The Long Descent (27 page)

Feeding the Deindustrial Future

One conclusion that follows from these points is that the technological advances we consider most important today may not get the same rating from future generations. Ask people today what they think is the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century and the answers will likely focus on the Apollo moon landings, computer technology, the discovery of the genetic code, or what have you. Past ages, though, were notoriously bad judges of the relative importance of the legacies they've left to the future, and ours will likely be no different.

In the Middle Ages, for example, scholastic theology was thought to be the crowning achievement of the human mind. On the other hand, Gothic cathedrals, the spectacular technological advances chronicled by Jean Gimpel in
The Medieval Machine,
and the English feudal laws that evolved into parliamentary government and trial by jury were considered minor matters. Today, nobody outside the University of Chicago and a few conservative Catholic colleges pays the least attention to scholasticism, while Gothic architecture still shapes how we think of space and light; a good half of the machinery that surrounds us every day runs on principles evolved by the inventors of the clock and the windmill; and the political and legal systems of a majority of the world's nations come from that odd Saxon tribal custom, borrowed by Norman kings for their own convenience, of calling together a group of yeomen to discuss new laws or decide who committed a crime.

When it comes to the long-term value of a culture's accomplishments, in other words, the future has the deciding vote. I don't pretend to know for certain how that vote will be cast. Still, I'm willing to risk a guess. A thousand, or two thousand, or ten thousand years from now, when people look back through the mists of time to the 20th century and talk about its achievements, the top of the list won't be moon landings, computers, or the double helix, much less the political and cultural ephemera that occupy so much attention just now. If I'm right, it will be something much humbler — and much more important.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Albert Howard, an English agronomist working in India, began experimenting with farming methods that focused on the health of the soil and its natural cycles.
¹²
Much of his inspiration came from traditional farming practices used in India, China, and Japan that had maintained and even improved soil fertility for centuries or millennia. Howard fused these practices with Western scientific agronomy as well as the results of his own experiments to create the first modern organic agriculture. Later researchers, notably Alan Chadwick in England and John Jeavons in America, combined Howard's discoveries with methods of intensive gardening developed in France not long before Howard began his work. Combining the result with the biodynamic system developed in the 1920s by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, Chadwick and Jeavons developed the system that is now the current state of the art in organic intensive farming.

The result of their work is potentially a revolution in humanity's relationship to the land and the biosphere as dramatic as the original agricultural revolution itself. To begin with, the new organic methods are astonishingly productive. Using them, it's possible to grow a spare but adequate vegetarian diet for one person on 1,000 square feet of soil.
¹³
(For those with math phobia, that's a patch of dirt 20' by 50', about the size of a small urban backyard, 1.45 of a football field, or a bit less than 1.43 of an acre — not much, in other words.) These yields require no fossil fuels, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and no soil additives other than compost made from vegetable waste and human manure. Hand tools powered by human muscle are the only technological requirements — and yet organic methods of intensive production get yields per acre significantly higher than you can get with tractors and pesticides.

What makes organic farming even more of an achievement is that these yields are sustainable indefinitely. The core concept of organic agriculture is that healthy soil makes a healthy farm. Instead of treating soil like a sponge that needs to be filled with chemical nutrients, the organic method treats it as an ecosystem that will provide everything plants need so long as it's kept in balance. The insect pests and plant diseases that give conventional farmers so much trouble can be managed by fine-tuning the soil ecosystem, changing the timing and mix of plants, and introducing natural predators (name any organism you need to get rid of, and there's another organism that wants to eat it for you). Where conventional farming depletes the soil, requiring heavier applications of fertilizer and pesticides every season, organic methods produce improved soil, increased yields, and decreased pest problems year after year.

The third factor that makes today's organic methods revolutionary is their portability. Many traditional cultures around the world have worked out farming methods that are sustainable over the long term, but nearly all of those depend on specific environmental conditions and plant varieties. The growing methods practiced in the New Guinea highlands, for example, are brilliantly adapted to their native ecosystem and produce impressive yields, but they only work for the specific mix of food crops, weather and soil conditions, and ecological factors found where they evolved. Intensive organic farming, by contrast, was developed simultaneously in the very different ecosystems of England and northern California, and it has been put to use successfully in temperate, semiarid, and semitropical environments around the world. Like everything natural, it has its limits, but some 80% of the world's population lives in areas where it can be practiced.

Some people at the apocalyptic end of the peak oil community have argued that starvation and mass dieoff will ensue when today's petroleum-fueled agricultural system grinds to a halt and nothing takes its place. This is a good example of what I've called the “Y2K fallacy,” because at least part of the solution is already in place. Rising prices of petroleum products and fertilizers, most of which are manufactured from natural gas, have already started to price chemical agriculture out of the market. At the same time, organic crops command premium prices. One unsurprising result has been the rapid spread of organic agriculture in most of the world's industrial nations. In the United States alone, more than 4 million acres were newly certified for organic production in 2005, a figure up more than 1 million acres from the year before.
¹⁴
The next round of energy crises may well see the chemical model of agriculture abandoned wholesale because organic methods can produce equal or better yields for less money — an equation even the most conservative farmer can understand.

The rise of organic agriculture suggests that in America, at least, the great agricultural challenge of the next century or so may not be producing food but rather getting it to people who need it. Very large cities may become difficult places to live in as the dein-dustrial age kicks into gear, precisely because there isn't enough farmland within easy transport range to feed their populations. On the other hand, most North American cities of half a million or less are close to agricultural land that could, in a pinch, be used to grow food intensively and feed the smaller population that will remain as declining public health takes its toll. What's needed is the framework of a distribution system around which this can take shape.

