https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/07/human-powered-air-compressor-and-energy-storage-system/
https://www.youtube.com/@greensnmachines
It's like fighing for and being granted sovereignty over a sinking island.
Monbiot's figure.
Not 'what would be nice in the realm of the extreme possible', but best outcome given the probabilities.
The analogy many have in their head is of the losing team, or the mother trying to save her child in a warzone. The 'never give up' mentality. The struggle against nihilism, against apathy, against doomerism. In these contexts, the reasoning goes, we must choose to be optimistic. We must rage against the dying of the light.
But in this case, it's more that we're on a sinking ship, and we can keep it afloat if we abandon the rear dance deck, but folks who are in love with dancing are saying 'I'm sure we'll figure something out.'
Or: we've invested our savings on a world tour; the weather report is horrible; we could have a fun trip if we canceled our plans and had a picnic at home instead; but we press on with the tour.
Our ideology should not be divorced from a material analysis of the likely state of the world, or else it is a dangerous ideology.
We are telling people to put their energy into a plan that claims 'there's no reason to think that we might not find an oasis over those hills', when we are about to run out of water, and have the option to use our dance tent to capture rainwater locally.
The real work is not how to desperately find a way to maintain our current standard of living, but how to reorganize ourselves so that the way we live is within current bounds. THEN we can play.
A primary focus would not be on small hacks to big ag, or ways of making small scale farming financially sustainable. The focus should be on developing the life support systems that we'll need: growing food to feed the growers, and then others, in an expanding circle outward from that land.
The appropriate technology movement and the transition movement weren't uniformly concerned with material depletion; there is a strong understanding about the removal of oil from the system, but perhaps not a full understanding of the implications for plastic, steel, fertilizer, cement.
The Greer idea -- that we should anticipate a period in which we are still surrounded by recent material abundance, but the supply chains have stopped -- is more in line with what we have in store.
So the 'hack' in FarmHack might be:
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If the lower-energy future comes about, we'd best start preparing now.
If we're somehow saved from it due to some unforeseen energy source miracle, we'll still need to conserve materials, lower our footprint because of other planetary boundaries. The lower energy we become now, the less climate damage we'll incur.
And lastly: if we're depending on energy and material systems outside our control, then there's a fundamental ceiling to our sovereignty.
FarmHack had its moment as a recognition of information sharing online, blogs, wikis, and this philosophy applied to farming. Information will set you free. An era of abundance, if we would just adopt the proper ideological framing.
Now we see that we are in an era of limits. Of abundance, but it requires a different framing: we need to make do with lower energy, lower material throughput. Increased conviviality, but within bounds. If we're not aware of the bounds, we're lost. The bounds become very important.
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Feather-ESP32-S2-PCB
Trying to develop a systems approach.
Energy. Water. Communications.
Biochar for water filtration.
Communications -- what sort of radio system, what coordination, what protocols.
Clothing.
Building shelters.
Making lumber.
Wind power.
Compressed air.
Setting up systems with idea that they'll last 50 or more years.
Refridgeration.
Dehydration.
Desalination.
How many calories can be produced on what area of land.
The class distinctions around who is getting into farming
We're all going to need to become peasants
Energy is going to need to become relocalized
So it's a 'grassroots-led' but we have to become the grassroots
The current hangups with folks in the North, the things they want to hold onto
Finding ways of making it less about belt-tightening and more about festival
Leading with festival -- this is one takeaway from the gathering in Maine
pizza as practice
as far as most folks there, who is the audience? ag4.0 people are looking for a buck so are many of the stakeholders ... they see profits, they see integration with global value chains so it's sort of empty moralizing ... but it's good for raising a flag for folks who are like-minded
for the other folks, the message is: we don't have the time, the minerals, or the capacity to make the renewable energy transition at current levels. there's no renewable replacement for the global supply chain. so you need to start working on transition now.
also: special responsibility in the extractive places, the ends of the supply chains, to ease this transition. it's easiest to rapidly work on designs there that leverage the downshift.
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logic of state
logic of capital
different logic needed
I think it's right to criticize Ag 4.0, and point to its origins in institutional and corporate ideation around an ideal future.
I'll say that it feels like an old battle to me. In citizen / community science, we took the same stance regarding environmental justice, using much the same language: it's time for the citizenry to decide priorities, develop their own methods for detecting and mitigating pollution; it's time for scientists and experts to stop claiming to run the show, and to defer to and lend their expertise to 'citizens'.
What I now feel, looking back on those discussions, is that this framing was often being made by academics and activists who themselves often had secure institutional or organizational affiliations. The framing was then somewhat of a self-critique: "It's time for us to stop speaking down to folks; we need to center them, not us."
What I'm now feeling is that the power and legitimacy of some of these institutions is currently waning sufficiently that this critique almost feels misplaced; it almost serves to reify divisions that are no longer feeling so solid.
It feels to me like it sets up a dichotomy: 'legitimate' farmers and peasants vs. people from institutions and corporations.
The analysis that feels more productive now to me is to realize that we're all going to need to become peasant farmers. The future must be, and will be, lower energy, lower material throughput.
Back then, it felt like a sort of aesthetic choice: do you want an eco-modernist, urban, high-tech future for people, with green spaces reserved as gardens? Or do you want a more bucolic life lived in the landscape? Proponents of both seemed to have reasonable rationales.
Dorn had early and often emphasized that many more people will need to go into food production -- 'in the future we'll be needing many more farmers'. I think that until recently, I thought that this 'people embedded in the landscape on small farms' approach was simply one of many possible futures; another possible path was the ecomodernist vision, in which robots make our food using intensive industrial techniques with a minimal land footprint, and the rest of the earth is 're-wilded'. People would then choose among these possible futures based on their values.
I think this is how many people still see the choice between (let's call them) 'regenerative ag' and 'ecomodernist ag', as almost driven by aesthetics: 'do you dig the idea of small farms dotting the landscape? or are you more into robots, with vast nature preserves?'
But these days, I've become quite convinced by analyses that conclude that the ecomodernist future isn't possible. The small farm future is the only viable future; and the longer we wait to implement it, the harder our transition into it will be.
For me, this changes the nature of debates over "Ag 4.0" that might tend to occur between the 'industrial / corporate ag' folks and people from peasant movements. It no longer feels quite as much as 'us' vs 'them' as it once did to me, once one begins to believe that the industrial, global supply chains are unsustainable -- that they in fact cannot and will not be sustained much longer.
In the past, my approach in dealing with "Ag 4.0" people was mostly one of moral condemnation (usually based on their proprietary, profit-obsessed practices), and I would consider corporate / industrial representatives to be in opposition to a 'grassroots' ethos in farming and technology.
Now, I'm less inclined to emphasize this opposition.
Self-provisioning seems to be key, here. Many things change about food production if self-provisioning is the goal. The scale is smaller. The approaches are more flexible. You're trying to come up with enough calories to sustain yourself, one way or the other. You're not trying to guess what other people might want, when.