Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When the high-energy authoritarian political centres fail, which ultimately they will, my hope is that some of these ‘irrelevant’ places will have forged resilient material cultures and mature political institutions that will enable them to usher our descendants into the next chapter of human history.
Perhaps, as the shamans of old-time cultures knew, what matters most is the patient’s proper integration into the wider community. Which I take to be an encouraging pointer to the possible good health available in a small farm future.
All I want to do here is make a few general points about welfare in a small farm future emerging from my Monopoly example to prepare the ground for more detailed future discussions. Six general points, to be precise.
For now, I just want to posit the possibility that small farm societies of the future might potentially deliver a decent level of human wellbeing.
The challenge is to unleash these spirits of enquiry and autonomy from the realm of blank collective control which, nowadays, is bound up in state-backed corporatism and narratives of human progress.
It certainly feels as though some new ideas are needed to overcome the ecological, political and socioeconomic troubles of present times. There is a way to address these troubles, not so much through an old book as through an old political movement, namely distributism.
When it comes to applying these lessons to agricultural history in Britain or elsewhere with a view to creating a just and renewable agrarian future, what I take from Sahlins’s thought is almost the opposite of what a superficial reading of ‘The original affluent society’ might suggest.
Anyway, that’s the ground where I stand: convinced of the need for ruralization and an orderly turn to agrarian localism so that it doesn’t happen by default in a disorderly way…
The case for ruralism over urbanism as I see it is simply that the dynamics of climate, energy, water, soil and political economy are going to propel multitudes of people to the world’s farmable regions sooner or later.
We don’t need re-genesis, but a de-urbanizing re-exodus to places where we can create such food cultures. The real lesson from George Monbiot’s grandmother, I’d submit, is not the narrowness of her diet but the breadth of her knowledge.
If global governments were alive to the nature of the climate, energy and water emergencies upon us, they’d be frantically busy planning how to sensibly and humanely repopulate the countryside and depopulate the cities…
To blow off a few cobwebs, I decided to spend a couple of days hiking a part of the Ridgeway, which has been in use for around 5,000 years and is supposedly Britain’s oldest road.
