Guest post: Earth is going to have the final say
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on How can Manchin.
…like everyone else, he is unable to imagine a life different than the one we live.
Well, if we just wait a little, we won’t have to imagine at all: it will be here.
I tell people the economy is man-made, the ecology is not. The ecology is more complex by orders of magnitude than the economy, and we understand it far less. Which one should we be thinking about changing?
Very well put. Our global economy is a pale, weak imitation of the exchange of energy, information, and elements that happens in nature, which we have been inerfering with and disrupting to our shame, and at our peril. Yes, a company going out of business is nothing compared to species going extinct. The former is like a car running out of gas; the latter more like multiple organ failure.
Economist Dani Rodrik’s political trilemma is illustrative of the choices we are faced with. According to Rodrik, democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic integration each have conflicts between them, and while you can combine any two of these three you can’t have all three simultaneously and in full.
What about a stable, functioning biosphere? Without one of those, the other three items aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
From what I’ve read on renewable energy, the U.S. can replace up to 80% of its current fossil fuel use via solar and wind and biomass fuels, while other measures like improving dwelling energy efficiency and building more densely can help with the rest.
The more I read, the more that 80% figure sounds like a fantasy. The amount of fossil fuels that would be expended to “replace” that 80% would be enormous, vitiating the supposed “cleanliness” of these energy sources. Certainly increasing efficiency is good, but actual reductions in energy use are what’s required.
Yes, it will cost a lot of money but as the kids these days put it, I’m happy to pay it forward.
Problem is the true cost of the “improvements” proposed is not monetary. If money were the only problem, we’d be laughing. Solar panels and batteries are technologies that depend upon mining rare earth metals, which results in massive ecological damage to wherever they are extracted; the ores then rely on extremely toxic refinement and processing, which is dangerous to whatever locality these steps are taken. Both of these steps need huge amounts of (fossil fuel) energy for the machinery and processes involved. On top of that are the inputs required for transport, installation, maintenance, as well as replacement and disposal at the end of these items’ service lives. Almost all of this chain is toxic and destructive. Yet it is called “green.” The monetary cost is trivial in comparison. There’s plenty of room for profit, too. For too many, that’s the important part. All that toxicity and habitat destruction are “externalities” that can be written off, ignored and forgotten. Until they come back and bite our heads off.
Here’s a simple proposition: when the economic system comes into conflict with the ecological one, it is the economic one that must give way.
You’d think this would be foundational to any and all economic theories and practices. The fact that it is not shows you that economics is not dealing with reality.
This is what no one wants to hear, so we continue to think up simple solutions to complex problems, simple solutions that promise to leave everything essentially as it is, no lifestyle changes necessary.
If we do not solve our end of these problems ourselves, they will be solved for us, with a comprehensiveness and ferocity which will be terrible to behold, let alone experience first hand. We have yet to see the totality of Nature’s “market corrections.” If we are very lucky, we never will.
The simple truth is, we can’t solve this problem while there are 7 billion people in the world. Every solution we come up with will “hurt the poor” …
Democracies seem to be not very good at selling bad news. Who will be first to declare that economic growth is bad? How do you get elected calling for wartime levels of sacrifice in a war where the enemy is the electorate’s lifestyle? What party looking for votes is going to promote a “No Children” Policy? Nobody is going to run on a platform that clearly outlines the actual problems we face, or solutions that will actually work. Those solutions would require degrees of self-sacrifice, self-denial, and surrender of accustomed comforts and privileges that nobody has ever had to deal with willingly. As things get worse, protecting natural refugia that will be needed as loci of healing, regeneration and restoration will be harder and harder as humans become more desperate (and as some continue the cycle of despoilation which has been, up to now, so profitable for them). Earth is going to have the final say, but nobody is courting its vote, or pandering to the non-human inhabitants of any country.
What we need to do requires actual change, sacrifice and, in Western countries at least, a sharp reduction in our standard of living. Yet a non-trivial percentage of the populations of over-developed countries don’t believe there is any crisis at all. We’re having trouble convincing some people to get free shots and wear masks during a pandemic. How the fuck do we save the world? Unfortunately, I can’t see solutions that don’t involve draconian enforcement.
It’s one of those quandaries so intractable that we haven’t really advanced much since Plato wrote about it. The shitty fact of the matter is that, since people are human, some problems can only be addressed by dictatorship of some variety or another.
