Bioregional self provisioning
Bioregional self provisioning
a conversation with Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future
Eco-localism nerd alert!
In this podcast conversation we deflect eco-modernist criticisms of agrarian visions laid out in author Chris Smaje’s recent books “A Small Farm Future” and “Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.”
Specifically, we examine evidence for the claim that traditional/territorial food webs supply 70-80% of the nutrition people intake globally, and discuss what this means for the potential of small biodiverse farming to “feed the world.”
Reasons for dispute of this claim include that much food production in traditional local food webs is “invisibilized” to top-down technocrats using data collected of commodity crops produced for the industrial food chain. This is one of several blind spots we discuss that characterize elites’ and technocrats’ worldviews and partially explains why their prescriptions fail to deliver on promised sustainability and “equity” goals.
In this episode we ponder whether it’s worth it trying to persuade technocratic elites of their errors, or instead turn our attention and efforts to different natural constituencies better oriented to implementing diverse approaches to agrarian bioregionalism. We consider what barriers people may face to getting involved and how to overcome those barriers.
The whole conversation pivots on the notion of Bioregional Self-Provisioning as a method for securing resilience for affluent-but-fragile “developed” regions while alleviating ecosystem degradation and impoverishing exploitation on poor peripheral “underdeveloped” regions, facilitating their own self-provision from local resources.