 Great. So it is my great pleasure to welcome Harriet Friedman to the Political Economy Workshop. She is currently Professor Emerita of Sociology at University of Toronto, where I think she's been since getting her PhD at Harvard in 1977 or somewhere. You've been there for a long time, I think. I've been there a long time. I did have a couple of, you know, only a very brief interlude, a sessional, and that sort of thing. She is one of the leading, if not the leading, political economists studying food and agriculture. Her first work was on the emergence of the global wheat market. And she has been in the mix on debates on the peasantry and family farmers and what she calls the food system regimes for her entire career. I'm sure you've followed those knowledgeable of political economy, have seen her articles in the New Left Review and Journal of Peasant Studies, where she was a central figure. She looks at how class, state, colonialism, and patriarchy are implicated and or constituted by patterns governing food and agriculture on a global scale from running from the micro to the macro. She's also an activist. Has done a lot of work with the Toronto Food Policy Council and many other things. And whenever I see the name Harriet Friedman attached to an article, I know it's something I need to read that is going to be incredibly interesting. So that is why I invited her because she's one of the most creative political economists I've had the pleasure of hearing of work. So without turning it over to you, Harriet. Thank you. Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. I hope I live up to it. So let me just start. I won't go into explanations of who I think you might be and what I think you might know. I've just done the best I could. So I'll move. I don't know how to advance the slide when I'm doing this. Oh, yes, there we go. So let me start. What we usually mean by food today, and put that in quotes, in phrases like food supply or food crisis or feeding the world, is narrowly reduced to a handful of financially traded commodities, all of which are grown in biomes ecologically different from their original places of domestication. I'll unpack a lot of that. Just right now, I'd like to emphasize that when people talk about food in international or even national negotiations, even adding nutrition, and still it's measured in calories and it's about the major grains and a few animals. They're just a handful of each. And so food is much bigger than that, obviously. And no one's trading in broccoli yet. So what we mean are these grains, basically, and the animals that increasingly now are fed by those grains. So this talk will explore the implications of a system that creates dependence by the world's population on a small number of these foods measured in calories, which are grown in ways that are intrinsically depleting and polluting, and that marginalize long-standing food ways embedded in ecological communities. I'll focus on the recency of this pattern and the long history of human food-getting. So yeah, so here are the, this is a map of the biomes of the world that I took from Wikipedia. You can see that, I'm not sure if you can, can you see my cursor? No. OK, look at the yellow bits. So the Great Plains of North America, the Pumpas of South America, Siberia, a little bit around the Danube Basin, Southern Africa, and Southern Latin America, and Australia, of course. So maize and soya and wheat now, it was the biggest. Now it's not at all. Maize and soya are grown as monocultures in temperate grassland ecosystems, which are very different from their original sites of domestication in relation to other species and the relations among species. In a relatively short time, that is decades, they changed from productive in economic terms to depleting and polluting of soils and water and became sustained only through massive inputs of fossil, well, fossil-based inputs, not only the energy, but also the nitrogen fertilizer, the pesticides, and so on. And it's not only fossils that are the problem, which I would like to emphasize that carbon is not a pollution, it's just out of balance in the atmosphere. And that's because of our changing balance of life forms. But we can get to that at the very end. I'll flag it now in case people want to talk about it. So let me start with the historical context. I'm going to start with colonial simplification of biocultural landscapes that began with sugar. This photograph from 1880, which of course is two centuries later or so, it's in Suriname, but it suggests the pre-colonial biocultural landscapes, both the people who lived there and the complex tropical forested ecosystem that was there. What replaced it in fairly short order was a simplification of this biocultural landscape based on sugar plantations. Now, sugar plantations were comprised of three introduced or transplanted elements, enslaved people from Africa for labor. Indigenous people were completely marginalized or absorbed. Some are now reasserting that identity in parts of the Caribbean. But the transplants were pretty dominant. And so it's enslaved Africans. An Asian plant, which is sugar, and European plantation owners. These new biocultural landscapes cannot survive in any way on their own. So they relate to a series of other simplifications of biocultural landscapes, such as cod fishing in New England, which is a major source of food for the enslaved populations of the Caribbean. Jute and timber, which were part of the shipping and so on. And of course, the effect on Africa, I'll just say on a sentence or two, they removed over several decades, even centuries, some of the young strong people from West Africa. And of course, introduced maize, which became integrated into a new biocultural landscape, more or less self-sustaining, which I will get to later, because some of them are. So then I'm just going to move quickly to the biocultural landscape replaced in the Great Plains to produce first wheat, and now very much maize and soya. It's helpful to know that there was a triad of interconnected beings at the center of this landscape. There was bison in the tens of millions, and this map on the left shows their range, which is enormous. They ranged over North America, but particularly concentrated in what we call the Great Plains, and which people in early settlement called the Great American Desert didn't look too promising. And I'll get over to that. The second element were perennial grasses that were eaten by the bison and trampled so that they kept the ecosystem going, but only through the management of what in effect was a vast prairie unrecognizable to human eyes, but it was a vast prairie managed by the indigenous people of whom there is a picture here on the right, Lakota Sioux from the 1880s. So sorry, I've gone the wrong way. Here we go. So starting in the 1860s, which was not long ago at all, even if we aren't thinking in geological ages, which I will get to at the end, even if we're thinking simply in the history of colonialism, it's not long at all. It's less than two centuries by quite a bit. William Cronin is the best source on this, Chicago in the Great West, Nature's Metropolis, and he describes first the Great American Desert that was transformed into wheat-producing monoculture, which was organized in ways that completely subordinated the landscape. It flattened it as much as possible. It substituted particularly the use of waterways as transport by railways, and it concentrated and standardized and anonymized the crops. In order to do this, there had to be financial instruments, what Arnie Ness calls replacing the complexity of ecosystems, including humans growing wheat, with complications, and these complications are mainly centered on finance. So the Chicago Stock Exchange futures market grew up in relation to this. It also laid the foundation for the 20th century maize and soy monocultures by centralizing and standardizing and industrializing livestock. So these are the Chicago stockyards, the tides of flesh in Cronin's terms that require bringing the cattle, or herding the cattle, the very brief, about 20-year period of cowboys, so central to American mythology, before the prairies were fenced. So these livestock were driven into the Chicago system, and there they were the first disassembly line, the first industrial linear processes. Here you see this is pork that's in the picture with the workers on the right, processing that meat and shipping it by rail. And then in the 1890s, refrigeration came in and allowed that to become bigger and more