Regenerative Agriculture and the Human Good with Ashley Fitzgerald

This is the third installment of a three-part interview that Judd Baroff did with Ashley Fitzgerald. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

Judd: Your definition of regenerative agriculture raises three questions. You brought up the idea that the rural areas produce the vast majority of the food stuffs for the urban areas. Now, the modern conception is that while that is true contemporaneously, it is also true historically. So London in 1650 wasn’t producing most of its food. Rome in A.D. 350 wasn’t producing much of its own food. Venice was never food independent. So on for all cities. My question is, given your focus on urban ag, do you think our picture of history is wrong?

Likewise, you’re fairly famous on Twitter for having a war against annuals, preferring fruit trees and other perennials. How does that fit into your idea of Regenerative Agriculture?

And finally, you talked about Regen Ag being ‘agriculture done on the human scale.’ Are there other industries that are ripe for being returned to the human scale? Like craftsmanship or industry on the human scale? Would you think it good if these local crafts used 3D printing or some other modern tools?

Ashley: Cities always import more resources than they can produce. That’s kind of the definition of a city. There’s this author Derrick Jensen who talks a lot about this kind of civilizational level thinking. And he was the first one to bring that fact to my attention. Cities import more resources than they produce, so they are a site of power, in the sense that, in a human society, if you have the power to get other humans to make things for you, to be more of a consumer than a producer, you have to have some kind of power to be able to make that happen. The modern shift has been a matter of proportion; there used to be some amount of urban agriculture in cities before the modern era.

It used to be common to keep livestock out in a village common and then to bring it back to your barn in the village at night. In the developing world now, like where we lived in Uruguay, people have cows and chickens. It’s so common to have some amount of production. It was also more common in the past to have a larger proportion of the total population involved in some amount of production, not necessarily farmers but some home economics, and not just food but like you said small industry or craft.

I think in the first century of the American Republic, the number of people involved in agriculture was 90-percent or more, and now it’s like 1-percent. Of course, that’s measuring farmers now. I would die to know how many people are involved in some kind of food production in America now. There’re no good numbers on those who just informally produce their own food in the U.S.

But, again, the amount of people in cities right now is unlike any other time in history; it’s never happened before. And it’s only possible because of fossil fuels, and it’s only possible to farm this amount of acres with this few people because of subsidized energy. Calorie per calorie, it’s not more efficient at all. Calorie in this case includes the calories of energy used in all aspects of industrial agriculture, the shipping and the creation of the tractor and the processing, &c.

The best source of this information is a place called the ETC Group. They focus on peasant agriculture and have studied it various ways, but the peasants are still the majority of food producers in the world. It’s only really in a few highly developed countries where only 1% of the population is involved in agriculture. And the peasants are much more efficient per total calorie use. I mean in categories like energy input and nutritional value and caloric output. We in the West are in a highly tenuous situation, subsidized by cheap fossil fuels; it’s an agricultural system that’s never before existed in human civilization.

I happen to focus on food, but I’m completely on board with a world in which we have a rebirth of craft manufacturing, including bringing older technologies back for goods production. But I also have no problem with appropriately scaled, distributed technology. There’s a guy who I think is a little crazy, but I’m hoping to get him on the podcast at some point, and he had this thing called the Open Source Ecology Movement and the Global Village Construction Set.

He talks about what kinds of machines, technologies, tools would you need to start a village from scratch and provide all your own needs. And I love that vision so much. There’s no reason we have to go back to certain older technologies if we have better versions. It’s really just about the human scale. The main needs are food, fiber, fuel, and medicine.

Then on the perennials versus annuals, the interesting way to think about agriculture is that it is humans taming the natural world for their food. Apart from agriculture, another way to get food is the hunter-gatherer system. You chase after game for your meat, and you gather the rest, berries, nuts, &c. Well, agriculture is just domesticating those same processes, placing your prey inside a fence, and planting your various plants so you don’t have to go find them out in the wild. You find them instead in your garden.

The main difference in agriculture versus hunting and gathering is the annual plants and the grains. And grains are a hugely explosive amount of calories per acreage of cultivation. But grains also can be subject to a lot of challenges in season. And so there’s a lot of insecurity around annual agriculture, because your crop might not come through. Whereas if you think about a perennial system, with hunting and gathering, as long as the populations of animals are high enough versus the human population then there’s not going to be a bad year. We’re not going to say, ‘we have nothing to eat this year.’ Because it’s not as finicky as grains, or annual ag.

And so the way I think about it is that perennial livestock based, tree-crop based systems are basically like agricultural hunter-gatherer systems, where the abundance that happens with the hunting and gathering can just be domesticated, and it can be put inside fences, and you can plant all of these fruit and nut trees and bushes and vines. And it’s not that they can’t have a bad year, but they can’t all have a bad year.

The other benefit to it is that it builds topsoil, and it allows for a functional, biodiverse, wild ecosystem to exist alongside it. Grains require plowing the soil and tilling it up, and you more or less need to clear the ground to make those grains be the only plant that’s thriving there. Whereas if you have a grass-based system and perennials, then other creatures, birds and frogs, and other plants, and even a huge diversity of prairie and native grasses can exist for livestock to graze on. So you steward a functional ecosystem, and then you are the apex creature in that ecosystem, shaping it to your will. But it’s still a functional ecosystem. Peter Allen’s website, Mastodon Valley Farm, has the best, tersest explanation of this, talking about humans as a Keystone species.

Judd: Just based on economics of scale, my assumption would be that agrobusinesses will be more efficient than the small-scale producers. Are you saying this isn’t true worldwide, but is it true in the United States? Is it true (either in only the third world or everywhere) in part because of an abundance of cheap labor?

As for Savannah Scaping (the Mastodon Valley Farm model), when you’ve argued for it on Twitter, I’ve seen people push back at you saying, basically, industrial agriculture is how we feed the 8 billion people on the planet and stopping industrial agriculture would starve a good portion of the world. Let’s call this the argument from Norman Borlaug. So there are two questions here: to what extent is any of that received wisdom true? And if Savannah agriculture is so plentiful and sustainable and consistent in terms of producing high quality and a variety of calories every year, why then did grain monocultures become so prevalent? Because it seems to me that grain agriculture, and the famines that go with it, is what needs explaining, from the Egyptian famine that Joseph’s dream interpretation avoids to the Irish Potato Famine.

