“Most early measures were human in scale. One sees this logic at work in such surviving expressions as a “stone’s throw” or “within earshot” for distances and a “cartload,” a “basketful,” or a “handful” for volume. Given that the size of a cart or basket might vary from place to place… these units of measurement varied geographically and temporally.” - James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

Welcome to another Field Note, a short reflection on something interesting that I have read recently. If you would only like to receive my essays, please feel free to unsubscribe from Field Notes, whilst keeping a subscription to Over the Field.

James C. Scott’s magnum opus, Seeing Like a State is a truly phenomenal read and is a book I am keen to do a reading group on at some point. It is one of those “few and far between” books that all agrarians ought to be familiar with for Scott sheds a perceptive light on why traditional societies and agrarian lands have suffered under the influence of high-modernity, and also what we need to be on guard against in the future if we are to restore and protect what remains of the agrarian life.

In his first chapter which is all about ways of seeing, reading, and managing nature, Scott discusses an integral feature of agrarian societies that many of us overlook or dismiss as mundane: the importance of units of measurement. Specifically, Scott explores how most of the units of measurement that peasants and agrarians in traditional societies used were both highly localised and imprecise/unfixed. Needless to say, this suited locals just fine, but caused no end of frustration to centralised states, their leaders, and their bureaucrats…

Read more

Incomers to a community do not always arrive with the best of intentions. Those who come with beguiling smooth talk (and smart suits and clipboards) are the ones to watch out for above all else. There are at least two harmful attitudes they may secretly possess which will, given time, cause significant damage to the health, beauty, conviviality, and sustainability of the new place they supposedly “root” themselves too.

Firstly, there are those who upon arrival make it known that they wish to impose their own ideals, and force their own forms of change, onto the community — such as those who wish to upend what they perceive to be archaic traditions, or those who bring in new and unwanted forms of industry which outcompete rooted local family businesses. Secondly, there are those who come in to extract as much profit and goodness as they can from the community in as short a space of time as possible, irrespective of the impacts to the place and its people. It is this second group of incomers that Wendell Berry warns us of in his essay Local Economies to Save the Land and its People.

Read more

I am currently working my way through Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’ work More and More and More. It bills itself as an all-consuming history of energy and from what I can see, it is going to be a fairly revolutionary read in terms of current debates around energy sustainability and resource use. There is one term, much used by techno-futurists and sustainability think tanks and one which many politicians and techno-positivists (as well as a great number of environmental NGOs) are putting their hopes in, that Fressoz is going for the jugular of. And that is energy transition.

Essentially, the theory of energy transition states that more efficient and cleaner forms of energy replace and make obsolete inefficient and dirty forms, an example of Schumpeterian ‘Creative Destruction’. Thus, coal is said to have replaced wood, gas replaced coal, and renewables will replace fossil fuels. In this way, the climate crisis will be solved without substantial changes to our energy hungry lifestyles. Or so the theory goes…

In just his introduction alone Fressoz blows this theory out of the water.1 He argues when proponents speak of and advocate for energy transitions, a statistical sleight of hand has been deployed. Advocates have relied on relative use rather than absolute use (as seen by the figures below). As an example, in relative terms, yes, it is true burning wood for fuel has, by and large, been replaced by cleaner more efficient forms of energy. But when considered in absolute terms, we are globally still burning as much wood today as we did back in the 1850s and the volumes of wood that we use for other industrial purposes far surpass anything we have seen throughout history. The forests have not been saved by an energy transition — rather they are under more intense pressure than ever before.

This all matters. Greatly. When you begin to look for it, you will find the promise of energy transitions are repeated by politicians and think tanks the world over. Policy decisions, innovation, and investment are all being thrown at trying to make what has never been a reality — and what will never be a reality — a reality. This is can only be described as embarking down a dead-end street. With every yard further that we run down this road we lose precious time and resources that could be used transitioning to a genuinely sustainable future (which will depend on encouraging our societies to actually use fewer resources in absolute terms). Journeying back from this dead end street will be a painful and costly experience, especially when we realise all we have lost whilst chasing after the pipe dream. Better, then, that we do not travel down in the first place.

Share

Tip jar

Key terms: Energy Transition, Absolute and Relative Resource Use, Creative Destruction.

Key takeaway: Energy transitions are a fallacy and a costly dead-end street.

Book: Jean-Baptise Fressoz, (2024) More and More and More, Penguin.

Subscribe now