“In this timely and important book, Pat Kerans fulfills his role as an elder of the Canadian food movement, providing the insight, “teaching stories” and cogent analysis of the food system that challenge us to hope - and act.”
Cathleen Kneen, Chair, Food Secure Canada
A Pessimist’s Hope:
Food and the Ecological Crisis
Can we feed ten billion people? Posed this way, the question presupposes that industrialized society keeps on as it does now. It keeps us searching for technological fixes to a problem caused by technology. For 150 years people have made farms more and more factory-like: improving machinery, developing high-yield hybrids, and finally GMOs. We have long assumed that by industrializing the production and processing of food we had found the secret to progress. This book examines the history of industrialized farming and fishing to raise broader questions about industrial society:
What are the costs to the environment and human health of genetic engineering?
Why are economists trapped in prescribing endless growth as a social goal?
Can democratic politics break out of the quest for jobs and prosperity?
Such questions are pressing because, with food prices rising and the effects of global warming becoming measurable, the future looks bleak. Besides, the present food system leaves people stuffed or starved. Staying on the present track is unsustainable. Hence my pessimism.
We need to rephrase our question to open the door of hope: who will feed the world and how?
Signs of hope are all around us. We just have to start looking and noticing. For example, when peasants, farm workers and fishers throughout the world resist the globalization of the food system, there lies hope. They are not working in isolation. Their call for food sovereignty, which entails sustainable practices, they have the backing of scientists and agencies of the UN.
To grasp how hope works, the book reflect on the ways in which people become organized, how they get together, form communities and help one another find their inner strength to critically analyse their world. Their efforts show us that to re-imagine your world is to transform your culture. And that transformation reflects a universe – unfolding, dynamic, interdependent – that invites us to hope.
When the world around us is not just “resources” to be exploited and fought over, it becomes our commons: something precious and to be cared for, communally. This is to recognize, at last, the wisdom of the Indigenous viewpoint, once rejected as “savage”.
Hope does not bring comfort; it calls for courage. It consists in communal action, arising from gritty commitment, against all odds.
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