Ashley: So there’s actually two questions in your timeline question. The questions are, why did people go to settled agriculture at all from hunter-gatherer if agriculture is more unstable, and then why we in the modern era moved from like mixed-use agriculture to monocrop agriculture?

The first one is kind of out of my purview because it’s happened all over the world, and there were different contexts for different cases. I think it was kind of the case that there were population pressures such that you had to produce more calories per acre. And you can make more total calories per land base with annual ag than you can with hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering needs to have a certain balance of human population to whatever you’re hunting and gathering. That was part of the pressure early on in the move to agriculture. You can make so much grain in ancient Egypt, and then that could support population centers in a way that hunting simply couldn’t.

That’s kind of the story of all ancient civilizations; the population pressure was so great that they had to push to annual agriculture to get more calories per land. Doing that they wiped out the topsoil, and then they starved, and then the civilization collapsed. That’s basically the history of civilizations.

And then in the modern era, it was like there was a period of time, in many places in the world where many different cultures developed a similar kind of livestock mixed-use agriculture. It happened in the United States and in Europe. There’s a great essay called the Lost Forest Gardens of Europe about this.

I don’t know enough about the culture of other places to know, but these were prevalent until the modern era when we had cheap fossil fuels. And then there was basically a huge population spike in the same way that there had been in ancient civilizations, where you had to make more calories. It’s actually kind of a chicken and the egg thing, because you made more calories and had more energy to keep people alive, which meant more people stayed alive and there was more need to make more calories per land base, especially as people urbanized, &c, &c. That’s why agriculture went monoculture.

I think part of it is also this efficiency brain thing we were talking about. We had all this scientific “advancement,” and people were saying we have to “feed the world” but never ask questions about the quality of nutrition but just hyper “efficiency.”

Which reminds me, back to your efficiency question, people who say agrobusinesses are more efficient almost always leave out the total fossil fuels as counted calories. The same with Walmart being “more efficient”; nobody ever does a life cycle analysis where they actually look at all the energy embedded in every part of the system, including all the fossil fuel subsidies. It’s actually less efficient by the measure of anyone who looks at the total energy use.

I just think every landscape could have much more productive capacity, including the suburbs with a mixed-used system. We’re at the far end of this modern era where we have access to all sorts of new varietals of livestock and plants. There’s been a huge amount of scientific advancement in the biological sciences to make much more accessible livestock and plants than were available before.

Judd: That was great, but I’m super ignorant of this area, so I’m going to tell back to you with some elaboration what I heard you just explain to me about the history, and I want you to tell me if I’m getting this right. So what happened was, as people started domesticating plants and animals, they created a much larger population base. Now, you didn’t say this part, but I’m adding this. This population increase comes from many sources: possibly because you can keep the sick and the injured with you when you couldn’t have if you were in hunter-gather societies and always on the move, also having more stable locations means you can fortify your town more which in turn means fewer people die in wars, also stability means sick infants in particular will survive more readily, and also presumably more calories means more regular births instead of having women who are running around all over the place or possibly not being quite as regularly fertile. Many of those operating at once.

So you domesticate a couple things and then you’re basically running forest gardens. This creates a huge population, which you then have to actually sustain in other ways. And the carrying capacity of the land simply cannot naturally sustain such populations. So what eventually happens is that you feel yourself being forced to use more and more grains because they have this high caloric capacity and, presumably, they’re easier to save, so lean years can be supplemented by the surplus of glut years—back to the story of Joseph in Egypt again.

But what happens is that these monocultures open the populations up to starvation, not just because of weather but because, as you said, of topsoil erosion. So we get collapses. I wonder about that, because my image of these areas, from Egypt but over to China as well, is that they just have had this steady productivity from the far ancient world straight into the modern day.

So then the next move you say is that basically what happens is monoculture grain production continues and continues and continues until, for whatever reason, the population centers revert back to livestock mixed-use agriculture, which is productive, both in terms of sustaining the higher levels of population, but also varied and healthy, and this continues, more or less intact, until the modern era when, for a variety of reasons, perhaps better medicine, whatever it is, population levels start to increase again. And of course the introduction of fossil fuels.

Production levels increase again, and we’re caught in the same loop as you had in the ancient world, where with population levels increasing, you have to find a steady and stable calorie source, and grain is the most productive per acre. So we create the monoculture farms again.

And so then the thinking is that the modern era relied on monocultures, but like the forest gardens of Europe were reintroduced after the ancient era, in the post-Modern—not in the angry French intellectual way, simply after the modern—era, the suggestion is that we’ll start to reintroduce our own forest gardens. Am I getting that straight?

As for the efficiency comment, I was imagining a competition between three grocery stores: a big grocery store, a medium-sized grocery store, and a small grocery store. In that competition, the large grocery story is most efficient, because of efficiencies of scale. Because even if all these three stores are still getting the same Goya beans, the same Purdue chicken, those packages may be going straight to that big store from the processing plant whereas they’ll have to go to the distribution center for the smaller stores. That’s how the argument goes anyway, and I thought you were disputing that. But what you seem to be saying is not so much that there is no greater efficiency there, but that all these stores are grocery stores. And the vaunted efficiency of grocery stores pales in comparison to the real efficiency of the mom-and-pop stores, the local butcher who gets his meat from the area and maybe one state over, the local farmer who sells directly to local families. In that system, you’re never sending chickens from Kansas to New York at all.

And finally at the end there you gave us that almost throwaway line about there being massive scientific improvements in the varietals of agriculture and livestock. What advances are you talking about?

Ashley: I really appreciate a Jared Diamond type thinker who thinks about how agriculture changes and collapses in broad terms. If he talks about the collapse of different civilizations, he tries to draw these kind of broad rules; you’re over-expanding on your resource base and then your population plummets because you can’t keep up the resources needed for the population that you have. In his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization, David Montgomery makes the case that it is basically just like a soil health thing. But the details are specific to different times and places.

