THE AGE OF ABUNDANCE IS ENDING
Three major Defence Agencies are quietly admitting what most still refuse to face: climate breakdown is coming for our food, and the cracks are already spreading. While the wealthy cling to logistics and illusion, the real defence strategy is soil and local growers who refuse to let their communities starve.
Our day started at dawn. We’re deep inside the Austral summer and it is going to be hot. Not the tinder dry, deep heat that feels dangerous, but uncomfortable to work outside, nonetheless. So we begin early and retreat back inside before the day reaches its zenith.
As I walk up the hill to our food crops, Geoff sets off in the opposite direction to tend to other farm tasks. His day will be about siphoning water from one dam to the other. Setting the network of solar pumps in motion to water crops across the farm. For me, golden grass crunches underfoot on the path I tread each day, with dried stalks shimmering in the morning beside each step.
A gentle breeze carries rising birdsong. Every season a few more return. The soundscape richer. Harmonies and counterpoint more complex. I glance back to the hill behind me, where our old life once stood, under towering trees once alive to the rich and raucous laughter of rainbow lorikeets. They have not returned, and my heart flinches a little at the loss.
Still, there is work ahead today. I walk towards the crops that need a deep drink before the day’s heat rises. Their grassy green smell touches my face. Here, I choose what grows, how it grows, and who it feeds. Every seed planted is a decision that bypasses the industrial machine. This is my spirit home.
But all is not ‘peace and green’ this morning. I am upsetting my walking meditation, ruminating on the absence of attention to the alarming climate-chaos defence-industry reports released of late. It’s as if the world’s journalists and commentators read the banal, softened wording that emanates from government documents, shrugged with boredom and just moved on. (Oh, how I miss Richard Crim. He’d have been all over these reports).
As I walk among my crops—carrot tops billowing in the breeze, and radishes surging from the soil—I have to accept we are living in a world that resolutely pretends there are centuries to prepare. The bleak truth—and every real defence analyst knows this, even if the classified sections of their reports are locked away from the public—is that climate change is no longer a distant hazard. It is already shredding food systems from the Sahel to the Mekong, and it will destroy them outright within a generation unless we acknowledge the violence of that collapse. A whole bunch of people are going to get very hungry, very soon.
The Defence Agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom are not prone to melodrama. Nor is Australia, yet their Defence report is apparently too shocking for the people to hear, so remains under lock and key. Still the hints around the edges tell the story already. These three agencies of war deal in risk matrices and probabilities, not poetry. Yet, their climate assessments make an admission that should rattle everyone: the global food system is entering the blast radius. Drought and wildfires tightening fists around grain belts. Heat flattening yields. Floodwaters salting fields. They speak of threat multipliers, compound shocks, and cascading failures—language so empty it almost disguises the truth. But pause, reflect, and the meaning hits your gut: within the next decade or two, global food production will tank and become dangerously politicized. Harvests will falter, prices will convulse, supply will chains seize, and governments will strain to contain the unrest and human migration that follows hunger. This is what the soil already knows—the age of predictable abundance is ending. By 2030, these stressors will become visible to anyone looking. Slowly at first, then picking up pace. Yields fall. Prices spike. Conflicts ignite.
Despite these warnings, while I siphon water to the thirsty beds, the rest of the world still bets its survival on global logistics. Shipping grains across oceans. Flying fruit and fish in planes. Stacking shelves with produce from half a world away. Filling jars and packets with chemicals and gums, that are pale imitation of the produce they pretend to be. That madness is called ‘food security’. Here, at this slope in my garden, it is ‘food sovereignty’ that is tangible. And it is powerful. Every pump we set in motion, every row watered, is a quiet countermeasure, a pre-emptive defence against the instability the Pentagon, Whitehall, and Canberra now quietly admit is coming.
Sometime between 2030 and 2040 climate change will have moved to a ‘systemic destabiliser’, to borrow the US report’s vernacular. Models tie unstable climate conditions to persistent yield declines in maize, wheat, rice and soy—the staples from which modern civilisation draws its strength. This is when the fragile edifice of industrial food systems—built on just-in-time logistics and global inter-dependency—will crack from beneath.
Once the world has two billion more mouths to feed, the arithmetic turns from dire to fatal. Two billion more mouths. Empty plates under a blistering sun. Hunger will walk the land. By 2050 (a mere 24 years from now), if emissions do not plunge (they won’t) and socio-economic inequities persist (they will), we'll have entered a world where multiple structural failures in food systems have already occurred, where price spirals and crop collapses are chronic, where states struggle to keep order as populations scramble for calories.
