Paul Feather, Author at ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Stories We Tell About Food & Regenerative Farming

Animist farmer & writer Paul Feather reviews the book Six Inches of Soil and finds that progressive stories about regenerative farming could better integrate their roots in Indigenous practices of reciprocity and respect and tap the deeper implications of radical perspectives.

2,900 words: approx reading time = 11.5 minutes

“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” – Paul Harvey (1978) U.S. radio broadcaster

The stories that we tell each other, the stories that we were told perhaps by teachers or parents when we were young, those that we tell not simply in words—though words are very much a part of it, and I return to words in a moment—but that we enact with our choices and continue telling as they were told to us: these stories are the meat and potatoes of culture.

As I write this, my impatient daughter leans over to me and whispers that she is hungry. She speaks softly so as not to interrupt her mother’s conversation with two neighbors about these stories we tell and how we might gather over food one day soon to retell them together. Out of respect for this conversation, or simply because she judges me more likely to stop what I am doing—to stop typing these words—my daughter interrupts me instead of these others to tell me that she is hungry.

Eat another cantaloupe, I tell her. There are leftover potatoes in the skillet on the stove. You made bread at school today, and there is some left. Go eat it.

And we each will have our stories about this. I think to myself that she is bored more than hungry, but I don’t know what her stories are. Maybe that I am boring, or that someone should have made dinner, or that eggs are easy to make but she is tired of eggs.

Every meal has a story.

The stories we all tell about food are bound up with other stories: sometimes with stories about how we gather in community to cook it or eat it or grow it, or about the meaning of the soil and the Earth. They’re existential. They influence how we all act.

Regenerative farming: Showing an image of soil from 'Six Inches of Soil' — From Six Inches of Soil (2024)

Our food is globalized, so now our stories about food are further bound up with other stories about geopolitics and climate and war and just about everything else. It’s gotten rather complicated.

Social movements, scholars, and corporate or government bodies have been trying to unravel this complication and to converge on a viable global story about food, and the collective story has grown to encompass billions of words worth of books, academic papers and all the rest; but anyone with a lick of sense can tell that we haven’t really got it figured out just yet.

So writing about food is a tricky business.

Six Inches of Soil

Over the last few days, I’ve been reviewing Six Inches of Soil, a book accompanied by a documentary of the same name (which I did not watch) that describes the English movement for regenerative agriculture (RA).

The book starts off by introducing itself as a continuation of the documentary project and then the first three chapters establish the background for a conversation about regenerative farming.

Regenerative farming: Showing the cover of the book, 'Six Inches of Soil' (2024) — Six Inches of Soil

The first chapter summarizes the Green Revolution with a more-or-less mainstream analysis presenting it as “a miracle that created a disaster.” Some readers might object to this analysis and argue that the Green Revolution wasn’t as miraculous as it’s sometimes made out to be, since small family farms have always been more productive than industrial corporate operations. In her 2016 book Who Really Feeds the World, Vandana Shiva points out that small family farms—most less than 2 ha in size—produce 70% of the world’s food while being relegated to less than 25% of the farmland [1]. But Six Inches of Soil sticks to the mainstream narrative here about the miraculous productivity of industrial agriculture, and so that’s uncontroversial in a sense. In any case, every legitimate analysis agrees that whatever the initial value of industrial agriculture, it has made a very big mess.

The second and third chapters attempt to define regenerative agriculture and lay out the soil science behind it. Defining RA is a bit tricky: the billions of words of story about food is sometimes vague on distinctions between regenerative and other frameworks like organic, permaculture, agroecological, conventional, etc. Six Inches of Soil presents RA as a methodology that conforms to certain principles and practices intended primarily to increase soil health—which mostly means incorporating organic material, sequestering carbon, and increasing biodiversity—all good things.