standardized. It also, of course, cut forests along the way, and I'm very delighted at the increasing recognition of the importance of forests and the way that forestry and knowledge of forests has been reduced to a simple economic calculation. Jim Scott writes about this very much, but more people are writing about the actual ecological interconnectedness of all the beings in the forest. So I hope you know some of those. I'm not going to go into them now. I'll just skip ahead that the most recent simplification has been the expansion of palm oil in Asia first to other parts of the world very rapidly, and even now back to Africa, which is just astounding that this simplified plant genetically and in terms of the shape of the landscape, as you can see on the left, has been moved back to its area of original domestication where it was a basic plant in West Africa that was part of a mixed farming system and part of the diet. Now, with agroforestry, we can return to, and people are returning to, a mixture of indigenous and scientific or ecological knowledge to restore mixed farming in ways that need to be, need now, given the centuries of disorganization of ecosystems and cultures, of biocultural landscapes, they now need to be consciously managed and intentionally managed and integrated across places. So let me start now because I've been focusing on the way that monoculture is introduced by transplantation and becomes a monoculture in the transplanted areas. It's important just to recognize where the centers of domestication, the original centers of origin sometimes called of our major crops are. These were developed, as many of you will know, by Vavilov, I think in the 1920s. And you will note, given that we're going to, that maize and soy and wheat, and to some extent palm oil are considered financially traded crops. They're the important crops for finance. Therefore, for capitalism right now, that no center of domestication of any importance is in North America. The only thing, the only significant, in a less important way, significant crops that are commercially grown, which were originated in North America are mainly sunflowers. And if you want to go further down the list, Jerusalem artichokes. So it's an irony that North America plus a few other places, Australia, South America, the Southern Cone, have been called the bread baskets of the world and that the peoples of the world have become dependent on these because we rely now on finance and trade rather than reconstructing biocultural landscapes in ways that integrate us. We have separated ourselves from nature and finance is the main mechanism for doing that. There's another side of this though and I will return to it at the end. Alfred Crosby has a wonderful book from the early 1970s called The Columbian Exchange in which he describes the transplantation of crops from their centers of origin all over the world, under colonialism and onwards. So for a while, my life, I was carrying around a botanical dictionary. That was before we had Google and looking up things all the time. Where did it come from? Because if you find pineapples or coriander or mangoes or cattle or chickens in different parts of the world, how did they get there? When did they get there? And those are really important. So all of this is about the movement of plants, animals and people usually together, sometimes by capital, sometimes through the creative activities of people, let's call it from below. So now I'll get to my main point here, which, or the theoretical point let's say, that's the historical background, which is to talk about food getting in the Anthropocene. And right now there are two major contenders for how to think about the Anthropocene as political economists or even as Marxists. And I'm even going to stay within the Marxist frame. One is capitalocene. And the idea is that even though the use of fossil fuels, even though it's much older than capitalism, even though the development of agriculture and specialized cities and the division between the two and what Foster calls the metabolic rift happened partly earlier in ancient civilizations. That's what we mean by civilization usually, is the things that happen in cities like writing, like class structures, like classes, but also the separation of the cities from the countryside and the specialization of agriculture, even when it's included in the, we can talk about the design of cities. Carolyn Steele is brilliant on this for those who want to follow it up. All of these are suggestions that we could talk about in the discussion period. Andreas Moem is probably the origin of it, but Jason Moore has also picked it up and made it perhaps more generally known. The argument is that climate change, the imbalance of carbon in the atmosphere, the intensive burning of fossil fuels began with capitalism. And it's tricky then, was it capitalism beginning in 1500? Was it capitalism beginning with industry? And certainly in a tense fight after 1945 with industry and the deepening of the use of fossil fuels for far more than heat transportation and so on, especially I'll say in agriculture. The other one that I will pick up here is from John Bellamy Foster, who roots his analysis much more deeply in the geology, which is the origin of the term Anthropocene, and I'm finding that at the moment convincing, but I'm open, I'm open to suggestions. So he says that the Anthropocene is an epoch that is defined by human activity as the main effect on earth systems, on climate, on the hydrological cycle, atmospheric cycle, soil, all of it. But that if we, and there's not a but, and if we think about the Anthropocene as the epoch of human domination, let's say, it requires thinking about what will come after the Anthropocene, and it's hard to think, even the name suggests that nothing could come after the Anthropocene that would have humans in it, that humans would be gone, and that is certainly a possible, possibly even likely effect of our current destruction of ecosystems and balances of the gases in the atmosphere. So what he says is, if we really want to think about the Anthropocene as social scientists, maybe as political economists, but that's too narrow, but if we want to think about it that way, then what it is is a call to responsibility for humans to do it better, do it well, to recognize our part of nature, that we are nature, that nature is in us, we are in nature, and therefore we have to be able to think about an epoch within the Anthropocene where humans act responsibly. And so in order to do that, he names the current era, which he absolutely agrees is capitalist in its dynamic of accumulation, extraction, exploitation, that he wants to call it a specific era within the Anthropocene that is capitalinian. All of this, by the way, is in the September, recent September 2021 issue of monthly review in the main essay that he writes with somebody else whose name, I'm sorry, I forget. So the capitalinian in this view is destructive of earthly metabolisms and cannot, in its essential dynamics, be saved. That all of its efforts to repair the damage, which I guess are going on in copper right now, I have a few things to say about that. Foster has a lot of things to say about that. That following Marx, he begins with city and agriculture that soil cannot be renewed when it's no longer possible to reintegrate all the waste of animals, including human animals, into the soil, and therefore inputs are needed that have to be external. That is, they're not part of a metabolism anymore. That we can simplify this by saying that capitalism creates problems which become profit opportunities from a deep ecology perspective. I follow Arnie Ness, I mentioned this before, that ecological relations can be thought of as complex and when we break those ecological relations, again including humans in them, those ecological relations, when we break those, the opportunity and the necessity is there to replace them with something complicated like finance or certain kinds of markets, not all markets. So, broken metabolisms, I would argue, and I think Foster would agree, and more too, they center on food-getting. That is, that the broken metabolisms split production and consumption of food and require complicated mechanisms to renew production and to enable consumption when they're separate. And this is not to say that there can be or should not be or hasn't always been some division of labor at all. It's about a spatial and territorial, a landscape way of understanding these practices and these practices, let's