1. Researching my latest column, I was astonished to stumble across this. Sarah Langford presents herself as a guardian of the countryside and champion of rural people and their culture. Yet it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to rural people than “living between” two homes. 🧵
2. Now this is quite personal for me, as when Regenesis, my deeply-researched attempt to work out how everyone might best be fed without devouring the planet, was published, Langford launched a fierce but entirely unfounded attack on me, on the grounds that I was harming rural people. 3. “Living between” two homes when others have none helps drive rural (or urban) people out of the places where they were born, puts upward pressure on house prices, undermines services like schools and shops, and is devastating to community life. 4. Looking into it further, I came across this post of hers on Instagram. Let's spend a moment unpacking it, as it speaks to me of everything that's wrong with dominant media themes about the countryside.
5. First, those aren't oxeye daisies. They’re mayweed (probably scentless, though hard to tell from the photo). It's hard to imagine how someone could mistake mayweed for oxeye daisy. I've seen this many times: the “guardians of the countryside” often seem to know remarkably little about it. 6. Please read Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lie of the Land for a brilliant exposition of the difference between the way the so-called “stewards of the countryside” present themselves, and the reality of their knowledge and impacts. harpercollins.co.uk
harpercollins.co.uk
7. Second, it speaks to something I've seen far too often: the way cottagecore aesthetics seem to displace social and environmental concerns. I see the same thing when it comes to the food system, and decisions about how our very difficult challenges should best be met - more on that in a moment. 8. Her post continues as follows. She congratulates herself on buying marble offcuts, but how about the environmental impacts of living in two homes?
9. Not only does it mean two sets of white goods, furniture etc etc etc; it also means that another home needs be built to accommodate the family that might otherwise have lived there. 10. Now onto food systems. To me, her approach exemplifies what I call “the cruel fantasies of well-fed people”. Indeed, she wrote the foreword to the book this article is about, and it applies just as much to her approach as it does to Chris Smaje’s. monbiot.com
www.monbiot.com
11. The cottagecore aesthetic seems to me to override rather more important questions, such as how 8, 9 or 10 billion people are going to be fed without crashing Earth systems. I argue in that essay that some people appear to privilege their comfort zones above useful answers to these questions. 12. This, given that such people tend to dominate discussion of these issues in the media, is a huge problem. Their audience laps it up: many people love the aesthetic approach to food, farming and countryside issues and really hate the empirical approach. 13. If you play to the crowd, you'll inevitably get these issues wrong. Those of us who really want to solve these problems, and try to be as objective and clear-headed as we can, will always struggle. But we need to persist, however much people stop their ears, and however much dirt is flung at us. The thread on one page: skywriter.blue
skywriter.blue