Ecology and the Left: An Interview with "The Last Farm"
Permaculture, homesteading, degrowth, climate change, and eco-socialism
As we deal with the impacts of climate breakdown and the broader ecological emergency we must find ways to soberly deal with the serious and worsening situation in front of us—and to seek alternatives in sustainable and enduring ways of living on this planet.
There is no single approach that works, and many people are experimenting in diverse ways to try and respond to the demands of this moment. In this newsletter I speak to “The Last Farm,” a pseudonymous Twitter/Instagram user and Substack writer who homesteads in the Northeast. We had a conversation about ecology, the Left, permaculture, climate breakdown, and what an eco-socialist future might look like.
Our talk is lightly edited—but still goes long. This may get cut off in your email inbox, so be sure to read on Substack.
Will Solomon: Can you talk about your background, including how you got into farming and where your politics come from?
The Last Farm: I’ve always been, just as a hobbyist really, interested in growing food and gardening. It’s been something that I’ve enjoyed for many, many years, from a young age. But as far as the confluence of that with my politics, that really started to happen when I was radicalized, which was a result of the Zapatista uprising. I traveled to Chiapas [in Mexico] and spent time in Zapatista communities. And that was really the foundation of my politics today—reading the documents produced by the Zapatistas, experiencing it in real life, watching them go through their democratic process, and so on.
And then, you know, returning home to the United States and grappling with how to apply the lessons I’d learned in a very different sort of place to my own life. That, as with any form of politics, is an ongoing project. And so what you see in my posts and my writing is me navigating that tension and trying to figure out a way forward in our current world.
To tie it back to agriculture, I think this is in some way just an accident of history, that I’m alive during a critical moment in the history of our planet and our ability to thrive on it. And so the connection between the radical politics that I’ve developed and my love for growing food and agricultural systems and being outdoors and the multitudinal gifts of nature is just something that I’ve synthesized as I’ve grappled with how to cope with climate collapse and the reality of what we’re doing to our ecosystem.
WS: What was your experience like down in Chiapas?
TLF: That was a really seminal moment in time. The Zapatista uprising began in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas on the day that NAFTA went into effect. It was very much formulated explicitly as a rebellion against neoliberalism and capitalist globalization, and it really was a foundational element of the anti-globalization politics that were dominant on the Left at that time.
What’s so interesting about the Zapatistas, and remains interesting, was that they synthesized many different aspects of the Left into a pretty new approach. The Zapatista movement was started by a bunch of orthodox Marxist professors from Mexico City who moved to the jungle and kind of envisioned themselves as Che-Guevara-type figures. And then their politics were very much changed and shifted by the people they found there. And so, rather than sticking to their guns and becoming one of these classic Maoist-insurgency-type groups that ends up being very formulaic and very rarely successful, they adapted to their surroundings and to the community they were in, and developed this kind of radically democratic model rooted in the millennia-old Indigenous traditions of the people that they were organizing amongst.
It really became a true example of organizing, which is a two-way street. It’s not just bringing the good word to the masses.
And so that kind of non-dogmatic, highly syncretic approach that dealt with the reality of the situation on the ground—rather than being this kind of academic, high-minded, teach-the-text approach to Left politics—was really influential on me. And then seeing it in action in all its messiness and complexity, and seeing it succeed under incredibly difficult circumstances, was really tremendously inspiring, and a life-changing moment for me.
WS: As far as the ecological dimension, can you talk a little about degrowth? That seems to be a kind of anchor for your politics—especially considering a Left that I think has a mixed relationship in general with the environment, perhaps in the United States especially.
TLF: I would say [that’s true] everywhere. This was one of my struggles when I was in Chiapas: there was, I would say, a decidedly mixed relationship to ecology there as well. And, you know, I think a lot of people struggle to admit that the Left historically has not really had a thoroughgoing analysis of ecology, has not really made sense of it in a way that created a viable politics of human life on earth.
Degrowth is an example of that. It really came from outside of the traditional Left, and is now kind of becoming a synthesis with eco-socialism. And it’s something that a lot of people on the Left are struggling with because it is in many ways a very practical-minded analytical framework. It is not a grand theory that can be applied at all places and times. It is a prescriptive analysis for where we are today.
And where we are today is across six of nine planetary boundaries, the climate being the one that is in the most dire situation, but far from our only crisis. Degrowth is an attempt to answer the question: what do we do now?
