More Collapse Speculation

From Ran Prieur

November 30. Continuing on the future of food, I'm reading Carol Deppe's new book, The Resilient Gardener. Everyone who grows food has to read this. Deppe has deep experience and understanding, and I'm in awe of her skill as a writer. The book is extremely dense, with new and useful information in almost every sentence, and yet somehow it takes no effort to read it.

Also, she writes about lots of stuff beyond how to grow food, and in the chapter on climate change she describes the Little Ice Age in Europe. Basically everyone was growing grain, which needs stable and warm weather, and the population was stretching the best-case carrying capacity of the land. Then suddenly the climate shifted. In the Great Famine of 1315-1317, extreme rains ruined grain crops for three straight years. But the population didn't just starve down and bounce back -- the whole culture became nastier, there were more wars and murders and disease epidemics, and people lost faith in the ruling systems. The weather remained cold and erratic for centuries, and didn't warm and stabilize until the industrial age (probably because of greenhouse gases).

Meanwhile, farmers made all kinds of innovations: more diversity, more vegetables, root crops, animals, legumes, and perennials, a broader range of useful skills, and wider trading. In episode 6 of Connections, "Thunder in the Skies" (video link), James Burke argues that many other technological events began with the Little Ice Age.

This is my new favorite model for our own collapse. Our agriculture is based on genetically-modified monocultures, which are not really more productive, only better adapted to a stable climate and massive industrial inputs. As these conditions change, there will be food shortages and all the bad things that follow them. There will be deep shocks and partial recoveries, life will get rougher and more chaotic, and yet many of the existing domination systems will survive and become more brutal. At the same time, there will be more cracks, more room to try different things, and many innovations. Over hundreds of years, these will lead to a new civilization that we can't imagine.