{"id":18571,"date":"2016-03-07T13:21:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T18:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18571"},"modified":"2016-03-07T13:21:14","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T18:21:14","slug":"peasantization-as-modernization-an-alternative-ecomodernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18571","title":{"rendered":"Peasantization as modernization \u2013 an alternative ecomodernism"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=968\" target=\"_blank\">Peasantization as modernization \u2013 an alternative ecomodernism<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-meta\">I\u2019ve spent \u2013 wasted, probably \u2013 a fair amount of time on this blog critiquing various techno-fixer scenarios for achieving future sustainability and social justice, most notably that of the self-styled \u2018ecomodernists\u20191. I\u2019m not going to rehash that here, but in this post and the next I\u2019m going to come at the underlying issues from a different angle by reflecting on the question of modernism, which suggested itself to me through a rereading of the late Marshall Berman\u2019s brilliant book\u00a0<em>All That Is Solid Melts Into Air<\/em>. At issue is the question of whether there\u2019s a way out of the airless dualism in contemporary thought between modern\/high tech\/progressive\/optimistic\/positive\/rational\/urban vs primitive\/low tech\/reactionary\/pessimistic\/negative\/romantic\/rural that so disfigures debates about farming and social futures. Sorry to harp on about it, but I think it\u2019s important. I\u2019ll get back to some more on-farm content after these two posts.<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>I first read Berman\u2019s book thirty-odd years ago \u2013 required reading as it was then for every trendy young cultural theorist \u2013 and was reminded of it recently while reading\u00a0<em>Austerity Ecology<\/em>\u00a0by Leigh Phillips, who invoked it in support of his enthusiasm for heroic, large-scale technological modernization. I couldn\u2019t remember much about the book, except a nagging feeling that Berman\u2019s thinking on modernization was a lot more nuanced and ambivalent than Phillips\u2019. Indeed, even the passage from Berman that Phillips cites is quite ambivalent1. And so it proved on a rereading. In fact, it made me wonder if Phillips had really read the book \u2013 entertainingly, in view of the sub-theme that\u2019s emerged in my engagements with him over exactly who\u2019s read what, as elaborated by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=945\">Ruben<\/a>, my Canadian mole.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peasantization as modernization \u2013 an alternative ecomodernism I\u2019ve spent \u2013 wasted, probably \u2013 a fair amount of time on this blog critiquing various techno-fixer scenarios for achieving future sustainability and social justice, most notably that of the self-styled \u2018ecomodernists\u20191. I\u2019m not going to rehash that here, but in this post and the next I\u2019m going [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5303,12796,12795,9738,734,769],"class_list":["post-18571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-ecomoderism","tag-modernization","tag-peasantization","tag-small-farm-future","tag-social-justice","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18572,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18571\/revisions\/18572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}