It is a problem that Six Inches of Soil presents ecological farming as an outgrowth of the Green Revolution. The book’s claim that regenerative farming paradigms are a response to the destruction caused by chemical industrial agriculture is completely false. [2] & [3]

Regenerative farming has been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous people all over the world, and while the book mentions that European scientists began to think about organic farming after studying Indigenous growing methods, its failure to meaningfully and consistently acknowledge the origin of regenerative agriculture in Indigenous thought and practice as well as Indigenous people’s continued contributions to the movement will have implications for later chapters.

Case studies in regenerative farming

The middle portion of the book describes three different regenerative farms. The first is an 800-acre commodity grain operation that has brought sheep into their fields to build fertility and transitioned away from plowing in favor of less impactful cultivation methods. The second is a small start-up market garden that also integrates sheep for fertility and tills only minimally with hand tools. The final case study is a rotationally grazed cattle operation that experiments with silvopasture.

The case studies give the book a more grounded center and—along with the dialogical style arising from the book’s origin as a documentary film—make this a relatively easy read in spite of the complex topic.

Showing 'Principles of Regenerative Agriculture', from Six Inches of Soil (2024) — The principles of regenerative agriculture presented here in ‘Six Inches of Soil’ are strictly material and omit socio-cultural aspects of RA such as reciprocity, the sacred, or human rights.

All of the case studies present regenerative farming as bit of a struggle—though a rewarding one—and none of the operations are exceptionally profitable. Indeed, none of the featured farms pay their operators a living wage. These growers seem to be motivated mainly by a passion for their work and a sense that they are contributing to a positive social and environmental movement.

What does regenerative farming regenerate?

The final two chapters of the book present first a more spiritual dimension of regenerative agriculture and then a view of the future. These chapters taken together—along with several interludes sprinkled between the chapters—illustrate a fundamental tension within the RA movement. I perceive this as a tension between a mainstream, progressive, modern paradigm and a smaller more radical current that finds in agroecology far deeper implications about cosmology, epistemology, or spirituality. (In full transparency I am firmly committed to the more radical interpretation.) Somewhere in between, we might discern a dialogue that promotes relatively radical restructuring of our economic and social value systems, but does not find modernity to be completely bankrupt and would attempt to evade an epistemological crisis.

The book as a whole maintains a very progressive—and I would argue mainstream—synthesis of regenerative agriculture as a strategy to mitigate climate change. The book promotes a theory of change in which consumer choices and movement-building put pressure on governments and corporations to enact better policy. Most of the interludes and much of the final chapter offer policy suggestions or regulatory strategies that would support a healthier food economy. Progressive readers will be very much at home with all of this, while readers less enamored with progressive politics may be underwhelmed by these portions of the book.

I judge that the mainstream progressivity of the book as a whole arises from viewing RA as a response to the Green Revolution and from failure to acknowledge that Indigenous people have been doing regenerative agriculture for thousands of years and continue to do it in many places.

A 2023 article exploring anti-colonial definitions for regenerative agriculture finds that neglecting the paradigm’s Indigenous origins results in over-emphasis of its biophysical dimensions and tends to omit socio-cultural aspects that are critical to the movement’s success in mitigating global catastrophe. The authors suggest an anti-colonial definition for RA that foregrounds these socio-cultural aspects by making them a container for the biophysical farming practices:

A way of farming comprised of entangled values and practices, and founded in Indigenous principles of loving-caring for the Earth. This approach to farming values 1) reciprocity, 2) respect, 3) collective (human and non-human) wellbeing, 4) knowledge co-creation, 5) (re)localization, and it is often practiced through some combination of 1) minimizing soil disturbance, 2) maintaining vegetative soil cover, 3) maximizing diversity, 4) integrating livestock, and 5) minimizing synthetic agrichemicals. [3]

When we abstract regenerative agriculture away from its origins and away from this broader cultural container of reciprocity and respect, when we pay attention only to its biophysical dimensions, what we end up with will not address the roots of the global environmental crisis. Choices enacted from this narrower interpretation of RA will likely perpetuate environmental crisis.