Sure each report uses the same weasel qualifiers: ‘may’, ‘might’, and ‘could’. If this is your argument for not taking the message to heart, I’d ask, if you were given U$10,000 to invest in a fund that ‘may’ or ‘might’ evaporate inside a five years (ie 2030) taking your whole investment with it, would you put your money in that hole? No? Then shut up about the qualifiers. I’ve had enough of listening to people excuse this information away. (Rant over … apologies)
The shockwaves will reshape geopolitics, governance, and human life by 2030, and into 2040, 2050, and 2060. The only questions left will be about suffering and survival, not whether we foresaw the crisis we are now living through.
So where does this information take us? This is the question I now ask myself in the shade of the shed, as I prepare for our next community Harvest Boxes in a few days. This collective CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) I am running is a trial for this calendar year, and it’s etching the graft and endurance involved in feeding people into my muscles and bones. It’s beautiful, but merciless and there are no days off. Heat, rain, hail, or shine—the beds must be planted, watered, tended. Our small Grower Collective does it for free, so my community can learn what this mission actually takes. Frankly our ‘free’ price-tag is not that much lower than the average market gardener earns. And, as I stack boxes and crates with sweat on my brow and an aching back, my internal reflection burst out as spoken word: ‘that is seriously screwed up’. The Defence agencies of the US, UK, and Australia are telling us we are facing food system collapse because of rolling climate chaos sweeping across the world, and yet the people who feed us are in the poverty line.
This mess is not going to be fixed at a government scale, and anyone clinging to that hopium is deluded. The wealthy minority of the world—those 58–60 million adults with more than U$1 million each—are vested, consciously or not, in keeping the industrial machine ticking as long as possible. About 40 percent of this cohort are in the United States, with China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan not far behind. Canada, Switzerland, Australia—less densely so, but catching up. India and South Korea are climbing fast. It’s far to easy to blame it all on the billionaires, and shrug away the gross inequity of wealth that maintains the system.
While every human alive today is in some way responsible, this millionaire/billionaire group draws from the world’s resources far beyond what they’ve earned or nurtured. Their food. The soil worked by others. The sun and rain that fall on beds they’ll never touch. Hands never in soil. Feet never in mud. Their wealth sits atop a world where others bleed to feed. Their wealth profits from logistics, cargo ships, planes, trains, and millions of trucks all carrying food beyond the local. Fools’ dreams.
Contrast this with the reality of the local market gardener. In the US, the typical annual net income is U$30,000–60,000. Enough, perhaps, to scrape by—if you work year-round, hands blistered, back aching, and still take on off-farm work to survive. They work harder than most of the billionaires’ accountants ever will, yet earn pennies compared with the abstract numbers floating above their heads.
Always, they are being driven to be cheap. But as Adam Cohen recently said:
‘Cheap food is a lie we tell ourselves. Cheap food isn’t cheap: It means that someone else pays. Soil pays. Farmers pay. Communities pay. Future generations pay.
If you want “cheap,” fine, but stop pretending the bill disappeared. You’re just handing it to people and places with the least power to refuse.’
So, when I stack boxes for the Harvest Boxes this week and mutter about a seriously screwed up system, it is not exaggeration. The Pentagon, Whitehall, Canberra—all admitting quietly that food systems are fraying—and yet, the people who feed us remain on the poverty line. The math is obscene. The moral calculus is clear.
Continuing Adam's wisdom:
‘We don’t need a better food pyramid. We need a different food system. Local farms. Regional distribution. Shared cold storage. Mutual aid fridges. Co-ops. This isn’t ideology. It’s infrastructure.’
And, I agree with him.
Some time ago I wrote about the difference between food security and food sovereignty. It’s worth stating it again.
‘Food security shackles us to the very industrial agriculture system that is cooking the planet. Every tonne of grain shipped across oceans, every chemically dependent monocrop, every refrigerated supply chain humming through the night—it all burns fossil fuel, strips soil, and severs community from land. The global food system is responsible for roughly a third of greenhouse gas emissions, and yet, when the talk turns to ‘resilience’, the same institutions that profit from that destruction are the ones proposing solutions—more logistics, more imports, more vertical farms fed by fossil-fuelled fertiliser. Madness disguised as management.
Food sovereignty cuts that cord. It insists that resilience is local or it’s a lie. It demands that we rebuild the web of relationships—between growers, eaters, soil, and seed—that industrial agriculture has spent a century unravelling. And it’s happening, right now, in places most policymakers couldn’t find on a map.’
