Post-Intentional Informatically Occluded Brainfart

“We are soil people. If nothing else the Anthropocene is forcing us to remember that we are not disembodied souls waiting to ride the Big Elevator into the sky. We are en-souled creatures, yes, but we are earthbound first. In Augustine’s memorable phrase we are terra animata—animated earth.” [x]

The pressure to capitalise on nature

The pressure to financialise nature and offset destructive practices, including carbon and nature credits, and biodiversity net gain

realfarming.org

Offsetting is a huge distraction then, when we should be turning our attention to limiting the damage done in the first place, transitioning from fossil fuels and encouraging and investing in those farming practices which will be the only way forward in the face of climate breakdown. While we continue to operate within an economic system that will not stop growing, small-scale farmers and Indigenous people who are the protectors of 80% of the world’s biodiversity rely on intergenerational ecological knowledge to live within the planet’s limits. Moving away from corporate-controlled industrial-scale farming is imperative, as is the rejection of solutions that seek to perpetuate a broken system.

Investment must focus on those practices that address as a whole the polycrisis we now face across food, climate, biodiversity and health, and it should be at the grassroots level. Money should be flowing directly to people and communities building a local food system with circular economy thinking, and driven by the principle that everyone has the right to good food. Low input agroecological farming is the best hope of building resilience, in the face of future shocks.

The complexity of life does not lend itself to a simple market equation. Trying to shoehorn the unknowable intricacy of ecological processes into a one-size-fits-all table of solutions to be invested in feeds a flawed economic system and starves nature of its intrinsic, complex and priceless value. Put a price on nature and some will be quick to say it’s not worth much.

Thomas Malthus, who is often interpreted as arguing for population control to overcome economic limits, actually invoked the threat of limits to advocate for growth, arguing that scarcity is a natural fact, and that only a growth-based economy could overcome it. In this way, Malthus was one of the first ‘apostles of growth’. Since then, both neoclassical economists and elites sought to further cement the idea that growth is needed to overcome natural scarcity as common sense. But scarcity is not a natural fact. Rather, scarcity, as well as the social hierarchies that limit autonomy and self-determination, are imposed by a capitalist system of production. As a corollary, degrowth is not about imposing limits on society according to natural scarcity, but about regaining autonomy to collectively create public abundance, and also deliberate and set limits. And this – collectively setting limits – is a key prerequisite for the formation of autonomous, democratic governance, as the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis argues in his work. Indeed, it is precisely capitalism – through alienating us from each other and from the abundance of the earth – which undemocratically imposes limits on us and makes it impossible for us to set our own. Thus, just as degrowth is about the collective reappropriation and dépense of social surplus, it is also about the rejection of natural scarcity, the undoing of imposed limits set on us by capitalism and hierarchy, deliberating collective limits, and thus about creating a self-determined post-scarcity society.

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.

“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”