Interesting to hear Mark, thanks for sharing. I can imagine it would have been a pretty nice place to live, esp to raise kids too.

I can relate to the music lecturer's perspective, albeit with not the same depth of experience. Definitely the case in veg growing that 'false optimism' is pretty much the only thing keeping it going at this point. This closure represents another door slamming on the viability of the sector because now there's only the biodynamic courses left where people can go to pick up the kind of in depth knowledge you need to actually run a market garden. A very expensive way in, only open to the privileged, and my preference is to 'learn by doing' and work your way up to it gradually, but it's clear that at a certain point you need to sit down and do some actual training to get to that management level. But then, to do all that only to find that it's impossible to make it pay under the constraints of late stage capitalism... it's arguably doing everyone a favour to not waste their time, effort and money on this in the first place. Except of course that these are the skills that will become rather essential as the system unravels...

Paraphrasing Derrick Jensen: there isn't going to be a voluntary transition to a sane & sustainable way of living. This country is busy sealing its own fate in a way guaranteed to lead to the worst possible outcomes, pissing in the faces of those who are trying to present different options. That means the transition is going to be involuntary, and it's not going to be pretty.

cheers,
I