The wholeness of the word: 'Regenesis' as myth, Part II
In my previous post I tried to show how George Monbiot’s book Regenesis employs a mythic narrative structure that recuperates the positive capacities of modern urban-industrial civilization to overcome the problems it’s created without fundamental social change. I think his book succeeds pretty well in offering this mythic redemption. But I doubt what it’s proposing will work out in practice.
In that previous post I also mentioned a critical if exemplarily polite review of my own book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Jeremy Williams. Now, I know it’s not really the done thing for an author to critique their reviews, but here at Small Farm Future we’ve never been afraid to boldly go… So – I think Williams has succumbed to the same myth as Monbiot, and it’s this myth more than anything else that’s hustling humanity and a sizeable chunk of our fellow organisms down the road to disaster (I mention this on page 55 and page 159 of my book).
Here, then, I’ll further explore this mythic aspect of Regenesis, largely using Williams’ review as my foil. I’ll be moving between the two texts (or three, if you include my own) with a view to clarifying present predicaments and critiquing the tendency to offer largely narrative/mythic resolutions to them.
1. The energy cost of bacterial food
In Chapter 2 of my book, I show that the energy costs of producing mass human food from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria will always be higher than producing it from plants (along with the default animals they feed). Plants are energised by zero-carbon, zero-cost sunlight, whereas factory-produced microbial biomass is energised by generated electricity at an energetic cost amounting to at least an order of magnitude more. I show that only with a near-immediate breakthrough of the global energy economy into an abundance of low-carbon energy far beyond present levels can microbial biomass work as a mass food solution. There are hard-edged thermodynamics around this that won’t be gainsaid by blithe hopes of future tech breakthroughs.
Williams says that I raise “important questions” here. Well thanks, but what’s more to the point is whether my answers to those questions are plausible. If no, then why not? Nobody to my knowledge has yet refuted them. If yes, then visions for a farm-free future based on mass production of microbial biomass are a dead letter.
This matters because in the absence of magic bullets like microbial biomass and the associated step change in clean energy it implies, it’s hard to see how the existing global settlement pattern of capital-rich, energy-hungry urbanism that’s arisen on the back of abundant cheap fossil energy can survive without destroying itself and a good chunk of the biosphere with it. (Some folks have asked me how I square this with the notion that city life is more energy efficient – to which the short answer is that it isn’t, a slightly longer answer is that just as with manufactured food the key issue is cost rather than efficiency, and a slightly longer answer still can be found on page 53 of my book).
Barring a near-immediate breakthrough into clean energy super-abundance, like it or not humanity’s future is going to be mostly rural, with many or most people devoting a lot of their time to the production of food and fibre for local use with low energy methods.
2. Can [food tech x] feed the world?
On this question of agrarian localism, Williams writes of my book:
What the book doesn’t do is prove that this can feed the world, which is what keeps Monbiot up at night. Smaje uses Britain as an example, which is fine. But could you feed Tokyo’s 39 million people with local food? If millions of its residents decided to become farmers, where exactly in the already well-used Japanese countryside would those farms be?
It’s true I haven’t proved that local agrarian systems can feed the world. In fact, nobody has proved that any given food system – any food tech x – can feed the world long-term in the future. Certainly not Monbiot, who makes no serious attempt to show how his preferred approaches could do so – strangely, in view of his stated enthusiasm for quantification, especially if these questions are keeping him up at night.
But let’s take the British example mentioned by Williams that I do work through in my book, before addressing his Tokyo curveball. Britain is one of the most densely populated large countries in the world. Yet I show it could easily feed its existing 67 million population on less farmland than it’s currently using with organic mixed farming and horticulture (the fact that it doesn’t currently feed itself is a policy choice, not an ecological limit). If it can feed its 67 million population, then by definition it can feed the population of its largest city, London (9 million).
Or at least it can in principle. In practice, it’s unlikely that the kind of local food systems I discuss in Saying NO… could furnish the supply chains needed (let alone demanded) by London, especially in the light of shrinking future energy supplies. So, again, by default if not first by design, I think the future will largely be rural.
