I don't know why people are so horrified by the idea of more practical, outdoor work. It has the potential to be such a simple solution to many 'modern' problems relating to physical and mental health and over consumption. What would it cost the UK government to support a scheme where people say work 1 day a week for 'free' on farms/forests/carehomes etc etc paid for by reconfiguring taxation? Surely a lot less than the £25 billion they're planning on carbon capture and this scheme would be guaranteed to capture carbon (or atleast not keep burning it!) Perhaps it would even pay for itself by causing less demand on other services.... I think ordinary people are ready for radical ideas, they just don't get any put in front of them.
Thanks for the comments. Just to say that I opened up comments here on Substack recently, but I don't have the time to properly respond to and to moderate comments here as well as on my home website. Do please keep it polite - there's no need to call anyone in this discussion a sociopath.
Thanks for your insights, Chris. I eagerly anticipate your posts. I’m in that group of people who live the agrarian life that you believe is necessary, and I’m an unpaid subscriber. Would you consider advocating to Substack for a donation type subscription? The Guardian is an example. $80 is a little steep, though I’d like to support your efforts as a writer in an amount I can afford. Farming, even homestead type farming, still requires cash. Once the collapse comes, if I’m still alive, I, my family and those close to me will be sitting pretty, cash or no cash.
I currently think that the human equation that is being considered by eco capitalist modernists and eco socialist modernists is
population × resource availability = progressive human rights realisation
whereby resource availability = energy and material throughput = consumption
with the progressive realisation of human rights conditional on resource availability.
This equation highlights the different ways the progressive realisation of human rights can be perceived whether ecomodernist, ecosocialist, primative anarchism or whatever with each understanding the use value of resource availability differently.
I think from a more materialism overshoot perspective, the realisation of human rights is our weakest point because historically high resource availability generally results in higher realisation of human rights which is probably where Cain etc al are coming from.
So the challenge is how can reduced hydrocarbon and material throughput sustain high levels of human rights realisation?
A lesser part of the answer is in reconceptualizing how human rights can be fulfilled and realised through an agrarian based energy/material degrowth economy eg clean air and a healthy environment, health benefits of close to nature ecosystem service work.
But a greater part is how an energy/material degrowth system with population growth can sustain the full spectrum of positive and negative rights that are provided by a tax driven State including justice systems, welfare systems, defence systems, education systems, transportation systems and health systems.
This to me is the predicament that Cain et al seeks to address within their climate overshoot framework because so far degrowth does not have any convincing ideas about how to maintain high human rights realisation beyond what they might call degrowth mysticism in terms of a high faith in localised community cooperation in which justice systems, welfare systems, defence systems, education systems, transportation systems and health systems are managed and organised through perhaps sociocracy or some other 'higher order' governance system.
Thus I think the governance structure of the population × consumption × human rights realisation is key in articulating an alternative agrarian degrowth vision and how that governance structure will enable sufficient resource availability to progressively realise human rights bearing in mind that the current system is doing that reasonably well despite its inherent unsustainability and embedded energy/material overshoot problem.
This probably means having to counter argue with evidence for an inevitable collapse even though at a national level this inevitable collapse is being deferred through neocolonial foreign land, energy and material grabbing which is normalised as "import dependencies" and a "balance of trade deficit" which in turn increasingly requires foreign ownership of our national land, energy and assets.
So for me, the first point of call is how to reduce our import dependencies and then how the resulting energy/material degrowth can support the human rights of a growing population.
This means a radical reinterpretation of the good life and how substantially reduced tax revenues can sustain justice systems, welfare systems, defence systems, education systems, transportation systems and health systems through local community governance structures.
And here was me hoping for an enlightened discussion of ecological overshoot and how it affects everything within the human condition.
I kinda feel sorry for you that you had to read that book, so at least the rest don't have to waste our time on it. So thank you for your endurance!
We have noticed this within the collapse community, the co-opting of the word Overshoot to mean something other than ecological overshoot, for the rather dim-witted idea that we can temporarily pass 1.5-2*C warming then bring it back down again. Even a few climate scientists have suggested this.
It is frankly, an absurd notion, classic techno-utopianism. There is a time lag of at least decade between emissions and their warming effects, what we are seeing now is from when the warming was 400ppm CO2 and +1*C above the 1850 baseline, or even longer ago. At the time of writing we are at 430ppm and +1.6*C over the 1980-2000 baseline, more like +2.1*C over the 1750 baseline. I think it was Hansen that pointed out, even if we abruptly stopped carbon emissions now, warming would still increase. Just not by as much as the current business as usual.
