Review: We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation through Social Ecology by Stephen E. Hunt (Zer0 books, 2025)
Environmentalists find themselves in the paradoxical situation of living in a golden age of radical ecological thinking – even as our global economic system blasts through one climactic tipping-point after another, more or less guaranteeing the extinction of planetary life as we know it at present. A rich field of research and intellectual inquiry has sprung up from between the fault-lines of the emerging climate crisis, along with concomitant movements centred (among other aims) on food sovereignty, habitat protection, the democratization of land holdings, and anti-extractivist resistance. Joining in this spirit of stewardship and challenge, Stephen E. Hunt has produced a prospectus for what might be described as eco-socialist change, in an attempt to measure and mitigate “the profound reengineering of life on Earth” that capitalist food systems have wrought. In place of monopolistic land-hoarding and ever-expanding “agri-business” – which trace their roots to the era of settler colonialism – he makes the case for a not-for-profit, “circular economy”, based on the principle that “nutritious food” is “an essential human need.”
If Hunt draws inspiration from “utopian” ideas – the notion, say, that local commoning could provide a vital food source for significant numbers of people in the U.K. (where he lives), in place of the corporate or commodified provisions they currently rely on – he is nothing if not clear-eyed about the scale and extremity of the climate catastrophe predicted to engulf our already warming world. The vitality of his analysis might be said to stem from its symbiotic pairing of transformative hopes with a deep-running awareness of natural necessities. It is simply not possible, he states, to reach or maintain “ecological integrity within planetary boundaries” without simultaneously “addressing profound social problems embedded in deep history.” Far from being inevitable, he argues in a similar vein, famine is “primarily a social problem that demands solutions founded on social justice.”
If Hunt often focuses on the practicalities of ecological action – how to grow wholesome food, and nurture communal practices, in a durable way – he nevertheless situates his proposals within an internationalist horizon. His book draws as much on the lessons of the Kurdish revolutionaries in Rojava, say, or the grassroots agricultural labourers comprising La Via Campesina, as on the experience of local campaigners in Bristol, his home. We Must Begin with the Land is anything but parochial. In fact, by arguing for the radicalism of community gardening, foraging, the conversion of waste grounds into allotments, and the like, Hunt may find himself in the vanguard of progressive thinking. Some commentators – not without reason – have attempted to hitch the cause of ecological adaptation exclusively to the wagon of the nation-state, essentially envisaging climate adaptation as a matter of enlightened technocratic adjustments from on high. Hunt’s contrasting emphasis is on the importance of localised, grassroots environmentalism, with an anti-capitalistic edge – aligning him politically with the late Grace Lee Boggs, for example, whose campaigns for community-led ecological regeneration in Detroit offered a new model of labour agitation in that industrialised city.
Hunt also invokes the “social ecology” of Murray Bookchin, a multi-faceted philosophy that advances a critique of “the historic turn towards hierarchy and patriarchy” within radical movements – often hampered, ironically, by rigid structures and internal power imbalances – as well as a diagnosis of the “statism” and “capitalism” that define wider social structures, particularly in the global north. By re-examining our conceptions of urban and rural, of agricultural production and consumption, Hunt observes (via Bookchin), reformers can “ensure that human and ecological well-being are at the heart of democratic initiatives”, bringing the grand ideals of socialist transformation down to earth – and into an actionable zone inhabited by actual communities. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, he recalls (perhaps with a tinge of nostalgic over-statement), the occupiers’ “self-managed food provision” merged into something of an improvised welfare service. The movement exposed the degree of social isolation in the twenty-first century’s metropolitan centres. One of the chief benefits of communal eating is to help to address alienation.
Such schemes, of course, are driven as much by physiology as by psychological or socio-econonmic factors. Our ability not only to think beyond the present infrastructre of a capitalistic economy, but physically to survive, is directly connected to the attitudes we hold and the measures we take regarding food and the land it grows from. It was hunger, after all, and not just a spirit of experimentation and progressivism, that inspired the rebellious denizens of Kronstadt to cultivate the waste grounds of their city in 1921 – instituting a “horticultural commune”, according to the historian Voline, that the Bolsheviks, intent on centralization, were zealous in repressing, even after the famous mass of striking sailors there had been executed or dispersed. Then as now, democracy and ecology may be thought of as connected strands of any authentically revolutionary endeavour. As Kristin Ross has written:
Land and the way it is worked is the most important factor in an alternative ecological society. Capital’s real war is against subsistence, because subsistence means a qualitatively different economy; it means people actually living differently, according to a different conception of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation.
Such issues take on a palpable urgency in the age of climate change, as extreme weather events merge with the predicted decimation of habitats and food-chains. Whether or not we realise it, how we feed ourselves (and learn to live with one another) is a crucial question for communities everywhere – a question likely to turn into an existential dilemma if left unanswered. In Hunt’s words,
as the food crisis worsens, it will be increasingly necessary to make productive use of urban or “peri-urban” land for local self-provisioning… it is wise to activate urban gardening as a collective form of commoning that transcends the atomisation of communities into clusters of individuals.
Noting the explosion of factory farming and other for-profit models of meat production globally, he wonders: “Can the straight trajectory of relentless economic growth be bent into the spiralling plenty of truly regenerative production?” For readers in Ireland, these speculations hold special resonance. A nation-wide campaign centred on community-organised green spaces and vegetable allotments – such as Hunt envisions – could serve as an original, effective response to the expanding epidemic of dereliction afflicting Irish towns and cities (itself in part a symptom of the housing and cost-of-living crises that have caused concomitantly high levels of emigration and homelessness). As to the issue of food sovereignty, despite inspiring efforts by networks such as Talamh Beo to implement sustainable models of “agro-ecology” across the country, successive Irish governments seem to have remained in thrall to a meat (and dairy) industry operating on a commercial model hostile to workers’ rights and favouring large-scale operations that are emissions-intensive. Meanwhile, the goal of reaching even the minimum requirements for decarbonising our farming practices seems as illusory as it’s ever been. A dramatic re-set in local and national policy is needed – and soon.
Among other things, there is arguably a risk of hubris in a progressive politics that centres its aims and actions solely on the state and its traditional organs of power. As Hunt suggests, in an era of drastic ecological and economic ruptures, a consumerist society that simultaneously “does not know how to feed and dress itself”, that destroys abundant eco-systems to make way for industrial-scale farming and vast monocultures, can hardly be taken as the sanest or safest of socio-environmental paradigms. We must begin with the land, he declares – and re-build our agricultural economy from the grassroots up. The change we need starts here and now.
