Whitewashed Hope

SUBHEAD: A message from indigenous leaders on permaculture and regenerative agriculture.

By several indigenous authors on 18 January 2021 in Resilience -
(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-01-18/whitewashed-hope/) 


Image above: An indigenous East Indian couple in indigenous clothing.
From (https://www.climatescorecard.org/2020/08/indias-indigenous-peoples-are-key-constituents-in-climate-action/).

A note from Resilience.org:
Our intention is to invite proponents of western ecological agriculture (e.g., regenerative ag / permaculture) to go deeper and encourage their peers to go deeper—to not just ‘take’ practices from Indigenous cultures without their context, but to also encompass the deeper Indigenous worldviews… inspiring a consciousness shift that hopefully will support us to go from a dominant culture of supremacy and domination to one founded on reciprocity, respect, and interrelations with all beings—including, of course, among all humans.

 Whitewashed Hope

Regenerative agriculture and permaculture claim to be the solutions to our ecological crises. While they both borrow practices from Indigenous cultures, critically, they leave out our worldviews and continue the pattern of erasing our history and contributions to the modern world.

While the practices ‘sustainable farming’ promote are important, they do not encompass the deep cultural and relational changes needed to realize our collective healing.

Where is ‘Nature’?

Regen Ag & Permaculture often talk about what’s happening ‘in nature’: “In nature, soil is always covered.” “In nature, there are no monocultures.” Nature is viewed as separate, outside, ideal, perfect. Human beings must practice “biomimicry” (the mimicking of life) because we exist outside of the life of Nature.

Indigenous peoples speak of our role AS Nature. (Actually, Indigenous languages often don’t have a word for Nature, only a name for Earth and our Universe.) 

As cells and organs of Earth, we strive to fulfill our roles as her caregivers and caretakers. We often describe ourselves as “weavers”, strengthening the bonds between all beings.

Death Doesn’t Mean Dead

Regen Ag & Permaculture often maintain the “dead” worldview of Western culture and science: Rocks, mountains, soil, water, wind, and light all start as “dead”. (E.g., “Let’s bring life back to the soil!” — implying soil, without microbes, is dead.) 

This worldview believes that life only happens when these elements are brought together in some specific and special way.

Indigenous cultures view the Earth as a communion of beings and not objects: All matter and energy is alive and conscious. Mountains, stones, water, and air are relatives and ancestors. Earth is a living being whose body we are all a part of. 

Life does not only occur when these elements are brought together; Life always is. No “thing” is ever dead; Life forms and transforms.

From Judgemental to Relational

Regen Ag & Permaculture maintain overly simplistic binaries through subscribing to good and bad. Tilling is bad; not tilling is good. Mulch is good; not mulching is bad. We must do only the ‘good’ things to reach the idealized, 99.9% biomimicked farm/garden, though we will never be as pure or good “as Nature”, because we are separate from her.

Indigenous cultures often share the view that there is no good, bad, or ideal—it is not our role to judge. Our role is to tend, care, and weave to maintain relationships of balance. We give ourselves to the land: Our breath and hands uplift her gardens, binding our life force together. 

No one is tainted by our touch, and we have the ability to heal as much as any other lifeform.

Our Words Shape Us

Regen Ag & Permaculture use English as their preferred language no matter the geography or culture: You must first learn English to learn from the godFATHERS of this movement. The English language judges and objectifies, including words most Indigenous languages do not: ‘natural, criminal, waste, dead, wild, pure…’ 

English also utilizes language like “things” and “its” when referring to “non-living, subhuman entities”.

Among Indigenous cultures, every language emerges from and is therefore intricately tied to place. Inuit people have dozens of words for snow and her movement; Polynesian languages have dozens of words for water’s ripples. 

To know a place, you must speak her language. There is no one-size-fits-all, and no words for non-living or sub-human beings, because all life has equal value.

People are land. Holistic includes History.

Regen Ag and Permaculture claim to be holistic in approach. When regenerating a landscape, ‘everything’ is considered: soil health, water cycles, local ‘wildlife’, income & profit. 

‘Everything’, however, tends to EXCLUDE history: Why were Indigenous homelands steal-able and why were our peoples & lands rape-able? Why were our cultures erased? Why does our knowledge need to be validated by ‘Science’? Why are we still excluded from your ‘healing’ of our land?

Among Indigenous cultures, people belong to land rather than land belonging to people. Healing of land MUST include healing of people and vice versa. Recognizing and processing the emotional traumas held in our bodies as descendants of assaulted, enslaved, and displaced peoples is necessary to the healing of land. 

Returning our rights to care for, harvest from, and relate to the land that birthed us is part of this recognition.

Composting

Regen Ag & Permaculture often share the environmentalist message that the world is dying and we must “save” it. Humans are toxic, but if we try, we can create a “new Nature” of harmony, though one that is not as harmonious as the “old Nature” that existed before humanity. Towards this mission, we must put Nature first and sacrifice ourselves for “the cause”.

Indigenous cultures often see Earth as going through cycles of continuous transition. We currently find ourselves in a cycle of great decomposition. Like in any process of composting there is discomfort and a knowing that death always brings us into rebirth. Within this great cycle, we all have a role to play. 

Recognizing and healing all of our own traumas IS healing Earth’s traumas, because we are ONE.

Where to go from here?

Making up only 6.2% of our global population, Indigenous peoples steward 80% of Earth’s biodiversity while managing over 25% of her land. Indigenous worldviews are the bedrocks that our agricultural practices & lifeways arise from. 

We invite you to ground your daily practices in these ancestral ways, as we jointly work towards collective healing.

• Learn whose lands you live on (native-land.ca), their history, and how you can support their causes and cultural revitalization.
• Watch @gatherfilm and Aluna documentary.
• Amplify the voices and stories of Indigenous peoples and organizations.
• Follow, support, donate to, and learn from the contributors to this post.
• Help republish this open-source post: https://bit.ly/IndigenousWorldViews

Contributors

• @CulturalSurvival / Galina Angarova
• Māori Waitaha Grandmothers Council & Region Net Positive / Tanya Ruka
• @NEN_NorthEastNetwork / Seno Tsuhah
• Society for Alternative Learning & Transformation & African Biodiversity Network / Simon Mitambo
• Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Organizational Development / Bern Guri
• @EarthIsOhana @LoamLove / Kailea Frederick
• Regenerative Agriculture Alliance.org / Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin
• @Linda.Black.Elk / Tatanka Wakpala Model Sustainable Community
• @GreenstoneFarm_LA / Greenstone Farm and Sanctuary
• @CulturalConservancy / Melissa K. Nelson PhD
• @NatKelley
• @GatherFilm
• @AGrowingCulture
• @Terralingua.Langscape
• @FarmerRishi
• @KameaChayne

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Making Biomass Sustainable

SUBHEAD: Coppiced woodlands, pollarded trees, and hedgerows provided sustainable energy. 

By Kris De Decker on 15 September 2020 for Low-Tech Magazine
(https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/09/how-to-make-biomass-energy-sustainable-again.html)


Image above:Pollarded trees in Germany are a technology worth keeping. Photo by Rene Schroder in original article.

IB Editor's note: The article has many more images of coppiced and pollarded wood farms in Europe that have operated for centuries.

From the Neolithic to the beginning of the twentieth century, coppiced woodlands, pollarded trees, and hedgerows provided people with a sustainable supply of energy, materials, and food.

How is Cutting Down Trees Sustainable?

Advocating for the use of biomass as a renewable source of energy – replacing fossil fuels – has become controversial among environmentalists. The comments on the previous article, which discussed thermoelectric stoves, illustrate this:

• “As the recent film Planet of the Humans points out, biomass a.k.a. dead trees is not a renewable resource by any means, even though the EU classifies it as such.”
• “How is cutting down trees sustainable?”
• “Article fails to mention that a wood stove produces more CO2 than a coal power plant for every ton of wood/coal that is burned.”
• “This is pure insanity. Burning trees to reduce our carbon footprint is oxymoronic.”
• “The carbon footprint alone is just horrifying.”
• “The biggest problem with burning anything is once it's burned, it's gone forever.”
• “The only silly question I can add to to the silliness of this piece, is where is all the wood coming from?”

In contrast to what the comments suggest, the article does not advocate the expansion of biomass as an energy source. Instead, it argues that already burning biomass fires – used by roughly 40% of today’s global population – could also produce electricity as a by-product, if they are outfitted with thermoelectric modules. 

Nevertheless, several commenters maintained their criticism after they read the article more carefully. One of them wrote: “We should aim to eliminate the burning of biomass globally, not make it more attractive.”

Apparently, high-tech thinking has permeated the minds of (urban) environmentalists to such an extent that they view biomass as an inherently troublesome energy source – similar to fossil fuels. To be clear, critics are right to call out unsustainable practices in biomass production. 