say. So, it's not about markets, but about the disembedness of markets from society in Pellanese terms, and they're hijacking by capital, and Fernand Brodel is good at that and Raj Patel has picked that up as well in thinking about markets because in the food sovereignty and other literatures, I'm finding it a lot less common now, which is good, but there used to be talk of food not being a commodity, which might mean it's not traded in markets or it might mean it's not traded in capitalist markets. So, I'd be fine with the second one, and I think Patel would and so on. Anyway, so Foster's second era of the Anthropocene is what he calls communion. That is civilization rooted, these are all quotes from this recent article, September 2021, civilization rooted in communal use values, which can occur only through social, economic, and ecological planning grounded in a new system of social metabolic reproduction. By the way, I'm assuming everyone's read Foster's Marx's Ecology by now, but maybe you haven't. If you haven't, you're not going to be able to follow this entirely, but anyway, I'm assuming it. So, continuing, this is also a quote, although I forgot to put the quotation marks around it, the advent of the Communion or the geological age of the Anthropocene to succeed the Capitalinian, barring an end Anthropocene extinction event, that is of us, not of all life, almost certainly, but of us, necessitates an ecological, social, and cultural revolution, one aimed at the creation of collective relations within humanity as a whole, as a basis for a wider community within the Earth. I'm going to repeat that last line, that the creation of collective relations within humanity precedes the collective relations with the wider community of the Earth. That means all beings, also the flows of water, air, and even soil and rocks are much slower, that it precedes that, and that it's humanity that has to integrate itself first. I would love, if anyone wants to pick up on it, to talk about war, and whether it's class war or interstate war, because all of that is growing, and I'm saying this not only as an empirical fact, but as a conceptual one, that I'm going to suggest that it is possible that the recognition of our common humanity against nationalities, races, classes, genders, I'm not sure about genders, we can get to that, but anyway, it depends on what some indigenous friends of mine call the third factor in talking about reconciliation between indigenous people and settlers in Canada, and that is the third factor is the land. If we can learn to relate to the land, meaning itself organizing qualities, including human management of them, then we can find a way to get over our divisions and conflicts. So I think that's a really alternate and deeper view. I don't even know, I haven't had a chance to talk to John about this, but I'm going with this for now. So one thing that leads me to think this is a problem is his idea of an environmental proletariat. And following Jason Moore's critique of Foster, who was his teacher whom he respects, admires consistently, and the most recent thing of his that I've read, nonetheless he critiques Foster in saying that he simply adds together social and natural. Now, I don't think that's true at all in Foster's conception of these ages of the Anthropocene. I think he's rooting it in science and geology, which of course in its origins in Darwin and all the others, was not separate from geology. They discovered fossils in the rocks and that's how it all opened up and became divided and reductionist, I will say. However, the political part that comes now, that comes I think out of political economy that needs to be revised, perhaps to political ecology, perhaps something deeper than that, is simply additive of the social and natural and environmental proletariat. It's hard to see where that will come from and there are different suggestions in Foster's recent article that it could be all of humanity or it could be something, he doesn't say this, but could be perhaps related to environmental justice and the people most affected, which has become a bigger theme than in the past, rightly so, of the environmental movement. It seems to me it's possible that it still privileges the human by demanding or expecting or conceptualizing human integration first and then integration with the rest of nature. I'm going to argue with many others who, most of whom are not political economists, but possibly Foster would agree, I don't know, so it may not even be a critique, but let me go ahead with the argument that there is instead an emergent configuration of experiments, relations, and knowledges based on different principles from accumulation, based on relationality, reciprocity, and respect for all beings and all earthly cycles on which we all depend. And I will then just name briefly a few of those and perhaps some of you will know more about them than I do or we can just pick them up in the conversation. One is, one of the three elements that I'm going to name are what I call the secret history of colonialism and that has to do with the diasporic food ways, agronomies, and cuisines that were created by people, enslaved Africans, indentured Indians, settlers who were lowest on the hierarchies of places, of colonies, let's say, that they created as kinds of syncretism that is a model for us to build on, a model and a foundation for us to build on. And I'll say more about that, of course. The second is ecological sciences, which are in danger now of being reduced by disciplinary divisions into something less holistic than they can be and are frequently. I'm saying that with some hesitation because there was some, everything has a dark side, there was some racism at the center of the origins of ecology, at least the term ecology, not the origins of ecological thinking. I'm going to go further back than that, that John Bellamy Foster is focusing on and so he's objecting to the term holism and I'm not entirely sure why, but I like it and I'm using it for now. I'm interested in what you think. The third is the recovery of what Wade Davis, the wonderful anthropologist or biogeographer he's sometimes called, calls the ethno-sphere, which is the sum of all of our inherited ways of knowing and living on the earth, which are rapidly being destroyed through the undermining of cultures and the loss of languages, many of which name the ecosystem elements in particular places as they once existed and as sometimes they still exist or can be recovered. So I'm just going to have one slide each for each of these really massive ideas. I've given many lectures on the secret history of colonialism, not on the other two. So I'm just going to briefly say that if we look for instance at Jamaica as going back, remember the sugar, the first simplification through plantations under colonialism, by bringing together people from all over the world, marginalizing indigenous people. They also marginalized the indigenous plants and animals. They cleared the landscapes, deforested them, flattened the earth as much as possible, introduced industrial systems under slavery. Sydney Menz is brilliant on this. And at the same time, over time the people who came in brought with them often African women, enslaved women would braid the seeds into their hair. And Judith Carney writes about this wonderfully in black rice and then later in the shadow of slavery, diasporic agronomies and cuisines that create new biocultural landscapes and the cultural part includes the cuisines. So Jamaica is a beautiful case and I look at, I grew up in Louisiana where I experienced it firsthand and always delight in exploring the origins of the various parts of the cuisine there. The Jamaican national dish is ackee which is African but indigenized and transplanted so it now grows in Jamaica. Salt fish which has to be imported still because it comes from the North Atlantic and has to be preserved in order to do that. And rice. So rice is both African and Asian in origin. I don't know which variety has been indigenized to Jamaica perhaps both of them. It's a fascinating story that Judith Carney writes about in black rice. The discovery of two independently domesticated geneses of rice. But both of them were transplanted here and beans which are indigenous to South America. So this combination of plants that have to grow in some kinds of mixed farms and do by ordinary people outside the plantations at the edges of plantations in the escaped areas of escaped slaves and so on. Those are now part of it. They formed a new biocultural