One word that sums up the problem: Agriculture.
Our food and agriculture system is particularly broken, but we can’t simply wait for the government to fix it. As with clean energy, there are many opportunities for private enterprise to stimulate progress while making a profit. Some of the short-term opportunities in food might be to leverage consumer awareness and build a brand that stands for environmental consciousness, while aligning for longer-term regulatory changes to level the playing field.
A great piece by Ari Partovi. Anyone who helped make Dropbox is okay in my book. He thought to invest in a company that puts greenhouses in the roofs of supermarkets.
Well, at least we have moved away from the days of the small family farm. Big, factory farming produces its own problems -- but at least it makes production more efficient. What is needed is command of the means of production through radical social reorganization. Only then can the haphazard, chaotic and dangerous hyperexploitation of agriculture, as well as other fields of production.
ReplyDeleteefficient?
ReplyDeletewe have ecological crises because we have moved away from small diverse family farms to polluting, monocultural, energy intensive, animal cruel, factory farming.
factory farming:
let's throw more idiotic, urban-centric, cartesian problem solving technology at food production and see how we can maximise profits. shareholder science isn't ecological intelligence - it's brown tech all the way. dumb and dumber; hyper-mediated and vulnerable to expensive oil and climate instability. small biodiverse family farmers (permaculturalists et al) are generalist ecologists, factory operators are thugs. i know who will be more resilient in a post-city future.
post city:
with reruralisation of populations due to energy descent and climate chaos, many of us will gradually return to distributed food supplies - ie relocalisation of food and energy – marking the efficient/global/hyper-exploitative legacy of high ascent industrialism just an end chapter in the historical period we can label 'late pathological anthropocentrism'.
bring back the generalists i say - the poets, foragers and small plot farmers who know the world through understanding again the local. industrialised global art, science, academia, governments and corporates are collectively the very nub of the problems we face. climate chaos and energy declines will attend to inane human progress myths, and may even mark the end of the historical age - an end to organised violence; woof woof
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Permapoesis: Pure Romantic anti-capitalism. You'd prefer a return to the feudal mode of production. The small family farm has been romanticized to the point where its reality is almost unrecognizable. It was a haven for provincialism, backwardness, darkness, and ignorance. It was not this pastoral paradise that you'd like it to be.
ReplyDeleteno ross, that's just your bleak and limited interpretation of what i wrote.
ReplyDeletea return to sexually repressive old testament agrarianism has never been a response I’d champion in order to attend to current energetic and ecological crises.