AEP 86: A People’s Green New Deal with Max Ajl, and Stan Cox

Justin: All right. I am here with my co-host, Stan Cox. Stan is a researcher at the Land Institute, and I have appointed him as of today as my co-host and special correspondent for the ecosphere. So, Stan, welcome. Welcome to the show. It's good to be here. And then me and Stan are going to interview Max Eil, who is a postdoc at Wageningen University and the author of the book we're going to talk about today, which is A People's Green New Deal. And I especially wanted to invite Stan because if you've listened to our previous episode on Stan's book, which is Beyond the Green New Deal and Beyond. So I've got two different green new deals. that i think are quite compatible actually um and this is a this is like a tightly woven um podcast because max has written a review of stan's book um stan is going to interview max about his book and i have interviewed stan about his book and written a review of stan's book and now we're going to talk to max about max's book so max welcome

Max Ajl: Thank you so much for having me. It should be added that I extensively cited Stan's book in my book. If you want to complete the circle.

Justin: I think that we have to complete the circle. So Max, your book, just to introduce your book on its own terms, I think of your book as... basically an antidote to the Eurocentrism of the climate change debate. So you are taking the whole discussion of climate change, climate justice, climate transitions, and looking at it from the perspective or at least with information from the rest of the world so that it's not just about the US and what the US does to the world. And to think about even a concept like a Green New Deal, but in a truly global way. Is that fair? Tell me how that compares to your own conception of your own book.

Max Ajl: Absolutely. It's about trying to think about what is an appropriate way to plan a sustainable social system and thinking about where we are now, which is an imperialist, capitalist, heavily polluting social system in the Euro sphere and the destruction and environmental degradation of the rest of the world and saying, how can we get from where we are over there? Yeah.

Justin: And early on, you talk about this Bolivian manifesto, which seems to be very important in your book. Can you talk a tiny bit about that?

Max Ajl: The Bolivian manifesto is so important and has been seriously neglected, if not actively suppressed by certain nefarious actors in the Euro-American Green New Deal discussion. So this emerged as a response to the Copenhagen Accords, which were successfully roadblocked by the radical Latin American people's governments, along with Sudan. Of course, we know what happened to Sudan and has been going on to the Latin American people's governments because imperialism doesn't take being roadblocked very kindly. It does its best to remove the roadblocks in whatever way it sees fit. So these... these people's agreements basically laid out a roadmap for a planned socialist transition in the world economic system and the world way of managing its interaction with the environment focused above all on things like demilitarization, just terms for technology transfer, massive, massive amounts of climate reparations as part of colonial reparations, food sovereignty, Rights to live in peace, rights to live without war, rights to have just food systems, right to have control over the environment, demands for decolonization, both of territory and of atmospheric space. In other words, it was a Southern call for eco-socialist revolution in many ways.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, so the first part of your book is called Capitalist Green Transitions. The second is A People's Green New Deal. So the first book, the first part of the book is like what you're against, I would say, at least the first two chapters. So, you know, for me, I always think of environmentalism and the environmental movement, like the biggest danger, the biggest problem that we have is always cooptation. And so you kind of go through all these different types of co-optation that have gone on, um, with regards to the environmental, you know, movement or environmental discourse. Um, and, uh, you know, the first one is, is kind of the idea that, okay, there's an environmental crisis. So we need to militarize, uh, the West needs to further militarize seize more resources and stop, um, all, uh, you know, immigration, you know, exert further brutal control over key resources and so on. So you call that fortress eco-nationalism. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Max Ajl: Absolutely. So if we look at our existing world system, it's based essentially on uneven economic access to development, uneven access to world resources. And it's already maintained by extremely militarized borders and a lack of mobility of people between nations, as well as the systematic destruction of nations. And of course those policies go hand in hand. If you are systematically destroying nations and making them uninhabitable, you have to modulate population flows between nations. Otherwise, people will, in one way or another, be making claims upon the resources that are concentrated through military force

Stan Cox: in the wealthier countries and also making demands on their social security and so forth.

Max Ajl: So you would end up destroying the entire logic of uneven and polarized accumulation if people can just go where everything is being accumulated. So you have to control the movement of people if you want a system of uneven accumulation. Now, this is in essence going to worsen under... ongoing and worsening patterns of global climate change. And this is well within the projections that are currently being put forward by the IPCC and all the other organizations, as well as the scientists who talk about what's actually going on as opposed to the more conservative predictions that come out of the heavily massaged IPCC process, right? And what they're basically stating is that there's going to be a widespread destruction that is going to flood over large portions of the global south. And this is very clear if we look at what's already going on. So there's already, you know, large and systematic aggregations of natural climate disasters that are already hammering into large portions of the global south. Everyone remembers the cyclone that hit into Mozambique. of what happens to the Southeast Asia, the heat waves that have already started to hammer into especially Southern India and other portions of South Asia, what's been happening to Bangladesh in terms of floods, what's been happening to Zimbabwe, the hurricanes that have slammed into the Caribbean again and again and again to the point where reconstruction is not even possible. because of the ferocity of the hurricanes. I mean, we know what happened to Haiti. We know what happened to Puerto Rico. So these kinds of pattern destructions that are a direct consequence of a decision on the part of the ruling class to not do anything about global warming, since they knew exactly that global warming was happening and what its consequences would be since at least the 1980s.

Justin: Fifty years have been lost, you know.

Max Ajl: Yeah. And so these are known. And so, of course, the ruling class is now summoning up these responses that operate along capitalist and nationalist and also fascist and colonial lines in order to deal with the issue that they are making large portions of the world, either less habitable and possibly in the long run uninhabitable. And, and, that means you have to even further militarize the borders. And this is, of course, an object of understandable consternation and, of course, political activism in the European core, in the United States and Canada. There are all these kinds of no borders campaigns. But the other side of that coin is that what the problem is not merely the border, it's also the process of the kind of constellation of causes that produce displacement in the first place, right, which means both the environmental destruction and also the grabbing of resources, which includes not only atmospheric space, but also land for biofuels or land for biodiversity preservation under militarized conditions and so forth, that will end up further aggravating population displacement. And so it's very modest to focus on these issues of borders, and it's a lot less modest to focus on issues of imperialism. And what that basically amounts to is actually putting a bandaid on the wound, rather than addressing why the wound is occurring in the first place.

