From Foraging to Fossil Fuels, Unveiling Agricultural Paradoxes
A podcast with Gunnar Rundgren
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Episode Description
Read Gunnar’s latest article.
What if humanity's quest to control nature has led us to a precipice of both technological triumph and ecological disaster? Join Gunnar and I on a journey from the ancient practices of foraging and controlled burning to the modern complexities of mechanized agriculture. We uncover how early agricultural methods created both stability and fragility, and how our evolving belief in dominating nature has woven itself into the fabric of modern society and historical texts.
As we navigate the tangled web of market forces and agricultural practices, we question the effectiveness of capitalist logic in solving environmental crises. We'll explore the historical context of sustainable farming, the disruptive influence of fossil fuels, and the commodification of agriculture. Reflecting on insights from the Substack article "Cow, Capital and Growth," we challenge the idea that markets are self-correcting and consider moving more elements out of this system to better address ecological and social issues.
Finally, we reframe the narrative around global food production and hunger, highlighting the real culprits behind food shortages. By examining the inefficiencies in resource allocation and the unsustainable nature of continuous population growth, we emphasize the need to respect natural limits and foster biodiversity. We share thought-provoking perspectives on sustainable agriculture, cultural significance of food, and the inherent boundaries that shape our existence. Tune in to rethink our relationship with nature and agriculture, and discover a path to true sustainability.
Chapter
0:11 - The Evolution and Impact of Agriculture
13:04 - Limits and Market Logic in Agriculture
24:07 - Rethinking Control and Agriculture
37:25 - Exploring Sustainable Agriculture and Kinship
49:42 - Cultural Significance of Food and Agriculture
1:07:32 - Living Within Natural Limits
Transcript
D. Firth Griffith: 0:11
yeah, we, um, we homeschool our three children. That's a loose term for what it is. They learn at home, whatever that means yeah like yesterday we processed the sheep, today we processed chickens, tomorrow we're going to break some draft horses. It's different every day.
Gunnar Rundgren: 0:30
I guess Well, how old are they?
D. Firth Griffith: 0:34
They are three, five and six. Okay, Well, it's a privilege and an honor sitting with you. I have been thinking about this conversation for a while now. I've read through none of your books in totality, but I flipped through many of them. I have many notes. I have recently re-dove into your writings on Substack One of the pieces I think was written in june all about cows and limits and capitalism and markets.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:11
I I really yeah, I think it was after that one you contacted me yeah, yeah, well, it was after reading that, um, there's, there's just something you know and and maybe we can just start here um, in in one of your books, garden earth, in the introduction you talk a lot about the progression from hunter-gatherer societies um, or I believe you call them capture societies yeah, in a way foraging or capturing societies, because the hunting thing is maybe a bit overdone.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:44
I mean basically, well, many of them were hunters or fishermen, but the foraging or collection of wild crops and stuff was also very important to many of those. So I think we are sometimes a bit misled by the hunting thing, which is more macho and of course very symbolic and was important, for sure, but still also a lot of life, I think, was just, you know, collecting root crops or fruit crops or whatever crops there were, depending on where you were, or shellfish or stuff like that, which is of course a kind of hunting or fishing, but it's also a collection of stuff.
D. Firth Griffith: 2:27
Right, right, and you write that. You know obviously this is not a linear narrative, but the question is going to make it seem so. So I apologize, but you write that out of this capture or collecting society, this hunter-gatherer narrative. You know, agriculture spr spraying up to some degree as like a stabilizing force potentially, but it immediately felt unstabilizing, like when we become agricultural to some large degree, we become unstable, and I wanted to investigate that with you and I think the conversation is naturally going to progress, at least as I anticipate, and who knows what that means. Often these conversations progress in an entirely new direction. We don't get to talk about anything that I prepared for, but to limits, and I want to talk about limits and capitalism and markets, and then I think, as I see it and again we'll see what happens but progress, that conversation from limits to relationship and morality and kinship and this connection between earth and earthlings and some of your more, you know, very recent thoughts, and so that's my idea for this conversation.
Gunnar Rundgren: 3:34
We'll see where it goes.
D. Firth Griffith: 3:36
Yeah, so let's talk about the stability. So capture or gathering societies progressing into agriculture, it's both stabilizing and unstabilizing. Let's explore that together. What was your intention in bringing that up, especially as it came to modern machines and fossil fuels as they relate to agriculture? And how might that evolution in the human tool set or in the human worldview or paradigm you pick, how you want to explain that, how might that be simultaneously stabilizing and unstabilizing?
Gunnar Rundgren: 4:13
yeah, I think that's. It's in a way, we, we, uh, it's about control and our, our society or humans, have tried to control things for a long time and agriculture is, of course, I would say, a step towards a much higher level or degree of control than hunting is, although I must say that already when I wrote that book, which was now well 13 years ago, I think, I made the case for that maybe the rupture between the old and the new wasn't that particularly clear. The step from hunting and gathering, or collecting stuff, to agriculture was maybe very much a very slow process and it was actually not even a linear progress in one direction. Some societies even went back and forth between that. For instance, that has been studied in Sweden that agriculture for a while shrank back again because of climate change and stuff like that. For a while shrunk back again because of climate change and stuff like that.
Gunnar Rundgren: 5:24
Anyway, but largely we could say that also with hunting and gathering, humans try to control things. They burn landscapes and stuff to facilitate hunting or to promote grazing animals and stuff like that, and with agriculture we increase that degree of control, at least over that particular part of land that we farm. Now I talk specifically about crop farming. Of course you have the parallel development with pastoralism and stuff like that, which is slightly different, I would say, although it still has something to do with control. But pastoralism is more adapting to changing circumstances, because pastoralists realize that they are not in control. Farmers kind of believe, or want to believe, that they are in control.
D. Firth Griffith: 6:18
But anyone who?