On spirit

Chapter seven is about the more spiritual side of agroecology.

Chapter seven brings a deeper ecological perspective to the book by gesturing toward the unfathomable microbiological complexity in the soil popularized by scientists like Anne Biklé or Martin Sheldrake; more radical perspectives such as Vandana Shiva’s statement that our sense of self could or should arise from having our hands in the soil; and by including several poignant observations from contributors like Satish Kumar, who observes,

In our modern mechanistic world view we only recognise things which can be measured. What cannot be measured does not exist. I think this worldview needs to change.

Satish Kumar. From Six Inches of Soil (2024).

This chapter seems intended to address the deeper cultural implications of agroecology—and it more or less does—but there is a difference between including a chapter about something and making that something a container for the entire book.

The book has 22 contributors, and for some of them it seems that the movement is mostly about moving carbon from the atmosphere into the soil so that it better delivers ecosystem services and mitigates global warming. This is entirely consistent with a modern mechanical worldview, does not require a deep cultural shift toward values of reciprocity and respect, and according to this interpretation a farm growing sugar for Coca-Cola on land stolen from Cambodian peasant communities could be regenerative if percent carbon in the soil is going up. [4]

Some contributors like Satish Kumar and Dee Woods do consistently foreground deeper epistemological and cultural issues, but the book as a whole does not.

Something missing

Sitting here now and returning to wrap up this review after letting it simmer overnight, I am again writing between interruptions from my daughter about the food we will eat. She is neither bored nor hungry today. She is chatting with me while cutting up pears and apples and roasting them as an after-dinner treat for company visiting this evening—a service she proposed as an exchange if I would boil potatoes for dinner, and to which I readily agreed.

And so today as every day we enact our stories about our food, and inside of this story where my daughter is cutting up pears I will try to cut to the center of my thoughts with these awkward words and to have time left over to boil the potatoes before the guests come.

Regenerative farming: Showing an image from 'Six Inches of Soil' — From Six Inches of Soil (2024).

There is a sense that however many billions of words we have written, there remains something missing from our stories about regenerative agriculture. A 2022 literature review comparing agroecology and RA frameworks explores whether politics are the thing that is missing:

One aspect of agroecology that does not always fit comfortably in the realm of regenerative agriculture is political activism, or the place and emphasis that the “social” dimension takes in the definition of the social-ecological system. This is perhaps one of the reasons why agroecology is more closely associated with peasant movements, for whom claims on rights and access to natural resources are urgent, while regenerative agriculture is an approach increasingly—but not exclusively—also adopted by commercial, often large-scale farmers or external investors less concerned with natural resource access or food sovereignty issues. [5]

The mainstream trend in the RA movement does actually promote political activism, but I think it somehow remains apolitical in the sense that it’s progressive rather than radical.

To the extent that an ecological worldview finds our disconnection from the land rooted in deep cultural dysfunctions, and to the extent that progressive politics fail to address those dysfunctions, I wonder if the mainstream current within RA might be agroecology without the ecology?

Whatever framework we use, if it isn’t held within a cultural container of reciprocity and respect, it is without a soul.

Six Inches of Soil could more naturally address these deeper dysfunctions if it better acknowledged agroecology’s roots in Indigenous farming practices and the cooption of those practices by Western academics and scientists who adopted “regenerative” methods without acknowledging the central values of the cultures who invented them and who, in coopting these methods, failed to perceive that regenerative values are integral to the methods themselves.

But these are fraught and thorny issues, and perhaps it isn’t reasonable to expect this book to adequately address the deep dysfunctions of our culture. If portions of Six Inches of Soil fall short here, it does also clearly advocate that consumers get their hands in the dirt and visit a farm—that we all build better relationships with growers and make some connection to the soil, and that we make opportunities for children to do the same. If the book is effective in that advocacy—if people read it and then tear up their front yards to plant a garden with their children, or even if they grow a bit of kale in a pot on the patio—then I think it is a successful project and I am grateful for it.

