O/T: Monbiot engages with criticism of 'Regenesis'
Posted by Ian M on October 10, 2023, 6:18 pm
"Does he do it in good faith without throwing around a load of gratuitous insults, while simultaneously posing as the only moral and/or serious person engaging with the issue?" - I hear you ask. "Hahahaha" - I respond.
The astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death
[long article, won't copy/paste]
*****
The usual frustrating combination of some well-observed phenomena in the organic/alternative foodie scene with with some outrageous slurs against those, including Chris Smaje (author of 'A Small Farm Future', as well as the critique of Regenesis, 'Saying No to a Farm Free Future') who propose basically undoing the process of enclosure and returning people to rural lives where they attend to their own needs of food, fuel, shelter, clothing etc as humans have done for 99+% of our history. For Monbiot this amounts to a death sentence by starvation for urban populations, and he insists that everything must be done to maintain the quantity of bulk foodstuffs to support these populations. He doesn't seem to understand that if people are allowed to leave the cities and work on the land (as millions still remember how to do, before they were forced off it) they will be producing their own food. Really it's an argument for decentralisation and autonomy, but somehow Monbiot has again ended up on the side of the state, funneling all the resources in from the hinterlands and deskilling everybody to the point where they're in abject dependence on institutions for every aspect of their existence. Scientists growing food-like organisms in a lab is the end point for this process of extreme alienation and specialisation.
Apologies for the further time & effort devoted to this man. Somehow it still feels important to make a response - I guess partly because it represents a threat to my livelihood and/or preferred vision for a livable, dignified future for humanity.
I think the best way of looking at the whole situation is through demographic transition.
The world population won't increase for very much longer...and of course in many areas it's reaching or indeed well into the decline phase. Rather than advocate or strategise for an unnecessary Malthusian mass kill-off (and some unfortunately indeed do ...)any plan to provide food and avoid famine must effectively align with that transition. In effect we must stay within a framework that maintains those elements in any society which constrain population naturaly rather than those which maintain a high population unnaturaly.
There's room for a plurality of approaches there...so lets hope the ideologists will let us live long enough to get over the top of the population curve and that we can have a gentle down the other side.
-The weather is awful here btw: mudslides at al. Hope you haven't been blown of that hill yet....
Re: O/T: Monbiot engages with criticism of 'Regenesis'
No probs, I imagine there will be more to come! You write:
'The world population won't increase for very much longer...and of course in many areas it's reaching or indeed well into the decline phase.' - agreed we're approaching a global population peak but would say it's because the ability to convert natural gas into food has reached its limits, not so much because of the demographic transition. Generally I subscribe to the argument Daniel Quinn made, that food surpluses generate population increases rather than being reactive to them. The demographic transition argument as I understand it suggests that increased affluence leads to a drop-off in the birth rate and subsequent stabilisation of population, albeit at a higher level than before. However this wealth still depends on increased populations of exploitable labour in the global south (though the 'ghost slaves' made available by fossil fuels complicates this)... Difficult to explain concisely, and I'm out of practice. If you want more to chew on here's an article that digs into it:
As relates to the discussion of how to feed the 8bn, the real danger is that there is a new discovery unlocking the ability for a new way to mass produce cheap food, potentially leading not only to a sustained population at that level (disastrous in itself) but even to a further increase in the population. That's what happened with the green revolution after all. Monbiot uncritically accepts the benefits of much reduced famine which the haber bosch process allowed, without noting the downsides that this had for the natural world as the human population exploded. Fear of collapse and starvation - as well as enormous profits - drove that transition. The same could result in yet further growth, which the planet could possibly not recover from. Quinn made the distinction that Malthus' warning was about the system's failure whereas his was about its ongoing success. One way or another we've got to go down the other side of the curve, as you mention, though there are plenty of ways for it to go very, very badly. I'm forced to agree with Monbiot on that at least!
re: weather, yes awful here too, getting pretty sick of it. People are reassuring us that it's not usually this way, but then nothing is 'usual' any more... On the plus side the soil seems to have an impressive ability to absorb and disperse excess water without much surface runoff, and being on a slope means there hasn't been much standing water anywhere, which is a blessing. We'll see what it's like with reduced vegetation in the winter...