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next_migrationI mentioned last week my desire to talk back to Eliza Daley’s essay about reruralization, reprinted on Resilience.org. (If you’re reading this, you almost certainly know about Resilience.org, but if not, it’s a very interesting site.) Daley’s been writing for a while about creating a sustainable future and I have a lot of respect for many of her perspectives. So let me start by enumerating the very important major points on which I agree with her:
1. It certainly does not make sense to try to attain sustainability by getting as many potentially displaced people as possible to move into already oversized cities.
2. As the future progresses, the decline of affordable fossil fuels will create an increasing need to reduce the energy put into food production, in terms of calories burned per calorie of food obtained. This will presumably entail more reliance on human labor.
3. Long-term transport, especially of refrigerated foods, will also become harder to afford, making it sensible for more consumers to live closer to agriculturally productive areas. Growing perishable foods hydroponically or by other hi-tech means in urban areas will be too resource-intensive to substitute at a large scale.
4. Many urbanites have unreasonable prejudices against both rural culture and the physical conditions of rural living that are not fully centered in reality. On the other hand, we also agree that rural society includes a significant contingent of “obnoxious young men ... with their enormous trucks and their neck beards and their assault rifles and their flaming insecurities,” and that these might not be the greatest neighbors for some kinds of people.
However, she also makes some assertions with which I strongly disagree:
1. “[H]umans have generally not grown food in urban environments.”
2. “Loud folks” who do not want to become some type of farmworker (more on that soon) are lazy, spoiled urbanites. They “don’t want ... to work.” They “don’t want ... to live without ... someone else doing most of their body’s work.” If you “like to eat,” you should have to do farm labor, because “If you are not doing this work for yourself, someone else has to do it for you.”
3. “If urban areas can’t sustainably feed us, then billions of people need to move. Now.”
Let me address each of these in turn:
Can food be grown in urban environments?
Certainly, cities can’t grow all or most of their own food. There is no room for extensive agriculture, wherein you have large fields of grain or pastures for animals. However, a small-scale intensive agriculture, in which vegetables are given less space but receive far more care per square foot, can be practiced on a scale, not sufficient to provide for all of a city’s produce consumption, but to fill in quite a bit. Let me make it clear for the rest of this discussion that by “city” I mean “urbanized area,” not “Manhattan.” If residents are stacked on top of each other thirty stories high and almost all of the meager remaining land between buildings is paved, then yes, it’s virtually impossible to grow a useful amount of food locally. If most residents are living in single-family homes or in two-story apartment buildings with good-sized lawns, something meaningful could be done.
The potential for urban horticulture is not confined to suburbanites with big yards and the resources to do fancy square-foot gardening with imported topsoil and amendments. In a book called African Indigenous Vegetables in Urban Agriculture (which you can get as a PDF free), I once saw a list of some major African cities that produced 30% to 90% of their own vegetables. Probably the amount of vegetables they consumed was rather less than desirable for good health, but still, it wasn’t nothing. You can’t grow wheat and corn in the city, but at the same time, you can’t live healthfully on nothing but wheat and corn, and if you can produce some of the more expensive, perishable foods locally to supplement imported grain, that’s helpful.
Some animal products are also produced in cities. Lots of people keep a few chickens in backyard coops and feed them largely on scraps. In the past, it was not that uncommon for a cow or pig to be kept by urbanites, probably not very humanely. That’s illegal now for hygenic reasons, which, like many other things, might slide as decline progresses. Rabbits can be raised in hutches in a basement or garage, which is definitely inhumane, but rural meat factories do worse.
Daley says “You still need exactly the same area to grow food in a city as you need in the country. These are still the same plants.” But that’s not true of small-scale horticulture. More care and human labor per square foot can make up for fewer square feet per plant; yields per plant will be somewhat lower, but not zero. Spacing of some crops in extensive agriculture is set not just by the needs of the plant, but by the needs of the machinery that will tend it.
