To the lifehouse?

Apologies for my silence here – the book-writing has been in overdrive, and I’ve also been trying (with limited success) to keep up with the winter’s woodland work.

Anyway, some moments of respite today. Time enough for a blog post with brief notes on three things, viz.

1. My forthcoming book

2. Manufactured food newsflash

3. Lifehouses?

Finding Lights in a Dark Age

So, I now have a final title and subtitle for my new book after much discussion with my publisher – Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. Not sure of an exact publication date yet but in the autumn.

I’ve had my struggles with the writing, but I’m feeling quite happy with where it’s at now. It’s a more accessible read than my previous offerings, with a bit more personal backstory. Thanks to everyone who’s given me reading suggestions and other help, which has been very useful and much appreciated.

Manufactured food – another newsflash

A paper published recently in the journal Nature Communications has definitively settled the debate on the energy costs of microbial protein that I’ve been involved in. In his book Regenesis, George Monbiot claimed that a kilogram of microbial protein manufactured by the Finnish company Solar Foods could be manufactured at an electrical energy cost of 16.7 kWh. Even that energy-hungry figure seemed to me improbably low. I calculated an energy consumption figure of at least 65.3 kWh – see here and here.

The new paper – co-authored by the outgoing CEO of Solar Foods, Pasi Vainikka, who features heavily in the key Chapter 7 of Monbiot’s book – gives a similar figure to mine at 69.3 to 73 MWh per tonne of protein (this equates to 69.3 to 73 kWh per kilo of protein). This figure, by the way, covers only the direct energy costs of the manufacturing process itself, not things like building factories or solar panels, nor the energy costs for other inputs like water and minerals (a tonne of mineral inputs is required for every 12 tonnes of protein produced). Anyway, it’s more than four times higher than Monbiot’s figure, and about seventy times higher than the energy cost of producing the protein in industrially farmed soybeans.

There’s more to say about the new paper. Hopefully, I’ll take a deeper dive into it in a post later in the year. But for now I’ll just conclude that the uncertainty about the real energy figure for producing bacterial protein powder is over. The 16.7 kWh/kg figure is erroneous, and should be corrected.

Solar Foods’ new CEO’s first priorities reportedly include “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States” and “increasing product price points”. It seemed clear to me when I published Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future that this technology wasn’t going to feature in any brave new world of cheap mass-produced protein to feed humanity. That now seems certain. I got quite some blowback for my book, a lot of it from people who really wanted the 16.7 kWh/kg figure to be true, even though they didn’t have any evidence to show why my figure was wrong.

Ah well, shooting the messenger is a hallowed tradition. Unfortunately, while the hype around bacterial protein powder will dim, there’ll undoubtedly be some new supposedly ass-saving corporate product hitting the newsstands – but not the streets – any day now. And so it goes on. I can only hope that more people will see this ecomodernist merry-go-round for the distraction it is and will stop invoking technology as a substitute for the real work of building resilient local communities.

To the lifehouse?

One person who’s already on board with this, or perhaps I should say who’s already off the merry-go-round, is Adam Greenfield in his interesting recent book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. Or sort of off the merry-go-round anyway. There are a lot of resonances between his book and my own books, not least my forthcoming one. I align with Adam around the ideas that tech won’t save us, the modern nation-state won’t save us, we’ll have to try saving ourselves through grassroots politics, through practice, through community, through building refugia etc.

Now, I’m not one of those dreadful authors who comes across a book in their own field and pathetically starts leafing through the pages to see if their name … oh, all right, all right, it’s on page 181 – “The influential farmer and agroecologist Chris Smaje…”

I’ve often wondered who I am and whether anyone has noticed me, so … thanks Adam.

But alas that sentence is about as good as it gets for Dr Smaje. Over the next few pages, Adam proceeds to pour cold water on “Smaje’s vision”. He does it with a rare graciousness that I’ll try to reciprocate here, but it’s at this point and onwards in his text that some of its weaknesses start to coalesce … and I’m not convinced that his vision of Smaje’s vision is clear of obstructions.