References

[1] For data to support this claim, see Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland (2014), published by GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

[2] Six Inches of Soil p25: “There have been a series of ecologically or biologically based farming systems that have responded to the roll out of industrial farming. The first response was biodynamic farming, and then came organic farming in the late 1930s. Permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology arrived during the 1970s, and then finally, we have regenerative agriculture.” See also the chart on p26.

[3] Origins of regenerative paradigms in Indigenous agriculture are well documented, e.g. Sands, B., Machado, M.R., White, A. et al. Moving towards an anti-colonial definition for regenerative agriculture. Agric Hum Values (2023).

[4] This is just one example where this sort of claim gets made, e.g. ‘Nature-based solutions’: Land grabs in nature’s name (2022), published by PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP), one of five regional centres of Pesticide Action Network, a global network dedicated to the elimination of harm upon humans and the environment by pesticide use, and to the promotion of biodiversity-based ecological agriculture. Six Inches of Soil does not make explicit claims that projects associated with clear human rights violations are regenerative, but neither does it consistently and unambiguously clarify that they are not.

[5] Tittonell, P et al. Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics? (2022). For another review on the contestation of these terms, see Giraldo, F and Rosset P, Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements (2017).

Find more

Six Inches of Soil: How to heal our soils, ourselves and our communities through regenerative farming ed. Molly Foster, Priya Kalia & Jeremy Toynbee (2024) is published by 5m books. Contributors: Mike Berners-Lee, Matt Chatfield, Henry Dimbleby, Adrienne Gordon, Vicki Hird, Anna Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Hannah Jones, Satish Kumar, Tim Lang, Claire Mackenzie, Nicole Masters, Josiah Meldrum, Lucy Michaels, Emma Mills, James Murray-White, Marina O’Connell , John Pawsey, Tom Pearson, Colin Ramsay, Nic Renison, Lizzie Sagoo, Ben Thomas, Ian Wilkinson & Dee Woods. The book consists of seven chapters and six ‘interludes’:

Chapter 1: It’s a miracle, but that miracle has created a disaster
Chapter 2: Regenerative farming, what is it?
Interlude I: Are we using our farmed land wisely?
Chapter 3: The science of soil
Interlude II: Regulation, greenwashing and co-option
Chapter 4: Regenerative mixed farm: Pig Pink Farm, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire
Interlude III: Subsidies, Brexit and trade
Chapter 5: Organic market garden: Sweetpea, Caxton, Cambridgeshire
Interlude IV: Food security and UK self-sufficiency
Chapter 6: Pasture-fed beef: Treveddoe, Bodmin, Cornwall
Interlude V: Applying agroforestry in mixed regenerative farming
Chapter 7: Soil as soul
Interlude VI: Enterprise stacking
Chapter CHAPTER 8: How do we build a sustainable future for food and farming?
Epilogue – Act now

In parallel to the book, the documentary film Six Inches of Soil, directed by Colin Ramsay, tells the story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food. The film website includes additional reading and resources, including an impact campaign.

In his previous ClimateCultures post, Dystopian Farming: an Inquiry, Paul introduces ‘dystopian farming’ as resistance as well as sustenance and a search for joy and meaning that makes our dire times tolerable: the potential for liberation. And in Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate, he seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.

Paul Feather

An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.

Dystopian Farming: An Inquiry

For animist farmer and author Paul Feather, 2024 brings a creative inquiry into ‘dystopian farming’ as resistance as well as sustenance, and a search for joy and meaning that makes our dire times tolerable: the potential for liberation.

1,100 words: estimated reading time = 4 minutes

I have been farming for twenty years, and I’ve had some success in growing food. Enough success that people ask me lots of questions about it, and that I have several hundred pounds of sweet potatoes, yacón, pumpkins, and potatoes stacked in crates in the cellar alongside shelves full of canned tomatoes, pears, and pickled everything. Enough that I don’t feel overworked in producing all of this. I have been farming for twenty years, yet I still don’t feel like I know how to do it — even less do I know how to talk about it or how to answer your questions about farming.

