The Challenge of Food Ecomodernism: A Puzzle Outlined
Given the unfriendly nature of my debate with him – if ‘debate’ is the right word – I’ve tried to avoid further engagement with the writing of George Monbiot. But a recent Guardian article of his is such a perfect microcosm of the difficulties and dangers of ecomodernism (more on that term below) as applied to the food system that I think it merits attention.
I’ll begin by parsing the story George tells in the article as follows: There’s a problem with agriculture – it’s something quite technical, to do with a trade-off between crop yields and environmental impact. There’s a farmer near Oxford called Tolly who miraculously seems to have solved this problem and “found the holy grail of agriculture” – high yields and low impacts. His solution involves soil management which somehow affects the behaviour of soil bacteria, but nobody quite understands how he’s done it. If we could characterise soils more scientifically, then maybe this holy grail could be replicated and scaled up – but how can we do that? George meets a scientist for a drink in a pub in Oxford and it emerges from their conversation that there might be a way. The results are (literally) seismic.
“We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?”
With $4 million of start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund George and two colleagues (a seismologist and a soil scientist) have developed a way of ‘seeing’ soil. The technology they needed for this was initially expensive, but allegedly should ultimately be zero cost, and they’ve started building the AI and machine learning tools they need. So far, George says, they’ve measured the volume of a peat bog more accurately (“The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous”). Eventually they hope that the technology will give farmers an almost instant readout from their soil that will help protect soil health and resilience, and ultimately help everyone find the high yield/low impact holy grail like Tolly.
That, in a nutshell, is the story. I will now comment on some of its elements.
There are essentially no politics or food system economics in this story. There are only apparently technical problems like yields and impacts, which can be addressed through technical means (the frame of analysis is entirely single farm scale, not food system scale). George has elsewhere defined ecomodernism as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change”. If there are political or economic changes that could beneficially be made to improve the food and farming system – and I believe there are many – then this article is squarely ecomodernist in his terms. I believe it’s important to understand the evasion of politics that this kind of ecomodernist writing about food and the food system involves.
I’m not going to get into the detail here of where politics and economics meets the technicalities of farming at the individual farm and the farm system level. I’ve written a lot about it previously, as have many others. Generally, we have to understand the global farming system as a profit-driven one characterized by the overproduction of most food commodities, and global political systems as ones that inflict scarcity and lack of food and other entitlements upon many people. This means that high yields and low food prices often don’t benefit nature or consumers, especially poor consumers.
So it’s a lot more complicated than George implies in his article. The fact that high yields don’t necessarily benefit nature and low food prices don’t necessarily benefit consumers (including poor consumers) may be a bit counterintuitive, but it’s nevertheless well understood within food system scholarship (one clue to how it works is that farmers and food system workers are essentially the largest category of workers globally, and they are disproportionately poor). The people that high yields and low food prices unquestionably do benefit are the (usually corporate) providers of yield-boosting farm inputs and retail food distribution systems. Intentionally or otherwise, ecomodernist depoliticizations of the food system of the kind that George purveys in his article effectively support the status quo of overproduction, hunger and corporate control.
Moving on in the story, we come to Tolly. He’s a brilliant veg grower who’s influenced me a lot, but he hasn’t found the holy grail of agriculture. His approach is essentially the long-established one of mixed or ley farming. Historically, farmers have mostly done this by alternating crops and livestock. Modern farmers like Tolly can do it with tractors and without livestock if they choose. It amounts to much the same thing.
Most thoughtful people who’ve spent any time around the sharp end of food production and its ineluctable trade-offs treat the latest hosannas in the press about having found the holy grail of agriculture with a resigned eye roll. As shown by the likes of food system analyst Glenn Davis Stone (The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World), these hosannas are usually sung loudest by people who have new commercial inputs they want to bring to market, and are ultimately aimed at the governments or venture capitalists they think might fund them.