I’ll start with this point of divergence between us – Adam writes “I think it’s a reasonable bet that whatever else happens, most of us will continue to live in densely settled urban places, even amid the worst conditions” (p.182). Whereas I think it’s a reasonable bet that fewer of us will do so.

I have no idea how many fewer – I do not, as Adam implies, espouse any schemes involving “the decantation of billions into [the] countryside” (p.184). Partly because it’s not about ‘decantation’, and partly because the numbers are unknowable. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about ‘billions’ moving to the countryside – definitely not in my two recent books, anyway. I usually only specify numbers when I’m fairly sure about them, like ‘more than 65.3 kWh/kg’ – but if I’ve talked anywhere about billions moving to the countryside I’ll happily recant it. What I certainly have done is objected to the organisation formerly known as RePlanet, which has been supported by various prominent journalists and scientists, in its vision of 90 percent urban residence globally by the year 2100. Now that would likely involve the decanting of billions.

As I see it, people generally seek peace, health and prosperity where they can. They care less whether those things are to be found in the city or the country. It’s the things themselves that matter. In recent history, the locations best able to deliver those good things have often been urban (leaving aside the history of coercing or ‘decanting’ people from the countryside). In future history, I think those locations will more often be rural. Why? Well, Adam does a pretty good job of explaining it in his book – urbanism is a high-energy, high-capital, high political order settlement pattern, and the shocks to it in the world to come will impose high costs that governments either won’t wish to or won’t be able to maintain. In which case “the electric power, water, gas and sewerage infrastructures that support high-density habitation will swiftly fall into disrepair” (p.31). And with them will fall many of the opportunities for peace, health and prosperity. Possibly, he’s projecting urbanism to fall apart in the more climate-challenged parts of the world to come, but not elsewhere. I’m sure it’s true that some cities will do better than others, but I don’t find much logic in that wider assumption.

In critiquing my case for ruralism, Adam invokes the rather tired old ‘Ruralism! What, you mean like the Cultural Revolution?’ cliché. No, not like the Cultural Revolution. Believe me, when the electricity, water, gas and sewerage goes offline, people won’t need Maoist ‘persuasion’ to want to leave town. There may be any number of reasons why they can’t or don’t leave town, but the way this will shake out long-term is in poorer living conditions in places like New York City than in, say, rural New England. Ultimately, this will have demographic consequences. We can do this in easier ways now or harder ways later.

Of course, settlement patterns are more complex than a rural-urban binary. As city populations thin, then it potentially becomes easier to grow food and generate other services, to create livelihoods within them. Hence, the situation more resembles a population density continuum.

A whole other set of variables here is real estate pricing. Consider the price of a roof over urban heads compared to the price of all the other stuff like food, energy and sewerage those urban heads and bodies need, and that they typically outsource to the global countryside. The outsourcing arises partly because there isn’t enough space to furnish them in the city itself, but partly also because urban land prices at present levels can’t support the production of affordable food, energy, water and waste treatment in situ. Those prices and that outsourcing rely on abundant energy and abundant political order. That reliance is time limited.

Food systems don’t seem to be Adam’s specialism, so I’ll gloss over his discussions of vertical rice farming, protein production, the propinquity of agricultural land to cities and countries, and the ease of trade with “federated agroecological communities in our arable near-hinterlands” (p.182). In short, I don’t think his food systems analysis is credible. Where I do agree with him is that, in our challenged future, “achieving any meaningful yield to speak of will clearly require massive investments of a community’s time and effort” (p.184). That means a lot of people will be spending a lot of their time producing food. Urban-rural settlement patterns currently rest on the fact that not many urban people spend much time producing food, while more rural ones do – and the whole thing is (literally) oiled by cheap energy. In situations involving massive investments of people’s time to produce food, the basis of contemporary urbanism dissolves.