People get really caught up on how straightforward the prescription is because it doesn’t actually lend itself in a very straightforward way to more recent history of theory on the Left. The idea is, essentially, that we cannot get back across those boundaries into safe territory without dramatically reducing our energy usage and resource throughput. And what that probably looks like in the Global North is something like an eighty-five percent reduction in energy usage—which could only be achieved with a radical reimagining of what our everyday life looks like, what our economy looks like, how our politics function, and so on.
This runs up against a lot of people’s preferences and also a lot of people’s biases. And it is a real challenge to talk about in a Left that has been caught up in what is typically called productivism, and is now kind of embodied in this idea of ecomodernism.
WS: How would you characterize ecomodernism?
TLF: I will start off by saying that within degrowth and ecomodernism there is also a Left and a Right. There are people on the Left who consider themselves ecomodernists. There’s a liberal aspect of degrowth. What I share with Left ecomodernists and what almost everybody in degrowth shares is a belief that any sustainable solution requires a redistribution of wealth. That’s the common ground among people there.
That’s sort of where it ends, though. The ecomodernists call themselves Prometheans, the idea being—and this is something Marx wrote about—that humans can achieve a kind of final break with their animal selves, with their attachment to nature. They [connect this to] the story of Prometheus.
To me, the much more salient example would be the story of Icarus. I think this Promethean hubris is lunacy. It flies in the face of everything science understands about ecology. It also flies in the face of all known human history. And if we just map their ideas onto the present world, what that looks like is building thousands and thousands and thousands of nuclear power plants, massively ramping up industrial production—basically doing everything that you would need to do to bring the kind of lifestyle that is experienced in the Global North, in the countries that are the centers of both historical colonialism and neocolonialism today, to everyone. This is of course an impossibility, because those are extractive systems that rely on the exploitation of other people to achieve their wealth.
They try to thread the needle by saying: we’re going to do redistribution, everyone is going to be wealthy, and we’re going to achieve these enormous increases in production through the magic of technology. This ignores basically everything that the global boundaries analysis tells us, which is that it’s not just about climate, it’s not even about just CO2—there are other extremely important factors in determining whether or not we can live a good life on this planet. Things like biodiversity, the health of the ocean and its acidification, and so on. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are deeply reliant on those systems, and we are also destroying them.
And so if we try to follow the Western development path of mass industrialization and endless consumer culture and so on, we will commit mass suicide in the process.
WS: Sometimes I’m personally unsure how seriously to take these people, because it does seem so fantastical. Several of these ecomodernists write for Jacobin and consider themselves Leftists. But to me, it just seems like it’s fundamentally a fascist politics at the end of the day, because it’s so rooted in ecological denial.
TLF: Yeah. I think their response to that would be that they are deeply committed to Marx’s—or to their understanding of—a Marxist notion of the progressive character of capitalism. They love everything about capitalism: its material culture, its consumer culture, its technology program. Everything you see about capitalism they love, except for the distribution of wealth.
Theirs is a very narrow critique. They walk that back towards Marx saying that capitalism had an inherently progressive character, meaning that it advanced the human cause, the human project. It made it better. The problem was it concentrated the goods created in that process in too few hands.
And that’s it. There’s no critique beyond that of everyday life, or the quality of our material culture, et cetera. And they would argue that as a defense—that this is inherently progressive. I reject that completely. I think if you don’t have a critique of everyday life under capitalism, and if you don’t have a critique of our consumer society and our material culture and so on, extending outwards, that to me is a hyper-conservative understanding of our civilization. And one that I don’t see as recognizably on the Left either.
WS: Getting down into the day to day: could you talk about permaculture a little bit, maybe giving a definition for people who aren’t really familiar?
TLF: Permaculture is an agriculture design philosophy that seeks to create a closed-loop system. And it does that by mimicking the closed-loop systems we find in nature. And what I mean by “closed-loop system” is a system that is essentially self-maintaining in regard to things like pest control, fertilizer, et cetera. Everything that it needs to function indefinitely exists within that system. This stands in stark contrast to industrial agriculture, which is a system that relies enormously on outside inputs.
The best estimate is that industrial agriculture requires ten calories of input for every one calorie of output. Most of those ten calories come from fossil fuels. So it is an extremely inefficient means of converting one form of calories into an edible form of calories.
Permaculture takes the opposite approach. It tries to create a calorically efficient system, and what that looks like in daily practice is: it wants you, the person growing the food, to be as lazy as possible. And in order to achieve that goal, you try to design and build a system that is very good at taking care of itself. And does so in a way that largely mimics the functions of natural ecosystems.