A few years back, such hosannas were being sung for bacterial protein (“food from thin air”) and for synbio alt-meats more generally (good old-fashioned plant-based alt-meats never got the same attention, for reasons that I suspect have a lot to do with their lesser promise for delivering full corporate control). Yet the prohibitive energetic and other costs of these synbio alt-meat technologies were always going to stymie them as viable mass food approaches, and venture capital now seems to be deserting them for sexier new fields like AI.
I can’t help noticing how prominent these fads are in George’s writing on food – from bacterial protein in his book Regenesis, to AI in his latest article. And also how his fiercely expressed opposition to neoliberalism and gloves-off capitalism in his political writing seems to go missing when he writes about food. Funding from the Bezos foundation “may cause some discomfort”, George writes, “but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want”. This isn’t the hardest-hitting critique of techno-capitalism and the source of its funds you’ll ever hear.
An article on the Bezos Fund’s website about the project suggests that the techniques it’s developing will unlock “new ways to finance climate solutions, allowing transparent measurement and verification for soil carbon markets. This is how we can feed the world without devouring the planet”. That last sentence echoes the subtitle of George’s Regenesis book, while the preceding one reveals a commitment to achieving it through the existing mechanisms of large-scale global capitalism. George builds his article out from a desire to spread the successful practice of a small-scale local veg grower, but perhaps this obscures what the project’s funders are really looking for. An alternative headline for his article might have been ‘Controversial funder bankrolled by one of the world’s richest men supports scientists to improve market information for global capitalism’. It would have been more factual, if less dramatic and upbeat.
Why is the Bezos Earth Fund controversial? Well, according to an expert quoted in a report in, er, The Guardian, “The projects of the Bezos fund do not address the key issues of the fundamental climate crisis we are facing – they are nice but unfortunately cosmetic”. Another expert quoted in the same report stated, “In only a couple of years since it launched, the Bezos Earth Fund has become one of the most influential funders in the carbon market space, and has played a significant role in providing pro-market organisations with resources to promote the role of carbon markets. There is a real risk that excessively pro-market funding leads to drowning out more critical voices which provide the necessary counterbalance to the debate”.
In another article in The Guardian, the writer – who is, er, George Monbiot – argues:
“Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years. Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders …. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.”
Well said, sir. So it might surprise some that George is now taking grant funding from the Bezos Earth Fund to develop a product that, the Fund hopes, will allow verification for soil carbon markets.
I’ll pass as quickly as possible over the next part of the story, involving men staring at each other meaningfully in Oxford pubs. My guess is that if you could do a rank ordering of the venues historically where white guys have been apt to congratulate themselves for solving the problems of the world, then pubs in Oxford would come pretty high on the list – and I say this as a white guy from near Oxford who loves to put the world to rights over a pint.
Walter Haugen got straight to the point about what guys like us really ought to be doing to solve the problems of the world:
“You – the human engine that has a very low energy input/output ratio – need to get off your dead ass and actually grow some food using hand methods driven by the creativity of your grotesquely enlarged primate brain.”
Here, Walter touches uncomfortably on my own central contradiction, in which my efforts to grow more food are continually stymied by my Oxford pub syndrome that makes me think I might be more help to the world by writing articles like this about, well, the dangers of the Oxford pub syndrome. Do let me know if you’ve found this post useful so that I can adjust my priorities accordingly.
Anyway, one way or another this brings us to the crux of George’s article. What, practically, does the technology he’s working on actually achieve? He says that it’s measured the volume of a peat bog (called Whixall Moss), although the paper he cites in support of this says only that the bog’s depth was measured across an eighteen metre line using ten sensors, and that “it is not possible to extrapolate from this single line to an alternative peat volume for the entirety of Whixall moss” (George’s implication that his team surpassed in 45 minutes what fifty years of preceding soil science had achieved seems over-hyped in several respects). Still, maybe the technology really will be able to measure soil volumes and estimate carbon stocks in the soil cheaply and accurately someday. But I can’t see how it will tackle the more pressing political problem of reducing carbon stocks in the atmosphere, unless you subscribe to the view that better-evidenced capitalist carbon markets result in less capitalism.
