Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: A (Very) Brief Review

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is wildly popular by the standards of nonfiction books. Probably because it fully reinforces the ideologies of ruthless competition and "might makes right" at the core of modern capitalism, giving readers a comfortable sense of erudition in thinking about weighty matters, but without actually challenging them at all.

Harari is so entrenched in a domination mindset that I couldn't make it past 20 pages, especially since it's mostly a broad overview of stuff with which I'm already familiar. Not worth the frustration. During those 20 pages (17 pages worth of actual text), I had probably 3 dozen moments of "wait, what?" in response to captions like "Map 1. Homo sapiens conquers the globe." and epitomized by this passage:

Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It's hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can't win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll. Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps, and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling.

Ugh.

The book is suffused with this attitude, and I don't believe Harari is even aware that he has this set of assumptions which affect how he interprets and synthesizes everything. He's not making a case for pure competition and domination as the driver of evolution vs some combination of competition & cooperation; he just takes it for granted and presents these beliefs as a given.

As I was giving up on the book and flipping through it, the book fell open to "Afterword: The Animal that Became a God." I'm guessing he doesn't mean bacteria or plants or fungi or earthworms or the others fundamental to creation, who make life possible for countless other species.

For those who do read this, I recommend balancing it with Derrick Jensen's The Myth of Human Supremacy for a much-needed perspective on the role of cooperation in the grand scheme of human and non-human life.

Book review: Every Living Thing by Rob Dunn

I discovered Rob Dunn while researching the Stop Fossil Fuels biological annihilation page. I greatly enjoyed his article on the perhaps foolhardy attempt to estimate the number of global species. His humorous yet informative approach convinced me to read Every Living Thing. The subtitle—Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys—only superficially summarizes the scope.

The book does indeed portray the work—and, frequently, in laugh-out-loud moments, the quirks—of scientists from Carl Linnaeus to Carl Sagan, with dozens in between. (Including, disproportionately, at least three more "Carls.") But the underlying theme is awe of and love for biological life, in all its frequently unbelievable, unimaginable, and incomprehensible richness.

Dunn zooms from the mostly visible...

There are more species that live with ants; more species in this one obscure relationship than there are bird species. There are hundreds of lifestyles, as strange or stranger than living with ants, that are more common than being a bird, hundreds that are more common than being a vertebrate, for that matter. [...] There are tens of thousands of species of beetles, silverfish, mites, and other invertebrates, not to mention microbes and the occasional ant-following snake that lives with, and only with, ants.

[...]

What Carl and Marian [Rettenmeyer] have discovered, in their years of studying army ants, is not some “big new world of life.” They did not discover microbes or a new kingdom. What they did discover was the intimacy of the interactions of one group of species, the army ants, with others. They discovered these intricate possibilities in the slow way that the morning sun discovers leaves and birds and then finally the forest floor and its interstices.

...to the tiny...

Leeuwenhoek did not know it yet, but this would be the first of hundreds of microscopes he would build and the first of thousands of days he spent looking through them. At night, he would go to sleep seeing microscopic creatures on the backs of his eyelids. He would dream of fleas, ants, and smaller things. His lenses, combined with his abilities to observe and to experiment, were about to open up an entire world of life.

[...]

All along, the biological story had seemed to be about humans, but Leeuwenhoek would show that we were enormous and oversized—the Big Gulps of life. Linnaeus would much later show that there were more big species than had been imagined. But it was Leeuwenhoek who showed that most life was many times smaller than us.

...and ranges more than a mile below the ocean surface, to the deep sea floor in the aftermath of the eruption of a submarine volcano...

As the [submersible] Alvin rounded the hill, the tube worms, crabs, and other life seen in the photos of the site were gone. In their place was a blizzard of white forms, a blizzard, somehow, like the Milky Way. As far into the distance as they could see, the sea was speckled white and the specks were being blasted up in the moving water. [...] [T]he white flocs of the deep sea were produced by bacteria. The blizzard was, in fact, a ninety-foot-tall cloud of bacteria and bacteria excretions. This flowering of life and its products had come out of the cracks and caves in the crust of the Earth through which the magma moved as it had escaped. Life had been coughed in a dense cloud out of the realm of the world once thought lifeless.

...and to outer space. This segment interested me the least, especially phrased as it is with the question (no less insane in its commonness) of "Are humans alone in the universe? Are we the only intelligent life?" This anthropocentrism in a book otherwise enamored with the beings all around us is an ironic, painful juxtaposition. Similarly, some passages are difficult to read as they blithely describe torturous or murderous experiments on living beings, e.g. Terry Erwin's "canopy fogging," a euphemism for applying pesticides to massive tropical trees to wholesale kill and collect tens of thousands of insects. [Part II is, perhaps intentionally, appropriately named for what this culture is doing to the world—"Fogging (The Tree of Life)."]

But besides those occasional glimpses into the sociopathology of the strains of science funded within capitalism, the book is a pleasure to read. I recommend it for anyone biophilic or simply curious about the diverse species with whom we share the earth. Even for those without such interest, the book offers a fascinating dose of humility, an antidote to the ingrained misconception that humans have more-or-less mastered knowledge and control of the planet. We really only know just enough to be dangerous.

---

On a personal note, this gem may have the longest lasting impact on the story of my own life, as a strong contender for my gravestone epitaph: "Imagine how much less he would have done had he brushed his hair more often."

---

Table of Contents

Part I: Beginnings

1. What we All Used to Know
2. Common Names
3. The Invisible World

   Part II: Fogging (The Tree of Life)

4. The Apostles
5. Finding Everything
6. Finding an Ant-Riding Beetle

   Part III: Roots

7. Diving the Cell
8. Grafting the Tree of Life
9. Symbiotic Cells on the Seafloor
10. Origin Stories

    Part IV: Other Worlds

11. Looking Out
12. To Squeeze Life from a Stone
13. The Wrong Elephant?
14. What Remains

---

Rob Dunn has several other titles which promise a similar mix of interesting topics and enjoyable writing:

• Never home alone: from microbes to millipedes, camel crickets, and honeybees, the natural history of where we live
• Never out of season: how having the food we want when we want it threatens our food supply and our future
• The man who touched his own heart: true tales of science, surgery, and mystery
• The wild life of our bodies: predators, parasites, and partners that shape who we are today

How many cats to catch 100 rats? Not what you think.

