Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Patrick Brown and the Breakthrough Institute are underwritten by oil money, meat interests and nuclear industry cash. Brown labors, ultimately, on behalf of the cascading uncertainty rule – the corporate conspiracy to elicit popular trust.
But if abundant low-carbon energy doesn’t immediately materialise, or if it’s used to grow the human economy and its footprint, then Monbiot’s farmfree solutionism offers no solutions to real present predicaments.
Ultimately, humans aren’t going to protect the rest of creation from their own actions by excluding themselves from it.
I’m going to continue my present mini-theme concerning emerging class conflicts around agrarian localism with a few words about current antipathies between farmers and ‘experts’.
Hopefully my writing and maybe even my speaking might convince a few waverers from getting hoodwinked by some of the more preposterous ecomodernist claims, but mostly I’m happy to preach to the converted…
The case for manufactured protein is sometimes made on the grounds that its bacterially based processes are more energy efficient than plant photosynthesis. But it’s a misleading claim given the energy costs of producing the generated electricity and industrial plant needed in the manufactured route.
Who needs to read Saying No to a Farm-Free Future? Anyone thinking that the ecomodernist prescription might be a good idea; and anyone arguing with ecomodernists and looking for data to back up their feeling that “food” factories in megacities is not the best path.
How do those raised in a culture of separation from nature, with abundant exosomatic energy from fossil fuels and vast transportation networks, develop the knowledge, skills, and new culture that draws from the past while preparing for a very different future? Chris Smaje helps us out.
We need a new, more radical paradigm, which exposes the modern technological lifestyle as an ‘economic suicide cult’.
This article is an attempt to seriously engage with socialist ecomodernism in a way the interview failed to do with degrowth: on its own terms.
Overall the plan of action should be the same: empowering localized economies and grassroots organizations as a way to mitigate resource overuse and move toward an ecological civilization. Any model that begins from the proposition that consumption patterns can remain unchanged is a nonstarter.
We don’t need re-genesis, but a de-urbanizing re-exodus to places where we can create such food cultures. The real lesson from George Monbiot’s grandmother, I’d submit, is not the narrowness of her diet but the breadth of her knowledge.
