Food & Community in the Ruins: Nate Hagens, Dougald Hine, Chris Smaje, Pella Thiel
Oh, blessed day! Some of our favorite people together!
On this Reality Roundtable, philosopher and writer Dougald Hine, social scientist and farmer Chris Smaje, and ecologist and farmer Pella Thiel join Nate to discuss the future of food and community. Our disconnected relationship to agriculture and our neighbors have been shaped by a modern industrial society fueled by surplus hydrocarbon energy. What will these relationships look like in a lower energy future, where we need to once again work with each other and the land, rather than in isolation. Can we learn from history to celebrate with each other in times of abundance and find strength in community in times of need? In the present world where people are in constant search for meaning and purpose, what are strategies to find joy in simplicity and well-being through the growing and sharing of food?
About Dougald Hine
Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies (2023). He co-hosts The Great Humbling podcast and publishes a Substack called Writing Home.
About Chris Smaje
Chris Smaje is a writer, social scientist and small-scale farmer, co-running a mixed holding in Somerset, southwest England. He's the author of A Small Farm Future (2020) and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future (2023), both published by Chelsea Green. He blogs at and is contactable via www.chrissmaje.com.
About Pella Thiel
Pella Thiel is a maverick ecologist, part-time farmer, full-time activist and teacher in ecopsychology. She is the co-founder of swedish hubs of international networks like Swedish Transition Network and End Ecocide Sweden and a knowledge expert in the UN Harmony with Nature programme. Pella was awarded the swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019.
About Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens is the host of The Great Simplification.
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF) an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles.
Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.
Nate is also an ecological economist with a unique and important perspective on that field.
These folks are all truly amazing and awesome -- and have ever so much to offer us by way of wisdom.
And ... Dougald never fails to stand up as a philosopher of the most respectable sort, even though he has never gotten a degree in philosophy.
So much for degrees in philosophy!
Hi James,
The Hairy Beast is the whole consciousness inquiry, from all disciplines, forever and ever.
I have tried to understand David Bohm's ideas and experiments in consciousness with Krishnamurti in conversations: that has been morphed into something called Bohm Dialogue, and unless you are a regular on the wonderful Pari Institute in Italy, you will be lost. Bohm was intrigued with the Blackfoot Nation's language which relied upon verbs far more than nouns; I have heard a Blackfoot scholar admit that because that Indigenous language was short on nouns but long on
verbs: that was because their culture was based on movement, which made their thinking and
consciousness much different than ours. Calvin Luther Martin has taken this up in much of his writing
which exhibits keen observation and non-judgment of his First People hosts and directs his attention to the spiritual effects on culture via language. Mmmmmm. Curiouser and Curiouser.
I believe this is what John Moriarity was exploring, as well as the impetus behind poetry. And so much more.