Farming dystopia. Showing Full Life Farm in the lower piedmont of the Appalachian mountains. — Farming dystopia: Full Life Farm in the lower piedmont of the Appalachian mountains. Photograph: Terra Currie © 2023

Whether I have answers or not, people continue to ask how my farm works. So, in pursuit of these answers that I don’t yet have, in 2024 I will make an inquiry into what I do. I shall call it ‘Farming Dystopia’, because I feel that dystopia best describes our cultural and ecological context. I resonate with the words of Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte who points out that “some indigenous peoples already inhabit what [their] ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future” in which settler colonialism has so drastically altered people’s environment that it is harder to obtain the traditional foods and materials that they have relied on for millennia. He emphasizes that in spite of this unfortunate reality, “we do not give up by dwelling in a nostalgic past even though we live in our ancestors’ dystopia.”¹

This dystopia does not only affect Indigenous people (even if it does affect them most severely). We all live in a world of façade and confusion, where every practice, including farming, requires some not-quite-tolerable measure of exploitation half perceived, but partly veiled by the cognitive dissonance that makes it possible to get through the day. The present dystopia is a soul-numbing experience for anyone, at best; and a terrifying and dangerous one for far too many.

Farming for liberation

If I would honestly describe my farming methodology, acknowledgment of our dystopian context would have to be the jumping-off point. I am farming within a dystopian context. I am inside The Matrix. It is Nineteen Eighty-Four, and this is a Brave New World. Dystopian farming is a means of sustenance and also resistance. It is a frank admission of our dire context, but also — maybe even primarily — a search for the joy and meaning that makes that context tolerable.

This inquiry originates as an attempt to answer questions about my farming methods, and so its initial structure will be blog-like: if I can’t ‘explain’ my methods, perhaps I can narrate them every week or so. However, I would also like to de-center my own methods, because farming is extremely context-dependent. I have no real way to know whether my particular methods will be helpful for people with different access to land, different body types, different social and family structures, different climates … different everything. In the dystopian context, the value of a method is in its potential for liberation, and I don’t know how much my methods can liberate others, especially people with less privilege than I have enjoyed. I would like to be able to answer that question.

If my inquiry is to be successful, it will also have to include other voices, other platforms, and other knowledge. Perhaps it will evolve away from a personal blog to become more like a book, a zine, or a journal article. If there is dialogue, we could even borrow the format of a podcast.

For now, I will inquire and write. My initial reflections have been about the curious mix of liberation and obligation that goats bring into my life. As I make small daily movements in preparation for spring seeding, I will snap pictures and share thoughts about how to coax another round from the dirt. What do I owe the dirt for this?

Dystopian farming in dialogue

As I hope to include others in this inquiry, I think it is helpful to situate dystopian farming in a broad dialogue about global agriculture. Without making prescriptions about what people should or shouldn’t be doing in contexts that I haven’t experienced, I hope I can narrow the scope of the inquiry in a way that invites the participation I am looking for.

I think that dystopian farming should be agroecological and radically holistic. Agroecology is a broad framework that includes dimensions of science, social movement, and practice.² It is true that like many frameworks, the concept of agroecology is partially coopted by institutions³, so for this inquiry we retain the multidimensionality of agroecology and emphasize its roots in peasant social movements such as La Via Campesina.⁴ We also use it as a framework that addresses multiple scales: from the ecology of a single farm plot all the way to the global food system as a whole.

This inquiry will naturally interact with dialogue about permaculture — which along with ‘regenerative farming’ seems to have captured much of the imagination of the ecological farming movement — but we should critique these frameworks for their extraction of Indigenous farming practices while failing to integrate Indigenous critiques of modernity. Permaculture and regenerative agriculture have also failed to credit Indigenous people for their intellectual foundation or adequately address the legacies of settler colonialism. This is not something I will critique on the basis of morals or ideology, but because the approach I describe as dystopian farming is radically holistic and acknowledges that failure to integrate these critiques makes our farming practice more damaging to the land, weakens our social movements, and undermines our scientific foundation.