She also thinks that urban soil and water is inherently too foul to grow food: “There are not many vacant lots that have food-safe dirt, for example. There are whole urban neighborhoods where the water is not potable, and for the record, this means you can’t use it to grow food either.” If people are actually drinking that water now anyway, for the record, they won’t see why they shouldn’t pour it on their tomato plants. But in her vision of a catastrophic future, will poor urbanites not rely mostly on rain and rain barrels anyway, being unable to afford regular watering with metered water?
As for soil, nowadays there are community gardens and minifarms in vacant lots in many cities. Probably they test the soil before setting up, but in a future of widespread hunger, fewer potential urban gardeners would be paralyzed by the idea that there might be atoms of lead, or whatever, in the backyard soil. In some cases that would mean that people suffered serious toxicity or cancer. But the fact that one’s diet might do long-term harm doesn’t generally mean that people will give up eating; otherwise, the grain-fed meat, soda pop, and candy industries would all be long gone. And with the quantity of Roundup that conventional agribusiness is now feeding us, it’s far from obvious that food from rural land is the healthy alternative.
Should everyone be a farmer?
There are two problems here. One is the moral opprobrium Daley would apply to those who “don’t want” to grow their own food. The second is the literally insurmountable obstacles that would stand in the way of the vast majority of urban Americans who decided that they did want to grow their own food. The two are not unconnected.
Since it seems she envisions good Americans as self-sufficient peasants each growing their own family’s food, let’s think about what it would take to grow one’s own food. First, you require access to land: land that you can afford to purchase, or to rent with some guarantee that you won’t be thrown off as soon as you’ve improved it a bit. You’ll also need to know that you can pay whatever taxes exist, that you can have a conventional house or won’t be thrown off the land for living in a shack, that you can have a year-round usable water supply and some means of heating and cooking, etc. And then you’ll need tools, seeds, soil amendments, etc.; many of these things are shipped into rural farms just as they are into city mini-farms.
For the moment, let’s assume you’re one of the fortunate few who has access to land and the other necessities. As a second requirement, since you won’t be buying a $300,000 combine as a subsistence farmer, you’ll need to have a fair amount of muscle. Best be young and able-bodied. And third, if you hope to succeed at it, you’ll need to have some real skills. As a half-assed organic home gardener, I can see that the local CSA people who grow enough for hundreds of boxes per week must really know what they’re doing. And handling “cows and goats” requires more skills yet than growing plants.
At one point, Daley knows that. In an encomium to “rednecks,” she describes them as the people who “know how to work [their land] ... who have the skills and tools and knowledge that all of us so desperately need.” Even more, “They are ... the people who are going to survive in this round of crises.” I take it that since I lack those specific tools and skills or zip code, I’m gonna die and probably deserve it. Sounds a bit Gary North-ish. But let’s move on. Three paragraphs earlier, Daley imagined making this hostile response to a podcast guest who said “Not everyone likes to farm”:
You don’t like to farm… Well, I assume you like to eat? You like to wear clothing and stay warm in the winter. You like to be relatively clean and healthy. All these things require farm work. If you are not doing this work for yourself, someone else has to do it for you. Why do you think it even matters what you like? And don’t you think you probably should learn to like to take care of your own bloody business?
But farming is not the only necessary job, except in dark age societies so poor and squalid that everyone’s either a peasant or some type of robber. I do like to wear clothing; does that mean I should feel morally obliged to become a tailor, or to spin, weave, and sew all my own clothes? I do like to be clean and healthy; should I be both a soapmaker and a doctor or herbalist? Doing any one of those tasks well enough to make even a meager living at it (assuming the absence of legal obstacles) would take years of regular practice. Well, the same is true of farming. We all understand that nobody can do everything, much less do everything well, so some division of labor means great benefits for all of us. Saying that everyone who eats should grow their own food, in the same way that we say that everyone should pick up their own dirty underwear, implicitly denies that growing food is a specialized skill that requires knowledge and practice. After all, if everyone can do it, it can’t be worthy of much respect.
Moreover, the <1% of Americans who do make a living as farmers, the people Daley celebrates as morally superior, actually wouldn’t want every one of the rest of us to be magically conjuring up our own food. Farmers may share the general rural hostility towards urbanites, but they still want there to be someone buying the flour and hamburger. In order to be farmers, rather than peasants (which it will still be hard to get away with for a long time, and which few would choose voluntarily), farmers need non-farming consumers. Without that market, they could no longer make a living producing cash crops or (usually) factory animal products, and would shortly be bankrupt. That’s a funny way of showing respect. The collapsing wealth of land barons would be a pleasant side effect, though.