Justin: Yeah, yeah, that's a great summary. And I mean, you talk a bit about Malthus, you know, you have a section called The Return of Malthus, and that's, you know, so many of the funded environmental organizations have a very Malthusian and, you know, ultimately imperialist take on these issues, which is pretty scary. Yeah. Of course they do.

Max Ajl: Of course they do. Malthus has always been a kind of social scientific, social science fiction resort of imperialists and the capitalists when they don't want to discuss socialism.

Justin: So Stan, we're approaching chapter two and I remember, I guess it was two years ago now when you were working on the Green New Deal and beyond and we talked a lot about the eco-modernists. So why don't I give the floor to you and Max to talk a little bit about the fact that you guys have both neglected the the miracle you know the miracle cure of fully automated luxury communism which i think you know we really need to um sorry i can't keep a straight face but yeah why don't you guys talk about uh fully automated luxury communism and how it's gonna save us all

Stan Cox: Or ecomodernism more broadly. It seems, Max, that in addition to your book, in addition to being a corrective to the global north bias of various Green New Deal-type proposals, it's also a corrective to the urban and technological bias of them. And that's where your critique of eco-modernism comes in. And it's especially, what's especially troubling is, and I was surprised when it started happening, what you called this being a a way of introducing reactionary thought into the left, because this whole idea has become, has been taken up by, you know, all sorts of people on the left. And I wonder, do you, the people proposing all this stuff, do they do you think they really believe that humanity can live physically independent of the non-human world, and especially in how we will eat? Do they really believe that with lab-cultured meat and I guess Jetsons pills or something that we're that we can really wall off nature and what you're calling it, it's like an apartheid concept and live in a technological bubble. Do they really, is this a scam of some kind? What's going on?

Max Ajl: Well, it's tricky. And we do get a bit into individual motivations and individual mentalities, which can be a fraught subject, right? When we want to understand the phenomenon a bit more sociologically, what allows these ideas to flourish and what allows them to wither. But I think there is a use in clarifying which... technologies people really believe in, because there are certain things that people do really believe in. I think people do really believe in this idea of vertical agriculture, right? That people, I'm quite sure that people really do think Sure, we can just put the farms on top of one another using concrete and steel and glass and directed mirrors. And if we put them on top of one another, then we will liberate the land for nature. I think people are so alienated from... agrarian production and sustainable land management and so forth, and how agro ecosystems work, that there are certainly a lot of people in the North who think you can actually do that. There also have been sold the idea that it is possible to do that, right? So it's not Of course, they believe it. And maybe some of the promoters, in fact, believe it. But it's also a question of understanding how these ideas circulate. So the lab meat salespeople, including those who have managed to situate themselves on what passes for the North American left, I think they're quite honestly true believers in the use of lab meat because they're not used to thinking about where things go. come from. So it's an exercise of thoughtlessness, right? It is the entire world system is structured so that they don't think about where inputs actually come from and they don't think about what other human beings subsist using pastoral production or integrated animals integrated into their smallholder farms and so forth. So what allows them not to see it when they should see it is a question that people have reflected upon very much in their reflections, for example, on the Holocaust, right? People were like, how did this happen? How did people look away? How did people manage not to know? And there's a conscious process of looking away. and not really coming to terms with the barbarity of what is in fact being put forward. So I think it's, to some extent, it's important to understand how that happens and how it really reflects a certain parochial interest, right? It reflects a parochial interest that is also a class position that's saying the impacts of these policies on the South are ultimately not our concern. We're not really allowing them to enter our consciousness. And so it's not a coincidence, for example, that one of the major promoters of lab meat on what passes for the progressive left has been promoting Israeli lab meat venture capital, right? Because who cares about the boycott? Who cares about Palestinians? Again, it's just a lack of concern, right? And it is saying, okay, this is how racism works. I mean, there's people who matter and there's people who don't matter. Now, you know, whether Sir Aaron Bastani himself is a duper or what have you, I'm not really sure. I mean, he kind of seems like has this kind of high evangelical true believer energy about him. So I can't be very clear about that. I think what's interesting to me from a political kind of perspective is who allows this to go out into the world and why isn't there a widespread protest against it? I mean, for example, I had not read a full highfalutin hallucinogenic luxury Northern American communism until I was preparing my book itself. And I was rather shocked, not about the asteroid mining, Because that was kind of a well-known lunacy. What I was shocked is that there was a defense of the Green Revolution in the book.

Justin: Uninformed, you have to be, yeah.

Max Ajl: which struck me because I thought the Green Revolution was something that one of those things about agriculture that even people who don't know about agriculture and even people who don't care that much about the third world are like, we know that the Green Revolution was pretty bad. We don't know all the details. We might even agree with industrializing agriculture, but we do know this thing called the Green Revolution was not really a good thing. Right. Even if it's a poorly informed understanding. Now, I was rather shocked and I'm also shocked why Why are people accepting that senior editors of Verso books, right? Why would someone treat them as decent human beings when they allow defenses of the fascist green revolution to appear in their printing press? Why would you not protest those people when they try to present themselves in left-wing spaces? Why would you treat them as your comrades when they're saying, well... Yeah, a couple hundred thousand Indian people are ingesting pesticides in an act of suicide as a consequence of the greed revolution and there's widespread health destruction and there's been widespread flight to cities, massive poverty. It's a legitimate position on the left and we want to promote that. And this is how evil happens, right? This relates to how evil happens. People are saying, okay, well, this happens. Leftist publishers publish things like that from time to time. This is part of the left. And this is what I find actually the most shocking of all.

