Guest post: Everything flows from the food supply
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on How to personalise care.
There is a meme (in the classical sense of the word) circulating among some young people, especially young men, that “hard times create hard men, hard men create soft times, soft times create soft men, soft men create hard times”. And this sentiment, while chauvinist and not true in the strictest sense — exigencies of political economy, the natural environment, and ever-present arseholes gaming social systems at those systems’ expense to the arseholes’ personal advantage are almost always at fault for “hard times” — it does reflect a true-ish instinct one gets from the cyclical nature of stability and collapse.
Only a decadent society can collapse, because only a wealthy society can collapse, and only a wealthy society can afford to become decadent. In turn, only a collapsed society can grow out of its ashes and rise to heights where decadence is possible. After the most recent collapse which began with the Great Depression and ended with a hundred million people being immolated across Europe and Asia and Africa for no good reason, our own society has been on an upswing for three generations with only temporary setbacks that have thus far been made up for with higher and higher levels of debt. This upwelling of prosperity and peace has peaked and is now beginning to ebb once more, as conflicts inch closer and closer to the heartlands of the West and we have less and less confidence in our ability to carry our collective debts.
There are social forces at play which we are witnessing get taken over by sociopathic narcissists in real time, whose dogmas are spreading to every corner of influence, where the sociopathic narcissists are sure to follow. We have myopic technocrats bragging openly of effectuating a “Great Reset”, after which “you will own nothing and you will be happy”, once the entire economy is on a pay-as-you-go seigneurial model that resembles nothing so much as feudalism for us with trips to the Moon for them.
Not for nothing, but these fly-me-to-the-Moon billionaires are also busy buying up as much of the world’s most productive farmland as they can, in countries where their money can help them write the rules on how that land is used; during the pandemic, for example, Bill Gates became the world’s largest agriculture magnate. Because, as much as the mid-tier tech-lords and genderists and anti-racists seem to think that food magically shows up at the supermarket and the economic system upon which their fantasy lives are predicated is inviolable, anyone who knows anything about how the real world works knows that land and its cultivation are the true keys to a society’s long-term stability and prosperity.
After the United States, Ukraine has some of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, which are responsible for feeding an enormous number of people in the Old World. That this land is as we speak falling under the control of one of the world’s last powerful gangster statesmen is perhaps not an accident, after Ukraine’s revolution ushered in a government much more amenable to the West than to Russia. As unknowable as Putin himself is, it is possible he understands that everything flows from the food supply; without that, all the social games in the world dissolve into dust.
Without a stable supply of food, in other words, the “hard men” show up with their friends and their weapons and take what they want, until more “hard men” show up to stop them. Perhaps the techno-feudalists know this and will, out of their own sense of survival if not out of the goodness of their hearts, ensure a stable and ample supply of food enough to keep the “hard men” away. But that is a lot of faith to lay in the hands of a few men, who even with the best of intentions can still be quite wrong.
Either way, the view from Germany is getting interesting these days.
And that in turn rests upon a healthy functioning biosphere. It is the very basis of the ability to conduct agriculture at all. The biosphere will last longer without agriculture than agriculture will last without the biosphere. Protecting agricultural lands without protecting the natural cycles of material and energy upon which agriculture depends is a losing game. There is no replacement or prosthetic biosphere available; we have to live with, and within the one and only one we’ve got. You can’t buy an equitable climate, good weather, and a suitable growing season. If you erode or degrade those ecosystem infrastructures at the same time you’re relying on them, that’s a course to disaster. There’s no replacing them. You can only move on, until there’s nowhere else to move on to.
I suppose the hyper-rich are smart to do all this buying while their money still means something. At some point, the basic necessities of life are no longer going to be for sale, because the people you are trying to buy them from need to live too. If your money can still pay for coercive force, you can always steal these necessities, killing those who resist you. That might be the last use for wealth.
Agriculture does not happen magically any more than food does at the grocery store, but the thinking that buying up all the good farmland will be anything but a stopgap is delusional when everything else, including the very ecosystem services required for agriculture, is on fire. Then again, I guess it only has to work for as long as Bill Gates needs to eat.
not Bruce, that is very true. I’m amazed at how many people think we can survive without the ecosystems and the life they support. I have been told, in all seriousness, that we will find a way to synthetically create food. Probably; we already do some of that with medicines and food. But…synthetically creating relies on…resources. We can’t create food without something to create it from.
I’m not surprised given how much “wealth” and “economic activity” consists of manipulation and speculation on numbers in computers connected only tenuously, if at all, to anything real or physical. This disconnection from reality is a symptom of the idea that we are a self-made species, a sort of biological libertarianism that sees the recognition of any bar to human activity or desire as an affront to our rights and freedoms. Exceptionalism might have been born in religious thought, but it’s graduated to modern industrial civilization at large.
Granite. Really high in essential minerals. High in non-digestible fibre. Just as soon as we evolve the ability to digest silicon oxides we’re away laughing.
This is very very true.
Following Der Durchwanderer, Your Name’s not Bruce? and iknklast, nine planetary boundaries and the global hectare have been identified (Wikipedia). In The Handbook of Nature Study (1911), which I have not read (but have read about), Anna Botsford Comstock showed understanding.