Anthony Doerr's World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See poses the following question in the notebook of Werner Pfennig, a mathematically gifted German boy. Take a couple of minutes to answer the riddle, then expand to read my take.

If five cats catch five rats in five minutes, how many cats are required to catch 100 rats in 100 minutes?

My intuition initially jumped to an answer of "one hundred cats." It feels like a simple scaling: 5 x 5 x 5 to 100 x 100 x 100.

My next instinct was that the answer couldn't be that easy, or there'd be no reason to pose the question. So I applied logical analysis and mathematics to yield an answer of "five cats." Most answers to similar questions on internet sites take the same approach.

However, this conjecture is only accurate if the cats are killing machines, malevolent cousins of the Energizer Bunny, methodically catching rat after rat until their batteries run down. But real cats are individuals with motivations and needs and desires.

So, why do these hypothetical cats want to catch rats?

Cats often stalk and play with mice for practice or for fun, but rats are significantly larger than mice, relatively dangerous prey armed with sharp teeth and claws. Cats usually only take risks with rats in hopes of a substantial meal. In my experience with a sample size of one rat hunter (hi Pookie!), a hungry cat can eat an entire rat in one sitting, then might catch a second rat in the same night, to partially eat or stash for later. I'd guess it rare for a cat to risk catching more than two rats in one hundred minutes.

If five cats catch five rats in five minutes, how many cats with wills of their own are required to catch 100 rats in 100 minutes?

Taking into account what I think I know about cats and their motivations, my answer is "about seventy or eighty cats."

* * *

Our culture turns everyone into numbers, manipulated as variables in equations to maximize profit. Trees older than any human, soaring skyward and spreading a vast canopy sheltering countless individuals of hundreds of species, become board feet. Hens, evolved to scratch and eat seeds and insects while gossiping and squabbling and teaching their chicks to forage, become "layers," their worth measured in eggs deposited from battery cages.

Humans evolved to be nurtured by and in turn contribute back to an intimate community. Human communities evolved to be nurtured by and in turn contribute back to their land bases. In such environments, people fully express their personalities, develop their interests and strengths, and build lives of purpose and responsibility and meaning. In contrast, our culture reduces us to taxpayer IDs, statistics and quotas, interchangeable employees of global systems of extraction and exploitation.

In Nazi Germany, the Jewish men, women, and children in cattle cars were the quintessential abstraction of living beings into numbers, forcibly computed into a final solution. In Doerr's book, even Aryan Germans are valued not as individuals, but because "what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt" as war fodder, "this final harvest of the nation's youth rushing out in a last spasm of futility."

Werner Pfennig, trapped within the Nazi war machine, is repeatedly told "It's only numbers, cadet. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way." But as the story unfolds, abstract numbers wielded in the real world impact real people in devastating, even deadly ways.

Our minds are evolved to form and maintain relationships with a few thousand humans and nonhumans, lifelong family and friends and acquaintances. We can only conceive in abstractions of the 7.6 billion humans and trillions of nonhumans with whom we share the earth. We can't possibly feel the reality of 40.3 million human slaves, 6 million annual deaths from fossil fuel pollution and climate change, 2.4 million children dead from malnutrition, half an acre of natural forest lost every second. In a world globally linked by technology, abstractions are often necessary to grapple with the ethical choices of our time.

But we must never forget that there are lives behind the abstractions. It's not only numbers.

Permaculture: Revolution or Lifestylsm?

Covering two of my three blog themes—permaculture and resistance—Boris Forkel writes a piece I wanted to republish here:

Capitalism reaches fulfillment when it sells communism as a commodity. Communism as a commodity spells the end of revolution.

—Byung-Chul Han

I’m a permaculturalist. And I became a permie in the first place because I wanted to break free from this culture.

To me, permaculture was and still is highly political. “Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening” is one of my favorite Bill Mollison quotes.

After all, what freedom can we have without subsistence, without having control over our most basic resources, our own food? “There is no sovereignty without food sovereignty,” said Native American activist John Mohawk.

I’ve been so ardent and naive. I thought that the permaculture-approach is so ingenious that it would become a mass-movement, indeed a quiet and peaceful revolution. It would free us from being dependent on the digital food they sell us in grocery stores nowadays, and from the wage economy at the same time, because we would build small, local food cooperatives that would all be sharing the surplus.

Unfortunately, time and experience shows that it’s not that easy.

One of my permaculture teachers, who taught me the concept of the food forest, often said: “I don’t understand what’s the problem for all these critical people. Nowadays, we have all the freedoms we want.” He also articulated a very strange notion about the future: “Once we have reached the number of 10 billion, human population growth will come to a halt. Thanks to Internet technology, humans will then all be connected and serve as the consciousness of planet earth.” Attendants hung on his lips when he said that, and while everybody else was amazed by this perspective of a golden future, I sat quietly, stunned.

I knew in my heart that he was wrong, but couldn’t articulate a sufficient answer to his statements back then.

It made me angry. How can one say that “we have all the freedoms we want,” while the air we need to breathe is being polluted, the greatest mass extinction in planetary history is happening, the climate is being destroyed, the oceans are vacuumed and filled with toxic garbage? In short: when the most basic functions of our planet to support life are being destroyed?

What about the freedom of having breathable air? What about the freedom of having a livable planet? What about the freedom of having a future?

I’ve given a lot of thought to his statements ever since, because they seem so appealing to many people. The Earth never supported more than 2 billion humans until Fritz Haber and Robert Bosch indeed broke the planetary boundaries with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. Nowadays, we are hopelessly overpopulated. So the number of 10 billion is purely random and nothing but magical thinking. The notion of Internet technology and humans as the consciousness of the planet is nothing more than a new fashion of the good old ideology of humans as the crown of creation. What about nature in this fantasy? With 10 billion (industrial) humans, there will hardly be anything left.

Everybody with a sane mind and a little understanding—especially a permie—should know that the trees, the fungi, the soil, the air, the water, the animals and so on, in short what we call nature, indeed is the consciousness of planet earth. Apparently, the manifest destiny of the technocrats is to eradicate what they perceive as primitive, raw, red in tooth and claw, wild and uncontrollable, and to replace nature with a “better” system of human technology.

Deconstructing that was the easy part. The hard part is his statement about freedom. With all this in mind, the primary question is: what does freedom mean for someone like him?