Scientists here: Can you write a short description of what our daily life would look like if (a) we would cut down to an extent that we could halt climate change? (b) Or of our daily life after climate change has shrunk the world’s human population by a few billion people and destroyed our industrial infrastructures?
Would we be looking to a return to 1800? 1700? 5000 BCE?
There is a truly massive amount of disinformation about the significance of rare earth metals in photovoltaics. The overwhelming majority of solar panels produced use silicon. The raw material that needs to be mined is relatively good quality sand. Technologies like cadmium telluride (not truly rare earth metals) are expensive niches.
Lithium is of increasing importance for energy storage, wind turbines use a range of rare earth metals, so the concern should not be dismissed out of hand, but it has been vastly overstated in the past five years, particularly in the US.
In addition, the energy payback of a PV module has been firmly established to be easily under two years, even in Northern Europe – which is nowhere close to an ideal deployment location. Frankly, that just isn’t a ‘massive amount of fossil fuel energy’, and it doesn’t have to be fossil fuel at all.
“Vastly overstated?” On the contrary, the concerns regarding mining and refinement of the materials needed for solar and for magnet production for wind turbines have been vastly understated, particularly in the US. We have been exporting all of the ill effects to China, while patting ourselves on the backs for our “green energy” consumption. Entire regions and ecosystems in China are toxic hellholes now, not even counting the human rights issues (however cheap it is, it’s cheap because the Chinese like to use slaves in their mining operations), just to feed our thirst for ever more energy (and the smug satisfaction that we’re somehow producing it cleanly). It takes little to no actual effort to find evidence of this, and the reports aren’t even new.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-mining-china-social-environmental-costs
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/27/mining-holds-the-key-to-a-green-future-no-wonder-human-rights-activists-are-worried
etc. etc.
And that is just from the Guardian, and just the first page of duckduckgo search results.
No, I don’t have any definite answers, I just know we’re in serious trouble. I have no blueprint or expertise on how to get from where we are, to where we need to be. I just know that where we are, and where we’re going to end up if we keep on doing what we’re doing is going to be…unpleasant. I’m in the position of being on a plane that I know is going down. Looking out the window, I can see parts falling off, including Aafew seats with passengers still strapped in. The wing on my side of the plane is starting to burn, and the plane is starting to shake. I am not a pilot. I cannot land the plane. I do not know where the nearest runway of sufficient length is, or how to get the plane there. Some of the passengers in first class figure that those parts and passengers that fell off must not have been very important, as they’re quite okay; the plane must be fine because we’re still flying, they have their cocktail, and the movie is still running on the seat-back screen in front of them. Communications from the cockpit are full of unwarranted confidence that, despite the slight turbulence (!) we will reach our destination on time…
I know it’s easier to be a critic than to offer solutions, but the search for effective solutions can only start once the true nature of the problem has been discoverd and acknowledged. A misdiagnosed ailment is less likely to recieve proper, efficacious treatment. If you have a team of doctors who are keeping the seriousness of your sickness from you, or who think it’s less serious than it actually is, who are only praying for your recovery, or who think there’s nothing wrong with you and send you home to carry on as you were, your chances of recovery are going to be low.
(a) Climate change, as iknklast pointed out elsewhere, is just a symptom of a much larger problem. If we could instantly swap out all fossil fuels for truly green, clean energy, we would still be facing biotic collapse from the environmental pressure of 7 billion humans pursuing constant economic growth on a finite planet. If we could wean ourselves off growth, step away from our war against the natural world and reduce our population, we might stand a slim chance of making it through these crises with somewhat less pain. Here are some things that could happen, that might help.
-Government becomes more local and direct.
-More people grow their own food, if they’re in the position to do so. Fewer lawns, more gardens.
-Consumption becomes more local, reduced, and simpler. Fewer imports of foreign made gewgaws that aren’t necessities.
-More local production of things like clothing, tools, etc.
-More purchases of used stuff through thrift stores, etc. (There’s lots of material stuff out there that can be cycled through a series of owners while it still works, fits and operates).
-More emphasis on repair of things than replacement.
-Culture becomes simpler and more local. People sang, danced and told stories to each other for millenia before the invention of the “entertainment industry.”
-Less travel and transport.
-Rewilding of more areas as human pressure is reduced.
