The following is excerpted from a lengthy conversation in Shareable magazine between the author of a very influential ecotopian novel in the 70’s, Ecotopia from Ernst Callenbach, and Novella Carpenter, the author of a multiple award-winning current underground bestseller, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Interviewer is from JAS, an initiative to monitor and construct an alternative cooperative economy in the Bay Area.

The full article has a lot of contextual material about Ecotopia, and the utopian dreams of the seventies, as opposed to urban farming in a context of decline, as represented by Novella Carpenter’s efforts. We excerpt the discussions about urban farming, and some meditations on the impact of the internet.

Interview:

JAS: Here in the Bay Area there have been a million projects like Novella’s farm, where people are trying to create the world they want to exist in, in these little bubbles. They start urban farms like the one we’re sitting in now, build green homes, start neighborhood work groups, and so on. When you look back on the decades since Ecotopia was published, do you see those kinds of projects influencing the wider culture? Do you think those have been worthwhile?

EC: I try to look at everything biologically, including what human beings do. And you could apply the concept of succession to what’s going on now. The industrial era has laid waste, visibly or invisibly, to huge parts of our society. And in nature what happens when you disturb something, or when there’s a fire or something, first you get really quick-growing little plants that produce a lot of seeds and don’t last very long but they take up the ground; during that time, none of the bigger plants can come in. Then finally you get to the point where the land is hospitable again to whatever was the biggest vegetation there before.

So I think all these little start-ups and stuff—like we’re sitting in one here at the moment—you could say in a way that they’re demonstration projects and they’re very important.

NC: They’re experiments.

EC: Very important experiments. But they’re also the equivalent of what we often call weeds. They’re coming up in battered areas where the regular society doesn’t know what to do anymore and little by little people learn what works and what doesn’t. Like being a farmer in a normal, conventional sense. A lot of the stuff you try doesn’t work. I grew up among farmers and I have an immense respect for practical farmers who are—you can say they are ridiculously conservative but it’s not ridiculous. Their survival depends on being conservative and not doing too many dumb things. Or they’ll starve. So they are very cautious about doing new stuff but that’s the period we’re in now, where we have to try a lot of new stuff. And people do wonderful, wonderful things.

NC: I think farmers too are very conservative—I was thinking about this this morning when I was watering—for me, it’s not high-stakes, right? My lettuce crop fails or whatever and it doesn’t matter. I’m not dependent on this. But if you knew, “Okay, it’s up to me to grow all this food,” then you would have a sense of precariousness…you just know too much. You know how these things could fail. So I think there’s a real sense of the power of nature and the things that could go wrong. That’s why I can see how farmers, especially larger farmers, really want to control things and make sure that everything’s going to work out. Otherwise people are going to starve. It’s a big responsibility. And for us we’ve made it so rarified in the Bay Area—we’re so like…organic, whatever, and I think that’s great but at the same time it’s not—food doesn’t have that sort of survival thing anymore, it’s pure pleasure. So it’s really interesting to see how that plays out.

JAS: It seems to be that partially what’s happened since you were working on Ecotopia is we’ve developed this very bifurcated food system, with large-scale industrial farms on one side and a growing number of many small organic and urban farms on the other…

EC: Yes, the number of small farms has gone up a couple hundred thousand in the United States, and they’re real farms. It’s the best piece of news I’ve heard in a long while and these are not people having backyard gardens, these are farmers who are growing something or other—various things usually. Mixed farming is beginning to come back. And even the US Department of Agriculture—which is, God knows, no friend of the small farmer—did a study now I think 15 years ago, where they looked very carefully at mixed farming where you have animals producing manure as well as a variety of plant crops — and they found on 160 acres a farm family could make quite an ordinary decent living out there. This was big news to all the agricultural economists who were thinking along the lines you were talking about. Once the secretary of agriculture—under, was it Nixon, I guess?—Earl Butts, from Utah, said, “Get big or get out”—and that was the mantra that they’ve been living under until very recently. But maybe that’s beginning to give way.