Full Life Farm. Design: Terra Currie

Finally, dystopian farming is pragmatic. There is room for abstract discussion — and possibly even fiction — but in the end we must have sweet potatoes and a cellar to put them in. Obviously my initial inquiry is personal and fundamentally anecdote, and perhaps that is all it will ever be. But this is also an invitation — or maybe it’s a manifesto to co-create something far more interesting than anecdote or my personal critique of a farming ethos that fails to address the deeper crises of our modern dystopia.

References

[1] Whyte, Kyle Powys, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene”, in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2021, Routledge).

[2] Steve Gliessman (2018) Defining Agroecology, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 42:6, 599-600.

[3] Omar Felipe Giraldo & Peter M. Rosset (2017) Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45:3, 545-564.

[4] Val, V., Rosset, P. M., Zamora Lomelí, C., Giraldo, O. F., & Rocheleau, D. (2019). Agroecology and La Via Campesina I. The symbolic and material construction of agroecology through the dispositive of “peasant-to-peasant” processes. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 43(7-8), 872-894; Rosset, P., Val, V., Barbosa, L. P., & McCune, N. (2019). Agroecology and La Via Campesina II. Peasant agroecology schools and the formation of a sociohistorical and political subject. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 43(7-8), 895-914.

Find out more

You can find Paul’s Farming Dystopia blog at his website with Terra Currie, where they discuss Full Life Farm — the ecological experiment they established in 2007 on five acres in the lower piedmont of the Appalachian mountains – as well as present their art and writing and health and education work.

Paul Feather

An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.

Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate

Farmer and author Paul Feather seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis, and names that can reflect its super wicked nature, in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.

2,000 words: approx reading time = 8 minutes

When we name our planetary crisis, it’s something like a birth. The problem is born into our dialogue and its umbilical cord is cut off from the organism that created it in the first place. When we name it the Climate Crisis, our dialogue is constrained by that name, and we respond to that crisis differently from a crisis named Runaway Capitalism or Mass Extinction. Even if we acknowledge that these other framings are relevant, naming the problem centers a particular way of thinking.

People have thrown names at the planetary crisis like it’s an indecisive couple’s new baby. We could call it the Anthropocene. And then there’s Patriarchy. How about Settler Colonialism, or maybe something with Justice in it? — so we sound woke. Sometimes I prefer broad, sweeping names like Polycrisis or Ontological Failure, but at the end of the day, we should probably admit we don’t really know what’s going on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a science person. There’s a lot of carbon in the atmosphere; and while we can debate about where exactly to put the lines between species — there are about to be a lot fewer of them. These are things we can measure. But in between and all around the measurements there’s this thing that we’re all going through, and it’s hard to say exactly what it is.

So what shall we call this thing we have made together?

Super wicked

In social planning, a wicked problem is one that defies solution because it is closely intertwined with other problems, and solutions are constrained by different stakeholders with different worldviews and values.¹ Beginning in about 2007, people began to talk about the climate crisis as a ‘super wicked’ problem, because it had all these wicked traits of complexity and social divisiveness, and also additional difficulties presented by an urgent timeframe and by social injustice wherein the nations who have the most responsibility for climate change and the most power to affect it also have the least incentive to do so.²

There’s actually an added bit of complexity that this framework leaves out, because while it acknowledges that the legacies of colonialism and slavery have shaped the power structures that now make climate change ‘super wicked’, these scholars typically don’t question whether these power structures are the most useful tool for addressing the crisis.³ This is a social planning and social engineering approach: it’s easy to assume that something so big as climate change would have to be addressed by the multinational corporations and governments who hold the levers of power in our society.

