The Coronation
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.
Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?
For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.
Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.
I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.
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I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”
Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.
The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.
While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.
The Reflex of Control
At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.
What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.
The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.
My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?
In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.
To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.
Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?
Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?
The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.
Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.
Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.
What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.
If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.
The Conspiracy Narrative
Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.
The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:
- • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
- • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
- • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
- • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
- • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
- • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
- • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
- • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.
This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.
Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.
To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.
And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.
Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.
True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.
What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.
The War on Death
My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.
Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?
The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.
Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.
The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.
The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.
I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.
But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”
When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?
Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.
Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.
Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.
What world shall we live in?
How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?
Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?
It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.
To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?
The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.
For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?
I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?
Life is Community
The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.
The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.
Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.
Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?
War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.
Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.
To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.
Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”
A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.
Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.
As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.
I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.
Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.
The Coronation
There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.
Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?
On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”
That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.
As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.
Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.
From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:
Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.
As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.
For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.
A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.
What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.
Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.
I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.
And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.
Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”
Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.
spread some seeds and change the world
Indeed, one of the big problems seems to be that what is now considered normal – in agriculture: conventional – with the story being that there is only either that (even if it ends in trouble), or trouble, overlooks all the third ways that work with and as ecology to create better conditions and better lives.
A look at history is in order: that kind of “normal” is very recent.
Quite a bit of writing on that also on my site, The Ecology of Happiness @ http://www.beyond-eco.org.
This is a beautiful vision, however the agra/chem industrial complex will fight this to the bitter end. Is there a plan to phase this in? Is there any cooperation at the local level? What can we do in our own local area to help this along? Are there articles we can give our local newspapers to educate people in our specific areas?
A couple organizations that are helping people organize at the local level.
http://www.transitionnetwork.org
http://www.transitionus.org
http://www.slowmoney.org
http://www.movetoamend.org
It is very simple. You, and anyone reading this, needs to rip up their front and back yards, and/or use any other space available under their control (spare rooms, tressels, rooftops, attics, closets, sheds) and plant food. This can also be done on public land. The sooner people see other people doing these acts more and more, the awareness spreads. Promoting the principles of homesteading, agroforestry, food forests, agronomy, hydroponics, vertical farming, permaculture, sustainability, and veganism, we can effectively begin transitioning into a negative-growth economy. This is a good thing, as the insanity of infinite growth on a finite planet, as characterized by the central bank interest-bearing debt money we have today, will begin to unravel.
I agree with you on everything except veganism. Herbivores will be essential for restoration and disturbance and being responsible, non-wasting beings, we must use their products(meat, milk, fat, etc) for sustenance and energy. Restoration can take place without animals but it will take 10-fold longer in time!
So you are suggesting that existing live animals not be wasted, right? Because at some point, it would otherwise require intentional breeding which could no longer be considered “non-wasting.”
Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the fledgling colonies of American: everyone would be farmers and help each other (Jefferson and Washington were plantation owners). However, life at the vagaries of Mother Nature soon led to tobacco’s rise as a popular cash crop; after all, nicotine is a drug. Just be aware of Jefferson’s vision and its detour.
Thanks for emphasizing the labor and cost issue over acreage yield. I’m a (conventional) crop scientist and been coming to similar conclusions on many points you make. I certainly agree that the common “feeding the world” statement is weak – it’s more directly a “reducing the cost of food” issue. But that’s where we also see things in the completely opposite manner: the conventional (supply-side) economic argument, which I mostly agree with, is that we want to lower the costs of production as much as possible, taking into account environmental and social externalities, because it results in a bigger overall pie that can then be divided. How is it that you see the 10 times more ag labor (which sucks to do, by the way), and more importantly, the more expensive food that would result from that, as a good thing? Honest question, not trying to be argumentative. Maybe that’s where we just have completely different visions of ag and society. I completely agree with you that the difference between the organic crowd and the conventional crowd is one of vision and not science.
Up until six years ago I worked as a psychoanalyst in France, the European country now spending the most on pill popping.
I also trained to become a clinical psychologist.
If you take the time to open up Descartes’ “The Discourse on the Method”, written around 1560, and read it carefully, you will see the ideological model and framework for our modernity, which rests on a particular definition of science that can be discussed, in my opinion.
It is a dualistic framework which ultimately divorces intellectual.. “labor” from physical labor.
And for many years, France has been.. senselessly promoting an intellectual elite that does not get its hands dirty. (Telling word, that…)
But, at this point in time, the shrink that I am tells me that this divorce between head and hands (and dirt…) has had damaging effects on our psyches (not just…).
