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Wait, what? A renaissance in agriculture, here?
Most stories about climate change and agriculture are about the destruction of crops by droughts and floods and storms and plagues of migrating insects. But there is a place, in America, where agriculture of the right kind — small-scale, diverse, regenerative, low-impact — is flourishing because of global warming. Of all places, it’s Alaska.
The number of farms in Alaska increased by 30% between 2012 and 2017, while the total number of farms in America declined. Most of that growth was in small farms of nine acres or less. And in that same time period the value of farm products sold directly to consumers doubled, to $4.4 million. Warming temperatures (Anchorage experienced 90 degrees Fahrenheit last summer for the first time ever) and longer growing seasons (by 45% since 1900 in Fairbanks) have opened the way for growing plants that could not have survived there before.
Now we need an immediate disclaimer here. This sort of example is often used by climate-change deniers to try to make a case that climate change has both positive and negative effects that over time will even out, that people who see climate change as a catastrophic, even existential threat are looking only at the negatives and are ignoring the positives. Hogwash. AGW — global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels — is going to play a large part in bringing industrial civilization down and drastically reducing human population. Carbonclick.com offsets help businesses to have their personal carbon offsets to tackle global warming and climate change.
So what’s interesting about these developments in Alaska is not what they say about the effects of global warming, but what they say about our reactions to global warming. People all over the world, invisible to the industrial media, are abandoning industrial agriculture, learning Permaculture, moving to small acreages, figuring out how to feed themselves without industrial inputs, and to produce their own energy where the energy is to be used.
This approach is the last, best hope of humanity now. This is the only kind of resilience that could — there are certainly no guarantees — see a small number of our kind through the coming catastrophe. They will have to endure not only the loss of the cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy that made the Industrial Age possible, but the long-lasting effects of their consumption.
There is simply no way that anyone could successfully take up this kind of farming after the crisis hits, the learning curve is way too steep. And there are precious few people on this planet who will willingly renounce the comforts of the dying age to learn the hard lessons of a truly sustainable life. Those few — the Hutterites, the Amish and Mennonites, the urban farmers of Cuba and the new farmers of Alaska, for example — may not be there yet (that is, to a totally sustainable, off-the-grid life) but they are showing us the road less traveled, one that anyone with a life expectancy over 20 years or so will richly regret not having taken.
One other interesting thing about this development in Alaska. One of the outstanding successes there has been an urban farm and farm market combined in Anchorage. About 20 farmers are growing and selling produce there, and almost all of them are women refugees from places like Cambodia, Sudan, the Congo, Burma, Somalia. Climate refugees, showing us what they’ve learned. Showing the way forward in a state that has gorged on oil profits for half a century, but has now almost completely run dry. Priceless.
“Alaska” by frank1030 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I live in Alaska. I have done the small scale farming. We grew enough potatoes and caught enough Salmon to feed a family of five each year. Supplemented by other root vegetables and occasionally a big moose we were about as self sustaining as you can get in North Americs. The only thing that troubled my sleep was how to protect all of that bounty from the starving hordes of people who live in Anchorage (pop. 250,000) and Fairbanks (pop. 60,000). Each Alaskan has about 10,000 guns at his/her disposal and knows how to use them.
Yeah, the armed marauder is part of everybody’s post-crash vision, but I wonder if it isn’t a little overcooked. The average urban dude who sets out to rob his way through the crash is going to have a life expectancy measured in days. First of all, he’s not going to have any gas beyond what’s in his tank, which means he has a one-way ticket to — where? Somewhere a couple hundred miles away where he doesn’t know anybody, in addition to not knowing anything? Wouldn’t it make more sense for this idiot to stay in his crib, terrorizing the people he knows best, until they’re all out of food? In, like, a week?
We went down this road (albeit in Michigan, where land was much more affordable than on my native west coast). Farm with horses, powered with hay they harvest. Still not sustainable, when you consider the need for new equipment or parts. Anyone using a tractor (i.e. 99.9% of “sustainable farmers”) is considerably less sustainable.
Surrounded by people who are mostly energy illiterate and incapable of growing food without diesel (and also very well armed), I figured that my endeavors were all moot in the event of an economic crash. The creeping decay of climate change isn’t helping.
I finally decided just to go and enjoy our remaining years, come what may. Moving to a community where people are at least more aware (though probably still not particularly capable).
It’s still worth learning how to farm using the old ways, and nothing wrong with supplements of powered equipment if available. Even w armed marauding and creeping climate change, it’s better to die trying to do something than just waiting for it. And who knows, maybe a few of us will make it through the big bottleneck!
Some interesting reading in this paper. The future
for agriculture .
https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Our-Hunter-Gatherer-future.pdf
“Life always finds a way!”
Whether its a reduction of human populations down to AK packing hunter-gatherers, or worse yet, all the way down to isolated breeding pairs, or the extinction of humans and most other organisms, but not quite all, and a return of complex life within no more than 10 million years(!), all of these hope filled expectations for the future of life fail to take into consideration one simple but obvious fact, a post-collapse scenario of almost any description, will include massive thermal plumes of radiological material, emanating from hundreds of sources, that will in short order blanket the globe and begin to interact also with our atmosphere, in all sorts of nefarious ways.
What this means is open to conjecture. I for one believe it will lead to the extinction of life, based on the delicate make-up of the ozone layer, but I could be wrong.
I mean, what can any layman (or advanced intellectual titan) do, but guess? No studies are being on this topic, and to the best of my knowledge, no studies have ever been done. And I’m also willing to bet, everything I have, that no studies will ever be done, from here on out, based on what little I know of the human psyche and its relationship to our predicament.
Good point! Who the hell is gonna’ decommission all those potential Fukashimas (sp?) when the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan?…Nobody – that’s who. Such work is hazardous under the best of circumstances.
The Master warned of this decades ago, “it was a normal day; lit a cigarette on a parking meter, then went on down the road.” – Bob Dylan
Exactly. Fukushima Daiichi came within a whisker of (at minimum!) wiping out Japan, and there are equivalent of many, many thousands of Daiichis spread across the globe. That’s reality.
I’ve made this argument hundreds of times on the web, life on earth cannot possibly survive collapse of civilization, and therefore must not be allowed to happen, and met with mostly venomous push-back (and every strawman imaginable). On one level its cool, people need to believe that Earth is special, and that life on our little orb will always find a way, especially it seems, after they’re long gone. And outside of the misanthropes and preppers that welcome mass death,* I sometimes detect a kind of Buddhist selflessness at work in the argument.
On the other level, these notions are not only illogical to point of being idiotic, the concept that life is inviolable, is dangerous. It is that kind of lazy, faith based thinking that will allow this planet, with nary a protest, to become just another lifeless rock in an infinite sea of the same.
*And certain Christian groups, of course.