All Our Yesterdays

Every Sunday, at least until at least the end of October – I am doing a weekly “El Nino” digest (first one here) – for reasons.  Some of the stuff I encounter just has to be blogged, so every Wednesday I will put up something, usually based on something I’ve encountered while looking at stuff that does or doesn’t go in the digest. Below is the first.

Whatever does and doesn’t happen in the course of 2027, whether the physical/political/economic impacts are beyond belief or merely really bad, I think that 2027 will spell the end of an illusion some of us have been Labor/Labouring under –  that sooner or later we will return to the “good old days” of stable economic growth – a chicken in every pot and some sunny uplands. 

As someone said, (it may have been Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on the Chris Hayes podcast, or maybe it was someone on the American Prestige podcast, idk – there was a time that the fash would promise their followers good things, material things – things that they’d looted from, say, the Jews, or there would the promise of farming land that had been stolen from the Slavs. But now, not so much – it’s just straight displaced hate and “owning the libs”. 

FWIW, IMO, they don’t need to promise anything else, because organised labour big enough to force them into those promises?  (As per Anton Jager, the subject of a perceptive book review in the early September Private Eye, are they really fascists, if you define fascism as a response to a credible  threat of socialism?)

Anyway, for once I have digressed. Fwiw, I think we’ll all get a lesson in some of Barry Commoner‘s four laws from his 1971 book “The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology.”

1. Everything is connected to everything else,
2. Everything must go somewhere,
3. Nature knows best, and
4. Nothing comes from nothing.

(see Footnote 1 – for once it’s worth your time).

Re laws 1 and 4 –

There is a fantastic and terrifying interview with a food security expert in . Nightmare fuel, you’re welcome.

Meanwhile, as far as UK readers are concerned, it might be the end of mangoes on Christmas Day (2). In an Observer article, the hack interviews a couple of people in a position to know about supply chains for discretionary food spending in the UK. 

Julian Marks, the chief executive of Barfoots, which supplies retailers with vegetables ranging from sweetcorn to aubergines, said: “We run relay races around the world to ensure consistent availability and quality of produce.” Yields of asparagus from Peru are now down 25%, Marks said, and the vegetables are of poorer quality. “They have less shelf life because the plants are more stressed.”

and

Marks said: “The sense of abundance that we have as consumers today… the removal of seasonality from people’s minds, the idea that you can have a mango on New Year’s Day – that’s something that could disappear.”

And

Christian Jaccarini, economist at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, said  “The inflationary pressures are still there, but much of it is being absorbed upstream for now, meaning this wave of inflation has likely been delayed rather than avoided.”

What this put me in mind of was Joanna Blythman’s  (not Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall!)’s concept of Permanent Global Summertime. You have to be my age or older to remember when seasons were reflected on supermarket shelves (nd I only just remember it, and that’s probably because I lived in the end of a supply chain – Adelaide. If I’d been in the metropole, maybe I’d need to be a few years older still.) 

Anyway, the point is that we “conquered” the seasons, or rather, we gave ourselves the illusion of having conquered the seasons. How did we do it? We used congealed sunlight from millions of years ago. We fed that into the tanks of metal birds of our own invention and flew farm produce around the world.  There aren’t many songs about this, strangely, but I am fond of T. V. Smith’s effort his song “Free World” from his impossibly good album “March of the Giants” – 

“you can force it drug it and exhaust it, pick the fruit of the rape of the land”

It is going to become implausible, impossible to sustain Permanent Global Summertime quite soon (3).

Re law 2 (“Everything must go somewhere”) clock this – 

 from a January 1963 Popular Science, sent to me by a good friend. 

It really captures the assumptions of the 60s that you could just dispose of your waste, however, and the earth was so big that it would absorb whatever you did to it. 

And the first successful push against that was Rachel Carson in 1962 with her Silent Spring, and of course she was denounced as a communist and a lesbian and hysterical and all of the above. 

The Malthusian “resources will run out and we will starve” fears gave way, in the 1970s and 1980s, to the “we will overwhelm the capacity of the planet to act as a garbage dump.” – Ozone, Climate, and here we are. 

References

Vasager, J. 2026. Super El Niño could end the ‘sense of food abundance’ enjoyed by UK consumers. The Observer, Sept 17

Footnotes 

(1) “The four laws of ecology and the four anti-ecological laws of capitalism” of John Bellamy Foster.

1. The only lasting connection between things is the cash nexus;
2. It doesn’t matter where something goes as long as it doesn’t reenter the circuit of capital;
3. The self-regulating market knows best; and
4. Nature’s bounty is a free gift to the property owner.

(2) The Telegraph is running something about chocolate or coffee getting more expensive, but a) it’s behind a paywall, and b)  Axel Springer], 

(3) During the Berlin airlift (1948-9) they were actually flying in coal, It made up 65% of the tonnage flown in, which is, I mean, just astonishing.

What do you think? Does this make any sense? Does it spark any thoughts, connections of your own?