There’s a disturbing trend towards thinking of systemic collapse as being the inevitable and even necessary precursor to a more ideal future. It’s all coming down. Empires must fall. Only that way can we usher in better things. We must make good ruins, as Dougald Hine put it. Chris Smaje imagines cities emptying out in an agrarian future. Donella Meadows was right. Collapse is coming. Then we’ll be proved right.
Enough.
It’s a simplistic attitude that fails to acknowledge the reality that many millions more would suffer in the collapse scenario of some people’s fantasies, even beyond the loss of life and suffering that we see now. It also fails to acknowledge the possibility of a pluralistic path forward. It’s an attitude that suggests standing back and waiting for the collapse, rather than acting to mitigate against the worst effects of it, or even steer the ship away from the rocks.
We need to make the best of the situation we have, to be realistic; engage in making good change forcefully, persistently, and pragmatically now; and acknowledge the messy nature of any transition from one state to another, uneven over time and geography. We don’t simply switch states from one to another, like a light coming on. It won’t look like that. Binary thinking will get us nowhere. As H.L. Mencken said, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
“You never change something by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I wonder if we can’t build something new while we work in the reality. Mycelial networks grow through and beneath existing ecosystems, exchanging nutrients and establishing relationships, but may have the potential to transform those ecosystems. We need to learn Judo, not boxing – using the weight and momentum of existing structures to move in a new direction, rather than opposing them head on.
Believing that collapse is necessary for things to really change is just as dangerous as the belief that change isn’t possible at all, and that collapse is inevitable. It’s the same determinism.The conditions to bring about positive change will never be ideal and welcome you. You won’t get a blank slate and a fresh start. The map is not the territory. The bright future you imagine will not happen, at least not the way that you expect. Neither, in all likelihood, will the collapse you imagine. But while you wait, those who profit from the status quo are getting on with it.
I’m picking up on this thread for my Master’s dissertation by diving into the mess and looking at pluralism in food systems.
Throughout my degree, I’ve been struck by the binary nature of food systems debate. On one side is the industrial model dominated by transnational corporations; on the other, an agroecological system led by food sovereignty movements and peasant farmers. The two approaches are generally seen as oppositional, often talking past each other.
Food systems scholarship, and many in alternative food networks, position industrial and alternative models as oppositional or incompatible. Jennifer Clapp criticises this approach. Yet, practitioners and businesses increasingly operate in hybrid spaces. This disconnect between theory and practice limits our understanding of resilience and adaptability in food provisioning, and, I think, holds us up.
I’ve already explored plurality in food systems, including how fourth agricultural revolution technologies might be leveraged within agroecology, and I’ve been particularly engaged by wicked problems and systems thinking. Now I want to examine why binary framing is inadequate for food systems, and argue that resilience means drawing on strengths from multiple approaches.
That means looking at businesses and organisations operating in hybrid spaces: the opportunities and risks of bridging different models, how agroecological principles can be maintained, and when purity needs to give way to pragmatism – as Marc Edelman et al. put it, the degree of tolerance for pluralism is one of the biggest and most challenging questions confronting food sovereignty practitioners and researchers. Can sustainable, socially just food provisioning coexist with industrial systems in ways that benefit all? With climate breakdown and geopolitical instability intensifying, the case for hybrid food systems moves beyond interesting to necessary. The core question is how different models can coexist and reinforce one another to produce something genuinely resilient.