As I venture out into the heat of the afternoon to do another circuit of the crops, and to collect the eggs from my chickens whose chorus now adds to the symphony of birdsong, I decide I am going to challenge everyone to embrace food sovereignty with every fibre of their being. You don’t have to be the grower of the food to do this. You do need to connect yourself into the food growing network. Not the big farms. Not industrial ag. I mean the small local growers doing everything they can to survive. They are passionate, deep advocates for food sovereignty. And they need you. Find them. Buy from them if you can. Offer to help them if you have no money. You’d be surprised how your skills in social media, or writing reports, or helping out with sales will make a huge difference to their survival. Know they are struggling, but proud. They are the true believers in feeding community. Their crops, the soil, the water—that is the real wealth. That is survival.
If there are no growers near you, build a network yourself. Whether you’re in the city, the suburbs, or wrestling wind and weeds in the wilderness, every setting brings its own mix of grit, risk, and raw potential. What matters isn’t the address—it’s whether you’re ready to dig in, stay put, and build something rooted, collective, and future-facing. Not everyone will be ‘the grower’. Fair enough. Still, that doesn’t get anyone off the hook. There’s work either side of the planting line that needs doing—lifting, fixing, preserving, defending—and growers can’t do it all. So toughen up, get close to the soil, and learn to think like a grower.
At the very least, become grower-adjacent. Because if Defence departments are sounding the warning, know we are all facing an epic trial.
Solidarity & Soil
Margi
A word of thanks
A huge shout out to Geoffrey Deihl of Sane Thoughts for Insane Times, for including me alongside Justin McAffee and others in his recent essay, More Administration of Death. Geoffrey’s essay are always impeccably researched and presented. I value them greatly and it’s an honour to receive such a mention. Gratitude.
From the homestead
We’re deep in summer, here on the homestead. Crops in the ground and consistently feeding some 26 people in my community through the fortnightly Harvest Boxes are carrots, beets, radishes, potatoes, onions, garlic, summer squash, silverbeet and kale, and a range of lettuce, rocket, and baby leaves (for a salad mix). Other growers in the Collective provide the other crops.
For our own household we have eggs, and smaller stands of tomatoes, bell peppers, winter storage pumpkins, sugarloaf cabbage, sprouting broccoli, plum, pears, apples, nectarines, cape gooseberries, and strawberries. Enough for two and a bit to share. The peach, lemon, lime, and blood orange trees are growing, as are the avocados and loquats. They’ll be feeding us next year. Also, there is a growing collection of medicinal herbs (to many to mention here) that I’ll write about in a future post. For a three year old garden it’s doing well.
Your support
I walked away from the algorithm’s choke-hold to stand where it counts—hands in soil, words on the page, shoulder to shoulder with those adapting to climate chaos. Radically Local will never hide behind a paywall; climate chaos is brutal enough. But if this writing steadies or strengthens you, and you have coin, become a paid subscriber and weave yourself into the living chapters of our homestead—into the rows, the risk, the words themselves. Your support buys time—time to grow food, time to write, time to keep this writing fierce and independent—and it tells Substack that fire-and-flood words, scorched and stubborn, matter.
And, if this essay moves you, comment or pass it on like a sandbag in rising water.
If you’re looking for practical tools, maps, and field notes for the road ahead, start with A COLLECTIVE GUIDE TO SURVIVING CLIMATE COLLAPSE.
Margi, I found your blog a few weeks ago, and was strangely comforted by your writing. I’m young, part of the generation that was shown documentaries about climate change in primary school and told that we were going to fix the problem by ditching plastic straws. I didn’t really believe that at the time, and I certainly don’t believe it now. I had many years of climate anxiety, where I couldn’t even listen to talk about climate change because I felt so constricted and helpless.
Finding your newsletter has been life changing. Finally, here was someone confirming what I knew in my bones, what I knew every time my family and I shut our windows tight against bushfire smoke blown in on the breeze. Neoliberal individualism gave me many things to do; ditch plastic bags, plastic straws, ride a bike to work, but it never gave me any sense of actually doing anything.
Thanks to your blog I am committing to using the time I still have linked into this global network to learn how to grow. While there are still seed shops I can buy from online and still a working internet to learn from and still soil to buy at Bunnings, I will learn everything I can. I’ve bought some broccoli, bok choy, and herb seeds and over the next few weeks I’ll plant them.
Thank you for providing hope in the form of action and an example for what we need to become.
Another great read Margi, thank you. I have tried to support local growers where I can for over 20 years - the amount of times I've had the "cheap food is not cheap" argument with people has left me frustrated.
Most people in my life believe that all these crises converging are either conspiracy theories or the government/scientists/AI/younger generations will come up with the solutions. I think the cognitive leap in understanding what's already happening and what's to come is too great. People are afraid to really face change head on and what it will mean for their lives.
I was shocked to hear of Richard Crim's passing and found out completely by accident. I will really miss his writing.