Economics

as if Soil and
Health
Matters
Victor Condorcet Vinje
Nisus Publications

Economics as if
Soil and Health
Matters
The Case for a Quality
Grain Currency
Standard and Barter
Trade in Quality
Staple Goods
Victor Condorct Vinje

Copyright: Nisus Publications, 2015

ISBN 9788291612355
2

Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part One: The Modern Crisis and its Historical
Parallels
Chapter One: Urbanization Ran Amok; A Threat Towards
Authentic Citizenship and a Viable Civilization
Chapter Two: The Dead End Road of GDP, Planned
Obsolescence and Fiat Currencies
Chapter Three: The Loss of Soil; The Necessary
Consequence of an Agriculture Based on Industrial
Premises
Chapter Four: The Prolificacy of Metabolic Diseases; the
Most Conspicuous Sign of a Bankrupt Food System

Part Two: Long Term

Sustainable Solutions

Reforms

Towards

Chapter Five: Direct Public Participation; the Case for

Civic Virtue and Non-hierarchical Relationships
Chapter Six: Democratization and Popularization of
Science and Technology
3

Chapter Seven: Legislation for the Restoration of

Civilizations Agrarian Basis
Chapter Eight: Taxation for Decentralization and
Ecological Production and Consumption

Bibliography
Notes

Introduction

The presupposition of the perspectives put forward in this

paper is that any viable civilization rests upon an agrarian
basis. This is redundantly verified throughout history
from ancient Mesopotamia, via the Greco-Roman world,
to the Incas of Peru. Even modern Western Civilization
has deep roots in Atlantic soils. Furthermore, to argue the
case for the necessary agrarian basis of civilization is to
argue for the proper place of man in Nature not apart
from it. It also implies that the Earth is not a megamachine, anymore than soils can be reduced to physical
particles lest it gradually disappears through wind and
water erosion. The ancient Romans ventured a sort of
industrial civilization and failed, even in their small
scale, beleaguered by soil erosion problems and the
infeasibility of centralization. Our modern industrial
civilization is even more risky beleaguered by massive
ecological dislocations, colossal urbanization and huge
social problems.
Urbanization, or, more precisely, the formation of cities,
once contributed essential elements of civilization to the
West, thereby recovering certain traits from the ancient
Greek and Roman civilizations. Tradesmen and artisans
were to break the hegemony of the feudal lords and the
clergy, and pave the way for democracy in its Medieval
5

and modern forms aside from supplementing the

agrarian basis of the economy with industry, which
profited primarily the wealthiest merchants and
eventually turned the democracies into oligarchies.
However, municipal democracies lasted throughout
centuries, flourishing throughout Europe, often
confederally associated, before they were crushed by the
centralized modern state during the 16th century.
Furthermore, they existed in an equilibrium with the
countryside, in which none of them dominated the other.
This socio-economic landscape also became the later
model for early economists such as Quesnay, who
stressed the agrarian basis of civilization during the
earliest stages of The Industrial Revolution, insisting that
industry and trade are essentially consumption. That is to
say, true production consists exclusively in agriculture.
All civilizations in history succumbed to the deterioration
of their soils. Moreover, this deterioration was invariably
caused by politico-economical factors whether in the
form of the excessive cash-crop farming among the
Athenians or the Romans, or in the form of massive
silting of the irrigation system of Mesopotamia,
accentuated by the minimally industrious slaves. It
follows as a universal rule that defocusing the sustainable
cultivation of the soil in favor of other economic
activities such as trade or industry, or both, is highly
damaging and ultimately fatal to any civilization.1
6

Todays industrial agriculture or, rather, agribusiness

is hardly more advanced when it comes to soil
conservation than were the pre-historic slash-and-burn
farmers at their overextended stage. Loss of top soil is
occurring to a non-precedent extent, soil is polluted and
compacted, and infested with resistant fungi. The
situation is seriously worsened by the climate crisis,
which accelerates erosion and threatens agricultural
production in general and even threatens seaside life
through silting, autrophication and loss of water oxygen.
To make this crisis complete an into a veritable socioecological one we have an economic system which
takes industry and trade as its basis, depriving agriculture
of its living aspects its long evolution of cultivated
plants, its microbial life forms, and its symbioses.
Microbial life forms have created our atmosphere.
Humanity is largely ignoring their historic and present
role, as well as importance for our future, so as to cause
turmoil in the atmosphere and the emergence of a climate
crisis partly as a result of the leaking out of CO 2 from
the worlds soils. The ancient Romans exhausted their
soils especially in Italy until ca. 500 B. C., and
thereby undermined their own existence. Towards 1000
B. C. temperatures were rising all over Europe, allowing
for example the Vikings to achieve substantive progress
within their agriculture. Todays man made climate
changes will be anything than beneficial, without even
7

the faintest similarity with the above mentioned.

However, it is still microbial life forms which represent
our most fundamental and irreplaceable co-operators in
the attempt to manage and overcome the crisis.
This essay constitutes an attempt at promoting reforms
which may redress this dismal situation, of which we are
merely glimpsing the early dawn, and steer our shattered
civilization onto a viable path. Surely, the concrete forms
which such reforms may take, must vary greatly from
one region of the world to another, according to the
actual geographical and climatic circumstances. Common
to all the reforms is that they advocate decentralization,
confederation, ecological production, civic virtue and
direct democracy which together constitute the counterpower to status quo.

The Economic and Political Status Quo

It is a sad fact and threatening to our Civilization that
Economics as a Science has been reduced to a
combination of gambling and mathematics, when it
actually consists in physics, biology and chemistry and
not least abundant amounts of ethics and prudence. As
we should all know by now, Economics stem from the
ancient Greek terms Oikos and nomos, which mean
the laws of the household in society while Ecology
equals the logic of the household in nature. Obviously,
8

our laws for the household in society cannot stand

opposed to the logos of the household in nature lest we
are accumulating an increasing debt in the so-called biobank; the renewable and non-renewable natural resources
of the planet Telus. However, to reduce the laws of the
household in society to the logic of the household in
nature invariably leads to complete relativism, and
ultimately to cannibalism as the end stage for our species
indeed, to an extreme form of barbarism supplanting
any vestiges of civilization produced throughout human
history from ancient Egypt to our modern one.
To Marxists labor has been the essential value in the
Promethean sense of the term. To be sure, this is hardly
progressive since it tends to maximize it and hence
minimize leisure, which makes for literacy, intellectual
achievements and artistic creation. This Promethean
economic view, which Marx drew from the so-called
political economists (Smith, Bray, Ricardo, et. al.),
poises men against nature and makes for an antiecological society. Furthermore, it poises cities and the
megalopolis against the countryside, contributes to
excessive urbanization, and drains the worlds
agricultural areas of their natural and human resources
without considering the long term implications and
effects and worse; centralization becomes an end in
itself.

Historically, in ancient Greece where our western

civilization originated the city or municipality (polis)
reasonably encompassed the rural surroundings, and most
of its citizens were farmers (yeomen) in addition to doing
artisanal work, arts, etc. in winter time. Furthermore,
every single democratic revolution in modern history has
been conducted by self-reliant farmers from the English
revolution in the 1640s throughout the American and
French revolutions in the 1760s to the 1790s and their
repercussions elsewhere for example in Scandinavia. 2
So, the question that these facts poise is: To what extent
is an authentic (direct) democracy possible in postyeoman societies?

Fiscal policies ancient and modern

Currencies based on industrial produce necessarily result
in accumulating debt in the bio-bank as well as
financially within modern societies. Why is that so, you
may ask? The answer is as simple as the question may
seem perplexing: Industry is essentially consists in
consumption consumption of natural resources as well
as human labor and energy; hence the absurdity of the
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as a standard of
measuring economical thrift and prosperity.
GDP
includes destruction and accidents as well as
production, in the conventional sense of the term in its
10

calculations of growth, and is measured in

mathematical numbers instead of ethically justifiable
quality produce measured by physical, biological and
chemical criteria conducive to public health and long
term prospects for a sustainable future. The ultimate
consequences of the present economic misconceptions
already addressed by the French Enlightenment
physiocrats (Quesnay, Turgot, et. al.) in the 18th century
are that quantitative standards replace qualitative ones;
humanity is plunged deeper and deeper into ecological
crises and catastrophes and, necessarily, financial
collapse around the world with the possible exception
of the still existing agricultural areas in possession of
uncontaminated and non-eroded soils. The reason why
agricultural areas will be better posited for surviving a
global collapse is, of course, they are and will be
conducting authentic production that is, organic growth
utilizing the productivity inherent in nature, from
microbiological processes to the power of the sun and the
photosynthesis.
As indicated above, these conceptions constitute an
elaboration of the Enlightenment physiocrats actually
the first real economists within our modern civilization.
Their financial currency measure was in contradiction
to the bankrupt mercantilist standards of precious metals
(silver and gold) simply grain. This is scarcely
mysterious since they were historically schooled
11

intellectuals and had studied the causes of the fall of the

Roman Empire in ancient times, in relation to the
Romans increasing obsession with militarism, silver and
gold at the cost of tending to their soils. As pointed out
by Hyams, the Roman soils and their yeoman producers
were largely destroyed by the Punic Wars in the 3rd and
2nd centuries B.C. causing the Republican institutions to
disintegrate and finally resulting in the massive slave
revolts such as the Spartacus rebellion in 70-69 B.C.3 As
for the French in the modern era, their economic policy
entangled them in an embittered battle with the
imperialist Great Britain, bursting out into open conflict
in The European Seven Years War (1756-63) and
culminating in the Napoleonic Wars half a century later.
Unfortunately, despite the advances made within
agriculture and the rudimentary beginnings of
biochemical research (by dHolbach, Wallerius, de
Monceau, et. al.), the physiocratic economists had no
exact way of measure the quality of grain, nor to fully
understand its immense importance. Today, we are fully
capable of doing so; indeed, major amounts of research
have been conducted within this field of natural science
during the past hundred years or so by Eastern as well as
Western researchers on an internationally cooperative
basis and mainly by Russian and American scientists.4
So, while the self-centered, myopic and shortsighted
form of economic liberalism warping the original
12

French notion of laissez faire came out victorious in the

course of the 18th century, the socially and ecologically
responsible social liberalism of the physiocratic school
was denigrated and largely forgotten by academics and
the public alike. Indeed, not even Marx addressed their
economic stance properly, preferring to quarrel with the
so-called political economists of the Smithsonian
school. Hence, by the time of the Democratic
Revolutions towards the end of the century notions of
human rights were limited to the right to life, property
and the Pursuit of Happiness, while it is not farfetched
to suggest that the deeper and more encompassing
physiocratic concepts would have entailed the more
comprehensive and prudent the right to life, vocational
and intellectual freedom, usufruct and the Pursuit of
Happiness.

13

Part One
The Modern Crisis and its Historical
Parallels

Chapter One
Urbanization Run Amok; A Threat towards
Authentic Citizenship and a Viable
Civilization
From the earliest civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia
and Harappa, in the Indus Valley, to the modern era,
urbanization has taken a heavy ecological toll both in
the near vicinity of the growing cities and in more distant
regions. As the cities need for building material and ship
timber grew woods were cut down to provide fuel for the
brick furnaces and boat plank for the shipwrights. In the
course of time, the resulting massive deforestation has
led to dramatic climate changes ending up turning rain
forest zones into deserts and arid semi-deserts, by
rendering the fertile top soil layer highly vulnerable to
14

wind and water erosion.5 The problem complex is

exacerbated by the increasing loss of agricultural labor
force, leaving those who stay in the countryside with ever
more onerous tasks in providing for the city dwellers
basic needs, and with ever less capacity to cultivate their
soils in a sustainable manner. Very often, state taxation
has made matters worse for the agriculturalists, forcing
them to make money at a rate which cut across the
needs of their soils to renew themselves after harvests
through such age old practices as green manure cropping
(clover, etc.) molded into the top soil to maintain its
structure, fertility and resistance against erosion.
There is little doubt that the most creative and promising
stages of civilizations in history have been those in which
balanced relationships prevailed between town and
country in social contexts in which the agricultural
countryside maintained its strong economic position,
even as it shred itself of the most counterproductive
feudal structures. In this dynamic setting the urban
populations tended to their artisanal work and organized
their guilds providing solid buffers against the
development of mass societies. The avoidance of such
mass societies is crucial for any civilization, and the
failure to prevent them from taking over has played a
significant role in the downfall in more than one of the
civilizations in history. Indeed, one could hardly have
envisaged the tragedies of WWI and WWII without mass
15

organized people with a too narrow and myopic socioeconomic horizon, and a highly overdue stress on short
term self-interests. Hence, the deterioration of the basic
agrarian economic structures, ecological dislocations,
urbanized mass societies and disintegration of
civilization are intimately interconnected; consequently,
any viable reform program at this stage in history will
have to draw the lessons from previous mistakes and
view the above mentioned problem complex as a whole
in order to come up with anything like long term and
sustainable solutions.

The Negative Spiral of Warfare and Urbanization

Ever since the very first encounters between the various
earliest human groups warfare has had a decisive impact
on the contending parts victors and losers alike. While
the vanquished cultures may have been enslaved or
extinguished altogether, the victorious combatants may
have been so drained of their resources through
protracted warfare that their entire culture went through
fatal changes and lost its former solid foundations. Being
possibly the most conspicuous example, ancient Rome in
the wake of the three extensive and long lasting Punic
Wars in the 3rd and 2nd century B. C., the Roman republic
lost its backbone the self-reliant yeomanry and was
beleaguered by massive urbanization and an alienated
16

and disaffected proletariat. These suddenly urbanized

masses were subsequently easily mobilized by
demagogues into utterly unsustainable war campaigns to
compensate for Romes own loss of productivity and
cultural viability.
With militarization getting the upper hand, and generals
monopolizing the seat of emperor, this degenerative
process was accelerating until the core that once was
Rome was completely rotten, and the Germanic tribes
could put a definitive end to Roman civilization in
Western Europe in the 5th century A. D. No doubt, the
degree of militarization has been equally momentous in
the modern world especially from the European Seven
Years War onwards, when masses of people roamed the
streets of London due to the war pressures on the
economy rioting and looting6 to the war ridden 20th
century and its repercussions so far in the 21 st. Thus,
urbanization has taken on a massive scale, and the mass
production engendered by military expansion has filtered
into every aspect of society almost to the extent of
eradicating quality production, and even establishing a
new technological science; that of planned
obsolescence fabricating flaws in electronic products
and other manufactures so as to keep sales numbers on an
artificially high level.
While such an escalation of militarism is hardly
sustainable ecologically, apart from the human sufferings
17

involved, my contention is that these war eruptions in

the ancient era as well as in modern times are caused
by imbalanced economic structures and trade relations.
The focus is drawn away from basic agricultural
production and other primary economic activities, and
tends to be redirected towards speculation and short term
gain eroding the very rationality of production and
exchange and ending in violent disputes between nations
and within society in general.