Spending your days typing on a (clean ?) computer, rather than rooting around, and getting tired and dirty is just not the paradise that we thought it would be.
Many people here are out in orbit. They can theorize, jargon, whatever, but… they don’t know what their hands (or their bodies..) are for, except to get fixed in an industrialized hospital, on a specialized assembly line where they are treated as nuts and bolts.
This… is not progress.
Getting our hands dirty (in the earth…) would go far towards healing our unconnected minds, at this point.
And… a little hard physical labor would remind us to that we are not just… homo SAPIENS, or at least that homo sapiens does not have to be… homo theoreticus.
My quick reply is I don’t do as much field work as some of my peers, but I do enough to know that it can suck, big time.
Walking through 1000 plots taking field notes every three days gets tiresome, quickly. And the average person would agree with me. Still, I certainly have colleagues that love field work.
All that said I know what you’re talking about in terms of specifics. I agree people need to get their hands dirty…at least from time to time. But I don’t agree with that in regard to the general population and society as a whole.
You actually bring up a point that I’ve made for some time: the (stereo)typical pro-“organic” pro-“sustainble-ag” person is somebody who works at a desk and has absolutely no idea how much it sucks to do real farming (I’m not talking about gardening).
Having lived on an organic farm for a few years now, I have the chance to see new people coming in every year to farm. My experience is that most of them love it. However, not that many people continue doing it, because it is incredibly hard to support oneself by being an organic farmer. For me, cheap conventional food is a big part of the problem. This food is so cheap because of artificially low prices for non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, and because many of the costs are externalized.
I truly believe that the very act of growing food in a wholesome and sustainable way can help heal humankind, that it can be one of the most satisfying occupations worth dedicating one’s life to. But to make a livelihood out of it however, much of this satisfaction disappears. This is not, in my opinion, because farming sucks, but because the economic infrastructure its embedded in does.
Permaculture = Permanent (Agri-) Culture. There is actually LESS work to do if it’s done right (no thinning, no weeding, no applying pesticides/herbicides/fungicides, less water usage… sheet mulching is our friend), but many more hands are needed when it comes time to harvest = more jobs. Why are more jobs a bad thing again?
And another thing, because of the huge variety of fruits, nuts, and vegetables produced there is very little danger that the entire farm will be wiped out by insects or disease. The same cannot be said for monoculture.
Agree with much of the above.
I think that we really do not imagine… how many prejudices we have at this time about lots of things, including farming.
Last year I let my cherry tomatoes run wild in their plot, and out of laziness.. did not weed out the constantly encroaching morning glory. The weeds kept the moisture in, and allowed me to not water as much. While my… industrious and disciplined neighbors (constanstly busy with pesticides) complained about their poor tomato crop, mine did just fine.
We have intellectual blinders on…
More hands means.. less backbreaking work for each individual.
At this point in time, it seems to me that “progress” has brought us to the point where the salaried worker is now working in many of the same physical/material conditions as former… slave labor once worked, but without many of the advantages (being lodged and fed…).
Logical. Whenever “paradise” points its head, “we” manage to sink our teeth into the apple once again…
Think about it… when you have learned over 2000 years that paradise is just not for you here and now… you will unconsciously find ingenious ways of continuing to maintain.. “utopia”, and not… “eutopia”…
And it is not the decline of the Jewish/Christian religions that will change this.. “we” have managed to secularize these religions in order to metamorphize the old gods into… new idea(l)s…
Of course that gets tiresome quickly! That’s some crazy, long, boring ass shit walking 1000 plots doing the same thing! The problem is the centralisation of food distribution. A few people doing all the work for heaps, dealing with one crop all the time. None of the intricacies of crop rotation, companion planting, any of the interesting stuff that goes into growing a whole bunch of different things on a small scale for a small community. Putting a part of the responsibility for food on to everybody.
> How is it that you see the 10 times more ag labor (which sucks to do,
by the way), and more importantly, the more expensive food that would
result from that, as a good thing?
That is a good question. I believe it comes out of a misunderstanding of economics. Rather than debate theory, we look at reality. Anywhere in the world where a greater percentage of the population is engaged in agriculture to feed their own people, we don’t see people going hungry for lack of ability to buy food. We typically see people eating very healthfully and with greater variety than in the industrial system.