Gunnar Rundgren: 6:19
has been actually farming also know that that is not entirely true either. Anyway, we try to control things and of course that has progressed to our current society where we actually are excelling in control in all kinds of aspects. But control also means increasingly unstable conditions and fragility and complexity, which you know well. I'm sure you heard about these theories about the collapse of complex societies and stuff like that. And it's not only complex societies, it can be all kinds of systems that are. You know, you try to fix them and then you add on another controller and another layer and another layer and at some point the whole construction is not stable any longer and you don't even understand it.
Gunnar Rundgren: 7:17
So I think agriculture is a lot about that, and of course it has also nurtured the idea that we are indeed in control. I mean okay, even curated by writings of the Bible and stuff like that, where humans are seen as the crown of the creation or something like that, the head of the creation. And with enlightenment and modernity jumping ahead, we get to yet another stage where we really try to understand all the rules governing the world and manipulating them and controlling them. We talk about laws of nature and stuff like that, and we of course understand that we can't change those laws, but we can use them to our gain, so to say. That's kind of how I see it. I must say, having said that, that there is. I don't totally subscribe to the idea that agriculture was a big failure and the fall of man, more or less. We were happy as long as we were foragers or hunters and then we became desperate, poor and hierarchical patriarchy and all that stuff with agriculture. I don't know if you're familiar with David Greber.
D. Firth Griffith: 8:51
I am.
Gunnar Rundgren: 8:51
Yeah, and I read his David Wengros book the Dawn of Everything or something. I think that's correct.
Gunnar Rundgren: 8:59
Yeah Well, they also try to show that this linear thinking is a bit too simplistic. Although I know they have had a lot of criticism from scholars about how they relate that story, I still look up some of the points there as I think are quite valid, that even within the agriculture system, within the hunter and gatherer system, there are plenty of options for being cruel and authoritarian and there are plenty of options to be libertarian or freer in the mind. But I also think that agriculture has been very much linked to the great civilizations. The narrative on agriculture has been very much linked to, you know, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Chinese, the Romans and the situational farmers within these large civilizations and mostly they were actually quite poor.
Gunnar Rundgren: 9:58
They were maybe quite safe because the state kind of guaranteed them food. They had huge storages and stuff like that, but they had to deliver so much of their production to the state, but not only the production, also their manpower and stuff like that. So the fact that they were poor doesn't necessarily reflect the true nature of being a small farmer or a peasant and stuff like that. The collapse of the Roman Empire was maybe a tragedy of a civilization, but I'm not sure it was a tragedy for peasants in France, or in northern Italy or in Spain. There's no evidence that they were harmed by this, so to say, this collapse right yeah, that's it so much there.
D. Firth Griffith: 10:49
I mean this idea of globalism. I was in a conversation recently with a fellow where I was making the claim that his entire viewpoint has to exist, host to the idea of a true globalistic society, that what he was arguing was only able to be manifest because we've so well accepted and purchased this globalistic narrative. And so when my point is, when we look back at history and we see the fall of the roman empire let's say whatever it was, 400 ad, you know, we think the whole world, you know, gave a rat's ass about it, like the whole world was just affected by it. You know, it's like what? The only reason we can believe that is because we live in a globalistic society today. Obviously it's not the case.
D. Firth Griffith: 11:28
I wonder, have you read? Equally people pick on this book similar to the Dawn of Everything, graeber and Wengros book from a totally different perspective. But have you read Rebecca Costa's the Watchman's Rattle? I believe it's one of those books that if you read the introduction in the first chapter, you'll understand the book, but it's still a very worthwhile spend of time. Anyways, I want to dive into this, because what you're getting at is she writes that civilizations or empires or peoples fall because what she calls the cognitive threshold, that the created systems, the human created systems, so like agriculture, particular forms of political life or governance or society, whatever it is, let's just say agriculture, for now that the created systems, the human created systems, evolve out of pace with biological systems. I mean, it's really simplistic and is obviously a lot more nuanced thing.
D. Firth Griffith: 12:30
But I wonder because when you look at the archaeology, I just published a book earlier this summer. Later this spring, I was looking at some recent studies in 2018 and 2019 of this international team of archaeobotanists that discovered really the existence of crop agriculture in the Jordanian River Valley at about 23,000 years ago. And not that that's outrightly interesting in its own way. It just shows complexity and nuance and it's wonderful. Obviously, people pick on their science as well, but it's only been corroborated and re-cooperated since 2018, you know, all the way till today, entirely machine-based, controlled and mechanized system of agriculture, in the absence of any other methodology or paradigm. It does seem to build upon a certain worldview of this like settler, colonial, this dominant, you know, this very controlling human species. What do you think about that Like is it?
Gunnar Rundgren: 13:44
a lack of nuance.
Gunnar Rundgren: 13:47
Yeah well, I agree, and I think the transformation of agriculture into commodity farming is underpinning this. I mean, it's a bit of a question of what is the driving force, if it's the technology or if it's the market, but I think they go hand in hand and, together with fossil fuels as well, has moved us away from self-correcting natural systems which were mainly locally based for local use, where natural processes like circulation of nutrients etc. Were more or less self-evident. You don't need to. I mean, the notion of sustainability was apparent it was nothing that you didn't need that word at all in those small farms, not that large, those small scale farming systems that were established and where you get self-correction over centuries starting. Or Australia exporting their own agriculture system and expanding it ridiculously and not having that, yeah, never worked in that system. I've seen that in other countries also, with people migrating, for instance people from the Andes moving down to the rainforest in Peru. Well, they make a mess of the whole thing because their farming system was sustainable and good where they lived, but when they move, you know, not very far but to a totally different climate, they make a mess of it.