A friend of mine, who was lucky enough to hear Noam Chomsky speak live, told me that in the discussion after somebody asked the usual question: “What can we do about it?” Chomsky responded that he thinks this is a strange question. People from so-called developing countries would never ask such a question, only westerners, he stated. Apparently, third-world-people still have a clearer sense for suppression and cultures of resistance. “We should rather ask what we can’t do,” Chomsky said.

When I attended a talk by Rainer Mausfeld, of course someone asked the very same question. Mausfeld stated that this question shows how well the soft power techniques he’d been describing work. We can’t even imagine any form of resistance.

For more than a century, the political left’s analysis has been very clear: The suppression and exploitation of the poor (working class) by the rich (owning class), that is the very basis of capitalism, can only be solved by organized class struggle to come from the working class. This concept isn’t hard to understand. It is classic Marxism. But somehow, the ruling class has managed to completely eradicate it from the proletarian minds.

I’ve come across a lot more of what I like to call liberal lifestyle-activists. I understood that most permies chose permaculture not because they want a revolution (like I did), but because they want a more sustainable lifestyle for themselves. They believe that they are free, because they perceive their individualism and their freedom of choice as the greatest freedom, the greatest achievement of modernity. Being part of any group, class or movement is perceived as regressive. The notion of class struggle is so yesterday.

At the same time, they’re usually educated people, and they know that a lot of things are going badly wrong. But as liberals who are taking power out of the equation, and individualists lacking any concept of social group our class, they must take it all on themselves. “It is all of us who are causing the destruction,” they’d say.

As a result, the only thinkable form of political action are personal consumer choices. Buy organic soap and feel better.

A great example of this are vegans. No doubt that factory farming is horrible and has to stop. But as a lifestyle-activist, all you can do about it is to stop consuming meat. In your worldview, the problem can only be solved by everybody stopping eating meat.

For liberal lifestyle-activists, “having all the freedoms we want” can only mean the freedom to consume (or not consume) whatever we want, whenever we want, in any quality and quantity we want. This is the kind of “freedom” with which capitalism has hijacked us. If we can afford it, of course. But within neoliberal capitalist ideology, there is no such thing as a suppressed class. The poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough, or they are simply to stupid to sell themselves well enough.

“Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.”

Byung-Chul Han

For radicals, the question remains: Without the possibility of mass movements, how do we stop the destruction of the planet that is our only home?

For a new generation of serious activists who are tired of all that shit and ready to take action, DGR has the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy.

The limits of gardening as the world burns

If every homeowner in Seattle ripped up their lawn and replaced it with edible plants, the resulting crop production would be enough to feed just one percent of the city’s residents, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington.

Researchers in Seattle performed a rigorous analysis of the potential to grow the city's own food. Their conclusions are very similar to my own, based on our experiments in Portland: if everyone in Portland converted their yards and rooftops and driveways to food production, and planted all the public areas, and did a better job than we did...the city could still only feed half its population.

The Seattle study estimates the city could grow 21% of a balanced diet for the city's inhabitants, assuming conversion of all possible surfaces (permeable and impermeable) to food production. Seattle, like Portland, and like all other cities with dense populations, can never be sustainable.

What are the implications for those of us working towards local food systems? It doesn't mean we shouldn't continue our work. But we shouldn't delude ourselves or others into denying cities' dependence on massive importation of resources, almost always extracted violently from the land, and often from humans. It's good and noble work to establish a community garden, or to convert our lawns to perennial polycultures to support humans and non-humans alike. But these individual actions, even if adopted by everyone, will never add up to the systematic transformation we need. To leverage their impact, this localization must be integrated into a culture of resistance, supporting direct dismantling of the industrial infrastructure wreaking large-scale havoc.

It's enjoyable and satisfying, but it's not a real solution to just putter around in our backyards while the world burns. We have to think about, and get involved with, the big picture.

Read the full article about the study: This is why cities can't grow all their own food

The article has also sparked a discussion between myself and another person on Reddit, with more of my thoughts on cities, sustainability, the value of individual action, and more

Integral Permaculture presentation on "Food Freedom"

Integral Permaculture, a radical permaculture group, put together "Food Freedom: an Integral Perspective", a talk for International PermaCulture Day. They cover:

• The food freedom of other species
• The food that most liberates our environment
• Food that liberates the human mind and body
• How not to be enslaved to addictions
• How to free our meals & economies from the Multinationals

Watch the recording of Part 1, and the upcoming Part 2 on Sunday May 11th, at Integral Permaculture Food Freedom.

Demand Crash! — A response to Holmgren's "Crash on Demand"

The situation in many third world countries could actually improve because of the global economic collapse. First world countries would no longer enforce crushing debt repayment and structural adjustment programs, nor would CIA goons be able to prop up “friendly” dictatorships. The decline of export-based economies would have serious consequences, yes, but it would also allow land now used for cash crops to return to subsistence farms.
–from the Deep Green Resistance Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy

Introduction

David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, has a long history of thoughtful and thought-provoking publications, including design books from the original Permaculture One to his 2002 Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. He's written numerous essays over 35 years, ranging from the specifics of agricultural vs forestry biomass for fuel, to the future of energy decline.

I've long admired and respected Holmgren's thinking, so I looked forward to reading his new "Crash on Demand" (PDF), an update of his 2007 "Future Scenarios" projections for global developments. I felt especially intrigued that he's arrived at conclusions similar to my own, regarding not just the inevitability, but the desirability of a crash of the financial system as soon as possible. But the article disappointed me; I think Holmgren is soft-selling his realizations to make them palatable to a hoped-for mass movement. Interestingly, even this soft-sell is being rejected by the permaculture blogging community.