However, these are the consequences of a relatively recent, “industrial” approach to forestry. When we look at historical forest management practices, it becomes clear that biomass is potentially one of the most sustainable energy sources on this planet.

Coppicing: Harvesting Wood Without Killing Trees

Nowadays, most wood is harvested by killing trees. Before the Industrial Revolution, a lot of wood was harvested from living trees, which were coppiced. The principle of coppicing is based on the natural ability of many broad-leaved species to regrow from damaged stems or roots – damage caused by fire, wind, snow, animals, pathogens, or (on slopes) falling rocks. 

Coppice management involves the cutting down of trees close to ground level, after which the base – called the “stool” – develops several new shoots, resulting in a multi-stemmed tree.

When we think of a forest or a tree plantation, we imagine it as a landscape stacked with tall trees. However, until the beginning of the twentieth century, at least half of the forests in Europe were coppiced, giving them a more bush-like appearance. [1] 

 The coppicing of trees can be dated back to the stone age, when people built pile dwellings and trackways crossing prehistoric fenlands using thousands of branches of equal size – a feat that can only be accomplished by coppicing. [2]

Ever since then, the technique formed the standard approach to wood production – not just in Europe but almost all over the world. Coppicing expanded greatly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when population growth and the rise of industrial activity (glass, iron, tile and lime manufacturing) put increasing pressure on wood reserves.

Short Rotation Cycles

Because the young shoots of a coppiced tree can exploit an already well-developed root system, a coppiced tree produces wood faster than a tall tree. Or, to be more precise: although its photosynthetic efficiency is the same, a tall tree provides more biomass below ground (in the roots) while a coppiced tree produces more biomass above ground (in the shoots) – which is clearly more practical for harvesting. [3] 

Partly because of this, coppicing was based on short rotation cycles, often of around two to four years, although both yearly rotations and rotations up to 12 years or longer also occurred.

Because of the short rotation cycles, a coppice forest was a very quick, regular and reliable supplier of firewood. Often, it was cut up into a number of equal compartments that corresponded to the number of years in the planned rotation. 

For example, if the shoots were harvested every three years, the forest was divided into three parts, and one of these was coppiced each year. Short rotation cycles also meant that it took only a few years before the carbon released by the burning of the wood was compensated by the carbon that was absorbed by new growth, making a coppice forest truly carbon neutral. In very short rotation cycles, new growth could even be ready for harvest by the time the old growth wood had dried enough to be burned.

In some tree species, the stump sprouting ability decreases with age. After several rotations, these trees were either harvested in their entirety and replaced by new trees, or converted into a coppice with a longer rotation. Other tree species resprout well from stumps of all ages, and can provide shoots for centuries, especially on rich soils with a good water supply. Surviving coppice stools can be more than 1,000 years old.

Biodiversity

A coppice can be called a “coppice forest” or a “coppice plantation”, but in reality it was neither a forest nor a plantation – perhaps something in between. Although managed by humans, coppice forests were not environmentally destructive, on the contrary. Harvesting wood from living trees instead of killing them is beneficial for the life forms that depend on them. 

Coppice forests can have a richer biodiversity than unmanaged forests, because they always contain areas with different stages of light and growth. None of this is true in industrial wood plantations, which support little or no plant and animal life, and which have longer rotation cycles (of at least twenty years).

Our forebears also cut down tall, standing trees with large-diameter stems – just not for firewood. Large trees were only “killed” when large timber was required, for example for the construction of ships, buildings, bridges, and windmills. [4] 

Coppice forests could contain tall trees (a “coppice-with-standards”), which were left to grow for decades while the surrounding trees were regularly pruned. However, even these standing trees could be partly coppiced, for example by harvesting their side branches while they were alive (shredding).

Multipurpose Trees

The archetypical wood plantation promoted by the industrial world involves regularly spaced rows of trees in even-aged, monocultural stands, providing a single output – timber for construction, pulpwood for paper production, or fuelwood for power plants. 

In contrast, trees in pre-industrial coppice forests had multiple purposes. They provided firewood, but also construction materials and animal fodder.

The targeted wood dimensions, determined by the use of the shoots, set the rotation period of the coppice. Because not every type of wood was suited for every type of use, coppiced forests often consisted of a variety of tree species at different ages. 

Several age classes of stems could even be rotated on the same coppice stool (“selection coppice”), and the rotations could evolve over time according to the needs and priorities of the economic activities.

Coppiced wood was used to build almost anything that was needed in a community. [5] For example, young willow shoots, which are very flexible, were braided into baskets and crates, while sweet chestnut prunings, which do not expand or shrink after drying, were used to make all kinds of barrels. Ash and goat willow, which yield straight and sturdy wood, provided the material for making the handles of brooms, axes, shovels, rakes and other tools.

Young hazel shoots were split along the entire length, braided between the wooden beams of buildings, and then sealed with loam and cow manure – the so-called wattle-and-daub construction. Hazel shoots also kept thatched roofs together. 

Alder and willow, which have almost limitless life expectancy under water, were used as foundation piles and river bank reinforcements. The construction wood that was taken out of a coppice forest did not diminish its energy supply: because the artefacts were often used locally, at the end of their lives they could still be burned as firewood.

Coppice forests also supplied food. On the one hand, they provided people with fruits, berries, truffles, nuts, mushrooms, herbs, honey, and game. On the other hand, they were an important source of winter fodder for farm animals. Before the Industrial Revolution, many sheep and goats were fed with so-called “leaf fodder” or “leaf hay” – leaves with or without twigs. [6]

Elm and ash were among the most nutritious species, but sheep also got birch, hazel, linden, bird cherry and even oak, while goats were also fed with alder. In mountainous regions, horses, cattle, pigs and silk worms could be given leaf hay too. Leaf fodder was grown in rotations of three to six years, when the branches provided the highest ratio of leaves to wood. When the leaves were eaten by the animals, the wood could still be burned.

Pollards & Hedgerows

Coppice stools are vulnerable to grazing animals, especially when the shoots are young. Therefore, coppice forests were usually protected against animals by building a ditch, fence or hedge around them. In contrast, pollarding allowed animals and trees to be mixed on the same land. Pollarded trees were pruned like coppices, but to a height of at least two metres to keep the young shoots out of reach of grazing animals.

Wooded meadows and wood pastures – mosaics of pasture and forest – combined the grazing of animals with the production of fodder, firewood and/or construction wood from pollarded trees. “Pannage” or “mast feeding” was the method of sending pigs into pollarded oak forests during autumn, where they could feed on fallen acorns. 

The system formed the mainstay of pork production in Europe for centuries. [7] The “meadow orchard” or “grazed orchard” combined fruit cultivation and grazing -- pollarded fruit trees offered shade to the animals, while the animals could not reach the fruit but fertilised the trees.

While agriculture and forestry are now strictly separated activities, in earlier times the farm was the forest and vice versa. It would make a lot of sense to bring them back together, because agriculture and livestock production – not wood production – are the main drivers of deforestation. 

If trees provide animal fodder, meat and dairy production should not lead to deforestation. If crops can be grown in fields with trees, agriculture should not lead to deforestation. Forest farms would also improve animal welfare, soil fertility and erosion control.

Line Plantings

Extensive plantations could consist of coppiced or pollarded trees, and were often managed as a commons. However, coppicing and pollarding were not techniques seen only in large-scale forest management. Small woodlands in between fields or next to a rural house and managed by an individual household would be coppiced or pollarded. 

A lot of wood was also grown as line plantings around farmyards, fields and meadows, near buildings, and along paths, roads and waterways. Here, lopped trees and shrubs could also appear in the form of hedgerows, thickly planted hedges. [8]

Although line plantings are usually associated with the use of hedgerows in England, they were common in large parts of Europe. In 1804, English historian Abbé Mann expressed his surprise when he wrote about his trip to Flanders (today part of Belgium):

 “All fields are enclosed with hedges, and thick set with trees, insomuch that the whole face of the country, seen from a little height, seems one continued wood”. 

Typical for the region was the large number of pollarded trees. [8]

Like coppice forests, line plantings were diverse and provided people with firewood, construction materials and leaf fodder. However, unlike coppice forests, they had extra functions because of their specific location. [9] One of these was plot separation: keeping farm animals in, and keeping wild animals or cattle grazing on common lands out. Various techniques existed to make hedgerows impenetrable, even for small animals such as rabbits. 