Gunnar Rundgren: 15:56
Anyway, my point is that previously traditional agricultural system had so many self-correcting features, both ecological but also social, I would say that kind of limited what you could do. A lot of land were in commons, for instance, were not privately owned, which means that the grasslands and the forests were almost always at least in Europe in communal use and people had to agree on how to use them. And all this changed with the commodification of agriculture, which is a rather late thing, which is actually in developing countries, has only been going on for 70, 80 years full scale. Of course there were early plantations of commercial crops, already 150 years by the English, with tea and coffee, and oil palm started later, but anyway, cotton, for instance, a typical plantation crop that has been expanding in the tropics. So a lot of agriculture was self-correcting, sustainable in many ways and with the impulse of fossil fuels, industrialization and markets, and even more than global markets as we speak, this changed a lot and agriculture has become, I would say, a rather destructive force. Without you can't say anything else.
D. Firth Griffith: 17:29
I mean as in general, right, well, let's, I want to, at the beginning of that, stay. I have two different ways that the conversation, uh, can unfurl here, and maybe we'll go both ways, but the first I want to focus on this idea of markets. Uh, you've written on this and so I I believe I know you're hard on the subject, but I'm going to ask, like I don't, so that you can infer all that for the users or for the listeners, but like the capitalistic narrative is that markets are self-correcting because of consumers. Is this so? And if this is so, then it seems like agriculture and our mechanization or commodification of nature through agriculture is fine, and if it is not so I think it needs to be questioned. What do you think?
Gunnar Rundgren: 18:13
Yeah, well, I must say it's especially my experience in farming, both in Sweden and in other countries, has made me question the logic of this narrative. Countries has made me question the logic of this narrative. I think the market logic and the capitalist logic of self-correction through markets is correct within its own narrative, so to say within its own rules. But it behaves as there is nothing outside that system. But when there is something outside that system, it's not very self-correcting anymore. So I mean climate change, environmental pollution, even exporting social problems to other parts of the globe, is part and parcel of capitalism, and there is okay.
Gunnar Rundgren: 19:03
Some people then think that the solution is to get all that stuff into the market system.
Gunnar Rundgren: 19:11
You know, you put price on carbon, you make ecosystem services as tradable goods, et cetera, et cetera.
Gunnar Rundgren: 19:21
I don't think that is a very successful avenue, actually, and I think in the short term it's a band-aid for capitalism or something they can show. But in the long term it just means that we move out the boundaries, but there will always be new boundaries and things that are not self-correcting in the system and things that are not self-correcting in the system, and in addition, it means that we are including even larger parts of the planet in the market. I mean, so far, the air is not a marketable commodity, water is only partly a marketable commodity and biodiversity is not, in general, a marketable commodity, and I don't think they should be marketable commodities. In my view and maybe we come back to that also at the end of our conversation I think the trick is rather to move more things out of the market again and not to refute the logic of capitalism because it's not working very well. It's not even, I would say, very efficient within its own context, although I can buy the arguments if you look at markets in a very isolated way.
D. Firth Griffith: 20:37
I was looking at your substack while you were speaking, but Cowles Capital and Growth is the title of the wonderful article. That speaks a lot, I think, to what you were just elucidating for us. It's on your podcast, your Substack Beyond Sustainability. I'll put a link in the show notes. But in it you almost take us through a thought exercise as you're working to make the decision or not, on whether or not to expand the food producing capacity of your landscape and, to you know, spoil the story for everyone. But at the end you conclude that if you were to expand, you would reach a new limit, like your current limits are your limits. If you were to expand, you would reach a new limit and you investigate all of the opportunities of those limits. More land that also you know that you would reach new limits and you investigate all of the opportunities of those limits. More land that also you know that you control. That also means that there's less land for other people. There's less land in the commons. There's less land for X, y, like it's. That's one limit, but also your human capacity to run that new land is also now a new limit. And then you also talk about increasing import of you know feeds and more hay and other things, and you say how that's identical to this idea of just farming more land, because you're taking the resources from the land that you're not farming and you bring them in, and it's just money and market and capitalism that allows you to do that, because often that's not coming from your neighbor's land, that's coming from, you know, plains of Ukraine where all of the potash is mined and created. You get my point. It's coming from other areas of the world.
D. Firth Griffith: 22:10
And so this idea of limits that when we break the limit we run into a new limit once again, to me this illustrates two things.
D. Firth Griffith: 22:21
The first thing is that limits are implicit in our operations, and you write about this in your book, our Nerf.
D. Firth Griffith: 22:28
Even in the intro that I brought up initially, you write about this idea that there's an intrinsicness in life, in a natural life, whatever that is, if it's agricultural or the hunter-gathering type societies that maybe preceded it, maybe co-evolved with agriculture, whatever the actual reality is, there's an intrinsic mix of that life, of limits, and you can't get around that and we have to start understanding what that means. So that's maybe number one, but number two is, I think, so much of the arguments that could be raised, maybe against you know, some of the thoughts you raise in the books, you know, or even in this conversation, is that agriculture needs to increase its production power to feed the world. And what you're saying is, as I understand it, so correct me and this is, I guess, a question saying that if we were to continually increase the production of food in the agricultural systems, that we're going to continually rely on things that continually make us less stable, so, in search of stability, we become unstable, that that seems to be like the natural limit yeah, it captures it quite well.
Gunnar Rundgren: 23:42
And I and I must say that this, you know, I've been a proponent of organic farming since 1977 and been very much engaged in this, and the standard argument against organic farming has always been you know, you can't feed the world, and I worked a lot with developing countries as a consultant to help small farmers and stuff like that. And this global narrative of food shortages, to begin with, it's a myth. The per capita production of agriculture has increased one and a half two times since 1960. So the fact that people are starving or people are hungry are really not at all something to do with that. Production is too small and what has happened is instead that agricultural raw materials are increasingly used for bioenergy and also that we we or we, but industries have, uh, increasingly used crops that could be used as human food, uh, for a feed to chicken and pigs in particular, to some extent also to cattle in american feedlots, although if you look at the statistics, it's actually a very small share of the cattle or the beef or the milk in the. That. There is too little products, because if there were, the prices would be much, much higher. So this idea that we have to increase production or productivity is just not true.