Should billions of people move “Now”?
Nope. Especially not with the goal of becoming farmers overnight.
First, megacities are unsustainable, but some are more unsustainable than others. It was true thirty years ago that megacities were unsustainable in the long run, and survivalist types then used to tell people that residents who wanted to deserve to survive needed to move to the countryside “Now.” Yet here we are thirty years later and urban areas are bigger and richer than ever. In the long run, the larger ones certainly must become smaller and poorer, but some are going to get smaller and poorer much faster than others (e.g., consider Las Vegas vs. Chicago). Barring some massive catastrophe like nuclear holocaust, food will be shipped into Chicago, to say nothing of smaller Illinois cities like Springfield or Decatur, from surrounding farms for the rest of your life. Today’s farmers produce food to sell. If their yields were cut in half, they’d still have far more than enough corn and soybeans to feed their families, should their families be willing to live on corn and soybeans. They will sell their surplus to willing buyers, which ultimately mostly means people in towns, now and for a long time to come.
In my writing, I argue that even those who do need to migrate as fast as possible from a select subset of most-unsustainable areas (the Southwest, most urgently) need to avoid directing too many people into a few places within a short period of time: a hundred thousand migrants turning up all at once in La Crosse, say, would have catastrophic effects on the local housing and labor markets. The same is true of any area of countryside of similar population. A few more new farmers each year would be great: a huge swarm of new farmer-wannabes would create economic dislocations that harmed both newcomers and locals, maximizing resentment. So the mere fact that your hometown will ultimately be “unsustainable” in its present form does not mean you need to make yourself a refugee today, or that you should.
Let’s ignore the fact that you may have neither the background nor training nor strength to run your own farm, and just concentrate on the financial logistics of obtaining a small farm. Farmland prices are escalating like everything else. In 2021, the cost of Iowa farmland skyrocketed to $9751 per acre. (That’s an average; Google tells me that good farmland can cost over twice that.) It doesn’t help that the superrich, seeing things fraying and the value of other assets threatened, are buying up farmland as investments. In 2021, Bill Gates owned 242,000 acres, equal to about one-fourth of the entire state of Rhode Island, and he’s still buying.
Of course, in a state where the average farm is 300 acres, you can seldom buy just one acre—certainly not one acre with enough water and freedom from zoning laws that you can live a hand-to-mouth existence on it. I searched on LandAndFarm for Iowa farms of 1 to 10 acres, potentially suitable for growing one’s own food. There were a few; those with houses usually ran $200,000 to $600,000. The cheapest included $49,500 for 6 acres (a “small hunting farm”), $115,000 for 9 acres with a one-bedroom house and a well, $125,000 for 8 acres, and $134,000 for 2 acres with a house, sheds and creek access.
That does sound pretty sweet, assuming the water hasn’t been poisoned by runoff. Maybe I could ... but wait! I don’t have enough liquid assets to pay cash for it, and once I explained to the local mortgage lender that my future income would derive from “growing cabbages by hand,” I envision him looking me over then laughing hard enough to strain something before he tosses me out.
And I could cover a down payment, which, as we will see in a minute, most Americans cannot. You imagine what a rural banker would say to an African-American nurse’s aide, bus driver, or adjunct professor from the big city who thinks she’s going to waltz in with no grubstake and start making a living as a farmer overnight. If you could get a mortgage, you couldn’t be a subsistence farmer; you’d have to have enough income to pay the mortgage, which means either compliantly playing the cash-crop game or taking a second full-time job to pay the bills.
Perhaps one could rent. Over half the farmland in Iowa is owned by private nonfarming owners, usually inheritors (of substantial wealth, since the average farm is worth millions), who rent it out. Rents are typically in the $200 to $300 per acre range. These are clearly assumed to be rentals for the cultivation of either corn or soybeans. The absentee owners want to keep generating that income forever, so they don’t want the land to be turned into your mixed-cropping subsistence doomstead or let go in part to woody plants, which any sensible peasant would want to have some of. They want it to continue to be rentable as a production zone for large-scale monocrops and will rent to people who have plans consistent with that.