This is just wild guesswork, late at night, off the top of my head. Here’s more wild guesswork. A redirection and rearrangement of societal values would be helpful. An acknowlegdement of our ultimate dependence upon the biosphere, and the basic material and energy cycles and processes of the Earth should be the basis of all human activity, along with the need to live within the limits that these communities and systems place on the scope and intesity of our activities. Adopting and acting on the principle of looking ahead seven generations when making decisions. Turning away from the valorization and admiration of extreme wealth and the extreme inequality that inevitably accompanies it.
Is any of this going to happen? Some; maybe. All; likely not. Adversity can bring out the best and worst in people. It’s a crap shoot. Surprises will happen, both bad and good. Will anything be enough and timely? I vacilate between unjustified hope and cynical fatalism.
(b) To paraphrase Einstein “I don’t know what weapons will be used in World War III, but World War iV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Some writers I’ve read suggest the problem is civilization itself, that urban living is inherently violent and unsustainable because it depends ultimately upon the exploitation of a hinterland for a reliable food supply, and the use of force to obtain and defend that food supply. Humans lived for a couple of hundred thousand years without civilization, which is a track record of success that, at this juncture, looks difficult for civilization to match, let alone surpass.
Call me a primativist or a Luddite. Call this a backward step. The more I look at it, the more I wonder if our “forward” steps will have been worth the price we and the rest of the planet paid for our ten millenia dalliance with civilization, should everything come crashing down. If things do truly go to hell, one of the things I would feel particularly badly about are all the other species, we destroyed in the course of our criminal folly. I can almost pardon the cultures that caused extinctions before the advent of our modern understanding of extinction. They couldn’t know that there were no more of a given animal yet living the next valley or island over. How were they to know that all the propitiation and gratitude in the world would never bring back an animal if they’d just killed the very last one of its kind. But once we knew extinction was forever, and that we could cause it, there was no excuse. We had no right. We never did. We still don’t.
If things get really bad, I believe that those cultures most likely to survive are those that are least plugged into the global economy, which have a good, reliable supplies of fresh water, get all or most of their food from natural, living communities, rather than through extensive agriculture, or through trade or purchase from beyond their own land base. It would also help if they did not live close to or between any industrial nations which might go to war over the control of dwindling resources. It would also be good if their numbers and resources were small and inconspicuous enough to avoid the covetous attention of hungry, militarized urbanites. There can’t be that many such candidate cultures left at this point.
Naif #3
I’m not in a position to make any confident claims with respect to rare earth metals, but I can certainly testify that there’s a lot of misinformation going on in general.
To be clear: Renewables are indeed “greener” (or less “brown”* in Herman Daly’s terminology) than fossil fuels, even when you factor in the energy and natural resources that go into the production of the technology itself. The life cycle analyses I have seen have been pretty unambiguous on that point. My country gets almost all its electricity from hydro power (don’t be too impressed, we also extract and export massive amounts of oil and gas, and appear to be more addicted than Whitney Huston on a six-month tour of Columbia and Mexico). If all our hydro power plants were magically replaced by fossil fuels, that would indeed be worse, so let’s not talk as if the options were indistinguishable. A MWh of wind or solar energy is cleaner than a MWh of fossil fuel generated energy, and I don’t think it’s entirely fair to write off the whole technology because under the present conditions the alternative when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing is usually fossil fuels. A total change in the way we live is not a substitute for replacing fossil fuels, but a necessary addition.
*”Less brown” (i.e.dirty) is not as bad as “more brown”, but that still doesn’t make it “green” (as in “environmentally friendly”), just like giving you a nosebleed might not be as bad as knocking your teeth out, but that still doesn’t make it “you-friendly”.
> More people grow their own food, if they’re in the position to do so. Fewer lawns, more gardens.
I’m all for replacing lawns with vegetable gardens, and I’ll vouch for the therapeutic benefits of growing your own. However, an amateur gardener with less than an acre of land will never be able to produce more than a fraction of the calories they need to survive.
Our broken food system needs a lot of improvement, but that needs to come from scientists and farmers rather than enthusiastic amateurs. The average person can help by minimizing food waste and reducing meat consumption. If they also find satisfaction from growing their own carrots, that’s a plus but a fairly minor one.
James,
There are no rare earth metals used in the production of mono- or multi-crystalline silicon PV panels. Not one of the links you provide says otherwise. The only rare metal (rather than rare earth) used in any measurable quantity is the titanium in the titanium dioxide used as an anti-reflective coating, and that is to a thickness measured in microns – of a metal that is not particularly rare at all.