Around meadows, hedgerows or rows of very closely planted pollarded trees (“pollarded tree hedges”) could stop large animals such as cows. If willow wicker was braided between them, such a line planting could also keep small animals out. [8]

Trees and line plantings also offered protection against the weather. Line plantings protected fields, orchards and vegetable gardens against the wind, which could erode the soil and damage the crops. In warmer climates, trees could shield crops from the sun and fertilize the soil. Pollarded lime trees, which have very dense foliage, were often planted right next to wattle-and-daub buildings in order to protect them from wind, rain and sun. [10]

Dunghills were protected by one or more trees, preventing the valuable resource from evaporating due to sun or wind. In the yard of a watermill, the wooden water wheel was shielded by a tree to prevent the wood from shrinking or expanding in times of drought or inactivity. [8]

Location Matters

Along paths, roads and waterways, line plantings had many of the same location-specific functions as on farms. Cattle and pigs were hoarded over dedicated droveways lined with hedgerows, coppices and/or pollards. 

When the railroads appeared, line plantings prevented collisions with animals. They protected road travellers from the weather, and marked the route so that people and animals would not get off the road in a snowy landscape. They prevented soil erosion at riverbanks and hollow roads.

All functions of line plantings could be managed by dead wood fences, which can be moved more easily than hedgerows, take up less space, don’t compete for light and food with crops, and can be ready in a short time. [11] 

However, in times and places were wood was scarce a living hedge was often preferred (and sometimes obliged) because it was a continuous wood producer, while a dead wood fence was a continuous wood consumer. A dead wood fence may save space and time on the spot, but it implies that the wood for its construction and maintenance is grown and harvested elsewhere in the surroundings.

Local use of wood resources was maximised. For example, the tree that was planted next to the waterwheel, was not just any tree. It was red dogwood or elm, the wood that was best suited for constructing the interior gearwork of the mill. When a new part was needed for repairs, the wood could be harvested right next to the mill. 

Likewise, line plantings along dirt roads were used for the maintenance of those roads. The shoots were tied together in bundles and used as a foundation or to fill up holes. Because the trees were coppiced or pollarded and not cut down, no function was ever at the expense of another.

Nowadays, when people advocate for the planting of trees, targets are set in terms of forested area or the number of trees, and little attention is given to their location – which could even be on the other side of the world. However, as these examples show, planting trees closeby and in the right location can significantly optimise their potential.

Shaped by Limits

Coppicing has largely disappeared in industrial societies, although pollarded trees can still be found along streets and in parks. Their prunings, which once sustained entire communities, are now considered waste products. If it worked so well, why was coppicing abandoned as a source of energy, materials and food? The answer is short: fossil fuels. 

 Our forebears relied on coppice because they had no access to fossil fuels, and we don’t rely on coppice because we have.

Most obviously, fossil fuels have replaced wood as a source of energy and materials. Coal, gas and oil took the place of firewood for cooking, space heating, water heating and industrial processes based on thermal energy. Metal, concrete and brick – materials that had been around for many centuries – only became widespread alternatives to wood after they could be made with fossil fuels, which also brought us plastics. 

Artificial fertilizers – products of fossil fuels – boosted the supply and the global trade of animal fodder, making leaf fodder obsolete. The mechanisation of agriculture – driven by fossil fuels – led to farming on much larger plots along with the elimination of trees and line plantings on farms.

Less obvious, but at least as important, is that fossil fuels have transformed forestry itself. Nowadays, the harvesting, processing and transporting of wood is heavily supported by the use of fossil fuels, while in earlier times they were entirely based on human and animal power – which themselves get their fuel from biomass. It was the limitations of these power sources that created and shaped coppice management all over the world.

Wood was harvested and processed by hand, using simple tools such as knives, machetes, billhooks, axes and (later) saws. Because the labour requirements of harvesting trees by hand increase with stem diameter, it was cheaper and more convenient to harvest many small branches instead of cutting down a few large trees. 

Furthermore, there was no need to split coppiced wood after it was harvested. Shoots were cut to a length of around one metre, and tied together in “faggots”, which were an easy size to handle manually.

To transport firewood, our forebears relied on animal drawn carts over often very bad roads. This meant that, unless it could be transported over water, firewood had to be harvested within a radius of at most 15-30 km from the place where it was used. [12] 

 Beyond those distances, the animal power required for transporting the firewood was larger than its energy content, and it would have made more sense to grow firewood on the pasture that fed the draft animal. [13] T

here were some exceptions to this rule. Some industrial activities, like iron and potash production, could be moved to more distant forests – transporting iron or potash was more economical than transporting the firewood required for their production. However, in general, coppice forests (and of course also line plantings) were located in the immediate vicinity of the settlement where the wood was used.

In short, coppicing appeared in a context of limits. Because of its faster growth and versatile use of space, it maximised the local wood supply of a given area. Because of its use of small branches, it made manual harvesting and transporting as economical and convenient as possible.

Can Coppicing be Mechanised?

From the twentieth century onwards, harvesting was done by motor saw, and since the 1980s, wood is increasingly harvested by powerful vehicles that can fell entire trees and cut them on the spot in a matter of minutes. 

Fossil fuels have also brought better transportation infrastructures, which have unlocked wood reserves that were inaccessible in earlier times. Consequently, firewood can now be grown on one side of the planet and consumed at the other.

The use of fossil fuels adds carbon emissions to what used to be a completely carbon neutral activity, but much more important is that it has pushed wood production to a larger – unsustainable – scale. [14] 

Fossil fueled transportation has destroyed the connection between supply and demand that governed local forestry. If the wood supply is limited, a community has no other choice than to make sure that the wood harvest rate and the wood renewal rate are in balance. Otherwise, it risks running out of fuelwood, craft wood and animal fodder, and it would be abandoned.

Likewise, fully mechanised harvesting has pushed forestry to a scale that is incompatible with sustainable forest management. Our forebears did not cut down large trees for firewood, because it was not economical. 

Today, the forest industry does exactly that because mechanisation makes it the most profitable thing to do. Compared to industrial forestry, where one worker can harvest up to 60 m3 of wood per hour, coppicing is extremely labour-intensive. 

Consequently, it cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels.

Some scientists and engineers have tried to solve this by demonstrating coppice harvesting machines. 

[15] However, mechanisation is a slippery slope. The machines are only practical and economical on somewhat larger tracts of woodland (>1 ha) which contain coppiced trees of the same species and the same age, with only one purpose (often fuelwood for power generation).

 As we have seen, this excludes many older forms of coppice management, such as the use of multipurpose trees and line plantings. Add fossil fueled transportation to the mix, and the result is a type of industrial coppice management that brings few improvements.

Sustainable forest management is essentially local and manual. This doesn’t mean that we need to copy the past to make biomass energy sustainable again.

 For example, the radius of the wood supply could be increased by low energy transport options, such as cargo bikes and aerial ropeways, which are much more efficient than horse or ox drawn carts over bad roads, and which could be operated without fossil fuels. 

Hand tools have also improved in terms of efficiency and ergonomics. We could even use motor saws that run on biofuels – a much more realistic application than their use in car engines. [16]

The Past Lives On

This article has compared industrial biomass production with historical forms of forest management in Europe, but in fact there was no need to look to the past for inspiration. The 40% of the global population consisting of people in poor societies that still burn wood for cooking and water and/or space heating, are no clients of industrial forestry. Instead, they obtain firewood in much of the same ways that we did in earlier times, although the tree species and the environmental conditions can be very different. [17]

A 2017 study calculated that the wood consumption by people in “developing” societies – good for 55% of the global wood harvest and 9-15% of total global energy consumption – only causes 2-8% of anthropogenic climate impacts. [18] 

 Why so little? Because around two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably, write the scientists. People collect mainly dead wood, they grow a lot of wood outside the forest, they coppice and pollard trees, and they prefer the use of multipurpose trees, which are too valuable to cut down. 

The motives are the same as those of our ancestors: people have no access to fossil fuels and are thus tied to a local wood supply, which needs to be harvested and transported manually.

These numbers confirm that it is not biomass energy that’s unsustainable. If the whole of humanity would live as the 40% that still burns biomass regularly, climate change would not be an issue. What is really unsustainable is a high energy lifestyle. 

We can obviously not sustain a high-tech industrial society on coppice forests and line plantings alone. But the same is true for any other energy source, including uranium and fossil fuels. 

The Failure of Farming

SUBHEAD: An excerpt from book “The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending”

By Kollibri terre Sunnenblume on 6 Dec 2018 for Macska Mosshka -
(http://macskamoksha.com/2018/12/agriculture-as-wrong-turn)


Image above: Contrast between modern agriculture in southern California and wild-tending a meadow in eastern Oregon. From original article and cover of book "The Failure of Farming g and the Necessity of Wildtending".

"The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great." —John Lanchester[1]

The “Agricultural Revolution” is lauded as one of the greatest achievements in the history of the human race, proof positive of “Progress” and of our own exalted status “a little lower than angels.” Doubtless, it is among the most momentous changes that our species has experienced, on par with the utilization of fire, the development of language and the splitting of the atom.