Humans are going to have to get used to that the planet, in an emergency attempt to balance out the energy imbalance caused by human activity, is altering the state of the planet, by attempting to equalise that energy imbalance across the globe (hence the poles warming four times faster than the rest of the planet). We are moving out of the Holocene and into something else, at such a rate that very few current species can adapt quickly enough, and it won't stop until some kind of stabilisation is reached, probably between hundreds of years to tens of thousands of years from now.
Warming and its effects are non-linear and according to the IPCC itself, and irreversible on time scales meaningful to humans.
If there was a market answer to this 'problem', it would be already happening. As Simon Michaux asks -"Is it happening now? 'No' - Then it is isn't going to happen."
The reason these kinds of ideas emerge is because these people are absolutely terrified that they might have to give up their pens and keyboard and plush offices and end up using a fork and spade in a semi-rural setting, getting up with the sun and going to bed at dark because there isn't constant electricity. They are stories to make themselves feel better about the data they see, an attempt at bargaining with the future in the face of the basic laws of physics.
(Although if we teach them the benefits of no-till gardening and mulching, it might ease their anxiety.)
To paraphrase a meme, these people can imagine the end of the world but cannot imagine the end of capitalism (or any other economic orthodoxy).
This is why William Catton's book Overshoot is so important, it covers what he calls cargoism, the delusion that technology will always save us.
Until these people stop thinking in anthropocentric terms, and start thinking on behalf of all the species on the planet, together, nothing will change within the dominant cultures that oversee us.
Either you've been living under a rock or you're delusional. REAL people are working 2 jobs to make ends meet & you want them to work a day for free? You're as bad as DeSantis trying to set up children to work at night in the fields picking produce. You belong in the category of people that can't see beyond the end of your own nose....sociopath.
At first I thought you posting in response to Chris' article, which didn't make sense, then realised you were replying to a comment below.
I take it you are an American? Judging by your posts on your own page I'm guessing so. That last comment is well out of order and needs calling out.
Perhaps you cannot grasp the UK nuance.
Yes, you're right, many people in the Uk are working 2 jobs or more to not even get by.
I don't know about America, but I think it also true, that many people are happy to volunteer in their local communities, just to make them better places, and for our own wellbeing.
I volunteer with local tree planting, and do volunteer litter picks almost daily. I have worked with a community garden in the past.
So, if governance (at any level) was to encourage people to get out and doing, it would be a holistic attempt, ie, the economic environment should be reconfigured so that people do not need to work 2 jobs just to survive. Whether through a UBI, or nationalisation of energy and water supply. For example, in Scotland the water supply is still nationalised, and the average water bill is £100 a year. Here in England mine's just gone up 25% to £350 a year. it shows what can be. If the local council owned the water supply (as it did in the 19th century, it would be even less). And so on. If more people were fit and active outside the burden on the national healthcare system would be less, especially in mental health departments. Which saves the government money (and hence tax payers) in the long run.
Once people are in a position where they don't have to endure wage slavery to get by, it would not take much to encourage people to volunteer locally at things they like doing, or rather, like the outcomes that benefit everybody. Switching off the TV and smart phone networks for parts of the day/weekend would help enormously too.
I do not think the commentor was recommending slave labour on industrial factory farms that are too tight to pay wages for sufficient fruit pickers.
Incidentally, growing your own food is very enjoyable, even if the slugs do get an unfair share of it.
There's a deeper lesson here (besides the importance of self-restraint when posting). Work is localizing, but digital/social media are delocalized, screening out significant context. I'm writing as an American from Ohio: my ideas about what a "small farm" is are bound to be very different from Chris Smaje's (and also from someone who lives in Kansas or Oklahoma).
That difference has some grounding in the geography of the United States compared to England. But it owes a lot to the fact that, going back to Thomas Jefferson's National Land Survey, the US has always had a market in land. In some places--like Wendell Berry's Kentucky--that market has been tamed by traditions of stewardship, with families settled in place for generations. Elsewhere, though, what's "small" and what's "big" is highly relative: I can own a few acres, have a lease on others, and contribute seasonal labor to others through shared technologies. What it means to work the land is always under pressure from economics.
I'm interested in, and very sympathetic to, Chris' ideas about a "small farm future," but "the future" is a big place and a lot will happen before we get there. In the US, a lot of thinking about "collapse" is bound up with survivalism and doomsday prepping--not the kinds of folks I want to hang out with. I appreciate listening in on serious discussions about the transition to a more decentralized/localized polity/society/economy, but those aren't the conversations we're having here.