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources recently offered to rent some of their properties to beginning farmers cheaply, for several thousand dollars per year. These properties are too large for a subsistence farmer and commonly come with stipulated management activities that will require machinery and chemicals; they are aimed at conventional monocrop or hay farmers. A few small private properties with quirky, tolerant owners (or owners who want a temporary resident to build their doomstead for them then go away) must be available for longer-term rent, but the option wouldn’t be available for huge numbers of people whose goal was a diversified small subsistence farm, a la Five Acres and Independence.
We’ve all heard that about 40% of Americans wouldn’t be able to meet an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing, selling things, or skipping bills; well, two years into COVID-19, that’s gone up to 49%. For 2019 the U.S. Census reported that median household net worth among non-Hispanic white Americans, including home equity, was $187,300. By comparison, that figure was $14,100 for Black Americans and $31,700 for people of Hispanic ethnicity. Not all of that wealth will be liquid, of course, and many people have zero or negative net worth. From those figures alone, we can see that many urbanites, even before the disruption of the pandemic, couldn’t dream of buying a valuable chunk of land in some distant community, moving to it, then purchasing even the most basic necessities to grow and preserve food from it. That includes the children of many of the Black farmers who were forced off their land in the late 20th century with the USDA’s help, who would now have no hope of buying back their parents’ land.
But beyond that, income inequality within groups is severe. Distribution of assets by age is conspicuous: the large majority of those in the upper tiers of the white and Asian-American wealth distributions are older people who couldn’t possibly take on the backbreaking labor of subsistence farming. Young people usually have very little money if their families aren’t rich. From the same Census figures, the median net worth of households is $15,700 where “the householder” is less than 35 years old (that includes couples; it’s $2725 for a single female under 35, vs. $14,710 for a single male); $27,420 for millennials and $3080 for Generation Z; $4084 for those who rent rather than owning a house; and $2000 for those who receive SNAP food assistance.
People whose net worth is in those ranges can’t afford to buy rural land at its current price, nor would they be eligible for mortgages. Worse, if a hundred million Americans decided they wanted to be rural homesteaders all at once, the price of land would go through the roof—which would mean Bill Gates and his ilk had yet more ability to outbid little folks for it and become even bigger absentee landlords. We can be sure that rentals of properties where you could live as Daley recommends are not plentiful enough to provide homes for millions or tens of millions. Therefore, the vast majority of urban Americans who are young enough to do hard manual labor would have no possible way to get a farm of their own.
One wonders if Daley really envisions many millions of Americans becoming yeoman farmers, or farm laborers—people who do the heavy drudgework for meager wages without gaining any share in ownership of the land. This labor is often grossly exploitative, with migrant laborers treated as disposable tools to be killed off by heat and poisons, while long-term sharecroppers can be virtual serfs. And there aren’t too many of the latter in America these days. Big monocrop farms don’t wish to employ a lot of “hired men” who don’t know anything about agriculture; no matter how badly they were paid and housed, they’d still be more cost and trouble than a machine that can do the same work. That won't change so long as farmers are prioritized for fossil fuel access. Nor do most farm laborers have the opportunity to produce much of their own food; they are toiling to produce specific commodities.
Will we, in the post-fossil fuel era, need to have many more farm laborers and, if inequity is not to worsen, many more farmers? Surely so. However, some transitions can be made far in advance of need (e.g., people can start bicycling to work in large numbers, where that’s feasible, while they can still afford to gas up cars), but others can’t. I have commented here on the logistical problems that trying to instantly reverse the centuries-long movement of Americans away from farming would entail. Briefly, so long as less than 1% of the population is able to produce more than enough food to feed us all, there’s no possible way to suddenly raise the farming population even to, say, 10%.
