Fathers’ early interactions with babies may affect child health years later

affect child health years later Paternal warmth and developmentally supportive engagement with a 10-month-old child was associated with child health risks at age seven in new study

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — How a new father behaves toward his baby can change family dynamics in a way that affects the child’s heart and metabolic health years later, according to a new study by researchers in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development.

In the study, recently published in Health Psychology, the research team found that fathers who were warm and developmentally supportive with their babies at 10 months of age had more positive co-parenting with the child’s mother when the child was two years old. In families where this pattern played out, the child’s bloodwork indicated better markers of physical health at seven years of age. In contrast, neither the mother’s warmth when the child was 10 months old nor her positive or negative co-parenting when the child was two predicted the child’s physical health at age seven.

This doesn’t mean that mothers do not matter, the researchers said.

“Everyone in the family matters a lot,” said Alp Aytuglu, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biobehavioral Health. “Mothers are often the primary caregivers, and children are experiencing the most growth and development. The takeaway here is that in families with a father in the household, dads affect the environment in ways that can support — or undermine — the health of the child for years to come.”

Prior research by other scientists demonstrated that children raised in high-conflict or unstable households can be at greater risk for health problems, including elevated inflammation, lower ability to regulate blood sugar and obesity. Those studies primarily examined the effects of mothers on children, according to Aytuglu. In this study, the researchers wanted to examine the entire family and the various interactions within a family.

Using data from the Penn State Family Foundations project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the researchers examined videos and other information from 399 families in the United States that included a mother, a father and first child. Families in the study were 83% non-Hispanic white and had higher than average levels of education and income.

When each child in the study was 10 and 24 months old, Family Foundations researchers visited the families’ homes and recorded 18-minute videos of the parents playing with their child. Researchers then reviewed the video and observed individual parenting behaviors and co-parenting behaviors.

For both videos, trained evaluators assigned codes to the mother’s and father’s parenting attributes, including whether parents responded to the child in a timely manner, how warmly parents behaved toward the child and how appropriate parents’ responses were for a child that age.

Evaluators also examined co-parenting behavior in the video. Specifically, they identified instances where the parents competed for the child’s attention — rather than playing with the child together or taking turns with the child more naturally. The researchers observed that when one parent competitively gained the child’s attention, the other parent often withdrew from the interaction, disengaging from the play.

When the child was seven years old, the Family Foundations researchers collected a dried blood sample from the child. From that sample, the researchers in this study measured four well-established indicators of heart and metabolic health: cholesterol; glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), which reflects average blood sugar over two to three months; interleukin-6 (IL-6), a messenger in the immune system that represents inflammation; and C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation produced by the liver.

Using structural equation modeling, the researchers in this study discovered a connection between a father’s behavior at 10 months and their child’s health indicators at age seven.

Fathers who showed less sensitivity to their child at 10 months were more likely to compete for the child’s attention and/or withdraw from family play when the child was 24 months old. When fathers displayed higher levels of competitive-withdrawal parenting behavior at 24-months, those children displayed higher levels of HbA1c and CRP at age seven, completing the connection from father’s engagement at 10 months to the child's health more than six years later.

“No one will be surprised to learn that treating your children appropriately and with warmth is good for them,” said Hannah Schreier, associate professor of biobehavioral health, Penn State Social Science Research Institute co-funded faculty member and senior author of this study. “But it might surprise people that a father’s behavior before a baby is old enough to form permanent memories can affect that child’s health when they are in second grade. It is generally understood that family dynamics affect development and mental health, but those dynamics affect physical health as well and play out over years.”

Much of what made this research novel, according to the researchers, was their ability to use observations of actual parent-child interactions in their own homes.

“Researchers studying parenting are often forced to rely on parents’ self-reports of their behavior,” said Jennifer Graham-Engeland, Elizabeth Fenton Susman Professor of Biobehavioral Health and co-author of this study. “When any of us self-report something, we can be influenced by what we remember or how we want to be seen — which may not represent how we actually behaved. And, of course, children this young can't report on how their parents acted. The Family Foundations data made possible this intimate look into family lives as well as the connection of those interactions to later biological indicators of health. We believe this allowed us to create a more accurate picture of the influence of fathers than was possible previously.”

The researchers said they anticipated that mothers’ co-parenting behavior would have an impact similar to fathers’ co-parenting behavior, but the results of this study did not reveal a specific impact of mother’s warmth at 10 months or competitive-withdrawal co-parenting at age two or on the child’s health measures at age seven.

