Since 2015 Resilience has been publishing articles by Chris Smaje. Chris writes eloquently about a variety of sustainability-oriented topics, including critiques of what you might call “high-energy modernity” and forays into political economy, but his specialty is the role of small organic farms in a future that is more energetically and materially constrained. The subtitle of his book, A Small Farm Future, sums up his aim quite well: “Making the case for a society built around local economies, self-provisioning agricultural diversity, and a shared Earth.”
In “making the case,” Chris has criticized George Monbiot’s take on livestock farming and artificial meat. The debate first materialized in print six years ago when George wrote an article that appeared in The Guardian, and Chris wrote a critical response that appeared on his blog and in Resilience. In his article, George argued that the rise of cheap artificial meat should signal the end of all types of livestock farming, including that practiced by small organic farmers. In his response, Chris expressed surprise at George’s conclusions and argued that there’s a valid role for livestock to play on ecologically sound farms.
Their debate has since expanded into a larger quarrel over how to feed a growing human population, at a time when we’re experiencing worsening trends in soil depletion, chemical pollution, water scarcity, weather chaos, concentration of financial power, widening gaps between the rich and the poor, and other disconcerting environmental and social conditions. George wrote a book called Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, that came out in 2022 and calls for an overhaul of global farming, including investment in artificial meat to free up grazing land. Chris’s book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, came out this summer and directly challenges George’s proposals for the future of food. Following publication of his book, Chris wrote numerous articles that we have published in Resilience that continue to criticize high-tech industrially manufactured food while supporting low-input agrarian localism.
On October 4th, George posted to his blog an article titled “The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People” that pushed back, and he reached out to Resilience to ask us if we would publish it. Although Resilience does not claim to be an unbiased journal,* we are often willing to publish opposing points of view, and we support dialog and debate on critical issues. But in this case, the editorial team decided not to publish it because (1) we felt like George made too many leaps in ascribing beliefs to Chris that misrepresent his position, (2) we thought George crossed a line in attacking Chris, and (3) there’s a power imbalance between these two writers; George has far more reach and influence. On October 23, Chris wrote a point-by-point response in Resilience to George’s “Cruel Fantasies” article, and George asked us a second time to publish his. The Ecologist reposted George’s article on October 6th and didn’t publish Chris’s follow-up. (Ed. note: The Ecologist has now published an alternative short response from Chris. You can find it here.) All this back and forth has led me to write the chronology and analysis you’re reading now.
Based on their bodies of writing, it appears that Chris and George share many underlying values, want many of the same things for people and nature, and would agree on premises such as:
- Everyone deserves access to adequate nutritious food.
- Agriculture, as it’s widely practiced today, is unsustainable, polluting, and wreaking havoc on soil, waterways, and habitats.
- We need to find ways of feeding ourselves (and conducting all manner of other human affairs) that are congruent with nature’s limits, avoid undermining the life-support systems of the planet, and allow other species to thrive.
- It’s better to prepare for tough times than to react after you’re mired in them.
A commenter (Joe Clarkson) on Chris’s Oct 23rd article hit the nail on the head in characterizing the rift. It’s not about why humanity is in a bind, and it’s not about whether we need to make massive changes to get out of the bind—it’s about how we might be able to get out of the bind. Clarkson says about cities, “There will just not be enough energy to maintain them and to keep food and other resources going into them. This puts everyone who lives in a city, and many others too, at risk for starvation and death. Smaje offers re-ruralization as a risk-reducing step and Monbiot offers a hypothetical synthetic food system.”
Like Clarkson, Resilience is more aligned with Chris’s view. Resilience and Post Carbon Institute (my employer and the parent organization of Resilience) have become a hub for articles and reports that wrestle with how society can function in a pro-social, environmentally sound way after the fossil fuel bonanza subsides. Our take is that we will have to power down, derive most of our energy from daily flows of solar energy, and relocalize production, including in the food sector, which will mean a reversal of the modern trend of urbanization. A few years ago, we even produced, edited, and distributed Jason Bradford’s report The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. We are hoping for a rapid transition of agriculture to small organic farms that employ lots of people who produce enough food for everyone to thrive, all while working with nature to support habitat and biodiversity. This vision seems more practical and likely to succeed than a system that relies on high-tech, high-energy manufacturing of synthetic food, and more consistent with what’s required in other aspects of modern society.