War, Political Power and Social Stratification

As noted by the prominent historian, David Thomson 7,
war is often followed by Revolution the most obvious
examples being The Great French Revolution in France
in 1789-93 and the Russian revolutions of 1917, towards
the end of World War I. This chapter aims at illuminating
other important social and political consequences of
warfare, underpinned by developments within ancient
Greco-Roman civilization as well as in the modern
World.
It will be seen that the social and political consequences
of war fall within the following four main categories:
Firstly, for the winning side, its victory may result in a
democracy with corresponding economic equality, on the
requisite precondition that the war is just, that it
includes an increasing number of its citizens, and that it
18

is fought well. If the war, on the contrary, is an act of

aggression and is fought by elite soldiers and/or
mercenary troops, its political and social circumstances
tend to produce some kind of aristocratic or oligarchic
government and an increasing socio-economic
stratification among the members of the victorious social
group or state. Thirdly, for a losing side in a war, the
political result may be as noted by Thomson a
revolution dispossessing ancient regimes and producing
new socio-economic elites, while the chances for a
democratic outcome are rather scarce. Fourthly, the
defeated part may of course be utterly annihilated or
subjected to the victorious side and, hence, dependent
upon the socio-political structure and economic
dispositions of the latter.
A sustainable civilization cannot be established and
maintained otherwise than by a basis of agro-ecological
production, underpinned by high cultural standards of
civic virtue and morally sound trade operations. As far as
urbanization whatever its causes is concerned,
according to S. C. Chew:
[It is] thus resource intensive and resource dependent on
its immediate surroundings and, as well, on distant lands.
The ecological shadow cast extends beyond the
immediate urban confines, and perhaps extends even
globally, contingent on the state of globalization process
of the world economy.8
19

It all boils down to the issue of economy in command

vs. ecology in command. When it comes to ancient
Mesopotamian civilization, core-periphery relations are
very degradative to the Environment, especially when the
periphery is providing a vast amount of resources to meet
the high consumptive needs of the core, with its highly
urbanized population and exuberant life styles.9
Harappan civilization (The Indus Valley)
The exaggerated urbanization of Harappan civilization in
the second millennium B. C. took such a toll on the
forests in the surrounding regions the wood being
consumed in the brick ovens to make bricks for the wells
along the Indus river that the climate of the area
changed and limited the scope for agriculture; hence,
irrigation became an absolute necessity and large
quantities of soil were lost to the wind and concentrated
rain fall. Surely, a wise government would have imposed
regulations on the extent of trade and the trading class,
introduced reforms favoring country living, and put more
emphasis on agricultural productivity and soil
conservation. As the tendency towards economic
specialization also implied an increasing loss of civic
virtue among the population, a reform programme should
also have included a higher premium on versatility and
self-reliance, and encouragement of co-operation and
mutual aid.
20

Urbanization, Soil Erosion and Anti-Enlightenment

Despite all the theoretical knowledge on environmental
issues since WWII10, the problems have aggravated
immensely during the two generations which have passed
since the end of that war. Thus, we find ourselves in an
alarming state of anti-enlightenment seemingly unable
to respond to crucial issues confronting ourselves and
future generations and leaving only marginal scope for
acting upon the huge ecological threats and their socioeconomic implications by implementing the knowledge
achieved by previous scientists. A very substantial part of
the explanation for this malaise is an urbanization
process run amok; the masses of alienated people in the
cities are bereft of hands-on contact and meaningful
interchange with the bioregions in which the escalating
ecological problems could and must be halted and
reversed. In the urban social sphere mass consumption is
the order of the day, and frugality and conservation are
frowned upon as signs of poverty and low status.
To illustrate the astonishing discrepancy between the
seriousness of our catastrophic ecological problems and
the scientific knowledge of them on the one hand, and the
anemic failure to act upon and redress them on the other,
the state of soil erosion in the worlds ne super power,
21

China, is a most telling example. Despite more than 50

years of intensive scientific focus on soil erosion,
according to Wen Dazhong:
[It] is the most serious environmental problem in China
today. Despite its achievements in soil and water
conservation, China still has one of the most serious
erosion problems in the world. Total loss of soil in China
accounts for one-fifth of the soil lost in the world.
Erosion rates are still increasing more rapidly than
control rates in the Southern region and in the Loess
Plateau region.11
Thse lines were written some 20 years ago, and there is
surely no reason at all to believe that the problems have
been redressed since then, considering the pace of the
urbanization process in China and the Chines authorities
search for agricultural land in Australia, Asia, Africa and
Latin-America (so-called land grabbing) to feed its
own population in later years. Thus, the leading world
economy at the present stage is clearly on a path towards
literally using up the planets green mantle, reversing
millions of years of organic evolution and at the
controlling wheel are situated centralized government,
excessive urbanization and fiat currencies without ties to
sustainable utilization of natural resources.

22

The Social and Ecological Implications of Factory

Farming, Monocultures and Cheap Food.
With the introduction of industrialized agriculture has
set a new dubious record among the various species on
this planet: In our very nutrition and metabolism we are
no longer supposed to aim at quality standards within
food consumption a fact unheard of within the rest of
the animal kingdom. If this approach does not qualify for
the label hubris; well, then nothing whatsoever does
which would amount to characterize the ancient Greeks,
who invented the term, as completely nonsensical.
Moreover, to dismiss them as such would not do us any
good in our modern context, since we would hardly have
had any western civilization at all without their efforts
during the first millennium B. C.
As metabolic diseases spread around the world to an ever
increasing and alarming extent, antibiotics are
outmatched by resistant microbes, and for example wheat
harvests are destroyed on a massive scale by rapidly
mutating and fungicide resistant Rust fungi not to
mention all the widely published scandals within the food
industry we are definitely reaching a stage in which the
very basis of the worlds overall economies are on the
verge of collapse. The conventional economists talk of a
financial collapse and what currency to invest in,
23

while not even lending a thought to the fact that

currencies as such have no inherent value at all.
Traditionally, fiscal currency as a means of economic
exchange was accepted by people only because it was
linked to some basic quality product or other notably
storable staple products necessary for human survival and
well being. Today, we are as far away from sound
economies as we can get, as illustrated by the fact that in
the worlds dominating economy, China,
[] where factory farms are expanding faster than
anywhere else, the countrys first national pollution
census in 2010 [!], shocked many people when it
reported that agriculture was a bigger source of pollution
than industry, with the authors putting the blame squarely
on factory farms.12

The Need to Reverse Urbanization

A merely superficial look at the problem complex
involved in the present ecological crisis directs attention
towards the relationship between deforestation and the
climate crisis issues which again play into the major
socioeconomic struggle of the present century; the global
food crisis. The overwhelming transportation demands
caused by centralization and urbanization has warped
the world economy around fossil fuels, produced
alarming climatic changes, and is now turning to wood
24

and cellulose for so-called clean fuel. Surely, this kind

of human approach to our natural habitat cannot last long
and the consequent civilization breakdown could well
prove to be far more rapid than for example in ancient
Harappa in the Indus Valley or in ancient Mesopotamia,
which succumbed to similar centralization and
urbanization excesses, albeit on a much smaller scale.
As noted by Chew13 the Harappans developed an
ecological philosophy in response to their ecological
problems in the second millennium B. C,, without being
able to prevent the ultimate demise of their ancient
civilization. In our modern context we are in a far greater
hurry, while the overall situation is immensely more
dramatic and global in scope at that.
The present need to reverse urbanization rests on two
crucial issues, which are closely interrelated. Firstly,
recognizing the illusions of any kind of industrial
civilization as a veritable Frankenstein-Promethean
project raises the case for reestablishing the agrarian
basis of civilization which implies a far higher
percentage of the world population occupying themselves
with soil cultivation and conservation than is the case
today. Secondly, physical decentralization must be
facilitated to reduce transportation demands and the toll
taken on our forests, and reverse the dangerously high
levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causing the climate to
tilt into highly unpredictable and unprecedented patterns.
25

Thus, since both forests and soils are of crucial

importance as regards the carbon cycle 14, human
activities directed towards sustainable and CO 2
sequestering forestry and soil cultivation should be of the
utmost concern to any responsible financial authority in
our era and enough time of crisis has passed by now to
conclude that the proper levels for claiming such
responsibility are the local and bioregional ones.

Chapter Two
The Dead End Road of GDP, Planned
Obsolescence and Fiat Currencies
The Infeasibility of Precious Metal Currencies
From the decline of Roman civilization, via the
corruption of the Chines dynasties in the ensuing
centuries and the dead end road of the Spanish empire in
the 16th century, to the collapse of Western civilization in
the first half of the 20th century, silver and gold currencies
were the essence of economic valuation systems which
tended in a cancer like manner to remove focus from
quality food production and soil conservation, undermine
age old sustainable cultural traits, and foster large scale
accumulation of capital and a reckless consumption of
luxuries. All of the above mentioned essential examples
26

ended in disaster and there is no reason why a similar

way of measuring economic values would not do so if it
was ventured once again. Moreover, it is a testimony to
the utterly ahistorical orientation within the field of
economy as such that theorists who at the present stage
worry about the fate of so-called fiat currencies
recommend investment in silver and gold as a way to
cope with the crisis. Those who have learned the
lessons of history somewhat more properly tend to prefer
investment in seeds and agricultural production albeit
without knowledge of the most essential aspects of soil
cultivation (in the respective areas of investment) or the
soil conservation demands pertaining to it. Thus, those
agricultural klondykers may easily end up causing the
erosion of fertile top soil in less than a generation, as has
happened so many times before when gold diggers
turned agriculturalists overnight. This represents the very
essence of the tragedy as regards the demise of formerly
rich yeoman cultures basically, self-reliant and frugal
yeomen are those agricultural producers who are best
situated to conduct sustainable soil cultivation, deliver
quality products to society at large, and provide high
ethical standards to the public by way of their keenly
sensitive attitude towards the world of life in general.
Such vital and solid yeoman cultures take decades and
centuries to develop, and even under favorable
circumstances at that; on the other hand, however, they
may be undermined in the course of a single major war,
27

and may only be reestablished by the most prudent and

elaborate reform programs. This book constitutes an
effort to present such a reform program, aiming at the
reintroduction of a quality grain currency in the sense
of resting the economy on basic staple products and
barter trade in which such are exchanged in bulk between
the various bioregions of the world.

The Ecological Implicatons of Precious Metal

Currencies
From the time of the Roman Empire onwards silver and
gold have played a dominant role within the world
economy except from certain periods in which staple
goods were preferred, such as the High Middle Ages and
the Renaissance and the Enlightenment era even to the
extent of penetrating the thinking of such diverse
economic philosophers as Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
However, at the time of writing, when economic
valuation based on precious metals is idealized and
tentatively implemented on a vast scale seemingly as an
alternative to the bankrupt fiat currencies, the oikos
aspects of economic life the very soil upon which
human beings live and their very basic health conditions
fade from attention once again, at a time when we need
it the most. Moreover, the very mining processes
themselves initially involved and still involve
28

immense deforestation to facilitate the extraction of

mineral ores and the metallurgical industries, causing
large scale soil erosion and loss of biodiversity. Apart
from that, the very access to the mineral ores themselves
more often than not involved sheer military conquest and
plunder, enslavement of indigenous populations and in
this highly unethical context provides a poor basis for
equitable trade relations.
Obviously, precious metals are luxuries more valuable
the less they are available and the use of them in
exchange for basic staple goods needed for human
survival and well being necessarily undermines the
organic aspects of the economy and consequently
precludes human existence as a viable species within
ecosystems and bioregions around the world. Obviously,
too, there are no other species with whom we share this
living planet who is obsessed with such cold and dead
objects such as mineral rock apart from
microorganisms such as mycorrhizael fungi, who are able
to extract nutrition directly from them and the reason is
simple: Any such preoccupation would have rendered
them extinct long since.
However, this line of argument is not a case for crude
biologism or neo-primitivism; it is, on the contrary,
part of an effort to provide some clues for preventing the
present vestiges of a civilization from falling into the
abyss of previous ones. And in this respect the very way
29

in which values are measured, and trade is conducted, are

crucial elements as regards the sustainability of any
society and the sensitivity of human populations toward
determining ecological issues. In other words, we need to
transcend the level of looting and enter the mature stage
of harvesting, if we are to retain a viable civilization and
even a living Earth (Telus or Gaia) and to achieve such
a mature stage we need new ways of economic
measurement, based on elementary organic principles.
The most immediate implications of a transition to
organically founded economic measurements is the
revival of the very notion of oikos itself, and the reunion
of economy with ecology. Accordingly, and most
significantly, the illusion of an industrial civilization
will have to be abandoned in favor of the only authentic
basis that any civilization ever had the agrarian one.
Agricultural surplus of quality staple goods (such as
grain and timber) always were the foundation of
civilizatory developments from ancient Egypt to the
modern Western world and when these surpluses
somehow were disrupted or became unattainable, former
civilizations rapidly disintegrated irrespective of the
technological levels that they had reached. After all, it
took the Germanic chieftain, Odoaker, only a dagger to
finally conquer Rome in 476 A. D
The continuous denigration of the modern civilizations
agrarian basis for at least the past hundred years
30

resulting in the loss of rich rural communities and

yeoman cultures is paralleled by a mass consumerism
propelled by infamous techniques of planned
obsolescence within commodity production. As in
ancient Rome, where the Punic wars resulted in warping
the entire agrarian basis of the once promising Roman
republic drawing upon the Etruscan and Greek legacies
the outbreak of WWI in Europe in 1914 set the scene
for a similar process in our own era. Industrialized
militarization and commercialized urbanization tended in
both cases to deflect attention from the organic aspects of
our existence as a species, and provide the mental
framework for a Promethean notion of humanity as the
lord of Creation a notion that even Cicero already
expressed as the Roman republic finally fell to pieces in
the first century B. C., only to be replaced by a highly
fragile empire, under constant attack from the so-called
barbarian tribes of the North, Northwest and east from
the Gauls, to Attila and the Huns, and the Goths.
However, rather than lords of Creation we are products
of billions of years of evolution, and however ingeniously
we conduct our technologies we are subject to the very
same organic principles and natural laws as any other
species. Thus, our economies necessarily will have to
take the form of elementary adaptation to our natural
habitats a necessity which commonly eludes the
ordinary modern city or, most conspicuously, metropolis
31

dweller, who tend to lead his or her daily lives as a lord

of creation even while having no clue about from where
and how the ingredients of his or her next meal are
obtained. Surely, such a situation is not only
unsustainable it is outright unenlightened and mocks
the very principles on which modernity was built in the
Enlightenment era of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Ecological Deterioration as a Result of Uneven Trade

Even as imbalanced trade relations contributed greatly to
the demise of the ancient civilizations of the Indus Valley
and Mesopotamia with a parallel unsustainable degree
of urbanization, the same pattern was repeated in the
Minoan Crete and mainland Greek and Roman
civilizations. Thus, instead of strengthening and
consolidating the self-reliant subsistence economies
which had provided the very basis of these civilizations
in the first place, undue vocational specialization and
pecuniary
transactions
led
to
socioeconomic
disintegration and ecological dislocations, such as
massive soil erosion.15
How could this downturn spiral have been avoided? And
why does it seem to be repeated over and over again
within civilizations millennia apart?