I don't know why people are so horrified by the idea of more practical, outdoor work. It has the potential to be such a simple solution to many 'modern' problems relating to physical and mental health and over consumption. What would it cost the UK government to support a scheme where people say work 1 day a week for 'free' on farms/forests/carehomes etc etc paid for by reconfiguring taxation? Surely a lot less than the £25 billion they're planning on carbon capture and this scheme would be guaranteed to capture carbon (or atleast not keep burning it!) Perhaps it would even pay for itself by causing less demand on other services.... I think ordinary people are ready for radical ideas, they just don't get any put in front of them.
Thanks for the comments. Just to say that I opened up comments here on Substack recently, but I don't have the time to properly respond to and to moderate comments here as well as on my home website. Do please keep it polite - there's no need to call anyone in this discussion a sociopath.
Oddly, AnPrim as far as I understand, actually isn't agrarian at all. It's basically hunter gatherer. That doesn't require working land at all.
Chris, somewhat unrelated but name the time when you’d like to come on the pod to promote your book!
Thanks for your insights, Chris. I eagerly anticipate your posts. I’m in that group of people who live the agrarian life that you believe is necessary, and I’m an unpaid subscriber. Would you consider advocating to Substack for a donation type subscription? The Guardian is an example. $80 is a little steep, though I’d like to support your efforts as a writer in an amount I can afford. Farming, even homestead type farming, still requires cash. Once the collapse comes, if I’m still alive, I, my family and those close to me will be sitting pretty, cash or no cash.
I currently think that the human equation that is being considered by eco capitalist modernists and eco socialist modernists is
population × resource availability = progressive human rights realisation
whereby resource availability = energy and material throughput = consumption
with the progressive realisation of human rights conditional on resource availability.
This equation highlights the different ways the progressive realisation of human rights can be perceived whether ecomodernist, ecosocialist, primative anarchism or whatever with each understanding the use value of resource availability differently.
I think from a more materialism overshoot perspective, the realisation of human rights is our weakest point because historically high resource availability generally results in higher realisation of human rights which is probably where Cain etc al are coming from.
So the challenge is how can reduced hydrocarbon and material throughput sustain high levels of human rights realisation?
A lesser part of the answer is in reconceptualizing how human rights can be fulfilled and realised through an agrarian based energy/material degrowth economy eg clean air and a healthy environment, health benefits of close to nature ecosystem service work.
But a greater part is how an energy/material degrowth system with population growth can sustain the full spectrum of positive and negative rights that are provided by a tax driven State including justice systems, welfare systems, defence systems, education systems, transportation systems and health systems.
This to me is the predicament that Cain et al seeks to address within their climate overshoot framework because so far degrowth does not have any convincing ideas about how to maintain high human rights realisation beyond what they might call degrowth mysticism in terms of a high faith in localised community cooperation in which justice systems, welfare systems, defence systems, education systems, transportation systems and health systems are managed and organised through perhaps sociocracy or some other 'higher order' governance system.
Thus I think the governance structure of the population × consumption × human rights realisation is key in articulating an alternative agrarian degrowth vision and how that governance structure will enable sufficient resource availability to progressively realise human rights bearing in mind that the current system is doing that reasonably well despite its inherent unsustainability and embedded energy/material overshoot problem.
This probably means having to counter argue with evidence for an inevitable collapse even though at a national level this inevitable collapse is being deferred through neocolonial foreign land, energy and material grabbing which is normalised as "import dependencies" and a "balance of trade deficit" which in turn increasingly requires foreign ownership of our national land, energy and assets.
So for me, the first point of call is how to reduce our import dependencies and then how the resulting energy/material degrowth can support the human rights of a growing population.
This means a radical reinterpretation of the good life and how substantially reduced tax revenues can sustain justice systems, welfare systems, defence systems, education systems, transportation systems and health systems through local community governance structures.
And here was me hoping for an enlightened discussion of ecological overshoot and how it affects everything within the human condition.
I kinda feel sorry for you that you had to read that book, so at least the rest don't have to waste our time on it. So thank you for your endurance!
We have noticed this within the collapse community, the co-opting of the word Overshoot to mean something other than ecological overshoot, for the rather dim-witted idea that we can temporarily pass 1.5-2*C warming then bring it back down again. Even a few climate scientists have suggested this.
It is frankly, an absurd notion, classic techno-utopianism. There is a time lag of at least decade between emissions and their warming effects, what we are seeing now is from when the warming was 400ppm CO2 and +1*C above the 1850 baseline, or even longer ago. At the time of writing we are at 430ppm and +1.6*C over the 1980-2000 baseline, more like +2.1*C over the 1750 baseline. I think it was Hansen that pointed out, even if we abruptly stopped carbon emissions now, warming would still increase. Just not by as much as the current business as usual.