And I know a lot of anthropologists get mad at people like Jared Diamond, David Montgomery, and Joseph Tainter (who wrote The Collapse of Complex Societies). But they’re all just making different versions of a case about socio-environmental factors working together to lead to collapse. So it’s not just one story, but still the idea is that there’s a resource-base overuse.

In terms of what exactly increases the population in the first place and leads to a sedentary civilization, I think it’s the opposite of how you described it or it’s mutually reinforcing. It’s not that they had a bigger population and therefore had to find the food to feed them. But instead, my understanding is that they domesticated and discovered food having massively higher amounts of calories per acre. Those extra calories fed and kept more people alive.

One thing is that there is also a dynamic of fertility with hunter-gatherers. There was an amount of movement that suppressed fertility and had birth spacing. Birth spacing absolutely got shorter with agricultural society, but there was also a lot of infant death. And in a lot of hunter-gatherer examples, there was infanticide which was a kind of adaptation to not overusing the resource base. So that’s obviously very bad too, not something we want to reintroduce.

But there was a lot of infant death also in agricultural civilizations. Typically the way it would work is the families would eat in order of age from a parent down, and so the babies would be fed last. And with super close birth spacing the moms wouldn’t be nursing more than a baby at once, so they’d be like supplementing with some sort of grain based or maybe some milk from livestock. And if the baby wasn’t getting enough calories, they wouldn’t survive.

I would also just point to Graber’s and Wengro’s book The Dawn of Everything, which shows that this movement from hunter-gatherer to sedentary is actually much more blurred and complex, and there were periods of time even within these tribes where they would be nomadic for a period and then settled for a period, or they’d be nomadic just at certain times of year, and then sedentary. So it’s all just much more complicated than I can express easily here.

On this point of efficiency, they’re just not what they say they are. For example, to aggregate and produce, let’s say, a bunch of soybean or corn that gets turned into high-fructose corn syrup, it gets planted with a giant amount of fossil fuels, and the machine that plants it uses a giant amount of fossil fuels. It gets sprayed with chemical fertilizer that itself is made with a bunch of fossil fuels. It gets harvested with fossil fuels, gets put into a giant truck. That giant truck gets brought over to a grain elevator which also uses a ton of fossil fuels.

Then it sits there until it gets transported. Then it gets transported to a factory, maybe multiple factories over long distances. Then there’s a bunch of energy involved in processing that into corn syrup. Then there’s the packaging, which is plastics and takes fossil fuels. Then that all gets put onto a pallet and loaded onto a truck. And then those trucks transport those products even further, and that’s a vast majority of what’s in those stores.

And so I know it sounds like a conspiracy, but none of the embedded energy in any single step in that process is accounted for when people talk about efficiency. Not to mention how much it wastes, the unused overproduction of grains that just sits and rots or are paid to be destroyed. The whole system seems efficient, and it’s not at all.

Now if you think about a similar type of system where, for example, my friend Peter Allen grows beef, no synthetic inputs at all. He just moves them around on the landscape, eventually processes them. It only takes a little bit of energy to process them because they just hang up the beef on a tractor to slaughter it. They freeze it there too, so the freezing part also takes a bit of energy, and then he ships it to me directly once a month. So basically the energy involved here is just getting it from his farm to me and maybe the energy to lift the cow up and then the freezing. So relatively which of these systems uses more energy per calorie? And the closer to the source, the better. And of course, what you’re growing matters too and what machinery is involved. But it just simply is not more efficient. It’s just a lie.

This stuff is also kept artificially cheap by corn and soy subsidies from the government, which tips the scale toward this production system. And now the corn and soy lobby is very embedded, and those subsidies can’t really get rolled back or there would be a revolt in the system. So now we’re committed to this corn and soy thing. You might want to watch Food, Inc. to get a sense of what is going on.

And so there’s this thing called the Jevons Paradox where when something is cheaper, that doesn’t mean it’s more efficient because, instead, more people use or buy the cheap thing. A good explanation of this I’ve heard is imagine your car gets 100-miles-a-gallon and now imagine it gets one-mile-a-gallon: which type of car would you drive more? When it’s four dollars every time you want to go one mile, people drive their cars less. They find other ways to get around. When you can go a hundred miles on one gallon, then you’re going to use it more because it’s like, ‘oh who cares? It’s really cheap! It’s very efficient!’

This is why when some people talk about ‘an energy transition’ to solar and wind and renewables, it’s actually just an energy addition. There’s no transition at all.

But there have been advances in biology, just a huge amount of work in adapting varietals to different climates and improving their taste. For example, there’re grapes adapted to Vermont now, and there’re raspberries, and there’re a bunch of different types of fruit trees that are adapted for all these different areas. Pre-Columbian exchange, there wouldn’t be universal accessibility of all types of livestock in all places. And now there is.

A downside of globalization is that everything’s from nowhere now. But now there’re people in Uruguay keeping Hereford cows, which are also in the US and also from England. And if they’re a good livestock, and they’re adapted to a place, people can get them now. You can get chickens, you can get goats, you can get sheep, and get whatever kind of varietal; there’s just a huge amount of diversity and variety of plant and animal foods, flora and fauna. It would not take much to have the most diverse garden and operation, no matter what size you are. There’s all this accessibility, so it’s really just a matter of know-how and not tipping the scales in favor of the corn lobby and the terribly, terribly nutrient deficient foods in industrial agriculture.

Judd: This is all fascinating, but I’m going to push you a little here. As for the Savannah Scaping, I was trying to figure out if you were saying it’s as many calories per acre or if you were just (“just”) saying it’s more sustainable and provides better nutrients. You seem to be saying the latter. So if grains do generate such higher yields per acre, the question then becomes, how are we going to make the transition to diverse agriculture without bringing about the mass starvation of modern man? I see that’s some of the pushback you get, ‘modern agriculture feeds 8 billion people; they will die if we do away with its practices.’