landscape and even when indigenous people begin to recover their indigeneity or their partial indigeneity it's within this context in which the landscapes and the cuisines are completely changed. Now these are more thoroughly changed than happened later because there is an acceleration as followers of David Harvey will know an acceleration and intensification of these processes from their origin through the settlement of the North American plains and the development of wheat and maize and soy there. So coming to maize on the same slide there's a wonderful book by Lauren Baker my colleague here called Corn versus Maize, that's the title of the book and her research was in Mexico where corn that is industrial, simplified genetically and in landscape terms agronomically simplified corn is now back in Mexico using the genetically modified variety which this is a slide from one of the companies that that is can be opposed to what she still calls maize because Maize of course is the indigenous, well I don't know if it's indigenous or Spanish, sorry it is the name she uses for the diverse types of corn or maize that are all over Mexico, Central America and indeed all over the world they were transplanted to Africa in its early phases they were grown in China as early as the 16th century, southern China they were brought by colonialism everywhere and when people put these seeds into their gardens or their farm fields and start to adapt them they increase the diversity the genetic diversity as well as the diversity of the landscapes, so seed saving now becomes an extension that has to be conscious because it's so marginal of what people have been doing since the beginning of colonialism and arguably since the beginning of agriculture so that's part one that we can build on means and agronomies we can renew biocultural landscapes building on lots of traditions and it's a very different approach obviously from having migrants tie in boats in the Mediterranean or in cages on the Mexican border so people, I'll just add, people have been on the move as long as we know, that's how we moved out of Africa as a species, so it's not about local versus global or movement versus stasis it's about what kind of movement and when whether self-organized human managed ecosystems emerge from these or whether they're dominated by capital which separates and creates linear economies that have to be managed by capitalist institutions of ever greater complication so holism, a term I'm going to stick to for the time being, has a long history and I'm just talking centuries now I'm not going back to Aristotle or anything I'm going to start with Alexander von Humboldt who was an absolute genius in the early 19th century and was part of what was I didn't write it down here but Andrea Wolff W-U-L-F has a beautiful book that many of you may know called The Invention of Nature about the invention of nature is what she calls von Humboldt's work because what he did by traveling all over Latin America and many other parts of the world was he came to understand a couple of things one is as illustrated in this map from Ecuador, a volcano in Ecuador that plant species shift as you go up in height and that you can think about that we can think about that as as a pattern that holds everywhere even though the plants are different but the elevation will change and this is something that's now become so familiar to us if we think about it as an original understanding that not just this tree or this volcano or this waterway this river but all are connected that all volcanoes are connected through the earth, he eventually came to that and that it was the beginning arguably of earth system science which is what has led us to have a term like the Anthropocene and a concept of a place of humanity in the earth so he came to understand the earth as diverse and interconnected this is not opposed to standardization of certain things like he standardized latitude and longitude measurements that allowed shipping and sailing to become far more efficient even possible really in the ways that it came to be so this is more about starting from relatedness interconnectedness and diversity which is where many ecologists are going now again ecology itself is in danger as a science of being reduced to different levels whether it's genetic levels or the level of the plants and which plants do well here or there rather than understanding relationships so I've just started reading this very popular book which is brilliant and I asked my ecologist son-in-law what he thinks of it because he's in danger of reductionism too I think but don't, oh this is recorded that's very bad anyway he said oh Samar she's brilliant that's wonderful she's written this book called Finding the Mother Tree there are many other works like this the exploration of fungi, the exploration of all the life forms that integrate the earth in ways that we haven't seen by not following Humboldt and by the way Humboldt was for those who haven't read the invention of nature or other things about Humboldt he took Darwin's book with him sorry Darwin took Humboldt's book with him in his great voyages that led to the theory of evolution it is a strain of Darwinism that focuses much more on collaboration than on conflict both are present in life for sure and it's the thread that can be picked up and is picked up by ecologists like Suzanne Simard and finally I'll point to indigenous knowledge which mustn't be romanticized I don't think I do I try very hard not to and I don't think the indigenous people who are advocating for it in my experience either in the food sovereignty movement or in academia do either so perhaps the most widely known right now for good reason is Robin Wall Kimmerer who is a scientist she wrote a well respected book on moss but now not but and moved on to writing sweetgrass which integrates as the subtitle says indigenous wisdom scientific knowledge and here's the crucial thing the teaching of plants so how do we learn from plants well there are many ways we can put them under a microscope and cut them up and things and that's got certainly got its uses we can also try to understand them in relational terms what do we need to do in order to respect the plant to be reciprocal in our relations with the plant to find balances among all the elements that connect us and the plant with the soil with the water with the air with all other beings microbes under the soil large and small so I think this is this is growing Kimmerer is not the only person by any means working on this and it's growing very rapidly so I find this very promising as a way to on the one hand integrate ourselves mentally emotionally spiritually even with what we could call the rest of nature but to really understand nature that we are nature and nature is us and that we can do that and still be scientific we don't and that maybe romanticism is not a bad idea if it's not opposed to science and I'll just show you my last slide and end here where we can look at the earth and and I'm hoping this is happening I think it is a little bit that climate consciousness has at least institutionally and I think in popular discourse been understood as a matter of carbon and carbon pollution that it's not a helpful focus we are made of carbon you and I and every plant and every living thing it's a matter of the exchange of gases between plants and animals at the simplest level that we make carbon dioxide and the plants make oxygen and if we cut down forest we don't have any oxygen and we have too much carbon so you know even at that simplest level but of course it gets far more complicated and fascinating and beautiful when we look at fungi and bacteria and the microbiome and the landscape biome the great plains and you know the the various biomes whose map I put at the beginning and I love this image on the right which is images that earth from space is centered on a tree and trees are coming to be understood even cup 26 is it that's going on right now today they announced that they're going to try to stop destroying forests it's kind of late in the day but it's still a good very good thing and yet the same time the amount that they've pledged these numbers are really hard for me to hold in my head but they are less than 10% of the amount of money that the US alone spends on its military and that amount is for all the countries pledging it not just the US so we're just not anywhere near where we need to be and focusing on the way that life is interconnected is collaborative and that we are called in this era