While I’m addressing the issue of vision, as it applies to feeding people and the future of farming, I want to share something I recently learned from Elizabeth Sawin, the founder and director of the Multisolving Institute. Beth is an advisor to Post Carbon Institute, and we recently invited her to talk with our staff about the visioning practices she uses when working with students and other people confronting global warming and related environmental issues. She explained that people tend to develop their worldviews, behaviors, and actions based on simple rules. For example, if the simple rule in a corporate boardroom is “we must earn profits,” then the executives who run that corporation will see profit-making as a good thing, and they will act accordingly to ensure that they cut costs and earn lots of revenues. Beth further explained that, regarding how people treat nature and one another, there’s a battle between two worldviews, each based on simple rules. The first worldview, which is the one that put humanity in a precarious position of overshoot, is based on the simple rules of extraction, gaining power over, and domination. The second, which is an ecological worldview, is based on the simple rules of mutuality, being part of, and webs of relationships. When considering a vision for the future, it’s important to assess which of these two sets of simple rules that vision follows. I invite you to take a look at what George and Chris are proposing and see where you land.
Finally, I want to report that this was the least fun article I’ve written since, well, I can’t remember. My problem is that I have great respect for both George Monbiot and Chris Smaje. I hate to see these two deeply concerned environmentalists attacking one another. Having read their latest articles, I understand that their main beef (livestock or synthetic – sorry, I couldn’t resist) is with one another’s ideas. But I also sensed hurt and defensiveness behind their words. We need constructive debates about food and farming so that we can find the best ideas for addressing the desperate business at hand: figuring out how to live healthily on a healthy planet.
*It says right there on the website that “Resilience.org aims to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these.”
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Thank you. Great piece, astute comments.
We have an issue, as the rift between traditional conservationists (who adopted Climate Change seamlessly) and existentialists, widens. Sometimes there is cross-over (ecologists, and sometime even ecological economists), but mostly there is a widening gap.
The conservationists will all be empathetic types; caring is an obvious prerequisite – and Monbiot fits that description squarely. But empathy and pragmatism can be uneasy bedfellows, and if you add in a limited education in physics….
The real leaders in this are not mentioned, but Nate Hagens is facilitating, and Tom Murphy is driving, the front end of the debate. Under the lowering lid of the Limits they articulate, is the only space in which we can maneuver. That says that half the UN Sustainable Development Goals are unattainable, ex population limitation/reduction. That say that unlimited ‘human rights’ are invalid, ex population limitation/reduction.
The question then becomes a big-picture one; how do we land this running-out-of-fuel plane with the least jolting? Obviously, population reduction as fast as information can drive it, is paramount. But how to feed the reducing numbers without depleting soils, waterways and biota, is the head-scratch. For 8 billion people, ex fossil-calorie input, there may simply not be an answer.
But there will always be best cards in the pack; best options even of a sub-par set of options, and there is never harm in identifying and playing the best card. This is where Monbiot fails, because food is energy, and you cannot create it. So the energy has to have come from somewhere. The sun, in Chris’ case. Down some fossil-powered grid-wire, is the presumed answer in the case of lab-food. The latter, then, is like a hybrid car – maybe slightly more efficient (or not) but answering the wrong question.
Dealing with well-meaning, empathetically-thinking but not existentially-thinking folk, is hard. They often get distressed, and often leave the room/group/discussion. Population, particularly, seems to distress them as a topic, but fear of offending them is no excuse for not having the essential discussion. Thank you Resilience.
Hi Rob.. I know both of them a bit and I agree
that George stepped over a line in how he attacked Chris’s morality and that there could have been a much more productive exchange there.. I’ve written my own response to George here.. https://www.scanthehorizon.org/p/george-and-the-food-system-dragon. – I think he has some fundamentally wrong assumptions about the food system which I try to take on. Best, Jim
As a long term (including financial) supporter of the Post Carbon Institute, I think you’ve made the wrong decision in not posting George Monbiot’s article.
I consider myself to be an engineering Luddite. I believe in using the best technology that will do the job, but not more. George Monbiot personifies what I see as a fundamental failing in the environmental movement. His heart is in the right place, but he doesn’t understand technology. If synthetic food could be made with lower total environmental impact than holistic farming, I would support it. But it can’t.
“The Ecologist reposted George’s article on October 6th and has declined to publish Chris’s follow-up.”
I’m slightly confused about the relationship between The Ecologist and Resurgence Magazine. In their print versions, they are published together between the same covers. And they have a shared website as well. But when I found Monbiot’s article (the one which was so harsh toward Smaje), it was on a website devoted exclusively to Resurgence Magazine. So I’m not sure that it is entirely correct to say that Monbiot’s article was published in The Ecologist, per se.
