Interview: Raj Patel on agroecology, reparative approaches, and land reform

there is a natural intelligence at work in existing ecosystems, and therefore the most intelligent way to farm was to interfere as little as possible. This obviously requires a reworking not only of what we consider farming, but maybe even what we consider progress.

I think that many of our biggest problems relate to the ways in which we have become so distanced from our environment.

Japan, reinventing its agriculture, has accomplished abruptly and rapidly what the United States did somewhat more gradually and Western Europe more gradually still. It created rural productivity upon a foundation of city productivity. There is no inherent reason why this cannot be done by other nations even more rapidly. Modern productive agricult

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The more you get out of an air-conditioned car and into an air-conditioned house, the less relevant the environment is to your direct experience. So reclaiming our food is reclaiming much more than our food. It’s reclaiming this huge set of relationships that ultimately connect us to the land and to the biological web that we are part of.

In the face of crisis, the authors warn that mere redistribution within current forms of ownership is not enough; our goal must be to go beyond the limits of the current system, dominated by private enclosure and unequal ownership. Only by reimagining how our economy is owned and by whom can we address the crises of our time—from the fallout of the... See more

These included a prohibition on privatized water extraction; land redistribution and other policies to create pathways for “re-ruralization”; “more explicit and systemic disaster planning”; a Green New Deal that would also transform agricultural and water practices; as well as being ready in moments of crisis to move radical ideas from politically

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The solutions are the same in ecology and technology: aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.

We can't change the world by focusing only on dismantling, we have to really build up the alternative and show that it can work in a different way, and radicalize people, not through convincing them of the rightness of an ideology, but through their lived experience of true participation, of the collective power of livelihood in a non-capitalist pa... See more