In this respect, the wicked problem framework fails to address added epistemological and ontological legacies of colonialism (i.e. colonization of the mind) that have been explored by at least forty years of Western scholarship⁴— and a far longer Indigenous awareness of that legacy — that implicate this rational, engineering-centered onto-epistemology with the origins and development of the global crisis.⁵ This added level of complexity questions the whole framing of the crisis as a problem in need of solutions, but fortunately rather than leaving us with ultra-wicked problems, it’s more like some of the variables cancel out, and things actually get simpler.

Baby gets a new name

If we acknowledge that social engineering is not really a viable approach — that not only do the complexity of the problem and unjust power relations (i.e. its super wicked nature) doom that strategy to failure, but that the whole engineering paradigm is built on colonial notions of power and control that further implicate us with the crisis — then the framing of the crisis changes. We are no longer invested in designing complex international legal interventions to bring down CO₂ emissions, nor even controlling the power structures that would presumably do this. It’s not even clear that we’re still centering CO₂, because coloniality of power and knowledge are now part of the dialogue. This new framing follows the umbilical cord of the climate crisis to better integrate the origins of that crisis: the baby gets a new name.

When we stop trying to engineer our way out of wicked problems, and when we frame the crisis to include coloniality of power and knowledge, we become participants in the crisis rather than the detached observers that engineers must always be. We are no longer debating how to optimize the behavior of billions of (other) people to soften ecological collapse; but rather asking, how do I personally respond to a crisis formerly known as climate change that increasingly defines the human experience?

This does not mean that our response is a solo act unconstrained by social norms and arising purely from personal experience. On the contrary, there is a great deal of meaning to be found by interacting with communities that are already establishing social norms that oppose the systems of power that continually enact the ongoing crisis.

Communities of resistance

Showing a sign in Atlanta forest, Georgia: "You are now leaving the USA." — Atlanta forest, Georgia – “You are now leaving the USA.” Photograph: Public domain

My personal experience is that communities who actively challenge the dominant systems of power and knowledge arise from local resistance movements. In my own search for meaning, I have found the most clarity of purpose when participating in defense of specific places and people from equally specific governments and corporations. I believe that these spaces of resistance are the wombs from which a deeper understanding — even potentially a name — for our crisis will be born.

I have most recently spent time in the Atlanta forest, where a community of forest defenders has been enacting an abolitionist society without police for over a year. This community implicitly rejects a socially engineered response to the more-than-climate crisis, because individual autonomy is a central value. This is both a strategy to ensure group security in a community that is consistently under attack, but also an anarchist conflation of ends and means wherein the resistance community is structured to reflect the values of the society we aspire to create.⁶ Nonetheless, even in such a community there are obvious social norms and expectations that constrain individual action — and, for me, development and understanding of those norms is arguably as important as defending the forest: they are one and the same. This experiment in abolitionist society has been consistently attacked: at this writing about twenty people have been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, and one forest defender has been killed by police. The violent suppression of this movement is an unfortunate testament to its success and potential.

Previous conflicts have illuminated connections between power, policing, and climate: as for instance in the brutally repressed resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline,⁷ or Enbridge Line Three.⁸ In the Atlanta forest, these connections between hegemonic power and the more-than-climate crisis are particularly transparent. The forest is a key safeguard against climate instability for local communities, and the underlying conflict threatening the forest is the city’s agenda to expand policing with an immense new training center. This unique pairing of threats (climate and policing) explicitly connects climate agendas with abolitionist narratives that some scholars are already integrating into mainstream environmental justice dialogues.⁹ Finally, the movement’s centering of the site’s history and removal of the Creek/Muskogee Nation in the 1800s followed by forced labor on the Old Atlanta Prison Farm explicitly synthesizes decolonial, abolitionist, and mainstream environmental justice narratives. This ‘perfect storm’ of issues, place, and history situates Defend Atlanta Forest to make unique and lasting contributions to our mutual understanding of power, coloniality, and crisis.