In any case, the fact that they (whoever they are) refused to publish Smaje’s follow-up offends me. This seems to me to be a violation of editorial ethics. Both The Ecologist and Resurgence are stained by this.
A Small Farm Future*
*individual results may vary
**terms and conditions may apply
***offer excludes any person without access to reliable rainfall, arable land and moderate climate
My first question is did the Ecomodernists kidnap 2015’s George Monbiot, the one who authored the Guardian piece citing Smaje against the ecomodernists, and brainwash him?
Monbiot clearly doesn’t want to talk about energy. As Nate Hagens taught me, we’ve gone from getting 10 units of food energy per one input of largely human or animal energy to using 10 units of fossil fuel energy to get one unit of food energy. Too bad the Butz-heads didn’t realize that was unsustainable before they demanded the whole world’s food production be switched to their system. I think Smaje starts with that problem and envisions a return to high labor inputs to grow food.
The second thing, something not emphasized enough, is that Smaje’s project isn’t only to grow food; it is also aimed at the huge restoration project required by decades of fencerow-to-fencerow plowing and fertilizing and pesticiding. Restoring soils and fresh water courses is nowhere on Monbiot’s dance card, either because he thinks these things will restore themselves, which they would if we had lots and lots of time, but we don’t have that luxury, or because it’s not a concern of his.
The man who argued effectively against the Ecomodernists 8 years ago has become one himself, just as Smaje labels him. When you’ve been traveling down a path that leads you to cliff’s edge, it’s insanity to keep going in the same direction. Monbiot’s solution to agricultural technology’s ruining our soils and water is to take an Indiana Jones “step of faith” into a technology even more demanding of energy and further removed from Earth’s natural processes. That’s an Ecomodernist move as much as Monbiot tries to deny it.
The wiser response to finding one’s self staring into the abyss is to step back, retrace some steps and choose a path that doesn’t lead to the edge of the gorge. Peasant farming is a plausible alternative path, especially if enhanced by what we’ve learned about permaculture, food forests, etc. How would we get there? The first thing would be to end the decades-long assault by people like Gates against the millions still engaged in peasant farming. We should be learning from them, not forcing them off the land with cheap imports, patented seeds, etc. Second, we should form farming guilds to teach and promote ecosystem-restoring techniques and while protecting those engaged in permaculture, etc. through the power of the collective. Third, we should be shifting research efforts toward learning more about Earth’s processes and how we can fit our needs within those processes.
Humans need to be closer to the Earth, not removed from it. It’s the only way to restore some of the damage we’ve done both to the Earth and to ourselves during this Carbon Pulse party.
Thanks for the article Rob, and for navigating this tricky issue. Thanks also for the discussion.
But I just want to push back against Colin Boyle’s comment – I’m getting a bit tired of this ‘deaths of billions’ labelling, which scarcely encourages open debate. I’m not aware of any workings in George’s book about how to feed the world’s population sustainably, apart from his microbial protein analysis. This amounts to much less than such a demonstration for various reasons, among them that, as I’ve shown, his energy figures are flawed, and that he provides no account of how to supply sufficient clean electricity to support this method. It seems to me far more likely that George’s proposals will result in hunger, through their improbable punt on energetically high-cost urban metabolisms and electrically-energised food, than investing in the peasant food web, as Jim Thomas refers to it in his important article linked above.
The evidence suggests that the peasant food web can feed the world at the very least just as well as the industrial food chain. ‘How many can be fed’ is not really a relevant question in this debate since area productivities of the peasant food web are high, particularly in view of arable overproduction in the industrial food chain. Nor is it a question that anyone can answer with any certainty in relation to ANY future food production method. How to get the politics right around the food system and how to protect wildlife ARE relevant questions, but they don’t admit to easy quantification, and George certainly doesn’t quantify them meaningfully in his work. What does seem clear is that yield-improving agricultures don’t necessarily actually spare land for wildlife, and indeed are potentially harmful. So yes it would be great to debate these things, but it would be easier to do so without wild accusations about mass death and biocide, and without unrealistic demands for quantification that neither side of the argument has given or realistically can give.
“(1) we felt like George made too many leaps in ascribing beliefs to Chris that misrepresent his position, (2) we thought George crossed a line in attacking Chris, and (3) there’s a power imbalance between these two writers.”
Point 3 could be a valid argument for the decision you made.
As for point 2, Smaje describes his book as: “… a polemical critique of George Monbiot’s book, Regenesis”, on this very website. What made Monbiot’s essay an attack and Smajes “polemical critique” and consecutive essays on this (and his own) website not an attack? If it’s supposedly the higher quality of Smajes arguments in the essays, I’m not seeing it.