Assuming it’s not in the mass starvation of the population, what do you think this transition will look like?

I’m going to again rephrase what you’re saying about efficiency and see if I’m getting it right now. What I hear you saying is that any greater efficiency that big-box stores might have over a local supermarket (from efficiencies of scale) is nothing when compared to the vast inefficiencies that are hidden in the whole industrial system, so while Walmart or Target might be more efficient than Greengrocer Local, between any of them and a real mom-and-pop operation like your friend Peter Allen or my local butcher, there’s no comparison. It’s the system that’s the problem, the system which is cheap but (for all of that) inefficient. Talking about how much more efficient Superstore is from Jim’s Local Market just distracts us from that. Is that about right?

If that’s right, then how would you address the claims I’ve seen made against this argument that even the local guys really benefit from industrial society in dramatic ways, from the roads they use to the machines, to the clothes. Even, I know one person said, that they benefit from the Haber-Bosch process because the runoff of industrial farms gets into the ground water.

Which reminds me of a point of the energy transition, I’ve seen a graph recently that said, ‘actually, we’re producing in our industry and energy production less CO2 than we have since the First World War, yet still producing massive amounts more material wealth.’ And it makes me wonder various things, starting with if CO2 is really the proper thing to measure. Maybe we’re just obsessed with it because of climate change and Al Gore. Or is that chart somehow rigged too, as the measure of ‘efficiency’ is?

Just on the innovations in biology, I plan next spring to buy a frost-resistant pomegranate tree. And I think that’s perhaps a perfect example of what you’re talking about, of innovation in varietals that didn’t exist before. And I’m excited about it because I love pomegranates, and the idea that we can grow our own is wonderful.

But that reminds me that you have a countercultural take on invasive species. From what I understand, your argument is that there isn’t really such a thing as an invasive species, species move and so where they go isn’t really a big deal. So, yeah, please just elaborate on that one if you can.

Ashley: About changing agricultural methods, there’s really two questions. One is the question about how many calories can you produce, just raw output in terms of calories per acre, and access to nutrients and also functional ecosystem. So we have on one hand something like potatoes, beans, and wheat; in a tiny amount of space, you can get huge amounts of calories. They will indeed keep you alive, more or less, but they won’t nourish you significantly. And to have a system like that, you can’t have a functional biodiverse ecosystem because those plants require tilling up the soil with the plow, and they require basically killing everything that isn’t that plant.

So the alternative system is mixed use, diverse, savanna agriculture. And that both allows humans to manage an actual functional ecosystem, including dozens of types of grasses and wild animals and insects and amphibians and birds, &c, while also producing food that is healthier, more nutritious, and more diverse. That’s because you’re basically managing a savanna with animals and trees that you’ve planted and you’re doing, like I said before, a kind of domesticated hunter-gatherer ecosystem as opposed to this scorched earth farming. There is no ecosystem there. It’s only the plant that I want to grow and everything else must die.

On the question of ‘does that mean we’re all going to die from starvation?’ It’s a good question. But the answer is no.

Peter Allen has convinced me that the amount of calories on the hoof, the calories in the ruminants, and in plants and in trees in North America pre-Columbian (or maybe it was early Colombian) was some factor more than are currently on the hoof in the United States. He thinks the carrying capacity of the United States in a fully diversified, regenerative ag system, which includes how East versus West of the Mississippi will be different systems, but all regenerative ag, all together Peter Allen contends that America could probably support 10 billion people.

Now, the tricky part is always just the transition from here to there. But if you put a concerted effort toward training people how to do regenerative ag, and if they utilize all these advances in biology and access to various diverse farm animals and plants, it wouldn’t even be that hard. Which is the crazy thing. A lot of these operations, like Peter Allen’s and a lot of people I know who run these kinds of operations, their farms start turning around in a year or so. If they came from a monoculture, spray with glyphosate, chemical, Haber-Bosch fake nutrients system, they turn it around and build it up, and the soil’s fertility comes back in a timescale measured in years, not in decades.

It’s so easy and I can see the vision so clearly that I just find it absurd that it hasn’t happened yet. It’s only power and greed and control over the food system that makes it not happen, because this would be a decentralized system with more land managers and more independence from corporations. And we can’t have that, now, can we?

So is industrial society necessarily subsidizing local economies? Certainly very cheap energy is going to make everything easier. I mean, if you have to do something with a shovel versus a tiny teaspoon of gasoline which’ll give you X times the power of the work of a man with two hands—yeah, of course, that’s going to be easier. You have all this energy. And actually, a lot of small-scale producers I know say, ‘I mean, I’m prepared for a low-energy future, but things are easier with access to this energy that we’re being completely wasteful with.’

So of course everything is easier when you have a glut of energy, for any animal in any ecosystem, everything is easier. But do you take advantage of it to the point that you destroy the basis of the ecosystem that supports you?

But that’s separate from whether Haber-Bosch subsidizes Peter Allen. And it doesn’t, in any way. He does not use chemicals on his land. Now there is some ag runoff that goes down rivers like the Mississippi, but those excess nutrients turn into the algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re not getting into, for example, Peter’s groundwater in any significant amounts; they’re not increasing his fertility. That’s just not happening. You know who adds chemicals to his land? His animals, via eating the grass and depositing just rich manure which builds the soil. The small-scale organic producers I know use animal fertility. They don’t use chemicals.

On the energy addition, not transition thing—I think what you’re referring to is what people called ephemeralization, which is where we’re producing more and more, using more and more energy, but somehow reducing CO2 emissions. I’m not convinced that that’s the case. I don’t think they have that right. I think the more energy we use, the more CO2 emissions we’re expending. What’s happening is people are offshoring manufacturing and then not counting it. And that’s why they think we’re an industrial economy.

All this giant material throughput, where people around me are constantly consuming and throwing out 90-something percent of the new consumer goods they buy in a year—yeah, that’s not ephemeral, it’s just made in China and we don’t count that. It’s a weird accounting trick. Ephemeralization is not the case. I have a friend who’s a degrowth guy who does a very good job of clarifying these things.

