How Will Communities Handle Troublemakers?

Pt 3 of a 3-part series

“?” courtesy Khaydock, CC BY-SA 3.0. Landscape: the Coast Range in Sonoma County at sunset.

Part 3 of a 3-part series. In part 1 of this series, "Farewell to a Garden," I shared photos of my veggie growing this year at a farm in Sonoma County that I just left. In part 2, "Why I Hate Market Farming," I explained my departure. In this final part, I discuss some big picture reflections highlighted by the experience.

An increasing number of people are collapse-aware. They see that the United States is in decline, economically, politically, socially and otherwise. The systems that provide for our needs are at once decreasing in quality and increasing in price. The status quo serves fewer and fewer people even as its ecological footprint metastasizes beyond the finite limits of our planet. Sooner or later, something will give way that reveals our system as the house of cards that it is. Whether this is gradual or quick is unknown, but regardless of the timeline, the collapse aware know that the time to prepare for other ways to live is now. This is why I got into farming in 2005. The disaster that struck New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed me that we cannot count on big institutions to take care of us; my anarchist friends who traveled there to help out reported that the localized, community-based efforts were much more effective than FEMA or the Red Cross. Hurricane Katrina was but a small taste of the wider-spread challenges we will face as the big institutions either fail or turn openly authoritarian (perhaps simultaneously) and as climate chaos becomes more intense, so we need to build alternative means of support based on mutual aid now. Metaphorically, the time to plant a vegetable garden is not when the grocery shelves have just been emptied. You want that food in the ground already, and if this season is just a drill, you'll have some nice meals anyway.

Margaret Killjoy talks about the triangle of prepping: gear, skills and relationships. Gear includes physical resources like tools, blankets, camping supplies, first aid kits, plus food stashes like buckets of rice and beans,or boxes of canned goods (and a can opener!). Skills include knowledge and experience in how to do practical things, including how to use the gear. Relationships are about people to cooperate with when times get hard (and to learn from and have fun with in the meantime!). I'd say that, in the end, having trusted, reliable people around would be better than going it alone with a cache of firearms and ammo, though I know folks who are prioritizing both friends and guns, and I don't have an argument with them.

The first two, skills and gear, get the most attention, and there's plenty of resources out there about those topics, so I won't be addressing them here.

Relationships/Community are my focus today, and specifically the question of "How do we deal with assholes?" (I put “troublemakers” in the headline in case people share this post on social media.)

I haven't seen much on this topic, though if anyone has gotten into it, I'll bet it's Justin McAfee at his Collapse Curriculum Substack, which I highly recommend.

A group of people could have a well-rounded set of skills, a great stash of gear, and still be sabotaged by an asshole in their midst. What do I mean by asshole? Someone who, whether through malice or selfishness, fucks up cooperative endeavors in some way, rendering them partially or wholly ineffective. Maybe they don't follow rules set by the group. Maybe they lie to or manipulate others. Maybe they steal. Maybe they're misogynistic. Maybe they suffer mental health or addiction problems that they refuse to address, so their problem becomes everybody else's. Maybe all of the above, as was the case with the tenant farmer at the place I just left in Sonoma County (see part 2). And of course, there's a lot more maybes that are possible, including the threat of violence, which fortunately was absent there.

The tenant farmer's daughter lives in a nearby town and has already made clear she will be taking in her elderly father when he's no longer able to function on the farm by himself. Some would say that day is near, given his deteriorating physical condition, but I would say that day has passed. The question is not just whether he as an individual can still get himself up in the morning, feed himself, and wipe his own ass, but whether his belligerent presence is itself an obstacle to the ability of the farm to function, including the nurturing of much needed community there. That is, his ability to function can not be measured merely in terms of whether he can take care of his personal logistics but also whether he is able to work and play with others, or is an obstacle. As it stands, regardless of the progress of the advancing cancer cells, he is dysfunctional here and now in terms of relationships/community, the third component of prepping.

Here's one example of how this one person's dysfunction affects other people in a purely logistical way. As mentioned in part 2, the tenant farmer's experience was in salad growing. At one point, before a multi-day hot spell of 90-100 temperatures, he asked me how I had brought lettuce through such periods in the past, and my answer was that I just hadn't tried to grow lettuce in the heat of summer because it was too challenging and impractical. He didn't like that answer. A few weeks later, in July, right before another such spike, he transplanted out a bed of baby lettuces in the middle of a sunny afternoon. (Which is a bad move all by itself as it intensifies transplant shock. Best to put out new plants in the evening when the sun is low and the temps dropping.) For the next week, he was out there watering the lettuce three times a day. Now, the water supply on this farm for the veggie beds is neither infinite nor dependable. It comes from two sources, one for the owner's side, which slows down but never stops, and one for the tenant's side, which typically runs dry by September. It's a precious, limited resource. Insisting on growing a water-intensive crop out-of-season is selfish to others in the community because it endangers other crops that are better suited to the heat but still need irrigating (like beans, squash, root crops, etc.). A well-functioning community or sensible owner would be like, "Hey bud, we know you like growing lettuce, but it doesn't make sense to use our resources that way at this time of year." But that wasn't going to happen there. I'm so glad I won't be around for the stress that will happen when the water runs low! And I don't want to be someplace where such poor decisions are allowed to stand.