A vibe I get from Adam’s book is a kind of urban anxiety at the thought of a rural and agrarian life. It’s this, I think, that underlies a lot of the enthusiasm for energetically unaffordable and ecologically disintegrative ideas like urban vertical rice farming (or indeed manufactured microbial food) that distract people from the necessary path. And also, in his criticism of me, that leads Adam to seek “some workable balance between the naive techno-optimism of the ecomodernists and the isolationism of rugged-individualist homesteaders” (p.184). That’s a false duality – agrarianism implies learning some level of livelihood-making skill but not necessarily any commitment to isolationism or rugged individualism. Here, I think Adam is projecting an urban anxiety onto my arguments that prevents him from really seeing what I’m saying.

I sympathise. It’d be good to find ways to demystify ruralism and agrarianism for urban people to ease the journey, but there are various political and mental obstacles. One of them is the idea that urbanism is somehow non-negotiable, a given of modern life.

Hence the curiosity of Adam’s idea of ‘lifehouses’ – local places built bottom-up where people can go for food, water, energy and community when systemic shocks destroy the capacities of their own households to furnish these things. Doubtless such local cornucopias as alternatives to the modern centralized state will be a godsend in emergency situations wherever they can be coaxed into existence. But where we’re talking about what Adam calls ‘the long emergency’ – a state of chronic system shock – resilience has to be built into every household in its capacities for livelihood making. Hence, low energy agrarianism. To me, Adam’s lifehouses look like a somewhat improbable effort to recreate the best aspects of the modern state (rational politics) with the best aspects of the modern countryside (tinned food) in order to save an everyday urbanism that can’t really be saved.

The examples that Adam builds his lifehouse approach on are mostly responses to relatively sudden and acute emergencies, like Storm Sandy and the Greek financial crisis. Or else situations of sharp conflict – the Black Panthers and Rojava. And always ones involving an agenda of wider political transformation clearly routed through left-wing political traditions. He writes of this carework that “Its politically transformational qualities only begin to appear when care is consciously thought of as a matter of collective self-provision, outside the obligations of the family, the impersonal structures of state and market or the vertical relations implied by charity”. He goes on to say “The first steps on the way toward mutual care were taken by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) in the Bay Area of the late 1960s” (pp.79-80).

The most generous way I can respond to this is to say that seeking political transformation is definitely important in the contemporary context of the disaster zombie liberal state, and that those examples are informative. But the first steps toward mutual care weren’t taken by the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area of the late 1960s. They were taken by many peoples numberless millennia ago. The main modalities of them have been family, kinship, ancestors, spirits, gods and local livelihood-making communities. If you talk about carework only “outside the obligations of the family” and these other structures, then you miss something that I’m willing to quantify as somewhere between ‘a lot’ and ‘almost everything’. And, again, you implicitly vaunt the urban over the rural. Coming from a basically urban and left-wing background myself, it pains me to see how the contemporary left limits itself and its potential base by talking largely to itself and its own urban, professional-managerial class concerns, albeit sometimes illumined with exotic examples like Rojava or the Zapatistas. I think it needs to get more real, more locally. And if we do want to draw on wider examples, why not Gandhi? Or maybe Zapata, as well as the Zapatistas…

A final point I’d make about this is that while there’s much to learn from people who’ve self-organised rapidly in modern times to deal with acute crises, there’s even more to learn from peoples who’ve made their livelihoods long-term over generations in the substantial absence of top-down power providing for them in day-to-day life. I get the sense from Adam’s book that he was energised by participating in the grassroots response to Storm Sandy – which is great, but such examples of ‘paradises built in hell’ aren’t organised around long-haul human relationships, as Adam himself acknowledges. So, for example, I’d suggest the thought of a collective workshop in the Lifehouse well-stocked with tools for people to use that Adam seems to imply on page 188 will make those who use tools on an everyday basis break into a cold sweat. A construction site is a huge testament to people’s skills at collaborative working, but the fact that its individual workers typically own their own tools is not a trivial point when it comes to thinking about robust organisation to survive the long emergency.

There’s a lot of other interesting stuff in Adam’s book about things like decision-making structures and whether people in the countryside are “unprepared to greet newcomers” (p.184). Happily, these are discussed in Finding Lights in a Dark Age, saving me the need to discuss them here.