Showing Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who was killed while opposing the Atlanta forest police training facility. — Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was killed while opposing the Atlanta forest police training facility. Photograph: public domain.

The climate crisis is real, but it is exceedingly abstract. It does not feel easy for individual humans to find a meaningful response to this super wicked global problem. It lives in the atmosphere or in tiny molecules of CO₂. It does not have a place. It is not a useful concept for orienting ourselves or making individual decisions — and in that sense it is almost meaningless.

Places like the Atlanta forest are the crucibles where people and movements spill over into each other and where new movements and new meanings are born.¹⁰ We participate in this process — and to some extent we do shape it — but our understanding and language is equally shaped by the places themselves as they are uniquely situated in history and space. If we will find our way through these confusing times, we will need simple answers to wicked problems; and we will find them in the trees, in the deserts, on city streets. We will find them where other seekers have gathered to fight for something meaningful together and in doing so to create a community bound by something that no amount of policing can destroy.

References

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2007) Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the ‘‘super wicked’’ problem of global climate change. Paper presented at International studies association convention, Chicago, Il, February 28th–March 3.
For example, see Lazarus, R. J. (2008) Super wicked problems and climate change: Restraining the present to liberate the future. Cornell L. Rev., 94, 1153. Although Sun, J., & Yang, K. (2016) The wicked problem of climate change: A new approach based on social mess and fragmentation. Sustainability, 8(12), 1312 does make some gestures toward less engineering-oriented approaches.
e.g. counting from Wa Thiong’o, N. (1986) Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature (republished 1991 East African Publishers). See also a decent literature review in Clement, V. (2019), Beyond the sham of the emancipatory Enlightenment: Rethinking the relationship of Indigenous epistemologies, knowledges, and geography through decolonizing paths. Progress in Human Geography, 43(2), 276-294.
Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017) On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017, 16(4): 761-780.
Land C and King D (2014) Organizing otherwise: translating anarchism in a voluntary sector organization. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organisation 14 (4): 923-950.
Burrell M, Grosse C and Mark B (2022), Resistance to petro-hegemony: A three terrains of power analysis of the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota. Energy Research & Social Science 91
Mittal P (2021) Extraction, Indigenous Dispossession and State Power: Lessons from Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en Resistance. The Arbutus Review 12(1): 121-141.
Pellow D N (2017) What is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity, and also Menton M, Larrea C, Latorre S, Martinez-Alier J, Peck M, Temper L, and Walter M (2020) Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions. Sustainability Science 15: 1621–1636
Perkins T (2021) The multiple people of color origins of the US environmental justice movement: social movement spillover and regional racial projects in California. Environmental Sociology 7(2):147-59.

Find out more

Defend Atlanta Forest, or Stop Cop City, is a decentralised social movement in Atlanta, Georgia, United States — where people occupying trees are being charged with terrorism. In Property ≠ Life, a recent piece he wrote for Resilience.org, Paul discusses the nature of violence and non-violence; “Stop Cop City is explicitly contesting the nature of violence, and this is profound for a society that is based on the violent exploitation of others: a society that doesn’t seem to know who it is without that violence, and whose customary language doesn’t differentiate destruction of life from destruction of property (or when it does seems to value the latter).”

In January 2023, The Guardian’s report, ‘Assassinated in cold blood’: activist killed protesting Georgia’s ‘Cop City’, covered the killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who opposed the police training facility, while The Intercept reported that The Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is So Brutal Because of the Movement’s Success. Atlanta Community Press Collective provides A brief history of the Atlanta City Prison Farm.

In thinking about spaces of resistance, you could explore the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, which documents and catalogues social conflict around environmental issues.

You can explore wicked problems in some previous content here on ClimateCultures, for example our About page on Ecological & Climate Predicaments, and Culturing Climate Change. For a discussion on super wicked problems, you can download the paper by Richard Lazarus that Paul cites above: Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future.

Paul Feather

An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.