The food we buy isn’t cheap. The costs we pay simply aren’t included on the price tags in the stores. We pay the environmental damage caused by industrial agriculture. We pay for the reduction in physical activity and increase in toxins by buying gym memberships, diet books and programs and medical care. We pay in welfare and other social programs because the reduction in labor numbers creates unemployment. We pay in the costs of public and private military control over lands in other countries where our corporations seize control of other people’s land to make up for the degradation of cropland here at home. We pay in many ways that have a calculable monetary cost for the industrial food we buy. The problem is that since those costs are spread out and unaccounted instead of concentrated on the price tag, we look at the price tag and call the food cheap. It’s a very narrow and short-sighted way of looking at the enormous cost of the system we have.
“Cheap” food has not benefited the populace at large. It has benefited those who make money from the system.
thanks jo ann.yes, it is kind of a permission space execpienre of self within the hive-like confines of like six others vibrating at tonalities you can recognize as within you and your own, seeing difference as unrecognized sameness?i recently had different execpienres of people playing the voyBom guitar with me in a jamming space, rocking out and being brought into awareness of hearing the same-different polarity within the sounds of the strings and the limited but interesting harmonic choices, and the increasingly compelling rhythm. each was drawn directly in to the non-verbal communicative mode that one could say characterizes real music-making. but without the ten years of practice. (Knowing full well that with ten years of practice of the right kindvirtuosos can be trained, but to what end? only to confirm the algorythm? of success?but were this used by people as a sanctuary from media, alienation and selfishness. what if voyBom is this vibration? of complete new-found confidence for all humans. starting with toning and moving out from there?
Justin Ma – There are many (many) people in this world who love to farm, or garden – to grow things and immerse themselves in the world of earth, plants and nature. If you’re not one of them, then perhaps something else is for you – creating art works, alternative energy or building, making music, whatever. I don’t find agricultural work ‘sucks to do’ as you put it! I love it, and would (do) do it even if I didn’t get paid.
The cost thing you mention – that organic/sustainably produced food costs more – is in fact a con: the fact is that big ag is massively subsidised, and externalises costs like pollution, waste disposal (in permaculture there is no waste or pollution), and the destruction of soil. If big ag were to work sustainably, and had to take these costs into account, that food would cost as much. Never before have humans spent such a tiny percentage of their income on food, as we do nowadays.
How is it that you see the 10 times more ag labor (which sucks to do, by the way), and more importantly, the more expensive food that would result from that, as a good thing?
And also account for the resultant (local) lack of choice, variety, and quality that will ensue. AND… safety. How do we control for unsafe production (for any reason)? For me (a libertarian) I know that answer; you won’t be able to sell your excess production (locally) if you get a reputation for poor/unsafe products and sane individuals will not intentionally poison their own families; but poisoned they will be. Do you expect those numbers to be equal to, or less than, the current inefficient governmental regulation/inspection.
And finally, most important… what are consumers willing to pay to avoid working their gardens?
Thank you, Charles.
Found the post and the comments quite interesting. Having spent three decades at various levels, from full-time organic farming/ranching, to research scientist in lab, forest and field, academically and privately, we are at the cusp of significant change. Conventional and industrial food production has to change, and it will eventually, if not by choice, then by collapse of the modern system(s).
Parallel with emerging distributed and point-of-use renewable energy production, food production will follow, albeit belatedly like an on old man on one crutch. Famine may precede this change given the unchecked growth of human population. This, in addition to drought, has been a check-and-balance in previous civilizations. Even with our supposedly superior technology and science, we are still vulnerable. However, considering the current global population and climate change, the mortality rate will be unheard of.
We must be open to new ideas. As any good scientist knows, vision often drives science. Couple the two and we may have some solutions.
when we work with nature and the soil food web things flourish, as in nature,It means being in tune with each particular plot, suiting plants to conditions, adding in plants for predators and beneficial wildlife. not forgetting the beneficial fungi under the soil that work in symbiosis with most plants When changing from conventional methods you may need to hold backfrom interfering and using chemical pesticides, but eventually nature strikes a balance, with predators controlling pests. You will love the natural diversity, within your plot when you let go, and let nature in. My own garden has frogs toads two species of newts, slow worms, various dragonflies, solitary and bumble bees, bee flies, ladybirds, spiders galore, we also see feild mice, moles, shrews little and tawny owls bats, larger visitors include badgers, foxes etc
PS Food forests are less labour intensive, they can feed many generations and after careful planting, most of the work is harvesting, with some tweaking, pruning, adding. and cutting back.Monoculture is flat – food forests maximise use of space and all levels vertically starting below ground and up to the canopy. Debra is right, it should not hurt an intellectual to get their hands dirty – I do it most days and derive enormous pleasure spending time with nature, equally I love to stretch my mind.
join up http://viacampesina.org/en/
agro-ecology and bioregional food self-sufficiency
Decent article, on balance. This sentence in particular explains a lot:
‘Conventional agriculture doesn’t seek to maximize yield per acre; it seeks to maximize yield per unit of labor.’