Yet this concern has become commonplace as a counter to the deployment of photovoltaics in many US jurisdictions. Perhaps you should be questioning why that is?
As the one who started this ball rolling, I have an observation:
What we can actually do to address global warming is more important that going on about what we should be doing but aren’t.
IMNSHO, it’s an absolute political non-starter to make living a much reduced lifestyle an immediate demand that to boot must be imposed on people by a higher authority. That might happen in China but it sure won’t happen in the U.S. or in other democratic nations. So if something isn’t going to happen then why make that the goal right now?
My own example of installing solar panels to reduce my own carbon footprint (yes, there are energy costs to make solar panels but they produce significantly more energy that that during their 20-25 year life) isn’t just for my benefit, it’s to also to do that thing that can help persuade others called walking the walk. People tend to respect that more than being lectured at.
Other things that are more doable than living in a cave are things like reducing meat consumption, especially beef – which if we gave up would lower emissions as much as not driving our cars. The land currently devoted to beef production could instead be used for biofuel production, which is something we’re already doing with ethanol, so eminently doable as well.
To quote a line from Yes, Minister: “We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it.” If it’s something that’s doable which lowers greenhouse gas emissions, let’s do it then.
I think most, if not all of us here, recognize that it is a political non-starter. I think most of us also recognize that without those changes, and right away, we will not have a prayer of solving this. The argument for small steps has been there since the 1980s. Meanwhile we have increased consumption, increased fossil fuel usage, and gone further down the road to unhabitable conditions. No, we’re not going to get this to happen. I’ve got news for you. We’re not even going to get the smallest changes imaginable to happen. The trajectory of the various climate summits, and the failure of all countries to meet the extremely modest goals, tells us that. So I don’t think there is any need to lecture us on what we should be doing. We know what we should be doing, which is major. We know what we will be able to push through, which is nothing. Cosmetic at best.
And frankly, whether we do it or not, we will be reducing our lifestyles, whether by choice or by necessity. The resources of the earth are finite, the earth is warming up, and species are disappearing rapidly. If we don’t make the hard choices, we will be thrust into them. It is my opinion we will find ourselves thrust, because everyone I talk to is saying the same things as you are. And that will not do the job. Circumstances will force us to a different life.
We have shown the ability to reduce our lifestyle in a critical situation. We did that in WWII. Then, when the war was over, we jumped into an orgy of consumption that continues to accelerate,. Unless we recognize the emergency and act accordingly, we will lose.,
If this is your idea of something that is more possible, you may be quite deluded. The beef lobby is one of the most powerful in the country, and people are committed to eating beef. When I moved to Nebraska, I was astonished (and disgusted) to discover most of my students ate meat three times every day. Some of them eat steak every dinner. This is the most undoable of all the proposals, not the compromise position.
And no one is suggesting living in caves. This is the straw man often leveled at people who tell the truth about the environment.
GW #2 “what our daily life would look like”
In Chapters 11 and 12 of Life Rules (2012) Ellen LaConte mentions several of the items @Your Name’s not Bruce? #5 and in Chapter 13 cites specific examples of local communities in India (NGO Navdanya), Columbia (the village Gaviotas), Brazil (Landless Workers’ Movement), Argentina (popular assemblies), Basque Region (Mondragonian co-operatives), South Boston, Massachusetts (Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative), Sweden (Sami region Kangos) operating Earthologically as well as other examples elsewhere in the book.
The Argentina movement failed, partly because of repression.
Navadanya continues today (https://navdanyainternational.org/join-us/interns/) along with the Indian Farmers protest.
The Mondragon co-operative (https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/) continues with reports at least until 2019
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (https://www.dsni.org/) operates today.
Gaviotas may still be continuing (https://www.100-percent.org/las-gaviotas-colombia/)
They are all different, all locally inspired but operate within Life’s rules democratically with Servant Leaders.
“a political non-starter” iknklast #10
Correct. The trick is to work ‘outside the system’, locally and also share experience with other local movements. Gaviotas, admittedly a small population, stopped eating beef by replacing their cows with chickens and rabbits. (Plant-based meat substitute or cultured meat a whole other topic.)
