TL;DR: The most coherent treatment of the environmental and associated crises, and the fallout from them, that I have come across; a must read.

I have stumbled on Chris Smaje by chance while browsing blogroll.org looking for interesting (to me) rss feeds. Even at just a brief glance at the blog, Chris’ thinking struck a chord with me in a way that no other has in recent years, and so I promptly ordered his two books.

My own reflections on the reality of climate change, and the discourse around it, have repeatedly run into three major stumbling blocks:

  1. The dominance of what I prefer to refer to as Utopian Technologism, the idea that any and every problem can be solved by technological means. Alas, socio-economic problems don’t lend themselves to technological solutions, and climate change is, most fundamentally, a socio economic problem, the result of gross over-exploitation of earth’s natural resources. As such climate change cannot be addressed without a dramatic, permanent, cut in our resource (not least fossil fuel) use. This is sometimes referred to as degrowth, but the idea really exists only on the (mostly left) fringe of the environmental discourse.

  2. When degrowth is talked about there is often implied equivalence between the growth economic model and capitalism as a system — do away with capitalism, and all will be well. However, the growth economic is merely a specific expression of the generic idea of an endless ongoing progress, which is inherent to marxist economics as much, if not more, as it is to capitalism; the marxist state is as obsessed with wealth generation as capitalism is.[1]

  3. The contemporary environmental discourse is oversimplistic and short on seeing the whole picture. Most of the passionately advocated solutions do not scale up to the required planetary scale on their own, and are also mutually incompatible with each other at larger scale. This includes recycling, renewables, veganism, rewilding.[2]

I have not been able, in my own mind, to work through these issues toward cogent answers; but Chris Smaje, I think, has.

A Small Farm Future is well researched and coherently argued book, and is the first piece of writing that I have come across that doesn’t sidestep these issues. Smaje makes the point that the principal question of degrowth is, and must be, where will the food come from (having read the book, this now seems the obvious question to be asking, but I must admit it’s not something I spent much time reflecting on prior to that).

If the key to climate change is in drastic reduction of our use of fossil fuels, Smaje points out this means making agriculture considerably less energy intensive than it is at present. And the only way to achieve this is to make it more labour intensive (this point is, I think, widely applicable beyond agriculture — labour savings are invariably paid for by energy consumption, whether we are talking about agricultural labour, industrial labour, domestic work or AI).

Smaje argues that the best/only way this can be achieved is through small scale, family based, farming, with most of us being involved in food production, and producing significant proportion of our own food. That is, the future belongs to the small farm, either through voluntary controlled transition, or simply because it will be forced upon us when the current economic system collapses.

The book doesn’t answer all possible questions, nor it attempts to lay out a detailed plan for what the future will look like / how to get there, but the overall argument is cogent and persuasive, and it has helped me in clarifying some of my thinking on the current environmental crises.

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[1] This is self evident to anyone who has experienced the reality of the five year plans of the marxist economic first hand, and the extreme, untempered, ideologically driven resource exploitation that came with it. The marxist praxis is considerably different from what its western proponents imagine it to be.

[2] Recycling doesn’t work, most of the materials we consume cannot be recycled and/or the environmental costs of the recycling are worse than cost of the new materials; advocates of renewables are unwilling to face up to the (unmeetable) material costs (as in the quantities of steel, copper, cement required), as well as the associated environmental costs of deploying such a low energy density systems at the requisite scale; the proponents of the vegan diet seem unaware of where fertilisers come from and the implications of deploying the western vegan diet at planetary scale; for the inadequacy of the rewilding ecological model you can see here.