The good news is that this framework already exists; it's called the farmers market movement. The last three decades or so have seen farmers markets spread with remarkable speed across North America, from 340 markets nationwide in 1970 to 4,385 in 2006.
¹⁵
At these weekly markets, local farmers set up stalls and sell produce directly to local consumers, bypassing distributors and grocery chains. Like the slide rule or the haybox, it's a technology — a social technology, in this case — remembered from an earlier time, dusted off and put back to work to solve a contemporary problem. As fossil fuels become more expensive and the cost of long distance transport begins to cripple today's food distribution system, farmers markets are likely to become even more economically viable than they are today, taking over a steadily larger role in getting food from farm to table.

In many ways, the conjunction of organic agriculture and resurgent farmers markets provides a working model for a constructive approach to catabolic collapse. Systems that are economically viable as well as ecologically sustainable are the key to this approach. If people can earn a living by building the foundations for the dein-dustrial societies of the future, those foundations are a good deal more likely to get built.

The examples just given also show that under these conditions, the systems needed to manage the Long Descent can spring up with impressive speed. Forty years ago organic agriculture was the special interest of a small group of enthusiasts on the fringes of society, and the last of North America's farmers markets were fighting for survival against city governments that dismissed them as anachronisms. In the same way, recycling forty years ago was practiced by a tiny minority of environmentalists; today it is a way of life for most urban Americans and a growing fraction of the small town and rural population as well. Other systems needed to deal with the consequences of the deindustrial age will likely develop in the same way — if people are willing to commit the time, effort, and resources to make them happen.

How Not To Save Science

The tools and technologies discussed so far in this chapter represent one side of the heritage of our industrial and preindustrial past that would be worth saving. Another side, less tangible and thus potentially more vulnerable, comprises the knowledge gathered over the last three hundred years or so of the intellectual adventure of modern science. Now it's true that some elements of that knowledge might be better off lost — I'm not at all sure the far future really needs to know how to build nuclear warheads or synthesize nerve gas — but on the whole, the heritage of modern science forms one of the great triumphs of our civilization and deserves a shot at survival.

It's all the more impressive, in an age dominated by the myth of progress, that the challenge of preserving this heritage into the future has already been discussed in scientific circles. Most of that discussion has centered around a proposal made by ecologist James Lovelock in his 1998 essay “A Book for All Seasons.”
¹⁶
Lovelock proposed that a panel of scientific experts be commissioned to write a book outlining everything modern science has learned about the universe, forming — in his words — “the scientific equivalent of the Bible.” This book, he urges, ought then to be produced en masse on durable paper, so that some copies make it through the decline and fall of industrial society and reach the hands of future generations.

It's hard to think of a better proof that most scientists don't learn enough about the history of their own disciplines — or a better piece of evidence that they need to. A book of the sort Lovelock proposes would be a disaster for science. I don't simply present this claim as a matter of opinion. The experiment has been tried before, and the results were, to put it mildly, not good.

In the twilight years of Roman civilization in western Europe, as the old institutions of classical learning were giving way to the Dark Ages, Isidore of Seville (560–636) — a Christian bishop and theologian in Spain (who was recently named by the Vatican as the patron saint of the Internet) — compiled a book along the same lines as the one Lovelock envisions. Titled
Etymologiae
(
Etymologies
), it was the world's first encyclopedia, a summary of what Isidore's contemporaries defined as useful knowledge, and it was a huge success by the standards of the time.
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The most popular general reference work in medieval libraries, it was still so widely respected when printing became available that it saw ten print editions between 1470 and 1530.

During the Dark Ages, the
Etymologiae
served a useful purpose as a compendium of general knowledge. Over the longer term, though, its effects were far less positive. Because Isidore's book quickly came to be seen as the be-all and end-all of learning, other books — many of which would have been much more useful to the renaissance of learning that spread through Europe after the turn of the millennium — were allowed to decay, or had their parchment pages recycled to produce more copies of the
Etymologiae.

Worse, the reverence given to Isidore's work gave a great deal of momentum to the medieval belief that the best way to learn about nature was to look something up in an old book. That same reverence came to be applied to the works of Aristotle and other Greek classics after they were translated from the Arabic, beginning in the 12th century. The resulting conviction that scientific research ought to consist of quoting passages from ancient authorities succeeded in hamstringing natural science for centuries. It took the social convulsions of the 16th and 17th centuries to finally break Aristotle's iron grip on scientific thought in the Western world and make it acceptable for people to learn from nature directly.

This could all too easily happen with Lovelock's “scientific equivalent of the Bible.” Like Isidore's encyclopedia, a modern compendium of scientific theories about the world would inevitably contain inaccurate information — today's scientists are no more omniscient than those of 50 years ago, when continental drift was still considered crackpot pseudoscience, or 110 years ago, when Einstein and the quantum physicists hadn't yet proved that the absolute space and uniform time of Newtonian cosmology were as imaginary as Oz. Because the compendium Lovelock imagines would be a collection of knowledge, rather than a guide to scientific practice, it would teach people that the way to learn about nature was to look facts up in a book, rather than paying attention to what was actually happening in front of their noses — and it might well ensure that, in a time that had limited resources for the preservation of books, copies of a book of scientific doctrines could be preserved at the expense of, say, the last remaining copy of Newton's
Principia Mathematica,
Darwin's
The Origin of
Species,
or some other scientific classic that would offer much more to the future.