Naif@8:
You will note that I referred only to mining, not “rare earth metals” mining. The green lobby is extremely disingenuous, as are you, by insisting that photovoltaics and magnet production are A-okay because “little rare-earth mining is needed”. Perhaps you should be asking why you’re not worried about the overall picture, instead of trying to knock down one extremely specific example? It is that bigger picture to which I, and the links I provided, spoke.
Someone at work, who also happens to be politically active, recently made a comment about how stupid it was to think we can just abolish fossil fuels before we have a viable substitute in place. I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from pointing out that we have already had more than 30 years to come with such a substitute without even getting started. Instead, what we have been doing is going to ever greater lengths to find more oil. And for most of that time his party was in power.
I was tempted to say something like: Imagine we had been getting regular alarms of high temperatures (rarely a good sign!) from a certain critical component (a generator, a transformer etc.) since the 1980s*. Imagine further that the Operation Center (where I work) had been reporting the problem repeatedly and kept trying to draw everyone’s attention to the issue for all that time while being told “Yeah, we’ll look into it” with no follow-up. In the mean time the alarm has been repeating ever more frequently until finally, about ten years ago, it stopped going away entirely. Now imagine it’s finally decided that the whole power plant has to be take out of commission now or we will have a total failure, and the same people who had been ignoring the problem for 30 years started complaining about “short notice” and not having a viable substitute in place. How seriously would you take their complaint?
* The analogy is, of course, totally unrealistic. The component would have failed decades ago, besides all our units do indeed undergo regular maintenence whether there are any critical alerts or not.
James – for the simple reason that my post which you decided to refute with your ‘bigger picture’ was directed very precisely to the issue of environmental impacts of photovoltaics. In particular, I was referring to the spectacular flow of disinformation that has been churning out over the past 5 years, with emphasis on the rhetorical trick of trying to connect the environmental impact of all renewable technologies to one another in order to condemn them one and all. Which, speaking of disingenuous, is exactly what you are doing.
To be clear, I did not say ‘little rare earth mining is needed’. I said none. I have no idea why you are talking about magnets. As for lithium, I personally think it is a dead-end, but for photovoltaics it is relevant only to the extent that energy storage is required for effective deployment of PV, and batteries are not the only option. Lithium batteries are a complementary technology, and their environmental impact needs to be considered quite distinctly.
As for mining as a whole, well, if your vision of what the world needs to look like excludes even quartz ‘mining’, you had best conceive of what civilization looks like with zero energy use. Silicon is the single most abundant element in the earth’s crust, and completely benign in its oxide form. If we can’t use it, we can’t use anything.
I recently learned that deer produce more methane in their ruminant processes than cattle do, which is important to know because of the claim that if we all switched to a vegetarian diet we could fight global warming. There are no fast, easy solutions to cutting down the continual contribution of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. So, if we aren’t going to switch from beef to venison, we might as well eat meat. When any one group makes the claim that ONE THING wil fix global warming, then they are not looking too deeply into the matter. Switching to a vegetarian diet would increase the need for arable land; and even though I left the rural landscape for the urban when I was 21, I do know that there are several stages in crop production requiring emissions emitting tractors to circle around the field; spring plowing or disking (which also releseases stored carbon from the soil,) seeding, fertilizing, harvesting (two stages for some crops) and then fall plowing. Then there’s hauling to the elevators to store until the train picks up the grain, milling, and then market distribution of food products. That uses a lot of diesel and gas fuel, milling uses electricity. So, no, cutting back on cow farts doesn’t necessarily help out for global warming. Also, there is a lot of pasture land that can’t be farmed due to rocks that turn up every year on land that is glacial till. Cattle can graze there, thought.
James, yes. It’s misleading to say that renewables are clean in production and extraction. But when we look at the costs, there are decisions that would be best made with a clear delineation of the environmental costs of all of the energy sources.
We know that the carbon sources are environmentally hazardous in extraction, production, transportation, refining, distribution, consumption, ash disposal, and emission. We also know that energy is consumed in facilitating each of those stages, the sources of those energy adding to the burden on both the environment and the carbon load of the atmosphere. In exracting and mining the materials for solar panels and for wind generators, how does that compare with the volumes of rare earth and magnets for all of the appliances we use, for our computers and watches and phones and then weigh in how their energy production of energy at the end use stage either does or doesn’t produce emissions. I would also consider how much of this is due to the fact that these are largely early stage processes that with will and science can be made cleaner as the technology progresses.
