Of bust bacteria and naked Neanderthals

an interim report on the Regenesis debate

The last couple of weeks have brought some of the activity here at Small Farm Future Central to wider audiences – perhaps most obviously through George Monbiot’s response to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. I also joined Nate Hagens on his Reality Roundtable podcast to discuss food and community futures along with Pella Thiel and Dougald Hine, and Alison Kay on her Ancestral Kitchen podcast. Then there’s this interesting review of my book, in which I emerge relatively unscathed despite unpromising beginnings as “another joker on the left”.

But here I’m going to focus mainly on some learnings from George’s response to Saying NO. I’ve published another essay about it over at Resilience.org, which I’ll probably reproduce next on this site for archival completeness.

I doubted that George would respond to my book at all, but I was steeling myself for something aggressive if he did. Even so, I wasn’t expecting quite the hit piece that he served up with his ‘Cruel fantasies’ essay, Nazi comparisons and all. Although slightly shell-shocked at first, ultimately I think I have to find the Bakhtinian comedy in it – “Sire, you protest too much. I have tweaked your nose!”

My overall sense of George’s piece is that he’s more interested in trying to get one over me – not difficult, with his vast media platform – than he is in seriously debating the issues. Happily, I’ve only had a couple of people contacting me to ask why I connive at mass death, and far more thanking me for my intervention. I tried unavailingly to get a reply placed in one of the august journals that reproduced George’s piece. Oh well. Now that his energy figures are shredded and he’s fired his fusillade, I think it’s probably time for me to move on without giving his writing a great deal more attention. All the same, his response does clarify a few things, and it provides a foil to lay out some further aspects of agrarian localism. So in this post I’m going to mention a few points of interest arising from his essay that I hope to return to in the future. Just a little bit more nose-tweaking, then, before moving on.

Unfeasible energy costs of bacterial protein

Although George said nothing about the manufactured bacterial protein that he favours as a source of human food in his response to my book, in the aftermath of his intervention I was able to get him to clarify on Twitter/X his source for his claim in Regenesis (p.190) of 16.7 kWh electricity input per kg of bacterial protein. I think I’ve now shown conclusively that this figure greatly underestimates the total energy costs of the technique.

It wasn’t easy to get George to reveal his source. He engaged in quite some foot-dragging and diversionary tactics, including the claim that he was using real data from Solar Foods, so I should take it up with them, before finally revealing that his figure came from this study. Which is not real data from Solar Foods. The figure that George takes from it manifestly underestimates the energy costs of manufacturing bacterial protein several times over. I’ve laid out the issues in this short document, with a bit more background here. Do let me know if you’d like me to write another post about it. Likewise if you think I’m in error. But my conclusion as things stand is that manufactured bacterial protein is completely fanciful as a way of feeding people en masse.

It’s a bust for bacteria.

Numbers

George sets a lot of store by numbers in his recent writing on food systems. “As I’ve discovered since publishing the book, if there is one habit that incites fury more reliably than any others, it is to put numbers on the problem.” In my opinion, actually he ventures surprisingly few numbers in his analysis, and – as I’ve shown – the ones he does venture are sometimes crucially wrong. Meanwhile, there are other important numbers he doesn’t mention at all. If ‘people of Chris’s persuasion’ are to come around to his future visions, then I think people of George’s persuasion need to develop more numerically informed positions around issues like low carbon energy futures, agroecological food productivity, arable overproduction and livestock greenhouse gas emisssions.

There are other numbers and evidence that George does cite in his essay. I’ll just mention one here, contained in this quotation:

The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be supplied with staple foods…is 2,200 kilometres. Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly-habited lands (US plains, Canadian prairies, Russian steppes etc) and shipped to tight, densely-populated places.

These are the numbers to which people of Chris’s persuasion most furiously object, even though they have no answer to them. Why? Because the numbers are incompatible with their worldview. They show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.

I’m not exactly sure what ‘answering’ a number means, but I guess George’s point is that humanity is now so far down a globalized food supply route – so boxed into what I called in A Small Farm Future ‘the arable corner’ – that localizing the food supply is just a pipedream. The flipside of that objection is to ask how the hell we’re going to keep shipping staples 2,200km as climate change and energy, water and materials constraints along with geopolitical fracturing and a bunch of other issues play havoc with the world we’ve known. George has no answer to this, as far as I can see. Another pipedream.