Justin: It's interesting, too, because I mean, I wonder, you guys both have talked a little bit about the, you know, the nuclear because because the the fully automated luxury communism basically comes down to nuclear power. power right like we're just gonna have abundant super abundant energy and that'll just everything everything becomes super easy once you have that so um you know i don't know like how does how does that how does how does that aspect of it sit with you guys you want to go go for that stem

Stan Cox: Well, it just shows that it's more magical thinking on their part to make it work. They have to talk about mining asteroids and so forth. Last year, There was a paper published by a group of nuclear scientists, and they were all people who spent their careers trying to make nuclear power work. And they kind of threw up their hands in this article and said, we've come to the conclusion that this is a dying industry and it cannot be revived anymore. It certainly can't be. relied upon to produce nominally carbon-free energy in any time in the next 50 years because there's no more conventional nuclear that's going to be built. And the speculative backyard nukes and so forth and all this new versions of nuclear power, they said, even if they can be developed, by the time they are developed and certainly by the time they can be deployed on a big scale, we're already going to be cooking that they won't be a climate solution, certainly. So it is another magical thinking situation. Regarding vertical farming, which I've spent 10 years now fighting, this other version of nuclear, of magical thinking. We were talking about it here one day, and one of my colleagues said, well, yeah, we're talking about the impossible energetics of the thing. And he was saying, well, yeah, they could You can have these tall buildings where you're stacking plots of crops, one on top of the other, but next door, you can have a stack of nuclear reactors, one on top of the other. They'll probably have to be about the same height to run the thing. It's bonkers, right?

Max Ajl: And you know what the other part, and you know, Stan, you know, you're practicing research, scientist in agronomy, so I know you know more about this than I do. But what strikes me is so bizarre about this is that so many more people know about high-tech vertical farming than low-tech vertical farming. Like people don't understand including I think probably a lot of people who actually do do some level of agriculture, right? Probably don't conceptualize that there is actually a lot of potential for elaborating on our knowledge about the fact that farming can occur in three dimensions, right? Through multiple stories. And that this is actually something that there isn't nearly enough North American or worldwide sustainable agronomic research that goes into, but it's quite fascinating because it actually allows for a multiple use of land in many ways. And people are not discussing that at all, but are discussing these fantasy worlds of vertical farming that turn the energetic farming on its head. And it really goes to show you about the kind of the way political economy determines the orientation of our entire research infrastructure, right? Yeah.

Stan Cox: In fact, I had a note here I wanted you to elaborate on some of this 3D farming, which I've used that term also as an alternative to vertical farming. But could you elaborate some on where you mentioned and briefly described in the book There are things like the arbors of Sumatra and the Kayapo polycropped forest gardens and other examples of this.

Max Ajl: Yeah, absolutely. So I've spent a lot of time in Tunisia and also have made many trips to the Tunisian south, to the oases of Gerbis, where I actually frequently get sick because they're being murdered by this kind of phosphate holocaust that's been imposed upon them through this heavy industrial export or primary commodity export developmental model where everybody has cancer. But the system there is brilliant, right? You have the tallest trees, you have date palms, and below that you have pomegranates, and you have trestles, sometimes grapes or other things, and you have peppers, and you have squash, you have melons growing at the bottom. So you're actually using all the dimensions of... the three dimensions and the sun is cutting in at its distinct angles and different things that you can cultivate and you can harvest year round. And it's an extraordinarily productive on a per hectare basis. Right. And I think this is particularly novel probably for people living in the Northern reaches of North America. Although polycropping has changed, To some extent, feasible, of course, as you know, in the northern certain portions of North America as well. But because we're not used to understanding that farming can occur year round. This is part of it, I think. And I know far less about it, but I also know that there are ways to stack animals that eat different levels of vegetation to increase the productivity and more efficiently use the biomass of certain types of animal farms. So I think there's so much there that... needs to be explored that can be explored in terms of increasing the amount people are getting from farms. And so I think it's a super interesting line of research that, in fact, no one is even discussing, right? So this is why, again, it's something I've been inspired by, the work you are doing at the Land Institute, is that one of the major problems blockades towards, from my perspective, towards a kind of new way of conceptualizing modern, interdependent, sophisticated forms of ecological planning that have agriculture much closer to their center, is that there's so little research being done about developing sustainable agriculture and sustainable in the broad sense of agroecology or perennial cereals. So there's so little research money going into it. I think it's far under 1%, for example, of EU research budget goes into that agricultural research budget.

Justin: Why would you do that when you can develop algorithms to get people to click on ads? Why would you want to spend money on sustainable agriculture? So the fully automated luxury communism, whatever, all of these different eco-modernists are based on an idea of growth. And when I think about growth, I kind of think of it as almost like a counterinsurgency program against against the communism, against redistribution. Right. Like ever since the the communists showed up on the scene 100 plus years ago, the the U.S. answer to that was always like, no, no, no, don't don't redistribute the pie. We're going to grow and make more pies. And if you try to redistribute, you're going to get in the way of growth. And so you got, again, like both of you, we'll take, you know, we'll have Max address this first, but like you, it's interesting because, you know, The idea that degrowth or being less of an emphasis on growth, economic growth, being a progressive or a leftist or an anti-imperialist position, you know, it doesn't always fit, right? Because we leftists are always about giving a better life to people, you know, like ending deprivation for the masses of people. So, you know, how do you think about that, like that trade-off between the need for development in the global South and the importance of degrowth overall for the sake of, you know, planetary stability? Max, go.

Max Ajl: Yeah, well, so although I'm not a de-growther, to be very fair, the de-growthers tend to emphasize that de-growth is meant to apply to northern societies and that it's not really meant to apply to southern or peripheral societies. So I think that's an important distinction to make.

Justin: Stan says that in his book. Stan says, you know, some places will need to consume more energy per capita than they do now.