I’ve been struggling to understand this curious state of affairs where farmers are supposed to be under this tremendous pressure to increase productivity, and yet organic techniques, simple veg gardening and indigenous multi-storey forest garden traditions have been shown to compete with and sometimes outproduce monocropped grains for bulk caloric output acre-for-acre. For example David Bainbridge compared yields from corn to that from acorns, a staple food for many N American tribes:
‘Corn yields generally range from 2,500 to 10,000 pounds per acre. In comparison, acorn yields in natural forests have been recorded as high as 2,000 pounds per acre from the live oak (Q. virginiana), and—in a good year—I’ve recorded black oak (Q. velutina) yields per tree that would amount to more than 6,000 pounds per acre in a pure stand. And J. Russel Smith, in Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, cited an individual oak that produced a full ton of acorns annually. If a 100-foot spread is assumed for that tree, it seems possible that a yield of 10,000 pounds of acorns per acre could be achieved.’ (http://www.motherearthnews.com/Modern-Homesteading/1984-09-01/Acorns-The-Grain-That-Grows-on-Trees.aspx)
This doesn’t account for other uses such as fuel & building materials from the oak wood and secondary crops from annual seed-bearers and shrubs grown in the understory, nor does it take into account the many potential game animals that could thrive in a landscape managed that way (annual grain crops don’t provide the habitat and any nonhumans are more likely to directly affect the harvest and consequently be viewed as pests). Why don’t the business-minded, production oriented modern farmers emulate some of these methods? It only starts to make sense if you view the primary cultural consideration as being one of power, control and the centralisation of wealth. People can live self-sufficiently in forest gardens from small, local allotments. Big monocrop fields are designed to feed the cities, and the people who farm them have to buy most of their food just like everybody else.
On this issue of production, though, I have to say that I’m getting sick of hearing statements like this from people who should know better:
‘permaculture methods can easily feed the peak world population of perhaps 10 or 11 billion we’ll see by mid-century.’
This tells me that you don’t understand basic population dynamics whereby an increase in food availability leads to an increase in the feeder population. I’ll tell you what I told Oxfam in response to a recent campaign of theirs (http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/what-is-grow): If you GROW enough food for 9 (10,12…) billion people soon there will BE 9 billion people. Inevitably this manifests as mass extinction and ecological collapse as biomass is sucked from the total living community to feed the growth of a single member species. The last I heard humanity used 40% of the planet’s total photosynthetic capacity – the amount of sunlight that hits the surface of the globe – with agriculture accounting for two thirds of this, even before factoring in the ‘fossilised sunlight’ that most crops depend upon in about equal measure (see ‘The Oil We Eat’: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915). Do you think it’s a good idea to increase this share, basically stealing it from all the other lifeforms who depend on it? I don’t think I’m the first to say that the permaculture movement needs to figure out what to do with its ‘theoretically unlimited’ yields.
I recommend the work of Daniel Quinn on this subject, in print:
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2004/02/06/population-a-systems-approach/
and in person:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7826621532426926190#
Or read the Hopfenberg/Pimental paper, ‘Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply’:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u4x1r416w5671127
best,
Ian
Ian, I can give you a perspective from growing up in a farm town. It’s because farmers often feel pressured by the amount of debt and equity they’ve developed in their land. They know they’re sinking in the margins between those figures but change is costly and the subsidies they depend on are big.
So is the answer chopping all those subsidies and take away one of their reasons for holding on to old ways? No, I don’t think so. That will create a whole new crisis! For now, co-ops which sell a variety of fresh organic food directly to customers are increasing in number. So are both urban and rural farmer’s markets, including some which have permanent installations in order to sell even winter crops.