Today, the context is really different because of the economy. As economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times argued, “Let’s face it, we’re in a depression.” It’s not just a recession that’s gonna roll by and everything’s gonna be okay again. This is really a new ball game and so everything — agriculture, urban planning, architecture, transportation, everything — is all going to have to be re-thought. I rather like the work of William Kunstler, who wrote the The Long Emergency. He’s a bit of a madman and in my opinion he collapses the time perspective far too much—he imagines things are going to happen a lot quicker than they probably will. Richard Heinberg [author of The Party’s Over, 2003, and Blackout, 2009, among other books] is also a marvelous, marvelous analyst. They’re both trying to figure out what happens when oil gets more expensive and when therefore doing practically everything gets more expensive.

NC: Yes. We had that experience last summer. Because I have a bio-diesel station and diesel prices were at $5/gallon and so was bio-diesel, and I realized that I was never going to drive anywhere. I would do some calculations, and I’d be like, “Let’s see I could go to East Oakland and go get some burritos” and then I’m like, “Wait, that’s gonna cost me $10 in fuel” — and so I wouldn’t! When it finally happens that we are paying the proper cost for oil, or transportation, people are just going to be staying at home a lot more.

EC: Yeah, localization—I mean, locavore is the first thing that has really gotten into the language, but it’s going to be local everything.

JAS: What do you say to the criticism that high gas prices disproportionally hits poor people or working class people?

EC: Well, it does hit poor people worse but so does everything. Every damn thing that society does hits poor people worse than not-so-poor people—much less the rich. It’s just the way our society’s set up. We’re not probably going to have a genuine revolution of any kind in the foreseeable future so we have to try. In Europe what they do with carbon tax proceeds is to decrease taxes on wages so it’s net-revenue-neutral, as they call it. That means that it’s not raising or lowering the general tax rate but it’s taking some of the burden off working people and putting that burden on the people who use a lot of fuel, mostly. By contrast, these cap and trade systems are very easy to evade. They’re highly political, and in our system which is totally corrupt it would just be a farce, I think. But a carbon tax, you can see the oil coming out of the ground and going in the ships and you can tax it.

NC: Wildly unpopular, though.

EC: It is, and it’ll never happen in our current political system.

NC: This is what is interesting about me in terms of doing urban agriculture, which is kind of hard. People have become so used to everything automated and delivered to them. It’s not even about knowing where your food comes from, it’s like knowing the pain in your back when you’re harvesting stuff. These kinds of things, people are gonna resist because our tendency is to avoid pain at any cost and so these are going to be impossible things to—unless there’s major pressure.

EC: I used to be a lot more optimistic about the human species. We’re reasonably smart compared to the squirrels in my back yard or something—well, I’m not all together positive about that: squirrels are smarter than people think. Random foraging has great advantages, it turns out. But human beings react to real pressures. The mule may have to be hit on the head with the 2×4 but there are lots of 2x4s out there aiming in our direction, so all these people who are so spoiled are going to have to buckle down. It’s easy for me to say that because I grew up in a really, really poor community where the kids got one pair of shoes in the fall and they went through the school year and in the summer they went barefoot because by then their feet had grown bigger and they couldn’t wear the old shoes—and besides they were probably worn out.

But nowadays—you know, like my grandchildren, they have no conception of going without fundamental things. Even quite poor people are living fairly well in this society. And there are many wonderful things about that.”

From the second part of the interview:

“JAS: Novella, do you see your farm having impact on the surrounding community here in Oakland?

NC: I think there’s an impact. I think it’s the same thing as what Ernest was describing, running a flag up on the pole — it’s a positive thing that people can see, and say, “Hey, it could be like this.” You know, there’s an empty lot on every street corner. Every block has an empty lot. And it’s not—by no means do I feed everybody here, but people do come by and harvest food. And I feel like it just gives people a different option. It gives people a sense of hope or maybe this idea of the impossible being possible. Because I think people often think, “Oh, everything’s just so dirty in the city.” There’s this whole loathing of cities that goes on, especially in America, because we’re a rural people, ultimately, in our heritage, and so we have built this ideal of what it means to live out in the country: the fresh air, the trees—you know, no bad things are there. I wanted to prove that you could do something in a city that was considered to be a rural activity like raising goats or ducks or growing food.

JAS: Why is that important to you?