Max Ajl: Right, right. You know, the problem, the growth is an ideology, right? as well as a material practice. And so I think throwing the wrench in the ideology that we need permanent growth in order to sustain the health of not only capitalism, but to provide enough for everybody, I think this is a very useful thing. And I think the technical interventions that come from the more planning-oriented de-growthers are often very important. And of course, I would highlight the work of Uneven Earth around this, where there's very, very important interventions on the technical level, including on a lot of stuff overlapping with Stan's work around air conditioning and sustainable agriculture and so forth. Now, you know, for me, so those are the aspects I appreciate. But what I think is so important is that there are some things that need to grow and some things that need to shrink. We need to shrink the US military. We need to grow northern renewable energy. We need to shrink the use of cars and we need to increase the use of mass transit and monorails and airships and trolleys. We need to shrink the bureaucracy clustered around the healthcare system, and we need to increase the amount of preventative medicine, and we need to decrease the amount of fossil fuel use, and we need to increase the number of windmills. So there's so many things for everything that needs to degrow, there's other things you need to grow. Whereas for the South, they probably, there's needed a certain path of qualitative development as distinct from quantitative growth in GDP, which is aggregating a whole cluster of things, some of which are socially entropic and harmful, and some of which are socially beneficial, right? But what I think is so important also, the contribution really of the degrowth is to remind us at least that already the existing forces of production on the face of the planet, if kind of converted and distributed equally would provide everybody with a good life more or less. Now, Of course, you can't quite do that, right? You can't quite take Northern energy use and plop it into the South. It doesn't quite work that way. At the same time, it does remind us that GDP is not really having a lot to do with people's wellbeing. So the idea of growth of GDP to provide everybody with adequate wellbeing doesn't really explain the nature of the social challenge in front of us, because in fact, as a socialist, I don't want many things to be quantified as GDP in the first place. I want healthcare to be, I want healthcare to be free. I want, you know, you know, I want education to be free. I think housing can mostly be collectively owned, whether by unions or by municipalities and people could have access to it. So I don't want those things included in GDP anyway.

Justin: Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, whatever you measure, you're going to try to maximize somehow. Right. It turns it into a game when you're measuring. So, OK, you guys both named your books after a historical program that was very problematic as well, a.k.a. the New Deal. So you have Green New Deal. And then there's also like you guys are both American, where the phrase New Deal has probably more resonance. I mean, everybody in the world knows what the New Deal was and so on. But I think the debates, maybe I should let you guys, you know, just have an American conversation about that. about the proposed New Deal, which I gather is mostly dead in the water, right? Like AOC's New Deal probably isn't actually going to go anywhere. But what is the American conversation about the actually existing Green New Deal or what you call Green Social Democracy, Max? What's going on with that?

Max Ajl: Let's go first on this one.

Stan Cox: Well, The New Deal part of the Green New Deal, and by the way, the original Green New Deal terminology came out of the UK in around 2008 when the world economy was collapsing. And so they were thinking, well, building renewable energy could be an economic stimulus. And so it wasn't, the green part was sort of dressing, window dressing, and what it was aimed at was the New Deal part. And that has kind of continued the Green New Deal as it, was described in the joint congressional resolution in 2019. And since then has been, there are a lot of good things in the New Deal part of it for social safety nets and job guarantees and so forth. It doesn't go far enough. I agree with you, Max, that we need what are being called universal basic services, and not necessarily universal basic income, but to guarantee that people have access to healthcare, transportation, etc. But then, of course, the The green part of it is what was, it was completely amorphous and with no plan at all to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels or to even to reduce emissions just like in agriculture, they said, reduce emissions to the extent technologically possible. And now what Biden is talking about is kind of a watered-down version even of the Green New Deal. In fact, I was going to ask you about this because he's falling back on the net zero pledge that all the countries and corporations are making now, which I refer to it as a not zero pledge because it's kind of a shell game. Yeah. A shell game that is not only is aimed at being able to continue burning fossil fuels, but it also is going to increase the plunder of the global south and rely to a great extent on the south to help create this impression that the emissions in the north are being canceled out. Do you have any observations on that, Max?

Max Ajl: Yeah, definitely. So it strikes me that net zero is a nightmare if it's true and it's a nightmare if it's false. This has been my perspective because it seems to me reading the literature that, for example, the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative and other of these kind of highfalutin sectors, some of them are more or less willing to accept that at some point the fossil fuel industry will have to go. This is at least my impression. And they're willing to consider, and probably ideally they would like to channel as much of tax revenue into the expropriation or nationalization or eventual suppression of the fossil fuel industries. So they are willing to consider eventually getting to... net zero, and even a kind of zero eventually, right? So there is some awareness of the nature of the problem, right? Although I also think that they would like to continue burning as long as possible and also to carbon capture emissions or geoengineering and scattering particles in the sky. And if those work also to allow the burning of fossil fuels to the great profit of ExxonMobil and Toto and so forth. I think people, the northern conglomerates are very much in favor of that and avoiding the kind of systemic social restructuring that actually dealing with the fossil fuel issue would entail.

Justin: On the other hand, of course,

Max Ajl: I do think that there are other sectors of the ruling class that are very much interested in blanketing the South in these monocrop plantations. And they're already experimenting with it. I mean, there was a massive experiment with it in Ethiopia. Of course, it failed utterly. There have been experiments with it, I think, in Morocco. They also totally failed because it doesn't You can't just plant trees wherever you want. I mean, there is a lot of biomes that are not used to having trees, let alone having all trees that are of the same age and of the same species, which means that they're all drawing from the water table in the same way and causing a massive damage to the water table. They're also not having any biodiversity, so they're very vulnerable. drawing on similar types of nutrients. And it seems to me that these experiments are in, although these experiments are based on a faulty knowledge of forest ecology, both North and South, that these experiments people are very enthusiastic about. They're also enthusiastic about putting value on the existing carbon drawdown activities that are occurring already in the South through the conservation of forests. And then once you've turned that into a revenue stream, you can put a bond on it and then you can sell the bond and you've kind of created a new frontier of accumulation. And then there's also this kind of excess enthusiasm around something like biochar, right? Where there's also people making small bets about that, the kind of conversion of forests into a mix of biogas and these charred blocks that also draw down carbon from the atmosphere and so forth, and also work on biofuels. So I think, but the point is that all of this is basically calling for a recolonization, reprimitive accumulation of all the natural and semi-natural and agricultural areas of the global South, which very much relates to this question of, fortress nationalism, right? Because what's being mooted or what's being considered is not only net zero as a lie, but also net zero as a truth that requires the absolute catastrophic destruction of the lives and livelihoods of 40% of the planet.