WS: What are some examples that you’re employing?
TLF: One of the most common ways of doing this is through planting what are called polycultures. That, again, is in contrast to industrial agriculture, which plants monocultures—meaning you see a giant field of all the same plant: corn, soybeans, whatever it is.
In permaculture, you will interplant things to the greatest extent possible to create a highly diverse system, the reason being that each of those plants serves a different role within that closed-loop system. Some of them are habitat for beneficial insects that perform the function of killing insects you don’t want there. Some of them are food for pollinators. Others repel diseases or pests that you don’t want. And then others are just a diverse way of creating a well-rounded diet. A person does not survive on corn alone, so if you were to grow yourself a monoculture of corn, you’d have to sell it, and then use your money to buy other food. In a permaculture system, you try to grow a complete diet.
One of the key elements of permaculture systems are nitrogen fixers. These are plants that form a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in their roots that draw nitrogen from the atmosphere and add it into the soil. The bacteria exchange that nitrogen with a plant for sugars. This is a natural process—it’s why there is nitrogen in our soil to begin with. We harness that power to add nitrogen fertilizer to a permaculture system.
So a plant might be there just because it’s a natural fertilizer. You cut it down every year and it adds that nitrogen in, and other plants get to use it. There’s all kinds of examples like that. The goal is just to add something that, once it is set up and mature and generally doing its thing, you can be quite hands-off about it.
WS: Do you have any favorite projects you’ve done this year? How about longer-term projects going forward?
TLF: One of the ongoing successes I’ve had is with Hugelkultur. This is kind of a key tool in permaculture and is [a traditional way of building] a garden bed that in some ways mimics what’s called the nurse log phenomenon. That’s when a tree falls in the forest, and lots of plants end up growing on top of that tree. As leaves fall on top of it and so on, a layer of soil forms, and then that dead tree becomes a nurse log for the next generation of plants. It’s the most nutrient-rich part of the forest.
We kind of mimic that by excavating an area of the garden, filling it with wood, and then layering the kinds of things that might fall in the forest on top of it: dead leaves, green leaves, animal manure, things like that, and finally we put a layer of topsoil on top and plant our garden into that.
I’ve built them a couple times over the years, but really small ones, like in community garden plots and things like that. Last year I built quite a large one. It’s about five hundred square feet of growing space. And I’m at work on my second. And that’s just been wildly successful.
I garden in a very remote location. There are no utilities, there’s no running water, there’s not even vehicle access—I have to walk across a creek to get to it. So even if I wanted to shower it with inputs, I wouldn’t be able to. And the garden has just done exceptionally well. I leave it for long stretches of time without any inputs at all other than an occasional harvest and things like that, and it’s just cranked out food. So I’m a big fan of Hugelkultur.
Next year I’m planning on building a pretty ambitious version of what’s called a Three Sisters garden. That’s the ancient North American combination of dent corn (maize), runner beans, which grow up the maize, and then squash, which grow on the ground around it. And the Three Sisters name is a bit of a misnomer. There are actually more plants that go into it than that. But that’s the basic concept. I’ve got a pretty large area that I’m working on where I’m planning on growing that system. I grew winter squash this year and had a ton of success with it, which is really exciting. And so I want to kind of lean into that and also produce both carbs and protein, on the same piece of land, and see how that goes. That’s a project I’m pretty excited about.
WS: One thing that comes up, in terms of localizing and the way we produce and distribute food now, is an assumption that there’s a limitation to what you can eat and grow locally. Obviously it’s the case to some degree, but I think the limits are much wider than people realize. I know you’ve written on this. I wonder if you can talk a little about that diversity that you’re trying to grow in your garden.
TLF: I think you’re absolutely correct. Yes, there probably are some limits to what you can grow in a certain environment—but, you know, people are ingenious and with any amount of effort you could probably figure it out.
But it’s also true that we are totally ignorant of what we can actually grow in the areas we have. There are so many things you can eat that are not grown commercially for a variety of different reasons: some just quirks of history, others because they don’t fit well into long supply chains, and so on. If we were to actually re-localize our diet the reality is that most people’s diets would get vastly more diverse, not less diverse.