of the Anthropocene to come to the Communinium I did I get it right it's so new for me too to get to the Communion epic or whatever we want to call it to realize that the Anthropocene is not just a danger but it's an opportunity and it's a call to responsibility and that we have elements to do that so I'll stop there and hope that I've been at least reasonably clear and see what you have to say. Thank you so much Harriet we can now people could raise their hands or we have a small enough group people could jump in with questions I think it's a lot there's no doubt about that let me ask to connect it a little bit to back a little bit to the political economy I mean do you see any political and economic forces that might lead to this transition or are we just screwed well one of the slides I didn't use now which I have often used in ending lectures is one of the two slides of the Great Lakes which are one of the largest lakes in the world and therefore a source of life for everyone who lives near here one is an image from space where you see what they are and the other is a map that shows the red dotted line that goes through Lake Superior Lake Ontario in fact all the Great Lakes except Lake Michigan which is part of the Westphalian state system in Canada and you see how ridiculous it is and then I follow that and unsustainable either from the use of water like can you run a pipe this did happen it does happen run a pipe from Ohio under Lake Ontario to take out water for whatever use including bottled water all of which is ridiculous and that lowers the level of the whole lake including on the Canadian side so their commission set up Great Lakes commission to regulate this and they've done a little bit they did bring Lake Erie back from the dead and I love eating fish from it but you can't really solve the problem with the territorial boundaries we have now so we have to move and migration which I mentioned before is another big piece of this nationality and I think this is for inequality and super exploitation so we have to move to some system of bioregions and the Great Lakes is an extremely interesting bioregion so the next slide I put up when I do that I could see if I could find them but the next slide I put up after that is what you can call the Great Lakes Commons and if you go on their website I'm sure if you Google it Great Lakes Commons you'll find it right to me if you can't it's written in English French and Mohawk so they have a charter in all those languages and the people involved which do canoe trips walks led by Indigenous elders around the Great Lakes very much participated in by people who have obviously land conflicts people who live in cities, people who are in cottages on land that is unceded Indigenous land so everyone I know engaged in Indigenous politics and there are few people I know that's engaged in it, there are few I know none of them expects to go back, whatever that would mean to some pre-colonial land use but they do say and they're quite right that they have knowledge that can allow for a more wholesome way of integrating ourselves and collaborating with all the other beings including the waterways so I think that somehow in this conversation with the third element in conflict over land use between Indigenous peoples and this is true in Africa Africa is being treated right now the way North America was as Terinulios they don't use the term like it's unproductive, it's unsettled if it's with nomadic people or hundreds and gatherers as we used to call them so it's still going on this marginalization of people I think it's fair to call Indigenous, they've been there a long time it's also fair to call many Europeans Indigenous despite their layers of conquest amongst themselves so I think there is something there's something profound that has to change it's not just capitalism, it's the Westphalian state system which grew up within capitalism at least the colonial phase of it and which then became the framework for capitalism and is the is part of the problem now so yes we have to get past it so it's easy to see how international negotiations which are so consistently disappointing and frustrating and scary because they're interstate how that can happen it I like to do counterfactuals all the time to try to access turning points when things could have been different I think in the 1990s the United Nations and NATO and a whole bunch of other institutions could have been either abolished or transformed into something that isn't interstate or state centric and there were various proposals to do this but they weren't and instead now it's all been hijacked as much as they can by capital challenged by civil society which in an interesting I would say complex and contradictory way has become increasingly global so the various declarations on the rights of indigenous people, of farmers that have come out of the UN through the trans national, trans-territorial trans-cultural organization and networking of people based on their own, based on diversity the unity based on diversity that it seems to me good ecology is and what our world needs to be so we need to move to a different thing from the state system we've got and I don't think it will be different borders I think it will be something, I'm John Rugge who became the advisor to Kofi Annan when he was head of the UN Rugge wrote an article in the 1990s on what he called neo-medievalism and he said the Westphalian state system is recent, it's crazy it doesn't do what we need it to do and we could transcend it and what we could do the way we could transcend it and I could say a few more things about this if you want is by thinking of nested and overlapping ecosystem or sorry nesting and overlapping jurisdictions and the EU did start experimenting in this before it was the EU that you try to have a jurisdiction over everything at the lowest, the smallest possible scale it's not lowest the smallest possible scale so the atmosphere is global however every atom of carbon is produced somewhere even if it's an airplane moving through space so we have to be able to think about locality and universality let's say together in a contradictory synthesis we can say so or I could say I'll try to say so if we started moving in that direction and there are ways of doing it municipalities taking up carbon politics which are a problem in a way municipalities taking up maybe just an example of this an early phase although we don't know what could or should happen with cities in order to repair the broken metabolism with food getting I think even Carolyn Steele who's wonderful on feeding cities she doesn't quite go there so it's huge it's huge to try to go there and no one person can so I'm drawing a very big picture here and yes we have to change everything as Naomi Klein put it is not just that we've already changed everything with our extractivism and so on but also that we need to change everything in a better way and so I like the idea of emergence and emergent strategy it's an African-American you probably know her whose name is slipping my mind at this moment that's really terrible but I didn't put her thank you she has a book called emergent strategy the idea of emergence is coming up in multiple ways out of social movements and the NGO world occasionally so the idea of emergence is I guess what I'm trying to work with when I look at these biocultural landscapes that have been created say in the shadow of colonialism when I look at the possibilities of the ecological development when I look at the possibilities of the integration of ecological knowledge with grounded knowledge which I've been calling indigenous but if you think about the biocultural landscapes I'm emphasizing indigeneity is constantly recreated in a certain way by embedding plants, animals and people in collaborative relationships we continue to exist which is why I would argue we continue to exist given that finance is so unstable and capitalism itself now I think is so unstable did that answer your question more than TMI too much information it did I think that we don't only have to transform capitalism but we have to transform the international state of things like a tall order let me just make it even more complicated I'll let Gregor go ahead not okay even if we manage to do these things do you have thoughts about what about the population I mean Ken do you foresee some kind of what do you call it communion it's a jumbling fosters phrase communion as the follower of the era communion era do we still have 8 billion people or is it a lot less