Friday, June 13, 2014

Listening to the genius of Sunnansjö Gård

A semi personal update from Gunnar.


Tomorrow I will move to Sunnansjö Gård, 30 km west of Uppsala. I bought the farm together with Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen and she will follow suit, together with her son. 

It is a nice farmstead at a small lake with a lot of wetlands, and I fear quite a vibrant community of mosquitoes. It has some 40 hectares of forest, most of it more than 100 years old, 10 hectares of farmland, most of it poorly drained, 10 hectares of wetland/swamps and peatbogs and part of the lake. The pictures are from the farm.

We will find out what to do on the farm after  "consulting the genius of the place" as Wendell Berry says. But I am sure there will be some fruit trees planted, and certainly vegetables for ourselves and family. I will continue with my writing and some consultancy.

As I am also in the process of finalizing the book Global Eating Disorder, I will not be very active on this blog for a while.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Screwed economics: how reducing emmissions becomes a cost

The two most disturbing ideological concept of our current time are the notion of "progress", the belief that humanity moves in a linear direction towards an ever "better" world, and the view that the economy (or the market) in some way is an independent system. Taken together those two views are expressed in the faith that economic and technological growth are the main avenues for future human progress, and that this must be based on the imperatives of the competitive market economy - competition and profit-making. This view makes society and nature to subsystems of the economy instead of the other way round. This can be noticed in the current political discourse where the role of public policy mainly is about strengthening the competitiveness of a country in the international markets. 

As an example of the distorted perspective, the current political discussion about climate change is about how we can afford to mitigate it, while the real question should be how we can afford driving those cars that cause the emissions in the first place. To reduce emissions is no more a cost than it is a cost to eat less.  

As cutting emissions will reduce competitiveness and profits (and it will do that) that is not seen as an option. Instead it is by new technologies we will reduce emissions, which indeed will incur costs. But those costs will rapidly be turned into new ways to make money by the private sector. Which is why it is preferred.