Looking back, looking forward

This is something of a placeholder post, with four miscellaneous items on the general theme of looking back to the past and forward to the future, and then finishing with some questions for regular commenters and Substack subscribers at the end.

So, looking back (and forward) …  well, first, the first anniversary of the publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future passed last week. As previously signalled, I’m shifting my attention from the themes of that book to other projects, but I’ll be posting a retrospective about the book and a couple of follow up posts on specific themes from it here soon. Partly this is to mark the anniversary and then help put the book to bed, but it’s also because a few critical commentaries relating to the book have come my way recently that are a little more interesting than earlier critiques. So I’d like to chew on those a bit.

Second, on Saturday, I went to a great conference in London on spiritual ecology at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. In keeping with my looking forward/looking back theme, it gave me plenty of food for thought in terms of my own personal and intellectual trajectory. I’ve long argued that the current global meta-crisis is essentially a cultural or spiritual crisis, even though I’ve never been an especially spiritual or religiously oriented person. It was excellent to hear people speaking eloquently to that theme out of thought traditions different to my usual frames of reference.

Dekila Chungyalpa, one of the keynote speakers, stressed the importance of understanding that the climate crisis and the wider global meta-crisis of which it’s a part is the product of an ongoing colonialism. I agree with that, and I hope my writing has contributed in some way to developing that understanding.

René August, another keynote, also talked about colonialism from her South African perspective, while emphasizing the need for people to create stories that can hold us together in the present moment. This led into a discussion about (some of) we white people’s feelings of guilt over colonialism. I liked René’s take on that: we shouldn’t ask people who’ve been at the sharp end of it to reassure us and help assuage that guilt – instead, we should seek connection, and find other, better stories to tell about ourselves.

René made two other remarks that particularly landed with me. The first was that if, metaphorically, we run out of path and have no obvious route forward where others have already trodden, the work of storytelling in that moment is to look back and learn where we’ve come from. The second was that we must ask what current stories need to be disrupted.

The way I’ve manifested these points in my writing about agrarian localism is as follows. While colonialism has been unleashed most devastatingly by European powers and their offshoots onto people in other parts of the world, and also within their own peripheries, it was also unleashed by those powers on their own populations in the form of expansionary governmental power and the search for endless economic increase. A better story we can tell about ourselves in a country like Britain is the need for us to reclaim local economic agency and sufficiency, which could contribute to other people elsewhere achieving that too.

This new story involves looking back and learning where we came from – learning about how we came into the story of colonialism and endless increase, and what other options are available. The looking back isn’t grounded in some naïve belief that we can erase these latter stories and restore a misplaced sense of past innocence. It’s out of recognition that there are usually things to be learned from other people, and this includes learning from the agrarian localists of the past as we try to build agrarian localisms for the future.

The current story that I think most needs disrupting is the essentially ecomodernist one that the agrarian localist story is a bucolic fantasy, and that what’s needed is high-energy technofixes to the existing global food, energy and urban metabolisms.

Ecomodernism isn’t a firm and fixed doctrine or membership club, but a story with disparate elements. I don’t consider all its purveyors to have honourable intentions, but some of them do – and it seems to me that the more honourable strands are grounded in genuine colonial guilt that nevertheless reproduces colonial structures of power: we built a high-energy, high-capital empire on the back of other people’s unwilling labour, and now we seek to give the benefits of our techno empire to everybody, with an offer they can’t refuse.

I believe this story is gravely mistaken and I’ve invested a lot of effort in trying to disrupt it, which was basically the point of Saying NO… I think it would be better to stop trying to save the world by imposing questionable ‘solutions’ reliant on high-energy, high-capital global tech, and to favour instead more local approaches that are more firmly grounded in politics than technology.

Per René August’s point, grounding responses to the meta-crisis more in politics than in technology means creating stories that can hold us together in this moment. And this is what I want to turn to as I look forward to future work. Some people have criticised the negativity and combativeness of some of my previous writing. That’s probably fair enough. There are fine lines involved in the necessary work of both disrupting problematic stories while trying to build capacious new ones, and I know I haven’t always navigated them well – even as I also think some of these criticisms aren’t well motivated and require me to stand firm.

I don’t have easy answers as to how I might do all this better in future, but I was interested by the ideas of another keynote speaker, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, concerning prayer and embodied communion. To pray, to praise and to forgive – to forgive oneself, also, I think. Not in the sense of giving oneself an easy pass, but in working toward real self-forgiveness. Anyway, the conference gave me much to think about as I contemplate new projects.

Third, as I made my way back from the conference, I got caught up in the crowds at the end of the Pride event in central London, which probably wouldn’t be the kind of thing you’d likely see in the more rural parts of my home patch in Somerset. I’m currently reading Anna Jones’s interesting book Divide, concerning ‘the relationship crisis between town and country’. She, along with other writers and thinkers I’ve encountered recently, has interesting things to say in it about racism and homophobia in the countryside – interesting not least because she’s subtle enough to trace the borderlands between bigotry and rural social conservatism without just lumping them together in condemnation. It’s another ‘no easy answers’ arena in which I’d like to deepen my understanding. For now, I’ll just say that I’m interested in discussions and views about building inclusive and cosmopolitan rural localisms.

Fourth, talking of conservatism, and ruralism – well, here in Britain we have a general election this week in which the ruling Conservatives are widely tipped to be wiped out by the Labour Party. Who knows, but normally at election time when I travel in the countryside I see numerous farmers’ fields with billboards for the Conservatives, and almost never for other parties. This time, I’ve seen none. The farmer vote isn’t going to swing the election, but – to use an appropriately agricultural metaphor – the empty fields could be a straw in the wind for what’s to come.

Normally at election times I write a post that runs the rule over the manifestos of the various parties, but to be honest I lack the enthusiasm this time around. I did start reading the manifestos and got to the bit in the Labour Party’s about the importance of economic growth and Britain’s vital financial services sector when my still-dodgy rural internet connection failed. I’m taking that as a sign. I’ll be delighted to see the back of the present government, but I don’t believe meeting the challenges of the meta-crisis now lie within the ambit of central governments of any variety, and certainly not within Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

But if the Tories indeed are crushed and if a Labour government fails to make much headway with the problems of our times, we might see populist political realignments of various kinds emerging – various kinds of scary and various kinds of promising. I’ll be interested to track this issue in the longer term.

And so (almost) finally to my question for commenters and Substack subscribers. I’ve been publishing my posts simultaneously on my own website and more recently on Substack, and have amassed a nucleus of subscribers on the latter platform – including a few who generously pay a subscription, even though all the content currently is free. I’ve turned comments off on Substack, as I don’t really want to manage parallel comment threads. But I quite like the Substack platform and would like to open these posts up for wider comment. If nobody commented I’d probably stop writing them, yet sometimes I feel I lack the time to respond properly when people take the trouble to write a thoughtful comment (I like it when commenters start discussing issues with each other!)

I also wrestle a bit with the whole question of money for writing – overly commodifying it seems wrong, but so does spending so much time on it for so little tangible return while I let endless practical jobs on the holding slide in favour of it. Should I switch over to Substack? Should I open up to Substack comments (note: comments are open on Substack at least for this post)? Should I offer something more to paid subscribers? Should I earn more, or write less, or just carry on as I am because it’s what I do? My choices of course, but any thoughts welcome.

Finally – I promise! – a heads up on a couple of media offerings. My interview with Henry Leveson-Gower in the Mint Magazine is just out here. And I’ve just come across this excellent critique of food system ecomodernism by ramblinactivist Paul Mobbs, which is worth a watch.