However, a closer look, based on research and scholarship, reveals that the adoption of farming led to declines in human health, caused sharp social inequities, started a war on the environment, and put us on a road that’s headed towards extinction.

But wasn’t life before farming miserable? Notoriously “nasty, brutish and short?” Weren’t hunters and gatherers always on the edge of starvation, constantly focused on survival, and never able to enjoy free time? According to experts who study history: No.

Among those who investigate the Agricultural Revolution are archaeologists, anthropologists, paleopathologists, sociologists, geneticists, linguists, primatologists, botanists, climatologists and even economists. A survey of their literature from the last half century exhibits near consensus on the big picture: the Agricultural Revolution caused clear, measurable declines in quality of life, individually, communally and ecologically.

That this knowledge has not filtered out into mainstream culture is hardly surprising since these findings contradict cherished cultural beliefs that have religious origins and political value, to say nothing of personal appeal.

The fossil record reveal that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers. Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they were sicker, their mortality rates were higher. Living in close proximity to domesticated animals led to diseases that crossed the species barrier, wreaking havoc in the densely settled communities.[2]

The diets of wildtenders and other gatherer-hunters were very diverse and their lifestyles were highly mobile. The variation in food, in kind and in season, supplied complete nutrition and lessened the chance of going hungry. Living in small, migratory groups virtually guaranteed that individuals were in good physical condition and disallowed certain diseases from becoming widespread.

Of course, gatherer-hunters were themselves diverse, and their diets and lifestyles differed with geography, but altogether they were more like each other than they are like the agricultural societies that largely replaced them.

The Agricultural Revolution radically reoriented the fundamentals of human culture. Some of its inventions were cities, property, writing, taxation and in the Near East, monotheistic religion. The transitions were not immediate.

First, humans settled into sedentary villages based on horticulture (aka, “stick agriculture”), which brought one set of changes. Then, after a few thousand years, agriculture proper emerged, driven by the plow and fed by irrigation, spurring more drastic transformations.

In most gatherer-hunter societies, the majority of the diet was the part that was gathered. Such was comprised of roots, seeds and nuts, berries and fruit, greens, and in some places, grubs and insects. All of these had their own seasons, stages and habitats that varied annually depending on natural cycles, the weather and other circumstances.

But food was not the only thing being gathered; the botanical world also provided fibers for weaving clothes and containers, colors for painting and dyeing, and teemed with medicinals for treating injuries, easing pain, tending to hygiene, improving vigor and—last but certainly not least!—controlling fertility.

Altogether, gatherers had knowledge of hundreds of plants and thousands of factors. This encyclopedic understanding was shared generationally for millennia through an oral tradition that conveyed not merely information but also wisdom. As a result, the practice of gathering was a highly consistent endeavor that dependably provided sustenance, crafting materials and medicines throughout the year.

Hunting meat, by contrast, yielded erratic results. Even when game was predictable—such as during an annual Salmon run or a Reindeer migration—the pattern of hunting as an activity was “feast-or-famine.” In some cultures, meat was preserved by smoking or drying it, but the amount that could be conveniently stored or carried was finite. In some parts of the world, gatherer-hunters would never have been daily meat eaters, and during particular times of the year, would have had a predominantly vegetarian diet.[3]

According to the archaeological and anthropological evidence, gathering was predominantly the sphere of women and hunting that of men. This division makes sense, since babies or small children could accompany gathering activities, but were likely to disrupt hunting. This division was also voluntary, says Gerda Lerner, author of The Creation of Patriarchy:

“The earliest sexual division of labor by which women chose occupations compatible with their mothering and child-raising activities were functional, hence acceptable to men and women alike”[4] [emphasis in original].

So, since Paleolithic survival depended on the contributions of both sexes, egalitarian societies were the norm. Roles within a group were based on “linking rather than ranking”[5] and relationships focused on cooperation rather than competition. These balanced forms of culture have also been called “partnership societies” as opposed to “dominator societies,” the latter of which are patriarchal.

The image of the caveman dragging his woman around by her hair is a mythical view of the past, although it’s a telling expression of our present day misogyny that this is what we project back in time. Clearly, we are trying to justify what we know is bad behavior.

From the contemporary viewpoint it seems impossible to imagine, but property—besides one’s personal articles—was a concept new to the Agricultural era; no one had owned land, animals or other humans in preceding times. But the first written records (dating to ~5100 years ago)[6] are mostly comprised of lists of property, primarily grains, slaves (tracked by sex) and heads of animals. For its first five centuries, writing’s exclusive use was accounting, not art.[7]

Art, it has often been claimed, flowered with the Agricultural Revolution because of extra leisure time, although, in actuality, such time was actually in shorter supply. Some scholars have suggested that art suffered from the transition. Says John Zerzan:

The pre-Neolithic [pre-Agricutlural] cave paintings, for example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The neolithic art of farmers and pastoralists, however, stiffens into stylized forms; Franz Borkenau typified its pottery as a “narrow, timid botching of materials and forms.”

With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life… And where there had been no representation in Paleolithic art of men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation between people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles becoming common.[8]

Deeper still were shifts in how humans looked at themselves in relation to the natural world. James Suzman writes:

Where hunter-gatherers saw themselves simply as part of an inherently productive environment, farmers regarded their environment as something to manipulate, tame and control. But as any farmer will tell you, bending an environment to your will requires a lot of work. The productivity of a patch of land is directly proportional to the amount of energy you put into it. This principle that hard work is a virtue, and its corollary that individual wealth is a reflection of merit, is perhaps the most obvious of the agricultural revolution’s many social, economic and cultural legacies.[9] [my emphasis]

Here, then, are the roots of the “Protestant work ethic” and of the over-production that techno-industrial capitalism has taken to such ecocidal extremes.

No discussion of the Agricultural Revolution in the Near East would be complete without mentioning monotheism, which Gore Vidal called, “easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.” This religious dogma was a logical expression of the agricultural lifestyle.

The new god was a man, entirely independent of women, with no mother, wife or daughter, a sharp contrast with gods in the existing pantheons. He did not live on the earth and was not present in its life, its form, or its elements, except on special occasions, e.g., when taking the form of a cloud or a fiery shrub. He declared that the planet and everything on it was the “dominion” of humans, for them to treat as they would like.

Clear hierarchies existed: God over humans, human men over human women, all humans over nature. Last but not least, humans themselves were born flawed, inherently unable to find true happiness in living.

By whatever justification, religious or otherwise, and through whatever mechanism, intentionally designed or not, during the Agricultural Revolution, men took the majority of social power from women and it has never been returned or retaken.

Or even honestly acknowledged. Modern liberal feminism has won only very minor reforms; the fundamental mode of oppression remains unshaken. That mode—patriarchy—is the domination not only of men over women but of those characteristics considered masculine over those considered feminine.

Dualism and domination are two of its hallmarks: the division of everything into opposites and the subsequent subordination of one to the other. On the grand scale, patriarchy is an expression of humanity splitting itself from nature and setting itself counter to it.

As domination over nature was exerted, respect for nature declined. How could it not? You cannot at once lash something and love it. That some people believe you can just shows how far down this “nasty, brutish” road we’ve traveled. But no: respect and domination don’t go together. Can not. They are mutually exclusive.

Ultimately, the breaking of our conscious, intentional connection with nature was the worst outcome of agriculture. Not content to merely abuse ourselves and each other, we extended our desecration to everyone else—animal, vegetable and mineral—and to the planet itself.

Currently, our survival is no less connected to nature and the world than at any other time, but we are now less aware of that connection than ever before. The cost of that break–of over fifty centuries of intense exploitation—is now weighing on us heavily.

Environmentally, the damage done to the planet by agriculture is severe and far-reaching.

First, farming’s footprint is enormous, taking up fully 40% of the earth’s land.[10] Every acre of that started out as wildlife habitat but is now disturbed to one degree or another. On ranchland, many of the original animals and plants might still live there, albeit with limitations. But in a field of corn, a rice paddy, or an almond orchard, nearly all other life has been wiped out, often completely.

City tourists might take a drive to admire the rolling hills of “wine country,” but what they are looking at is a former wilderness that was once home to flora, fauna, fungus and previous human populations, all since decimated. It’s no pretty picture at all. It’s a vision of ecocide.

You can’t farm without soil (hydroponics notwithstanding) but soil is the first casualty of agriculture. For abusing soil, nothing beats the plow, from the original ox-drawn and human-led tool of the Neolithic Era to the contemporary fuel-powered and unmanned GPS-coordinated behemoth of the 21st Century.

As it turns out, forcibly breaking down a soil’s structure with blades and removing the vegetative material that holds it together results in quite a lot of it eroding into waterways and blowing away in the wind.