Justin: Yeah, I mean, imperialists have never missed an opportunity to blanket the global south with monocrop plantations, right? I mean, that's kind of like the whole thing, their whole thing, going back to the 19th century. So here's another idea that I guess you have a really strong anti-imperialist critique of, because The idea of just because you've got your vision, you know, that you you lay out in the second part of the book, you call it a planet of fields, you know, and I've heard, you know, so-called deep ecologists, that kind of that kind of northern environmentalist. argues that we should leave most of the planet alone right so there's this kind of idea like leave nature um alone you know kind of conservation areas that only maybe tourists and from the global north and maybe some researchers from the global north can could ever go and have access to um And, and, you know, in a way this, this is, you know, I think there's something to this. I think there are some wild species that, you know, really don't want to be around humans and need some space, you know, big, big charismatic megafauna, whatever. But there's also a kind of an imperialism to this too, right? I mean, there's a whole militarized imperialist kind of conservation, which is what it's been in a lot of ways from the beginning. So you have a great critique of that. Can you talk about that? Like where the wild fits into the future that we would envision and also where imperialism fits into the current debates about rewilding or conservation, whatever.

Max Ajl: Yeah, so again, and I find myself having to offer a lot of praise for the Land Institute in this conversation, because the work that's been going on there has always been through Stan and Wes Jackson and others, has always been really important to my understanding of how you can remold agriculture to make it kind of synergistic and beneficial way of having the human metabolism with the non-human world. And so that's been one of my launching points. And as I've learned more growing up, which happens unless you are a vertical farm enthusiast, in which case you learn less as you grow up. You know, I've understood that, of course, one, this is the indigenous landscape of what came to be the United States was very much blanketed in these kind of sustainable agro-ecosystems where biodiversity and agriculture worked hand in hand, right? That these were not opposed processes, but that they were synergistic. Exactly, yeah. The other really foundational piece of literature, and I lift it up because I would hope anyone listening to this will go look into it, is the work of Yvette Perfecto and John Vandermeer around nature's matrix, which kind of imagines a repatterning of especially tropical agriculture. But presumably a variant of the model can work around other agriculture, around other agricultures where you have, of course, non input using farms that also are hospitable, that are kind of interpatterned and a kind of tartan with. uh patches of uh untrammeled biodiversity forests and so forth but that the agricultural patches have enough of a resemblance to the untrammeled or non-agricultural land that animals can pass through easily and kind of don't consider it uh hostile habitat, because it's not being doused in chemicals and so forth. And so this also allows for a kind of human living with nature, rather than having to create this apartheid separation of humans from nature. And their modeling, of course, showed that this has been very beneficial for biodiversity, this is very beneficial for the food security of of the populations living on the land. And in fact, if, and I'm sure Stan has something very important to add about this, I know very little actually about the biodiversity conservation aspects of it as it relates to cereal cultivation on the perennials. then the prairies in the north. So I just want to get to the rest of the question because I've kind of been going on for a while, but please address that because I'm ready to learn about that. Not about, again, I'm not interested in learning about Lamu, but I am interested in learning about that. And I bet the listeners would be too. So I think this is in sharp contrast to these kind of apartheid colonial ideas of you have humans over here and you have nature over there. So you have humans in the cities. which in fact is very much embraced also by the North American left, right? I mean, my idea of a planet of fields was developed in juxtaposition to Mike Davis's planet of slums against, and then his idea of the city of Zark. And I was like, no, that doesn't make sense. I was like, you know what? I was like, this just doesn't make sense. Like you just have to like know that cities are not arcs and like the rest of the world is not a flood.

Justin: That's the fear of nature too, right? Like it's this kind of loathing of, of, you know, the idea that, yeah, there's outside of this arc is like completely un, unsurvivable where, you know, by coincidence.

Max Ajl: It's like Blade Runner 2049, right? It's this crazy post-lapsarian apocalyptic hellhole that they imagine and they're like, no, we'll just make it red. And this is very, you know, we'll make a communist version of your post-Lapseri and then, you know, humans will be in the arcs in the cities and whether the outside will be apocalypse or like Mad Max or whether we will reserve it as a kind of Jurassic Park or whatever.

Justin: In any case, who cares? We're just going to be passing through at high speed in some high-speed vehicle anyway.

Max Ajl: Yeah, or maybe we're going to have people harvesting crops by machines out there. Whatever the case may be, we're not going to be involved in that. I feel like you have to be very educated, but in a certain way. in a certain very pernicious way to actually think that those are reasonable ideas. You need to have like this whole kind of Rube Goldberg thought palace going on in your head to think that that makes any sense at all. It doesn't make any sense.

Justin: I think throughout everything that we've been talking about reminds me, it reminded me of the fact that like, I find that today a lot of discourse about science is driven by science fiction and, And I suspect that in the, you know, 70s golden age of science fiction, those science fiction writers were reading science and basing their fiction on science. And now it's sort of like popular conceptions of science are based on the science fiction rather than the other way around. It's a strange thing that's going on. But yeah, like I think that those like this Elon Musk worship and all these other things, they have a lot to do with like Hollywood and like pop culture ideas of of what science and technology are.

