Words&Dirt

“This relationship between power decentralization and successful climate action points to how the planning required by this moment differs markedly from the more centralized versions of the past.  There is a reason, after all, why it was so easy for the right to vilify state enterprises and national planning: many state-owned companies were bureaucratic, cumbersome, and unresponsive; the five-year plans cooked up under state socialist governments were indeed top-town and remote, utterly disconnected from local needs and experiences, just as the plans issued by the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee are today.

The climate planning we need is of a different sort entirely.  There is a clear and essential role for national plans and policies––to set overall emission targets that keep each country safely within its carbon budget, and to introduce policies like the feed-in tariffs employed in Germany, Ontario, and elsewhere, that make renewable energy affordable.  Some programs, like national energy grids and effective rail services, must be planned, at least in part, at the national level.  But if these transitions are to happen as quickly as required, then the best way to win widespread buy-in is for the actual implementation of a great many of the plans to be as decentralized as possible.  Communities should be given new tools and powers to design the methods that work best for them––much as worker-run co-ops have the capacity to play a huge role in an industrial transformation.  And what is true for energy and manufacturing can be true for many other sectors: transit systems accountable to their riders, water systems overseen by their users, neighborhoods planned democratically by their residents, and so on.

Most critically, farming––a major source of greenhouse gas emissions––can also become an expanded sector of decentralized self-sufficiency and poverty reduction, as well as a key tool for emission reduction.  Currently, much of the debate about agriculture and climate change focuses on contrasting the pros and cons of industrial agriculture versus local and organic farming, with one side emphasizing higher yields and the other emphasizing lower chemical inputs and often (though not always) short supply lines.  Coming up through the middle is ‘agroecology,” a less understood practice in which small-scale farmers use sustainable methods based on a combination of modern science and local knowledge.

Based on the principle that farming should maximize species diversity and enhance natural systems of soil protection and pest control, agroecology looks different wherever its holistic techniques are practiced.  But a report in National Geographic provides a helpful overview of how these principles translate in a few different contexts: the integration of ‘trees and shrubs into crop and livestock fields; solar-powered drip irrigation, which delivers water direction to plant roots; intercropping, which involves planting two or more crops near each other to maximize the use of light, water, and nutrients; and the use of green manures, which are quick-growing plants that help prevent erosion and replace nutrients in the soil.’

These methods and many others maintain healthy soil while producing nutritious food––more than industrial agriculture does, per unit area––and limit the need for farmers to buy expensive products like chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and patented seeds.  But many farmers who have long used these methods have realized that they also have a triple climate benefit: they sequester carbon in the soil, avoid fossil-fuel fertilizers, and often use less carbon for transportation to market, in addition to better withstanding extreme weather and other climate impacts.  And communities that can feed themselves are far less vulnerable to price shocks within the broader globalized food system.  Which is why La Lia Campesina, a global network of small farmers with 200 million members, often declares, ‘Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.’ Or ‘small farmers cool the planet.’”

––This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, pg. 133-4