But on CO2 itself, I am both of the mind that carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere and that it’s not the only thing we should measure. So first, CO2 doesn’t seem to be slowing, and it’s pretty much tied with economic growth at this point. And economic growth, which I think is best measured by material throughput, is more or less dependent on this cheap energy source.

Not only don’t I think there are any other renewable sources that are decreasing the CO2 we’re emitting, but I think all of these alternative energy sources (at least so far) are subsidized by cheap fossil fuels. It’s just like I said about industrial “efficiency,” nobody’s doing a full accounting of the embedded energy in all of these “alternative energies.” And a good podcast on that is this podcast on net energy and sustainability from the “Crazy Town” podcast. That’s pretty much convinced me that we’re not in any kind of transition.

And look, CO2 is certainly a thing that is tied up with industrial modernity and seemingly chaotic, if not actively bad. Climate scientists don’t really know. These models are too complex to know exactly what’s down the pike for this. But we are completely ignoring other forms of environmental degradation. We’re ignoring pollution, topsoil loss, and the wholesale destruction of various water systems. It’s just absurd how much CO2 has taken over the conversation about environment.

As to my “countercultural” take on invasive species, it’s like so many of my supposedly countercultural takes. There is just some subgroup of people who go off the deep end on some topic to the point that they’ve lost all touch with reality. And this is the case with carbon myopia, with like just stop oil people, with… I don’t even want to get into all the identity politics stuff, but as with a lot of the identity politics stuff, people have gone so far off the deep end that just trying to bring some sort of nuanced and moderate position becomes countercultural.

But there’s a woman who’s been on the podcast. She’s a permaculturalist, a very smart ecological thinker. Her name is Tao Orion. And she wrote a book called Beyond the War on Invasive Species, and that book convinced me that people who are involved in “conservation work” have decided for us that the pre-Columbian ecosystem is the ecosystem that we need to recreate. Any plant or animal that has been introduced since the Colombian exchange needs to be eradicated. They usually just pick a random date and find as much evidence as they can of what plants have arrived since that date.

So it becomes a weird kind of inversion of nativist sentiments. It’s the super far left wing who are saying native plants at all cost—no immigrants, basically, no new plants. But the way they map that on is like Native Americans, not colonizers. And it’s so off the deep end as to be absurd. Not only is it absurd that they’ve just chosen some random point in history when it could have been any other point in history, but people and plants move around. Certainly it’s been accelerated in the modern era, but there’s not any turning back the clock.

They blast ecosystems full of glyphosate, burn them to the ground chemically, and try to replant them using all sorts of energy-intensive methods, bulldozers, &c, in an attempt to then recreate this supposedly pristine ecosystem. Not to mention that a majority of the time, the ecosystems in the pre-Columbian era were managed by apex predators, and by that I mean human beings. Native Americans burned and managed large swaths of the landscape to keep them into a savanna-like state, for ecosystems either want to be forest or they want to be grass. They don’t really want to stay in the Savannah state because once you have a tree, it throws a lot of baby trees, and it wants to turn into a forest. And the only way to keep that down is fire and grazers.

And in the pre-Columbian years, where the ecosystems were flourishing and people were doing great, this is when Peter Allen has said there were a huge amount of calories on the hoof, what were humans doing? We had ruminants on landscape, which we managed, and what the “environmentalists” are trying to do now with this native plant and animal thing is to burn everything to the ground, toss some seeds, use a bunch of machines, and then they say, “oh, let’s just let nature do its thing.” But there’s no apex predator, and there’re no ruminants on the land, so what ends up happening is it turns into a forest. It doesn’t stay a managed savanna landscape. There’s just this weird obsession with certain plants that we supposedly have to eradicate.

Now, having said all of that, I am completely a pragmatist when it comes to ecosystem management, and my approach is informed by all these people I have talked to who have managed different landscapes. And that approach is that, yeah, certainly there are plants that are invasive, that are unpleasant, that disrupt your ecosystem in important ways, that make it hard for you to manage your livestock or whatever. You’re the apex predator. You get to choose. So that’s fine.

Just don’t become obsessed about it to the point that there’s some sort of weird historical brainworm about it to the point that you’ll literally upend ecological principles to uphold this ecosystem purity test. You’re not even managing it like it was managed then to try to get it back to a prairie or savannah setup. So it’s not really countercultural as it is nuanced, pragmatic, and sensical—not to toot my own horn.

Judd: So if green energy doesn’t address the climate change problem, if it simply offshores the costs, like digging up toxic minerals in Africa to create “clean” batteries, if all it does is make us feel good about ourselves, what about other types of alternative energy, like nuclear power or even futuristic, sci-fi types like fusion power?

Or are we to some extent just inevitably facing a low energy future? Because I’ve seen a lot of people react to your talk about a low energy future with absolute horror and an out-of-hand rejection. And it’s not just about a lack of fresh fruit imported into upstate New York in the winter. It’s about surviving an Arizona summer, or a Manitoba winter; it’s about heat exhaustion and freezing to death, about the energy necessary to run for hospitals and so forth.

After you answer that, I have another question mostly unrelated. Because I’ve been following your Twitter account fairly closely, I know another technology issue that you’ve been thinking a lot about is surrogacy. Would you talk about that a little, please?

Ashley: First on the low-energy future question, basically I’m just convinced that we have a finite amount of fossil fuels. We do have a hell of a lot of coal still, and I’m a little bit nervous about the potential of humans using all the coal that we have in the ground, and what that would do to the climate. I’m quite worried about that, actually. But there have been huge advances in extracting oil, and that indicates to me that the oil is harder to get, and increasingly so, and there is a point at which it costs more energy to get out a calorie of oil than it takes to use it, so that it will stop being economically viable.

Basically I think we are in a blip in human history where we’ve had access to this hyperabundant energy resource, and that means that there is going to come a major energy transformation to our society, whether that’s moving from oil to coal or whether it’s going towards renewables. Most renewables, as far as I’m concerned, don’t pass that net energy test, energy return on energy invested. But nuclear is another option.