Max Ajl: Yeah. Yeah. And, and so they want to, so this idea is that biodiversity will be out there rather than something that humans are actually in a dynamic interaction with, with tending, which goes, which is very much a, not only is it a colonial conception, but it actually is colonial in the sense of denying the actual biophysical social reality of our planet where an indigenous peoples are the primary custodians of biodiversity on a per capita and per land mass basis. Like the biodiversity hotspots are places currently inhabited by indigenous people. Exactly. So it makes sense to say, Oh, what is your world like and what, how can we support your social struggle to defend your world? That's like, for me, that's the leftist position. Whereas, uh, the leftist position is not, you know, turn, uh, New York city, Chicago and Bombay to Noah's arcs or, uh, Mike Davis's arcs, uh, new left reviews arcs. And, you know, uh, like it is, uh,

Justin: And tell the indigenous people, thanks for all the biodiversity. Now we're going to kick you out. Conservation area.

Max Ajl: Like, come to our concentration camps or our cities or what have you. And thanks for the good work you've done. And we're going to take it over from here, although we don't have the requisite knowledge.

Stan Cox: But we plan on doing it anyway.

Max Ajl: So, yeah. But, Stan, I insist that you go back to this point about the biodiversity related to perennial agriculture, because I want to learn about this. The cereal agriculture.

Stan Cox: Well, yeah, our... work from the beginning was focused in the central US, but we've had an international vision as well. But it was based on the observation of the biome here, which is the prairie or sometimes a savanna type ecosystems and those while not as as Impressive in visually impressive as as rain forest are extremely high levels of biodiversity and And a lot of very large percentage of the action is out of sight on underground And there's probably no way to capture that degree of biodiversity in a food producing system, but the two properties of the prairie ecosystem that are essential to maintaining soil health and biodiversity are that the plants are perennial and that there's a diversity of plant species in there because clearly a monoculture is not going to support biodiversity. So those are the two principles on which perennial grains, which Most of them are at least distant cousins of the annual grasses and legumes and other species like sunflower that were domesticated thousands of years ago. So we know a lot about them already, but as perennials and growing in polycultures in the same way that the kind of agroforestry systems that you write about in the book is going to support a lot more, a much more rich ecosystem than the wheat fields that we've got out here now.

Max Ajl: And is there an idea that those can be intercut with some kind of untrammeled savannas and prairies, or has that been modeled at all?

Stan Cox: Well, yeah, that we've always left that idea open. And in fact, starting even in the late 90s, our colleagues in Australia had been working on this idea in areas where they had taken out the existing scrub kind of vegetation and planted wheat. and they were having problems with salinity in groundwater, they were interplanting various tree species with wheat and were saying that really the system would not reach its full potential until a perennial wheat was developed. And so they were working on having perennial grains interspersed with these tree or scrub species. But it would certainly be, I remember in Southwest China, where they were growing these rubber plantations, which that wasn't so good, but they had an understory of upland rice growing in there. And we're talking about how, not rubber necessarily, but that if you had, tree species and here it's in the tropics. So there are a lot of different ones, even on hilly ground. And it was quite hilly there that if you had perennial rice, which has actually been developed in its own thousands of hectares now in China. But if you had perennial upland rice growing in a system with trees or other woody species, that it would be a much healthier ecosystem than just planting straight upland rice, which that land had been used for. Well, I was wondering, Max, you know, a planet of fields is, as you point out, is going to be a planet in which you have a much larger share of the population is going to be living outside of cities, and also a planet in which in the countries like the U.S. where agriculture has been almost totally mechanized, that there is going to be a need for people working more themselves outdoors and freed of the technologies that you have pointed out, or the so-called labor-saving technologies are a means of controlling and dominating the workforce. But this aspect of it is, I think, one of the things that scares people about this vision and causes the kind of overreaction with fully automated luxury communism, et cetera, to... protect people from having to actually do physical work. And you make a good case that much of what we do in our leisure time seems to indicate, in gardening and so forth, indicate that we actually have a need to do that kind of work. So how do you have people I'm telling you this, that people have for centuries have been fleeing the countryside and going to cities because of drudgery or whatever stereotypes there are about farming life. Do you have to fend off those kind of Those kind of complaints,

Max Ajl: To some extent, there have been a few malcontents, I would say, who are not particularly careful readers, who are, you know, type of folks who read with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears. So, yeah. So they're not reading at all. Who have raised this critique? I mean... My position is, to some extent, it's agnostic. So my question is, what is the percentage of people who need to live in the land, or perhaps more, to put a slightly different quantitative spin on it, How much annual activity needs to be done in order to have a sustainable management of the landscape that's managed so as to supply human needs? That's a question. The answer that comes from this kind of the eco-modernist fantasist crowd is asymptotically approaching zero, right? That's more or less their answer. This is obviously not the correct answer from a realistic perspective, nor is the correct answer something like 50%. That's a wrong answer. So what is the answer is, one, I don't know what the answer is, right? Two, the answer is definitely more than are currently involved in the United States in agriculture. That's another answer. Now, Beyond that, I have absolutely no idea, other than to point out that there are so many activities that I've also just thought about in the last three minutes, beyond activities like gardening and both... both gardening for food and gardening just for recreation and aesthetic reasons, but also activities that indicate a residual interest in being in nature, like hiking, like going to the zoo. This suite of activities could kind of be reconfigured into sustainable landscape management. I mean, children, before they're taught that work is crap and the correct thing to do is to play PlayStation all day, love sitting around and playing with dirt and building sandcastles and stuff. That's like hard work for kids, but they don't think of it that way because they haven't been socialized into it, right? So I think there is a scope for it, but it requires – I mean, one, of course, it requires a different conception of work. I mean, the deprecation of manual labor is part and parcel of the kind of capitalist – uh model the capitalist system which is based on a separation between uh you know a refined separation between manual and mental labor and that of course deprecates uh manual labor there's all these sorts of uh social science fictions that go into it for example that people claim people are fleeing the countryside in essence because it is hard work And suddenly people who are the most orthodox Marxists who think that, you know, Marx was delivering a sort of truth based on these stone tablets from, you know, Mount Communist, they forget that what Marx said is that people are involved in social relations. Whereas if you think of agriculture as merely hard work, you're talking basically about a biophysical relationship. And so people leave the countryside because of poverty. And usually because they don't have land.

