The Shape of Things to Come (on this humble blog)

Despite the schizophrenic subheading of my blog, I do in fact intend for this outlet to have a fundamental and integrated theme, though it may not be present in all of my posts. Observations on fatherhood or secondary education or the evolution of one's emotions over time, all of which are stored somewhere in my brain and will someday make their way to the blog, may have little to do with the theme, but writings on agriculture, gardening, food preservation, work, and other topics certainly do. This theme, to sum it up in a single though inadequate word, is sustainability, by which I mean not only sustainable agriculture or sustainable development but societal sustainability in the largest sense -- the kind discussed at great length in works such as Jared Diamond's Collapse (another good review here) and Joseph Tainter's superior (here's a brief discussion why) but underacknowledged The Collapse of Complex Societies. Indeed, a truly sustainable agriculture (which is to say, not the mere existence of a handful of ecological farms across the country, but an entire landscape of sustainable farming) requires a sustainable society in order to flourish, just as a truly sustainable society rests most fundamentally on a sustainable agriculture.


Thankfully that's as much as I need to say in order to demonstrate why this is such a crucial topic, because my friend Marty over at 'Plants Are The Real Capitalists' has already accomplished this with more lucidity and brio than I could have managed. Read his post if you want the full justification for why a project such as his and mine matters (and I'm stretching the meaning of the word 'project' in applying it to such a meager output to date). What I wanted to say in this post is far more prosaic.


An awful lot of ink has been spilled writing about sustainability -- what it means, what are its main tenets, the different forms of sustainability, etc. It is certainly a positive thing that the word and the concept have gone from fringe to mainstream in only 20-odd years, but one result of all that ink is that there is little consensus on what sustainability stands for, and even less on how we would actually go about achieving it. And all the time, more and more ink keeps getting spilled (here's a good example). Yet I would contend, and I hope to show via this blog, that sustainability does not have to be so complex after all -- that it essentially comes down to a discrete number of ideas or, if you like, principles. What I have found over the years as I have given a lot of thought to sustainability and its connection with agriculture is that no matter how many different angles I take on the topic, no matter how many different tangents I run off on, no matter how many different facets of sustainability are brought to my attention, they always link back to a set of core concepts. Oftentimes an idea will strike me and stick with me -- an idea perhaps worthy of being blogged -- and as often as not I realize later that the idea basically "reduces to" one of these core sustainability principles. And it is my belief that these concepts can essentially be mapped out with a series of essays, each one concentrating on a different principle of sustainability and the sum total comprising the full-fledged depiction of what sustainability is, why it's important, and why it is basically synonymous with what Marty and others have called "a new agrarianism." So, as if the subheading of my blog were not overambitious enough, my intent over the life of this blog is to be that mapmaker -- to lay out my axioms of sustainability and agrarianism through a series of essays. This will seem especially laughable when considering the tiny handful of people who might actually read the blog (I believe I've shared it with four individuals to date), but that's not really the point. If an idea has intrinsic worth then it doesn't matter how many people come into contact with it -- its worth remains. And there is no intellectual idea more worthy of our attention at this point in the history of our species than how we will sustain ourselves in the immediate and not-so-immediate future. First and foremost we have to feed ourselves. But I'll get to that later . . . . .