There is no free lunch, and I think that asking people in the developing world to cut back on energy use now that they are able to do things industrially for their economies that they couldn’t do before, is not going to work very well, and we are avid consumers of energy in the developed world and it doesn’t seem likely that people are going to cotton to giving that up.
We need to balance needs and costs. Population growth should be curtailed, yes, but I think the best we can do is reduce it from exponential growth to linear growth. Women and girls bore the cost of China’s ham-handed attempts to force reduced family sizes.
I think if we could convince people to turn even 10% of their lawns from non-native grasses to butterfly gardens, we would be lucky, let alone get people to grow our own tomatoes where once we played frisbee or send the dog out to shit. We have patterns of behavior to change. I know people that think nothing of overbuying groceries only to throw out half their food because it reaches a sell-by date. Even convincing people to use the quick-wash cycle unless their clothes are truly filthy has been an uphill battle.
If we stop using carbon based fuels, we don’t need to replace all of the energy that we currently use. 33% of the energy we used is in getting them from the rocks we break to bust them loose to your tank (or furnace) and even then much of the energy release is wasted as heat. We need to decide what the priorities are, and cutting carbon emissions is probably right up at the top, but we need our best people researching and providing the info, and we need to convince the boards of directors and legislatures and executives that this is a crisis that can’t be put off any longer.
@YoSaffBridge, #7
However, an amateur gardener with less than an acre of land will never be able to produce more than a fraction of the calories they need to survive.
70 square meters are enough to produce the vegetables and fruits needs of an average family in temperate settings. This is certainly enough to alleviate productivity needs to a large extant, and doesn’t require more than average skill (not accounting to the fact learning happens too)(most people used to produce food this way a generation or two ago).
@Michael Haubrich, #15
Switching to a vegetarian diet would increase the need for arable land
This is not strictly true. Industrial agriculture is designed to simplify agriculture procedure. Agrodiverse small farms are producing more than intensive monocultures. Ecological processes are only beginning to be used in intensive systems, e.g. intercropping, which allows yielding more per surface unit than monoculture (China increased some crop yields up to 10-20% using intercropping alone).
I am not reacting to the vegan argument per se. Rather, yields may not always be best approached if we keep thinking linearly about current industrial agrosystem.There are ways that are completely overlooked, and of course part of it is dogmatic propaganda.
Any time, the limiting factor in agriculture has always been labour.
@YoSaffBridge, #7
However, an amateur gardener with less than an acre of land will never be able to produce more than a fraction of the calories they need to survive.
A more personal account, anecdata…
When I bought my home three years ago, about 0.8 acres (with a somehow steep slope, but that’s why we could afford it, because no real estate developper would have increased their offer on that piece of land), I/we planned to give a try toward autonomy. Since we are envisioning long term, the idea was to get there incrementally. Covid precipitated the thing, because living on a tropical island, market –including food market, is a bit erratic in the face of such crises.
We are currently producing 25-35% of our own food after 3 years. Which is a bit of an understatement, because we certainly produce something nearing 50% if only nothing else would be available (simply we want more diverse diet).
I spend a lot of labour in this, but most of it is planting longer term food trees. Most of our food comes from mature trees that do not require a lot of work around, save for producing storable forms of foods (jams, dry fruits) and cooking. I spend some time on things that do not yield enough if at all, but that’s because I really want these –and I’d probably better learn to forget about it or decrease time invested in these failing experiments. (But then there is still the learning thing, and I see that it actually comes faster than one thinks –success requires a lot of failing after all).
My point is that I now think double, and aim for ‘passive agriculture’, i.e. foods that come at fairly low production cost (of course, luckily in the tropics the answer is agroforestry). It’s simply amazing to read about traditional agrosystems that actually already aimed at maximizing food production while minimizing labour required.
Somehow there is a strong regional influence on the kinds of crops that can prosper at a place, and the thing is to work out which are these crops fitting one’s area best.
I still maintain that, for someone with below-average skill like me, it is a more productive use of my time and money to support local farmers, and a more productive use of my tiny garden to grow bee-friendly herbs and flowers.
Content de t’entendre Laurent!
I know that there are several people referring to regenerative agriculture, combining livestock with cropland on a rotational basis reducing the need for plowing and fertilizing while enriching the soil with deep rooted crops. Kind of like the prairie before sodbusters turned over the Great Plains.