The cruel fantasies of well-fed people

[nekomatic]

Pretty scathing piece by George Monbiot on agrarian fantasist nostalgia versus the need to supply the world with food. Keep in your back pocket for next time you encounter one of the fantasists.

Although I probably won’t bring it up at the right-on organic veg shop, as getting barred would be awkward.

[Grumble]

This also chimes with Steve Novella’s view that we need agriculture to become more intensive, not less. In order to preserve nature, his argument goes, we need to reduce the land we use. In order to do that we need to intensify. In a vegetarian world we might be able to reduce land usage without further intensification I suppose, but it’s hard to argue that he’s wrong. The main challenge to this argument would come from bioreactor food production, though you could argue that this is just maximally intensified food production.

[lpm]

Strange article.

He seems to be arguing against some nutter who wants the urban elite re-educated in the virtues of peasant labour.

Why bother?

[Martin Y]

Strange article.

He seems to be arguing against some nutter who wants the urban elite re-educated in the virtues of peasant labour.

Why bother?

Perhaps as a contingency against the tories winning the next election. Eventually the survivors will mainly be serfs, tilling the land for a few warlords.

[bjn]

Strange article.

He seems to be arguing against some nutter who wants the urban elite re-educated in the virtues of peasant labour.

Why bother?

Because lionising an ancient bucolic idle is a common bit of foolishness, often espoused by a certain type of woolly thinker. Which includes our head of state.

[Tessa K]

Strange article.

He seems to be arguing against some nutter who wants the urban elite re-educated in the virtues of peasant labour.

Why bother?

Because lionising an ancient bucolic idle is a common bit of foolishness, often espoused by a certain type of woolly thinker. Which includes our head of state.

I blame Tolkein.

[Imrael]

When I was a student I was interested for a while in the ideas in E E Schumachers "Small is Beautiful". It proposed a return to a labour-intensive smallholder model of agriculture. It had some traction with the then-current environmental movement (which had very differrent focusses back then). Monbiot is a little younger than me but maybe these ideas are still around and he is reacting against them

[Woodchopper]

When I was a student I was interested for a while in the ideas in E E Schumachers "Small is Beautiful". It proposed a return to a labour-intensive smallholder model of agriculture. It had some traction with the then-current environmental movement (which had very differrent focusses back then). Monbiot is a little younger than me but maybe these ideas are still around and he is reacting against them

I think they've been around since the advent of mass urbanization in the 19th Century, with new books and pamphlets being written every few decades to interest new generations.

[dyqik]

When I was a student I was interested for a while in the ideas in E E Schumachers "Small is Beautiful". It proposed a return to a labour-intensive smallholder model of agriculture. It had some traction with the then-current environmental movement (which had very differrent focusses back then). Monbiot is a little younger than me but maybe these ideas are still around and he is reacting against them

I think they've been around since the advent of mass urbanization in the 19th Century, with new books and pamphlets being written every few decades to interest new generations.

Certainly Thoreau and the other Concord Transcendentalists were in the frame of mind.

[bjn]

When I was a student I was interested for a while in the ideas in E E Schumachers "Small is Beautiful". It proposed a return to a labour-intensive smallholder model of agriculture. It had some traction with the then-current environmental movement (which had very differrent focusses back then). Monbiot is a little younger than me but maybe these ideas are still around and he is reacting against them

I think they've been around since the advent of mass urbanization in the 19th Century, with new books and pamphlets being written every few decades to interest new generations.

Certainly Thoreau and the other Concord Transcendentalists were in the frame of mind.

The guy had his mother do his washing for him while he was toughing it out in the wilderness. I got a few pages into Walden and thought he as a total tool and couldn't be arsed to finish it.

[Bewildered]

When I saw this title I got very excited because I thought it would be detailed bdsm fantacies written by severely obese doms.

Shame on you all for not delivering.

[Stranger Mouse]

When I saw this title I got very excited because I thought it would be detailed bdsm fantacies written by severely obese doms.

Shame on you all for not delivering.

That’s unfair. I’m sitting here naked eating as fast as I can to push myself from overweight to obese.

You can’t satisfy some people.