So we could embark on the difficult path of deurbanization and food localization now. Or we could follow George’s path and try to put it off. I think we’ll end up in the same place either way – mostly rural populations eating mostly local food. George’s route will just cause that bit more misery and suffering along the way.

To put it another way, I think George’s take is another variant on the old cliché that we can’t introduce ecological policies because they’re bad for the economy. Which is to forget that the economy is a subset of the ecology, and the ecology always has the last laugh.

This exemplifies what I’ve called the ecomodernist doom flip. While readily invoking terrible future circumstances, George seems incapable of imagining that these circumstances might be so terrible as to prevent business-as-usual scenarios like transporting staple foods 2,200km, or stable megacity populations. I’m happy to debate the difficult details of how to effect ruralization and agrarian localism, but if people want to dismiss it out of hand I think they need to offer a more plausible alternative. I’ve not yet seen one from George, or anybody else.

In summary, I don’t furiously object to numbers like George’s 2,200km. They express exactly why we need to localise food production, urgently. The only thing I furiously object to is the history of enclosure, farm engrossment, destruction of local food systems and foolish dependence on ecocidal fossil fuels implied by such figures – a history that George barely mentions. Grain producing regions that are ‘lightly-habited’? Why would that be?

I have been reading the palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak’s strange and enthralling book The Naked Neanderthal. Slimak illustrates something I’ve noticed before – that actual scientists often have a more nuanced understanding of the limits of numerical evidence than non-scientists who make rhetorical appeals to ‘the numbers’ or ‘the science’ to buttress their opinions. Slimak complains about the kind of positivism which, he says, is “a failure, an obstacle to thought. It is a way of denying human nature and the animal logic rooted within humans. It hides behind graphs, measurements, tables in order to avoid looking human nature in the face.” (p.125)

…and so on in this vein. Maren Morgan’s excellent review of Monbiot’s Regenesis also takes a dive into this issue.

Ultimately, the key questions before us are ‘how should we live?’ and ‘what should we do now to move toward it?’ (questions that admit to multiple ‘wes’, answering them in different ways). Neither can be answered simply by numbers or evidence. I hope to say more about this soon.

Politics of enclosure

But to press my point further now, I believe that numbers are sometimes actively inimical to living well. In the companion essay to this one I explain how I think George’s number-mongering easily leads to a politics of enclosure.

There’s a huge social science literature about how the quantitative bureaucracies of colonial governments in particular have denied local and indigenous peoples rights over land, on the grounds that their claims are based in stories, songs and oral accounts of authority which cut no ice with modern forms of governmentality. Show me the numbers, show me the lines on the map, show me where it’s written down, show me where it’s clarified and quantified. Further back in history, there were similar legal issues around rights over land here in England.

I tried to make this point recently to the writer Guy Shrubsole when he weighed in on social media asking for the numbers to justify my position vis-à-vis George. Guy has written a good book about the tangled story of how so much land in England is owned by so few. Frankly, I was astonished to have him lecture me about the need for me to make “claims based on numbers rather than vibes”. Numbers over vibes is the language of enclosure, dispossession and land concentration par excellence. More on that another time too.

Economics of hunger

Again as briefly outlined in my companion essay, George’s response reveals more clearly than in Regenesis his neo-Malthusianism in relation to hunger and poverty. He seems to think the way to tackle these is to produce more food at lower prices, and he ridicules my argument that higher food prices can help alleviate global hunger, arguing that the reverse is obviously the case: “Is it really possible that you can write a book on food and farming and fail to grasp this basic fact?”

I wonder if he’ll come to regret that sentence. I aim to say more about this soon, drawing on various authorities and lines of evidence – not least one G. Monbiot, who correctly wrote: “Food is too cheap to provide sufficient income for small farmers, among whom number many of the world’s hungriest people” (Regenesis, p.129).

In addressing the question, it’s important to distinguish between situations where food prices rise at a given moment without any other significant changes to prices or social structures, which certainly would tend to make things harder for the poor and hungry (oh wait), and situations where long-term downward pressure on food prices pushes people into precarity. Anyway, more on that to come.