Justin: There's a deliberate policy, at least since the 50s by the US to depopulate the countrysides of the third world, right? I mean, that's where all their aid efforts and everything has gone. So it's not coincidental that the massive rural to urban migrations have happened in that period.

Max Ajl: For sure. And who, you know, which sector of the U.S. kind of radical movements have been most savagely persecuted by the U.S. state are actually like radical Black nationalist movements with a relationship to the land. So... These movements, for that matter, are interested in some form of relationship with agrarian systems. Then they're murdered and ripped apart and COINTELPRO'd by the US state. And then you have the kind of Groucho Marxist left saying, well, look, People don't want to do physical labor.

Justin: They don't want to be there anyway.

Max Ajl: People don't want to be there. That's why we have to send in COINTELPRO to disrupt their political activities. And you're just like, okay, I think you're kind of engaged in some sort of religious exercise that doesn't exactly necessarily have anything to do with changing the world. Certainly doesn't have to do with even looking at the world and trying to understand it as... This is all to say, you know, I have no idea what the answer is to, um, how many people are needed to manage the human relationship with nature in a sustainable way that can preserve biodiversity and so forth. I think it's a very open question, and it's okay to admit that we don't have all the answers. And it's also okay to put forth the proposition that part of our work as our own work in terms of understanding the world and our place in it and collaboratively working together to better understand with other people all of our collective place in the world is understanding and changing our minds about certain ideas that we received, ideas that we received from capitalist culture, such as that we can get away without doing any hard work at all.

Stan Cox: Maybe some of us, more of us than we are,

Max Ajl: then zero, need to get up off our asses and do a little bit of work to preserve nature. And that needs to be just explained in a rational, scientific, humane way. Okay, X amount of work. would have to be done to make sure that the planet is more or less perpetually safe and is a secure environment with a great biodiversity profile, providing food, preserving the environment, saving all the animals and the Amazon and everything. And it would be X amount of work. And that's how things have to work. I think most human beings will get on board with it. I don't know. You know, it remains to be seen. I don't have a blueprint for it, but that's just my feeling.

Justin: Yeah. And I mean, you guys, the Stan, Wes has that eyes on the land kind of idea, right? More people, more people out there. So, you know, towards the end of the book, Max, you again, like there's so many parallels between the sensible things you suggest and the sensible things that Stan suggests. But you both talk about demilitarization, so I'll hand the floor over to Stan first about that one. But I just wanted to say that the way you talk about indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and national sovereignty and nationalism is such a huge breath of fresh air for an environmentalist who um you know if you're in into environmental uh literature it's always so um not just eurocentric but like america-centric um as if the rest of the world doesn't exist and as if you know there's no problem that more imperialism can't fix right so if there's something going on in the third world well maybe we need to take that you know maybe britain needs to take over guyana's rainforest or whatever the clean development mechanism enables Northern countries to take over Southern tropical ones or whatever. But your emphasis on national sovereignty, I think is so important and also decolonization. But let's, maybe we can move towards wrapping up, but I wanted to give you both the floor to talk about, again, something environmentalists almost never talk about, which is demilitarization. And Stan, it was one of the first things you talked about at the end of your Green New Deal and beyond, and then we'll turn it over to Max.

Stan Cox: Okay. Demilitarization. I thought you were saying dematerialization.

Justin: No, no, no. We've already covered that, I think. Okay.

Stan Cox: Well, So what we're going to do if we really do what is necessary to eliminate the use of fossil fuels within a short time period and do all the other things, not only with regard to climate, but the other planetary boundaries that we've already transgressed to pull back within those. There's no alternative to Dr. More planning of production and directing of material resources and energy toward you know the meeting of human needs and. away from uses that are either harmful or unnecessary or superfluous. And there's nothing that qualifies as being both harmful and unnecessary as much as the military does. And so that's, clearly the first place to start cutting is there. Not only in this case, I was talking mainly about domestic policy in the book, but also it's probably the single best thing we could do. to reduce the harm that we're doing all over the world is to do that, to defund the police, this would be de-resource the military. I guess, but instead, what are they talking about? The Navy is aiming to have 100% biofuel powered jet bombers and aircraft and fighter jets and so forth. So it's another bit of magical thinking that we have.

Justin: Max, do you want to go from demilitarization to national sovereignty to decolonization?

Max Ajl: Yeah, I mean, demilitarization, I have nothing to add except just to also mention the U.S. footprint on other nations, for example, South Korea, Japan, all of the home militarized countries. Southeast Asia, you know, these are actually highly polluting and often because they're essentially practically sovereign, often based on the agreements between the US and, you know, whatever semi-colony they've cited their bases on, they don't ever have to deal with environmental remediation. from the waves, right? And it's also, you know, someone who does a lot of work on the Arab region. I mean, the environmental damage from the munitions themselves, right? White phosphorus and depleted uranium and so forth. I mean, these are catastrophic, right?

Justin: But if Elizabeth Warren had won, she would have greened the U.S. military, though, so...

Max Ajl: Yeah, exactly. This is why we believe in the electoral route to social change. Yeah, no. And, you know, the pictures that have come out, for example, from Fallujah, it's just entirely beyond belief or, you know, Agent Orange, for that matter, in Vietnam. So this should be added. You know, this question of national sovereignty. You know, there's a sophisticated and a more simple and straightforward argument. I think both are important because essentially there is a widespread argument it's not a support for colonialism in the U.S. left. It's actually just a shrugging at colonialism on the U.S. left. It's starting to shift rapidly now with the radicalization of a new generation of youth But the overwhelming—it seems to me that at least a vocal minority, if not a majority, of people who identify as the left, especially within the academy, my age, which is 37 hefty years and older— basically don't care about US operations against other countries, whether those are black ops, whether those are direct invasions, whether those are proxy wars, whether those are sanctions, you know, what's going on in Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, the sanctions against Iran.

