Dan Allen

When Agriculture Stops Working: Ten Recommendations for Growing Food in the Anthropocene

Now, despite my best efforts to look into the crystal ball here, I fully expect there will be a lot about the future of human food acquisition that will surprise me…and perhaps even in a good way! But in light of all the known troubles bearing down on us, I think it’s just plain suicidal to muddle on as-per-usual and hope it’ll all be OK.

When agriculture stops working: A guide to growing food in the age of climate destabilization and civilization collapse

As the toxic trappings of industrial civilization crumble around us, agriculture is set to regain its place at the forefront of our daily American lives.  …And won’t we be surprised to find out that it barely works anymore!  So perhaps it’s time we re-think our modern food-acquisition strategies in the face of the massive changes bearing down on us.  …

Extirpation Nation: How much of the US will be habitable in 50 years?

If the end is indeed near – say, within the next 50 years -- it will quite likely come in the form of extreme drought and/or nuclear contamination.  A couple key maps help us flesh out these possibilities.  …So is there something we can do about this?

Collapsing Into Gaia: What to expect when you’re expecting collapse

We are in the early stages of a great unraveling, an epic collapse of the largest human civilization this planet will ever know.  How are we to make sense of it?  Maybe this little diagram can help.

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)

No civilization has ever faced the agricultural challenges confronting us over the coming decades. Ever. And if we can pull it off – wherever we CAN pull it off – it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience; an agriculture that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again and again. So let’s do this.

Dialogue: I Spoke to the Land and to the People of the Machines

Then I returned and spoke again to the land. I said, “Tell me, what do the people of the machines want?” And I waited a very long time in silence. And when the land finally spoke it said this...

Occupying Post-Collapse America: What if the industrial death-urge lived on?

The Occupy movement is a start. But the stakes are rising. The earth is dying. The biocidal industrial economy, while coming apart at the seams, still rages on. …And what if the industrial disease DOESN’T die with collapse? What then? And what does that imply for resistance movements?

Planting our perennial future: Corn trees, oil bushes, potato thickets, & sweater swards

The current industrial model of US agriculture is economically, energetically, and ecologically doomed. Any hope for a livable future requires that we accelerate the creation of resilient, ecologically-viable ‘shadow structure’ replacements for industrial US agriculture in the diminishing time available to us. We already possess the tools, knowledge, and organizational structures to begin such …

Deus ex Machina: Will economic collapse save us from climate catastrophe?

A new paper by NASA’s James Hansen suggests that immediate and drastic declines (ca. 6% annual) in industrial CO2 emissions are required to avoid catastrophic climatic destabilization. As no realistic political solution exists for such immediate CO2 reduction, prospects for a livable future have now become dependent on a single back-breaking option: rapid global economic collapse. And in ‘Deus …

The perennial imperative: Breaking the land-abuse spiral of annual agriculture

As the primary energy source for human civilization, annual crops are an inappropriate technology. We can’t HELP but misuse them, and the consequences of their inevitable misuse are dreadful, essentially permanent, and morally unforgivable. We must find a better way.