32

These two essential questions for any civilization

including our modern one are of a basically
philosophical and legislative character. Left to itself,
trade operations tend to live their own lives based on
mutual budgets and goals of expansion bereft of the
long term perspectives required by ethical and ecological
considerations. Moreover, trade with basic surplus
agricultural staple products, against for example metals,
have tended to diminish the price of the agricultural
produce to a level at which soil is exploited at an
unsustainable level if only to balance the scale.
Hence, there is a constant need to maintain trade at a
level between equal partners with equitable products
such as food stuffs against food stuffs, building materials
against building materials, and manufactured products
against manufactured products to keep up the balance
and provide scope for exactly those ethical and
ecological considerations. Such a compartmentalization
of economic products would automatically sharpen the
public focus on the overall utilization of natural resources
and the sense and degree of self-reliance and selfsufficiency all of which are indispensable aspects of
any sustainable society.

The Monetary System in Early Modern Europe

33

The early minting and circulation of money as a means

of exchange of goods and services was naturally tied to
the old regionally based markets within an overall
subsistence oriented economy the authentic oikos or
household sphere of society with only the cities being
entirely dependent upon pecuniary ways of compensating
employees, achieving profits and obtaining staple goods
such as foodstuffs and, not least, luxuries. The numerous
currencies throughout Europe were accordingly tied to
the natural resources and produce in their respective
regions. Thus, the financial system was somewhat akin to
the ones promoted by green economists in our own
time, advocating local currencies as a means towards
sustainable economic structures and practices.16
However, the early modern decentralized currency
system was extremely fragmentized, accumulating
uncertainties of value as trade expanded, became more
intense and reached into ever remoter areas having their
own unfamiliar currency standards.
As the United Dutch Provinces turned into the most
prosperous economic nation in the 17th century,
conducting extensive trade around the Globe, it fell to her
to provide a solution to the monetary mess. The answer
became the Gold Florin, which rapidly was accepted as
standard currency everywhere. This was actually a huge
precarious step in modern history, away from an
agriculturally founded economics into something quite
34

uncertain in the long term perspective however much it

satisfied commercial agents at the time. There has always
been and still is two major problems with using gold
as a measure of value; firstly, it bears no relation
whatsoever to the basic needs in life; secondly, it tends to
accumulate in a few hands and/or locations. However, for
increasingly profit hungry traders at this early stage of
modern capitalism such concerns constituted no
sufficient warning: They could always buy what they
needed and more; moreover, capital accumulation had
already become their very object and raison detre, as
Marx elaborated on in his three volumes on Capital.17 For
society at large, though, and for the integrity of
ecological systems around the Globe, the gold currency
system proved in time to have fatal consequences. To put
it bluntly, it implies turning the world upside down or
putting the cart in front of the horse simply because of
its logical error of taking the act of trading as the basis
of the economy, while the very trade products themselves
and their producers are relegated to a secondary position.
One may wonder how long the early subscribers to the
primacy of trade would have been able to stick to their
conception hade farmers and artisans alike been in a
position to wage general strikes in the early 17th century
that is, if the guild system had not been so
compartmentalized as to create the veritable barriers
between the various trades and crafts, and town and
35

country had not been separated to the extent that they

actually were becoming at that stage in history.

The
Historical
Implications
Navigation Act of 1651

of

Cromwells

The immediate consequences of turning the economic

world upside down, permeating the whole scene with
Dutch gold coins, were monumental. As surely as the
United Dutch Provinces from their prominent
commercial position and largely ruled by wealthy
burgher families monopolized the currency system,
their rival across the channel, England with equal
ambitions on the seas retorted to her own counter
measures, at an early stage most notably represented by
the so-called Navigation Act of 1651. Thus prohibiting
foreign ships to carry goods to her coasts, England
provoked a series of wars against the United Dutch
provinces in the second half of the 17th century
launching entirely new dimensions to early modern
politics, namely fiscal warfare, and precluding the
realization of the French physiocrats ethically laden
ideal of laissez faire a century later on. By the time
Francois Quesnay published his Tableu Economique
(1758) trade had become so entangled with warfare
whether it was waged with currencies or cannons that
this admirable appeal to reason and free trade after the
36

outbreak of the European Seven Years War, could only

be perceived in the mocking form of capital
accumulation propped up by cannon boat diplomacy.
The fact that the Navigation Act was not repealed until
the 1850s, when the major damage was already done to
the formerly well balanced economic regions around the
world, illustrates the degree to which the notion of
laissez faire -- from its original and ethical sense has
become reduced to a mere word much like the fate of
the concept of democracy. Moreover, the corruptive
developments of the very market itself produced its own
formidable counter-power in the form of socialism
according to which societies can do without markets
altogether, apart from bulk imports and exports
conducted for the most part by a centralized state
authority. The dialectics of this ideological battle have
propelled the world further and further away from crucial
pillars of civilization, such as the conservation of its
agrarian basis, self-reliance, and regionally based
markets which were economically founded on some
essential staple product such as for example wheat,
hides, timber or dried meat and fish while at the same
time leaving room for exchange of a multitude of other
products and crafted manufactures. Hence, just as the
financial trickery of the early modern states paved the
way for globalization as we know it today in the
sense of an extreme form of centralization and
37

accumulation of capital the reform proposals launched

in Part Two of this book aim at economic regionalization
and political confederation.
Apart from the tendencies towards economic
specialization and probably as a result of it ancient
Harappan society became strongly class divided, with a
tiny elite at the top indulging in consumption of luxuries
and taking a huge toll on natural resources (building
palaces, and so on). Highly probable, too, nothing less of
a veritable social revolution could have saved that
civilization from extinction a revolution, however,
which was precluded by the alienation between the
agricultural laborers and the urban proletariat, as so often
has happened in history all the way to the Paris
Commune of 1871 and the Russian revolutions of 1917.
The problem complex is of such a character as testified
by the fact that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus successively
tried to solve the economic and political problems of the
Roman Republic with their reform programs in 131 and
121 B. C. respectively and when they both failed (or,
rather, were killed by the envious and suspicious Roman
senators) Roman society was plunged into the slave
revolt of Spartacus and his tens of thousands companions
a generation or two later on.
Such stages are crucial turning points in history, and our
own civilization has verged on the wrong side of the line
now for more than at least 150 years; thus, it is simply of
38

immense importance that reforms are implemented to

reverse the urbanization process, the tendency towards
economic specialization and social stratification, and the
ruinous toll on the natural environment around the Globe.
Surely, the incentives for decentralization, quality
agricultural production and refinery, and quality craft
work as the very pillars of a sustainable ecological
civilization must be of a more spiritual than narrowly
materialistic character. Thus, there will be need for some
minor tax releases in combination with attractive ecovillage settlements either reviving old country
communities or establishing new ones as well as
introducing new rites in the form of celebrations of the
sowing and harvesting seasons, and so on. After all, the
very meaning of progress according to Enlightenment
philosophers such as Condorcet pertained to the
development of the human mind. Hence, a high premium
on agri-ecological practices and historical subjects in the
universities would also constitute relevant means of
elevating the above mentioned crucial matters to a
prominent position on the modern or post-modern
agenda before it is too late to save our civilization as
well as the biosphere from reverting to a pre-mammal
state of evolution. However, it is hard to see that the
initiatives will come from the apexes of the modern
states, which are stuck too deep in the quagmire of fiat
currency capital and GDP economic evaluations, while
39

we are here dealing with basic economy and the case for
quality staple product currencies. Thus, communal
confederations in the various bioregions would rather be
more relevant starting points. More about these subjects
follow in Part Two, especially in chapter Five.
With the failure to implement reforms in time, when the
decline set in because of ecological and climatological
reasons, the fall of the Harappan civilizations which is
here used as an ample parallel to our modern crises was
complete. Surely, the establishment of a viable
agricultural civilization takes some time, and urban
popoulations rushing into the countryside in search for
food in times of crisis are not even faintly equipped to
conduct the patient tasks pertaining to sustainable ecoagriculture. Without prudent reforms preparing
substantive segments of the now urban populations for a
future life in the countryside, the roaming urban masses
into rural areas at the moment when the global food crisis
hit and the degree of self-sufficiency is way too low, will
cause huge disturbances to those who still cultivate the
soil and possibly wipe out the respective vestigial rural
cultures altogether, leaving only small bands drifting
around in search for food. In other words, not only will
the urban aspect of civilization be wiped out, but such a
tremendous crisis will also sweep away its agricultural
basis long languishing under the non-proportional
predominance of urbanism, and pave the way to a
40

regression into a novel form of barbarism including war

lords and so on in a way similar to what happened in
ancient Mesopotamia, Harappa and Rome.
One may say that in the two former, and even in the third,
people even at the top of the social ladder had no
clear notion of what was going on in the time of collapse,
and did not perceive that their respective civilizations
were on the verge of eradication. In ours, on the other
hand, in which knowledge of past failures should be
greater than ever before, it is only a total pulverization of
responsibility which may provide scope for the
ignorance, neglect and denial of trends similar to those
which brought down former civilizations. Such a
pulverization of responsibility, on the other hand, renders
human life essentially meaningless and hardly satisfies
citizens with a sense of pride and intellectually
investigating minds. No doubt, this malaise results from
political systems in which elected representatives are not
mandated by the public, and even abdicate their own
reason and voting power to a party discipline apparatus at
that fighting for particularistic interests at the cost of
the bigger picture and the common public good.

The Myths of Agricultural Productivity Measures

In our industrial civilization it is a commonplace to
gauge economic productivity per capita as if every
41

human economic activity was an industry. However,

within agriculture there are two decisive factors which
tell us that this approach is a dangerous fallacy. Firstly,
within agriculture it is primarily the combination of
fertile soil, sunshine, water, microbial life and seed which
produces that is, literally doing the labor for us while
humans merely administer the processes involved.
Furthermore, if this management is inadequate for some
reason most often poor economic policies and lack of
biological knowledge it is not only personal economic
bankruptcy which occurs, but social ecological
bankruptcy, debilitating soils for generations and ages to
come.
Thus, as every organic horticulturalist has realized, the
productivity of soil is many times higher on moderate
plots (say up to 5 acres) than in vast mono-cropped
fields. There are many reasons for this: The soil practices
of the former favor a high content of organic material in
the soil, which gives scope for viable microbial life,
utilized by plants in several crucial symbiotic processes
making for sturdy and healthy cultivated plants in no
need for pesticides or fungicides of any kind. Moreover,
the avoidance of heavy machinery reduces soil
compaction to virtually zero and since loss of organic
material and soil compaction both result in loss of soil
particles and decreased soil productivity, there is every
reason why resettlement of the countryside is highly
42

urgent if humanity shall be able to prevent a major

ecological and economic collapse leaving the scope for
a viable civilization virtually zero.
So, we have to increase the long term productivity of
soils through agri-ecological methods and these
methods largely rest on horticultural craft work rather
than the soil destructive industrialized agri-business so
prevalent today. The latter half of this book deals with the
possible measures and reforms which may be employed
to reverse the dead end processes that we are enmeshed
in; hence, let it suffice at this stage to indicate that they
would have to deal with property conditions, taxation,
market regulations (based on the original conception of
laissez faire), economic valuation and, not least,
incentives to high standards of civic virtue rather than
mass consumption in short, humanity will have to
refocus its attention from obsession with quantity and
bulk to quality and ethics.

Chapter Three
The Loss of Soil; The Necessary Consequence
of an Agriculture Based on Industrial
Premises
The Scope of Soil Degradation
43

According to research conducted during the past few

decades land degradation and loss of soil affect from 30
to 50 % of the Earths surface. 18; moreover, considering
the fact that enormous amounts of CO2 leach from eroded
soils into the atmosphere, while the removed soil
particles and contaminants pollute drinking water
resources for an immense number of people in addition
to despoiling the productivity of vast Ocean areas the
problem complex related to soil abuse and, alternatively,
conservation must be ranked as the most serious
ecological issue that humanity will face in the decades
and centuries ahead. In view of this dismal picture it is
nothing less than startling that the issue of soil
conservation does not make it to the conventional media
of the present era. This Titanic neglect seems to have
no precedent in history, and despite honorable efforts by
environmentalists and concerned scientists throughout
the past 150 years (cf. G. P. Marsh, N. S. Shaler, F.
Osborn, W. Thomas, et. al.) to address the alarming
issues involved, the ordinary urban citizen around the
Globe has noe clue whatsoever about their magnitude.
Quite to the contrary, the ever accelerating urbanization
processes proceed as if they were a question of natural
law and to the extent that environmental issues are
related to by the public at all, the all too narrowly
focused climate crisis receives all the attention. Surely,
however serious the climate crisis proves to be, it can
never be solved within such a narrow conception of the
44

problem complex involved because it evades the two

basic pillars of a solution: Decentralization to minimize
transportation and energy use, and soil conservation to
restore and maintain a balanced carbon cycle.
If only on the basis of such a neglect of crucial issues
affecting the very future of humanity and life on Earth,
our age does not qualify as an Enlightened one for all
its communication technologies, mass media and public
schooling systems. To make the situation even worse, the
common knowledge of former civilizations and their
demise as a result of excessive urbanization and soil
exhaustion is largely lost to new generations and so is
also the history of sustainable agrarian cultures in the
pre-industrial era. It takes no ecologist to figure out
that this cultural malaise is a dead end road.

The Soil Costs of an Industrial Civilization

There is at least one reason why the fall of the ancient
Greek civilization may properly be regarded as more
honorable than that of ancient Rome. In fact, ancient
Greece succumbed to a militarization process imposed on
them from without. Hence, it is illustrating that it kept its
balance between town and country until the end, while
Rome continually was torn by disturbances within their
overpopulated cities driven there by its own initiated
military-industrial processes. After the fall of the Gracchi
45

this negative spiral ultimately sent the Roman civilization

into history; and for quite some time before its eventual
collapse it was a civilization in name only. And,
necessarily, all along the way since the balance between
town and country was toppled at some point towards the
end of the republican era, soil was lost to wind and rain
in increasing amounts possibly causing substantive
climate changes in the centuries ahead, as documented in
the warm and wet early Middle Ages in Europe.
The modern industrial civilization, however, is in a far
worse situation, mainly for the following two reasons:
Firstly, the extent of urbanization and the consequent
massive imbalance between town and country is so
incomparably much higher in the present era. Secondly,
the structural malaise is global in character. Thus from
the time in which G. P. Marsh first investigated soil
erosion on a global scale in the 1860s, and Fisher
reported on the problem in the U. K. in 1868 in the
immediate aftermath of the first take-off of the Industrial
Revolution soil has been lost to rivers, lakes and seas in
immeasurable amounts. This very fact also proves the
impossibility and illogic of an industrial civilization; it
will simply reduce this planet to a lifeless lump of
minerals and microbial life forms, at which evolution will
have to start all over again if possible at all. It should
hardly be necessary to point out that organic processes
such as plant growth and agriculture need an organic
46

approach rather than a mechanical and industrial one;

still it is the latter which dominates and agriculture today
is subsumed under the label of industry and its short term
profits and mass consumption dynamics. Frugality,
prudence and conservation are viewed as moralist
Puritanism in the negative sense of the terms;
oppressive, archaic and better forgotten, while the fact
is that those character traits once belonged to the most
libertarian humans in history, defining our very human
rights.