The push to change our farming methods is growing and the nation’s big farmers will have to adapt. Some groups interested in environmental, food or economic justice like Occupy or Food Not Bombs have started programs to assist small farmers in switching to organic and sustainable methods either through volunteering or donations. This is what I consider the highest priority in regard to any kind of justice and a sustainable future. We need to help our small farmers put good methods into practice.
We’ve been working on what I call “affordable equity” farming. We formed a co-op and purchased land in its name. Since that time, we’ve been trying to attract member-funders, who could build a house and collaboratively farm for about 1/3rd the cost of owning their own titled property.
But I’m not sure the world is ready for this. Those with enough zeal to embrace the paradigm don’t have a dime to put in, and those with money to put in are sitting scared, more willing to look at the potential down-side of something right in front of them than to face the certain down-side of something so vast that it boggles the imagination. The certain, long, slow train-wreck of a civilization built upon fossil sunlight is just too scary to contemplate, so it’s easier to to just say, “That won’t work” when any alternative is brought up.
Want to do collaborative Permaculture? We could use some help!
Ian,
A very apt teaching moment for you. Yeah, the human population question and it’s ramifications in terms of the human carrying capacity of our Eaarth home needs to be front and center in any moral/ethical discussion as you make perfectly clear. I’m trying to wrestle with this myself. I doubt if that carrying capacity is as low as the 1 or 2 billion I often read about, but I doubt that it is higher than the 3 or 4 billion that I suspect, and only then if nearly all of our energy comes in renewable forms, ultimately from sun energy and the winds that the sun creates.
Sorry, only just saw these comments.
Isaac – Thanks for that. I figured debt and/or other forms of coercion had something to do with it. Subsidies are only made available in support of certain practices, right? It seems doubtful that any government would fund projects that undermined the dominant business interests. People who supply most of their own needs independently through a direct engagement with the land obviously threaten those interests because they have no requirement for a consumer-capitalist (or deeper, an agrarian-industrialist) system. As Oak enthusiast Christian Siems writes:
Permaculture is not about unlimited yields. Anyone who thinks that doesn’t understand permaculture principles of which there are three: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares (i.e. share the surplus fairly). In practice, permaculture is a closed-loop system based on the observation of Nature and in which there is no waste as in a natural ecosystem. Nothing in Nature has a ‘theoretically unlimited yield’. It is true that Nature naturally creates abundance under optimal circumstances, but in fact all Nature’s creatures except homo sapiens sapiens knows when to stop growing for the benefit of the whole and a healthy permaculture ecosystem will also limit growth for the sake of the resilience of the whole. Anyone trying to force ‘unlimited yields’ out of an ecosystem is not really a permaculturalist. Permaculture practitioners think in terms of balance and resilience and that’s what ultimately accounts for abundance.
Thanks for that, J. I looked it up and the quote originally comes from Bill Mollison: ‘The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited, or, limited only by the information and imagination of the designer.’ (http://www.permaculture.org.uk/principle/3-obtain-yield). I see now that he’s “subversively” trying to broaden the concept of yields beyond the usual conception of harvest/product. As the PermaWiki puts it:
(Here’s an article that goes into more depth: http://www.self-willed-land.org.uk/permaculture/yields_ints.htm)
You write: ‘in fact all Nature’s creatures except homo sapiens sapiens knows when to stop growing for the benefit of the whole’. Hmmm, I’m not convinced there’s ever a conscious choice to ‘limit growth’. Doesn’t this have more to do with running into hard limits which don’t permit the growth of populations beyond a certain point? This may come from predation, depletion of food availability or competition from other species until a balance is struck. The trouble with Homo sapiens sapiens (or, rather, with one particular cultural group within that species) is that agriculture gave him the ability to defeat these feedback mechanisms by artificially increasing carrying capacity through expanded food production. This enabled him to defeat those hard limits and expand his population to the extent made possible by the new food surpluses.
You say: ‘Anyone trying to force ‘unlimited yields’ out of an ecosystem is not really a permaculturalist. Permaculture practitioners think in terms of balance and resilience and that’s what ultimately accounts for abundance.’ – This sounds fine to me; my concern is what happens to the surplus. Does ‘Fair Share’ go beyond the boundaries of the species? Because if all the surplus food goes straight into human mouths, then to me that seems like another invitation for the population numbers to grow even more at the expense of the rest of the living community, in effect creating the ‘peak world population of perhaps 10 or 11 billion’ which Charles took for granted in the above post. If permacultural practices can be harnessed towards that end (though I don’t doubt that many would resist the production emphasis) then I, for one, would curse the day they were discovered.
best,
Ian
What a glorious picture. I saw a programme on tv some weeks ago which featured a permaculture garden. The growth was amazing – so luxurious. It made me hungry! (I love my veg and herbs!).
