Dorn Cox - The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope

Copyright 2023 by Dorn Cox

Foreword copyright 2023 by David Bollier

All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright 2023 by Dorn Cox.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Excerpt from Parables, as published in Everything Speaks in Its Own Way (2012) by Kae Tempest, is reprinted with permission of Lewinsohn Literary Agency Ltd.

Acquiring Editor: Ben Watson

Developmental Editor: Ben Trollinger

Project Manager: Rebecca Springer

Copy Editor: Diane Durrett

Proofreader: Angela Boyle

Indexer: Linda Hallinger

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

v1.202303

ISBN 9781645020677 (paperback) | ISBN 9781645020684 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Chelsea Green Publishing

White River Junction, Vermont, USA

London, UK

www.chelseagreen.com

To my family

O f the many epic challenges that climate change is bringing to humankind, one of the most significant is surely the need to reinvent agriculture. Can the worlds farmers find a way to shift from large-scale, carbon-intensive industrial farming that is destroying soil and ecosystems to smaller-scale bioregional systems that not only respect nature but regenerate it? Can we invent systems that grow enough nutritious food, distribute it fairly to all, and remake agriculture as a decentralized, place-respecting enterprise?

At this point in the unfolding climate catastrophe, these ambitions are not simply a nice fantasy to ponder. They are existential necessities. If humankind is going to avoid fatal disruptions to the planets ecosystems and civilization itself, agriculture must find ways to pursue some radical shifts.

In the short term, the top imperative must be new strategies for adapting to climate change: new cultivation practices, new crop choices, holistic commitments. Over the longer term, the art of farming must reintegrate itself with local ecosystems and the biosphere. Agriculture must do more than sustain an already degraded landscape. It must understand and improve the generativity of life itself.

Dorn Cox offers us a powerful framework for undertaking this task in The Great Regeneration, replete with myriad examples of soil restoration and ecological monitoring, farm hacks and open-source observatories, and social and ethical principles for keeping regenerative agriculture on the right track. This book introduces an impressive storehouse of innovations that illuminate many pathways forward.

The Great Regeneration does not provide a blueprint so much as a range of powerful methodological shifts needed to open up new vistas of possibility. With active participation and ingenuity, farmers can begin to take practical steps that draw on recent findings in earth sciences; new applications of open-source software, networking tools, and data systems; bold experiments that blend low-cost observational technologies with attentive human stewardship of landscapes; new organizational forms and cooperative financial models for self-reliance; and patterns of commoning that empower individuals and communities.

Regeneration, as Cox points out, is not simply a set of techniques. It is a mindset and worldview. It is a deep priority and commitment. Regenerative agriculture is not only about improving crop yields and reducing harmful ecological impacts. It is about bringing new vigor to biogeoecological systems while enlivening us as humans.

The legacy of the Green Revolution has been the destructive use of industrial techniques and miracle technologiespesticides, fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, monoculture cropsto maximize yields. Soil and other natural systems are not treated as alive but as machines, essentially dead resources. In the Great Regeneration envisioned by Cox, technology plays a significantly different role. Instead of deploying powerful, poorly tested tools that often shatter the dense, symbiotic web of life in a landscape, the Great Regeneration sketches an agricultural future that revives aliveness through the skillful blending of open-source technologies, ecological wisdom, and local empowerment.

In his seminal history, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Christopher M. Kelty notes how free software (the politically minded precursor to open-source software) is a kind of collective technical experimental system. It blends conventional practice with daring experimentation to address evolving, real needs. It privileges creative, pragmatic solutions over proprietary business models, entrenched political interests, and even law itself. (Free and open-source software became possible only through clever, elegant hacks of copyright law. Expanding the scope and support of law is a part of this new future as well.)

Open-source systems are at once powerful and flexible because they honor individual creativity that can be collectively shared and constantly improved upon. The technologies avoid bureaucratic and political stagnation by privileging the freedom of bottom-up agents over centralized control. They authorize and support creative modification and agile innovation. The focus is not on beggar-thy-neighbor competition and market success that tends toward economic consolidation; it is about cooperative stewardship of dispersed, autonomous systems on a holistic scale. Everyone can flourish together. Instead of intensifying the winner-take-all ethic that often prevails in capitalist markets, regenerative agriculture can deliver maximum effectiveness at low cost. Its secrets are democratic participation, sharing and collaboration, transparency and accountability, flexible innovation, and the freedom to localize solutions.

These affordances, and this ethic, are precisely what contemporary agriculture will need to navigate the difficult years ahead. As technology comes to support natural systems rather than disrupt themthrough monitoring sensors, software apps, data analytics, networked cooperation, and moreCox astutely sees a new silicon-based nervous system helping farmers to monitor and improve the carbon-based ecosystems of life. Open-source technology can enhance the search for more symbiotic, ecologically respectful forms of agriculture rather than ignorantly subverting the generativity of natural systems. This infrastructure, artfully knitting together agriculture, ecosystems, and technology, will itself become generative. It will usher in new forms of cosmo-local production by inviting a global community of agricultural players to collaborate in developing world-class designs while enabling the production of low-cost physical equipment and infrastructures at local levels.

This compelling vision is not without its complications, however. There are, most notably, tensions between open-source communities and capitalism. The history of Big Tech co-opting or neutering the expansive potential of open-source software is a cautionary story. While there should always be room for value-added proprietary business systems that revolve around open-source technologies, dangers arise when technology companies attempt to capture and dominate a knowledge commons or other shareable system, whether in a legal or de facto