Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
ORFC Staff Highlights from the #ORFC18 conference – you guys are all so wonderful, what a great time we have with you every year! Plenty more resources and content from the ninth annual Oxford Real Farming Conference
But when it comes to food, we continue to believe that what you see, touch, hear, smell and taste is all that you get. Thankfully, food cannot be digitalized. But quite a bit short of that, I believe we need to do something to make ourselves more mindful about food’s unseen powers.
There is a great irony that Adam Smith, a professor of Moral Philosophy, should become the apostle of an economic order that degraded people’s inclination to take moral decisions in their economic arrangements. Further, an economic order which has helped “externalities” to multiply until the point where we have a veritable social and ecological crisis.
As our planet rockets into a new geological epoch, we find ourselves on unfamiliar terrain. The only thing that is certain is that no one knows what will happen, and no one is in control. The rest of our lives will be defined by an exponential ecological entropy that will increasingly destabilize both the economic and political foundations upon which the modern world has been built. All bets are off. The collapse will be anything but boring.
In this tumultuous world, one thing seems certain: today’s dire threats to our democracy did not arise out of nowhere. Every culture thrives, or not, on whether its core narrative—the causation story we tell ourselves—enhances mutual gain or spurs division. And, the narrative driving today’s unfolding catastrophe feeds the latter.
People grow old and die. Civilizations eventually fail. For centuries amateur philosophers have used the former as a metaphor for the latter, leading to a few useful insights and just as many misleading generalizations. The comparison becomes more immediately interesting as our own civilization stumbles blindly toward collapse.
A medium-sized wormery can process several pounds of organic waste a day – that’s several pounds you don’t have to put in bins, wrap in plastic and put outside in the cold; that won’t take up space in the landfill; and that won’t worsen climate change.
Demand response and demand flexibility—shifting demand to intervals where electricity is abundant and cheap, and away from when the grid is constrained or power is expensive and dirty—can help keep prices down, optimize the grid overall, and help us integrate more renewable supply into grid power while displacing more fossil fuels.
In order to make the future that we want, we have to openly confront the stark problems already at the heart of the Third Digital Revolution, and there are several glaring problems already in plain sight. Despite great efforts toward democratizing the Third Digital Revolution by making much of the technology “open source”, historically oppressed and disenfranchised communities remain excluded.
It is possible to feed more than 9 billion people with organic production methods with a small increase in the required crop acreage and with decreased greenhouse gas emission. But this assumes considerable reduction in food wastage and in the quantities of feed grown to animals.
This is about building, for the first time in history, a capacity for collective self-awareness, a sense of shared identity, and a political expression of our common will in pursuit of our common interest – not only as nations, tribes and social groups but as the species whose ancestors first ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
One of the reasons I think our imaginations are in such a poor state in 2018 is that we spend so much time looking down. Look around you. On the bus, on the train, in the street. Our eyes are locked down to our screens, our attention elsewhere. So I want to share with me something that I find really helps.