Something like a hearty banana is an example of that. A cold-hardy banana, which will grow in the Northeast or New England, is not going to produce edible banana fruits, but there’s another part of the banana that’s edible. That’s the core. A banana is not actually a tree. It’s just a giant leaf that is wrapped very tightly around itself. And the middle part of it is edible and delicious, and it has been eaten for many, many years, primarily in South Asia, and is a core part of the diet there. Banana curry and things like that are classic dishes.
A banana grows about fifteen feet tall in a year. That’s a lot of core. That’s a lot of curry if you want it. There are these kinds of really delicious, novel, edible foods hiding in plain sight. But they’re not something you’d see at the grocery store today. The reality is that industrial agriculture under capitalism is exclusively focused on maximizing profit, so it’s only going to offer you things that allow it to do that. It’s not inherently interested in offering you diversity.
WS: Homesteading in a lot of cases has a kind of libertarian connotation. How do you unite that with a Leftist politics, with your vision of eco-socialism?
TLF: Yeah, it does. I think a lot of the homesteading community or whatever you would call it is based around hyper-individualism and this notion that you can escape to a remote plot of land and do everything for yourself. And this will free you in some way from relying upon a system you abhor.
That is mythology. That is not the reality of the situation and it never will be. We are interconnected whether we like it or not. We are social animals and no one is going to supply their own needs entirely on their own. And so, my version of homesteading is, on the one hand, just a lifestyle choice. I’m not claiming that my homestead is creating the revolution or anything. It’s just what I like doing. But to the extent that I’m able to live my values through it, I very much take the approach of trying to make it something that builds community and offers opportunity to others, rather than being this kind of isolationist, bunker mentality of me against the world.
I don’t expect everyone to love homesteading, but I think that if they do want to do that, then that should be an option available to people. It shouldn’t just be something that you can buy your way into if you’re an upper-middle-class person who decides to get out of the city.
So I think there’s a justice orientation to that. And there’s also a desire to make information as free as possible and to decommmodify that information. Because the reality is that permaculture and homesteads are not very good at producing capitalist commodities. To me that’s a strength, not a weakness. That’s part of why I like them. But the one thing that a homestead does produce, that can be commodified, is information. And I think the goal should really be to make that information as decommodified as possible—while recognizing at the same time that we still live under capitalism, and we all have to navigate day-to-day life under it. So there’s a tension there, but it’s one that I try to navigate as best I can.
WS: This summer’s been particularly drastic in terms of climate impacts. What’s your vision of the future, both the apocalyptic and the eco-socialistic?
TLF: Yeah, I think this summer has been startling for everyone. It’s been a wake-up call. And I think, you know, on the plus side, it makes people like me seem less hysterical. On the downside, we’re dealing with some really tough circumstances here.
I think in terms of—what’s the sort of utopian future versus what’s the apocalyptic future—we are forced to reckon with the reality of our situation, which is that it’s going to have to be some combination of those two things. The ship has sailed on preventing some truly drastic effects of climate collapse. We are going to be enduring those things, whether we like it or not. The future is going to have to cope with that.
The goal, and my goal for eco-socialism, and my vision for it, is that we will cope with those things in the most just manner possible, and in the way that makes it most likely that humanity will continue to thrive. And ideally, in a better way than we have been.
I do think that—this is kind of the duality of collapse—on the one hand we’re very likely headed for a system change in really bad circumstances, circumstances that are not of our choosing necessarily, that do not involve a lot of planning or mitigation. Things are already coming at us in a way that’s causing mass suffering. And that is obviously a terrible tragedy.
On the other hand, it is creating the circumstances for system change, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. But either way, it’s a very rare thing, and it’s a very hard thing to engineer. So the fact that we are on the precipice of a global system change creates a lot of opportunity. I think if eco-socialists and other people who envision a different and better kind of world in the future are willing to grasp that opportunity, we have a historic moment, where we can shape what can come next, by struggling for it now. And that can look like a world with a great deal more joy if we want it to, even with all of the effects that we will experience from climate collapse.
WS: What sorts of programs do you see in that world?
TLF: I’ve done two versions of these threads on an infrastructure agenda for an eco-socialist future, for municipal eco-socialism and for rural eco-socialism. The concept here is just: what practical steps should our cities, towns, villages, and rural areas be taking today to cope with our present ecological reality and also to shape the future? How can we start to do the things that are going to make us resilient in the face of climate collapse, and how can we also make that as non-traumatic a situation as possible, to limit the damage as much as possible?