It’s a super high-tech option. I’m completely open-minded about nuclear, but the main thing with nuclear, as with all these other alternatives besides coal, is that that means we would be a totally electrified society. And as of right now, we are not totally electrified. There’re a bunch of resources that go into running electricity, whether you put it in a battery or whether you put it in wires. And we are absolutely not building out the infrastructure anywhere near the speed we need to, if we were to have a totally electrified society as opposed to a liquid fuel society.

But one way or another, a major transition is coming. And kind of the question I’ve been entertaining as a young adult, the whole point of my podcast was to think through the big question, ‘are we in a collapsing civilization?’ ‘What have past collapses of complex societies looked like?’ And, ‘Is there any way to avoid the worst parts of collapse by being intentional and planning ahead, by knowing that we’re in a collapsing civilization?’

Well, I think that a lot of people who are drawn to Doomer Optimism are drawn for similar reasons. They see the writing on the wall and are trying to build out the skills and infrastructure necessary for a low-energy future. That would be actually a wonderful life. It actually is a wonderful life. You don’t have to wait for the low-energy future to have that life.

We had it in Uruguay. We had a passive solar water heater and a composting toilet, gray water garden. We had a well on the property. Our house was highly insulated. We heated with wood. There are even more efficient ways to heat with wood that we didn’t use. Then we grew a lot of our own food. We had chickens. We had cows. We have a big orchard, vineyard, olive trees.

There’s just a lot of infrastructure that can go into a really lovely life. This is what I was saying before. We have all these new varietals. And all this amazing low-tech technology, like solar-powered electric fencing for cattle, and a regenerative ag system that would make a low-energy future just absolutely wonderful and abundant. The problem is when you have a bunch of people with no skills and no willingness even to do a little bit of manual work, even though it would be good for them. But they will fight tooth and nail for their high-energy, high-tech world even if it’s collapsing and crumbling.

So the transition is really one of people being unwilling to give up “advances,” which are in fact really just a kind of life that actually makes a lot of people miserable. And so that’s kind of the upshot of the podcast: A lower energy life, one that’s more embedded in land and aware of resource use and active and engaged with the material world in terms of home economics and crafts and food production is actually a more lovely life anyways, you know? And so enjoy the collapse now and avoid the rush. This is a good thing to do whether that low-energy future is actually coming right around the corner or if it’s a few centuries out.

And then finally on the question of surrogacy—basically the question I have is, ‘do people think of access to technology as a kind of right no matter what the moral implications are?’ Something like surrogacy has a bunch of moral implications that have not at all been considered. And people think just because it exists that they have a right to use it.

I was going back and forth with people on twitter, either they are in same sex partnerships or they have fertility issues and their arguement is basically, ‘Well, surrogacy is my biological chance to have children, and therefore I deserve to rent a woman’s womb and to use her womb for my genetic material.’ And I just think, like, ‘Do you? I mean, are you entitled to do that? And why do you feel entitled to do that?’

It is just grossly under-theorized. And there’re a lot of downstream implications even of sperm donation.

And I know people look toward this assisted reproductive technology with the best of intentions, but like ‘Who is my dad?’ ‘Where do I come from?’ ‘Who do I look like?’ There are so many questions about familial bonds. And surrogacy is the most extreme scenario where it’s a totally unregulated consumer product.

So for example, there are people in Europe who were renting Ukrainian women’s wombs, and then when the Ukraine War started a lot of these babies were being left unclaimed because the people who ordered them weren’t able to access Ukraine. So the child becomes this consumer product who belongs to no one.

What really irks me is that just because this technology exists, people think, A) they’re entitled to use it, and B) that it’s a good thing. Because isn’t it better that this child exists instead of doesn’t exist? Well, there’s a baby sitting in a nursery in a war-torn zone unclaimed by either his gestational mother or his biological, and is that better? You know, is it better to exist in that framework than not exist? It’s not an easy question to answer.

So part of my orientation is about technology rightly used and rightly considered. And to do this we have to ask, what is a good life? And is a good life just hyper-tech AI, the fully automated future? And are we even taking a huge risk leaning into that future, considering the fact that we don’t really have a transitional fuel that could scale to the level that our society is at now? Why lean in so hard into that high-tech, high-energy life? You’re just going to crash even harder from those heights.

Judd: So your description of this sort of low energy future, ‘collapse now and avoid the rush,’ is fun. And yet you talk of nuclear energy, which does seem to be a source of abundant, cheap, clean, energy, even though it will be concentrated in the cities. That got me thinking about a book I read about a year ago, called Exogenesis. It was about a lot of things, but one of the main worldbuilding components was that the central civilization lived in one very large city of fifty-million people.

The people in this metro area lived under a techno-surveillance state, had very few children, and had imported a Chinese Social Credit system to monitor those who lived there. Meanwhile, they had access to these pleasure pods, spas and drones and instant meals and self-driving cars, all that while, outside the city, people had significantly more freedom but significantly less access to technology and luxury. You had to work with your hands, got cold in the winter, hot in the summer, &c. But there were people who, naturally enough, preferred to live out there if it meant escape from the techno-surveillance nonsense.

That’s a long way round to getting to this question: can you see a version of this play out in our world? Not a dystopia, but a real human mix of utopia and dystopia. A world in which most people don’t want to give up their Elon Musk fancy tech utopia but meanwhile those of us who feel confined by even our current level of techno-surveillance, those who want a more spiritual, physical, poetic earthbound existence will end up living on the outskirts with the (comparatively) low-energy future you describe. Is that what you see in the future?

And now the more I think about your response to the surrogacy question, the more I’m thinking that this is just the perfect example of all of these conversations we’ve been having in the abstract about alienation from nature and the Spreadsheet Brain. So I’m going to put some objections to you, and I want to know how you think them through.