I have just discovered there is a short permaculture course run in a community college here in Cork City so am aiming to do that when it runs again.
A 2 years course is run in Kinsale County Cork on permaculture, sustainable development, building with cob, – here is web site for anyone interested.
http://www.kinsalefurthered.ie/courses/fetac-level-5/permaculture-2/
and it is great.
Translated into Russian: http://alacma.net/2012/07/28/78/
Hi, I would like more info on the myth of scarcity in economics & ethics. I’m intersted in how this myth applies to healthcare. Any recommended reading or sources? Dancinginegypt@gmail.com. Thanks!
Monocropping has never been economically efficient, not if you look at it from the perspective of all the embodied energy that has gone into it. It also strikes me as very naive to imagine that the big agribusinesses are simply going to keel over due to their size…if you think that, you haven’t been following Monsanto’s shenanigans in 2012.
I am working on a project that utilizes permaculture in planed economically self-sufficient eco-villages ajacent to urban food deserts
. The plan is simple and even has a built in ROI, but I am finding it challenging to find collaborators.
“The plan is simple and even has a built in ROI…”
Hmmm… I think that sort of thinking is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The notion that little bits of coloured paper get together in bank vaults, copulate, and reproduce is simply part of the “growth is good” mantra. Fiscal capitalism is just about the worst evil civilization has propagated.
(Don’t get me wrong; I don’t see ordinary “capitalism” — where one uses the means of production to actually produce something — as a bad thing. But it’s been corrupted by its application to the abstract notion of money, where all one “produces” are changes in magnetized bits on a computer disk.)
Kudos X 10!
Nice article. This, however:
“Conventional agriculture doesn’t seek to maximize yield per acre; it seeks to maximize yield per unit of labor.”
is subtly wrong if you ask me. Originally, in the ancient past, sedentary monocropping style agriculture was born of the desires of some to rule. Cities need food, and there’s only so far you can transport grain on an oxcart and still turn a profit. So they had to gather (often forcibly) enough people to farm fields near the city. Lots of people and animals, densely packed, easily legible (and thus taxable) monocrop fields. The labor requirements were great, and the eating poor, especially when compared to the barbarians in the hills. The denseness of animals and people led to epidemics and the transfer of animal diseases to people. Then there was tax and corvée labor on top of that.
What I’m trying to say that there was not much sense for a serf to stay in the city of not for the threat of violence. The benefit was for the ruler. In the past, manpower was everything, and that arrangement is what allowed the concentration of manpower.
It is only with the use of oil that the labour requirements for monocropping became low. Before that, mobile swiddening, hunter-gathering or permaculture-style practices yielded a better diet for less work.
PS: As an interesting aside, they also allowed people to escape from the rule of the state. The primary reason barbarians were inevitably stigmatized by the states of old is twofold: They were not ruled and couldn’t be taxed, and more importantly, represented a very real danger of people literally walking away from the state into places where it couldn’t project it’s power. Apart from the dietary and health benefits, the non-civilized life was apparently pretty addictive, so states regularly hemorrhaged people. Not much of a wonder the people not ruled were painted as backwards folk living lives brutal, miserable and short?
Thanks very much for this article. The summarization has been very useful for a position paper my husband and I are creating on the need for very different methodology when undertaking pit and quarry restorations.
Update: morning meeintg rained out. We’ll try again, it may be early next week. Food and agriculture policy are definitely showing symptoms of the same excessive corporate influence on regulation that the financial and banking sectors show. A lot of the folks here grew up on farms and many plan to return to farming. I can’t wait to hear what they have to say. ~Molly
Would be fantastic the healing of the damaged lands of the farms.
digitaleoptionen.yolasite.com
You don’t need permaculture to do small-scale agriculture. In fact permaculture actually impedes your efforts because of its anti-evolutionary design orientation. Random mutation provides the material for natural selection and this is how we get new varieties and changes in current varieties to adapt to changing climatic conditions. You can enhance this process by mixing up your seed lines to facilitate crossover, stressing your plants by late planting and minimal watering and weeding, tilling or not tilling for specific crops, etc. These are all techniques that work on the ground by adapting to what is happening, NOT by modifying a landscape based on so-called “design principles” – the basis of permaculture.