Holmgren argues:

"For many decades I have felt that a collapse of the global economic system might save humanity and many of our fellow species great suffering by happening sooner rather than later because the stakes keep rising and scale of the impacts are always worse by being postponed." (p 9)

"It seems obvious to me that it is easier to convince a minority that they will be better off disengaging from the system than any efforts to build mass movements demanding impossible outcomes or convincing elites to turn off the system that is currently keeping them in power." (p 14)

"Mass movements to get governments to institute change have been losing efficacy for decades, while a mass movement calling for less seems like a hopeless case. Similarly boycotts of particular goverments, companies and products simply change the consumption problems into new forms." (p 22)

Holmgren proposes a possible solution:

"Given the current fragilities of global finance, I believe a radical change in the behaviour of a relatively small proportion of the global middle class could precipitate such a crash. For example a 50% reduction of consumption and 50% conversion of assets into building household and local community resilience by say 10% of the population in affluent countries would show up as 5% reduction in demand in a system built on perpetual growth and a 5% reduction in savings capital available for banks to lend." (p 13)

Where I agree

Holmgren couches his proposal almost rhetorically, apologetically, as if proactively halting the ecocidal system is crazy talk. He need not be so shy about advocating for collapsing the system! It follows very logically if you agree that:

1. Industrial civilization is degrading our landbases every day it continues, far faster than we're healing them
2. Industrial civilization will collapse sooner or later regardless of what we do
3. Industrial civilization will not divert its resources into healing our landbases before it collapses

The facts back up Holmgren's assessment of our dire situation, including imminent climate catastrophe if we continue with anything like business as usual. Industrial civilization is driving 200 species extinct each day and threatening humans with extinction or at best a very miserable future on a burning planet. It is deforesting, desertifying, polluting, and acidifying forests, croplands, landbases, and oceans orders of magnitude faster than nature and all the hard-working permacultarists can heal the damage. The industrial economy consists of turning living ecosystems into dead commodities, and it won't stop voluntarily. It's headed for an endgame of total planetary destruction before itself collapsing.

So I fully agree with crashing the system as soon as possible, and I fully agree with getting as many people as possible to withdraw their dependence on and allegience to the systems and structures of industrial civilization. We desperately need people preparing for crash and building resiliency, in human and in broader ecological communities.

Where I disagree

We also need a viable strategy to stop the dominant culture in its tracks. We are, and will remain, a tiny minority fighting a system of massive power. Individual lifestyle changes do not affect the larger political systems. People "dropping out" is not enough, is not a solution, is not an effective, leveraged way to crash the system.

I worry about Holmgren's speculative numbers. I assume the elite, who control a hugely disproportionate percentage of income and wealth, will be even harder to convince of voluntary simplicity than the average citizen. The poor generally don't have the option to cut spending by 50%, and have few or no assets to divest from global corporate investments. My rough calculations (based on data here) suggest that in the US, 15% of earners between the 40th and 80th percentile (more or less the middle class) must adopt this economic boycott to slow consumption by 5%, and nearly 50% of the middle class must divest their savings to reduce nationwide investment in the global financial system by 5%.

Even hoping for just 15% of the US middle class, 18 million people would have to embrace substantial short-term sacrifice. (While decreasing consumption 50% and building gardens and other resiliency infrastructure, people must still work the same hours at their jobs. Otherwise they'll simply be replaced by those who want to live the consumptive dream.) This lofty goal seems inconsistent with Holmgren's recognition of the infeasibility of a mass movement.

History throws up more red flags. Again and again, when growth economies have encountered sustainable cultures, people from the growth economies have forced the others off their land, requiring them to integrate into the cash economy. The dominant culture will not gently relinquish access to resources or to consumer markets. It will retaliate with weapons honed over centuries, from taxes and outlawing sustainability to displacement and blatant conquest. On a less dramatic scale, banks can, if divestments sufficiently diminish the cash they've been hoarding for years, adjust fractional reserve rates to compensate. (Though precipitating a fast "run" on the banks could work very nicely to crash the financial system and wipe out faith in fiat money.)

Permaculture activists and thousands of other individuals and groups have for years urged people to consume less. Many good people have adopted voluntary simplicity, dropped out of the global economy, and built regenerative local systems. While this has immense value for the adopting individuals, and often ripples out to benefit the wider community, it hasn't put a dent in the destruction by the larger financial system. New people are born or assimilated into the culture of consumption faster than people are dropping out.

Holmgren advocates more of the same permaculture activism, with little explanation of why it would now convince people in numbers thousands of times greater than in the past. He hopes the ever-more-obvious signs of imminent collapse will prompt a more rapid shift, but given our fleeting window of opportunity to act, we can't bank on that hope.

Another Approach

Deep Green Resistance is a design book of what makes a good resistance movement, a permaculture analysis of influencing power and political systems.¹ It arrives at the same conclusion as does Holmgren: we need to prepare for crash by building local resiliency, but the sooner industrial civilization comes down, the better. Its crash will leave the majority of humans better off short-term, as their landbases will no longer be plundered by the rich for resources. Crashing the sytem now will benefit all humans long-term, giving future generations better odds of enjoying liveable landbases on a liveable planet. And crashing the system now will obviously benefit the vast majority of non-humans, currently being poisoned, displaced, and exterminated.

If we truly hold as our goals halting ecocide and slashing greenhouse gas emissions as dramatically as Holmgren suggests, we must devise a realistic plan, based on a realistic assessment of our numbers and strengths, the vulnerabilities of industrial civilization, and how much longer the planet can absorb its blows. Recognizing our tiny numbers and relative weakness compared to the global system, and limited time before our planet is beaten into full ecosystem collapse, we must apply the permaculture principle of making the least change to achieve maximum effect.

The Deep Green Resistance book, as part of its strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare, examines more than a dozen historic and contemporary militant resistance movements. It concludes that "a small group of intelligent, dedicated, and daring people can be extremely effective, even if they only number one in 1,000, or one in 10,000, or even one in 100,000. But they are effective in large part through an ability to mobilize larger forces, whether those forces are social movements [...] or industrial bottlenecks."

Holmgren notes that it's easier to convince a minority to disengage from the system than to spark a majority mass movement for true sustainability, but his plan relies on 10% of the population making dramatic change. DGR's analysis suggests it's easier yet to convince a tiny minority to take strategic direct action. The rest of the sympathetic population, whether 10% or just 1% of the general public, can provide material support and loyalty with much less immediate sacrifice than in Holmgren's proposal.

The Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND), with small numbers of people and meager resources, has used militant tactics against oil companies to routinely reduce oil output in Nigeria by 10-30%.

In April 2013, saboteurs in San Jose CA shot out transformers in an electrical substation, causing damage that took weeks to repair. The New York Times explains some of the difficulties involved in replacing transformers, especially if many were to fail in a short period of time.

We have more promising strategies available than hoping we can persuade 10% of the population to adopt voluntary simplicity, and hoping that will crash the financial system.