Those two things overlap. It’s not a question of—either we’re trying to stop climate change or we’re trying to adapt to a climate-changed future. The Venn diagram overlaps quite a bit there. I think these are things that we should be doing, whether we’re acknowledging what we’re facing or we’re trying to stop the worst of it.
One of those things is municipal food forests, which would be city or town run. They’d be what I described earlier in terms of polycultures—based around fruit trees and nut trees, designed to create a sustainable source of food for people. [These are especially relevant] right now as we’re facing really dire food inflation, and we’ve also been made acutely aware of the fragility of global supply chains around food. Having local sources of food where the price does not change as the commodity price fluctuates—a fruit tree yields for free, no matter what the price of apples is at the supermarket—and trying to systemize that, to take that from being just a personal adaptation, a backyard thing, to making it a community thing and something that’s supported by the state, is really important.
It’s also a form of redistribution. The state implements progressive taxation and then spends that money on a municipal food forest that supplies food for everyone. That’s a redistribution of wealth, and it’s also a climate adaptation. It speaks to the class struggle side of it and to the ecological struggle.
And then some of the other things on the list are things like municipally owned supermarkets. We obviously want to not just grow food, but also find a way to deal with the system as it is today, and get food to people without the profit motive. I think that’s a really important and concrete way that our municipalities could be responding to food inflation.
Then I speak to other basic necessities on this list. Things like heating our homes. We don’t have coppice agroforestry, which is the process of cutting woodlots on a rotation and using the wood for charcoal and home heating and things of that nature. Where I live, almost everybody burns wood for heat. I realize there are a lot of drawbacks associated with that. But, you know, it is what it is. We’re not going to change that overnight. And doing that in a sustainable way, rather than an extractive way, would be a really positive step forward.
Another thing that is really inflationary is lumber, construction material. Growing your own construction woodlots is something that communities can be doing. We’re very fortunate to have a native North American tree, the black locust, which grows very quickly. It’s a nitrogen fixer. And its wood is rot resistant—at least as much, if not more than, pressure-treated wood, but without any of the toxicity associated with that.
These are all things we can be doing as a hedge against inflation, as a hedge against fragile global supply chains, and as a hedge against ecosystem collapse. This is something that we could build advocacy around.
WS: You started talking about the Zapatistas, and in terms of new opportunities coming out of this moment, I’m curious if there are other examples you’re looking at, either nationally or globally, as ones to be emulated or to draw from.
TLF: One I posted about the other day that’s been around for many years, and one that I think has hit an incredible stride, is the MST in Brazil. That’s the Landless People’s Movement, or Landless Workers Movement. They’ve been around since the 80s and they kind of exploit this loophole in the Brazilian constitution about land reform, where they occupy land that’s owned by either large land barons or agribusinesses or even the government itself, that isn’t being put to socially constructive use, and then they petition the government to seize it and redistribute essentially lifetime leases to the occupiers. And obviously that’s been a real struggle and a source of conflict, but it’s also had enormous successes.
The MST are now running their own candidates for office and winning, which I think is kind of the missing piece of the puzzle. Unlike a lot of people on the radical Left, although I’m no fan of electoralism, I’m kind of a realist about it. I think it’s something we have to engage with if we want to win. And so I think their shifting into an electoral stance on top of what they’re doing is really an outstanding move and holds a lot of promise for the future. But they’re also engaging with broader social struggles in Brazil in a way that they haven’t in the past. That’s creating a lot of connections across culture and across movements that have already shown a lot of success.
So I think the MST is really the premier example going right now of what an eco-socialist movement that engages in class struggle and climate struggle looks like. And obviously their circumstances are different than ours. They have a very specific legal situation that they’re relying upon, so not everybody can do exactly that. My goal is not to say that we should all do the same thing. But they absolutely deserve our support and solidarity and we should learn whatever lessons we can from them.
The United States is in a completely different situation. I think here where I see the Left really struggling for power and having some impressive successes is in DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, especially the New York City chapter, and a few other New York chapters, which recently won the Build Public Renewables Act. This was a major coup, to allow the public power authority to build renewable energy.
I think eco-socalism within DSA is really having a moment. And the organizers there are really impressive and doing some really cool things that a lot of people thought they couldn’t do. So those are two that I would highlight.
WS: I want to ask about resources you’d recommend for people—on permaculture, degrowth, any of this material we’ve been talking about.
TLF: As far as permaculture, there are definitely loads of great books out there. The publisher that puts out the most is Chelsea Green. You can just check their website. They’ve got tons and tons of great books on permaculture, and they have a sale every year with the books up to ninety percent off. You can also get them at your library.
