Foragers and farmers: further thoughts on a debate with Tom Murphy

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.

Salary/ecology

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.

Historical timelines

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 21^st 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.

Foraging and farming

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 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.

The agrarian-imperial state

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’.

Ecology and localism

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.