First, most of the good farming land is being farmed. Land for all those new farmers would not be available without land redistribution, and the tiniest hint of that would bring out an army of those young men with enormous trucks and assault rifles, especially if the beneficiaries were to be urbanites, who are the ones here being commanded to farm. Second, if additional marginal lands were despoiled to use for farmland (which still wouldn’t be put into the hands of the urban poor, you can be sure), the new farmers would have to grow cash crops to meet their non-food economic needs and pay taxes. More crop production would, as in the Great Depression, mean crop prices dropped yet further, putting yet more strain on family farmers who, despite their competence in modern industrial farming, are often barely turning a profit without federal subsidies as it is.
In future, as fueling heavy machinery becomes more costly, running megafarms will become more difficult and expensive, especially for family farmers. As costs rise and yields drop, the value of farmland may also drop. These trends could well make the partition of large farms into small farms for sale more attractive to cash-strapped large landowners. However, I expect them to take decades to make a great change in the rural landscape and economy.
Do I recommend that climate migrants stick to urban areas? Not at all. Those who think they could relocate to small towns and live and make a living there are encouraged to prefer that option. Those who are young enough to be still choosing a path in life are advised to develop skills that they could use to make a living in a small town. For many of those, though, skills other than farming will be a much safer bet.
Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-23 08:21 pm (UTC)..hey there! On Degringolades blog you mentioned that you're not quite a fan of JMG nowadays. Since I just recently started on one of his magic books, I'm wondering if I overlooked things that would be of importance to me. Would you mind sharing your issues, so that I can find out if it is something that I should take into account? I would appreciate that very much. Thank you!
Best wishes Emily07
Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-24 01:13 am (UTC)Your comment automatically posted - I haven't been screening comments from people with Dreamwidth handles, since the trolls haven't exactly been beating down my doors - but you can delete it if you like. If you do, I will delete this lengthy ranting comment.
I have been a longtime fan of JMG's. His earlier books dealing with long-range views of history and several related subjects always seemed very rational and well-informed to me, well worth reading, and his fiction is brilliant. Unfortunately, he's apparently gotten more right-wing in recent years, sneering at anyone who objects to the Jan. 6 coup attempt, quicker to label more of the world as menacing Wokesters and to call his readers liars, trolls, or shills if they express even direct personal observations that challenge his current beliefs about, e.g., vast no-go-zones in Portland. Though he could tend to assume disagreement was due to laziness or bad faith, he used to be a writer who regularly warned others to avoid binary thinking, factionalism, and associated lazy rhetoric, such as "cold prickly" or "snarl words." Now, everything he doesn't personally like seems to be Woke.
He's not a white nationalist (if something of a Great Replacement Islamophobe), I'm 100% certain of that from his writing, yet he's got a coterie of pet white nationalists whom you will be booted for arguing with. I've been booted from his blogs more than once - the last time right after I got this Dreamwidth handle, I made the mistake of arguing with and scoffing at the crew that thinks a proposal to make artificial meat from insects is an anti-white plot - then the next day I found my handle was banned. And you know what, I knew better, so I shrug and say "his blog, his rules." Except, the readers' malevolent rhetoric has escalated to the point that he's allowed two rightists recently to say explicitly that they want to see all LGBTQ or "Left" people slaughtered, and to participate. "Common courtesy" now apparently includes allowing some very fine readers to comment about how they hope to kill other readers.
I wish I could say to him, what are you doing here? Have you really changed, or are you perhaps just riding the tiger? Did your long-term view of history convince you that democracy will fall, that fascism is inevitable, so you'd better make nice with the brownshirts since they'll soon have the power of life and death over you? Because surely you don't really believe we're heading in the right direction.
A second major bone to pick: As one of the dead armadillos in the middle of the road, I do NOT want to get into fighting over covid vaccines here. I respect Greer for creating a space in which people could discuss heretical views that are sometimes simply acknowledgements of data - though other commenters come up with QAnon-level paranoia - but he continues to mention his "intuitive sense" that "most if not all of the people who've been vaccinated for Covid would die as a result of side effects." That was today; he used to say most or all people who've been *boosted*, so he's escalating the vision of doom at the very time when, though it's become obvious that the vaccines are much less safe and effective than originally claimed, it's also obvious that most people who got two shots, quite a long time ago now, are not dying like flies. And I (with some biological background) see no evidence for any mechanism that could cause mass dieoff much later.