The one I recommend the most is called The Resilient Farm and Homestead by Ben Falk. It’s a great book. Super thorough. Really thoughtful. A vital resource, especially if you live in a temperate climate.
Then another one for me is Farming the Woods. That’s a book written by a former Cornell agroforestry professor. Super thoughtful, super well-researched. Just a tremendous resource for anybody who is interacting with the woodland in any way.
And then another one is Integrated Forest Gardening. This is a book that’s all about designing polycultures and food forests, which are like the macro version of a polyculture.
Those three books will really set you in the right direction if you’re living in a temperate climate, you’ve got some woodland, and you’re looking to build a perennial polyculture food system that’s going to provide for you for a long time.
A lot of permaculture people use YouTube as well, primarily because you get paid for the ads. There’s an enormous amount of information on YouTube about permaculture, of varying quality.
And then, if you get into it, the thing to do is take a permaculture design course, of which there are thousands. Find a good one, one that people speak highly of that’s reasonably priced. That’s a way to really learn permaculture in a hands-on way, so I definitely recommend doing that.
As far as degrowth or eco-socialism, there are some good books there too certainly. Verso put out a collection a little over a year ago called The Future is Degrowth that I think is very much worth reading. I recommend Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal, which is not really a degrowth book, although it sort of gets there in a roundabout way. It’s more of an eco-socialism text. I don’t necessarily endorse everything in the book, but I think it’s a really great addition to the discussion.
These ideas are ones that are really in formation. They’re still contested, and still being figured out.
WS: You also have a newsletter.
TLF: Yeah. The purpose of my newsletter is really to allow me to hash out my thoughts on this synthesis of degrowth and eco-socialism in real time. It’s a little bit eclectic, but it is focused on my permaculture practice, and also how I think about politics and how I synthesize these ideas and cope with reality as it comes at me.
You can subscribe for free, and you get about half the content that way. If you kick in for a paid subscription, you get everything else, which is more the permaculture content, and also the utopian fiction [that I write]. And then anything that I’ve had to personally spend money on and learn about. Even five bucks a month makes a huge difference to me. So if you’re able to kick in for that, that’s great.
WS: One final question. It’s come up in the course of our conversation a few times, but this newsletter being themed on environment in the Northeast, I’m curious about your sense of the future of this region. I’m asking about both the positives and some of the particular challenges we’re up against—whether it’s the specific way we’re feeling the effects of climate change, or the unique ways in which wealth from cities like New York and Boston has so affected the rural areas of the region.
TLF: Yeah, it’s an interesting situation, because in some ways the Northeast is pretty climate resilient. Certainly more so than some places, like the Southwest of the United States, which is facing a really dire future. New England has a better situation. But at the same time, we’re going to be exposed to a lot of challenges that have been quite infrequent in the past. They’re going to become quite regular and quite disastrous—things like Western-style forest fires. Those are not common in our part of the world. But they will be. Increasing frequency of hurricanes is another major concern. And flooding associated with heavy rains, as we saw again in Vermont this year.
Those are really challenging. Plus sea level rise on top of flood and drought cycles that we haven’t experienced in millennia. Things like that. That stuff is going to be tough. But we’re better positioned than some.
But that’s the ecological side. The inequality side is quite complex. For a long time, rural areas in the Northeast have benefited from proximity to the wealth in places like Boston and New York, because those are markets for people to sell things into. It’s pretty easy to make an agricultural living here when you can sell in those cities, comparatively. On the other hand, what we’ve seen post-pandemic is this huge property rush where lots of people have moved out of those cities, or at least have bought second homes in the country, as some kind of apocalyptic hedge—I don’t know what they think they’re going to do when they get there—[or in response to] a general kind of desire for fresh air and being away from the crowded areas of the city and so on.
[As a result] property prices have skyrocketed, in many cases out of the reach of long-time local residents. And when it comes to farmland that’s a really bad situation to be in. Because it’s not like you can just build more farmland. That’s really tough, it’s squeezing people, and it’s limiting the future of things like agriculture in our region.
So it’s certainly a double-edged sword to be in such proximity to wealth. But on the whole, I’d say, relative to other parts of the country or other parts of the world, I think the Northeast is pretty well-positioned. But it’s definitely going to require a grassroots political movement to head off some of the worst effects of both inequality and ecosystem collapse.
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