and I doubt it's knowable because I do think we determine our future we as a whole species right are we going to add more wars famines plagues and wars I mean they've been going on they're getting worse and famine I could talk about that if you like because but anyway so yeah I mean there could be a malthusian crash I guess which would also at a certain scale be what many people including foster are calling a civilizational collapse which is much bigger than the state system I mean state systems from 1647 1648 whenever that was done and that's not very old so I guess what I'm arguing for here is a very very long view to understand ourselves as a species that has inhabited the earth moved across the earth since our origins and that since our written records we have settled into cities and increased our numbers we don't know what I guess that colleges would call a caring capacity for humans is usually it depends on consumption I mean that's the usual critique of malthus right if everybody however many earths we would need from the ecological footprint for everyone to eat or drive cars or do all the things we do in North America it's just not possible and but that takes us into a negative view like we're going to have to suffer we're going to have to give up our beloved gadgets and things which isn't necessarily true I don't think we know I think there are things I mean I'll go back to the hippies or to the their antecedents in the 19th century forming utopian communities there are people who since the level or since the advent of capitalism have understood that our main gratifications if we cultivate those aspects of ourselves are not through accumulation and things at the same time there are things like the internet makes possible like this lecture that and I remember you probably do too Lawrence I don't know how many people are old enough I see a few others it might be I remember when the internet started and the phrase was the internet wants to be free and at first I couldn't understand when people started warning about the commercialization of the internet I couldn't picture what that was well it's not hard to picture now and who had an idea of all the things that have happened since that are destructive about it so it's always a process of discovery and that discovery is always taking place in a context of what has happened before and before means immediately before but that immediately before is conditioned the possibilities of that are conditioned by what went before that going all the way back so it's levels of time of chronology as well as dimensions of space that we're required to to think in in new ways and I think that thinking can only happen by including invoking centering ourselves more in the emotional and spiritual spheres I mean I think we have to learn to love the earth and love other beings in order to be able to love each other beyond it seems to me like right now we're getting at least in this part of the world loving fewer and fewer people we're more and more isolated communities are more and more fragmented and yet there's always efforts at recovery and we see them all over if we look for them so I think you know one of the things I like to think about in terms of big epical possibilities is to think about what we generally consider to be the origins of capitalism under the feudal mode of production and it seems pretty clear to me that no one not the people starting the champagne fairs not the merchants who were buying aristocratic titles not Michelangelo or Leonardo the visionaries none of them could possibly have imagined what capitalism would look like and so if we accept that then we have to accept that there's a limited amount of control that we have even of what we know about moving into an age that would be sustainable so in terms of population yeah I mean we know right now that the food people say it all the time you know there's plenty of calories in the world we could feed all the people it's a matter of distribution or we can get more sophisticated and say it's a matter of nutrition can't just think about calories the World Health Organization got there about 20 years ago so we can do all that and we could say well yeah we could support all the people in the world if but that if seems way too big for me given capitalism, given the state system given everything it does how many people could live in a collaborative world and I mean deeply collaborative with all beings respectful of the flows of water and air of the integrity of mountains even you know all those things that are not there now if we move there are different ways we could move in that direction and that would have different outcomes who's doing it and where and how and so I think we have to enter a period of experimentation which I think was happening at the beginning of capitalism lots of people experimenting in different things many of which failed some of which converged or emerged as a new system over it depends on which period we want to look at but we could even start with 1600 thank you anybody else want to chime in on a question Riker has a question yeah I'll read it out I accept the leaves I'm sorry about that go ahead Larry you could read your own question and then if you have to leave you can well if it's interesting to others too thank you very much for this talk fortunately I have to leave in a bit and my name is Greg or Simon York I was really fascinated by your talk and some of the connections and problems you made and threw up and one question I have most of the time I deal with people who say we need to accelerate rates of innovation in certain technologies that help us overcome it's usually focused on climate change so I guess my question is what are you making of these eco-modernist arguments that the tools that help create the crisis we are in are the only ones that are powerful enough to mitigate what's already upon us even if then afterwards we can go to some other phase of the Anthropocene that isn't perhaps determined by what we do now I was just wondering that thank you ecological modernization is yeah I mean and they're getting they the people who advocate it whether it's from the corporations governments and so on academics are ever more sophisticated at appropriating and turning it into ways of mitigating their own problems but I guess I do go with Albert Einstein on it I think that they're still reductionist okay if you if you're trying to well I'll just I'll give a little kind of experience I had when I was fortunate enough to visit China and be taken to different places that I was taken to one place by an agronomist and stayed at an agriculture experiment station that agronomist had just flown back from Nebraska where he was collaborating with agronomists there agronomy now wasn't always so agronomy now is completely reductionist it's only about individual plants and individual inputs to the plants and that's exactly what they were doing they were trying to reduce nitrogen of course they were measuring carbon emissions in their experimental plots too in little boxes but they were trying to reduce the nitrogen input with that in a context where in China wheat and soy and corn that they were growing in order to feed their intensive livestock industry far away and they would take that with so recent you could see it I could see water that was used to irrigate these nitrogen intensive little fields that were linked together into one field I asked are there any fish in that water my Communist Party minders said oh no oh no that's not possible we had just eaten beautiful fish in the city I don't know where it was from but not from there and that nitrogen if you look at diagrams that started in the 90s they didn't use nitrogen before that I was also I was also taken I would call that ecological modernization in fact the agronomist who sent me would call it that too I think something like that trying to fix it do the best they could and there were some interesting things there too that I'm not getting into or even what the farmers said about the way the government set prices to make that happen because they knew some of the older farmers knew they should be planting soy instead of using nitrogen but anyway or as much nitrogen but the prices wouldn't allow them to survive that way I was also taken to the beautiful remnants of the 4,000 year old terraces rice terraces now using the chronological equivalent of green revolution rice they developed new rice varieties and they are using that but the terraces are still there and they're still integrated with