Where exactly in the ‘well-used’ British countryside will these neo-rural ex-Londoners or their descendants be farming? On existing farmland. But they would be farming it to produce food for themselves or their local communities, not to stay afloat economically by producing commodity crops for global markets. The difference this makes to food self-reliance worldwide is enormous, given the global overproduction I discuss in my book (the wrong crops in the wrong quantities for the wrong purposes).
The Britain vs London comparison I’ve just sketched is more logical than the Britain vs Tokyo one Williams invokes. But for sure it makes sense to run the rule over other parts of the world. Can Japan or some appropriate political subdivision of it feed itself in principle long-term using agroecological or any other farming or food-manufacturing method? Likewise for other places? I don’t know. What I do know is that if they can’t, the people living there will sooner or later have to move to somewhere else with better prospects, or die. Unless they want to put their trust in food imports predicated on the persistence of energetically and geopolitically fragile export agricultures and their associated supply chains. At best, I think that’s likely only to introduce a slight delay to one of the other two options.
This is a truth that food ecomodernism seems incapable of speaking. Now, I’m a great supporter of ecomodernism in the right circumstances, but nowhere is it written that there must be places called Japan or Tokyo, with such-and-such boundaries and such-and-such a population.
3. Urban delusions
So when Williams writes:
With over half the world’s 8 billion people in cities, I’m not convinced small farms serving local markets can provide everything we need and Smaje’s book hasn’t changed my mind.
Or:
To those who keep asking if the answer is low tech or high tech, local or global, agroecology or manufactured, I’m afraid I reserve the right to say ‘both’.
Or:
I was hoping that Chris Smaje’s book would ask probing questions and refine what sustainable food systems look like in our busy world, but ultimately what it does is demand that we pick a side in a false dichotomy.
And when Monbiot writes:
most of our food has to be grown, for simple mathematical reasons, far from where we live1
…well, I’m afraid to me all this just sounds like hubris. The historical figure it brings to mind is King Canute, vainly trying to keep the waves at bay – in the modern case, the ones lapping figuratively and sometimes literally at mega-cities like Tokyo. (According to some variants of the story, the wily old king knew exactly what would happen and was puncturing the myth-making of his fawning courtiers – would that our present leaders and their media enablers had such wisdom).
Now, I do happen to think that most globalisation and high-energy biotech introductions in the food system have been to the detriment of agrarian and rural people. In fact, to most people. I don’t subscribe to the myth of urban promise and agrarian misery, even though all rural-urban transitions from the present look challenging. To me, Williams’s ‘right to say both’ is the voice of unconscious privilege.
But such objections on my part have little political force. The bigger problem the likes of Monbiot and Williams face is that ultimately they’re picking a fight with nature and with thermodynamics. These are sterner foes than me, and they will crush modern dreams of enduring urbanism – Tokyo, London, whatever – in a historical eyeblink. You can ignore it in your writing, but that doesn’t mean it’ll go away.
So as I see it, I’m not asking people to pick sides. Instead, I’m saying it’s wise for us not to succumb to cultural delusions that permit us to sleepwalk into catastrophe. The extraordinary degree of urbanism in modern times suggests a fractal pattern operating far from equilibrium, and such things don’t last, for numerous reasons.
Certainly, I’d like to see a world with some urbanism, but not too much. I’m not as confident as Williams that my right to say what I want has any bearing on events, but as I see it the metropoles have long exercised a presumed right to meet their needs at the expense of rural people and local food systems which is rooted in violence, and I will continue to speak that truth as loudly as I can. I believe the unintended result of Monbiot’s proposals will be to press this violence further. For this and other reasons, his vision is fundamentally anti-agroecological. So let’s turn briefly to agroecology.
