Time for a quick update on climate protest from your correspondent somewhere quite a long way behind the frontline, but still closer than you’ll read in the average news report. Then I’m going to bring it all back home before relating it to the present concerns of this blog around my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
So for starters, I’ve got to say that the British government has played a blinder in containing and derailing climate protest in these isles. If only it had displayed the same level of competence in, like, every single other area of its jurisdiction, the country might be in reasonable shape.
When Extinction Rebellion and then Insulate Britain made waves a couple of years back, with protestors pushing at a ‘fill the jails’ strategy, the powers that be opted not to take the bait and for the most part made sure the jails stayed resolutely empty, so that the protestors scored limited publicity wins. The government claimed it was hamstrung by inadequate legislation (it wasn’t), and that it needed to pass more stringent anti-protest legislation (it did).
The timing of the pandemic and the queen’s death weren’t kind to the movement, and when climate protest faded from the news cycle the government – armed with its shiny new Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill – has struck hard. Punitive prison sentences, over-zealous police clampdowns and, most outrageously in my opinion, the muzzling of defendants in court from mentioning climate change as a motivation for their actions – an abandonment of due process that sets up a very slippery slope indeed. Throw in journalists acting as agents provocateurs and a kind of kneejerk middle-of-the-road political gradualism of the ‘doomism and disruption are no way to get your message across’ kind even from sympathetic commentators, and the narrative descent to climate chaos is sealed.
I’m not uncritically supportive of every climate action I’ve seen, but I’m supportive of the fact that protestors are trying to figure out a better narrative that’s equal to the urgency of the times and that claims public space from the grassroots.
Ah well, at least the Labour Party, which may even get to be in government soon, voted against the police bill and has committed to stop new oil and gas exploration. However, Keir Starmer has also called for tougher sentences for protestors. I have a feeling I know which of these two commitments he’s most likely to honour if he manages to climb the greasy pole to power.
Inevitably, in the face of the harsh new legal regimen social media is abuzz with goons gloating along the lines of ‘serves you right, you self-entitled losers, for stopping ordinary people going about their business’ (expletives omitted). The thought occurs, as I track current temperature and political trends, that soon enough the legislation may also be working admirably well for silencing ordinary people going about their business of trying to secure self-entitlement to a square meal and basic human rights, but anyway.
Closer to home, my dear wife’s involvement in the Insulate Britain protests led to her being named on an injunction taken out by the National Highways Authority against protesting on its roads. She didn’t break the injunction, but the NHA sued all the people named on it for their expenses in serving it, and won in court. Meaning we now have an eye-wateringly large bill running to several thousands of pounds to pay. And also meaning that should any other agency take out a new injunction and copy-and-paste the names, there’s no end to the potential liability. Though that’s probably unlikely.
So that, dear reader, is why I said at the end of my last post that I was in need of the readies and desirous of people to buy my new book. Though, seriously, we’re okay financially, so if you’re minded to donate to a climate change cause please give to one that helps people in greater need than us. If, however, you find my writing worthwhile on its own merits, do please consider locating the ‘Donate’ button here on the new site and leaving a tip.
But let’s step back from personal woes and take a look at the bigger economic picture around the injunction. One reason the bill is so hefty is that the NHA’s lawyers charged for their time at over £300 per hour. I get that they have overheads to pay, but, hey, don’t we all?
My own climate protesting has been less full-on than my wife’s, but even so I’ve spent about ten hours twiddling my thumbs in police cells. If I charged out this important work of imploring the government to secure a liveable planet at an equivalent rate to the NHA’s lawyers, that’s £3,000 I’m owed right there. My wife must have clocked up at least fifty hours of cell-based downtime. Throw in about a week of my time devoted to protesting and six weeks on my wife’s part as a bare minimum, and we’re looking at a total expenses claim of around £90,000. There were some additional incidental expenses (public transport to protests isn’t cheap these days – unlike, y’know, driving) but let’s be generous and keep the claim to a round £90k. Subtract our share of the injunction costs and that should still leave us enough money to build the new barn we need. I’ve sent in the invoice, but the government hasn’t yet responded. Busy time of year for them, I guess.
Anyway, all this seems vaguely relevant to the present theme of this blog around my new book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – which is substantially a criticism of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. Monbiot says in Regenesis that extensive livestock farming is “everywhere an economic fantasy” in the sense that nobody makes decent money from it. Which is true enough, although I’d further generalise his remark across the agricultural sector at all scales worldwide and suggest that most farming to produce basic foodstuffs in most places is an economic fantasy. Very few people in the sector make what would be regarded as a good income from it by the standards of the wider economy.