fish, with people living along the side with a cow standing here with a lot of animals in little places around with the forests above and the water being managed as it flows down in incredibly intricate ways they've lasted for 4,000 years which is a pretty good definition of sustainability they are only kept now I have a slide I often use through what are called GIAs I don't know if you know about those globally important agricultural heritage sites so it's a UN program that basically allows or encourages the use of tourism to see these wonderful old terraces in order to preserve them now in my view we're in such a dire situation that anything that preserves them is a good thing I was sent to see those by the natural resource people I mean I had to be taken to go anywhere the natural resource people their mandate is to preserve water and forests and they understand that agriculture has to happen right in order to be able to do that and they may talk it out sometime in the Academy of Sciences they're all in it but as public policy it's really all about agronomy right now which way will it go but you can really see the difference and what the natural science people were doing too was they were putting their cameras on the terraces and they were watching how the fish worked which were put in at a very specific time into the terraces the fish not only manure and renew the soil there they also it turns out jump up knock the rice plants so that the insects fall off and they eat them now they also then measured what was happening with specialized rice monocultures and specialized fish farming monocultures too and so they by measuring you know what's lost which they are doing natural resource people the externalities you would say as well as what's gained a few kilos of rice that are produced per unit of land or labor that they're able to do that and they're able to see things in a more holistic way so what I'm saying is there are contradictions even in government systems even between sciences but ecological modernization is located only in some of those and they're supported mostly by capital right so it's hard to see you know I don't know I think there's so much we don't know but I think it is an end game for them you know for capital the last ditch last the separates do you agree with that by the way can I ask a follow up here on this you know for example like more speaks of the cheap frontiers and you know we talk about metabolic rift when we're discussing foster right but so when thinking in food systems but also in general like more about the climate consciousness here do you see like the role of oceans and or maybe like outer space as these kinds of you know blind spot metabolic I mean that I would redefine what we understand as like nature it's beyond earth systems I guess right when you're talking about outer space but like would that prolong you know would that would that play a role in like prolonging this phase of capital and scene or you know this kind of like dire state of things up to the point where you know maybe we're too far beyond point of no return we're gonna have some form of catastrophe and I don't know I mean how do you how do you like do you see oceans which are largely on it they're explored right especially deep oceans and like we enter it it's the land cover of the earth or like more than 70% of it or maybe outer space has this discourse between like capitalism finance you know investing big tech farms in in space something like that someone someone help me remember the person I know quite well who's the editor of historical materialism who's just written a book with someone else on the oceans of capitalism in the sea yes yes yes or maybe it's not historical materialism maybe it's another journal but I think anyway yeah it you know the sea has always been a part I think they help to recover the history we need to recover all these histories histories of the sea and I think I think deep sea exploration is really scary and they're working on it because there's so many ecological fixes that are needed now that the oceans promise some of it in terms of mining and so on and yeah they'll try some ecological modernization in terms of regulating fish cat catches and of course aquaculture reproduces for sea life what we did on the land you know simplified monocultures in controlled situations that get out of control but nonetheless that's the effort and also there's a lot more attention to a certification and a whole lot of other things in the scientific world that even comes across my screen but you know I'm not a scientist so I think the oceans need to be treated differently from space I don't know what do you think about space seems to me they're just trying to escape I don't know who they think is going to bring them their food I read a really interesting thing a long time ago on some just crazy site I was an academic who does future studies or something and I was invited by bankers to come and talk to them and he had created a power point and all and when he got there they didn't want the power point they were only a handful of them and they were sitting around a table and the question they wanted him to answer was how could they keep their guards loyal when they went into their bunkers so I mean there's a level and you know there were reports of this of I think even the one of 2008 some of the hedge fund dealers saying we better do this fast before it all crashes right there's a level at which they know or some of them know and yet what you know I don't it's hard for me to imagine but what do you think of the oceans I don't know I think when I think about a cheap frontier you know and the fact that they're trying to build these you know financially viable rockets for example and I see problems with like accumulation of waste for example and you're talking about like the depletion of some ecosystems right if there's some way we can because I obviously don't think we can live in outer space not in the outer space and not that many people but maybe ship the waste out there right ship super radioactive nuclear waste out to the outer space and that'll be it I guess I mean that would just be another cheap frontier in that sense right like is that a broken ecosystem in that sense or metabolism in that sense what do you think that would accomplish aside from profits right in some sense which is the point that we were talking about like you know you create the problems and then you can monetize and you know these profits are very you know capitalism is after anyway right yeah no I can see that I see what you're saying I think I guess what I'm trying to say is that and I think Jason Jason's getting there too is that there's a limit to how far the commodity frontiers can go because they're all reductionist in practice as well as in concept they're all about one thing and so you just named one thing and we can name two things or three things but they're not about relationships and the ecological crisis that is upon us now is not going to be solved they can do some things and they can make more profits and they can probably pull this one out one more time you know financially we'll see maybe not I don't know I just don't know but I think I see what you're saying the temptation is there and it's being followed right to try to make profits some other way it's also done by more intricate relations ever more creative financial instruments and ecosystem services being bought and sold there that that's part of it right that you just make things more complicated you can get more profits out of the system but what's happening to the system if it's an ecosystem especially a human inclusive ecosystem or the biosphere a larger sense it's almost 530 does anybody have any questions who hasn't got a chance to ask anything or comments or criticisms what am I doing wrong what am I missing well I don't think you're doing anything wrong and it's utterly fascinating I am you know there's a whole bunch of books now that I want to read but I don't feel any more optimistic than I did at the beginning of it you mentioned early the term holism and the controversy and part is there that young smiths South African was involved in this and he of course was a blatant racist so why not just use systems theory and or systemic that's really what you're getting at and avoiding that just a suggestion that's what I do in class when they talk about these things I talk about systems and systems theory and avoid that whole term holism something that I've wrestled with I am yeah thank you for that