I find this frightening, not because it could terrify the gullible vaxxed or discourage people from getting endlessly boosted without evidence of benefit, but because it's feeding a contingent of his followers who imagine that "the vaxxed" are all "PMCs", people with desk jobs, who, for one reason or another, deserve to die. Since I don't think Greer really wants to see a new American Holocaust, I've actually wondered if he is not playing a long game to try to defuse the ultraright's preparations for violence by convincing them that if they bide their time, the liberals and urbanites will all drop dead on their own (or become sickly and easier to kill). If so, I fear that promising them mass Blue Faction death in the near future could backfire, as those who eagerly believed would become increasingly impatient when - okay, if - it continues not to arrive on schedule.
I've bought at least 30 of Greer's books. I think he's an excellent writer, well-read, smart and creative, with an authorial voice I always took great pleasure in reading. But ever since Trumpism started its march to power, I've been watching his public character change in what appears to me to be a negative direction and wondering, with disappointment, why. If he should actually see this, I don't expect that he would answer me, but I truly wish I could understand what's motivating him at this point.
Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-24 05:00 am (UTC)I have no warm fuzzy feelings toward the Woke and in all honesty consider your fears of white nationalists overblown. When reading that you thought the South would prefer theocracy I chuckled. Southerners enjoy booze, gambling, and porn like most Americans. I didn't argue the point though because I could easily see a future where religious fervor is inflamed or where "degenerates" don't fight for their vices, let odious laws pass, and then indulge themselves illegally.
With that out of the way. I will say I think JMG got taken in by the Trump phenomena. For example:
During his Presidency, Trump passed a trade deal, and JMG praised the accomplishment. Despite the trade deal being TPP in all but name only. When I pointed out how prominent globalists praised the deal he brushed it off as nothing to worry about, probably.
JMG gave Trump other passes but the above is in my opinion the most egregious. If a Democrat were to have pushed through such a trainwreck trade agreement the bulk of his audience and himself would've taken it as another nail in America's coffin.
I myself have for the most part avoided his Covid open posts, after realizing that these discussions, no matter how civil, give me a icky feeling, similar in nature to binging heinous true crime material. By no means do I consider myself high on the spiritual totem pole but I get the distinct sense that immersing oneself in hundreds of hours of 'research', on whether mass death is likely, isn't good for an individual's emotional, mental, and spiritual state.
Some weeks past in the open posts, I wasn't surprised when the veneer of civility dropped, and the nastyness fully emerged. JMG noticed this and made a effort to lower the temperature. In my estimation he stopped those efforts prematurely and I predict the discussions will grow more heated than previously which run the risk of schisming his audience.
Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-24 01:49 pm (UTC)As a secularist, I have great concern about a movement that is passing religious laws in many states and wants to give itself the power to throw out election results that don't favor it. I would not want to live in a country ruled by the whims of Ron DeSantis. Booze (still banned in some counties in AR and TN!), gambling and porn are fripperies; education, contraception and voting are essential. (IMHO.) However, I recognize that there are other people whose preferred way of life - for themselves, not anything they wish to do to others - is hindered or prohibited by the sort of government prevailing in blue states, and who feel themselves culturally treated as second-class citizens in those states.
It is for these reasons (and some others) that I think division of the Union into smaller countries might actually be desirable, and the more people who move in advance into the reasonable territories of plausible successor states that would suit them, the better. It will never be the case that everyone is happy with their government, but if those who want very different forms of government can mostly live in different places, fewer people will be very dissatisfied.
Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-25 09:02 am (UTC)I too think a controlled break-up would produce the best outcome. What makes our current situation ugly is the feeling that a win for the other side constitutes a threat from the federal level and such a sentiment has merit given the hostility the elite want fostered between Blue and Red Faction.
Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-24 09:29 am (UTC)Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-24 09:44 am (UTC)Thank you very much for this, it was very helpful for me!
Best wishes, Emily07
Re: Jmg...
Date: 2022-08-24 01:32 pm (UTC)