The remainder rapidly loses its inherent fertility as irrigation washes out minerals and pesticides wipe out vitalizing micro-organisms. Currently, “a third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year.”[11]

Onto the cleared, drained and leveled lands of agriculture are applied poisons, hundreds of kinds, few of them tested and of these none of them thoroughly. Fertilizers taint the water, from aquifer to river to sea. Dead zones expand in the oceans, all over the world. Writes Jonathan Watts, in the Guardian:

The increased use of chemical fertilizers by the industrial agriculture sector over the past several decades… has prompted large-scale run-off of sewage and other byproducts entering ocean waters, causing deoxygenated dead zones to quadruple in size since 1950—now covering an area roughly the size of the European Union…. Low-oxygen dead zones make the ocean less inhabitable for marine life, suffocating creatures and reducing the area where they’re able to thrive.[12]

Pesticides are a nightmare. By dint of their particulate nature when sprayed, they are easily carried away by the wind and end up contaminating soil and water and poisoning other creatures. Only 1% hit their intended target. 1%! Subsequently, at the large scale they are used, they degrade habitat, reduce biodiversity and magnify extinction rates. Ironically, pollinators required for food production are frequent victims.
As with war, one can question whether non-target damage can honestly be described as “collateral”—”being aside from the main subject, target, or goal; tangential”—when it is inevitably, one could even say characteristically, a “subject” of nearly every attack, never truly “tangential.”

But nature can be resilient, and targeted plants can and do develop herbicide resistance over time, meaning they survive being sprayed. Unfortunately, the agriculture industry’s response is to jack up the amount of herbicide and develop new poisons.

Irrigation damages the environment from the points of source to delivery, and the bigger the project, the worse it is. Anytime water is diverted from one place to another, there is always at least one loser: the immediate locale from which it was taken.

Whether it is a spring, river or lake, the effects of use will make their mark, sooner or later. In many cases, the crop being irrigated isn’t even be food. In northern California, rivers have been running too low for the Salmon because of the wine and Cannabis industries.

In other words, we are prioritizing getting drunk and high over the lives of other creatures. Such trade-offs are emblematic of agriculture. That these acts are not considered theft or assault is demonstrative of mere cultural creed, not the honest administration of logic.

Dams built for agriculture are their own disasters. They drown entire areas, block fish migration, and interrupt previous patterns of seasonal flooding that brought fertility to the soil.

Agriculture is a major contributor to Climate Change due to the significant amount of greenhouse gases it produces. The majority of these gases come from four different sources:[13]

• Deforestation for land-clearing. Forests are “carbon sinks”—that is, they store carbon dioxide (CO₂)—so when the trees are cut down, much of the CO₂ dissipates into the atmosphere. Tilling cleared land produces additional CO₂, which the soil releases when it is disturbed.
• Rice cultivation. The customary flooding of fields causes anaerobic decomposition, which produces methane (CH₄). CH₄ produces about 20 times more warming in the atmosphere than CO₂ in the short term (a timeline of less than a century).
• Enteric fermentation by cattle. CH₄ is a natural byproduct of the digestive process of ruminant animals such as cows, who number in the millions.
• Fertilizer application. Nitrous oxide (N₂0) is created when synthetic fertilizers react with the soil. 60-80% of all anthropogenic N₂0 emissions are agriculturally sourced. N₂0 is about 300 times more warming than CO₂.

Farming is killing us. That’s no exaggeration. And we must stop doing it. That’s undeniable.

Of course that means drastic collective changes on a global scale, but in the service of survival, we must do what’s necessary. Drastic is not the same as “impossible.”

Unsurprisingly, the agricultural mind rejects the idea of ending agriculture, but its arguments deserve no hearing. The track record of the last 11,500 years is clear. Farming has been a failure.

“What else are we supposed to do?” is the wrong question. It’s not even a question, really. It’s a statement of insistence disguised with interrogatory punctuation.

The false claim being made is that “there is no alternative.” But without supporting evidence, this assertion of dogma has to hide behind a question mark. Beware those who speak this way. If you hear yourself saying it, stop and give yourself a sharp look.

The real question is: “What can we offer?”

What we have forgotten in agricultural societies is that life is all about reciprocity.

In an interview included in my new book, Jayesh Bear said: “It’s two different worldviews. One that is in fear of the natural world and one that strives to understand it and respect it and live in symbiosis with it.”

Inherent in wildtending, and in other gathering-hunting lifestyles, was such striving. Wildtending is reciprocal. Its actions, collectivity, and scope all exist as endless exchange.

Agriculture is the opposite: extractive; taking without giving. There’s only so long that can go on, and if the Americas hadn’t existed, it might very well have ended already. As it is, the monster was able to feed itself for another 500+ years, and has swollen into a bloated mess of tremendous size and ugliness. We’ll see how much longer it goes if left unattended. At some point it either runs out of fuel or is suffocated by its own toxic excretions.

Which returns us to the question: “What can we offer?”

Ultimately, reciprocity must again be our collective way of life, and by “ultimately” I mean today. Isolated, individual choices will not suffice. While there is nothing else to do, we will make them, and should make them as consciously as possible, of course.

But what that means, in part, is never forgetting that lifestyle choices are made primarily for ourselves, and the best they can do is to help us see and live more clearly. Gaining clarity is essential, of course, but we should not mistake it for significant material change. It is not.

Living in reciprocity with the other beings on this planet—human and non-human—is a necessity regardless of planetary outcome. The act of nurturing is a salve for all parties involved, even if we are merely comforting the dying.

[1] Lanchester, John. “The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?” New Yorker, September 18, 2017.
[2] ibid.
[3] Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics (Chicago and New York: Aldine·Atherton, 1972), p. 27.
[4] Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy (New York Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 42.
[5] Eisler, Rian. The Chalice and the Blade (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), p. 27.
[6] Wikipedia “History of Writing”
[7] Lanchester.
[8] Zerzan, John. “Agriculture.”
[9] Suzman, James. “How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago” Guardian, 5 December 2017.
[10] Owen, James. “Farming Claims Almost Half Earth’s Land, New Maps Show” National Geographic (Dec. 9, 2005).
[11] Conley, Julia. “New Study: Big Ag, Climate Crisis Key Drivers of Ocean ‘Dead Zones’ Quadrupling in Size Over Last 60 Years” Common Dreams, January 05, 2018.
[12] Watts, Jonathan. “Third of Earth’s soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture” Guardian, 12 September 2017.
[13] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” section 3.5. “Agriculture and Land-Use Emissions,” 2000. | International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Business Council for Sustainable Development. “Ecosystems Facts and Trends,” 2008, p. 6. | Earth Journalism Network. “Climate Change and Agriculture” (9 June 2016).
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Half-Earth, Half-Baked

SUBHEAD: Can a lower human population on only half of Earth's land allow for continuity of life?

By Chris Smaje on 4 September 2018 for Small Farm Future -
(https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2018/09/half-earth-half-baked/)


Image above: Insanity itself from Ecomodernists - "A manifesto to use humanity's extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene."From (http://www.ecomodernism.org/).

I’ve been writing in my book draft lately about the role of livestock in a small farm future, which has led me by a somewhat circuitous but probably fairly obvious route to reading Harvard biologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth (W.W. Norton, 2016), in which he argues that we should leave half our planet’s surface as “inviolable reserves” for nature.

I found it an interesting and informative, if also somewhat vague and rambling, little book (still, if I succeed in publishing a book that’s no more rambling than Wilson’s when I’m 87 I’ll be happy).

One of Wilson’s key points is that we’re not yet even close to knowing all the species with which we share the biosphere, let alone knowing how they fit into wider sets of ecological relationships.

Therefore, from numerous perspectives but not least human self-preservation, he argues that it’s not a good idea to wantonly let species go extinct.

Yet this, sadly, is what’s currently happening by the hand of humanity, with an extinction rate now around a thousand times higher than before the spread of humans around the world.

This amounts to a sixth mass planetary extinction, which will rival over a few human generations what the last one, the Chicxulub asteroid impact that ultimately did for the dinosaurs, achieved on one bad day – but in geological terms, the time difference is slight.

Wilson deploys his biological expertise to great effect throughout the book in a running battle with Anthropocene theorists, “novel ecosystem” enthusiasts and outriders of the ‘ecomodernist’ Breakthrough Institute like Emma Marris and Erle Ellis who’ve likewise detained me on this website over the years.

The basic message of the Anthropocenites to threatened species and to the people who wish to defend them runs something like ‘this is a human planet now – so deal with it, or get out the way’.

In practical terms, they raise the valid point that in an ever-changing and stochastic biota there’s never a baseline point of ‘balance’ to which conservationism can aim its restorative efforts.