“The lack of clear results based on the mothers’ coparenting was not expected,” said Graham-Engeland, associate director of the Penn State Center for Healthy Aging. “There could be many reasons for this, but one theory in the literature relates to the father’s role in the family that may play out in different ways. In two-parent families like the ones in this study — the mother is frequently the primary caregiver; so, it is possible that whatever the mother’s behavior, it tends to represent the norm in the family, whereas the father’s role tends to be one that reinforces the norm or disrupts it. It is also likely that mothers affect children’s health in ways other than those specifically examined in this study.”

According to the researchers, it is important to remember that each family is different, and everyone in a family affects others more than they may know. This study was limited to families with a father, a mother and their first-born child, but the research team noted that there are many other family structures that may involve grandparents, single parents, same-sex parents and more. Additionally, they said that family dynamics change if more children are added or if the parents separate.

“What I hope people will take from this research is that fathers, alongside mothers, have a profound impact on family function that can reverberate through the child’s health years later,” Aytuglu said. “As a society, supporting fathers — and everyone in a child’s household — is an important part of promoting children’s health.”

Other Penn State researchers contributing to this study include Mark Feinberg, research professor of health and human development and affiliated with the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center; Samantha Murray-Perdue, assistant research professor at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center; and C. Andrew Conway, postdoctoral scholar at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center.

The National Institutes of Health funded this research.

At Penn State, researchers are solving real problems that impact the health, safety and quality of life of people across the commonwealth, the nation and around the world.

For decades, federal support for research has fueled innovation that makes our country safer, our industries more competitive and our economy stronger. Recent federal funding cuts threaten this progress.   

Learn more about the implications of federal funding cuts to our future at Research or Regress.

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Journal

Health Psychology

DOI

10.1037/hea0001567 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Longitudinal associations between father– and mother–child interactions, coparenting, and child cardiometabolic health

How Effective Are Protests? Historians Say: Very.

Protests change the protesters, their communities and the nation. From emancipation to women’s suffrage, civil rights and BLM, mass movements have shaped the arc of US history.

By Robin Buller

December 27, 2025

Source: The Guardian

Participants in the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. (US National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons)

Trump’s first and second terms have been marked by huge protests, from the 2017 Women’s March to the protests for racial justice after George Floyd’s murder, to this year’s No Kings demonstrations. But how effective is this type of collective action?

According to historians and political scientists who study protest: very. From emancipation to women’s suffrage, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, mass movement has shaped the arc of American history. Protest has led to the passage of legislation that gave women the right to vote, banned segregation and legalized same-sex marriage. It has also sparked cultural shifts in how Americans perceive things like bodily autonomy, economic inequality and racial bias.

But as with any tool, there are ways to sharpen and blunt a protest’s impact. Here’s what decades of research tells us about what protest can and can’t do.

Protests can affect elections

When Carmen Perez-Jordan was first asked to organize a national protest for women’s rights, following Donald Trump’s first presidential election win, she did not anticipate that it would become the largest single-day protest in American history. On 21 January 2017, more than 500,000 protesters took to the streets of Washington DC, and as many as 4 million participated in affiliated demonstrations nationwide.

Looking back, Perez-Jordan says the Women’s March engaged millions of people in activism for the first time, inspired other movements like #MeToo and pushed people to see women’s issues beyond reproductive rights. “It was unquestionably impactful,” Perez-Jordan said. “The Women’s March proved that millions will rise up when democracy and human rights are at stake.”

Research confirms that the Women’s March incited tangible change. In particular, it directly prompted an unprecedented surge in female candidates for elected office, which scholars attribute to feeling empowered to draw attention to issues that have historically been dismissed. During the 2018 midterms, more than 500 women ran in congressional races, nearly doubling numbers from 2016.

The protest also changed electoral results. According to one study, regions in which protests had higher turnouts saw positive shifts in votes for Democratic candidates at the county level. Another showed that voters were more likely to support women and candidates of color due to the empowering effect of the protest.

And it isn’t only on the left that this trend can be seen. By the same token, localities that saw greater participation during the 2009 Tea Party protests also witnessed more Republican support during the 2010 midterms, one study finds. This shows the outsize impact a single protester can have, the study’s authors say. That’s because having one more attender at a demonstration rallies more support for a political cause than acquiring one more vote during an election does.

According to the often-cited 3.5% rule, if 3.5% of a population protests against a regime, the regime will fail. Developed by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who researched civil resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, the rule has seen renewed interest in leftist circles recently, especially with No Kings protests attracting historic numbers.