George also says that the tech may eventually be able to give farmers instant readouts about their soils. But how will it help them find the yield/impact holy grail that he claims Tolly has found? By George’s account, this grail has something to do with soil bacteria and their behaviour, which his ‘soilsmology’ technique presumably can’t measure or characterise. Possibly, the technique may give farmers information that will help them protect their soils, though it’s not clear how it will overcome the wider pressures encouraging them toward soil destruction (politics goes missing here again).
I can’t help feeling there’s a kind of spivvy middleman sales patter about all this tech-happy food ecomodernism. Take a well-established technique like mixed farming, sex it up as a potential holy grail when accompanied by new tech inputs of a modest usefulness (but let’s not talk too much about that…), sell it to farmers while claiming that it’ll soon be cheap as chips, ignore the contemporary politics that make it so difficult to farm in ecologically wise ways, and on no account support the idea that more farmers and fewer middlemen might be a good way to go. It gets a lot of media airplay, but it doesn’t amount to a good analysis of the food system, and it sells most people and most of the biosphere short.
George recently trailed once again his scornful critique of my polemic against his book Regenesis, writing
“In any discussion of food and farming, unless your solution can be scaled to feed 8 billion people, you shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, cottagecore fantasies that would feed only the richest consumers, leaving billions to starve, are all too common.”
He made no mention in that critique that he’d badly under-stated the prohibitive energetic cost of bacterial protein, as I showed in my polemic and has now been confirmed by researchers who developed the technology even as they continue to promote it. It’s abundantly clear that the bacterial solution he was touting won’t scale to feed 8 billion people. The priorities of the new CEO of Solar Foods, the bacterial protein manufacturer George promoted in Regenesis, include “driving growth in the Health & Performance Nutrition segment especially in the United States” and “increasing product price points”. To me, that sounds rather like feeding only the richest consumers.
So I guess it’s good that George seems to have quietly backtracked on bacterial protein and has swung more fully behind mixed farming of the kind that Tolly practices, even if he still wants to bang on about my alleged ‘cruel fantasies’ and my ‘formula for mass death’. This ‘cruel fantasy’ of mine is that ordinary people should have access to land to grow food. George thinks it’s cruel because he doesn’t believe local food systems can yield enough to feed the global population, but that’s an article of faith of his based on a poor understanding of food systems. For my part, I can’t see how George came to think that a monumentally energy-hungry industrial process for growing bacteria to make protein could ever scale better than growing beans, or was more likely to nourish poor consumers.
My approach may nevertheless prove a fantasy inasmuch as it doesn’t suit the economic and political powers that be to allow ordinary people the independent means to produce a modest livelihood. They prefer keeping people dependent on high-energy mass industrial food systems predicated on overproduction, monopoly rent and economic growth of the kind that generates ecological destruction and human poverty and hunger.
I think those systems will fail due to their own internal contradictions, and what happens next will arise out of the ensuing politics. There will be opportunities for agrarian localism and for people to take charge of generating local livelihoods ecologically. It’s very far from guaranteed that those opportunities will proliferate, but what I’d like to hear from those who dismiss agrarian localism as a fantasy is how they think high-energy mass industrial food systems will deliver good, population-wide nutrition and nature protection into the future. Food ecomodernism contains fantasies of its own, and a smattering of references to open source and anti-trust practices does not conceal them.
A bigger problem, though, is that since proponents of food ecomodernism have a much larger media and political platform than proponents of agrarian localism, they’re able to make their ‘cottagecore fantasy’ accusations stick to the extent they become self-fulfilling – ‘as everyone knows, we can’t possibly localise food systems’ … well, if everyone knows this supposed truth, then we certainly won’t – while ducking the problems of their own touted solutions. We’re up the proverbial creek without a paddle and nobody has an especially plausible plan to get us out. But it would be nice if we could at least debate our various unpromising options calmly.