Globalization and Soil Degradation

It is not the intent of this book to go into any greater
details about the problems of soil degradation around the
world. The facts are presented elsewhere19, as are also
certain agricultural techniques which make for soil
conservation.20 The intent of the present book is to draw
up the bigger picture, and relate issues such as
urbanization, militarization, fiat currencies, soil
degradation and declining public health.21
One single fact, though, presents itself as a crucial
indicator of what we are facing at a global level today;
according to Wen Dazhong22 the soil loss in China
accounted for 20% of the total world soil loss by 1993.
Moreover, with the Chinese authorities enforced
urbanization programs (!) since then, there is hardly any
47

sign that this process has abated during the past two
decades. Quite to the contrary, rather than encouraging
soil conservation programs at home, the Chinese have
increasingly turned to soils elsewhere in Asia,
Australia, Africa and Latin America to feed its own
people totally oblivious to the dramatic world situation.
Moreover, apart from the utterly immoral displacement
of indigenous populations from their traditional
agricultural lands, the highly unsustainable agri-business
practices utilized to exploit these soils overseas are most
likely to produce at least as soil degrading effects as they
have done in China itself. This kind of imperialism is
indeed of a highly desperate kind and parallels the turn
of events in ancient Rome before its downfall. The
problem today, however, is that the scope of the crisis is
so much more overwhelming, and the extent of soil
degradation so much more global in scale, that if left
unchecked any hope of recovery after some period of
dark ages after its downfall hangs in the balance. Thus,
considering the urgency of the situation, the hope of
turning the tide and embarking on vast soil restoration
programs on a global scale and reestablishing the
indispensable agrarian basis of civilization may well
rest on the prospects for a successful Chinese revolution
aiming at toppling the megalomaniac central government
and replacing it with a confederal structure enabling the
restoration of the balance between town and country, in
China as well as in the rest of the world.
48

Militarism and Soil Erosion in Ancient Rome

Among the several possible causes of the downfall of
Roman civilization there have been mentioned lead
contamination, the introduction of Christianity and
overdue militarization. More seldom is focus directed
towards massive soil erosion, as a result of failed
economic policies and overdue reliance on long distance
trade and conquest. Thus, according to Chew:
As a consequence of the rapid and extensive
deforestation during the Roman era, soil erosion was the
order of the day. Erosion rates increased more than
twentyfold from the second century B. C. onwards.23
This take-off as regards soil erosion coincides with the
conclusion of the Punic Wars and the fateful onslaught
against the Roman yeomanry. Certainly, when land is
cleared of forests especially in fragile areas such as the
Mediterranean it will need close tending to prevent its
soils from eroding and this close tending can only be
conducted by people who care for the land. Obviously,
this would mean yeomen rather than the plantation slaves
who substituted them, in the form of the latifundias
developing in the actual time period. Quite apart from
this issue is surely the very issue of land clearance itself
or the very scale of it, conducted to provide timber for
Romes naval fleet for military as well as trading
49

purposes along with the need for firewood for the brick
furnaces providing bricks for urban development.
Hence, there can be no doubt that the Gracchi brothers
touched upon the core of Romes problems with their
campaigning for agrarian reforms in the late 2 nd century
B. C., and that the self serving aristocrats who got them
assassinated displayed a crown example of that lack of
civic virtue which if allowed to proliferate eventually
brings down any civilization. The tendency among some
historians to portray the Gracchis as would-be dictators
is a gross misrepresentation of history, and even an
example of the rear mirror fallacy at that; in fact, the
restoration of a self-reliant and virtuous yeomanry is the
best guarantee against despotism that history has ever
come up with as manifested throughout various epochs,
from ancient Greece to the United States in the
revolutionary era. It is worth mentioning in this context
that one of the main concerns of the Gracchis in the
ancient Roman republic was how to restore the military
base among the yeomanry after the exhaustive Punic
Wars, and that the failure to do so brought in the fateful
military practice of using mercenary troops in Romes
foreign military campaigns resulting in such
catastrophes as the slaughtering of two Roman legions in
the Teutoburgian forest in 9 A. D., and the eventual
downfall of the Empire some five centuries later on.

50

Roman Civilizations Loss of its Agrarian Basis

While the Roman civilization and its Republic were
founded on the fertile alluvial soils along the Tiber river,
building on the geniality of their Etruscan and Greek
predecessors and inhabited by a sturdy yeomanry as long
as urbanization was held in check, the outdrawn Punic
wars destroyed this agrarian basis of their civilization
and ultimately destroyed the very civilization itself. Thus,
according to Chew, by the 1st century B. C. after the
assassination of the Gracchis had eliminated the last
reformers who tried to halt and reverse the destructive
urbanization spiral by an effort to redistribute soil to the
disaffected urban proletariat Rome was dependent upon
importing increasing quantities of grain. Furthermore, the
Roman authorities tended to force down the prices of the
imported grain to such an extent that it caused grievances
in the grain producing provinces. And if the regional
revolts halted the trade in grain, the very pressures on the
soil caused by the demand for ever increasing quantities
to exchange for the Roman manufactures tended to
exhaust the soil and cause large scale erosion. By the
time of the establishment of the militarized Empire the
age old agrarian basis of Roman culture had largely
evaporated and its economy had turned from one of
cultivation and conservation to one of plunder and
conquest ridden trade. Throughout history such
developments never fail to erode the principles of civic
51

virtue and frugality which made civilization possible in

the first place and its very spiritual and material basis;
and when the basis erodes the superstructure is obviously
bound to crash.
At the ebb of their respective civilization, the ancient
Greeks were about to sort out the causes of their own
demise; however, the owl of Minerva flies only at
dusk, and the insights of Aristotle, Theophrastus and
Epicurus occurred too late to save their civilization. The
Romans never even developed such self-consciousness in
the Republican era with the possible exception of the
above mentioned Gracchis and Cicero, and consequently
left more questions than answers to subsequent
generations and ages. To its credit, our present
civilization has produced a legacy of self-criticism and
self-investigation ever since the work of George Perkins
Marsh Man & Nature (1864), as well as Pierre Joseph
Proudhon, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter A.
Kropotkins works, though without being able to
implement the insights achieved in the form of viable
reforms on a grand scale.

The Loss of Soil Processes Towards a Denuded

Earth
When pondering on the ecological crisis of the present
era, one is struck by one astonishing fact which may
52

also contribute to an explanation as to why former

civilizations did not manage to cope with their ecological
problems, despite emergent eco-philosophies and
environmental movements: The extent to which alienated
urbanized populations tended to focus their concerns on
rather superficial aesthetic issues or warped material
ones. Thus, while the threat of extinction to individual
mammal species draws massive attention within the
modern environmental movement, along with the climate
crisis, the loss of soil around the world the very basis
for life on Earth is hardly noticed by others than soil
scientists and a few environmental organizations. Thus,
according to the U. N., by 1992 6 million hectares of land
were turned into desert each year, and a further 21
million hectares were so badly degraded that they were
useless for agricultural purposes.24 Hence, seen in the
context of still continued and rapid population growth
and a looming global food crisis exacerbated by erratic
climate patterns the issue of soil conservation and
sustainable food production cannot be ignored. However,
to the refined urban dweller, soil is equaled with dirt
it is something filthy, raw and primitive a
perception of the most basic biological phenomena which
illustrates the degree to which alienation has overtaken
huge segments of the world population today.
To turn this sinister misevaluation back on track, say, to
the value system prevailing in the pre-industrial era
53

certainly supplemented with modern day soil science

will take an immense pedagogical effort: Ethics will have
to replace aesthetics when it comes to scientific priorities
even as the beauty of the soil ecosystem may be
popularized through microscope photos of such
fascinating and indispensible microorganisms as the
mycorrhizae, not to mention the aromatic taste of
vegetables grown in fertile and organically well managed
soils.

The Importance of Microbial Symbiosis for Human

Well Being and Civilization
In a period of rapid climate changes the rate of human
adaptation to ever new conditions is far outmatched by
the so-called lower species among the biota on this
planet that is, by microorganisms and insects. Surely, as
long as 80-90 % of all green plants on Earth utilizes
mycorrhizal symbiosis in their growth processes 25
many among them being entirely dependent on this
symbiosis and may even additionally turn to rhizobium
symbiosis to provide for their nitrogen needs it goes
without saying that our attention must be directed
towards their role in food production and human health
and well being. The variety of microbial species is
immense, and they adapt effectively to local, bio-regional
conditions, mutate instantly and often combine to
54

reinforce their effects upon favorable plant growth and

resistance against crop diseases. So, while the fungicide
propelled wheat, rice and corn monocultures around the
world are increasingly threatened by fungicide resistant
species like the so-called Rust varieties, locally adapted
species in soils high in humus content and sound crop
rotation have produced ripe wheat during centuries in
corners of the Globe in which humanly manipulated seed
would not have the slightest hope of attaining mature
crops at least not under the assumption that humanity
successfully can manipulate the intricate processes in
viable and fertile soils in a way which treats them as
nothing more than a growth medium a dead mass of
physical and chemical particles. Such an approach is
simply unscientific and displays a complete contempt for
the time perspectives which we are confronted with as a
reflecting species on this planet.
Thus, the extensive scientific research which has been
conducted within the fields of microbial symbioses and
soil structure will be of immense importance in the
decades ahead indeed, maybe even absolutely crucial
for human success or failure in the larger scheme of
things. These sciences, which often require modern
equipment in research, is, however, very simple to apply
and they can be conducted by any soil cultivator with
the simplest means at hand, provided that he or she
understands the processes involved: Collection of soil
55

samples around the soil surface among sturdy and family

relevant plant communities, providing mulching material
around the cultivated plants, and adding the mycorrhiza
spores contained in the above mentioned samples to the
plant beds via a substrate based on nettles in a water
solution holding the optimal temperature of 20-25 o C.
Furthermore, to speed up sporulation, one may give the
spores a brief cool shock before distributing the solution
to the cultivated plants and their roots covered by
mulching material such as lawn cuttings or other organic
material.26

Measures to Prevent Soil Erosion

According to the report Losing the Earth; Land Abuse
and Soil Erosion, by 1992 23 billion tons of the Earths
topsoil was carried away by rainfall and wind. Surely, if
not halted this accelerating process will utterly change
the face of the Earth, approximating a moon like
condition and seriously curtail the very prospects of
human existence on this planet not to mention the
vistas for any viable civilization.
As proven throughout history, though, humanity has been
able under favorable circumstances not only to
conserve soil, but even of creating it. However, such
favorable circumstances have implied ideologies and
economic orientations focusing on the agrarian basis of
56

civilization and effective checks on urbanization. The

necessary economic framework for soil creation has been
paying attention to what soil scientist Albert Howard, in
the first half of the 20th century, called the Law of
Return, implying returning to the soil at least as much
organic material as one removes in the form of crops.
This practice not only necessarily elevates the market
values of the agricultural crops, but also enhances their
quality to a level at which nutrition has medicinal effects.
As the reader may have gathered, forms of soil
cultivation which are conducive to the creation of topsoil
belong to the disciplines of craft, art and science rather
than industry. Thus, the practice of mulching, which is
highly productive of healthy and stable soils and makes
for high quality agricultural products requires hands on
labor to function properly; the soil around the the
cultivated plants must be covered with green manure
material to feed the fungi and the earthworms, without
suffocating the cultivated plants. The process of
mulching is far more effective than the traditional manual
weeding, precisely because it subdues the excessive
growth of weeds at the same time as it retains the
moisture in the soil, keeps it aerated, and provides
nutrients for the cultivated plants in the best possible
manner that is, through the life forms in the living soil.
Thus, the very work operations of mulching with
clover, lawn cuttings or any other nitrogen and
57

phosphorus rich green plant should be elevated to a

high status and qualify for certain social distinctions;
indeed, it is literally equivalent to paying tribute to future
generations at the same time as providing invaluable
nutrition in the here and now.
The effectiveness of mulching has been demonstrated for
example in an analysis of more than 200 cases in
developing countries, in which it was found that
mulching practices can reduce erosion by 73-98 %
while increasing crop yields by 7 -188 %.27 Hence, any
responsible agricultural policy in our era shoud provide
for the maximum utilization of mulching practices from
certification of the products obtained from mulching
horticulture and agriculture, to tax redemptions on
acreage cultivated under mulching. Mulching labor could
also provide summer holiday labor for students, to
alleviate the work pressures on rural populations while
in a balanced town and country context there would be
enough labor force available for such work operations in
the countryside itself.
At the cultural level the attention towards the fertility of
soils and their importance for human existence could be
marked by novel or recovered fertility rites, harvest feats,
and so on. In other words, rather than celebrating the
dead, such as during the Halloween craze, we would do
better to celebrate life and the Earths life giving
processes, in which we take part in our agri-ecological
58

practices. Surely, auch practices may be applied within

any form of soil cultivation, so that urban gardening and
horticulture will provide the organic cultural connection
between town and country. Indeed, ideally there would be
farms stretching from the rural circumference and into
the very core of the cities, in order to facilitate the
interconnection between the rural and the urban spheres.
After all, the rigid division between the two have its roots
in the walled Medieval cities in their struggle against the
militaristic feudal countryside and, hence, has no
applications whatsoever in the modern era. Hence, even
as rural ways should be allowed and encouraged to enter
into the cities, the urban ways would be favored to some
extent to take root in the countryside albeit with a view
to combat consume hedonism. All in all, the favored
pattern would be one of decentralized eco-villages and
eco-cities, governed democratically by face-to-face
assemblies and coordinated on a confederal basis.

Chapter Four
The Prolificacy of Metabolic Diseases; The
Most Conspicuous Sign of a Bankrupt Food
System
Soil Exhaustion and Metabolic Diseases
59

At the height of its vitality, in the 6th to 4th centuries B. C.

Greco-Roman civilization entailed the extensive use of
green manure crops in their agricultural production. The
crop rotation processes involved prescribed sowing a
crop of some clover species every third or fourth year, to
be plowed into the soils and feed its microbial life and
hence maintaining soil fertility and agricultural quality
produce. It has been demonstrated (by Albrecht, Howard,
et. al.) that certain essential amino-acids in grain and
vegetables are dependent upon microbial (symbiotic
fungi) assistance to the cultivated plants, and that without
these amino-acids (lyceine and methionine) the grain and
the vegetables lose their value as sources of human
nutrition. In fact, lack of these amino-acids in the diet
causes serious metabolism diseases leading ultimately
to heart failure, cancer and schlerosis.
Thus, it takes no considerable stretch of imagination to
infer that the impoverished soils of Attica and Latium in
time provided grain of insufficient quality to the
respective populations of ancient Greece and Rome and
especially to their soldiers, who had to live by their grain
rations during their particularly onerous and stressful
expeditions. Indeed, there are no short cuts for
humanity bypassing the very basic and essential
biological processes which we share with other living
organisms and as a highly complex mammal our
biological needs transcend those of our co-species.
60

Hence, for all the achievements of modern surgery surely

no elaboration of hospitals to repair health damages can
cope with a failure to produce adequate nourishment for a
complex and demanding species like our own.
The very hubris implicated in an economy which does
not focus on quality production but, on the contrary,
neglects the very organic basis of the economy, meets its
nemesis in hospitals overcrowded with cancer and heart
failure patients and ever increasing levels of dementia in
modern day populations. Thus, if modern civilization is
to be rescued from a demise like the former ones, the
main focus must be redirected towards quality production
at the basic agricultural level as well as within
manufacture if we are to avoid eroding the very core of
a civilized life.