4. Agroecology
Williams writes:
Monbiot has repeatedly clarified that he supports agroecology, and that it’s not an either/or. Smaje acknowledges Monbiot’s words here, and then says “I’m not convinced.” Basically, Smaje doesn’t take Monbiot at his word. Sure, “he’s insisted that manufactured food and agroecology are complementary,” but he doesn’t mean it. What he really wants is to keep people out of the countryside, because “Monbiot’s view is that people and nature don’t mix.”
This is a bit of a deal-breaker for me. You can’t engage constructively with someone’s ideas while accusing them of bad faith.
Leaving aside the rather scrambled rendering of my position here, and the soft-pedalling of Monbiot’s, I find this an odd position to take. If a government minister says “the NHS is safe in our hands”, does that disbar critics from pointing out health service policies of said government that threaten it? The reader might have noticed that earlier I wrote “I’m a great supporter of ecomodernist approaches in the right circumstances”. By Williams’s logic, I can now insist that all claims I oppose ecomodernism are mistaken or in bad faith.
The problem with Monbiot’s statements and positions on agroecology aren’t so much bad faith as incoherence. I’ve written extensively about the numerous anti-agroecological aspects of his wider arguments, not least in my book which Williams has presumably read. When somebody simply states that they support agroecology or offers a few tidbits of faint praise for it in an analysis that otherwise presses in a wholly different direction I don’t see any reason to take it at face value – just as I doubt my stated support for ecomodernism above will convince anyone I’m truly on board with it.
I won’t repeat the anti-agroecological rollcall of Monbiot’s positions here, but I do just want to home in on this from Williams:
Monbiot says the solution that excites him most is perennial grains, not manufactured foods. And he specifically calls for “helping small farmers practice high-yielding agroecology”, which is exactly what Smaje wants.
The concept of “high-yielding agroecology” raises a lot of knotty questions (high-yielding of what, and with what trade-offs and long-term consequences, and in which places – does everywhere have to be ‘high-yielding’? Why?) I very much doubt that it’s exactly what I want. But let’s focus on perennial grains. These generally aren’t high-yielding in terms of human-edible biomass per hectare relative to their annual counterparts, and I suspect they probably never will be, at least in temperate climates. So why do they excite the high-yield-focused Monbiot so much?
I suspect it’s because the narrative around them is basically the alternative agriculture movement’s own version of ecomodernism – a techno-fix ‘solution’ to a weakly specified problem. It’s great of course that the folks at the Land Institute and other plant breeders are trying to improve perennial grain yields. But I find the ‘job done – disaster averted’ narrative around perennial grains problematic, and consonant with the similar great claims being made for other forms of biotech like bacterial biomass.
I’ve often quoted this passage penned by Land Institute researchers, because I think it says something important:
Fundamentally, the problem with annual grains is the scale at which they are grown to meet human food needs. In sparsely distributed garden-sized patches annual grains would have limited negative impact. However, the human population’s demand for cereal grains combined with social and economic pressures will make such an arrangement extremely unlikely in most situations2
Here I can agree with them. Scale matters. How we organise agricultural production socially matters – as much or maybe more in relation to its impacts as the choice of crop or technique.
It seems the Land Institute authors don’t consider a job-rich, small-scale horticulture of ‘garden-sized patches’ a desirable or likely direction for food production to take. Whereas I do – by default if not by design. But note that by dismissing small-scale horticulture with annual grains in favour of the large-scale agricultural status quo with perennial grains, they’re opting for a palliative techno-fix rather than addressing through socioeconomic measures the underlying political ecology that’s generating the problem. This is characteristic of ecomodernist approaches, like the one that Monbiot takes in Regenesis (not so much in many of his other writings). It is not, in my opinion, agroecological.
So, sure, those who want to argue with the title of my book (though there are surely more important things in it to debate) can say “Look – perennial grains. Not farm-free!” but perennial grains feature in Monbiot’s account as an abstracted tech that potentially ticks some chosen performance indicators of yield and ecological benignity. There is no social vision of a farmed future here.