Which brings me to point 1. Should I assume that you don’t consider Smaje doing exactly the same? Smaje has openly tried again and again to paint Monbiot as an ecomodernist. It was easily brushed off by Monbiot in his essay, and it seems Smaje has finally understood the argument has no merit. But still he clings to it, only now he is doing it between the lines. Here’s from his latest essay (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-20/of-settlers-colonists-and-doomers/): “…a superiority that lurks within ecomodernist plans to save the world through bacterial protein, nuclear energy and so on….” Or how to say Monbiot is an ecomodernist with saying Monbiot is an ecomodernist (I’ll get to this recurring and annoying implicitness in a bit).
Then there is the argument that Monbiot wants a farm free future. Smaje might not have mentioned this explicitly (although the title of the book suggests Smaje thinks Monbiot does really think that – there’s that annoying implicitness again), but almost everybody commenting on the discussion is saying Monbiot thinks that. Jason Bradford did it in his review of the book on this website, and Jim Thomas is doing it as well in the (otherwise good) article mentioned in the comments: “George nowadays argues for replacing farming (yes all of it-….”. No he doesn’t. Here from his essay: “I will state my position once more, but with no confidence that he or others will hear it: I do not want to see any depopulation of the countryside.”
And now for the implicitness in Smajes writing: He repeatedly argues in an extremely annoying way, where he’ll say something implicitly, and when called out for what he obviously meant, cowardly says his words have been misinterpreted. To give two examples: Monbiot wrote that Smaje calling cities “human feedlots” was overly negative, Smaje then acted as if the term was completely neutral and had some elaborate play of words to prove that. Who does Smaje think he’s fooling?
Smaje also tried to implicitly say Monbiot wanted 90% of the population in cities because an event he was involved with was sponsored by RePlanet. In a review of Smajes book (https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/09/hope-for-a-humane-agricultural-future-a-review-of-saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future/), this was mentioned and Monbiot asked for a correction, because it was nonsense. Smaje then reacted that he had indeed never said that and that he was misinterpreted. Yet here is Smaje, from this website (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-06-27/saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future-out-this-week/): “Monbiot has fronted the Reboot Food campaign sponsored by an organization, RePlanet, with visions to rewild three-quarters of the world’s farmland, produce all of humanity’s protein needs on an area the size of Greater London and locate 90% of the population in cities” So what is Smaje trying to say here, if not that Monbiot supports that? If you mention it, you deem it a valuable part of your argument. You can’t hide behind leaving all interpretation to the reader. Your not just the messenger. Again, who does Smaje think he’s fooling?
I would suggest Smaje stops with the implicit suggestions, writes a bit more explicitly and just owns what he means to say. By the way, I think it’s a bit stark that Smaje plays the “guilty by association” card when he has a blurb by Joel Salatin on his book cover. It is not a good look, and I’m surprised nobody at Resilience.org, with its support for indigenous people, has picked up on that.
Do I have an axe to grind with Smaje? Not at all. But what frustrates me is that he is given a free pass here (and on websites in this sphere). And that doesn’t seem to be on the basis of his arguments, but because he is supposedly ‘one of us’. If somebody, anybody, writes rickety arguments, then that should be mentioned. Fanboism is wrong no matter where. That doesn’t seem to apply to Smaje though. He says Monbiot did a Godwin in his essay, booom!, the echo chamber promptly repeats (also in the Jim Thomas essay). Even though it is easy to prove with a Wikipedia search that Smaje doesn’t fully understand Godwin’s Law. “Monbiot is an ecomodernist”, boooom!, the echo chamber duly repeats. “Monbiot wants to get rid of all farms”, booooom!, hear, hear.
With every new essay by Smaje, my feeling grows that he is just not that good of a polemicist. At least it is good to see that Resilience has recently decided to leave out the parts about Monbiot in reposting Smaje’s essays.
Much of the criticism of precision fermentation seems to be based on concern for central food production ownership (a concept against which George Monbiot rales) and the energy cost. The latter seems to be based on Solar Food’s Solein process, and hydrogen sourced from electrolysis of water. Leaft provides an alternative to both.
My further comment, directly to Rob Dietz, is to thank you for identifying the common ground. But your second last paragraph appears to encourage polarisation of the discussion. Any answer to the poly crises will need multiple approaches. If this includes nuclear power and precision fermentation in Singapore or other, then so be it. If it includes more widespread small farming practices good and well. Let’s leave as few people behind as possible.