Permaculture is “form follows function.” Toby Hemenway and others.
Evolution is “function follows form.” Stephen Jay Gould and others.
They are 180 degrees opposite.
I have yet to get hard yield numbers from ANY permacultist. I did get a reply once from Jan S. on Salt Spring Island referring me to their website where they supposedly had numbers, but it was impossible to make sense out of mass of data. If you want my hard numbers, they are encapsulated in Table 2, page 123 in my book, “The Laws of Physics Are On My Side,” available on Amazon. Briefly I had an EROI of 3.16 in 2011 with 51.07 kcal grown per square foot. [2012 and 2013 numbers are even higher but the book uses 2011 as a baseline.] This is much higher than industrial agriculture’s EROI of .10 to .14.
As long as permaculture and the other so-called sustainable systems use excavators, tractors and lots and lots of capital, they are not alternatives. And real alternatives are what we need now.
[I did check out John Jeavons “How to Grow More Vegetables” but his numbers are specious because they are “what you should be able to grow.” There is no hard data by year or location. Some good ideas but no reliable supporting data.]
I don’t think permaculture requires the use of tractors and things, though it doesn’t categorically exclude them in every circumstance either. My understanding, though, is that permaculture is precisely what you say it ISN’T: techniques that work on the ground by adapting to what is happening — and, I will add, what can happen or wants to happen. You are familiar, I assume, with the arguments put forth in _Tending the Wild_ about how Native Americans intentionally shaped North American ecosystems over thousands of years.
I agree that hard data on caloric or protein yield is hard to come by. To acquire it is much more difficult than with monocrop farms because there isn’t usually a single discrete harvest. And the small scale permaculture farmers don’t have that kind of time and money to carry out a rigorous study. The evidence is anecdotal at this point.
Here is my comment: “As long as permaculture and the other so-called sustainable systems use excavators, tractors and lots and lots of capital, they are not alternatives. And real alternatives are what we need now.”
If permacultists are using hand labor, no problem.
As an anthropologist, I am well aware of the landscape revisions by indigenous peoples around the world. However, they were NOT starting from a design perspective, as encapsulated by Mollison, Holmgren, Hemenway, Whitefield, et al.
If permacultists would just get out there with a shovel and do their work and not try and flimflam people with some bogus marketing schtick, I would be supportive.
Thanks for the excellent article, Charles. I just learned about what you are doing and as a fellow activist based in Berlin, am happy to hear you speak some ideas I had been writing about.
I was wondering why you didn’t mention a limit on meat consumption as part of your vision for 21th century agriculture? It’s animal feedcrops and biofuels that make up most monoculture.
As a permaculture student about to establish a project base in Spain (with 50% youth unemployment, fertile soils, and a tradition of anarchy the ideal country for a transition! village.creativechoice.org) I totally agree with your idea of permaculture. It’s great that permaculture is at the forefront now and a natural part of the transition.
The key word for me is localization, and I was happy to see that Bill McKibben of 350.org says exactly that in Eaarth. Wonderful to see thinking people converging, and happy to live in this deciding decade,
Warm regards
Kamiel
I’m looking for evidence I can cite for polyculture/permaculture yields. Are there any trials that have made it into the peer reviewed literature. Otherwise, I unfortunately have to conclude for my research, the same as anyone else, that we’ll lose about 30% or yield by going organic. If poly/permaculture really can increase yields it would be really good if someone would study it properly and publish it so that we can use that information. Otherwise, it’s a nice story…
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How Exchange Rates Affect Agricultural Markets
farm accounting services
Well as Bill Paxton so eloquently put it “We’re in some deep s**t now……Game over man ….game over”
Coronavirus measures could cause global food shortage, UN warns
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/26/coronavirus-measures-could-cause-global-food-shortage-un-warns
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/n7jgvb/china-may-have-beaten-coronavirus-but-now-it-could-be-facing-a-food-crisis
https://www.allselfsustained.com/warning-top-1-farmer-voices-his-concerns-about-the-coming-food-crisis/