Conclusion

While I wholeheartedly agree with Holmgren's analysis of our global predictament, and the desirability of crashing the system, his proposal for doing so seems ineffective. Certainly, we should work to disengage ourselves and neighbors from the global system, but we must combine building alternative structures with actively resisting and strategically sabotaging the dominant system.

Many people will disagree with the necessity of crashing the system, because they don't think conditions are that bad, because they hold vague hopes that God or technology or permaculture will save us, because they fear that fighting back will increase the anger of our abusers, or because they value their own comfort more than the life of the planet. That's fine; we can agree to disagree, though I encourage those people to further explore these ideas with their minds and with their hearts.

Many people do see the destructiveness of this culture, the inevitability of its crash, and the desirability of it crashing sooner than later; but won't want to participate directly in bringing it down for any of many perfectly legimitate reasons. That's fine, too. There's lots of work to do, and a role for everyone. You can work on restoration of your landbase or crash preparation for your community while providing material and ideological support to those on the front lines. We can join together as "terra-ists", with our hands not just in the soil as Holmgren defines the term, but also working with wrenches upon the wheels, the levers, and all the apparatus of industrial civilization.

Suggested Resources

• Endgame by Derrick Jensen, two volume analysis of the problems of civilization and the solution. Several excerpts available at the website.
• Deep Green Resistance - a book, an organization, and a strategy to save the planet
• Liberal vs Radical video presentation by Lierre Keith, explaining the different approaches of these two different frameworks for perceiving the world.
• For my readers in Portland, check out the DGR Lower Columbia chapter, and consider helping with their riparian habitat restoration on the Washougal River this Sunday, January 26th.

[1] Thanks to Stella Strega of Integral Permaculture for this observation

*** This article was reposted at Deep Green Resistance Great Basin and the Deep Green Resistance News Service

From Subsistence to Resistance

I cried today. Not once, not twice. Maybe I cried eight times. I'm not even sure how to separate one cry from the next, when my heart carries sadness and anger in waves from peak to ebb, ebb to peak.

The exact number doesn't matter.

I'm not used to crying. As a male, socialized into masculinity, I learned to suppress grief and most other strong emotions at an early age. I remember the last time I cried in front of my mother, at perhaps 12 or 13 years old. I don't remember why I cried, but I do remember (and this is why I remember) my guilt and shame around breaking down in such a way, mixed into my sadness and into the comfort I received from her. I haven't cried much since then.

I can give an easy proximate cause for today's release: two heart-wrenching movies. But I need to explore some background for it to really make sense.

 

Portland

Many of you already know about my years living in Portland, where, after an initial period of frustrating and ineffective involvement in national and local politics, my then-partner and I embarked on a path of "disconnecting from civilization." We aimed to develop the practical skills necessary to eventually move to land, create a "tribe" of close-knit community members, and establish self-sufficient subsistence via homesteading and hunting & gathering. I learned how to integrate some of my "waste" products of humanure, greywater, and kitchen scraps into my food system. I learned enough basic construction to build simple shelters. I planted food forests and a perennial vegetable garden to learn how to feed myself efficiently while creating wildlife habitat and sequestering carbon. I learned about those other cohabitants of our landbase, and even learned to listen to them in my attempts to understand the non-civilized world. I played with "rewilding" crafts skills. I talked with three successive groups of potential tribe-mates, and learned some of the difficulties of communication, of connection, of finding shared purpose, of resolving conflict.

At the same time, I engaged with the larger community, trying to share what I was learning and inspire others to disconnect, in part or whole, from the destructive systems of industrial civilization. I offered free tours and presentations and classes, blogged more (or less!) frequently to document my experiments and findings, and provided edible and useful plants and seeds at low cost. I was something of a "food activist", specializing in advocacy of perennial polycultures.

And at the same time, I knew it wasn't enough: neither my own personal withdrawal, nor sharing my skills and encouraging others to move towards true sustainability. I couldn't escape the reality and the challenge presented most eloquently by Derrick Jensen: the culture of civilization is insane and intent on destroying everything on this planet, and it will not voluntarily stop. Withdrawal and teaching are both legitimate responses to the threats of social, economic, and environmental instability, but are inadequate without forming a serious resistance movement to halt civilization.

Although I knew at some point I would need to take part in some form of resistance, I tucked that goal away. I rationalized that I needed to focus on getting myself and a tribe into a stable position on land of our own before I could put energy into addressing the big picture, long-term struggle.

 

Hawaii

After years of preparing to jump from city to rural living, I finally moved to Hawaii last August. But not only had our third hope at pulling together a like-minded community dissolved, but I had broken up with my partner of all those years. I did have a new girlfriend, an acquaintance and then friend of several years, but we were new to each other as romantic partners.

We moved here with the idea of buying land in 6-12 months, developing a homestead, and building a community, which I assumed would keep me busy for several years. I had vague visions of sharing my knowledge and skills as in Portland, but not until I'd learned enough about this new tropical environment to have something worth sharing. I imagined us creating low-tech, truly sustainable lifestyles (or rather, recreating - Hawaiians had all this figured out before western invasion 200 years ago.) We would demonstrate to people the satisfaction, enjoyability, and practicality of living car-free, growing your own food in perennial polycultures, and paring down to perhaps one computer, one cell phone, and a solar panel without toxic batteries


But something funny happened about five months in. I felt increasingly dissatisfied with my priority of pursuing radical simplicity as quickly as possible. We'd achieved food self sufficiency (more or less) within a month of arriving, learned most of the basics we'd need to design a functional homestead, gone car-free, lived on a fairly small solar electricity budget, done 90% of our cooking over fire for a few weeks, done laundry by hand, taken cold showers, lived without refrigeration, and all in all gotten within spitting distance of sustainability. It turns out to take a lot of time and sometimes gets downright boring!

For a couple of years I've had the lesson of Scott Middlekauf's "A Word of Caution for the Permaculture Enthusiast" in the back of my mind: that after years of developing his homestead he realized that his goal in life is not to develop a homestead; rather, he'd been developing his homestead to support him in whatever he really wants to do with his life. Arriving as close as we did to self sufficiency, as quickly and relatively easily as we did, forced me to confront my own weighting of values: "lifestyle purity" vs using "good enough" as a support base to carry out my actual life goals. I now felt confident enough that we can adopt the necessary lifestyle changes down the line when we have to adapt to changing world circumstances. In the meantime, the use of compromising technologies and conveniences in the present would allow me to move ahead with my higher priority goals.

