Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

I went on my shortest bike ride circuit out of Swinton today – takes me through the lovely village of Fogo with its very attractive Kirk.  The Berwickshire Merse is intensively farmed although there is a lot of wild life, particularly brown hares and roe deer, but it is deep rural with plenty of woodland.  I have started writing a proposal for a book developing a complexity informed take to address the contemporary urban crisis and whilst so doing I have been collecting some data – mostly from that excellent source Our World in Data. One hundred years ago – 1926 – just 15% of the global population of two billion lived in urban settlements. Now nearly 60% of a global population of eight billion live in urban settlements. This part of the greatest transformation of human society since the agricultural revolution of 2,500 bce.  I come from a family background of people from the congested districts of Connaught in Ireland who fled the famine to become coal miners in the North East of England living in urban Tyneside, not in pit villages. They were leaving a real peasant life style, not the small capitalist farmer raising cattle on grass of Joyce’s Peasants but a world of landless labourers and conacre tenants (no security) living off crops of potatoes. My Welsh grandfather came from North Pembrokeshire where the women farmed (and taught spherical trigonometry in the family marine school business) and the men went to sea.  These were rural people. As a university student I actually worked harvests as a farm labourer. University terms were arranged around the need for medieval students to be released from field work.  My mother as quite a senior civil servant (Tax Officer Higher Grade) picked potatoes on special leaves to do this during World War II.  There was still a bit of link between urban and rural life.

Now is there any? And rural life was very different from  urban life, particularly when most rural people were real peasants with much of the food they produced consumed by themselves with a cash relationship through rent and essential purchases.  I play at being a peasant in my large garden but produce at most 15-20% of what I eat paying more for what I get than if I bought it in the supermarket although my stuff is organic.  I still buy in a lot. I do avoid gym fees by doing hard manual work in the garden which is much more fun.  That said if I turned all my ground over to food production, kept hens and rabbits, and foraged more than I do I could just about sustain myself on the suggested pattern in Make Your Garden Feed You first published as part of the Dig for Victory campaign in 1940. I have a facsimile copy and it is still a good guide but I don’t roll my peas in red lead to keep the mice off the seeds – can’t get red lead these days.

My serious point is that urban life is extra-ordinarily vulnerable to disruption of food supply chains. During the siege of Leningrad 1.5 million people died despite evacuation of many civilians. More than half a million are buried in the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in mass graves.  People have left the land just as my great grandparents did but on a massive scale over one hundred years. We are sustained by ever more industrialized agriculture depending on pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers. A key element is phosphates which are in global short supply. The guano ran out years ago. Water supply is also and issue globally and even in the Merse water is extracted from rivers by farmers for watering crops in dry periods – and this in Scotland (although South East Scotland is the driest large part of the country).

Urban life is different, especially the urban life of post-industrial formerly industrial cities which includes places like London as well as rustbelt urban centres.  Industrial cities were productive of things. Post-industrial cities just consume things. Sure, the economic activity around consumption counts as components of GDP – BUT IT IS NOT THE SAME.  Attended an outstanding Zoom meeting of North East Labour History where Martin Spence with comments from Bob Clay described his researches in the National Archives to identify why two of the most modern shipyards in the world with a potential order book were closed in Sunderland in 1988. This was a political decision to force deindustrialization with the sites sterilized for productive use by the wretched Tyne Wear Urban Development Corporation using the land for housing and a campus for Sunderland University.

So I continue to write my draft proposal in a mood of extreme pessimism although I did have a good bike ride but failed to take photos of Fogo Kirk.