Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A new report from the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) discusses the results of the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey. The number of American farmers is decreasing and their average age is increasing, as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This survey examines the needs and challenges of young farmers to determine how to encourage a new generation of farmers.
In his article, Richard Smith calls upon his readers to “change the conversation”. He asks, “What are your thoughts?” He says, if we don’t “come up with a viable alternative, our goose is cooked.” I fully agree. So I join the conversation, in order to improve it.
Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism (Biteback Publishing 2017) is a powerful attack on rentier capitalism and, very explicitly, a call to revolt. It is very informative and the detailed factual descriptions that Standing puts before his readers are intended to make them angry. He succeeded with me and probably will with most readers.
The gradual climb in oil prices in recent weeks has revived hopes that US shale oil producers will return to profitability, while also renewing fevered dreams of the US becoming a fossil fuel superpower once again. Helen Thompson looks at the same shale oil revolution and draws strikingly different conclusions, both about the future of the oil economy and about the effects on US relations with OPEC, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.
I wonder if the process of learning and discovering with our senses isn’t really what makes us human, what makes our life worthwhile. Perhaps this is how as humans we evolved our ‘big’ brains, our specialized neural networks. Maybe in exploring the word with our senses and trying to make sense of it all, we developed language in order to tell stories, we developed writing in order to keep records, and in the process we advanced our social group from tribes into culture and from culture into civilizations.
Over the past three years, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have remained relatively flat. However, early estimates from the Global Carbon Project (GCP) using preliminary data suggest that this is likely to change in 2017 with global emissions set to grow by around 2%, albeit with some uncertainties.
We want a business that’s sufficient that pays our wage, pays the wage of the people that we employ, allows us to do all the things that we enjoy, but there’s still a huge opportunity for lots of other businesses operating all over the UK, like Grown in Totnes, to flourish in the same way. So yeah, it’s exciting.
To continue… I think it’s about time we headed in a different direction. The mulcting of ordinary people described by Goubert for the peasants of 17th century France has being going on long enough around the world in various guises, often in service of top-down notions of ‘development’ that have rarely returned full value to the people it subjects. So maybe it’s time to draw a line under the cargo cult utopia of capitalism with its promise of more ‘stuff’ ever-receding into the future, and explore the other pole of the peasant experience described by Wolf’s narrative of the peasant utopia.
The problem is, we live in an economy built on perpetual growth but we live on a finite planet with limited resources and sinks. To date, all efforts to “green” capitalism have foundered on this fundamental contradiction: maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, here and there, they might coincide for a moment. That’s because under capitalism, CEOs and corporate boards are not responsible to society, they’re responsible to private shareholders.
Imagine a world where corporate charters were only granted if they adopted a triple bottom line, and where shareholder lawsuits threatened every time a company broke one of its own social and environmental standards. Until that happens, it may be that the “worst event in the history of our civilization” is not the future development of modern AI, but the decision by a group of 17thcentury politicians to unleash the power of the Corporation on an unsuspecting humanity.
You have to take the time to train yourself. You have to take the time to convince yourself or to test yourself in the profession, to dirty your hands in the soil and to really see what it’s all about. There is a lot of fantasy around these projects but there’s also a reality which is difficult. It can be absolutely incredible, but it can be a nightmare if it’s done without preparation, without a good human design, without a good design for the site.
Now the Wine Country fires are out and Richard is available to come back on Locus Focus for this episode, but instead of talking about the original topic we’re going to look at how all the disasters we’ve witnessed this year are highlighting critical lessons about what it means not only to build a sustainable future but one that is resilient as well.