Gunnar Rundgren: 25:37
Having said that, there is also the other mechanism that increased food production and the affordability of food has certainly been a very helpful component to increase human population. And we can't look away from human population as one factor. I mean, the sheer size of the human population is problematic. I don't think that it's still so big that it makes our situation totally desperate, but for sure, to continually increase the human population is not a very sustainable way to develop human civilization. It can't be dependent on an ever-growing population. So the enormous increase in productivity of agriculture has certainly made number of humans higher. I mean for all other animals. We are quite okay to understand that, especially if there are no predators, and we have very few predators except for covid and those small ones. So all other animals, we accept the idea. Okay, there is more food, there will be more animals. So the same logic actually applies to us as well and we should be a bit careful of not expanding our numbers and we should not making expanding agriculture production as a purpose in its own. I think it's not.
Gunnar Rundgren: 27:09
I'm not a fan of dramatic rewilding, locking humans out of nature. I think we can live in nature. But even when we live in nature, like with our grazing cows, we don't capture so much from the land. We certainly capture a lot more calories from the land by growing potatoes or wheat from a piece of land, but then from that piece of land we lock everything else out, or at least we try to do that. In cattle we can do that in coexistence with a lot of other species that actually many of them thrive and are even better off. When our cattle graze there were no cattle. Anyway, maybe I'm distracting here a bit.
D. Firth Griffith: 27:56
No, not at all, I think. What? So what I'm understanding here is that there's an interesting level of control that I think humans feel like we need, while at the same time it is interesting because it is that same level of control that is to some degree reducing our potency over the landscape and our own integration and kinship with that same landscape.
Gunnar Rundgren: 28:23
Yeah, I think that's why some of your ideas. I must admit that I haven't studied the wealth of what you have written and said, but I understand that you also are into that line of thinking that we must let go of some of our control of the system.
D. Firth Griffith: 28:44
It just seems like there's a strange, it's just a strange servitude to this idea of power and control, and it's just this complex narrative that, through increasing that control, we can stabilize the life that we have, which automatically dismisses a couple of fundamental assumptions. Number one is that even possible? Number two, and I think you know this might be a train or a particular you know thread that we can weave in this conversation, but like why? Why would we want to control our way into a more solidified, human-dominated world? You know, like, why is that what we're looking for? Um, but also, you know.
D. Firth Griffith: 29:29
Three, something that my writing and, to some degree, some of the things that I've studied over the past couple of years is like uh, food waste. I've just, it's just paralyzing, like you're bringing up these numbers. You know, one, one and a half two times the food production since 1960. Last time I checked, it was 47% of the corn grown in the southeast of the United States today, which is not high corn crunch here, but it's everywhere. It's not central Turtle Island, western Hemisphere here, but it's pretty dominant. 47% of that I think this was 2017, goes to biofuels and cattle alone.
D. Firth Griffith: 30:10
Now we have a lot of cattle here. Yeah, I know, but you bring up pigs and pork. I'm sorry, pigs and chicken. It's interesting, my mom, she raises these very low, if not no input, free range chickens that we process once a year, and that was this morning. We processed some birds this morning and we were talking about the process and how long it takes for such little bits and pieces of meat and nourishment. But you harvest a cow or you harvest a goat or a sheep and it takes less time and you get exponentially more meat.
D. Firth Griffith: 30:45
And we were just joking with each other that there's know, there's this quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the enlightenment or anti-enlightenment thinker, depending on how you read them 18th century. He makes a joke that whoever was the first human to block off a parcel of land and say this is mine, and then everyone else around him believed him. Like that, that is the original standup comedy. Like that is the comedic moment of the human experiment. And we made a, I made a comment in regard to that and everybody was laughing in the barn we were processing, it was even like previous to the sun rising, and I was just joking like whoever looked at a chicken and said we can mass produce this and this makes a lot of sense, right, because poultry and even pork, right, these are lone animals, these are raised in small batches. They're hard to process, they're hard to render down, they're hard to process into foodstuffs, into foodstuffs. Why are we concentrating so much on species that provide so little and then complaining when it takes so much input?
Gunnar Rundgren: 31:53
to create such a little output, you know?
D. Firth Griffith: 31:54
Yeah, no, I agree it's a comedy. Yeah, it is.
Gunnar Rundgren: 31:57
I think, on your points there about control, I think initially my concern was more. You know, I'm raised in a kind of scientific environment. My father was a professor at the university and we all admired big scientists and stuff like that and I ran my chemistry lab in the garage and stuff like that and thought I would be a great scientist. But in the end I first lost faith in our ability to control I think it was with nuclear power actually when I realized that you know that was very sophisticated and then shit happens. Okay, so not so many of them, have you know, capsules, but it's enough, so to say. But then I realized that this control is to a large extent an illusion. But lately I'm also getting more and more intrigued by the fact that even if we could, it's not desirable, it's a boring attitude, it's a boring life, life. By trying to control we also undermine so many things that gives us joy and pleasure and wonders of the world, so to say. As soon as we try to control it, it's no longer fun, it's no longer interesting everything that we try to tame and standardize and control.
Gunnar Rundgren: 33:27
I worked a lot with certification in this organic sector because that was one tool that the organic sector developed for being able to go to the marketplace and I spent almost 20 years with developing certification systems and accreditation and inspections and all that stuff and first I thought it was a very valuable exercise. But lately I got so tired of this idea that you know you standardize it. So you just standardize it because you have to, because of the market. There is no other reason for why you would like to standardize a farming methodology or a system like organic. And then you standardize it and then because market forces you to also certify it and making it's all oriented to commodity production, actually to be sure that your organic apple is the same as my organic apple, which is totally the opposite of where I am today in my mind. I'm still organic certified because I started the Swedish certification system. I can't really opt out, I'm stuck in it.