NC: It’s important to me because it’s important to be self-sufficient and to be able to understand your life processes. Understanding where everything comes from. Understanding what is nourishing you. I just like to know where that stuff comes from. And I’m not well off, so I need to grow that stuff myself instead of having a farmer do it by proxy and paying them well to do it. Which is what most people in Berkeley and the Bay Area tend to do. So it was a move toward better understanding and then better eating. And you know, I’m not the sort of person that can just work in an office. I need to have contact with the earth and be around plants and animals, I just have that need. I think a lot of people do, they just don’t know. And maybe that’s why they have pets, that’s why they have cats and dogs, because they wanna have some kind of connection to—

JAS: Ernest, the biggest change we’ve seen since you first published Ecotopia is the emergence and growth of the Internet. How do you view that, through the Ecotopian lens?

EC: Well, you know, the funny thing is, being from an agricultural community background and also of my generation, I sometimes look at technological things and think, “Actually, this is no big fucking deal.” I would not venture to say that about the Internet, but I actually think that the cell phone is probably the most transformative technology, more than computers and the Internet because it affects how people do – or, more importantly, do not – relate to each other physically, as organisms.

The human species presumably evolved over a very, very long period to live in tribal-sized groups and forage and survive. We’re way, way, way, way past that, we’d like to think — but in a certain way, we’re not. I think it’s astounding that you can go into your computer and Google more or less anything.

For example, I’m looking for a faucet handle that turns down, like these things that you use in the kitchen, so if your hands are dirty or covered with chicken guts or something you don’t want to touch the faucet, you wanna use the back of your hand. So I had ones that turn up, but then they interfere with the faucet spout dripping down so it turns the faucet off. So I’m looking for a handle like that, that turns down. This morning I got on the Internet and I googled “faucets” and then “Chicago faucets,” which is what I have in my kitchen, and did not find one but now I am assured that they don’t exist. Whereas previously I would have had to burn up gas going to a plumbing supply place or something like that.

This is all wonderful and it does indeed create a kind of a giant interconnected brain where people who know things—I’m very impressed, for example, by Wikipedia. When Wikipedia started out I said “What?! You’re gonna let people just put stuff up there? It’s all gonna be garbage!” In fact, a bunch of librarians studied it, comparing to the Britannica, and its error rate is about the same as the Britannica’s.

There’s prankery, I’m sure, and Wikipedia is apparently having to crack down and have more people watch stuff that’s being posted or changed. But it’s kind of a miracle that so many people have been able to concoct this thing.

I am not so happy about the idea of the gigantic bandwidths and the gigantic energy consumption that goes on in server farms. People think it’s a low-energy industry. Not so. It’s not a low-energy industry. The Ecotopians had picture phones and fast trains designed to move bodies from point A to point B as efficiently as possible — if it couldn’t be done efficiently, the Ecotopians would not do it at all. In moving these vast video files and things like that around, maybe we’re really going to have to cut back on it in some way.

NC: But wait, go back to what you meant by “no big fucking deal.” What would farmers think is “no big fucking deal” about technology?

EC: Well, there are certain ways in which the Internet functions as a kind of bulletin board. The second-hand book trade now is enormously augmented compared to what it used to be, for instance. If I was a farmer and seeking a market for my turnips, it would be very handy to be able to get more market transparency by using the Internet, and I believe that’s happening to some extent, although there’s still these huge combines—Archer-Daniels-Midland and so on, at least for commodity crops. But where people can get a lot of up-to-date information that’s reasonably reliable, it can hardly do them harm.

At least leaving aside the question of mental harm. Because you can have too much information. I have a friend who uses an acronym in conversation with his very articulate daughter. They say to each other “TMI,” which means you’re giving me too much information, I can’t digest it, I can’t use it, it’s blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. It’s like that with the Internet.

NC: But they mean “too much information” like “overload,” whereas usually TMI means like, “Uh, I didn’t wanna know that detail about your sex life, Dad.”

JAS: Both meanings can apply to the Internet! Too much data, and too much information about people’s sex lives.

EC: It’s very hard to know whether we are suffocating in a mass of information that un-equips people for dealing with actual issues. Ted Roszak, my friend that I was mentioning before, wrote a book called The Cult of Information in which he distinguishes between things that are useful hypotheses or proposals or things that might be used to structure some kind of activity or whatever, and data which is just data — it just lies there. Data is inert, basically. And the human mind can get overwhelmed by data. I spend maybe an hour a day on the computer and I feel overwhelmed by data and I know there are people who spend four or five, six hours a day…”