and I will think about it for two reasons there's always a dilemma when words are used by people we don't want to associate with do you fix it or nix it do you abandon it because it was used by someone you don't like or is it still useful and I don't have an answer to that so thank you for that but also I think there's a I would love to hear what you have to say about this there's economic systems there's ecosystems I'm trying to think them together I'm not the only one so were lots of people many of whom I've named and that's where the dilemma comes in if you use that word you have to have an adjective in front of it and if so do you use that word to what I'm trying to do to the project here well you know you have systems on different levels there's no way to avoid that either so you do use adjectives in a sense you become a little bit deductive when you look at one system when in fact it's part of much larger whole as you mentioned I really like your statement so if you look at it that way we are part of one humongous system and yeah you know I I'm just mentioning that things to think about absolutely it's a methodological question how do you disentangle those elements in order to be able to think about them clearly I don't know I don't know Michael yes thanks well that was a very that was a wonderful talk and very very thought provoking I have a question I don't know criticism but alternative you're quite negative about states let me make the criticism first and then maybe turn into a question I mean democratic states have quite a lot going for them I mean let me agree with your downsides war making and treatment colonialism treatment of indigenous persons states have a pretty terrible record but democratic states are pretty good entities for listening you know have taking complaints and then having systemic solutions and say yes it's good to have production but we should also have environmental protection or maybe even finer tuned you know we want to have food but we also need to keep an eye on nitrogen and phosphorus cycles so states seem like they have some promise in this dimension so that's partly maybe a criticism kind of a half year one and a half years for states but it's also a question what do you think about governance mechanisms that can sort of take big changes and can buffer I mean it's really nice not to starve in famines and states can both trade with other states and also maybe even internally sort of you know transfer from an area that is having an immediate problem to an area from an area that's not having problems to an area that's having an immediate problem so I have a little bit of sympathy for sort of the large governance and the democratic not always realized mostly not realized of states I'm curious if you have a kind of a different governance model in mind or you think the democratic state really could go places well I guess I'll just yeah I tend toward anarchism I have to say but by that I mean self-organizing so I'm starting to explore I agree with you of course you know and I do all I can to protect the democracy and the democratic spaces that we have especially as I see authoritarian governments and authoritarian parties growing everywhere yeah of course and yet at the same time I do think that you know I talked about bioregions or biomes being bases for sustainable if I can use that word for or even regenerative I like that word better regenerative ways of living together and with the land I'll say just briefly it's the next step I would take or try to take is to say we need to model ourselves on nature itself in our governance systems when I referred to the EU that's a principle of subsidiarity that they took from the Catholic church I mean nobody's wrong about everything right so you know there are some principles like this idea of doing everything at the smallest possible scale and then coordinating in a nested and overlapping way I think that's if we need to be able to envision something like what we want and then do some back casting we're here so what do we do about states now in order to get where we want otherwise without the where we want to go is no guidance at all it almost doesn't matter what we do you know what I mean it's like or this principle that principle but they don't hang together and they don't necessarily get us anywhere we can envision and we get very defensive we have to defend democracy what we do but we have to defend it in order to well to live as freely as possible but recognizing lots of people don't have it and what are we going to do you know how are we going to rethink all of this relive and act all of this in a collaborative and respectful way that is beyond humanity that is the humanist project can only be realized at the point where it's superseded we can realize our unity as a species by relating well to all other species and to waterways so if we model ourselves for instance on water hydrological cycle is my favorite thing to explore right now if we model ourselves on hydrological cycle it's and David Harvey has something like this in his latest book but he doesn't he says capital does this capital works like water or like the hydrological cycle I'm saying maybe but we also need to think in a deeper way about the hydrological cycle the rain does the water in the streams it flows into the oceans it goes back up into the sky all of that is a unified thing that has very specific form at every place right and at every moment so it's in it's in process it's a cycle it's flowing if we don't interrupt it or even if we do manage it somehow that's why we're alive so if we try to think about governance something like that that we are we can self-govern in ways that are appropriate to scale and that can be discovered in practice through making mistakes and then backtracking so it has to be a much more humble thing and that I guess that's what kind of set me off about John Milley Foster's idea of rational planning for collaborative relationships I don't think it's about rationality mainly it includes that I don't think it's about planning mainly I think it's about relationship which is more about emotion and connection and it's about discovery you know a practice or a praxis of discovery that has to operate at every scale and if people do it everywhere and then we can and it's already happening like we're networked all these places you know we're talking right now over the internet yeah I don't, does that make enough sense yes I think that was a clear answer I guess I would lean towards more sociality in the I mean you said relationships I would lean towards more sociality in decision making I like very much what you said about discovery I think that has a lot going for it I don't know about the water metaphor because I worry about metaphors and water is not a very social thing I mean I guess I think it's really in the human in the social well I think water is a social thing we just don't look at it that way like everybody who lives on the Great Lakes and with the Great Lakes and with the problems of the Great Lakes and with the possible amelioration of those problems and even regeneration of the liveliness of those lakes and all of the land masses and all the people on them that it supports you know it's you know I think we have to start thinking that way but I'm open I don't want to divide, I'm with Jason Moore I don't want to divide the social from it it's so hard not to it's what's his name the French guy talked about the constitution the modern constitution the separation of the natural from the social sciences you know what I mean we've never been modern thanks well that was we're out of time like to thank Harriet for a fascinating talk that was really terrific and I'm sure we'll be generating a lots of other thoughts about all this material you know we'll send you the link and if anybody has any additional questions I mean I could talk about this all day but it was you lived up to what I thought you would do I knew it would be inviting you would result in a fascinating talk and it did so I only regret we couldn't have you in person me too maybe another time Bruno Latour is the one I was thinking about and I can't believe that this is going to go on YouTube with all the things I said in the lapses and all of that but never mind it's all part of it it's discovery humility alright well thank you so much Harriet thank you I've enjoyed it and thank you for your good questions and comments alright well thanks everybody yeah I myself think we need to solve capitalism before we solve any of these other problems