“I understand why people are drawn to it,” Chenoweth said on an episode of the podcast You Are Not So Smart earlier this year. “It looks like a magic number, looks like a number that provides people with certainty and guarantee. And it’s also a surprisingly modest number.”

According to Chenoweth, the number refers to peak, not cumulative participation. She also says 3.5% is not absolute – even non-violent campaigns can succeed with less participation, according to her 2020 update to the rule.

Protests foster lifelong civic engagement

Momentum begins with a first protest, research shows. Citizens who participate in one demonstration are more likely to take part in another.

For example, protesters who took part in the 1964 Freedom Summer – a movement to register Black voters in Mississippi during the civil rights movement – were more likely to engage in activism over the course of their lifespans than those who intended to join the protest, but ultimately did not.

“It tells us that the impact of protesting is more about action than intent,” said Jeremy Pressman, professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. “There is something about being in it that teaches you a certain skillset and makes you feel comfortable in that setting.”

For that reason, protests can build coalitions and networks that can be called upon for future fights. Pressman calls this “organizational success” and says it can be measured by growth in an organization’s membership, funding or even media attention. “You could have a policy failure in that they didn’t adopt a law, but that campaign may have led you to double the size of your organization so you’re more prepared and powerful for your next fight,” he said.

This dynamic can be especially critical in smaller towns and close-knit communities, scholars say, where people may fear voicing an opinion that goes against the grain. In a Trump-leaning county, for instance, a person may not feel comfortable vocalizing a position considered progressive, according to Omar Wasow, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. However, if that same individual sees an anti-Trump protest, they might feel encouraged by the thought that they have neighbors who see things the way they do. “That allows me to know I’m not alone,” he said.

Nonviolence is key

One protesting strategy has been shown time and again to be most effective in the US: nonviolence.

The seminal example of this is the civil rights movement, said Robb Willer, professor of sociology at Stanford University. From refusing to board buses during the Montgomery bus boycott, to refusing to leave a white-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to marching in towns and cities across the nation, civil rights activists showed “extreme discipline” when it came to maintaining nonviolent tactics, he said.

Together, these protesting strategies work towards creating a sympathetic movement that is more likely to sway public opinion, research shows.

In the context of civil rights, the movement’s ability to elicit violence from its opponents – such as in 1965, when armed police violently attacked peaceful protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama – only strengthened public support for the cause. “When the state is perceived as engaging in excess use of force, that tends to generate very sympathetic coverage, and that drives concern,” explained Wasow.

In the same way, protests that engage in violent tactics tend to lose the support of the public, even if it’s only a minority who are involved in the disturbances, and even when a cause is otherwise viewed favorably. Such was the case with the anti-racist counter-protests that unfolded in response to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although it was a white nationalist protester who plowed through a crowd and killed one woman, footage of counter-protesters throwing objects and brawling in the streets lowered their public esteem.

Other tactics that aren’t necessarily violent, but that are destructive nonetheless – like property destruction, setting fires or shutting down interstate highways – can have a similar effect, Willer explained. “People react very negatively to protest tactics that they view as risking harm to people,” he said.

Protests help people feel more effective and hopeful in their own lives

While legislative shifts and movement-building are important markers of impact, another way to gauge success is by considering how a demonstration affects the lives of its participants. In that sense, Pressman says, “it’s important to broaden the menu of what success and failure look like” by gauging success beyond legislation.

For one thing, protesting can improve emotional wellbeing.

Research shows, for example, that people who were part of the Act Up movement to raise awareness of and demand research into HIV-Aids in the 1980s and 90s continued to feel validated years later having participated in such an impactful movement. “It reshaped the kind of identity and emotional context in which some of the protesters were protesting,” said Pressman.

But shifting to that framework requires thinking less about how protests might shape political strategy and greater focus on whether a movement’s participants feel effective, hopeful and like they are part of a larger community. Said Wasow: “It is important not to get so focussed on big-picture consequences that we lose sight of protest as a way to hold on to one’s agency.”

This is also key since protests rarely incite policy or cultural changes overnight. Often, their rates of impact are much more gradual. For that reason, looking at them through a historical lens – when movements can be digested in terms of years, or even decades – is a helpful way to appreciate the tangible effect of taking to the streets.

“Protests often have a subtle cascade effect,” said Wasow. “These are long-term fights.”

The Challenge of Food Ecomodernism: A Puzzle Outlined

By Chris Smaje

December 22, 2025

Source: Resilience

Image from the 'Dear Alice' Decommodified Edition by Waffle to the Left

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!