To which Wilson makes the nice rejoinder that this is a problem that should be formulated as a scientific challenge, not an excuse for throwing up our hands and singing que será será.

But then, in the penultimate chapter, he lets it all run through his fingers. Take this passage:

“The [human ecological footprint] will not stay the same. The footprint will evolve, not to claim more and more space, as you might at first suppose, but less. The reason lies in the evolution of the free market system, and the way it is increasingly shaped by high technology….

Just as natural selection drives organic evolution by competition among genes to produce more copies of themselves per unit cost in the next generation, raising benefit-to-cost of production drives the evolution of the economy. Almost all of the competition in a free market…raises the average quality of life.

Teleconferencing, online purchases and trade, e-book personal libraries, access on the Internet to all literature and scientific data, online diagnosis and medical practice, food production per hectare sharply raised by indoor vertical gardens with LED lighting, genetically engineered crops and microorganisms…” (p.191)

Enough already, Edward…we get your point. After nineteen chapters of amiable good sense, Wilson suddenly goes full ecomodernist, as if some devilish Breakthrough Institute hacker finally figured out how to make him stop his anti-Anthropocene agitating by messing with his neurons like a cordyceps fungus attacking one of his beloved ants.

I won’t dwell here on how wrongheaded all this is – regular readers and commenters on this blog are well appraised of the counter-arguments. I don’t even dispute that there are some aspects of emerging high technology that might help us mitigate some of our present predicaments.

But, my dear professor, the ‘evolution’ of the ‘free market system’ is not among them – rather, it’s the ‘free market system’ (or, more precisely, corporate capitalism – which isn’t really the same thing at all, but is the beast that Wilson is implicitly invoking) that has biodiversity in its deathly grip.

Wilson is pretty vague about what a ‘half-earth’ devoted to inviolable nature would actually look like, though he tells us that it needn’t involve dividing off the planet into large pieces the size of continents or nation-states, and earlier on in the book he demurs from the idea that ‘wilderness’ necessarily implies a lack of human residents.

He favors a lower human population, but says nothing about urban vis-à-vis rural residence or the nature of the agriculture necessary to support a half-earth world (other than his half-baked half-earth of vertical farming and LED lights).

His simple point really is that the number of species going extinct usually varies by something like the fourth root of the area available to them, so if we make half the planet available to wild species we should retain about 85% of them.

Of course, things are more complicated than that in reality, but maybe it’s not such a bad place to start – especially if we proceed by trying to ensure that existing wildernesses and centers of biodiversity are protected first.

A quick look at the FAO’s global land use statistics reveals that in fact only about 37% of the planet’s land area is devoted to agriculture, with about 4% devoted to cities, roads and other artificial surfaces.

So by those lights Wilson’s half-earth ambitions are already achieved – though it’s doubtless fair to say that we humans have appropriated the nicest territory for our agriculture (about a third of nature’s 60% share is glaciated or barren land).

Still, perhaps when Wilson says we should leave half the earth as “inviolable reserves” he means really inviolable – so no chemical pollution of any kind, and perhaps no climate change either, creeping in from the human side of the planet.

If that’s so, then the ‘half-earth’ idea is a little misleading because it draws attention to land take, when it should really be drawing attention to human practices like GHG emissions and nitrate pollution (another reason to question the ‘land sparing’ critique of organic farming).

Maybe instead of a half-earth we need a quarter-earth – which would be easily achieved by cutting back on rangeland and arable crops grown as livestock fodder (nearly 70% of global agricultural land is permanent meadow or pasture – yet another inconvenient truth for the land sparers, who illogically obsess over the 1% of organically-farmed land).

But I think what we really need is a no GHG emissions and a no pollution earth. How to achieve that?

Well, I’m open to ideas but here’s my half-earth halfpenny’s worth: stop fishing in the open ocean, stop extracting fossil fuels, stop making synthetic fertilizer (except as a stopgap measure via special government derogation).

Decide on the total human land-take, which gives a global per capita acreage. Then divide it up equally between the people of the world for carbon-free homesteading.

Those who prefer not to avail themselves of this generous offer and continue working in the city would be entitled to do so with the proviso that they forfeit, say, 50% of their earnings on top of tax, split between practical conservation, farmer support, agro-ecological research funds and mitigation of the environmental "bads" caused by the commercial-industrial farming that their old-falutin city-slicking ways would probably bring forth.

I’ll admit that it needs working up a bit more – a few details to fill in, some implementation issues to address. Perhaps you can help me in that task.

My starter for ten is that this system won’t emerge by the ‘evolution’ of a free market system increasingly shaped by high technology. Wilson might have realized this, if only he’d consulted an economist biologist…

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A Brief History: Dated 2050

SUBHEAD: That is political immaturity, it’s infantile, not allowing people to cooperatively rule themselves.

By Ted Trainer on 18 July 2018 for Resilience -
(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-07-18/how-the-great-transition-was-made/)


Image above: Photo of Sieben Linden Ecovillage behind the yurts of "Globolo" by Michael Würfel. From original article.

“It was a very close call; we nearly didn’t get through. There were years in which it looked as if the die-off of billions could not be avoided.”

“Why not? What was it like back there around 2030?”

“Well that’s when several major global problem trends came to a head. Mason was one who saw this coming, in 2003 actually, when he wrote The 2030 Spike.

But many saw the storm clouds stacking up decades before that … dwindling resources, accelerating environmental problems, species loss, rocketing inequality, social discontent and breakdown. “

“Why didn’t governments and global institutions like the UN and the World Bank just bite the bullet and rationally work out a plan for transition to sustainable ways?”

“Ha! How naive. Your assumptions about humans and their societies are far too optimistic. Firstly, only a relatively small number of people saw that the core problem was grossly unsustainable levels of resource use.

Most people and virtually all governments and officials were utterly incapable of even recognizing the fact that most of the world’s alarming trends were basically due to the overproduction and over consumption going on, depleting resources, wrecking ecosystems, and generating resource wars.

The limits to growth had been extensively documented from the 1970s on but even fifty years later almost every politician, business leader, media outlet and economist and ordinary person was still fiercely committed to economic growth.

It was extremely difficult to get anyone to even think about the idiocy of pursuing limitless economic growth.

At the official level there was wall to wall delusion and denial and outright refusal to do what was necessary, like stop using coal.

So there was no possibility of the world accepting the need for massive degrowth and dealing with it in a rational and planned way.”

“So how was it dealt with?”

“The core issues would have gone on being ignored until the system broke down irretrievably. It should have been obvious that there had to be a shift to radical localism and far simpler ways, but as long as rich world supermarket shelves remained well stocked no one would take any notice of calls for degrowth or downshifting.

Many of us could see that a time of great troubles was coming, but we could also see that without it would there was no possibility of transition to very different systems that were sustainable and possible for all the world’s people.

But we could also see that the prospects for the coming depression to result in such an outcome were clearly very poor.

The most likely outcome was chaotic breakdown of order and descent into barbarity and a war lord plundering era with a massive population die-off.”

“Well we certainly got the time of troubles. What triggered its onset?”

“Two main things. Firstly the rapid decline in oil from fracking. For decades there had been increasing worries about getting enough oil but the advent of fracking made it seem that this could keep supply up.

But within about ten years fracking blew out as the fields were found to deplete fast.

Even by 2018 none of the major producers had ever made a profit; in fact they were all in extreme debt. But much more important was the rapid decline in the capacity of most of the Middle East suppliers to export oil, because their increasing populations and declining water and food production meant they had to use more and more of the oil they produced. “

“Yeah, so the oil price rose high again, like in 2014, but that crashed the economy again and oil demand fell and oil prices fell.”

“That’s right; we were into the “bumpy road down” scenario. Meanwhile the global debt was going through the roof. Even back in 2018 it was far higher than before the first GFC.”

“The first GFC?”

“Yes … that was nothing like GFC 2. The few who owned most of the world’s capital had little choice but to go on lending to increasingly risky investments, because the economy had been slowing for decades making it increasingly difficult for them to find anything to invest in profitably.

So global debt went up and up. But the point came where they could no longer believe they’d get their money back.

See, you only lend if you think you can get it back plus interest, and that’s not possible unless the economy grows enabling the borrower to sell enough produce to repay the loan and the interest. So if they eventually can’t convince themselves that future growth is likely they will stop lending.”

“But what slowed growth?”

“All of the difficulties I mentioned getting worse, especially the inequality. The super-rich were rocketing to obscene wealth while most people were stagnating. For instance most of the workers in the US had seen no increase in their real incomes for about forty years. The mass of people didn’t have the money to spend that would sustain economic activity let alone growth.

So, suddenly the financial bubble burst; the rich panicked to get their money back, meaning they called in their loans and wouldn’t lend anymore.