Gunnar Rundgren: 34:39
But you know it's contrary to my belief that my apple shouldn't be the same as your apple, even if they happen to be of the same variety by coincidence. I think they are not the same because they are grown in different soils, in different climates, in different everything. And I'm not you. I think I've been moving much towards a totally different view on why it's not only not feasible or technically possible to be totally in control, but it's actually no fun and it gives no joy.
Gunnar Rundgren: 35:18
And you said in the introduction that we may end up talking about relationships, because that's where this comes in also talking about relationships, because that's where this comes in also. You know, right, you can't. You can't control people and expect them to be on a on a mutual level of relationship, right, because you are in control and it's the same with us and the rest of the living that as long as we are 100 percent in control, we all this discussion about you, about other life forms, should have the same rights as us or whatever, it's just nonsense or bullshit as long as we manage the system totally and we keep it 100% under our control.
Gunnar Rundgren: 36:00
Having said that, of course, to just give up all control as a human is, I think, also impossible.
D. Firth Griffith: 36:07
Right? Well, it's just to misunderstand, I think, the essence of what it means. Yeah, because control is just a word and, like you said, rewilding you know these large rewilding projects that surround your hemisphere, you know, it's just, they're everywhere over there. Much smaller over here, we just have large conservation land in National Park. That's our bane. It looks at control and it says let's do the opposite.
D. Firth Griffith: 36:44
And then it also falls into the same traps that I think it was trying to run away from, because a human-less environment is not an environment, it's just a human-less environment, right? As if this wonderful mosaic just had an aspect of it ripped out, and then you still wanted to marvel at its beauty. Well, its beauty isn't there anymore. It's missing an aspect of itself. So there's an intrinsic relationship between man and earth, between earth and earth, between the trees and earth, between the trees and man. There's a kinship there, a relationship that has to be understood and respected, right? Because if humans started to grow roots, well, that wouldn't make any sense. And if trees started to give up their roots and start walking around physically, well, that wouldn't make any sense, right? So there's a particular essence, like a created essence, to the idea of life, and so it's not that humans should become something else, but what I'm getting from you, and what a lot of my work gets to as well, is it seems like there's a central aspect of our humanity that this industrialized, commoditized agriculture and a lot of it's strangely ulterior movements today, like organic, like organic is to some large degree like I believe initially, or maybe like regenerative agriculture today, would be a finer example. You know, it's like it's positioned itself in this narrative as a movement against commoditized agriculture, but at the same sense and not this is not that this is uniform in any of these things, organic or regenerative, even commoditized agriculture but to some large degree it's still based upon the same worldview that humans can dominate our way into a crisis. We can dominate, dominate our way out of a crisis right. We can heal earth, we can erode earth, and earth is just this damsel, you know, in distress, waiting for us. You know to do good or to do bad right, and so I guess what I'm getting at is, it seems, like number one. What you're saying is we have to start challenging ourselves in this understanding of stability and instability. Where are the limits? Like on your landscape?
D. Firth Griffith: 38:51
You, in that article on Substack, you write that you know, one comes in, one comes out. Your land can only hold so many, and then to some degree that's your processing strategy, and it's hard, and you said in the in the article that you wish you didn't have to process them and they can live out their lives and they continue to continually develop the. You know the relationship with the land, with you, et cetera, but you're not trying to raise more cows and you're not trying to exceed the limits of your system, because your system has limits. And so where I want to start is so much of kinship or relationship becomes entirely too philosophical too quickly. So let's first ground it.
D. Firth Griffith: 39:33
There is a particular relationship and kinship you have with the land in it and its animals. That necessitates a particular action or a particular inaction on your part. And maybe we can focus on the cows, because that's what the article was written about. Whatever we can focus on your gardens or a production or whatever. You can focus on what you like. But how does that relationship unfurl in the physical world? Before we get into some of this more philosophical thought, yeah.
Gunnar Rundgren: 40:03
Farm, yeah yeah. How does it? Well, I at the farm we have now, I see the farm as a kind of landscape management system or something. So I do try to manage the landscape, but I do see that we have quite a lot of different systems going on in the farm. We have some dense old growth forest, we have a peat bog, we have a swamp, we have a lake, we have former agriculture fields that have been neglected for 40 years, we have some meadows.
Gunnar Rundgren: 40:43
We are slowly regenerating, if you could say, the landscape. To some extent. We are actually trying to create more diversity and more border zones and stuff like that. Of course, there is a beauty in the plains or the ocean, or a big savannah or something like that, but most of the action in landscapes is at the border between different types of landscapes, different biomes, stuff like that. So borders are incredibly important.
Gunnar Rundgren: 41:22
So we kind of try to increase all these meeting places, both for us but also for different animals and plants and, well, all kinds of microbes that we have no clue about, how many they are and what they do with us or in the soil, because they are actually the rulers. It's neither we nor the cows, or not even the trees. It's all these small ones underneath that will survive long after us. They were here long before us and they are the real sustainable life forms. I think we are just, you know, in the long-term perspective. Okay, now I became very philosophical, left my own ground a bit but in the long-term perspectives, the rest of us, we are only visitors, I think, on this planet, compared to the fungi and the bacteria and all these guys.
Gunnar Rundgren: 42:18
They will be there forever, anyway. So what we try to do here is to make a landscape that is also we like to live in, which is kind of beautiful, I think. I mean beautiful is a very subjective terminology and I guess it's also changes over time, but I do think that aesthetics is somewhat of a guide sometimes to what you should do or not do.
D. Firth Griffith: 42:46
Is it?
Gunnar Rundgren: 42:47
ugly, well, then it's probably wrong to do that. If the building is ugly, well, don't build it, yeah.
D. Firth Griffith: 42:55
Well, unless you're in the commoditized system, which seems to me to prioritize that yeah.