61

Part Two
Long
Term
Reforms
Sustainable Solutions

Towards

Introduction: How to Retain and Maintain the

Urban/Rural Balance?
According to Chew, every civilization in history has
succumbed to the parallel process of capital accumulation
and deforestation.28 Today, this dead end road is further
accentuated by the highly excessive demand for fuel
now even in the form of cellulose for so-called clean
energy. The still accelerating urbanization process
around the Globe proceeds within the very core of this
problem complex. Thus, the very starting point for any
viable reform program intended to prevent a total havoc
to civilization due to breakdown of supply lines and
62

ecological disintegration, is decentralization

simultaneously at the political and economic-structural
levels. The huge challenges involved in such a program
constitute no excuse for sidestepping the problems
involved, and an eventual failure to act upon these issues
will not be judged lightly by future generations.
There have been attempts by self-proclaimed
ecologists to portray large urban entities as more
sustainable than scattered rural communities; however,
this allegation is hardly verifiable considering the vast
amounts of energy and resources which are consumed in
connection with sustaining the actual urban entities and
the transportation costs involved in this process.
Furthermore, they are largely consumptive entities,
providing faintly little production of any basic utility.
Surely, an extremely scattered population could prove
more energy and resource inefficient than dense urban
entities, but this has seldom been the case; rural
populations have traditionally been very frugal, self
reliant and oriented towards conservation measures.
Anyway, what is implied in the concept of
decentralization in this context, would be more like the
social scenery of, say, Medieval Flanders or the ancient
Greek poleis in which the balance between town and
country was maintained, at least in their most flourishing
periods. That is not to say, however, that these societies
socio-economic structures should be adopted in any
63

modern reform program for decentralization; after all, the

very demise of their balanced structures was caused by
serious flaws within their social organization.
Nonetheless, we can draw crucial lessons from these
flaws, compare them to those within our own societies,
and sketch some reform initiatives which may turn back
the scale slowly but steadily.

Chapter Five
Direct Public Participation; the Case for Civic
Virtue and Non-Hierarchical Socioeconomic
Relationships
Imperialism versus Enlightened Reason
By the 17th century the timber resources of Britain and
France were so depleted as to provoke stern action from
their respective governments. Moreover, already at this
early stage in modernity the two countries had parted
ways in their approach to natural resources in the long
term perspective. Thus, while France turned to forest
conservation measures, such as the Forest Ordinance of
1669, Britain sharpened its imperialistic axe and turned
elsewhere to obtain the increasing quantities of timber
that it needed to proceed with industrialization. In other
64

words, France tried to retune its economy back to the

regenerative pace of its bioregions, while the British
authorities chose not to bother about bioregional issues at
all leaving the problems to the providers of raw
materials.
These contrasting approaches to natural resources and
economic development illustrate the very core of the
Promethean fallacy of the unduly enforced industrialized
economy criticized already in its early stages thorough
the poetry of William Blake, Lord Byron and Percy
Bysshe Shelley. It also explains the highly diverging
turns that the Enlightenment itself took in the two
countries most notably in its views on economics.
Thus, while the French originators the physiocrats
and the fathers of laissez faire, Quesnay, Turgot, et. al.
held agriculture to be the self-evident basis of civilization
and focused on agricultural science and productivity,
their British pupil, Adam Smith, turned the whole
structure upside down as the British Enlightenment
remained obsessed with physics and trade. The demise of
the French approach of a naturalistic Reason, so to
speak as a result of their military defeat in the European
Seven Years War (1756-63), in which the British
victory was made possible largely by exploiting other
peoples resources, has proved fatal throughout the
modern era. Through warfare and war driven economics
human societies on a Global scale have become so out of
65

tune with the rhythms of nature and bioregional cycles

that the ways to reintegration often seem to be hidden in
the mist of centralized mass production and an extent of
transportation which rapidly exhausts the worlds
resources of fuel. Surely, this overdue exploitation of
people and natural resources cannot last; so the question
remains: How are we to go about ahead of time to be
able to deal with and administer the necessary changes
rather than being victims of them when the shit hits the
fan?

Incentives to Halt and Reverse Urbanization

As excessive urbanization, along with capital
accumulation and undue specialization, have proven to
be the main causes of the demise of civilizations in
history, the present civilization will sooner or later have
to deal with these challenges and come up with reform
plans lest this one too will pass into history. And if it
does so there is a huge risk that the human species will
follow suit.
Obviously, the sooner such reforms are implemented, and
the vaster the areas of their scope, the better will be the
opportunities for avoiding another Dark Ages which
may easily transcend the former ones in durability and
severity, considering the magnitude of the present social
and ecological dislocations.
66

Amidst a world situation in which human responsibility

is largely pulverized, the utterly absurd notion of the
intrinsic value of currencies have been taken for granted
for several generations, and accumulation of capital is
seen as the very raison detre for human existence in
such a malaise one cannot expect reform efforts to
originate from the apex of the socioeconomic ladder. So,
where would they origin? And what would they look like
to be rendered effective in achieving the stated goals of
preventing ecological collapse and the demise of
civilization?
To provide a tentative answer to these two central
questions of tremendous magnitude is a central aim of
this book and the answer to the one is intimately
connected with that of the other. A common denominator
nexus for the answers to the two respective questions is
decentralization
and
bioregionally
conditioned
economies; after all we constitute a biological species
which has to tend to our natural habitat our oikos.
Already in ancient Greece, Aristotle warned his fellow
citizens about what would eventually happen if they
neglected their habitat and proper oikos sphere in favor
of overdue trading activities. His pupil, Theophrastus,
followed up with the worlds first ever scientific
treatment of soil alarmed by massive soil erosion in
Attica and the surrounding areas and consequent loss of
agricultural productivity. However, it was already too
67

late; the Romans repeated the mistakes of the Greeks

and the Dark Ages followed. This demise of great
civilizations certainly puzzled the Enlightenment
philosophers of the 1th century, some of whom centered
their entire social philosophies around these crucial
issues most notably the above mentioned Quesnay in
his The Economic Table, who combined them with his
invention of laissez faire.29
Certainly, there are huge differences between a free trade
oriented economy based on agrarian economic structures,
such as was the case with Quesnays France, and the kind
of free trade which evolved from the rapidly
industrializing and imperialistically oriented Great
Britain. In fact, the cannon boat diplomacy of laissez
faire Britain was exactly the kind of conduct that
Quesnay and the Encyclopaedists regarded as belonging
to a barbaric age, and as a threat towards civilization as
such. Without the agrarian economic basis and the
ethical system of valuation derived from this basis, trade
itself becomes warped and often indistinguishable from
warfare and the line between civilization and barbarism
blurred. We have seen the consequences more than once
in World Wars and financial crashes and in our own
era the problems are exacerbated by tremendous
ecological dislocations.
The implications for societies around the world are
highly unpredictable and diverse. What remains certain,
68

though, is that overdue specialization in the respective

regions of the world will render their societies highly
vulnerable to the major distortions which will have to
follow from the cumulative problems outlined above.
Moreover, overdue specialization most notably within
agriculture highly diminishes the productivity potential
within the respective regions, depletes the soil of its
fertility, and reduces the degree of self-sufficiency to
alarmingly low levels. For all the present talk of fair
trade, then, this albeit honorable principle will be no
more than a curiosity as long as the very material natural
basis of societies are not reestablished, that is, raising
their degree of self sufficiency to the highest possible
degree within each bioregion. In this way trade will
undoubtedly be reduced to levels commensurable with
sustainability as far as energy consumption is concerned;
moreover, it will tend to focus on quality products which
most often are not obtainable elsewhere. Thus, quality
staple goods would be traded against similar products
from elsewhere, and set the currency standard within
each bioregion. To optimize the stability of the respective
communities, food stuffs should be exchanged with food
stuffs, building materials with building materials, and so
on.

69

The Complications of Politics in the Modern World

Political Parties and the Pulverization of
Responsibility
Ever since the concept of politics was invented in ancient
Greece and into fairly modern times (19th century), the
basic idea was to make it work smooth and simple so as
not to drain the economic, social and spiritual spheres of
their energy and vitality. From its very inception politics
was never meant to be a way of making a living, and
tendencies toward political parties were abhorred and
considered as undemocratic and potentially tyrannical
cf. the denigrating view of Jacobinism in the modern era.
These ancient sentiments were thus carried on throughout
the rudimentary democratic Medieval communes and
reinforced during the Enlightenment before they were
forsaken with fatal consequences during the Great French
Revolution, which were to stand as a warning sign for
liberals and libertarians ever after, in a world in which
politics (or rather statecraft) consume more and more of
humanitys focus and energy. However, in a largely
ahistorical society on in which men and women
worship the cult of perpetuum novum, to borrow
Daniel Bells diagnosis30, the lessons of history is
obviously badly learnt, if at all. Obviously, academia
itself must bear its part of the responsibility for this
malaise, with its all too narrow specialization and its

70

failure to integrate kindred sciences in historical

analyses.
As for the present writings, the reader will have
recognized that at least three sciences are operating
together, and hopefully complement each other history,
soil science and economics and to one who subscribe to
the dialectical way of thinking, the respective sciences
encompass more than their face value at any given
moment; on the contrary, they carry with them their own
long history and evolution accumulated through
generations. And lest on is asked to accept the positivist
view that historical development consists in a linear
upward movement, one will certainly allow for specific
insights from earlier scientists which will still have vital
lessons to teach us today however much they are being
ignored at the apex of academia itself.
When it comes to the issue of politics, it is the firm belief
of the present author that it will have to be attuned to the
original ancient Greek concept if human resources are to
be released for the crucial tasks which must be
accomplished in the social and economic spheres of
modern life. There are, of course, several ways to go
about this among the modern thinkers who have made
efforts in this direction are Murray Bookchin and Takis
Fotopoulos31, and there has been launched political
campaigns at the local level which have tried to
implement such ideas in order to restructure the very
71

meaning of politics itself and liberate energy for

reconstructive socioeconomic tasks. In this chapter I will
try to outline some alternative pathways which political
campaigning may take in order to readjust to the original
Greek concept, while providing criticism of the present
misconceptions.

Socialism and the Agrarian Question

It remains a conviction of the present author that any
economic activity in any viable civilization must have a
social aim; indeed, as it were, it must be socialistic in
spirit. This basic tenet makes for the indispensible civic
virtue among the overall population, without which
democracies degenerate into mobocracy and then some
form of tyranny if it had appeared formerly at all.32
Ever since the appearance of Marxs writings the
predominant focus of socialism has been the
categorization of social classes and the aim of a
classless society often alienating out of proportion
highly different social groups from each other, despite the
fact that they may have numerous and basic common
interests. Marxs notion that the industrial proletariat
constituted the revolutionary subject par excellence
and the progressive class elevated the most myopic and
short sighted social group to a noble position, challenging
the hegemony of an almost equally imprudent
72

bourgeoisie. The long term consequence of this political

tango has been the accelerating extermination of
yeoman farmers on a global scale. Instead of a classless
society we have inherited an almost farmer less society
in which the long time perspectives backwards and
forwards fade out of common public faculties. Thus,
which one constitutes the biggest evil among state
operated 5 years plans and the annual profit oriented
multinational corporation cannot easily be measured
moreover, they tend to merge with each other anyway,
largely because of their common bulk oriented economic
perception. The standard measurement regarding modern
national economies, GDP, tells not a farthing about
essential economic factors such as product quality and
soil conservation; quite to the contrary, its entire
operation entails the deterioration of both of these crucial
aspects for a viable civilization. In this way, it is
justifiable to say that the GDP-oriented tool for
measuring economic prosperity constitutes a direct and
continuous assault on two basic pillars of civic virtue
that is, ethical standards without which society descends
into barbarism to one degree or other; quality production
for the well being of society at large, and soil
conservation to the benefit of future generations. The
recognition of this malaise surely motivated the highly
creditable conduct of the Nepalese authorities when they
decided to replace the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
with Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH). However,
73

product there must be the question is how, how

much, to what ends, and at what costs?
Historically, within the socialist tradition, it was
primarily the anarchists most notably Pierre J.
Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter A. Kropotkin33
who were keenly sensitive towards the agrarian question,
in addition to the many lesser known Russian authors on
the subject.34 Proudhon, for his part, held the farmers to
be the backbone of any civilized society, hailing their
libertarian ways of life and reasonable mutualism, while
Bakunin paid tribute to the Slavic farmers, to be followed
up by Kropotkin when he, in his Fields, Factories and
Workshops, painted a lucid picture of the vitality which
infused especially French agriculture throughput the
century following the Agricultural Revolution. The three
authors were, of course, progressively oriented, but
neither of them subscribed to the Marxist notion of rural
people as der alte Scheisse (!)
So, to return to the questions pertaining to agricultural
production, which we certainly need in one form or other
unless we subscribe to Marxs hunter in the morning,
philosopher in the evening futuristic fantasy it can
generally be concluded that farmers thrive best when
they are least intercepted by authorities above them.
Yeomen are inherently egalitarian they cherish
independence, but not to the extent of excluding
horizontal co-operation among themselves for necessary
74

and festive purposes.35 These very traits go a long way to

explain Proudhon and Kropotkins tribute to their role
and legacy, as well as Marxs denigration of them, at best
entitling them to membership in his contemptuous petite
bourgeoisie. The horizon of the yeomans occupations
breeds civic virtue in its various aspects, and one may
easily understand the universal tendency among yeomen
to turn reactionary in periods when fragmenting
processes of regional and global market forces threaten to
undermine their very way of life; they fight for more than
narrow economic causes, indeed, it is a question of
spirituality and morality.
As the reader will have gathered, this piece of writing
constitutes an attempt to sketch out certain viable
economic reform proposals which may contribute to a
restoration and reinvigoration of an agrarian basis for our
civilization, especially directed at what Daniel Bell called
post-industrial societies, i. e. where the yeomanry is on
its way to extinction, and meaningful and prudent
production in general is decreasing. The task is
monumental and the scope of it unprecedented in history.
Yet, we have more historical material to draw wisdom
and inspiration from than ever, even if we cannot hope to
discover any blueprint for survival in the historical
records.