So … more or less instant collapse of the entire financial sector closely followed by just about everything else in the fragile over-extended global economy.

For instance exporters wouldn’t accept orders because they didn’t think the importers would be able to get the credit to pay, so “just-in-time” supply chains quickly failed. It was the start of the mother of all depressions.”

“But it didn’t bring on Armageddon did it… the old order was knocked down very hard but it sort of spluttered on, didn’t it?”

Yes. We were very lucky that after the initial jolt we went into a long slowly worsening depression.

This gave people time for the lessons to sink in. It would have been really bad if there had been a sudden catastrophic crash wrecking everything. The breakdown set two very different processes going.

 The bad one was that as prices rose and scarcities and unemployment increased many people understandably blamed the politicians for incompetence, and as governments had to grapple with increasing difficulties and demands on shrinking revenues discontent soared.

Consequently migrants and refugees were targeted for taking jobs, and racism and support for fascist movements increased.

 But the other thing triggered was widespread recognition that the old globalized and market driven economic system was clearly incapable of providing for all people, that it could not solve the big problems, in fact it was clearer than ever that it was the cause of the problems.

Large numbers of ordinary people realized that they had to go local, that they had to come together to grapple with how to make their neighborhoods, towns and suburbs capable of providing urgently needed things.

It was obvious that they would have to cooperate and organize, working out how they could convert their living places into gardens, workshops, co-ops, orchards etc. They saw that they must set up committees and working bees and town meetings to work out what they needed to do.

Most important here was firstly the shift in mentality, from being passive recipients of government, accepting rule by distant officials, to collectively taking control of their own fate.

Secondly there was a shift in expectations; people rapidly realized that they could not have their old resource-squandering affluence back.

They saw that they would have to be content with what was sufficient, and they realized that they would have to cooperate and prioritize the common good, not compete as individuals for selfish goals.”

“But how was it possible for people who had known nothing but working for money and going to the supermarket to start doing such things? People had lived as passive consumers of products and decisions, and had only ever experienced a culture of competitive individualism.

Why did they turn in the direction of collectivism and self-sufficiency?”

“Because by then the examples of the alternative ways had been established just widely enough, by the Transition Towns and Eco-village movements. It was just well enough understood that the people who had been plodding away at the community gardens and co-ops for decades had been doing what it was now crucial for all to do.

 People were able to come over to join the alternatives that had been established in small ways here and there, the food gardens, the support groups, the poultry co-operatives, the free concerts.

Increasing numbers realized that these were the only ways they could achieve tolerable lives now. They could follow the examples these movements had established.”

“So are you saying that we rapidly went from the suicidal old consumer-capitalist growth and affluence society to the new global systems we have today … just through people turning to localism?”

“Oh no. That was only what we call Stage1. The full revolution was slow and complicated. So far I’ve only explained the first major turning point, the widespread realisation that the way ahead had to be via the development of local communities using local resources to meet as many of their needs as possible.

Stage1 is best understood as a slow process of building an alternative economy, an Economy B under the old market and capital dominated Economy A, to provide things the market system neglected, especially work, incomes and goods for people dumped into unemployment and poverty. Economy B involved principles that flatly contradicted those of Economy A.”

“How?”

“Well firstly it wasn’t driven by investors seeking to maximize their profits. That was the mechanism at the core of the old system and it never did what was most needed.

It never prioritized the production of food for hungry people or humble and cheap housing.

It always produced what richer people wanted, because they were prepared to buy higher priced things and producing what they demanded was most profitable for suppliers.

The market system could not behave in any other way.

Secondly the decisions about what to produce and what ventures to set up were made by communities, collectively, by town meetings which discussed what should be done.

And those deliberations could and normally did give priority to other than monetary benefits, to things like environmental sustainability or town cohesion or real welfare. So it was an economy that took power away from the owners of capital.

Previously they were the ones who decided what would be developed or produced for sale and they only developed whatever would maximize their wealth, never what was most urgently needed.”

“OK that’s to do with how it worked but I want to know more about how it was replaced.

Are you saying the old economy was basically just swept away by a process of establishing more and more little firm and farms, some of them co-ops, using local produce to sell to local customers? “

“Oh no. That was a most important beginning but it could have led only to lots of nice little greenish firms operating within the old market system, trying to compete against chains importing from the Third World, and no threat to the global economy.

The crucial factor, the turning point, was when people realized they had to come together to take control of their town’s fate, to have meetings where they grappled with what the town’s most urgent needs were and what they could collectively do about them.

 This involved taking responsibility for the town, feeling that we must try to cooperatively identify our problems and work out the best strategies.

So community development cooperatives formed and town assemblies were held, and things like town banks and business incubators and town cooperatives were formed. These were not private or individual ventures; operating within Economy A.

Some did some buying and selling within the old Economy A but their concern was to build up Economy B, and it was to provide crucial goods and services not to make profits.“

“OK now how were governments involved? Surely they had to do a lot of intervening and planning and forcing people to change to these extremely different ways.

I can’t understand why they would do these things given that even local governments typically thought only in conventional economic development terms, I mean they were usually dominated by businessmen who knew that the best, the only way to progress was to crank up more business in the town to produce more trickle down.”

“No, again you’re overlooking the fact that the town’s conventional economy had been trashed by the depression and many businesses had been swept away. The self-destruction of the old economy did half of the restructuring automatically, that is, it got rid of vast numbers of unnecessary firms.

Because of the depression councils couldn’t collect much tax and therefore couldn’t do much let alone do alternative stuff, even if they’d wanted to. So we realized that we had to do it mostly by ourselves, by citizen initiatives.

In time everyone could see that conventional strategies couldn’t resurrect the old economy.

So governments were in no position to stop community development initiatives.

 People just got stuck into getting needed things going.

Of course we increasingly got assistance from some of the sensible councils which saw the importance of Economy B.

And as time went by we got more people with the alternative world view elected to councils.”

“OK but what about state and federal governments?”

“They remained less relevant for a long time, in fact until Stage 2 of the revolution.

They were trapped in conventional markets-and-growth thinking, mainly because the corporate super-rich had got so much control over them, especially via campaign contributions, and the mainstream economics academics and professionals knew only growth and trickle down.

So they thrashed around pathetically looking for ways of cranking up investment.

Of course the only ways they could think of involved massive handouts and incentives for the owners of capital to get them to invest.”

“That’s what they did in GFC 1…gave them trillions.”

“Yeah. Very strange how it never occurred to them that if you want to get that flawed economy going you have to stimulate demand and so massive handouts to the poor might have worked.

But as well as not being very interested in assisting the people at the bottom governments had low income from tax and few resources, along with escalating problems, so again they couldn’t do much to help local initiatives even if they had wanted to.

And, most importantly, centralized agencies could not run all the small local economies emerging.

They couldn’t do that even if they had lots of money.

Only the people who lived in a town knew the conditions there and what was needed and what that traditions and social climate were and what strategies would be acceptable.

And they were able to immediately implement decisions, for example by organizing working bees.”

“But I don’t understand how any of that got rid of capitalism. There were trillions of dollars worth of corporations. How did the government phase out all those useless industries producing packaging, advertising, sports cars, cruise ships…”

“Maybe I should have made this clearer earlier. Governments didn’t do it. They didn’t need to. The corporations got rid of themselves! They went broke.

Remember, it was the most massive depression ever seen. Vast numbers of firms of all sizes went bankrupt and disappeared … because people didn’t have the jobs or incomes or money to go on buying their products.

The real economy shrank down to mostly little businesses supplying crucial things like vegetables and bread, and many people who had worked in the useless firms came over to set up or work in these kinds of ventures.

Governments didn’t have to clean out capitalism! It self-destructed!“

“What about the 1%; how did you deal with them.”

“We ignored them to death! They just disappeared! Their wealth was utterly worthless. It couldn’t buy caviar or sports cars, because things like that were not being produced.

In the 1930s Spanish civil war when Anarchists ran Barcelona many factories were abandoned by their owners so workers just kept them operating, and in fact many factory owners stayed on as paid managers because they could see that this was their best option.

And in Detroit the collapse created lots of abandoned land that we turned into vegetable gardens.

Same in Greece and many other regions butchered by neoliberalism. A little austerity can do wonders! Mind you those who had read their Marx were not surprised.”

“What do you mean? What light could that old duffer throw on this revolution?”

“A core element in his theory of capitalism was that the contradictions built into it would eventually destroy it. His timing was out by about a hundred years but he got the mechanism right. See, the importance of Marx is in his account of the dynamics of capitalism, of how its structures inevitably play out over time.

Early in this century it was obvious that inequality was building to levels that were not only morally obscene but that were killing the economy.

The driving principle in the system was the fierce and ceaseless and inescapable quest by capitalists to accumulate capital. The system gave them no choice about this.