Gunnar Rundgren: 43:01
The commoditized system is often framed around ugliness and standardization. Have you heard this fantastic song of Pete Seeger Little Boxes? Have you heard that one?
D. Firth Griffith: 43:15
No.
Gunnar Rundgren: 43:16
Try that one. It's wonderful Anyway. So they all grow up in little boxes little boxes all the same. I'm no singer anyway. So I think if it's beautiful, it also has some potential for being a nice and functional landscape.
Gunnar Rundgren: 43:36
We didn't plan to have cows here, it was the landscape that called for the cows, because when we looked for the farm I actually didn't look for a farm with so much agricultural land. I thought one hectare, like two and a half acres, would be enough for my vegetables, so plant a few trees and stuff like that. But we got, you know, 25 acres instead and pasture land and stuff. And then we said what should we do with all this land? And there had been cows all this land, and there had been cows on this land for three, four hundred years or maybe even more. And so then we we, uh, we borrowed cows and some other person had them over winter and but then he wanted to sell and quit farming. So then we bought the cows that we had borrowed instead. Since then they are here and we learned a lot from the cows.
Gunnar Rundgren: 44:29
I must say I had cattle and goats for 35 years ago on my previous farm and I wasn't much of an animal person, I must admit I've always been more of a plant person flowers and trees, maybe mostly tree persimmon. But anyway, with these cows we started to study them and my wife was maybe more pioneer in that than I was. We discussed why do they do like that, why do they do that, why do they graze there, why don't they like that grass? And why are farmers taking away the younglings from the older ones? And why do they wean off the calves when they are six, seven months old and send them somewhere? And why is the bull not there? And stuff like that.
Gunnar Rundgren: 45:24
So because we have so few cows we have only five mother cows and their offspring and we raise the calves and some of them we slaughter as 10-month-old calves. Some of them are getting older together and we all keep them as one group and it's actually very nice to see how they behave as a group and how some bond and some hate each other. Like humans they don't go well together and some are very strong bonds in their family groups. With the older cow and her offspring and their offspring. They all form a kind of gang. So there were many things to study with the cows and we learned a lot from the cows. I still think they understand us better than we understand them. Unfortunately, when they tell me something, I'm not sure I always understand so well, but when I tell them they seem to understand it quite well.
Gunnar Rundgren: 46:21
So I think we have been on a learning exercise with the cattle In the meantime, also with the farming, the vegetable production. I've been on a learning exercise because of my previous farm. I grow on coarse not coarse but sandy soil. You know, three days without irrigation and the lettuce died more or less. It was really a very low organic matter, very sandy soil. Here I have a very heavy clay with poor drainage. You know, too much water is the constant problem.
D. Firth Griffith: 46:57
Yeah.
Gunnar Rundgren: 46:59
So I have to relearn farming as well with a totally different soil? Well, yeah, it seems as well with a totally different soil.
D. Firth Griffith: 47:08
Well, yeah, it seems. Thinking back to the comment that you made about commodification, how so much of the power and control agriculture demands is not innate to agriculture but placed upon it from the outside. Yes, has the ability to open, to manifest in a very conventional, commodified system. Even that looks for beauty, even that looks for biodiversity. And I gave a keynote address at this conference down in Texas a couple years ago and basically made that point. We're all looking to regenerate the earth, but we're not challenging the, the assumptions or the preconceived notions or the structures that surround our desire for regeneration and therefore we can still possibly degenerate earth. You know to say it very simply and less well, hopefully. Um and a lot of people got angry about that it seems like we want to believe that there's a linear narrative to can to defeat linearity now I agree, I agree, I I see that on many proponents of well, maybe regenerative agriculture or other environmental issues.
Gunnar Rundgren: 48:41
You know that people have this desire that there is okay, we've done something wrong, change things and we'll steer it in the right direction. But it's not really. It's not, mostly not deep enough. Sometimes it's just bullshit. Of course, and greenwashing the no substance.
Gunnar Rundgren: 49:03
But sometimes there is a well it's. It's a lot, a lot of it, I must say, and especially on the technical level, where people have, you know, all these miracle solutions that will uh, precision fermentation or something like that, that will produce food with low inputs and very little environmental footprint. People who promote that may be in good faith, but for me it's a non-starter actually and it's no fun.
Gunnar Rundgren: 49:35
It's really not interesting. As a human being I that's what I even with food. I think a lot, a lot of the debate, at least in europe, around food has been you know how many co2 equivalents is your diet reducing and it, and before that it was. How many calories or how many vitamins or how many proteins you know, know it's such an instrumental view on food, which is, I mean, food is. That's why I'm also very interested in food and agriculture is, of course, because it's our most immediate and direct relationship with the rest of life is through food. Rest of life is through food. It's how we ingest nature. I would say it's how we breathe and how we eat and how we drink. That's how we really relate to. Of course, we look at nature as well and we feel the smell and we look at the beauty, but really hands-on food is extremely important. Food is extremely important and this food is reduced to an instrument either for building muscles or for living until you're 130 years old, or to reduce your climate footprint. It's all kind of instrumental perspectives on food, while food has all through human history been extremely culturally important.
Gunnar Rundgren: 50:58
We built societies around food and food production and eating itself, the idea of the people eating together. It's a very strong feature in almost all cultures that you eat together, you discuss things, you decide things, or you just laugh or you have fun. It's all. I mean that is only left in our society, maybe at Christmas and a few party times, because eating today is just a mechanical thing that people do on the fly. They take grabs on fast food and stuff, and the problem is not only what's in the cup, I would say, it's also the process of how you get that food and how you eat it, with no consideration, no gratefulness to whatever life, whether it's a plant or an animal put into that plate. You know there's no connection to it, it's just something you take in.
