Unlike industrial-scale grass-based agriculture, a tree-based agriculture doesn't lend itself well to centralisation; no big ploughing or harvesting machines, no synthetic fertilisers, and economical at just about any scale.
And there's the problem.
The problem isn't "big corporations exploiting people and land", though that certainly is a problem.
The problem is, because of centralized agriculture, only a handful of people in the West today know how to, or want to, grow their own food.
In Colonial America, for instance, 90% of people worked directly in agriculture. In 21st century America, less than 1% do.
And even in developing countries, where significant fractions of the population still engage in subsistence farming, farming is seen as hard, dirty, insecure, poorly paid work - because it is - and most people try to find jobs outside agriculture if at all possible.
And this is a problem because forest-based permaculture, without big machinery and economies of scale, requires a lot more human labor to maintain. Not only that, but it requires expert human labor - people who know what needs to be planted when, how to recognize invasive weeds and protect desirable seedlings, when and how to harvest, how to process and store that harvest, and all the other details of keeping a food forest functional.
And, because industrial agriculture has these huge economies of scale, expert human labor costs a lot more in wages than the food a food forest produces.
I mean, look. It takes three hours of labor to produce 100 bushels of wheat - 6,000 lbs, nine million calories, enough to feed 12 people for a year, produced with three hours of human labor and a ton of fossil fuels and chemicals.
How many hours of labor does it take to produce nine million calories from a food forest?
How much training does it take to reliably manage a food forest?
Who's going to do that labor?
Who's going to train people to do that labor?
And what countries are going to accept the decrease in standard of living that comes with relocating so many labor hours to food production and away from everything else?
I don't think "but the food is healthier" is going to cut it.
Sorry, but unless you are disabled...nobody is obligated to drive.
Now hold up.
I've had jobs I literally could not get to without driving. As in, public transit did not go from walking distance of where I was to walking distance of where my job was. At all.
I've lived in places without grocery stores within walking distance. Without hospitals, dentists, without pretty much anything but a shitty strip mall within walking distance because suburbia sucks.
Look, there are whole suburbs in the United States that open directly into highways. If you try to walk to or from those suburbs you will be arrested because it is illegal to walk on highways. Let me emphasize that one more time: in some places in the US you cannot legally leave your neighborhood without a car.
You can say these aren't obligations - people can just move or quit their job. But then you're circling back to the regressive policy issue, because it's a lot harder to do that when you're poor.
And "unless you're disabled"? One in four adults in the US is disabled. And that will inevitably include you if you live long enough to experience the side effects of old age. Yeah, not all disabilities impact one's ability to walk or take public transit, bet's not write off disability with an "unless".
ChatGPT is the ultimate 'cultural product of the postmodern era,' and very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought," Foster concluded in his newsletter.
The best description of this distinction I've encountered was in a science fiction novel - Blindsight by Peter Watts.
There's so much amazing work getting done by ordinary people on the ground.
Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.
I get where you're coming from, and also, being a politician in the United States means being a public figure, and if you ride public transit you expect people to recognize you and talk to you. It's part of outreach. It's a populist thing.
Joe Biden rode Amtrak to work for 40 years - and from what I understand, now that he's not president, he's riding Amtrak to his office again (albeit guarded by his handlers in case he sundowns). People stop to talk to him, take selfies with him, whatever. It's not (necessarily) rude.
The thing about the United States is, unfortunately, no politician is so poor they have to take public transit. So any pol on the bus expects people to recognize them and start a conversation. If they didn't want that, they wouldn't take the bus.
Naaah. That's typical anarcho-capitalist/Republican crap - we have to do (insert bad thing here) because of those eeeeevil laws and those eeeeevil lawyers, and if we didn't have laws and lawyers, we could just do the right thing without fear of lawsuits!
Bull fucking shit.
There is no more risk of food poisoning from these cookies at the end of the business day then there is at the beginning of the business day when they went out for sale.
Management isn't throwing those cookies away from fear of food poisoning.
They're throwing those cookies away because they would rather waste food than let people have free cookies.
then you'd be more principled than most people if you never gave in to the temptation (conscious or subconscious) to make too many.
I would love to see if there are studies about that. Because, frankly, I doubt it.
Capitalists believe that labor will steal from the company whenever possible, because they think labor is morally inferior to capital - after all, if they were good, hardworking, well-educated people, they wouldn't be working minimum wage food service jobs, right?
American "Christians" believe that poor people are poor because they are more sinful than rich people, so fundie outfits like Jesus Chicken here believe that poor people will steal whenever given the opportunity.
But that's not actually how human beings work.
The average human being does believe that wasting food is wrong. The average human being does believe that stealing is wrong. The average human being does follow explicit and implicit social norms (like being a good steward of their employer's resources) without threats of punishment.
And frankly, when employees aren't good stewards of their employer's resources, it's because the employer has been a bad steward of their employees first. Good companies earn the loyalty of their employees. Bad companies get the same treatment they give.
The only way I would be tempted to make more cookies than necessary as a Chick-fil-A worker is if I or my coworkers were paid so little that we were literally going hungry - because if Chick-fil-A pays so badly that it's workers don't have enough to eat, fuck em.
I mean, it sounds like you're thinking "if I was an employee I would be tempted to make extra cookies for myself". Which is sure, reasonable, cookies are yummy. But would you actually do it? Or would there be other considerations, like moral (stealing is wrong) or practical (this franchise isn't making very much profit, and if it closes I lose my job) that would outweigh the desire for a short-term cookie benefit?
And if you were working at some place that wasn't a shitty employee destroying fast food chain, someplace that you wanted to see do well - like a bakery where you knew and liked the owner, and where the owner treated you and the other employees fairly - how much stronger would those other considerations be?
The idea that I would be tempted to steal or waste resources just because I had the opportunity, so I might as well? No. That's capitalist logic - if you see an opportunity for profit, you take it, whether you need it or not, whether it's morally right or not. But actual human beings have values beyond profit maximization.
Climate change is the acceptable price of modernity. That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion that Energy Secretary Chris Wright reaches in his recent essay in The Economist, a composition representing the studied fatalism increasingly found in the debate on energy transition.
Tldr: we're going to accelerate climate change, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I suspect Republican politicians and American fossil fuel companies got together, looked at the real studies, and realized climate change will hurt North America much less than it will the rest of the world.
So they put a plan together: seal the borders, move manufacturing back to the US, seize Canada and Greenland, and prepare for the United States to dominate the world as less well-positioned nations collapse from climate disaster.
And the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate collapses, and the closer America comes to global dominion.
It's not fatalism. It's manifest destiny.