Either you beat your rival in competition for sales or you would be eliminated, so the winners became bigger and wealthier all the time, and increased their political power to skew everything to their advantage.

This would have throttled the real economy even if resource and ecological costs were not also tightening the noose, making it more and more difficult to find good investment outlets and make good profits. And then the robots attacked.”

“Attacked?”

“Yes, best allies we ever had. Beautiful confirmation of that old duffer Karl.”
“What!?”

“Obviously introducing robots was marvelous for those who owned the factories; no need to pay wages any more. Well before long demand fell …duh…because no wages means nothing to spend so nothing purchased so factory owners going broke at an ever accelerating rate.

See, as Karl said, the system’s built-in contradictions pushed it towards self destruction. And we didn’t have to build barricades or fire a shot. Delightful … more people coming over to our co-ops.

By the way, Marx also got that right … capitalist accumulation producing deteriorating conditions for the majority to the point where they dump the system. But again, lousy timing.”

“But you couldn’t call the revolution Marxist could you? “

“You’re right. It was nothing like the standard model taken for granted by the red left for almost 200 years.

Firstly it wasn’t led by a ruthless party ready to take state power by force and tip out the capitalist class. It did not focus on taking the state, as if that had to come first so that change could be forced through from the top.

It was not about overt class warfare, fighting to take power off the ruling class, although that was an outcome of course. It didn’t involve rule by authoritarian methods until communism could be established.

It was the opposite of a centrally organized transition process or about a centrally run post-revolutionary society.

And its core element was not change in the economy or in power relations, it was cultural change. If only the red left had understood this we would have done the job much faster.”

“What do you mean, cultural change?”

“It was above all a change in mentality, in thinking and values and ideas about the good and just and sustainable society and about the good life.

People eventually came to see that the old system would not provide for them and that a satisfactory society had to be about mostly highly self-sufficient and self-governing local communities running their own affairs via highly participatory procedures in local economies that did not grow and that minimized resource use, etc. etc. That realization was actually THE revolution.

That’s what then led to the changes in power, the state and the global economy, and without the emergence of that world view we could never have achieved what we have now.

That sequence of events was the reverse of what the standard socialist vision assumed. Marxists thought you have to get power first and it would then be a long time until people had grown out of their worker-consumer-competitive-acquisitive mind set sufficiently for communism to be possible. The wrong order of events.

 The team that got all this right was the Anarchists?”

“What? The bomb throwers? How on earth were they relevant?”

“Oh dear oh dear. We have some sorting out to do here. “Anarchism” is a term like Christian, or Moslem or human, standing for a very wide category of ideas and types and practices, some of which I find appalling and some I find admirable.

Yes some who called themselves Anarchists thought violence was the way to change society, but those we followed, like Kropotkin and Tolstoy and you could include Gandhi, did not. Our variety might best be identified as being for government via thoroughly participatory democracy.

Decisions are made by everyone down at the town level, by public meetings and referenda, including those decisions to do with the relatively few functions left at the state and national levels.

We the people, all of us, hold power equally; no one has any power to rule over us.

That’s the way things are run now and it is obviously not possible to run good sustainable, self-sufficient frugal, caring communities any other way.”

“OK, let’s get back to the history.

I see how the depression cleared the ground and motivated people to come across to the new ways, but there’s a lot more to be explained here, about how we went from towns starting to create and run their own economies, to a situation in which national governments and economies are mainly about providing towns and regions with the inputs and conditions they need to thrive, in a world economy that has undergone massive degrowth to low and stable GDP.

Firstly, how about the fact that no local community can be completely self-sufficient. They would always need things like boots and chicken wire and stoves that can only be produced in big factories sometimes far away?”

“Ah yes, a very important point and it gets us into discussing Stage 2 of the revolution. We quickly became acutely aware of the town’s need for imports, of a few but crucial items.

One early response was for towns and suburbs to establish their own farms further afield, or oganize some existing farms to supply foods, especially grains and dairy products that couldn’t easily be produced in sufficient quantity in settled areas.

But of course there were many other items needed even by very frugal communities, like those you mention and also including small quantities of cement and steel.

 This led to intense pressure on governments to organize the supply of these inputs, by restructuring existing capacities and priorities away from non-necessities and exports and into small regional factories.

Again remember that in a crashed national economy this was not so difficult as there were lots of factories and workers sitting idle and eager to switch focus.”

“But how could every town or suburb get the chicken wire it needed, how could they pay for it when all they could produce were things like vegetables and fruit?”

“Yes organizing this was a most important task and the solution was to make sure every town could set up some kind of export capacity so that it could send into the national economy some vital items towns needed to import.

This enabled them to earn the small amount needed to pay for the things they had to import. In some cases they had a single industry, like mining a particular mineral or being the regional radio factory. Others organized to produce a variety of items.

A lot of rational planning and trial and error and adjustment was needed, to make sure all could have an appropriate share of the export production needed. But the volume and variety of these items turned out to be very limited, so it wasn’t such a difficult task.

Remember people accepted very frugal living standards so few elaborate luxuries were being produced.

The towns fiercely demanded and got these restructurings carried out by state governments, because they had to have them, and because governments could see these arrangements must be made or the towns would not survive.

The most important point here was that this was a process whereby the towns, the people in the towns, came to be calling the shots, making the demands, telling central authorities what was needed and what they must do.

Groups of towns were also establishing their own institutions, conferences, research agencies to work out the best developments and to build them and to insist that central authorities enable these.

In these ways the towns and their regional associations were taking over more functions previously left to state governments, and it eventually led to town assemblies having become the major governing agencies.

They muscled in, partly replacing state agencies and partly giving state agencies direct orders and partly installing town reps in government agencies. So state and national governments shrank dramatically and eventually ended up with only a few executive functions.”

“What about legislative functions, passing laws, forming policy?”

“No, that’s the main point; we took these away from centralized, representative, bureaucracy-ridden governments, slowly, just by increasingly pushing in on them, telling them what our regional conferences and referenda etc. had worked out must be done.

We gradually got to the situation where discussions at the town and regional levels and in our conferences were being delivered to state and national governments to implement.

So before very long we formalized the transfer of power to make these decisions at the lowest level, meaning that they were being made by ordinary citizens in town meetings.

That’s how we do it all now, right?

The proper Anarchist way.

Remember again that in a national economy that had undergone dramatic degrowth and in which most of the governing that needed to be done was about local issues and was carried out down at the town level, there was far less for state and national governments to do, making it much easier to shift the center of government from the state to the people.”

“Why did you say ‘proper’ Anarchist way?”

“Because the core Anarchist principle represents the way humans should do things, that is, without anyone ruling over or dominating or having power over anyone else.

Of course sometimes win-win solutions can’t be found, although we always work hard to find them, and the decision has to oblige a minority to go along, but this is citizens doing the ruling, not being ruled by higher authorities.

For at least ten thousand years most people have been ruled, by barons, kings, parliaments, tyrants, and representatives.

That is political immaturity, it’s infantile, not allowing people to cooperatively rule themselves.

That’s why you see monuments around here to the mother of all great depressions. It forced us to adopt the sensible form of government, because we realized that it was not possible to get through those very difficult times unless we ran good towns, and that could not be done other than by thoroughly participatory arrangements and it had to be done without powerful centralized governments ruling over us.”

“Could it all go wrong again? I mean, might we slowly move back to people seeking luxuries and wealth, and inequality building up again, and industries serving the rich emerging, and elites getting power over us, and competition between nations generating international conflict and resource wars?”

“No… mainly because the resources have gone. We burnt through our fabulous inheritance of high grade ores and forests and soils and species in a mere 200 years.

Now you cannot get copper unless you refine extremely poor ores.

We are lucky now because nature prevents us from going down the idiotic growth and affluence path again.

But more importantly there has been a huge cultural awakening, a transition in ideas and values that was bigger and more important than the Enlightenment.

Humans now understand that we must live on very low per capita resource consumption, and that the good life cannot be defined in terms of material wealth, of getting materially richer all the time.”

“Now there’s another point I want to take up … “

“Aw heck, sorry, I overlooked the time. Just realized my astronomy group meets in five minutes.”

“How about after that?”

“Sorry, got an art class.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Sorry, that’s the one day in the week I work for money.”

See also:
Island Breath: How Cuba survived Peak Oil 7/23/06
Island Breath: 1993 - Sustainable Growth Impossible 8/5/06 
Island Breath: Four Future 2050's for Hawaii 8/26/06
Island Breath: Introduction to Kauai Future 12/6/06
Island Breath: Kauai Future 2007-2029 12/12/06
Island Breath: Kauai Future 2030-2050 12/31/06
A PDF Version of all three parts are available as a PDF file:
Island Breath: 2007-2050 PDF


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