Suppose instead we did go down the route of ‘garden-sized patches’. Monbiot says little in his book about gardening. What he does say is mostly positive, but what of visions for building renewable societies of the future in general around low-energy, job-rich horticultures of ‘garden-sized patches’? Monbiot doesn’t say, but he’s been free with his condemnations of what he’s called ‘neo-peasant bullshit’ and ‘bucolic idylls’. The target isn’t clearly specified, but it seems to me these remarks have a horticultural and agroecological world of gardens, allotments, homesteads and small mixed farms firmly in their sights.
So again you could say “Look – fruit and veg. Not farmfree!” And again I’d reply that there’s no social vision in Monbiot’s book as to what this not-farmfree world could look like. To be honest, there’s not much of a social vision about what a farmfree world would look like either, except that it would probably be urban. Regenesis is a final attempt to rescue urban modernism using whatever abstracted food technologies seem potentially up to the job. Sure, some of them involve farming. Though mostly not. Monbiot does, after all, extol a coming ‘Counter-Agricultural Revolution’ and ‘our liberation from farming’3. What’s for sure is that he has no vision of agrarian, rural or agroecological society. His visioning is farm-free.
5. Of myths, numbers and authors
To reprise my argument, cities like London or Tokyo aren’t simple mathematical realities. They’re complex historical realities made possible by cheap and abundant energy. If the availability of that energy declines, then so will they, and people will move if they can to places where they can better secure a livelihood. Nowhere is it written that megacities or global food systems must endure. If people are drawn into a cultural myth that encourages them to believe these things must endure regardless of changing social or natural forces, then it’s this commitment to the ‘simple mathematical reality’ of urbanism that risks causing disastrous hunger.
I think it’s time to stop believing in modern mythologies of urbanism and progress before that happens.
Commitment to this modern myth of urbanism is one of the reasons why Monbiot’s book is so incoherent and evasive about energy and agrarian futures. Effectively, Regenesis is about how modern urban civilization can continue to propagate itself outside the lethal contradictions it’s created, while being kind to peasants, indigenous peoples and everyone else Monbiot wants to welcome into his embrace. No doubt the book’s a wonderful success – as a book, and as a myth. But it’s easier to resolve difficult political problems with words in a book than with lines on the ground or signatures on a treaty. Caveat lector. That’s why I called this two-part essay ‘the wholeness of the word’. Human abstractions like words and money can achieve great things. But they’re dangerous.
I’m not expecting ecomodernists to accept my arguments. I daresay some might consider them ‘meaningless waffle’ in the phraseology of one of my recent critics. But I’m hoping I’ve at least clarified why some of us regard the technological boosterism of ecomodernism itself as a kind of meaningless waffle, a technobabble with little bearing on real social and technical questions. Which is why this debate isn’t fundamentally about evidence and numbers, and will not be resolved by endless empirical refinement. It’s about myths and the frightful power of human words to overreach themselves with purported resolutions.
Almost finally, one point of agreement I have with Jeremy Williams is that this debate has become divisive. It’s in the nature of divisiveness for people to be divided about who’s generating the divisiveness, and I daresay it won’t come as a surprise if I say that I find Monbiot’s co-opting of agroecology into corporate-friendly biotech solutionism divisive (a process foretold by other voices in the agroecology movement such as Peter Rosset). As I’ve suggested in recent essays here, I think the ‘debate’ is almost over and is starting to give way to class formation and class conflict in the countryside – the point at which the language of ‘divisiveness’ ends and different versions of the truth with a hard political edge begin.
But from a larger perspective I’d like to add that even though I’ve homed in here on specific writers like Monbiot, it’s not really about him, or me, or any other individual author. Myths speak through individual authors and are given definition by them, but they’re painted on a bigger canvas than any one person. It’s that bigger painting that must somehow now be painstakingly re-crafted through long-term cultural change.
Notes
Monbiot. 2022. Regenesis. Allen Lane, p.226.
DeHaan et al. 2007. ‘Perennial grains’ in S. Scherr & J. McNeely (eds) Farming With Nature. Island Press, pp.65-6.
Monbiot op cit pp.210-11.