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/dont-look-now-people-responsible-worlds-food-supply-are-starting-get-sick
https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=strict&sxsrf=ALeKk00cWcMi9GG4HJPD9ZlOtOZjzgEaxQ%3A1586085315232&source=hp&ei=w72JXu2MDKeAjLsPrqWGyAc&q=shortages+of+phosphate+and+fertiliser&oq=shortages+of+phosphate+and+fertiliser&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIFCCEQoAFKCggXEgYxMi02MjFKCAgYEgQxMi0xUIQJWIQJYOMTaAFwAHgAgAHOBIgBzgSSAQM1LTGYAQCgAQKgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwit-q6elNHoAhUnAGMBHa6SAXkQ4dUDCAk&uact=5
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/shortages%20in%20the%20world%20fertilizer
Farmers call for ‘land army’ to sustain UK food production during coronavirus crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/20/farmers-call-for-land-army-to-sustain-uk-food-production-during-coronavirus-crisis
Modern cities are perfect incubators for the spread of viruses
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4481042/
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/26/sick-cities-pandemics-spread-metropolis
https://www.directrelief.org/2020/01/mega-cities-and-animal-agriculture-the-wuhan-coronavirus-signals-a-new-era-of-disease-response/
Megacities Might Not Save the Planet After All
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/megacities-might-not-save-planet/
https://www.santaferelo.com/en/moving/news-and-blog/why-a-rising-number-of-people-are-moving-out-of-cities/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/29/tired-of-london-thousands-flee-capital-for-a-quieter-life
The coming era of returning to the land …agrarianism and regenerative farming
https://theecologist.org/2014/nov/22/want-double-world-food-production-return-land-small-farmers
http://lammas.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Forward-to-the-Land.-Samson-Hart.pdf
http://tlio.org.uk/about-tlio/
https://www.apricotlanefarms.com/
https://civileats.com/2019/11/18/high-plains-farmers-race-to-save-the-ogallala-aquifer/
https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=strict&sxsrf=ALeKk00Y5NWpK_PonTGWBbFOiXS0RcsfhQ%3A1586075026296&source=hp&ei=kpWJXveVEPiDjLsPwIChkAQ&q=the+coming+era+of+returning+to+the+land+…agrarianism+and+regenerative+farming&oq=the+coming+era+of+returning+to+the+land+…agrarianism+and+regenerative+farming&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoECCMQJzoECAAQQzoICAAQgwEQkQI6BQgAEJECOgUIABCDAToCCAA6BggAEBYQHjoICCEQFhAdEB46BQghEKABOgQIIRAVOgQIIRAKSjkIFxI1MGcxNjM3ZzE3MTBnMTU1NWcxNjE1ZzE3MmcyNTlnMjg1ZzM5NWcxNDhnMjUwZzI3OWcxNjVKHggYEhowZzFnMWcxZzFnMWcxZzFnMWcxZzVnNWc1OVCdDljnsgJgq8ACaAFwAHgBgAGFDYgB6ZgBkgEUMzIuMTkuMTQuNC4yLjIuMi4xLjOYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwj3ppz07dDoAhX4AWMBHUBACEIQ4dUDCAk&uact=5
https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=strict&sxsrf=ALeKk02TMft6l1f0OtnesNCQRRWRBXh41Q:1586080306703&q=going+back+to+farming&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTrJDKgdHoAhXEi1wKHSqkAnEQ1QIoAXoECAkQAg&biw=1366&bih=625
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235884102_Feeding_and_healing_the_world_Through_regenerative_agriculture_and_permaculture
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/05/25/back-to-the-future-terra-preta-%E2%80%93-ancient-carbon-farming-system-for-earth-healing-in-the-21st-century/
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/permaculture-and-the-myth-of-scarcity/
https://rainforests.mongabay.com/10-how-to-save-rainforests.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/amazon-jungle-ancient-population-satellite-computer-model/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180723142845.htm
https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/bh175b/biochar_terra_preta_in_the_amazon_allowed/
Venezuela
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4873
Guyana
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-48185246
https://www.caribbean-council.org/latest-oil-finds-suggest-guyana-will-become-richest-nation-per-capita-in-hemisphere/
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4316367-guyana-how-to-invest-in-next-wealthiest-country-in-world
Africa
https://qz.com/africa/736626/african-farmers-say-they-can-feed-the-world-and-we-might-soon-need-them-to/
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-sudan-nile-land-farming/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1010039224868
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919214000888
https://www.ifpri.org/blog/unlocking-potential-agriculture-africa-reduce-poverty-and-end-hunger
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/01/battle-future-food-africa
Spanish pubizised version no long accesible. Please see to this. Thanks.