I’ve written a lot about the vulnerabilities of the existing high-energy food system, about the benefits of local agroecological food production and about the ideologies of modernism that make facile accusations of cottagecore fantasies so easy to stick. In so doing, I’ve developed a small but dedicated readership. Love you all to bits, but I’ve got pretty much nowhere in the larger debate with ecomodernism which seems to be sweeping all before it. Maybe it’s a case of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Philip Loring – author of the excellent Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology – nails what’s at stake in this present moment of food ecomodernism:
“We can be sure that the greedy eyes of disaster capitalism are peering at us from around every corner, waiting to use the tremendous pain and suffering that is emerging around us to appoint themselves our saviours. I can hear it now: “Only we can solve this problem. Only we can feed the hungry. Only we can keep you safe.” These are the voices of manifest destiny. These are the voices of the white saviour. But in reality, the opportunists making these promises can deliver on none of these promises. Why? Because their approach – indeed, their very culture – is part of the system that creates these problems in the first place”.
Quite so. But the remarkable thing is how absent such responses are in the face of corporate-friendly food ecomodernism, especially when it’s packaged in the guise of eco-friendly farming, as in George’s article. In comments beneath the article and in his social media posts trailing it, I barely found a critical or even a sceptical voice. Perhaps the odd scientist mildly questioning the novelty or wider applicability of the technique. Very little about the funding and its aims. Many comments were positively hagiographic:
“What a wonderful example of human perseverance, conscientiousness about our planet and living sustainably, tireless quests to find progressive answers and especially George’s obvious deep desire to genuinely improve life for as many as possible. In these increasingly dark days for humanity, let’s hope there are many more like him. This example and George’s humane-based conscientiousness also give you hope that the cynics will not win.”
Herein lies the trap for we advocates of agrarian localism. Point to the threadbare achievements of food ecomodernism, the dodgy energy figures, the greenwash, and we can be dismissed as cynics. Advocate for low-energy local food systems and we can be dismissed as cottagecore fantasists. It’s a perfectly closed ideological system, and I don’t know how to open up the obvious cracks in its facade.
I found Vilhelm Nilsson’s comments under an earlier version of this post informative. The comment is worth reading in its entirety (as is everyone else’s, of course), but there’s this:
“…‘saving the planet’ can turn into such a dangerously hubristic set [of] unquestionable faiths that leads to epistemic close-down and cognitive protectionism against inconsistency in our thinking …. At the same time some values such as community sovereignty and traditional food production aren’t reducible to managing calories or carbon, which means the net effect ignores moral losses tied to local knowledge and diverse ways of life … a larger critique which is worthy of having is that of instrumental ways to reason about the world, as such perspectives invariably sever the connections between the social and natural worlds.”
To my mind, Vilhelm’s comment in its entirety is bang on, but it still leaves me uncertain about how best to make the case for agrarian localism, since what I might view as a larger critique of instrumental reason, the likes of George are easily able to dismiss as cottagecore fantasies or whatever – though it’d be nice at least if they could fully embrace instrumental reason and admit to their numerical mistakes.
Vilhelm’s comment also resonates with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s views on the historically grounded nature of knowledge. I touch on this in my recent book Finding Lights in a Dark Age. I’d recommend buying a copy – if you do, you may just be helping to ‘save the planet’! But you probably won’t be – the undergirding philosophy that Vilhelm calls meliorism may have to crash and burn before it’s possible to do much reconstruction. That’s not going to be fun – I didn’t call it a Dark Age for no reason.
Ah well, the urgency of staving off as best I can the disaster capitalism that Philip Loring mentions keeps me going, even if it feels like a dispiriting and unequal battle sometimes. Cheers!
