Messy and iterative

versus perfect and all-encompassing

Today I want to address a central tension to the question of: "how do we get from here to there?"

Someone on the SCORAI listserv recently wrote:

"The challenge is to find ways to make regenerative agriculture thrive within the current system while, in doing so, also see if we can develop models that represent some tentative progress towards systemic change rather than rejecting anything that does not represent perfection. Also bearing in mind that what might represent 'perfection' to us may be others' vision of hell - and they have a political voice too, maybe a louder and more effective one."

There are two tensions here:

1. The tension between "messy" and "perfect"

2. The tension between an all encompassing solution (e.g. degrowth), and small, iterative changes (experimentation that is currently happening on the ground)

In general I tend toward the "messy" and the "iterative." Many solutions-oriented folks I've come across seem to focus on the "perfect" and the "all encompassing," a set of solutions I might call utopian. This mismatch makes it so that we are talking past one another because we are talking at different scales.

With regard to regenerative ag versus vertical farms (and the many other examples of industrial agriculture), I believe that the latter are actually part of a utopian-leaning project, with financiers lining up for potentially exponential profits.

I believe it's a question of "which path from here to there do we want to set ourselves on?" I do believe there is a kind of path-dependency once you pick one. People become more or less "all in" on a certain set of solutions, at certain scales. 

Regenerative ag is advancing in a messy and iterative way, not because of the potential for unlimited upside extractive finance capital, but because of ecological and social limits that will make farming industrially impossible (nitrogen fertilizer, phosphorus, soil erosion, drought, global supply chain breakdown, you name it!). I am setting my path dependency here, intentionally. To help usher in the messy, iterative process, and to invite as many people into the experimentation as possible.

Despite financial capital putting all of their resources toward the utopian projects of eco-modernist technological and industrial projects, many of these small-scale, messy, iterative projects are succeeding wildly. I am hopeful.

Ashley

P.S. Before you accuse me of it, I am not a total luddite. Many of the messy, iterative experimentations I am talking about use advanced technology as a central part of a more holistic approach to solutions. Technology is a tool that can be used for better or worse effect!