I started reading the latest projections of climate change, which terrified me; everything is spinning out of control faster than almost anyone expected. I got up to date on the actions those in power are taking to deal with the crisis, which all boil down to finding new ways to profit. I reread Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay, and was struck again by their well thought out and feasible plan - the only realistic response I've seen to stopping the destruction. They recognize that begging those in power to change their ways has never succeeded, and that far from being transformed by people "being the change they wish to see", the dominant culture has brutally crushed every sustainable culture it's encountered - we're talking about cultures extant for thousands of years and waaay groovier than even the most spiritual hippie permaculture commune you can imagine.

They lay out a strategy of simultaneously dismantling industrial civilization (primarily through underground activists sabotaging and disrupting critical industrial infrastructure), while networking aboveground activists to rebuild local alternative systems to take over as the global systems collapse (which will occur, sooner or later, whether or not an underground accelerates that collapse.)  I began checking the Deep Green Resistance News Service page almost daily, reading all the linked stories and absorbing the ongoing expansion of global domination and the courageous pockets of resistance fighting back here and there.

Finally, in April, I joined Deep Green Resistance to actively engage in this struggle as a member of the aboveground, and am feeling simultaneously excited, proud, in love, scared, and uncertain. Excited and proud because I'm directing my energy to something so important. In love because even though I barely know them, I feel so much love for my fellow members in DGR, and for its allies, putting their time and energy and passion and money into this shared struggle for Beautiful Justice and thousands of new, sustainable cultures emerging from thousands of landbases (or just being left alone where they already exist). Scared because of the consequences if we fail. (Time Is Short.) And uncertain because I'm new to resistance and don't know how best to apply myself.

In part to address that uncertainty, I've been educating myself - about radical feminism, about racism, about indigenous struggle, about historical and contemporary resistance. Which brings me back to my crying.

So much of what I'm reading and hearing and watching is heartbreaking. I remember crying many years ago as I read Dee Brown's classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, one of the only such memories until I go all the way back to that childhood moment with my mother. I cried several times in more recent years reading Derrick Jensen's books. I cried three months ago when I read about the Russian prisoner of war "Sasha" who helped lead a successful mass escape from the German death camp at Sobibor, only to be thrown later into a gulag by Stalin. I cried two months ago watching Escape From Sobibor, the dramatization of that breakout. I cried three weeks ago listening to a Feminist Current podcast of Jackie Lynn's account of abusive grooming for eventual prostitution. I cried two weeks ago reading Patrizia Romito's A Deafening Silence and its analytic yet human exposure of the denial around male violence against women. I cried yesterday hearing about the extinctions of Hawaii birds that have occurred within my short lifetime, and the likely forced death march of several more before my own life is through.

Po'ouli, extinct as of 2004

 

Today

And of course, I cried today. I watched two movies: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. I didn't expect either one to affect me as it did. Perhaps I primed myself to be ripped apart by Kanehsatake by reading Vine Deloria Jr's Custer Died for Your Sins and watching American Holocaust over the past week. More likely it would have happened anyway. The film, comprised almost entirely of on-the-ground footage in the thick of the action, shows the 1990 resistance of the Mohawk people of the Kanehsatake village to a planned seizure of their traditional land, disturbance of their cemetary, and the destruction of ancient pines to build new luxury housing and expand a golf course.

With amazing clarity and starkness, the film depicts the brute application of force against an already oppressed people; outright disregard for human rights; the repression of journalistic freedom; and soldiers and commanders and mayors "only following orders" and displacing responsibility for their roles in the violent violations. But it also depicts the strong spirit of the Mohawks and their allies, a resistance culture formed from longtime bonds of family and tribe, an integration of women and warriors and chiefs and children and spiritual leaders, unbridled expressions of anger and grief and love, a sense of humor, and an ironclad will to stand up to and fight back against injustice that I've never experienced in my white middle class life.

If a Tree Falls felt less intense. It's a more distanced documentary of interviews and vignettes centered around former Earth Liberation Front member Daniel McGowan as he awaits trial in 2007 for his role in multiple arsons of the property of environmentally destructive corporations (the original ecoterrorists.) I'd heard bits and pieces about his case, and those of the other defendants in the Operation Backfire roundup, but this filled in a lot of important detail, and made it all very human and real. The film drew me in and had me anxiously awaiting, with Daniel, the results of his trial. I'd already idealogically supported him and other ELFers, but I gained specific respect for this man who not only put his life on the front line, desperately trying to stop the ongoing horrors of industrial civilization after the approved political routes had failed, but stuck to his commitment not to turn state evidence against his comrades (even as most of them turned on each other and on him.) I broke down a couple more times watching his vilification and harsh sentencing.

I don't know what's happening to me, exactly. I've never reacted much to traditional tear-jerker emotion-manipulating films (usually about when I notice that I'm feeling something, I also notice the new musical score deliberately orchestrated to make me feel that something.) But the films I saw today are real. I guess I've opened myself up more and more to reality, to looking directly at the ongoing atrocities committed by the dominant culture. It's not as bad as one might expect; the grief hasn't led to despair, the anger hasn't led to some all-consuming directionless and distracting rage. To effectively resist, I need to operate from a realistic assessment of the situation - how others have resisted and succeeded or failed and why, how those in power have struck back against resistance and how they have succeeded or failed and why. I can handle the grief and anger; they're releasing and healing and authentic.

To misquote Steve Forbert: it feels good to feel again. I plan to continue.

Income from tours & classes

A friend and potential tribe-mate sent me a video of an Australian permaculture farm which makes most of its cash income from teaching classes and from tours. My friend wrote:

I know you aren't big on making $ but perhaps once you have a working system in hawaii (or even here) you can have tours which both teach people, inspire people, and maybe make a few dollars per visitor while also inspiring you to keep learning ?

My reply is meant not as criticism of what others do for income, but as an expression of my own approach:

I enjoy giving tours and teaching classes, and have hosted dozens here over the years. I don't like organizing them, and have left much of that up to Tulsey or to other folks who bring their class or a permaculture meetup group or whatever.

