Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rob Avis Recently Michelle, Rowan, Naomi and I embarked on a cross-country train trip to attend a family reunion in the eastern townships of Quebec. With a little extra time left over after the festivities, I decided to connect with Stefan Sobkowiak of Miracle Farms for a day, having come across Stefan’s work in this amazing Youtube video:
While I’m all for reducing the energy demands associated with food production, I think the singular attention given to the issue of food miles is misguided, and I’ll use this post to explain why.
If you want to corrupt a people, corrupt the language. Once it becomes impossible to say the truth with the language we have, it will ultimately be impossible for us to adapt and survive.
Perhaps the biggest reason why I focus on energy is that it mediates all biophysical transformations. Without an all-important energy conversion, nothing happens.
Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall.
For some years now, author and farmer Jean-Martin Fortier has lived rather comfortably with his family entirely off the proceeds of their market garden in Québec, Canada.
In other essays I presented data showing that small-scale, local farms aren’t always more energy efficient than larger-scale producers, but as far as energy used to distribute food local farms seem to have an advantage.
Academic researchers Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous for their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and their earlier paper This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises. Their point, of course, is that the same thing happens over and over again. We can learn from past crises to solve our current problems.
The rich are trapped within a modern version of Plato’s Cage, unable to see the reality of destruction around them.
Years back a pair of planners, Branden Born and Mark Purcell, warned that there’s nothing about smaller scale enterprises that make them inherently more efficient than their larger counterparts. With respect to on-farm energy intensity, they’re certainly right.
We are now living in a "full world." How must our ideas about human freedom change so that we can adapt and thrive?
I want to review here some of the reasons why I expect an era of crisis to arrive sooner rather than later.