D. Firth Griffith: 52:03
Yeah, I think people have said it in the past and I'm starting to question this. I think it's close but not on. We talk about a commoditized food system producing commoditized consumers, but I wonder if it's the commoditized consumers not wanting to reconcile the life of the food system that demands the commoditized food production system. So in this way it is, it is potentially, you know, we talked about markets, you know, because the popular conception of capitalism is that you know the consumer, you know votes with their. Popular conception of capitalism is that you know the consumer, you know votes with their dollars in the consumer, by changing the buying behavior and the buying capacities and all of these things. It's all about the buyers and and that sort of thing. Markets are run by consumers. Well, but it might be true in this sense.
Gunnar Rundgren: 52:52
Yeah, in a sense, but I also think consumer demand and expectations are created. So it's a kind of cycle where things feed into each other. I often take the example of chicken, by the way, because the chicken consumption is the real rocket in the meat sector globally. In the meat sector globally, the chicken was in the 1950s or something consumed to a very small degree in almost all countries. It was very expensive. In America they talked about Sunday chicken, because Sunday you eat something that is great chicken. But today chicken is a very cheap staple food. It's even in a Swedish shop. It's actually even cheaper protein in chicken than in beans, which is hilarious.
Gunnar Rundgren: 53:48
But anyway, and that is so what has driven this? Well, you could say, of course, that consumers bought all these chickens. Yes, they did. But the reason they buy these chickens, of course, is that the price of chicken has dropped tremendously compared to the price of beef or the price of other comparable products.
Gunnar Rundgren: 54:08
So well, is it driven by industrialization of chicken? Or is it driven by consumers' demand of chicken? Or is it driven by the food industry, which finds chicken as a super ingredient in all kinds of ready-made dishes? Because chicken has no flavor. It's not tough like beef, you know, you can season it with Asian style, texan style, chinese style, do whatever style you want, because chicken itself, especially at least industrial chicken, it has no identity of its own, it has no flavor of its own. It's just, you know, a chunk of processed meat. So I think the consumer, the food industry, the chicken industry and the feed industry, which is the main input into the chicken industry anyway, the feed industry, which is the main input into the chicken industry anyway, that's a very strong system that is reinforcing itself, so to say.
Gunnar Rundgren: 55:05
But I think it's too simplistic to say that it was the consumer who demanded these chicken, right For sure, like also with novel foods coming out, like, say, oat milk or whatever. Well, that's industrial development. Even Steve Jobs said something in a quote like that the consumers have no clue what they want until we tell them.
Gunnar Rundgren: 55:28
That's probably true too, yeah, I mean there were no one out there saying we want smartphones. Somebody has to make one and show them.
D. Firth Griffith: 55:38
Oh, well then what you can do Anyway.
Gunnar Rundgren: 55:42
I think all systems that are strong. So, even though I do think that our current civilization capitalist system is doomed in the long term, it has shown it has very strong self-reinforcing loops, which is both a strength of a system but ultimately also its weakness. It's a bit like complexity, because it's getting out of control. This conversion of everything into commodities is ultimately undermining the foundations of society, I would say, because humans are not commodities and society's function cannot be reduced to goods and services that should be bought, like politicians are bought. It's undermining the system because the system is not built on a total commodification of all aspects of human life, but the drive in capitalism is the total commodification. I mean it started with more private school, private health care, private, this private, that and everything gets into a market. And the political system is well. In America, I think it seems to be almost in the market already.
D. Firth Griffith: 57:02
Yeah, yeah, so that's for sure. From most all perspectives that I've been able to witness, it does seem to be true. Have you read? This is not pleasurable reading, I doubt for somebody like you, neither for I. But George Monbiot's most recent book, regenesis.
Gunnar Rundgren: 57:25
I did read it. I did read it, yes.
D. Firth Griffith: 57:28
At the end. Towards the end he argues and I don't want to misquote him, and so I was looking to see if I had it close. I don't think I misquote him, and so I was looking to see if I had it close.
Gunnar Rundgren: 57:39
I don't think I do the book, but he says something to the regard of one of the more dangerous aspects of modern society is poetry. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I don't know exactly the quote, but I know he says something to that regard.
D. Firth Griffith: 57:51
Yeah, yeah.
Gunnar Rundgren: 57:53
Because he has really taken a stance against all this romantic, small farmer, romanticizing nature stuff. I think he was better when he was focusing on being an anti-capitalist. He did that job well. Modern version he's actually folding in quite neatly with capitalists and his vision for microbial food, proteins and stuff like that, which certainly will be controlled by big capitalist companies.
Gunnar Rundgren: 58:30
So, of course, if the alternative is only capitalist, large-scale pork factories with 100,000 pigs. I don't have any feelings for those industries and I can certainly agree with everybody who objects to that one, but the thing is that he doesn't differentiate between those and any other kind of animal farming. Actually, he's even saying that the worst thing is grass-fed beef, in his view, because it uses too much land, even worse than poetry.
D. Firth Griffith: 59:08
Yeah yeah, it's really very bad.
Gunnar Rundgren: 59:10
Organic grass-fed beef is the worst thing you can do. I mean, he doesn't say it, but basically he says that all the pastoralists of the world can go to hell. They have no future. Their cultures are destructive. He doesn't dare to say that, but it's implicit in what he says actually All, from the Sami of Scandinavia to the Maasai. They're all pastoralists. They are grazing animals.
D. Firth Griffith: 59:42
Yeah, how dare they? They must not understand methane.
Gunnar Rundgren: 59:48
Yeah, let's not talk about methane I've had a lot of that, but I don't. Let's not go in there.
D. Firth Griffith: 59:58
I love it. I write a lot of that, but I don't. Let's not go in there. I love it. Yeah, I like there's a certain bit of romance that this beauty seems to require though. Yeah, and it could be overdone. I can see Monville's point to some small degree, but it's a small degree. In order for me to think something is beautiful, it must be romantic yeah and even in that romance there has to be a little bit of self-interest yeah, yeah.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:00:28
No, they don't have to be uh contrary or enemies in any way.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:00:37
Yeah, that's really interesting. It's an interesting place to land.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:00:42
Yeah.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:00:45
Yeah, so what do we do?