I really really dislike the notion of charging for tours. Partly because I dislike engaging in the cash economy in any way, but I have extra resistance to charging for information & knowledge, insubstantial and more or less infinitely reproducable goods. (I recognize that it takes time for someone to reproduce that by writing it down or speaking and presenting it, but I don't think of time as a commodity either.) I feel reasonably happy with my current model of giving information away to anyone who will listen, and having products like plants and books for sale at bargain prices for those who want to spend some money. I *hate* the idea of excluding people based on ability to pay, and I don't feel comfortable with "sliding scale" options because I almost always stay away from such classes myself.

I'm very concerned about the trend for middle class white people to be buying their way into peak oil / climate change preparation by stockpiling goods, buying land, and buying classes & information.  Giving away my knowledge is the least I can do to help counter that.

All that said, yeah, if we're hard up for income in Hawaii, I would entertain tours and teaching as part of our income model. But I'd rather not go into the project planning for that.

Reflections on This Life Is In Your Hands by Melissa Coleman

My strong interest in the realities of homesteading and community living drew me to Melissa Coleman's This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone; her gripping story of her family's disintegration with its familiar childhood perspective kept me reading until I'd finished the same day. If you have any interest in these subjects, I highly recommend this as an engrossing, quick and easy read.

Besides saying that, I don't want to review this book so much as jot down my reactions and reflections. You can read more detailed synopses of the book elsewhere, but in short, Melissa describes her first seven years growing up on a rural Maine homestead with her parents Eliot (well known in organic agriculture circles) and Sue Coleman, next to and on land purchased from their mentors Helen & Scott Nearing. Much of the book revolves around the accidental drowning of Melissa's younger sister in a pond on the property, and the assumption of blame for her death.

My Thoughts & Observations

Homesteading in Maine is difficult. I don't want to work so hard during the short growing season of summer and fall to prepare for a bitterly cold, long winter. Not that I didn't already know that.

Organic agriculture is difficult. I don't want to cut down an acre of mature forest by hand, then cut off the roots of the stumps to pry them out by hand, just to create growing beds I have to dig every year to grow vegetables I have to plant, water, and weed every year. Not that I didn't already know that.

Trying to get a homestead up and running with a newborn baby is difficult. Not that I hadn't already guessed that.

Trying to keep a homestead running with a 3 year old and a newborn baby is even more difficult. Usual comment applies.

Trying to keep a failing marriage from deteriorating further and a homestead running with two children and yet another newborn baby is...go figure...even more difficult yet. Usual comment, plus some head-scratching at the seeming inability of otherwise rational folks to understand the effects of popping out babies. (I can never contemplate global demographics for very long; I quickly scratch my scalp raw.)

Interesting that besides the seasonal reappearance of sparrows each spring, and some wild berries, Melissa doesn't talk about their landbase. Perhaps she just didn't want to add that theme to an already dense book, or perhaps this reflects the disconnection from landbase that seems to regularly accompany agriculture.

Melissa mentions a couple of times early in the book that their family bought in a lot of staple foods like nut butters, oils, and grains; plus occasional luxury items like oranges from Florida. Later on I think she mentions growing potatoes, but otherwise doesn't address staple crops again, so it's not clear whether they ever transitioned to growing their staples. I'm guessing they only grew or foraged their produce, root crops, milk, berries, and fruits; selling extra veggies to pay for imported staples along with other cash expenses like their car. So they never really achieved the sort of homesteading self sufficiency we're seeking.

The Colemans' adherence to a vegetarian diet made life harder than necessary. Besides possible nutritional imbalances causing or exacerbating Sue's depression and Eliot's hyperthyroidism, the diet led to inefficiencies:

• The family only needed one male goat for fertilization, so Eliot killed and buried any male kids as soon as they were born, a waste of substantial energy invested by the mother goat.
  
• The Colemans originally kept chickens for their eggs, but after a few years decided the chickens were too many extra mouths to feed during the food-scarce winters, so got rid of the whole flock. This baffled me since our own hens provide our most labor-efficient protein, fat, and calorie harvests. Eventually I figured out that since the family wouldn't eat their chickens, they couldn't utilize the normal temperate climate adaptation of slaughtering most of the flock in fall or winter, keeping just a few hens and a rooster to rebuild the flock the following spring.
  
• They probably missed out on labor efficient opportunities to hunt deer or other meat, which one of their neighbors did to the disgust of the vegetarian Nearings.
  

Don't design a system that requires you to operate near maximum capacity almost 100% of the time. (Or fall into such a system through lack of design.) Limited slack means any significant disruption has extreme consequences. See the history of China for example, with its population maxed out with all land cultivated as extensively as possible, leading to serious famines somewhere in the country almost every year for two thousand years. For the Colemans, who were running at full speed with just Melissa and the homestead to deal with, the expected arrival of their second daughter drove Eliot to exhaustion building an addition to the house. This apparently started his decline in health. Even worse, it initiated or expanded a chasm with Sue as he couldn't meet her need for connection.

Eliot constantly pushed himself. As an athlete in college he kept seeking the next mountain to climb, and apparently he took on homesteading partly as a "mountain with no top," a challenge he could never fully conquer. As soon as he achieved some success with homesteading, he threw himself into advocacy of organic farming, first publishing newsletters and organizing at a regional level and in later years taking multiple long research trips to Europe. This workaholic approach, so often respected as a model of modern success, trashed his health and his marriage as he used work as refuge from emotions and his growing distance from Sue. Eliot reminded me a little bit of myself in years past when I moved from obsession to obsession (Roger Zelazny website, bootleg taping, Kucinich campaign, etc) to distract myself from the pain of civilization. I've slowed down and opened up in recent years, though at times I've used the house project to avoid dealing with relationship challenges.

In the early years Sue generally shouldered all the necessities of child care plus heavy work loads, but even early in Melissa's life Sue had occasional breakdowns and mild depression from the strain and stress of their endeavor. Her exhaustion grew with a second and then third child, Eliot's decline in stamina with his health problems, and his increasing absences as he pursued teaching and research away from the farm. She grew emotionally distant from Eliot, eventually suspecting him of involvement with the cute young interns present every summer, but unable to discuss it with him. She became less and less capable of engaging with life and her children, spending more time sleeping, fasting for the resulting blood sugar spikes, or just emotionally "checked out" as she went through her day.

Sue and Eliot's marital break-up despite fairly successful homesteading demonstrates the overwhelming importance of communication and relationship in these projects. The "hard skills" of growing food, building shelters, and providing water are fairly easy to learn and implement; us modern civilized folks have a much harder time learning to live together and resolve conflict.