When the modern economy makes the production of the food upon which everybody relies to stay alive an economic fantasy, while remunerating corporate lawyers orders of magnitude more than food producers, it starts to seem like the real economic fantasy is the modern economy itself. It would be interesting to discuss how this state of affairs has come to pass and what kind of future it portends. What real or unreal, fact-based or fantastic, aspects of our world allocate resources respectively to farmers, lawyers and protestors in this way, and what does it tell us about where we’re headed? I have some thoughts about this, but maybe I’ll avoid pre-empting any discussion below by sharing them just now.
What I will say is that modern culture has a lot of theories about why the distribution of work, reward and punishment in our societies is as it is and as it must be. These theories look increasingly implausible, and are probably now on the last, unavoidable part of a crash course with reality. A problem I have with a lot of ecomodernist solutions to present problems, Monbiot’s included, is that they focus too much on why occupations like farming are an economic fantasy and not enough on why occupations like corporate law are. From that mistake, many other errors flow.
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Where do new small holders find land and where do they get the money to purchase the land? How can the goverment insure that enough food is produced for the nation’s population?
I fear that “new small holders” will be few and far between. There is every economic incentive to continue industrial agriculture as it is and very little to move people from cities to small holdings. There will likely never be any pre-planning and cooperation to this end anywhere.
The answer to your second question is clear, but impossible to achieve. The way to make sure people have enough food is to relocate them to small holdings where they can grow their own food, but since that can’t be done for the vast majority of people in industrial countries they eventually won’t get enough.
In what is often called “the global North,” which is also known as “the rich countries” and “the developed world” we’re nearing the end of the type of economy which we’ve known for the last century or so, and there’s no way to continue down the path we’ve been on in this respect. (See: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/)
There will be no smooth transition to a post-carbon luxury-based and luxury-dependent economy, and this means access to basic livelihood (a.k.a., jobs, money) will become increasingly difficult for an increasing number of people… until a point in the real transition arrives in which something basically snaps, and the kind of politics we now have will become impossible to maintain.
Personally, I believe this breakdown will occur sometime between today and five or ten years from now — likely closer to today than ten years out. When the snapping happens, if we’re ill-prepared for this occurrence, social chaos and collapse will ensue, and likely a great many people will die prematurely.
This is why it is necessary — by whatever peaceful means are possible — to transform our politics prior to such social collapse. It is necessary to provide a pre-collapse bridge to the very low carbon economy, which will not be a luxury economy, but a needs based economy. And a needs based economy must be overwhelmingly similar to the sort of small farm future which Chris Smaje has been advocating (though perhaps more often in the form of shared land stewarding, as in ecovillages).
What is required is a movement to inform the public of this need and to ask the public for support in building this bridge prior to collapse. This bridge, indeed, could prevent collapse … of a certain kind, depending on our definition of “collapse”. And Resilience.org and Post Carbon Institute, in my opinion, should help lead the way in building this movement.
Yes to everything you say, but it’s hard to be anything but cynical about bridge building. You see, the public has been informed about the necessity for the transition for many decades, at least since Limits to Growth, to little effect. Nowhere outside of PCI and prepper sites do I see any real clamoring for “back to the land” policies. Half of the US population sees talk of limits as a woke communist plot. Also, due to energy-trap issues it will always be easier to continue the status quo than try to move billions of people out of cities.
I also fear that the “snapping” will be later than you project. Oil has peaked, but there is plenty of coal left and coal use has recently reached an all-time high (8 billion tonnes worldwide). Coal-to-liquids may very well be the last gasp of the industrial economy. If it is, it will certainly ensure that the climate and too much of the biosphere is destroyed. We are alarmingly close to tipping into hothouse earth (if we are not already past that point) and a turn to coal will blow us right past it.
My main hope for a tipping point and collapse is a snapping of the financial system and the global market economy. That could happen at any time (crossed fingers that it’s tomorrow) but the rich world seems to keep putting it off and putting it off. The can is well and truly dented but still tumbling down the road to hell.
Joe,
Staying present to the feelings in despair is painful and difficult, and so many choose not to feel it any longer, and basically numb themselves to the feelings in despair. And I’ve reached a point, recently, where I damned near wish I could choose such numbness. But, so far, I cannot fully embrace despair as a way of life, as a general attitude. So, for me, this means I must work at trying to facilitate social and political transformation, even if the odds of success are abysmally low, at best.
So I continue to advocate for non-violent revolution, as nothing short of revolution is required, and violence would never work anyway. And … violence is ugly as hell.
Many many problems to address converting food production from large commercial farms to depending on small holders. Where do new small holders find land and where do they get the money to purchase the land? How can the goverment insure that enough food is produced for the nations population? The transition to small holders world wide will require pre-planning and cooperation between all the food exporting and importing nations.
Myself I am a former farmer (lost my most of my land in 1995). Today I try to garden but at 71 working in the Florida heat is very tiring. I have an $18,000 compact tractor that helps some. I know how to grow plants but still have a difficult time. Like you I enjoy working outside but finding tens of millions of people (100 million in the US) to do that willingly is a lot to ask for.