At this farm there was one person and one person only who could tell the asshole to leave, and that was the owner, who was seemingly unwilling to consider the possibility, despite at least five years of disruptive behavior--much of it directed at him personally!--and the departure of at least one other valuable helper who was unwilling to put up with the abuse. Plus the unknown number of other lost opportunities with neighbors who avoided the place so as to avoid the asshole.

This points to the problem of private property ownership.

I've come to believe that all agricultural land needs to be taken out of private ownership and be collectively managed instead. Picture small parcels run by multi-generational groups in a non-hierarchical fashion where the goal is to provide food, medicine, craft materials, etc., for themselves and others without monetary pressure and with an ecological awareness that respects more-than-human life as kin. In such a setting, assholes would have no place and the community would kick them out if they proved un-reformable. In a best case scenario, assholes would leave of their own accord shortly after arrival because there simply wouldn't be any openings for them to inhabit, and they would know and feel that even without a word being spoken to them.

Farmland is too important to be left in the hands of single owners, allowed to pursue their personal tastes and ego-centered goals to the detriment of the land itself, and, as a consequence, to their fellow humans and to the more-than-human kin on their property who have their own needs and their own desire to live. Invariably, every owner has a list, often petty or arbitrary, of which animals and plants are welcome and which are to be killed, with no input from the community, and certainly not from the targets. Keep in mind that, with very few limits, a landowner in the United States is allowed to wipe out whatever ecosystem happens to be within the lines of their deed, and fuck what anybody else thinks. That's madness, and we can't afford it anymore. We never could.

In truth, if not in law, land belongs to those who live there: to the insects, the birds, the mammals, the reptiles and the fish; to the wildflowers, the trees, the grasses and the mosses; to the fungi, the lichen and the soil microorganisms; to the stones and the water; to the wind. That we recognize the "right" of an "owner" who lives far away to decide what happens there is profoundly perverse. That we recognize one resident human to have "dominion" over all the living creatures there derives from Bronze Age values and, though sanctified by the Declaration of Independence (which originally read, "the pursuit of life, liberty and property" not "happiness"), is an outmoded cultural relic that we must dismiss and dismantle.

In my travels around the West, and in my many experiences on farms, I have seen a lot of land locked up by a small number of people. The big farms are owned by corporations, which is worse because they have the misbegotten rights of individuals under the law but the obligation under their charters to generate profit no matter the consequence. They could described as demonic. But even if all land was "owned" only by individuals and not phantasmic legal entities, the situation would still be entirely unacceptable.

I have come to see the truth of the old maxim, "property is theft." Land owners are stealing. Yeah, I get it; that's "the way it is" right now. But one way or another this set-up won't last longer, due to collapse or revolution or both. Our current state of affairs is neither divinely ordained nor immortal and now is the time to work towards its replacement.

Are there decent land owners out there trying their best to respect life? Definitely. I have met a few. But a precious few. They are by far the exceptions to the rule. And these well-meaning and hard-working folks are usually overwhelmed by the amount of labor. Farming is simply not an activity for an individual and a few hired hands nor a single family, homestead-style. Farming can only be effective in the bigger picture if it becomes a community endeavor.

Ecocide is the most significant ongoing crime of our age. It's cruelty is meted out not just on our fellow humans, but on everyone (and everything, if you make that distinction) else. If land is a "means of production" then yes, we do need to seize it. I have also come to see why socialist revolutions so often institute land reform as one of their first steps, taking from the oligarchs and redestributing to the "peasants" (read, "non-property owners" or “regular people”).

We don't talk about class in the United States, and so property owners are able to interact with people who don't own property as if they're on the same level. But they're not. Anyone with property has not just real estate to lord over, but financial equity. If they experience an emergency, they can borrow against it. This makes them fundamentally more wealthy than anyone who lacks property. But we peasants are expected to look past this, and pretend the difference doesn't exist. That's some bullshit, and part of our work is consciousness-raising about these hierarchies.

To conclude: Getting rid of assholes needs to be a community effort, whether at the level of our society or at a particular place. The owner of the farm in Sonoma County, if unwilling to make the asshole tenant move along himself, needs to be pressured by the community--both residents and neighbors--to persuade him do it. Letting an asshole be an asshole without consequence just encourages the asshole to keep being an asshole. It's not doing him any favors to reward him for his bad behavior. I do believe, perhaps naively I will admit, that every human is capable of redemption from their failings, but if they are never held account when they adversely affect other people, then they never even start down that road. We all need a wake-up call sometimes, and for someone so close to the end of his life, as this tenant farmer with stage 4 cancer is, time is running out. I've heard that a clarity can accompany one's realization that death is near and I do sincerely hope that he experiences such, as any increase in clarity in the world, no matter how small, is a gain for the world as a whole. In this case, I did what I could and moved on, and it's out of my hands now. I'm relieved that they are empty and ready to receive whatever life brings next.

Which is hopefully some fresh feral fruit!