75

The Corporate and Illiberal Aspects of Party

Politics
Ever since the Jacobin deterioration during the Great
French Revolution and the ensuing Terror in 1793-94,
politics in the modern period has been beleaguered by
the tendency of parties to usurp the individuals personal
conscience and voice, leading to concentration of power
in corporal bodies and the withering away of virtue not
of the State, as Marx predicted for the fate of modernity.
This lack of virtue actually reinforces the state; social
fragmentation has always favored centralization of
power, as was the case when the state grew mature and
established its hegemony in the late Middle Ages. The
actual form and content of this fragmentation is less
important than the very phenomenon itself; in every case
it fosters the power of a superior arbiter among those
segments within society which have thus become unable
to define a common ground and act beyond their own
self-interests. The alternative apart from confederal
organization is Civil War; in the modern Western World
restricted to theatrical contests between political parties;
in the Arab World erupting in full blown internecine
warfare propelled by religious controversies.
In both versions it runs counter to the modern liberal
tradition, which in its early stages in the late 17 th and
throughout the 18th century set out to revive the highest
republican ideals of ancient Athens and the Roman
76

republic; deals which were largely materialized during

the American and at the early stages of the Great French
Revolution. The former of these revolutions succeeded,
mainly because of the very low degree of fragmentation
within its society and the highly balanced relationship
between town and country, and, hence because of its
decentralized character. In France, where centralization
long since had reached a far higher level, after the
peasants who had taken the lead in the Revolution 36
had achieved their ends through the decrees in the
National Assembly in Paris, grew impatient with the
increasing demands from the swollen city (with its
approximately 1 million inhabitants), whom they
considered as largely unproductive. In Paris itself, those
who did basic productive work the artisans were
downtrodden by the bourgeoisie, and became the driving
revolutionary force. These crucial social tensions erupted
in bloody feuds between the various parties developing at
the time Jacobins, Girondins and Montagnards and
warped the once promising revolution, which was hailed
even by certain conservatives, such as Edmund Burke
and William Wordsworth in England, in its initial stages.

Civic Virtue Liberalism

As a recognition of the fact that the grand experiment
of 200 years of monetarized civilization is pointing
77

towards disaster, I will strongly urge the need to pick up

the threads at the points where it all went of the rails.
During the major parts of the 18 th century, western
civilization presented a highly promising prospect for the
human species. Progress was being made within all fields
of knowledge and engineering, brain labor as well as
manual labor, and the very notion of spiritual progress
was hailed as an essential mark of humanity. The concept
of civic virtue was everywhere around especially in
France and the German states, and was meant to infuse
the new economic conception of laissez faire with
indispensible ethical principles.
Then it was all destroyed by war. The European Seven
Years War (1756-63) proved to be fatal for the
subsequent turn of events; it tended certainly to split the
universalistic Republic of Letters, and it destroyed the
promising work of the French physiocrats which was
taken over and perverted by Adam Smith and the socalled political economists. In fact, Smith even
recommended warfare in his book The Wealth of
Nations as profitable, while the physiocrats worked
their wits out to find ways to cover the immense French
war costs, and Londoners were rioting in the streets
because of their lack of life necessities. To this very day
the world has carried with it these subtle notions of the
profitability of war, to the extent that historians have
described the First World War (1914-18) as
78

progressive, even while scientists ever since the mid

19th century have warned about the horror scenarios
imagined by the Romantics at the outset of the Industrial
Revolution. The Earth is being consumed by an economic
system which operates without long term perspectives
and sense of direction, grimly illustrated by the
techniques of planned obsolescence in production.
To put it bluntly; if humanity does not get its act together
and conclude that to build to destroy is not
commensurable with a viable existence on this planet
nor on any other which one could imagine the species
will go extinct, or be succeeded by a new species
developing out of and away from Homo sapiens
throughout this age of great changes. This somewhat
nietzschean perspective is not meant in his ordinary antidemocratic manner; however, there is no doubt that the
critical German was touching upon crucial matters when
he pointed to the weaknesses of a democracy tending
towards mobocracy because of its mass character and
lack of civic virtue principles. Surely, he was proven
correct in 1914, when the mass organized workers of the
German SPD suddenly lost all solidarity with their
Belgian and French brothers and agreed to the Kaisers
call to invade their respective countries.
Today, mass society has reached new heights, to the
extent that sociologists like the Frenchman, Maffesoli,
who have studied modern social movements have
79

concluded that, for many people, it is more important to

be together, than to know the reason why (!) This
certainly points back to the warnings raised by Proudhon
who, as already noted, also recognized the invaluable
role of the farmers in any republic against excessive
co-operation; in other words, in work operations in
which one person could perform the task(s) as good as
or better than in a team, everyone should do so.
This simple principle was related to the necessary
fostering of independence and self reliance among
individuals in a republican society, without which civic
virtue would be as vacuous a concept as democracy has
become among us. The strength of a truly republican
society lies in the character of every citizen, and in the
recognition that the social structure is no stronger than its
frailest constituent parts.
In our present society on the other hand we are
confronted with a form of individualism which represents
the very opposite of civic virtue liberalism; what we have
is a somehow theologically licensed freedom without
responsibility, which is a treachery against the
Enlightenment era and those who served Western
civilization back then. For all the technical ingenuities
invented, modern Mammon riddled civilization stands
condemned by a destroyed climate, eroding soils, dying
ocean basins, self igniting rain forests and not least by
1 billion starving people on a daily basis. Hence, the lost
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threads must be sought back among the physiocrats and

the encyclopadists of the 18th century.
From its rediscovery in the 17th century and practicable
avail during the English Revolution (1642-49), the
classical republican concept of civic virtue came to be
discussed and valued by men like Shaftesbury, Locke,
Montesquieu, Diderot, Paine and Condorcet and
eventually Godwin and his followers within the anarchist
tradition. The latter have been viciously defamed within
the mainstream media, academic institutions and the like
and consequently only a small group of people has any
substantive knowledge of anarchist history or
perspectives. This very fact in itself is a testimony to the
enormous threats which present themselves towards
Western Civilization, when the mass of it is aggressively
attacking the few ones left who pledge themselves to
civic virtue the last republicans, fighting to fend off a
new era of barbarism and a new Dark Ages.
So, while anarchism may be a dead word (with its
etymological meaning society without ruler, from
Greek an arche), there is another expression which fits
well with the essential meaning of anarchism, namely
civic virtue liberalism, which recognizes the necessary
social aim of any economic activity without resorting
to the authoritarianism which has largely marked the
socialist tradition ever since the predominance of
Marxism and the German SPD. Quite to the contrary,
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within civic virtue liberalism political proceedings would

be left to citizen assemblies, possibly divided into two
chambers male and female ; wider regional and
global issues would be left to confederal councils with
delegates mandated by the respective popular assemblies
and the total energy devoted to politics would be kept
at the minimum level, since no one can live by it,
strictly speaking.
The extra time and energy obtained within such a social
structure would not be wasted. The new motivations
fostered by the ethical principles of civic virtue would
induce a lot more people to work hard on behalf of the
common good, because it would be recognized as the
most valuable utilization of their own freedom the
payment being represented by honor and respect as
well as universal quality products rather than this or
that monetary currency. Hence, one would envisage an
immensely increased application of modern science
which seldom reaches out of academia in an anemic
society which drains the life blood of citizens through
bureaucratization and disempowerment. In short, it
would represent a new scope for progress in a world
which at present seems to be lost in a downward spiral.

Understanding the Scope of the Crisis and Proposing

Steps to its Reversal
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For more than 200 years Western Civilization has

indulged in a tremendous experiment in the sense of
abandoning its agrarian basis and supplanting it with one
of trade and industry. Apart from the simple fact that pure
logic revolts against such a disordering of ontological
schemes, the mere ignorance of the implications and
insights of the 18th century agrarian revolution would be
enough to conclude that the entire experiment has been a
failure and was doomed to be so already from the
outset. The questions remains, however, exactly how
fatal the failure proves to be in the end, and what can be
done in the direction of saving this civilization through
the demise of its misbegotten offspring?
Surely, there are those who for whatever reasons wish
to see the entire Western Civilization fall with its failed
experiment; but exactly what would constitute their
agenda? It will hardly be altruistic purposes, given the
fact that they seemingly would gladly do without the
declarations of human rights during the Age of
Democratic Revolution issued just at the dawn of the
above mentioned experiment. Theocratic regimes and
movements around the world are ready to seize an
eventual collapse of Western Civilization eagerly in order
to proclaim the victory of the Dark Age messages, and
the precious sciences that we need so dearly n our
struggle for survival as a species would be endangered.

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So, an effort to save the viable elements of Western

Civilization is the only rational and humanitarian
response towards the crisis. However, the attempt to
come up with concrete measures the form of which will
necessarily vary from region to region is the most
challenging task which may be embarked upon today. To
our advantage, we have a mass of historical data to draw
upon; to our detriment the difficulties ahead are of a so
singularly novel character, especially in their scope, that
historical lessons are not enough as serving as guidance.
Foremost among this problem complex is the extent of
urbanization, the centralization of economic structures
and political power, and the incredibly privatized and
consume hedonistic orientation among vast populations
in many parts of the world, especially in urban areas. The
flawed representative political system has produced a
social matrix in which the ordinary citizen has been
reduced to an idiotes, according to the ancient Greek
conception not as a result of personal failure, but as
victims of a disempowering political system and its
socioeconomic implications. Consequently, there would
be no chances that a social and economic reform
programme could have any chances to succeed without
parallel campaigns for direct democracy and
confederalism. Thus, if political and economic
centralization constitute central parts of the problem
which must be solved in order to save the viable parts of
Western Civilization, then political and economic
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decentralization are parts of the effort to reverse the

negative spiral and turn it in a sustainable and
humanitarian direction before eventual new goals can
be set.
One of the lessons that history teaches us is that every
successful democratic revolution in Western history has
been fought by yeomen. This would imply that to the
extent that the democratic tradition holds any reverence
in todays malaise, reforms aiming at strengthening the
yeoman class (irrespective of the sizes of their
agricultural acreage; may be everything from an acre
upwards) and rendering them the majority of the
population would be the safest means to recover and
retain democracy itself. This perspective is subscribed to
by the present author, one of the main reasons being that
popular democracies have been the most ingenious
human societies throughout history; indeed, the human
mind simply seems unable to flourish without them.
This simple statement illustrates the immensity of the
challenge. But then again; what is the alternative(s)? Just
sit around and watch until the entire infrastructure
collapses, and the mass of people will just have to fend
for him- or her-self and their closest relatives and circle
of friends without any notion of long term economic
subsistence, cut off from the wrecked chains of material
supply? Surely, such a scenario would not pertain to any
civilization of sorts. In many regions of the world the
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degree of self-sufficiency is appallingly low in todays

situation. Still, the potential in this respect may be huge
while at the same time people in the Global South are
robbed of their land and labor through the greed within
the privileged nations.37 Surely, this injustice and
irrationality will not last, and the following is an attempt
to promote safe guards against further barbarization and
raise edifices for a renovated Civilization.

Chapter Six
Democratization and
Science and Technology

Popularization

of

Bioregions, Popular Assemblies and Staple Currencies

History has demonstrated, and modern research has
revealed, that economic corporations whether
indigenous or foreign are the entities least inclined to
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conduct sustainable resource utilization. Moreover, quite

often if not always the operations of these
corporations are facilitated by centralized state power,
and together state and capital ride roughshod over the
various bioregions and their respective human and nonhuman populations. Consequently, the case for a
sustainable ecological and economic basis for civilization
rests with communes and confederations of communes,
coordinating their bio-regionally founded resources and
transactions.
Thus, as a preliminary step towards making peripheral
rural districts attractive to disillusioned and alienated
urban populations, the introduction of popular
assemblies in rural communes dealing with basic
economic issues regarding utilization and conservation of
resources would provide an ethically laden incentive to
decentralization, indeed, it would raise the individual to a
level of citizenship which he or she has never known
before. In this way a slow working attraction outside
urban centers will draw people out of the cities and into
village communities which may be permitted to grow to a
size commensurable with their respective bioregions.
Thus, despite the urgent sense of being in a hurry to
prevent total disintegration of societies around the Globe,
there is a need to let the decentralization process proceed
organically, and accompanied by high spiritual standards
most notably to root out the infective tendencies of
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speculation and one would have to select and employ

purely economic incentives with great care.
Accordingly, the economic aspects of the incentives
taken should also be laden with ethics, such as a high
premium on quality production (as against mass
consumption),
co-operative
production
units,
redistribution according to need, and so on. In the course
of this process certain staple products will stand out as
this or that regions trade mark and constitute its
exchange currency; moreover, one would expect that at
least a handful of these staples constitute sources of food
for a healthy population.

The Potentialities of Applied Microbiology Within

Horticulture and Agriculture
The immense challenges of restoring soils around the
Globe to their former fertile state of productivity after
ages of industrial abuse, may imply that an ordinary
agricultural approach will not do us much service. In
other words, machinery will not be of much avail, and we
will have to rely on biological processes of soil
restoration, while at the same time being able to obtain
valuable quality products from the recovering acreages.
Surely, the vast monocultures of the world will have to
broken up; new woods, orchards and hedges will have to
be planted, to provide for new biotopes approaching the
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scenery at the time of the Agricultural Revolution of the

18th century.
In this chapter and its approach the present author draws
on his some twenty years of experience within
horticulture, gardening and fruit production in a Northern
European region a region in which the climate has been
increasingly erratic during the time of experiments and
subsistence horticulture. To be more precise, we have had
everything from severe summer droughts to summers
with almost no sun at all, autumns with incessant heavy
rain, summer temperatures in late March and frost in
early June in short, all the most dramatic challenges
which a cultivator of plants may expect to come across
during his or her life time, within their selected field of
work.
Still, for the present writer, there has been no major crop
failure during all these seasons, while the losses have
been substantial within the conventional industrial
agriculture even to the extent that well established
orchards (apple gardens) have died off and the wheat
fields have not even produced animal fodder. The author
is not in the least doubt as to the reason for succeeding
where industrial agriculture fails; it is thanks to his cooperative efforts with microbiological life forms such as
mycorrhizael fungi and rhizobium bacteria that rich crops
of beans, peas, leek, onion, parsnip, carrots, tomatoes,
lettuce, potatoes, cucumbers, beets, celery and squash
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and even basil and tobacco along with other demanding

herbs have been harvested throughout these highly
challenging years. Moreover, as I have ventured my
gardening practices and experiments in a variety of soils,
from formerly chemically fertilized agricultural fields, to
an old pasture, wastelands and old lawns, I can say for
sure that it is the adaptability of the microbes and
extensive use of mulching which has saved my harvests
and my life as a subsistence horticulturalist.
My acreage has rarely been more than an acre, and on
these fields I have grown enough vegetables to support
myself and my family members with the greens that we
have needed throughout the year. With some poultry and
extensive inland fisheries we have been highly selfsufficient, and I can say for certain that the potentiality
for such self-sufficiency around the Globe is immense.
In order to make this book more than a purely theoretical
one I will in the following try to give an outline of the
kind of self-sufficient horticulture which I am searching
for as part of the restoration of civic virtue principles
within Western Civilization.
Depending on the growth season in your respective
region and irrespective of the diversity of your cultivated
plants, you should gather nettles with some root
fragments and soil on them in the spring and add them
to tempered rain water (15-20 o C). Then rotate the
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content of your container once a day until it has all

dissolved into a dark greenish solution.
While your sprouts are growing indoors or outdoors, you
should take a stroll in the neighboring fields and woods
and collect small soil samples from the surface of fine
and healthy plant communities and put them in an aerated
bottle or glass but make sure that they dont dry
completely out. Be especially on the lookout for plants
which are flowering perfectly in dark and shadowy
places such as underneath trees and so on; the
mycorrhizaes operating there may prove to be highly
valuable in gloomy summer weather.
Then, when your collection work is done, add the
samples to the nettle solution and apply it to your plant
rows (when the plants are somewhat beyond the sprout)
throughout your season. In this way, your crops will
hardly fail and dont worry about weeding as soon as
your cultivated plants are well established; the weeds join
into the symbiotic soil relationships and prove to be
highly beneficial for the exchange of nutrients going on
in the soil. And two more practical hints: When applying
the mycorrhizael nettle solution to your plant rows, just
take a few centiliters of the solution into your watering
can and then add ice cold water for a few seconds to
urge on the sporulation of the mycorrhizaes and then
raise the temperature in your can to some 20 o Celsius.
During the growth season, instead of weeding you should
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take care that the mulching material is well aerated, while

tight enough to prevent light from letting through, and
after a while (often 2-3 weeks under average weather
conditions) you should add new mulching material after
working the former one into the topsoil layer. In this way
you will be building soil simultaneously with obtaining
high quality nutrients.