[IvanV]

Pretty scathing piece by George Monbiot on agrarian fantasist nostalgia versus the need to supply the world with food. Keep in your back pocket for next time you encounter one of the fantasists.

This is very good, which is an unusual response from me to something from George Monbiot. Usually he is the one writing the crap that this time he effectively and eloquently dissects.

20 years ago I was in Ethiopia, walking through mountains, and, on the way, through fields being cultivated by hand, not a tractor in sight, something I have also observed in Bolivia, parts of Morocco, etc. Something like 70% of people work in agriculture in Ethiopia, a proportion that persisted throughout much of the mediaeval period in Europe. With 70% of your labour resource devoted to food production, it means that there isn't much left for anything else. Inevitably, nearly everyone is very poor.

The productivity of staple production in Ethiopia 20 years ago was only 1/5 of what happens in the great plains where most staples are grown. It is that point that left me somewhat more sanguine about the population growth in Ethiopia. When I was there, the population was about 65 million, and was believed to be growing at something like 1m to 1.5m a year. That turned out to be an underestimate, because today the population is about 107 million. And indeed the land productivity of crops has grown very substantially in Ethiopia over that time, as it had large potential to do. But inevitably, greater productivity comes from mechanisation and technology and larger scale production, which means people moving to cities and out of the countryside. It will come as little surprise that Ethiopia has been governed by an authoritarian government that discourages people moving to cities, though of course in reality it has been an unstoppable force. And such is the story that all countries go through as they develop.

A further point that Monbiot might have made is that cities are an unstoppable force because they are very efficient. People crowd together because putting people and non-agricultural production in close press reduces the cost of living and increases the productivity of non-agricultural production. It is also no accident that property prices tend to be higher in central parts of cities, because people actually experience that greater productivity in their life and so are willing to pay more to live where the productivity is highest.

For most of history, human population was limited by the production potential of the land, given the technology of the day. As technology improved, population expanded to the potential of it, and people remained just as poor. That is why most people remained perpetually poor, at more or less the same standard of living, from Roman times to the eve of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution could not have happened without prior new large technological improvement in agriculture, freeing labour to enable the new industries. At this point, the great divergence occurred, where the standard of living of people in the nations that developed in the industrial revolution grew rapidly, while other places - mostly Asia and Africa - continued along the same old same old population-expands-to-the-production-potential-of-the-land keeping most people at the same level of subsistence poverty they had been living at since their ancestors ceased to be hunter-gatherers.

The environmental destruction of the planet as we expand food production does raise the question of whether we should place limits on that, and hence place limits on the population potential of the planet. As regions eventually join the industrial revolultion and move out of poverty, typically population stabilises and eventually falls. Every time people re-project, it seems like planetary population may max out a bit lower than they previously thought.

I'm willing to pay a premium for some quality cheese and meat that takes more land to produce than the basic stuff. In Britain, agriculture is currently so unprofitable that land is being taken out of production. Around me, it is increasingly run to horses for leisure purposes. Elsewhere, the number of dairy farms is crashing rapidly, because bulk milk production is unprofitable unless you are using the most efficient methods, which don't have cows wandering around fields. Since that is what happens on a lot of our land, as it is removed, it leaves space for some people to engage in land-intensive high quality production that people like me pay a premium for.

And, let us remember, it is not because Britain is feeding itself from a smaller land area now. We only produce something like 60% of our food. We import a lot of our food from places that produce it more cheaply. But in a sense that's just like urbanisation. We don't expect every small area of Britain to feed itself, so why should we expect every small more densely populated country to feed itself.

[discovolante]

I think they've been around since the advent of mass urbanization in the 19th Century, with new books and pamphlets being written every few decades to interest new generations.

Certainly Thoreau and the other Concord Transcendentalists were in the frame of mind.

The guy had his mother do his washing for him while he was toughing it out in the wilderness. I got a few pages into Walden and thought he as a total tool and couldn't be arsed to finish it.

Off topic slightly, Thoreau was at least opposed to slavery. There is probably a reasonably strong correlation between having sound anti-establishment views and being a touch or more than a touch off-track in other areas, but the 'wacky' views do seem to be the ones that become/are made more prominent in general public discourse.