You talked about your friend who was born of a sperm doner, whose siblings were all born of different men. Now it would be arguing in bad faith to say, ‘oh, so you want your friend to die?’ But while you’re not saying it would be better if she were dead, if the war orphans now alive just died, you do seem to be saying is that it may be better not to have in place a system which produces such lives. So the question might be phrased, ‘if you’re going to pick and choose in that way which lives are worthy to live, why are you against abortion?’ Because a common pro-choice argument is to say, ‘Well, what about the children of drug addicts?’ And the pro-life response to that has always been, ‘They’re still made in the Image of God.’ But a response to that could be, ‘Well, aren’t those born through IVF?’ ‘Why not artificial wombs?’

That’s the sort of line drawing we’ve also been getting at this entire conversation. Because if we don’t grant something like artificial wombs, the response might be, ‘Well, what principle do we rely upon when we use antibiotics?’ All these questions, you see, swirl around this idea of natural limits. Now as you might know (we both attend Mass) the Catholic stance is to allow those which assist a natural process in acting how it ought and to prohibit those which would interfere with proper functioning. And so that’s why the Church allows antibiotics but prohibits IVF, why she allows Viagra but prohibits vasectomies. That’s her line.

What’s yours?

I’m sorry this was so long. But it’s a large topic and a difficult one, but also a good one to end on for it seems to bring all our threads together.

Ashley: I’ve long talked about a kind of bifurcation or balkanization in our world. “Collapse now and avoid the rush” is a John Michael Greer quote, the title of a book. And yes, the best-case scenario is you’ve got this rugged or resilient, intrepid, savvy kind of warrior, who is facing the future despite all of the downsides because everything that is required for that future is available now. And a big portion of the people who listen to my podcast are already doing that. There’s already a subclass of people who have collapsed now.

Including us, I think, even though people might disagree, but spending a decade in South America and learning all the skills that we did, we are so resilient. We are so ready for whatever’s coming. We have so much information and knowledge about what would be needed in a collapse. Even if we needed to escape to the hinterlands to avoid dystopia, we absolutely would have no problem doing so. We have a place to go. We have the skills. We have everything necessary.

This is my coalition. I don’t know if we’re going to meme anyone else into joining us for their own sake in time. That’s like my big question. Can we convince those inside the dystopia to come outside of it, to prepare for an alternative to it in time? I don’t know, but I am going to damn well try. Like that’s my mission, that’s my vocation in life.

I think in terms of centuries. Like I am going to hopefully stave off some of the worst parts of the collapse of complex civilizations by having foresight, by planning, and by getting the word out. In the super high-tech world that we’re in, it’s easy to convince people. Like, ‘Hey do you want a life that’s good and meaningful and connected to nature in your community?’ ‘Do you want it in the work that you do?’ Then join our team! So that’s very easy. The hard part is like washing away the potential tech-utopia in a lot of people’s minds.

On the surrogacy question, fundamentally it’s a technology question. And I can understand why it’s hard to parse, but I think part of the reason it’s hard to parse is that there is no one, cut-and-dried answer for any of these questions for me, like abortion, IVF, sperm donation, surrogacy, antibiotics, C-sections, whatever. With any kind of technology, it’s all about having discernment on specific questions. And so I get a lot of pushback for being a Luddite, in the form of, ‘You’re using a phone’ or ‘You use antibiotics,’’, and I say, ‘would you rather go back to before them?’

I always head that off by saying, that this isn’t a zero or 100 situation. There are two poles here. One is a life that’s nasty, brutish, and short with no technology at all. But that’s impossible. Even isolated tribes have technology. The other end of the spectrum is turbo hyperdrive techno-optimism without any breaks or any governing principles or morality. And all I’m saying is that you’ve got to pull back.

I’m not even saying for sure surrogacy shouldn’t exist at all. Because I can imagine a situation in which a loving sister is willing to carry the baby of her sister who can’t have a baby so that she can have a child. And I would probably be in favor of that, especially if there were some exchange of milk and connection, you know, to the baby and its aunt, so it’s very close. I can see a situation.

I can see a situation with a sperm baby, but a lot of the children of sperm donation have said there should be limits on, for example, the number of families a sperm donor can donate to. Otherwise you get into weird situations of people being cousins and not knowing it or half-siblings. The important thing for me is to just highlight that there are major, major moral quandaries.

In the case of abortion, I’m not actually a hardcore pro-lifer. I think that there are cases where we should be able to have discernment and control over some extreme situations. We should have an upstream culture that’s healthier about procreation and not taking unnecessary risks for extramarital sex. But that’s what I’m saying, there just needs to be more moral discernment at every step in the process. Because the technology now unlocks so much behavior that was literally never possible before, we just need to be asking these questions, highlighting what the moral quandaries are, and then talking about them to help us make decisions as to how to navigate these different situations.

The same thing is true with GMO food or industrial agriculture or whatever other thing—lab meat. What is this technology? What would it do to enhance our freedom or restrict it? These things keep rolling out as if they’re morally neutral, and they’re just not.

Judd: When you talked about how it’s a question of discernment, you used a useful metaphor. You said that it’s not a zero or a hundred situation. What that reminded me of is the zeros and ones in binary computer code. And of course what you’re saying throughout this entire interview is that we must do away with this machine-based nonsense. Life should be more human.

So discernment, yes, but in my mind, the question that arises is ‘discernment as to what.’ I know these things are devilishly hard to articulate. But if I had to articulate one for myself, I’d say that the discernment I go through when wrestling with all my moral decisions is aimed towards a further participation in God, especially through the Tradition of literature and education, and, even more especially than that, in my role as husband and father.

What is yours? And do you think yours is generalizable, as in it might correct mine, show me a real Summum Bonum, or is yours particular to yourself?

Ashley: The answer to this question is the answer to all moral constructs. Like what are you driven toward and for what reason? I’m just going to sidestep it by recalling an exchange I had recently with a friend, History Courses on Twitter, Abe. He asked me the question, ‘of these three categories, what would you value the highest in the raising of your children?’ And the categories were intelligence, agency, or morality.

And I said, ‘Well, all these things are intertwined, they work with one another.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, obviously, but which would you value the most highly?’ And I said, ‘If I have to choose, it would be morality, because no matter how intelligent you are or how successful you are, you can use intelligence, success, agency toward evil ends if you don’t have a moral compass.’