From the naked Neanderthal to ecomodernism – and beyond

I have, as I mentioned, been reading Ludovic Slimak’s book The Naked Neanderthal. In the face of George’s outrage at my argument that a pattern of urbanism scarcely in existence for more than a few decades may not be a wise long-term bet, it’s been quite a tonic to learn about another kind of humanity who occupied what’s now Europe over hundreds of millennia, an unimaginable span relative to modern society, and then rapidly became extinct some tens of millennia ago.

Slimak is in no doubt about the cause of that extinction – the arrival of modern sapiens with superior projectile hunting technologies, which, he says, were technologies of mind as well as weaponry, involving social standardization, intolerance of difference and cultural self-absorption.

Whereas no two Neanderthal tools were entirely alike, when it comes to modern sapiens “If we look at a hundred flints, we can easily grasp the techniques involved, and we know the next 100,000 will be exactly the same”. We sapiens, says Slimak, “are not very good at embracing difference”. We live in “over-normative” societies where “difference is frowned upon and only superficially tolerated at the periphery” and where our crafts are “all about us … our societies … our ways of being”. Neanderthal craft, on the other hand, “does not speak about the person, the individual, the ego, but exclusively about the ways of being in the world of the group as a whole” (Slimak, pp.177-85).

No doubt their societies changed over time, but on Slimak’s account it looks like it never occurred to Neanderthals to say ‘if we just jazzed up these weapons a bit we could kill a lot more game per acre and save ourselves a lot of labour input’. It seems their large, intelligent, human brains were oriented to other things. For a long time.

How ironic it would be against that background if the sapiens urge for standardization and modularity, for projecting ourselves into ever more instrumental control of our surroundings, led to the demise of our vast, ordered and regularized modern civilization, if not of our species itself, in such short order compared to the Neanderthals. I believe it well might.

No doubt ‘people of George’s persuasion’ will dismiss this as more romanticism on my (or Slimak’s) part. Well, I’m not arguing that we can or should try to ‘go back’. I’ve expended so many words over the years on distinguishing the case for low energy agrarian localism from simple nostalgic yearning – including in pages of my book that George has clearly read and in the pages of another one he clearly hasn’t. I suspect his attempt to position me thus is partly about him seeking the easiest means of ridiculing me. What I find useful in Slimak is the way he shows how meta this approach is, a silly but effective strategy coded deep in our sapiens soul – ‘forget that Mousterian crap, look at the length of my projection’. With modernism and its apologists, this has reached its pathological apogee.

So I guess I’m pushing a boulder uphill trying to argue otherwise. It seems to be my chosen lot. We can’t turn ourselves into Neanderthals but we could at least try to evince a bit of cultural wisdom, take our foot off the pedal just a smidge, and try to place ourselves within our landscapes as local keystone species rather than dematerialized gods, as I argue in Chapter 7 of Saying NO… It’s not all about us, and the more we try to make it so the further along the ecomodernist death spiral we hurtle.

As I see it, modernist politics, while still dominant, is exhausted. Its radicalisms of left and right have both devolved to a state-corporate gigantism clutching after magical remedies. Its thought leaders try to ridicule other voices bubbling up from the depths of civil society by using their social status and their amplified platforms, another form of projectile technology perfected by sapiens. The trouble is, as the physicist Richard Feynman put it, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

I understand why George cautions against approaches like mine that in his view embrace the unravelling of modernism and its cultures of growth. He thinks it’s self-indulgent. But to my mind, the real self-indulgence occurs when the demise of that global settlement is already baked in, yet mainstream political traditions are so incapable of thinking beyond it that everyone working within them converges around the manifestly inadequate blandishments of technocratic welfare capitalism as a proposed solution. I believe George has succumbed to this self-indulgence.

We need to stop trying to fool nature, and ourselves, and instead seek ways to place ourselves within nature again on the other side of modernism or ecomodernism, perhaps its only remaining variant. George defines ecomodernism as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change” and I believe that precisely describes his current approach. Which is why this joker on the left is urgently seeking a different way of doing things. Despite the ridicule, there are more of us on this path than you might suppose.