Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To break the bonds of dependence on capital is the objective of agriculture organized according to an explicitly oriented approach to remunerating labor and ensuring the ecological reproduction of the means of production. Agroecology is this approach.
The story of trying to hold the existing political centre will be a story of fascism, Caesarism, bread and circuses. Whereas the non-fascist story will be one of trying to create livelihoods as convivially as possible, mostly from the local resources – human and non-human – to hand.
More than ever, public support for healthy food production and distribution shows itself as a win-win strategy that is indispensable for combining long-standing social and economic challenges, now aggravated by the COVID-19 outbreak.
Because the film is so compelling and Attenborough such a sympathetic person, viewers may accept all of its statements and arguments. This would, however, be a mistake in my opinion.
As we cannot now afford to take vast tracts of land out of production due to the high and growing global population, the only viable option has to be to farm all land in harmony with wildlife and preserve what little wilderness is left.
What if we don’t look back on 2020 as the year from hell, a painful and surreal slip on the otherwise generally smooth path of progress? What if, instead, we look back in five or ten or twenty years to 2020 as the moment when everything started to really and truly unravel?
If we’re to bequeath a habitable and abundant planet to our descendants, a key part of that reappraisal involves rethinking the relevance of small farm or ‘peasant’ societies that are often dismissed for their ‘backwardness’ or buried under an unusable legacy of romanticism and nostalgia.
But what’s perhaps of greatest import are the points where our human self-conceptions confront the wider world – and here farming looms large. Since I’m hopeless at multi-tasking, how fortunate, then, that I’m a ‘former’ social scientist and a farmer, albeit improperly!
Closely weaving together habitation, community, and society, Arnie pays attention to how culture was and is created.
Water is everything – the only reason we survive here is because of water, the only reason anything survives here is because of water. We’re not talking about it, we’re not thinking about it; we’re just using it and polluting it, not thinking about what it’s being used for and how it could be used better.
Voting is such a powerful tool for impacting our communities that it’s often said that “your vote is your voice.” If that statement strikes you as naïve, consider the resources invested in voter suppression in just the past decade…
The heavy-handed nostalgia for a perfected vision of past modern achievements as the lodestar of human progress offered by figures like Steven Pinker is stuck in the past. It’s time to move forwards to a small farm future.