First and foremost, your job as a parent is to cultivate that morality. What the morality is, is literally just the question of being a human. And it’s inaccessible in trite or short descriptions, so I wouldn’t even try to attempt that, but I think there are some basic principles. The Good and the True and the Beautiful. When I’m asking moral questions, I tend to think in terms of what are the extreme answers to this question and what lies between those and what’s the correct balance? That’s what I do. So for example, sleep training, on the one end of the extreme you have people who are super militant sleep trainers and they continue that kind of militancy through toddlerhood and early childhood, and it does cause attachment issues with their kids. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got people who are like super attachment, but then they’re also permissive throughout young and middle childhood, and that’s also disordered.

This is just really a constant way I think about it. Do we want a total world with zero antibiotics and zero tools? No. Do we want a world where everything is surrogacy and lab meat? No. There’s a discernment. There’s a middle ground. I make my moral calculations to try to integrate the best of both poles without accepting the dysfunction of either.

Judd: Thank you. And may we all do that. I think that’s the perfect place to end our interview, so I think the only thing left to ask is, if someone’s reading this, made it to the end, and is pumped, wants to go out into the world and DO, how might he get involved?

Ashley: I very often get the ‘how do I get involved’ question. And I’ll answer that in a couple of different ways. The first thing is that Doomer Optimism has moved on far beyond an interest only in ag, but instead toward a more holistic vision for finding meaning in life and more connection, more functional institutions and community building. So things like school or family life. I write a lot about connection to nature even in your little garden, about connection to local food and local food politics. So broadly I think of DO as not just regenerative agriculture, but regenerative cultures, economies, reshoring manufacturing, getting automation and surveillance and AI out of our lives.

I have a friend, Gord Magill who’s a trucker, and he talks about the surveillance state in the trucking industry. This is all part of a resistance to the machine. There’s resistance in school, resistance against ideology and resistance against treating children like numbers and not teaching to the test but instead thinking of them as whole people and really asking critical questions about what do we actually want to teach.

On the family and connection to children, the centering of family and family life, and how to navigate that as a modern woman without going to the extremes of GirlBoss or TradWife. There’s something in between there! For men, how to navigate that same dynamic as a husband and as a father? How much to be involved with your children? How much to be focused on providing? There’s a middle ground on all these culture war things. And nobody’s really talking about a sensible approach to any of them.

First, it’s just about finding what areas of your life you can enact a more meaningful, anti-machine approach. Then pursue that. Second, build solutions at scales that are appropriate for the problem that is presented. By that I mean this concept of subsidiarity, which asks, ‘Is this a question for my family, a question for my neighborhood, a question for my county, or my state, or the nation?

It goes back to discernment and building out institutions, I’m very much a fan of infiltrating local institutions. Show up in them. People gravitate toward leadership and a positive vision. And I have so much hope in that.

I’m seeing that on the ground in my local school right now. Just so many involved parents. It’s a Chicago public school. You would think from the internet that my kids would be going to school with gang members and at the mercy of being shot. But it’s quite the opposite. The school is amazing. It’s flourishing. The teachers are great. My kids are having a fantastic time. There’s a hugely involved set of parents who built out the entire athletic program, golf and basketball and volleyball and soccer. And there’re so many activities; there’s choir, orchestra, and we show up, we coach things, we get our kids involved.

And part of it is if you are a good and intentional family or person, get involved. We need warm bodies in civic life, in civic institutions, in church, in school, at school board meetings, you know? This is where we need our physical presence, the Doomer Optimists. And then on a more practical or I guess strategic note for Doomer Optimism, we’re thinking about turning this into something slightly more professional.

It’s not really a movement but more a kind of heading under which you might find people similar to you or people asking similar questions or seeking similar answers. And so we might find ways to involve people. Those could include professionalizing the podcast and inviting more people on and building out the network that way, writing more pieces on a centralized substack and publishing people who are thinking similar things and in particular areas.

Some ideas include hyping up local politicians who are kind of DO adjacent, and there are a lot of politicians who are coming up who are very much local-politics focused, very much on the same beat as we are. We could hype up projects, like we have a project on advancing regenerative ag in the Ohio River Valley. That’s a perfect DO project. And so hyping those up, getting people to go to their events, giving them the DO stamp of approval and our attention. And then other people who are in that area can meet those people.

It’s about building in your own life, in the areas you’re most interested in and most drawn to and where you can have the most impact. Not that it should be all Spreadsheet Brain. Just, at every point in your life, you should be asking, ‘How can I make a more anti-machine decision here?’ ‘How can I find a solution which gives connection and meaning and stewardship over community or nature?’ And then building out networks. And a loose network is actually an extremely powerful political tool for making change.

We’re seeing some of these effects. In this election result right now, which is cool and exciting, we have DO people who are one handshake away from the Vice President and one of the candidates who was floated for Ag Secretary, Thomas Massey. We’re apparently close to power now. Never would have thought that I would be closer to power via a Republican Presidency instead of a Democrat given what I was doing. But, you know, here we are. This is the world we’re in.

Judd: Now that we’ve talked about how people can get involved if they’re interested, if they’re interested in you and if they just want to gobble down another interview or podcast or article or what have you, what would you recommend?

Ashley: Oh, man, that’s such a tough question because there’s so many things. I’ll just list a couple things up the top of my head. My article, “The Case for Left Conservatism,” is a really good starting point. “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry, a poem, is really good. “September 1, 1939”, another poem, by W.H. Auden. Desert Solitaire by Ed Abby.

And then we have a few seminal Doomer Optimism episodes. The first episode with Peter Allen, and the one with me and James Pogue and Chris Mott is very good. There’s really so many it’s hard to even cut it down. John Michael Greer, all of his body of work; The Long Descent is a good one. Yeah, I think that’s probably good for now.

Judd: Then I think that about covers it, at least for now. Thank you so much for talking with me Ashley. I very much enjoyed the interview and learnt a lot. I expect others will as well.

Ashley: Thank you for the interview. I enjoyed thinking through all of these things and making connections I hadn’t necessarily made before.

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