This is a lot to think about. I will try to reply this evening.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

Here is a piece of what I mean:  the hidden costs of industrialised farming:  autopathic problems and a neverending, cost-escalating, ologarchogenic merrygoround of desperate bandaids.  

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. "I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe," he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips.  That's exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat - sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it's easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism - to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

[...]

Surely this points to one of the great advantages of a decentralized food system: when things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, fewer people are affected and, just as important, the problem can be more easily traced to its source and contained. A long and complicated food chain, in which food from all over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can be impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain devilishly hard to follow and to fix.

    Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers' market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn't think twice about it. I guess it's because I've just always trusted these guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed that morning or the night before - it hasn't been sitting around in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I'm sure there is some, it seems manageable.

    These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what's going on at the farmers' market - how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect through these foods and their growers to the natural world. Stack all this up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little ... sentimental.

But there's nothing sentimental about local food - indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental - and deliberate - contamination.

[...]

It's easy to imagine the FDA announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution - elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.

it is cheaper not to break things in the first place than to patch them up afterwards.  but in a monetised industrial economy there is "profit" to be made in the ever-expanding market sector of Patching Things Up Afterwards, which in turn spawns whole new market sectors to patch up the side effects of the bandaids.  so there is always more profit to be made by doing things wrong (DeAnander's Law of Industrial Capitalism) which explains why the "logic of industry" is insane and suicidal, and feeds a death spiral of increasing energy inputs, increasing authoritarianism and centralised control, and diminishing returns...

words to live by:  "elegant, low-tech, redundant".  I would add:  ubiquitous, distributed, transparent.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

OK, I've dug my way out far enough.

It seems that humane people are drawn instead to imagined worlds of shrunken, easily manageable technologies, where the issue isn't explosive potential, but the fear (hope?) that failing resources will make the 21st century blur and shift into a world of locally grown vegetables.

...what is so wrong with a world of locally-grown vegetables...

Please forgive my lack of clarity. I've spent enough time turning compost heaps and avoiding processed foods and truck-ripened fruits to appreciate locally grown vegetables. What I intended to criticise was what I see as a tendency to welcome the idea of harsh resource constraints that would force people to tend their gardens and eat their veggies because they'll be so incapacitated by shortages that they can't move things around any more. (Mind you, one could argue people would soon be quite happy with the arrangement -- partly because of hedonic-treadmill effects.)

My claim is that a future where technology stagnates is easy to imagine and very soothing to contemplate, compared to one in which a something like the Moore's law explosion in the infosphere begins to take off in the world of physical technology. Superficially, these capabilities on this scale seem like an optimist's dream because they could be used to solve many of the overwhelming problems we face today (for example, by spreading global wealth while decreasing environmental impact). On closer examination, they lead to possibilities that are scary, complex, and very, very hard to think about. After grappling with this, the idea that resource limits will stop all that starts to seem like... well... an easy excuse for avoiding the hard issues.

...the technomanagerial approach and the heavy industrial tech it relies on cannot be fixed.  it is what it is and it works the way it works, just like a shark or a virus.  a whole different approach is required to stop the ungoverned feedback loop of more resource destruction leading to more profits

This may well be true in practice, though of course it could be different in theory :^). But what if heavy industrial tech can, in fact, be replaced by something that beats it in productivity, cost, product quality, cleanliness... ? Something that resembles heavy industrial tech about as much as a kid's cell phone resembles [>>warning: obligatory Moore's law comparison from pre-1950<<] a room full of technicians in white coats tending a 30 ton vacuum-tube computer that eats 40 kW and delivers about 1/1,000,000 the computing capacity. Or about as much as an oak leaf resembles a billion-dollar semiconductor fabrication facility. (Guess which one makes smaller electronic devices.)

...why do we require "enormously more powerful technologies"?

Let's assume that we don't need them. The question is, what do we do with them when they arrive anyway?

...the power of core elites to appropriate time, space and resources...
...those things -- time, space, and resources -- have been subtracted  from the lives of real people...

Time, space, and resources (for quite a while at least) don't have to be counters in a zero-sum game. What scares me is that core elites are full of people who crave ever more power, because it is people who crave ever more power who climb to the top, and they're forcing a nasty game on the rest of us. Being forced to live more like peasants wouldn't keep people from being stomped.

Moving in the opposite direction may offer a chance, but humane, far-sighted people seem to prefer contemplating (fantasies of) shortage-induced collapse, or warming-induced collapse, or nuclear-winter induced collapse, or [fill in blank]-induced collapse. So I predict that lots of planning will be done for a future of limited options that never happens, and almost none for a future of enormous possibilities that seems hard to avoid.

how can more powerful technologies improve this situation?  the increase in technomass can only come at the expense of biomass and the further impoverishment of the core.

They could easily make the situation worse, but not because of a zero-sum resource dynamic. My thesis is (1) that enormously powerful technologies will emerge whether we want them or not and (2) that so much could change that there may be a chance to break out of some old, destructive patterns.

the molecular-level work may look light in theory, but it's based on the same extreme resource pyramid of industrial tech that impoverishes the periphery more viciously with each passing decade.

Molecular-level developments aren't inherently and necessarily based on this resource pyramid, but regardless of their potential, they are of course slotted into the system. And this pattern may continue even when really radical developments could be leveraged to replace they pyramid with something different.


Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.