is that my doomy prognostications for the future sap people’s – especially young people’s – morale. And that my scepticism about a transition to high-energy urban societies powered by renewables gives succour to fossil energy companies.

Devoting those two sentences to that argument likewise gives it rather too much attention.

I find something of a contradiction in the way I get presented as both a romanticist of a glorious rural future and a catastrophist of miserable civilizational collapse. Another fine line to tread, it seems. But the main problem I have with these despair critiques is that the ecomodernist rescue mission for capitalist business as usual looks to me more like a counsel of despair than the world I project does. To put it crudely, would you prefer to wait around in the hope that the industrial technocrats will sort out renewable energy so that you can carry on paying sky-high rent in cramped urban housing while you hope the paymasters of your zero-hours contract job won’t robotize it out of existence, or would you prefer to get busy with gardening, low-impact building, community development, land and economic activism and suchlike?

As well as brickbats for my doominess, I also get messages of appreciation from people for my hopefulness. The way I navigate this contradiction is in thinking that my writing does try to amplify the grounds for hopefulness, but only within an analysis that finds few grounds to think that much we take for granted in the rich countries nowadays – high-energy, consumerist urbanism, secure wage-labour, citizenship within a welfare-capitalist state – will long survive. My doominess consists in doubt that the familiar political world has much more road. Which in many ways is a good thing, but not unless – to press the metaphor – we slow the hell down and prepare ourselves for the bumpy track ahead.

As to my succouring of fossil energy companies – well, I’ll touch on that in another post. Suffice to say for now that I think those companies have a lot more interest in a projected transition to a high-energy urban world of EVs and suchlike than to a distributed world of low-energy, decommodified, self-supporting farmers.

But the main problem with this anti-doom critique is that it assumes energy decarbonisation is all that’s needed to secure a stable future modernist civilisation. I think this is mistaken. In his impressive book Navigating the Polycrisis, Mike Albert shows that a likely outcome in this energy transition scenario is what he calls ‘volatile techno-leviathan’. As the name implies, this isn’t something to look forward to. In the unlikely event that a clean energy transition occurs, it probably just gives us doom delayed – maybe even doom amplified.

7. Health

I didn’t focus much in Saying NO… on the health implications of bacterial protein powder, but with the publication of Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People such issues have loomed larger. I think there are real concerns about the long-term health implications of diets in which they form a significant part, for example in relation to their PHB content. There are concerns too in the rapidity with which these foods are being rushed through regulatory approval.

My post-publication experiences with Saying NO… have raised other concerns for me about health, broadly conceived. For one thing, the health of the media in its openness to genuine debate and alternatives to business-as-usual narratives. I suppose it’s naïve to imagine otherwise, but I felt the chill winds of media hostility to those alternatives more keenly when I was on the sharp end of it personally.

I also became more aware of the unhealthy ways that op-ed style books and journalism lean on scholarly research as a rhetorical strategy to build the apparent legitimacy of their case. This is prompting me to rethink the way I draw on research and use referencing in my own writing, which is a healthy thing I suppose. Cherry-picking evidence is almost inevitable in op-ed style writing, including my own, but I think we all need to do a better collective job of acknowledging it. For my part, I plan to reduce the amount of referencing I do and try to avoid invoking scholarly research in support of wider opinions that the research doesn’t directly support.

Finally, the matter of my own health arose as an issue for me in the aftermath of publication, especially in the light of other things going on in my personal life. I’d been a little worried ahead of publication that the book might bring a storm down upon me. In the event I suppose it wasn’t too bad, if only perhaps because it didn’t gain all that much attention. Anyway, I only a couple of emails likening me to a mass murderer, and no actual death threats. But some of the general chatter has been a bit aggravating, and I’ve realised my constitution isn’t really suited to this kind of thing. On the upside, it’s finally led me to appreciate that negative comments on platforms like Twitter really shouldn’t be taken seriously, as commenters here have long been wisely counselling me. I’ve found that all too often debate is fruitless and not really what the interlocutor is looking for, and there’s much to be said for liberal use of the mute option.

Happily, this has given me more time to plan my next book.