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:00:47
Yeah, that's what I.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:00:49
Sit out and write nature poetry maybe.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:00:51
Yeah, no, I don't know, because I don't have faith in markets for sure to fix this stuff and I don't have faith in modern technology to clean things up. And so lately I have come to think that we it's more about culture. Of course we have to change the systems as well. Because I would say that that we it's more about culture, of course we have to change the systems as well, because I would say that the commodification system and the market system is extremely strong in reinforcing its own paradigm. So to some extent you must break that or put yourself beside that or make yourself independent on that to some extent, to change your mindset. But of course, in order to do that, you must have already changed your mindset a bit, otherwise you would have no motivation to try to break out of it. Way, this very strong system, you need to throw in some spanners in it or walk out of it or in some way, you know, reduce its grip on you. But in the meantime we also need to nurture those other relationships or kinships.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:02:10
Or in my last book that I wrote together with my wife it's unfortunately not in English but it's called the Living we land in a discussion about gratefulness thankfulness to food, to nature, and the idea that maybe some things should well be sacred in one way or the other.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:02:33
I mean because we as humans we are, so we are powerful. We can't run away from the fact that we are a very powerful species. We have given ourselves enormous tools, enormous abilities, and self-restraint is not one of our strengths, I would say, although there are people like monks and others who exercise that as a civilization, we may have to give ourselves limits. If nature is not giving them strongly and swiftly enough, we may have to make our own limits, which people did before also, I think implicitly and explicitly, by having things that were taboo, for instance. I think that was in many cultures a way to reduce overexploitation or some other use of the species or a mountain or a tree or whatever. We may have to go there again to see other things as sacred in order to respect them and leave them be or let them live or whatever. I don't know if that's, maybe that's poetry but maybe the poetry we need.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:04:01
Yeah, I definitely don't agree with mom bo see, but the interesting thing is it's interesting that he does pick on poetry, because poetry is the only medium of the written word that I know of that can take very simple ideas, very simple words. The best poets three, four letter words is all they use, and it conveys something that is so much bigger than any other medium of writing literature, novels, stories, mythologies, epics, prose could ever have accomplished. And it just requires time. It requires time and sitting and pontificating and unpacking and quietness, and well, to me those are all things that you know also surround this idea of sacredness, and so, to some degree, the poem forces you into a very sacred place where you look at a word and it's a very short, humdrum, daily word and all of a sudden it becomes a ceremonial masterpiece. You know, that's, that's the power of poetry, I think I wish I had that ability.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:05:04
I, I, I must admit that I I tried not to write but to read poetry. But my, I, I think I ruined poetry by training false reading as a child.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:05:16
You know I was obsessed by this idea that I should, you know, make 80 pages in an hour or something like that, to process as much information as possible. It kind of ruined my ability to read poetry. I just tried to extract as much as possible in a very rapid way and I haven't come over that. Maybe when I get a bit older I will be able to enjoy poetry, because I understand the value of it theoretically, but I have not yet experienced it in my heart.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:05:49
I would say Culture is important and maybe poetry is the highest art form.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:05:55
But I can't feel that yet, maybe, well, when it happens, it'll be the right time. What else, my friend, anything else in your heart, in your mind, that you would like to discuss?
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:06:11
oh well, there are so many things and I'm quite talkative, as you may have noticed, but I think we covered quite some ground.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:06:19
Yeah.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:06:20
Maybe your last reflections, no.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:06:25
It's always wonderful talking with somebody like yourself who has seen so much and has thought so much. And in your books, especially Garden Earth, that I got to read more explicitly than I did the other items that you sent over, it just calls to this deep sense of nuance that when agriculture arose it didn't solve problems, it didn't not create problems, it just existed. And now it's up to us to figure that out. And then the machine and fossil fuels, like there's nothing intrinsically negative about, you know, decaying ancient earth into black goo. You know I'm trying to say there's nothing implicitly negative with so many of these aspects, but it's the nuance and how we interrelate and how we perceive our control to be, how we, you know, actually start to utilize that ability of control. It's again nuance and complexity and it's a wonderful reminder, especially in view of limits Limits, you know it's it's.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:07:32
It's both a popular and unpopular subject. It is both a popular and unpopular subject it is. But to envision limits as an intrinsic force that, even when you feel like you've broken beyond them, you are still contained within them, seems to bring this idea of limits into a very divine sense to me. I'm not saying it is a god, what I'm saying is it's very similar to our relationship with this sacred source, this god figure, that it's very similar to our relationship with this sacred source, this God figure, that it is always going to be there and no matter what we think we can do to it, it still stands beyond that. So it's both humbling and also exciting, because it's like the sooner you realize that you can't extend beyond them, the sooner you're going to learn to live inside of your own limits yeah you know.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:08:19
So, anyways, those are the thoughts and images that are playing in my mind thanks to you. Okay, so I appreciate you. If um, I don't like to assume that you want to be found, but if people were to find you in your appropriate medium is substack the way people should interact with you.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:08:40
Yeah, that's. That's for english speakers. I think that's the easiest way and people can email me on gunner at growlinkse if they want to.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:08:50
That's fine also, but wonderful and your substack beyond sustainability garden earth beyond sustainability, Wonderful. And your sub stack Beyond Sustainability.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:08:58
Garden Earth Beyond Sustainability.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:09:00
Garden Earth Beyond Sustainability. Good, good, we will put the link in the show notes. Thank you again for being here. It is, like I said, it's a rich blessing and I really enjoy these conversations and I thank you for sitting and speaking.
Gunnar Rundgren: 1:09:16
Thank, you for having me.