What Cuba’s “organic revolution” taught me about AI
The Cuban experience now looks to me like an even more impressive success story, showing purely human intelligence coping with a seriously life-threatening situation at nation-state scale.
Food & Water featured
Localism, manufactured food and energy futures: thoughts from the Groundswell Festival
There will be no food factories on a dead planet, and there will be no low-carbon manufactured food in a fossil-fuelled energy system.
CAP Strategic Plans: More Money, Less Accountability
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, the agricultural sector has found itself embroiled in an ongoing crisis.
Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: Excerpt
The case for manufactured protein is sometimes made on the grounds that its bacterially based processes are more energy efficient than plant photosynthesis. But it’s a misleading claim given the energy costs of producing the generated electricity and industrial plant needed in the manufactured route.
Saying No to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje
Who needs to read Saying No to a Farm-Free Future? Anyone thinking that the ecomodernist prescription might be a good idea; and anyone arguing with ecomodernists and looking for data to back up their feeling that “food” factories in megacities is not the best path.
Review: Saying NO to Ecomodermism. Smaje Versus Monbiot, It’s No Contest
How do those raised in a culture of separation from nature, with abundant exosomatic energy from fossil fuels and vast transportation networks, develop the knowledge, skills, and new culture that draws from the past while preparing for a very different future? Chris Smaje helps us out.
Stepping beyond the livestock sustainability debate
If you know people who are raising livestock in low impact and low energy ways that enhance your local food system, then hold tight to them because they are probably pioneers who will be needed as we enter new worlds of agrarian localism.
Local Food for Rapid Transition
By building the local food economy and adapting to place, nothing less than a new indigenous foodway is emerging. I am watching rapid transition take place before my eyes – and it’s beautiful.
The Tale of the Plow
And I would submit that it is the idea behind the plow — the idea that humans are so specially superior that they are allowed to cause widespread death and destruction in the name of satisfying their wants — that is the actual root of all our culture’s problems.
‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’ – out this week
My book is a polemical critique of George Monbiot’s book, Regenesis. In it, I make the case for agrarian localism in the face of his derision for the same.
The More-Than-Human Magic of Transhumance
We humans are beings grounded in the earth, or ‘humus’; when we move a herd across ground, it’s described as ‘transhumance’.
Flash droughts: Are they the new normal?
Drought conditions are sneaking up on us much more quickly, more often than in the past.
