Crop Stealers

Sunday August 19th 2035

Have been busy making tomato chutney, which I like with cider vinegar but that is hard to get hold of. My nephew Alun over near Aberdan planted an orchard of apple trees a dozen years ago, and they are starting to crop well now, so I will ask him if he can spare me some for a batch of cider vinegar. I can give him broad beans in return, definitely my favourite vegetable, and a legume too, good for the soil. Even small children now learn that legumes and soil bacteria called rhizobia have a symbiotic relationship – within nodules on the roots, the rhizobia convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into nitrogen available for plant nutrition. Twenty years ago the public didn’t think about soil fertility that much. Manufactured fertilisers were still affordable, just about, but we need to grow differently now, and it demands much more skill. I am not sufficiently skilful. We have just enough food to survive. I always over-plant because you never know what will grow and what will be destroyed, by weather that has forgotten seasonal good behaviour, and by our competitors like slugs. Crops are stolen, too, have been for the past five years or so. Lyn and Sian down the lane give meals to a rota of village children in return for crop watching. Even five years ago we still used security cameras but the electricity supply became less and less reliable and also more expensive. We had a camera powered by rechargeable lithium batteries but when they eventually gave out we didn’t replace them because we have more urgent uses for our scarce electricity. Maybe I’ll try a solar-powered camera, but it’s bound to be intermittent.

There was talk of a village hydro-electric plant, powered from the Crychydd river, but it dries up every summer now. It would be OK in winter, perhaps we could resurrect the plan, but people are so tired. I wonder how many of today’s children will live as long as me? I was born just before the foundation of the old National Health Service, but that’s all been privatised and you only receive treatment if you have the money to pay, or have the luck to be accepted as a charity case. Here in Wales there is a long tradition of self-medication, just think of the Physicians of Myddfai, and the Herbalists of Cwrt y Cadno, and yes I do grow herbs with medicinal value, but as an amateur. Evening primroses and great mullein would take over the garden if I Iet them, above a carpet of wild strawberries. I make mullein tea for coughs and evening primrose oil for dry skin and eczema. Looking back as I can to the 1960s I wonder at the optimism then, at the confidence of eternal progress. I’ve still got some tomes from university days, one of which is Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth[1]…. I’ve just fetched it from the walnut Regency bookcase that grandad Henry gave me when I was about seven. (Stupidly I took off and lost its glass door, because I didn’t want the books hidden behind it.) There are 1,194 pages in this 1956 volume, published by University of Chicago Press. Chapters include ‘Possible limits of raw-material consumption’ and ‘Limitations to energy use’.   I have turned to ‘Limitations to energy use’, by Charles A Scarlott, who was enthusiastic about nuclear power, about “the possibility that the nuclear-fusion reaction can be made a controlled energy source. The amounts of energy such a reaction would make possible are almost incomprehensible”.  Mr Scarlott, then a technical information manager in the public relations department at Stanford Research Institute in California, admitted some concerns – “The facts about our energy resources are sobering. The rapidity with which we are finding ways of spending that energy, often without realizing it, is shocking” – but was not worried because of his “infinite confidence, supported by a long record of the past, that man’s ingenuity is equal to the task”. In terms of techniques of exploiting energy sources, that may have been true, but he did not even mention climate change.

The preceding chapter, ‘Possible limits of raw-material consumption’ by Samuel H Ordway Jr, a leading conservationist in the mid 20^th century, was more cautious. Mr Ordway wrote that if industries carry on expanding, there would come “an enforced, unexpected reversal of a faith”. He advised using the next 60 years – 1956 to 2016 – “to face up to the problem of how to save prosperity”. He thought that in an increasingly prosperous society, people would work less and have more time to devote to saving civilisation, but that did not happen on anything like the scale required. Instead of spreading prosperity, the big bosses kept more and more for themselves and kept wages too low for the nose-to-grindstone masses to have time to save the world.

“If men recognize today the danger ahead from continuing overconsumption of resources and basic lack of human sympathy with nature, they will seek remedies”, wrote Mr Ordway (it was all men, men, men in those days). By and large men did not seek remedies with anything like the urgency required. So Mr Scarlott was over-confident in the power of technology, and Mr Ordway was over-confident about the capacity of people to act in the long-term interests of the planet and therefore of themselves too. 

Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth reflects male and predominately American culture. Only one of over 70 authors was a woman, Dr Edavaleth K Janaki Ammal, from India, writing about subsistence agriculture in the recently independent former British colony. In the middle of the 20^th century women’s voices became louder. I think of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Vandana Shiva’s campaigns for seed sovereignty and regenerative farming, Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric decision making in and between communities, Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics – keep inside the doughnut for sustainability and avoid the dangerous black space of excess growth – and of course the climate activist Greta Thunberg. They are all from ‘democracies’ which no matter how flawed allow greater freedom of expression and dissent than in autocratic states with tight central control.

It’s true that autocratic states were in the ascendant until the exorbitant costs of climate breakdown led to the fraying of control systems, first at the margins then accelerating towards the centres. Technologies of control still exist, but it’s too costly to have them everywhere.

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[1] Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, edited by William L Thomas Jr, University of Chicago Press, 1956. Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation.

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