Stan Cox: This is basically either no one, they just don't care.

Max Ajl: And they certainly won't mention it to their 22,000 Twitter followers who they're blathering to about Marxology. Or they support it.

Justin: Yeah, because they're fighting dictators and other bad imperial powers or whatever.

Stan Cox: Yeah, so people...

Max Ajl: signed statements calling for, like, Cinzia Arruzza, who's kind of supposedly some kind of Marxist feminist, signed a letter calling for sanctioning the architects of the oppression in Iran. The letter was subsequently changed, but that doesn't really impress me. I mean, they saw the letter, they signed it, then under pressure, the content of the letter was changed to remove the call for outright sanctions. I mean, there is a serious problem support for neo colonialism on the US left. Right. So this is the basic position is that national sovereignty includes the right to be free of sanctions, the right to not have proxy armies invading the country and the right to not be directly invaded and occupied. And for example, or to have Qatar do it with the U.S. leading from behind, as was the case in Libya, which Gilbert Ashkar famously warned us not to oppose.

Justin: I'll never forget that he said that if we support the bombing of Libya, then we'll have a powerful argument for a no-fly zone over Gaza the next time Israel bombs Gaza. It was ultimately for Palestine that he advocated.

Max Ajl: Yeah, yeah. And it's kind of this culture of within which either people just don't mention those things, or if you do mention those things and also identify who is supporting the colonial actions, you're a sectarian.

Justin: Well, yeah. And it's also totally divorced from the environmental discussion, right? Like environment is seen as like some kind of domestic issue. And then if you get into like talk about, you know, whatever these US interventions, well, that's like... You're like a geopolitics person.

Max Ajl: Yeah, but these are intimately related. I mean, it's not a coincidence that Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia have been the main actors on the international stage putting forth a radical call for dealing with the environmental crisis in a way which actually allows for southern national popular development, and that these countries are under siege, sanction, coup d'etat by the United States. So first, I mean, the national question and the environmental question, these are two sides of the same coin, right? They cannot be... The coin cannot be split in half without destroying the coin. You have to keep both of these in mind because... dealing with the environmental question is mediated through dealing with the national question. Countries need national popular control over just their borders to be able to deal adequately with all these other aspects of the environmental question, like demanding climate debt. How are Palestinians supposed to have sustainable management of their ecology when they're being occupied? Thankfully, a lot of people on the U.S. left now recognize that Palestinians are human beings and deserve some form of control over their lands and lives. Unfortunately, this blessed recognition has not really been recognized to the people of Iran, Yemen, Libya, Syria, right? So, let alone Zimbabwe, right, where actually these people were demonized as human beings. uh, as, uh, as Mugabeists for taking their land back from white settlers. Right. And of course the same people, the same, the same kind of, uh, the same kind of pantheon of geniuses, uh, who were responsible for signing these letters, calling for, uh, sanctioning Iran or it's the same cluster, uh, uh, are the same people, uh, or at least the same publications that, uh, also call for, um, you know, demonize the Black Zimbabweans for taking their land back from the white settlers. This is really a cluster of people who are interested in destroying anything that makes people powerful and allows them to determine their own fate in the third world, which is the only way they're going to be... If you... can't deal with your own faith, then you can't deal with the environmental question. There's no way to separate out the two, right? I mean, there's a much more complicated question dealing with environmentally uneven exchange and using state apparatuses to reduce the impact of environmentally uneven exchange through industrialization, the calls for climate debt repayments, and so forth, which that's actually not terribly complicated to demand climate debt repayments. But you need a state in the way our world is set up that operates through the nation state system. That's not necessarily how I think one builds socialism per se, but you need a nation state to advocate in the UN and in Copenhagen or what have you for climate debt repayments. There's not another mechanism to do so. So...

Justin: What do they want?

Max Ajl: Anyone who doesn't want to deal with any of those things is a person who doesn't actually want to deal with a just global transition at all. And that's my position, in fact, is that they don't want a global just transition. They're just looking away while much of the world burns.

Justin: Well, you certainly are not doing that, Max. I'll People's Green New Deal. And Stan, you know, I was one I was meaning to ask you just before we log off. Is there a path to a livable future, you know, at all before us?

Stan Cox: Well, maybe I should, this, you're referring to the title of the book I've got coming out, probably should have put a question mark at the end of that, but Max, as you probably know, Justin likes asking these kind of questions, and I'm surprised through this whole thing that he hasn't asked both of us, the question that he always asks, which is, you know, they're not going to let you do that, don't you? But that's just his way of getting us to think of how to make them let us do it.

Justin: Yeah, so Stan's got The Path to a Livable Future coming out this year. Do you know when it's coming out, Stan?

Stan Cox: In the fall, sometimes.

Justin: And a People's Green New Deal is out, right, Max? Where can we get it? Tell us where we can get it.

Max Ajl: Bookshop.com, right? Is that what it is?

Stan Cox: They're great.

Max Ajl: Yeah, prefer Bookshop.

Justin: Or Bookshop.org, sorry.

Max Ajl: And if not Bookshop.com, Bookshop.org. If you don't have an account at Bookshop.org, please order direct from the publisher, Pluto Press.

Justin: All right.

Max Ajl: Keep the money in the hands of the publisher and out of the hands of Amazon.

Justin: Of Jeff Bezos, the soon-to-be quadrillionaire or whatever.

Max Ajl: Exactly.

Justin: Thank you. Thank you guys very much.

Max Ajl: Thank you.

Stan Cox: Thank you, Justin.