Personal Reflections

I see Tulsey going through some of Sue's struggles. When I met Tulsey working on the Kucinich campaign she seemed strong and fully capable as we ran the Portland office. But as I got to know her better, I learned of her brittleness following a long difficult marriage and divorce, years of overworking herself at the small business she and her husband owned, and her mother's death. In the years since, Tulsey has bounced between breakdowns and confident accomplishments, happily with the balance tipping much more to the latter as she's healed herself from past stresses. The house project of the last two years has rekindled a lot of stress, and though Tulsey is mostly coping with it well, it's taken its toll. Reading Melissa's story emphasizes the importance of keeping our workloads manageable in Hawaii, not trying to do too much at once. Always good advice (one of the principles of permaculture, in fact), and even more important when starting from a depleted state.

I also see my mom in Sue's story and myself in Melissa's. As the oldest of three siblings, and with our parents' relationship following a similar trajectory, Melissa's descriptions of her parents' stresses and her own fears and loneliness (felt in the gut more than intellectually recognized) felt painfully familiar to me, raising several tears and even outright crying two or three times. Looking back now, I can better appreciate the strains my mother must have felt working multiple jobs to care for the three of us, breaking down from time to time with the stress of it all.

Towards the end of the book and her parents' relationship, Melissa describes a memory laden with emotions difficult to articulate but so poignantly recognizable from my own long unvisited, time blurred memories of childhood. Coming home from a school where she doesn't fit in, longing for her parents' attention as their limited spare energy goes to her younger siblings, and living with constant background anxiety about her family's future, Melissa trips and lands hard. Convinced that she broke her arm, she rushes home in search of sympathy. Discovering both parents gone, she begins running back and forth, back and forth, cradling her arm even as the diminishing twinges reveal the insignificance of her injury, wanting to preserve her fresh moment of pain and need until a parent returns. She runs, conscious that it makes no sense, but continuing anyway, unable to understand why she does. That confusion resonated so strongly with me I put the book down and bawled.

---

Final take-home lessons for me: probably good that we're moving to Hawaii instead of northern California, for a much easier transition to fully self sufficient homesteading. Take it easy as we go. Focus on communication and relationship. Carefully scale in the addition of people who will demand more of the community than they can immediately repay (children), making sure the community can integrate and support them without undue strain. And enjoy ourselves!

Sustainable cities - feasible transition or oxymoron?

In my presentation on Self Sufficiency, Five Years In, I gave some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the carrying capacity of the city of Portland. If everyone in the city does a better job of feeding themselves and fueling their houses from local resources than we expect to manage on our own site, the city could support about 280,000 people. In this best-case scenario, the current population of 600,000 would have to kick out more than half the people to become sustainable.

Leonard emailed me a question about this, and I wanted to post his question and my reply. This illuminates my philosophy of sustainability and what I think it'll really take to adapt to a post peak oil world in a healthy manner.

Leonard asked: "One bit I wanted to question is your assumption about carrying capacity for Portland: it seems to assume that we would need to produce ALL food within city limits, and couldn't rely on a significant portion of land-extensive staple crops being produced on broadacre polycultural farms in our pretty-well-intact horticultural hinterlands. The future that I've envisioned is one in which intensive vegetable gardening for zone 1-3 crops happens in the city, with zone 3-5 crops coming largely from outside using appropriate (low-embodied energy) means of transport into the city."

My reply follows for the rest of this post:

Good question, and thanks for asking it. In short, my calculations
are based on a long term stable, sustainable system. I recognize that
in the short term, the city will have to transition from here to
there. Your model could make sense as a transition strategy.
However, I think any scenario in which a city depends on the
importation of resources perpetuates unsustainability, and a
relationship of domination and exploitation, both of the landbase, and
of the people working it. That is, it doesn't fulfil the "care for
earth" and "care for people" ethics of permaculture. And the "redistribute the surplus" ethic
continues as the current mostly one-way, coerced flow of resources
into the city.

A lot of my thinking is based on Derrick Jensen's writings. I think
his two volume Endgame is the most important reading for modern
times; it gives a crucial analysis of the relationship between cities,
civilization, and our landbases. Should be required reading for all
permaculturists, activists, and anyone else working with the
"invisible structures." You can read an excerpt here of Jensen's Endgame,
talking about cities.

My first concern is that even with the best intentions, when third
parties get between the consumers in the city and the producers
outside the city, the loss of direct connection can quickly lead to
over-harvesting of resources. The middle men have little reason to
foster sustainable harvest, and focus instead on maximum production.
I think this can only be fully averted via direct relationships
between buyers and sellers, complete with buyers being fully educated
about the impacts of harvests on the landbase, and with visits to the
sites of harvest to ensure sustainable operations. Theoretically
feasible, but unlikely to actually happen. (And of course, for
sustainability, you then have to deal with getting the waste products
of the city, such as humanure, back out to the hinterlands.)

My more serious concern is that if a population is dependent on
importing resources, it will use whatever means necessary to keep that
resource coming, including violence. I wonder, in your scenario, what
the incentive is for people outside of the city to provide staple
crops for the city dwellers? Right now the incentives are shiny
gadgetry (cars, electronic toys, and packaged entertainment, and of
course the energy to operate it all) which are made possible by fossil
fuels; and the need to pay property taxes, which boils down to the
threat of violence. (Someone may own their land in the country, but
if they don't pay property taxes, the sheriff with his gun will come
to evict them. Thus they're forced into the cash economy, which often
involves selling off timber, farming the land, etc.)

The only way I see a society acting in a stable, sustainable
relationship with their landbase is when each participant has an
intimate understanding of their landbase and the effects of their
actions on their community of life. That means everyone participating
directly or at most once removed in producing their sustenance.

It's taken me a long time to write this response; I keep going into extensive details and then deleting them. I'm coming from a comprehensive anti-civilization critique, and since I don't know how much exposure you've had to this sort of thought, I'm not sure how much depth to go into to explain my perspective. (Definitely some overlap between anti-civ and permaculture circles, but also plenty of permies who want cities and civilization to keep humming along, just in a kinder gentler sorta way.) I'm happy to write more if you're curious about anything else I said above. But hopefully that gives you an idea of my thoughts...and an understanding of why we're looking to get out of the city and to a landbase which can directly support the people living on it, including us!