Chapter Seven
Legislation
for
the
Restoration
Civilizations Agrarian Basis

of

The Effects of Non-Subsistence Markets on Soil

Productivity and Conservation
Obviously, the conditions for agricultural production and,
hence, the premises for self-sufficiency vary greatly
around the Globe. Nonetheless, mere bulk production on
an annual basis has never been a good way of measuring
agricultural productivity for a viable civilization. Hence,
the initial industrialized grain production in the American
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Midwest during the final decades of the 19 th century and

the first few decades of the 20th, resulted in huge short
term bulk production the three main fatal consequences
of which were the following: Firstly, because of the new
non-subsistence based markets the large quantities of
grain exported around the world irrespective of any
quality measures grain agriculture in many regions was
rendered noncompetitive, causing huge structural
changes within formerly viable cultures, and a steady
decrease in self-sufficiency within each region a
hazardous process which has proceeded to this very day.
Secondly, the huge overproduction of grain in the United
States caused the prices to drop dramatically within a
short time period, resulting in the American farmers
being unable to pay back their loans to the profit hungry
banks. This malaise has been considered as one of the
initial causes of the crash at the stock markets in 1929
and the ensuing economic depression of the 1930s.
Thirdly, and most importantly for our discussion, the very
industrialized farming practices caused a huge loss of
topsoil from land that should never have been tilled in the
first place, because of its susceptibility to soil erosion.
The list of such dysfunctional structures could doubtless
go on endlessly; however, this classic example suffices to
make the point clear enough: The markets for primary
production need to be regionalized, so as to be adjusted
to elementary ecological conditions. Moreover, apart
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from regionalization there will have to be a change in

focus from bulk production (mere quantity) to quality
production. As is well known, plant growth is a highly
complex phenomenon and nutritional plants depend on
soil ecosystems in which factors such as soil structure,
organic matter contents and microbial life is tended to. As
already stated, some 80-90 per cent of all green plants
enter into growth facilitating symbiosis with
mycorrhizael fungi and some of these plants (including
cultivated ones) are entirely dependent on such
symbioses. Indeed, without a healthy soil the plants
grown will lack essential amino acids and proteins,
making for example industrially farmed wheat virtually
valueless as a human nutrient.38 Thus, while the mere
bulk measuring of agricultural produce ends up with
weighing water and cause immense metabolic diseases
(the Homocystein problematic39) which are accelerating
across the modern world while destroying soils on an
ever increasing scale modern science is fully equipped
to test both soil conditions and nutritional value of
agricultural products. This is the essence of what I intend
to highlight with the very title of the present book:
Economics as if Soil and Health Matters. To put it
bluntly, losing sight of these to aspects of the economy
literally the very laws of the Household (Oikos) is to
render economics meaningless as a science; that is to
render it into some kind of number game like poker or
some other form of gambling and speculation. And
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worse, it could well end up with a massive global famine

without people not nearly aware of what is happening.40
Luckily, while history provides us with abundant
examples of loss of soil and quality oriented production,
it also provides us with abundant examples of the
opposite increase in soil fertility and quality production
as a result of human ingenuity; in short, the very basis for
a civilization to develop and prosper in the first place. So,
the crucial questions confronting us at this stage are the
following: How will we be able to reverse the present
negative spiral in order to avoid a collapse of our
civilization? By what means and reforms could the
necessary decentralization process take form in a
democratic way, instead of being forced upon masses of
people in the event of a global financial collapse? How
could a new financial system be established which, in
time, will eliminate the hazardous gap between ecology
and economy, and halt and heal humanitys destruction
of the planet and itself?
The answers to these crucial questions are, necessarily of
an immense scope and they will require measures well
adapted to the respective bioregions around the world.
Hence, it is not my aim to provide any blueprint for
survival under the highly diverse conditions across this
planet; a task which would certainly amount to the
superhuman level. On the contrary, I will try to
elaborate on certain basic principles which I consider as
95

indispensible if the above stated goals are to be achieved

with primary focus on re-infusing the very subject of
economy itself with the principles of civic virtue and
the spiritual aspects of our pursuit of happiness.

How To Resist Inundation of Imported Cheap Foods

of Poor Quality?
As the Global trade system have increasingly veered in
the direction of forms of distribution which are antiecological and non-health sensitive if not use the
simple word immoral and state apparatuses around the
world stand as the very guarantors of the present
corporatist system, the way to go about it order to
achieve change in a sustainable direction is located at the
communal and confederal levels. It may consist in
legal as well as illegal means the terms being
virtually meaningless in an overall immoral market. In
fact, for example in the early modern era, age old and
highly ethical trading networks were outlawed by
absolutist mercantilist state powers, conveying privileges
to largely idle classes and the commoners trade was
perpetuated in their various black markets.41
Thus, while laissez faire once was a good idea and
largely maintained by small producers and refiners
themselves, the very principle was destroyed by
centralized authorities who did not refrain from cannon
96

boat diplomacy to achieve their self serving goals. We

all know how that process ended in the two world wars
of the 20th century and both liberalism and democracy,
in the original meaning of these terms, have literally
been dead since then. So, neo-liberalism is just a funny
way to write no-liberalism in a vein that would have
received a laconic nod from Orwell, while democracy
has not recovered from its historical low when the
German Nazi party (NSDAP) received some 33 % of the
votes and became the largest political party in Germany
in 1933.
The momentous questions which will confront us in the
coming decades, will be decisive for what prospects there
are to restore and retain civilization not to say for
human survival as a species: How to restore the agrarian
basis of civilization? How to give back to democracy its
original meaning, implying the paideia principle so
central to the ancient Greeks, and civic virtue as
elaborated on in the Enlightenment era? There can be no
doubt that the originators of democracy would have
labeled the modern varieties as outrageous mobocracies,
leading directly to tyranny which they feared most of
all, even more than the tremendous Parthian armies
which they had to confront on the battlefields. Moreover,
and highly relevant for our purposes, the ancient Greeks
most notably the Athenians who justifiably cherished
their democracy and honored their yeomen never even
97

thought of asking permission from some kind of

superior authority in managing their communal affairs
and confederal relationships in a way that fostered a high
degree of self-reliance and equitable market
organizations. Neither can any movement for restoring a
sound economy and democratic socio-political structures
appeal for sanction from a superior authority before
venturing on such a restoration process. Surely, any
achievement in that direction will eventually have to be
sanctioned by law and jurisdiction but then it will be
the work of the people themselves, not of their
representatives.
This distinction between the original concept of
democracy and its modern failed replicas was
envisioned already by J. J. Rousseau, who rightly
concluded that sovereignty cannot be represented.42
Indeed, to take away an individuals sovereignty through
representation is the same as reducing him or her to a
mass being and pave the way for the kind of
mobocracies which we have today a form of rule which
erodes paideia (character building process), undermines
civic virtue and leads to a complete pulverization of
responsibility.
This modern malaise, as Charles Taylor has called it,
seems overwhelming to deal with at first sight. However,
without even the effort to address the issues involved and
try to sow the seeds of a restoration process, life in our
98

time becomes virtually meaningless a kind of limbo in

which the individual is reduced to a mass consumerist
of goods over which he or she has no influence or control
whatsoever. Whats maybe even worse is that those who
still create and produce are confronted by consumers who
dont give a damn about the quality of the products
delivered to the market place thereby eroding the very
meaning of human creative processes themselves. After
all, a public imbued with principles of paideia and civic
virtue would never ever have accepted the insidious
techniques of planned obsolescence which have
permeated manufacture engineering since World War II.43
Basic Principles of Economic Reforms
To achieve the fundamental aim of restoring and
perpetuating Western Civilization in the coming
centuries, the economic reforms intended for this grand
purpose will have to be based on three interconnected
principles: Firstly, they must be directed toward
achieving maximum quality production in a general
sense, entailing ethical consumption and fair trade.
Secondly, it must be understood that, properly speaking,
it is only agriculture and horticulture which constitutes
production in the basic economic sense of the term, while
trade and industry represent various forms of
consumption (of natural and agricultural, renewable and
non-renewable resources). Thirdly, the eventual success
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of such reforms will crucially depend on the standard of

civic virtue prevailing among the public, which
underpins the case for civic liberty and religious
toleration, as well as an optimized degree of genuine
political participation among the public.
Taken together these three principles go a long way
towards facilitating the restoration of responsibility in the
individual, repairing the widespread sense of alienation
which causes massive psychological distortions in our
era, and reclaiming the human control over the economy
from the ghostly hidden hand which has ruled the
world for more than 200 years without resorting to
authoritarian and statist planned economies.
If the bioregional approach will be necessary for tackling
the ecological crisis, decentralization and confederalism
represents the political and economic aspect of the
restoration process. Obviously, natural resources such as
soils, forests, fiords and waterways need better and
proper ecological management, and such management
can only be achieved by people with a feeling for their
environment, in addition to scientific knowledge. So,
where the American Revolution reinforced a long
standing legacy of town meetings and confederations, the
corresponding political products of the Great French
Revolution were, sadly, their opposites party politics
and highly centralized state power. Thus, the irony of
history tells us that the former political structures were
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tentatively revived during the Paris Commune of 1871,

five years after the Confederates had lost the Civil War
in the United States (1861-65).
Today, the notionnot to say the practice of
confederalism will largely have to be reinvented, lest
the very meaning of politics gets lost altogether. Its
origin was the ancient Greek polis, which was not a state,
nor only a city. It encompassed the neighboring
countryside surrounding a urban centre, and most of its
citizens e. g. those who had the right to vote in the
ecclesia and were expected to attend its assembly
meetings and decide policy directly were yeomen, who
also often tended to some craft and art besides cultivating
their soil. They were highly individualized and focused
strongly on character building and virtue, and regarded
tendencies toward cliques and parties with abhorrence.
The kind of balance which Athens, for example, obtained
between town and country as well as between its
citizens has always been a hallmark of great cultures
and civilizations in their flourishing stages; moreover,
this balance is always far easier to lose than to achieve. A
simple war may easily be enough to divest entire empires
of this balance, while it may take generations of
painstaking and prudent reforms to restore it afterwards.
More often than not the whole issue is left to the
vicissitudes of the market and the forces of nature the

101

former leading to further disruptions, while the latter in

the long run forces men back to reason and foresight.
When considering the disruptive effects of the Global
market in our own era, we would do well do distinguish
this unwieldy phenomenon from regional markets both
historically and in the present situation. While the former
causes disruptions because of the very impossibility of
equaling, say, food production in Arctic climates with
those of milder climates, the regional markets make for
self-reliance, decentralization and responsible cultivation
of soils and responsible consumption of natural
resources. Rather than having a world with a billion
people constantly starving or on the verge on starvation,
hunger could be avoided and ecosystems maintained at a
respectable level, even increasing biological diversity and
the fertility of soils. Surely, we will need global trade in
the future, but it would have to be compartmentalized
and ethically anchored in confederal decision making
processes. This would imply a realization of the ideals of
the originators of laissez faire that is imbuing it with
the basic ethical principles intended by the
Enlightenment philosophers like Montesquieu and
Quesnay.

Legislative Campaigns for Decentralization and

Regionalized Markets
102

In order to get the upper hand against the centralizing

forces of state and capital, confederated campaigns at the
communal level will be necessary. This revolutionary
approach, formerly advocated by anarchists such as Peter
Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin and Takis Fotopoulos, has a
peaceful transformation as its end however, exactly
how peaceful it will be depends, as it always did, on the
forces of reaction. While disallowing the taking of
power by any elite party or revolutionary vanguard,
the campaigning for decentralized, confederal ecocommunities will have to take root in the local
communes in themselves, constituting their efforts in
region wide confederacies aiming at transforming
legislation at ever higher levels and connecting with
similar campaigns in other regions of the world44a
By launching electoral campaigns at the communal level
for direct democracy, ecological production and
regionalized markets, the Green movement would be able
to turn the talk about change into the real thing. There
have been several such efforts through the last few
decades with more or less success. One thing is certain,
though, and it is that any such campaign is sure to be met
with black mailing and smearing campaigns in the main
stream media; so one may wonder if it will not be better
to boycott those media from the very beginning. The
news about the campaigns will reach out to the public
anyway through leaflets distributed in the village or in
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the city square, in alternative media, on the internet, and

so on.
The nuclei of such political campaigning will either have
to be traditional welfare organizations in the respective
communities or new ones especially created for this
purpose. Which approach will be the most fruitful will
certainly depend on the actual situation in the respective
region or community, and is not possible to determine in
advance. However, with several such campaigns gaining
success and power in the communes, coordinated
campaigns can be conducted at the state level in order to
operate as confederal bodies, clearly mandated by the
people in their local assemblies, which will be the sole
institutions conferring power.