Humans are going to have to get used to that the planet, in an emergency attempt to balance out the energy imbalance caused by human activity, is altering the state of the planet, by attempting to equalise that energy imbalance across the globe (hence the poles warming four times faster than the rest of the planet). We are moving out of the Holocene and into something else, at such a rate that very few current species can adapt quickly enough, and it won't stop until some kind of stabilisation is reached, probably between hundreds of years to tens of thousands of years from now.
Warming and its effects are non-linear and according to the IPCC itself, and irreversible on time scales meaningful to humans.
If there was a market answer to this 'problem', it would be already happening. As Simon Michaux asks -"Is it happening now? 'No' - Then it is isn't going to happen."
The reason these kinds of ideas emerge is because these people are absolutely terrified that they might have to give up their pens and keyboard and plush offices and end up using a fork and spade in a semi-rural setting, getting up with the sun and going to bed at dark because there isn't constant electricity. They are stories to make themselves feel better about the data they see, an attempt at bargaining with the future in the face of the basic laws of physics.
(Although if we teach them the benefits of no-till gardening and mulching, it might ease their anxiety.)
To paraphrase a meme, these people can imagine the end of the world but cannot imagine the end of capitalism (or any other economic orthodoxy).
This is why William Catton's book Overshoot is so important, it covers what he calls cargoism, the delusion that technology will always save us.
Until these people stop thinking in anthropocentric terms, and start thinking on behalf of all the species on the planet, together, nothing will change within the dominant cultures that oversee us.
Either you've been living under a rock or you're delusional. REAL people are working 2 jobs to make ends meet & you want them to work a day for free? You're as bad as DeSantis trying to set up children to work at night in the fields picking produce. You belong in the category of people that can't see beyond the end of your own nose....sociopath.
At first I thought you posting in response to Chris' article, which didn't make sense, then realised you were replying to a comment below.
I take it you are an American? Judging by your posts on your own page I'm guessing so. That last comment is well out of order and needs calling out.
Perhaps you cannot grasp the UK nuance.
Yes, you're right, many people in the Uk are working 2 jobs or more to not even get by.
I don't know about America, but I think it also true, that many people are happy to volunteer in their local communities, just to make them better places, and for our own wellbeing.
I volunteer with local tree planting, and do volunteer litter picks almost daily. I have worked with a community garden in the past.
So, if governance (at any level) was to encourage people to get out and doing, it would be a holistic attempt, ie, the economic environment should be reconfigured so that people do not need to work 2 jobs just to survive. Whether through a UBI, or nationalisation of energy and water supply. For example, in Scotland the water supply is still nationalised, and the average water bill is £100 a year. Here in England mine's just gone up 25% to £350 a year. it shows what can be. If the local council owned the water supply (as it did in the 19th century, it would be even less). And so on. If more people were fit and active outside the burden on the national healthcare system would be less, especially in mental health departments. Which saves the government money (and hence tax payers) in the long run.
Once people are in a position where they don't have to endure wage slavery to get by, it would not take much to encourage people to volunteer locally at things they like doing, or rather, like the outcomes that benefit everybody. Switching off the TV and smart phone networks for parts of the day/weekend would help enormously too.
I do not think the commentor was recommending slave labour on industrial factory farms that are too tight to pay wages for sufficient fruit pickers.
Incidentally, growing your own food is very enjoyable, even if the slugs do get an unfair share of it.
There's a deeper lesson here (besides the importance of self-restraint when posting). Work is localizing, but digital/social media are delocalized, screening out significant context. I'm writing as an American from Ohio: my ideas about what a "small farm" is are bound to be very different from Chris Smaje's (and also from someone who lives in Kansas or Oklahoma).
That difference has some grounding in the geography of the United States compared to England. But it owes a lot to the fact that, going back to Thomas Jefferson's National Land Survey, the US has always had a market in land. In some places--like Wendell Berry's Kentucky--that market has been tamed by traditions of stewardship, with families settled in place for generations. Elsewhere, though, what's "small" and what's "big" is highly relative: I can own a few acres, have a lease on others, and contribute seasonal labor to others through shared technologies. What it means to work the land is always under pressure from economics.
I'm interested in, and very sympathetic to, Chris' ideas about a "small farm future," but "the future" is a big place and a lot will happen before we get there. In the US, a lot of thinking about "collapse" is bound up with survivalism and doomsday prepping--not the kinds of folks I want to hang out with. I appreciate listening in on serious discussions about the transition to a more decentralized/localized polity/society/economy, but those aren't the conversations we're having here.