Soil Cultivation and Sustainable Food Production

As regards food production proper soil practices also
result in the cleaning of streams and lakes, which confers
a double triumph upon soil conservators in the form of
high quality products from their soils and highly edible
fishes from the waterways in between them. Moreover,
increased use of green manure and mulching practices
will reinforce the above mentioned processes, and
contribute to the building up of soils with a supreme
structure. Proper rotation between crops facilitates an
immense reduction in plant diseases, and makes possible
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the mineral depletion of soils. The reduction of deep

tillage to a minimum, letting the roots of clover and other
legumes in addition to earth worms do the deep
digging, and the avoidance of fungicides, herbicides and
pesticides, will secure that the highly useful, and even
necessary, mycorrhizal networks remains intact in the
soil.
In a period of rapid climate changes we will have to rely
on such microorganisms as the mycorrhizae and rhizobia
to point the way as regards soil cultivation and food
production. These microorganisms adapt incomparably
more readily to a changing environment than we can ever
hope to achieve in a laboratory, and they have evolved in
an intimate symbiosis with 80-90 % of all green plants,
some of whom are entirely dependent upon this
symbiosis including a lot of our regularly grown crops,
such as for example onion, leek and lettuce, while most
of the others favor mycorrhizael symbiosis if the
opportunity exists and there is not an excessive amount
of easily absorbable phosphorus in the soil.44b
Considering the facts that mycorrhizae bind the soil
particles and prohibit soil erosion, feed the plants with
otherwise inaccessible phosphorus from the soil, and
provide the plants with rich and diverse nutrients and a
high immunity against diseases seeing this pattern in
relation to the present worries about the depletion of
mineral phosphorus reserves around the world, the case
105

for an agriculture for the future based on organic soil

cultivation and co-operation with microbial life forms
should be comfortably proven. In the extension of this
line of argument it follows that the principle of
decentralization will be prominent at the economic as
well as political and social levels in order to provide the
necessary work force to do the advanced and more man
powered agricultural operations, as contrasted to the
dominant ones in the present era.
Urbanization or more precisely, the formation of cities
once contributed with essential elements of civilization
to the West, thereby recovering certain traits from the
ancient Etruscan, Greek and Roman civilizations.
Tradesmen and artisans were to break the hegemony of
the feudal lords and the clergy, and pave the way for
democracy in its Medieval and modern forms aside
from supplementing the agrarian basis of the economy
with industry, primarily to the profit of the wealthiest
merchants. Municipal democracies lasted through
centuries, flourishing throughout Europe, often
confederally connected, before they were crushed by the
centralized modern state during the 16th century.45
Moreover, they existed in an equilibrium with the
countryside, in which none of them dominated the other.
This social landscape also became the later models of
early economists such as Quesnay, who stressed the
agrarian basis of civilization during the earliest stages of
106

the Industrial Revolution, stressing that industry and

trade essentially constitute consumption. That is to say,
true production consists exclusively in agriculture.
All civilizations in history succumbed to the deterioration
of their soils.46 Moreover, this deterioration was
invariably caused by politico-economical factors
whether in the form of excessive market-crop farming
among the Athenians and the Romans causing wind and
water erosion, or in the form of massive silting of the
irrigation system of the Mesopotamians. It follows as a
universal rule that defocusing the sustainable cultivation
of the soil in favor of other economic activities such as
trade or industry, is highly damaging and ultimately fatal
to any civilization.
Todays industrial agriculture or rather, agri-business
is hardly more advanced when it comes to soil
conservation than were the pre-historic slash and burn
farmers at their overextended stage. Loss of top soil is
occurring to a non-precedent extent; soil is polluted and
compacted and infested with harmful resistant fungi. The
situation is seriously worsened by the climate crisis,
which accelerates erosion processes and threatens
agricultural production in general. To make this crisis
complete and into a veritable socio-ecological one we
have an economic system which takes industry and trade
as its basis and deprives agriculture of its living aspects
107

its long evolution of cultivated plants, its microbial life

forms and its symbioses.
This book has been an attempt at promoting reforms
which may redress this dismal situation, which we are
only glimpsing the dawn of, and steer our shattered
civilization onto a viable path. Surely, the concrete forms
which such reforms may take must vary greatly from one
region of the world to another. Common to all the
respective reforms, however, is that they advocate
decentralization, confederalism, ecological production,
civic virtue and direct democracy which taken together
constitute the counter power to the status quo.

Chapter Eight
Taxation for Decentralization and Ecological
Production and Consumption

Taxation for Economic Decentralization

Ecological Quality Production
108

and

In parallel with political campaigns for decentralization

and direct democracy, there would be a need for taxation
reforms with the aim to decentralize the economy, favor
ecological quality production, and restore regional
markets. Certainly, the common denominator of such
reforms would aim at small scale production, as this kind
of production has always proved to be the least wasteful,
at the same time as giving scope for quality production
and its control by the producers themselves both of the
very production process and the exchange of products.
When it comes to soil cultivation taxation systems would
be introduced which would simply render large scale
agribusiness unattractive and infeasible. For example,
there would be restrictions and stern taxation on heavy
machinery as destructive to soils; there would be tax
releases for people building small scale storage and
refinery facilities; and co-operative use of equipment
would be highly favored. In addition, local communes
would be favored taxonomically if they provide
communal workshops for artisanal production, leasing
out of agricultural land to wannabe soil cultivators, and
lending out of light machinery for soil cultivation.
The recycling of organic wastes would be of immense
importance in this reform nexus. Citizens would be
highly favored for their composting efforts especially
within home composting, but also for attending the
communal composting services. The finished product
109

would be utilized for horticultural and agricultural

purposes, such as has been operated in Burlington,
Vermont for several decades now. There is also a huge
potentiality in utilizing human urine for plant growth
and it is a great starter in any composting process, as
Albert Howard showed nearly a century ago, after
learning the technique from the people of India. Anyway,
our wastes will have to be utilized as the resources they
really are, instead of polluting seas and waterways, and
getting piled up where they can only do harm.

How To Reverse the Industrialization of Agriculture?

Taking for granted that this planet of life cannot
successfully be reduced to the operating mechanisms of a
machine, it follows that humanitys basic production
agriculture cannot neither be abstracted from its vital
organic principles. The efforts to do so, as already
documented, have led to the collapse of civilizations
throughout history, along with destruction of soils and
biodiversity. In our present civilization, according to a
recent research report, the last
[T]wenty years of expanding agribusiness control over
the food system has generated more hunger 200 million
more people go hungry than 20 years ago. It has
destroyed livelihoods today 800 million small farmers
and farm workers do not have enough food to eat.
110

Agribusiness has been a leading cause of climate change

and other environmental calamities, the effects of which
it is ill-prepared to deal with. It has generated
unprecedented food safety problems and has made
agriculture one of the most dangerous sectors to work in.
And it has funneled the wealth created through global
food production into the hands of the few.47
This process of undermining age-old rural cultures which
once developed in close symbiosis with the natural
environment and the respective bio-regions, would
clearly not have been possible without the aid of state
machineries. Thus, the corporatist mechanisms involved
in this sinister process not only erodes food security for
the majority of people around the Globe, but also
undermines whatever is left of democratic practices and
ideals in a world that passed the dangerous threshold of
mass society already 100 years ago, as horribly witnessed
by the outbreak of the First World War. Moreover, as
already noted, every democratic revolution in history
from ancient Athens to the modern Age of Democratic
Revolution was fought by yeomen; and there is faintly
little which testify to the viability of democracy without a
strong yeomanry regardless of cultural specifics when
it comes to other socio-economic traits. So, the question
remains: How to restore an agrarian basis which makes
for food security, democracy and ecological integrity?
Some answers have tentatively been provided throughout
111

this book. The details will certainly have to be filled in by

the respective regional movements embarking on radical
social change in a directly democratic, confederally
structured and ecologically oriented direction.

Economic Policies for Soil Fertility and Human

Health
The problem complex related to soil degradation
discussed in this book has been touched upon for several
generations, without being properly acted upon. Hence,
the situation at present is highly critical. Indeed, as
concluded by D. Pimentel, L. Brown, et. al. in the 1980s
and 1990s:
Severe soil erosion and rapid water runoff problems are
a worldwide crisis that is seriously affecting the world
food economy. High rates of soil loss are causing
declines in soil productivity world wide, and most
nations do not have sound land use policies to protect
their valuable soil and water resources. In fact, low-cost
food policies by most governments encourage farmers to
use low-cost, poor management practices in
agriculture.48
As addressed in an earlier chapter this insidious lowcost approach, based on mere bulk production, is simply
useless. Rendering nutrients in the light of mere bulk,
112

will in the last resort end up with considering human

excrements as nutrition. Hence, clearly a qualitative
approach is needed within agriculture as within
manufacture an approach which will enable agricultural
producers to tend to their soils in a sustainable manner,
fostering soil fertility and public health. Moreover, to
reach such a heightened level of consciousness, there is
an urgent need for economic policies which abandon the
focus on mass consumption (of increasingly useless crap
foods and manufactured products) and taxation schemes
which honor the integrity and responsibility of the
agricultural producer. Indeed, more than that, they will
have to foster a new recruitment to this sector of
economic production, of the simple reason that machines
cannot do all the essentially craft and artistic work
involved in sustainable food production.
Following from the brute fact that central governments
have proved largely oblivious to the entire problem
complex for several generations clinging to their
defunct GDP notions the initiatives will have to come
from the rural communes themselves and their possible
confederations, in co-operation with excessively
urbanized areas which can no longer provide viable
living conditions for their citizens.

113

Notes:
1

In his Soil and Civilization (1952: London; John

Murray, 1976), Edward Hyams presents a vivid picture of
the role of soils and soil cultivation in ancient
civilizations as well as in our modern one. The book is
widely regarded as a classic within the Ecology
movement, and deservedly so.
2

See for example Victor Condorct Vinje: The Versatile

Farmers of the North; The Struggle of Norwegian
Yeomen for Economic Reforms and Political Power,
1750-1814 (Ulefoss: Nisus Publications, 2014); Peter A.
114

Kropotkin: The Great French Revolution (Montreal:

Black Rose Books, 1989); and Gordon S. Wood: The
Radicalism of the American Revolution; How a
Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a
Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
3

Hyams, op. cit., chapter 9.

See especially the extensive work made by William A.

Albrecht, collected in The Albrecht Papers, Charles
Walters, ed. (Acres, USA, 1975); Sir Albert Howard: The
Soil and Health; A Study of Organic Agriculture (The
Devin-Adair Company, 1947); M. M. Kononova: Soil
Organic Matter; Its nature, its role in soil formation and
in soil fertility (Pergamon Press, 1961); Eugene D.
Weinberg, ed.: Microorganisms and Minerals (Marcel
Dekker, Inc., 1977); and Chantal Hamel & Christian
Plenchette, eds.: Mycorrhizae in Crop Production
(Haworth Food and Agricultural Products Press, 2007).
5

For a survey of this long term historical problem

complex, see Sing C. Chew: World Ecological
Degradation;
Accumulation,
Urbanization,
and
Deforestation 3000 B. C. A. D. 2000 (New York:
Altamira Press, 2001).
6

See M. Dorothy George: London Life in the 18th

Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965).
115

See David Thomson: Europe Since Napoleon

Chew, op. cit., p. 3.

Chew, op. cit., p. 26.

10

Se especially G. V. Jacks & R. O. Whyte: The Rape of

the Earth;A World Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber
and Faber, Ltd., 1939); Fairfield Osborn: Our Plundered
Planet (1948); and Thomas, et. al. (eds.): Mans Role in
Changing the Face of the Earth (1956) all the way to
James Lovelock: The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009)
11

David Pimentel (ed.): World Erosion and Conservation

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
12

Grain Report: The Great Food Robbery; How

Corporations control food, grab land and destroy the
climate (Barcelona: Pambazuka Press, 2012), p. 74.
13

Chew, op. cit., p. 162.

14

See especially Lal, et. al. (eds.): Soil Processes and the
Carbon Cycle (Boston: CRC Press, 1997), in the series
Advances in Soil Science.
15

For details on these corrupting tendencies, the reader is

once again referred to Hyams Soil and Civilization and
Chews World Ecological Degradation.

116

16

See for example Scott Burns: The Household

Economy; Its Shape, Origins & Future (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1975); and Paul Ekins (ed.): The Living Economy;
A New Economics in the Making (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1986).
17

Karl Marx: Capital, 3 vol. ()

18

Pimentel (ed.), op cit., p. 1.

19

See especially Pimentel, ed.: World Soil Erosion and

Conservation and Chew: World Ecological Degradation.
20

See especially W. A. Albrecht: The Albrecht Papers

and A. Howard: Soil and Health.
21

Some of the connections within this problem complex

have also been treated with by Murray Bookchin in his
Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1962).
22

World Soil Erosion and Conservation, p. 67.

23

Chew, op. cit., p. 95.

24

Understanding Global Issues: Losing the Earth: Land

Abuse and Soil Erosion (1992), Introduction.
25

See especially S. E. Smith and D. J. Read: Mycorrhizal

Symbiosis, third ed. (London: Elsevier Ltd., 2008).

117

26

In Chapter Six I will elaborate on a popularization of

microbiological science, drawing on some 20 years of
experience with organic horticulture in the Northern
hemisphere experience which includes some
experimentation with mycorrhizal symbiosis and which
any gardener can utilize and expand in his or her garden.
There are also valuable insights seen in a universal
global perspective in C. Hamel and C. Plenchette
(eds.): Mycorrhizae in Crop Production (New York:
HFAPP, 2007).
27

Losing the Earth, p. 5.

28

Chew, op.cit.

29

See Francois Quesnay: The Economic Table (1758:

Honolulu: The University of Honolulu Press, 2004).
30

Se Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of

Capitalism (New York: Basic Book, Inc. Publishers,
1976).
31

See Murray Bookchin: The Limits of the City (1974:

Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986) and Takis
Fotopoulos: Towards an Inclusive Democracy (London:
Cassell, 1997).
32

For a succinct analysis of the highly different concepts

of democracy in the ancient and modern eras, as well as
their respective inner logic, see Moses I. Finley:
118

Democracy; Ancient and Modern (London: The Hogarth

Press, 1985).
33

See especially Proudhons work Property and

Kropotkins Fields, Factories and Workshops.
34

For a vivid discussion of these Russian authors and

activists, see Franco Venturi: Roots of Revolution (1952:
New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966).
35

For a fine modern example of cooperative efforts

among farmers, see Chaia Heller: Food, Farms &
Solidarity; French Farmers Challenge Industrial
Agriculture and Genetically Modified Crops (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2013).
36

For a detailed account of the early developments of the

latter revolution, see Peter Kropotkin: The Great French
Revolution (1909: Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989),
chapter I and II.
37

See The Great Food Robbery and The Land Grabbers.

38

See especially Albrecht, op. cit.

39

See Braily: The H-factor Solution

40

See Julian Cribb: The Coming Famine; The Global

Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid it (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010).
119

41

See V. C. Vinje: The Versatile Farmers of the North.

42

Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract ()

43

For a succinct analysis of this kind of production and

its implications, see Vance Packard: The Waste Makers
()
44a

See Political Programme for the Sauherad Greens.

Municipal elections, Norway, 1995. At scribd.com.
44b

See especially S. E. Smith and D. J. Read:

Mycorrhizal Symbiosis.
45

For an analysis of Medieval democracy, see Henri

Pirenne: Early Democracies in the Low Countries;
Urban Society and Political Conflict in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance (1915: New York: Harper & Row,
1963).
46

See especially Hyams, op. cit. and Chew op. cit.

47

GRAINs report, The Great Food Robbery, p. 30.

48

World Soil Erosion and Conservation, p. 291.

120