(No) Dig for Victory
What could it look like if we treated ecological collapse like the emergency that it is?
This is a Constraint scenario, one of four archetypal scenarios described in IFTF’s ‘Alternative Future Scenarios’ toolkit. It explores a future in which limited resources, ecological collapse, social instability or geopolitical conflicts impose societal limitations, which must adapt and build resilience.
What could it look like if we treated ecological collapse like an actual emergency?
The full brunt of the ecological crisis hit sooner and with more ferocity than most expected. Frequent heatwaves, droughts and flooding severely impacted UK agriculture, whilst global supply chains were disrupted to such an extent that it made the COVID-19 pandemic seem like a picnic. Food insecurity, famine, mass displacement, and civil unrest occurred worldwide in the mid to late 2020s. Some feared societal collapse. In response, Britain went insular.
Massively reallocating resources and labour to domestic food production became the national priority — a war effort1 sans war, centrally planned by the government's newly formed Ministry for Food.
The Ministry for Food worked with a team led by (now Nobel Prize winner) Demis Hassabis, building on his earlier success using artificial intelligence (AI) for scientific discoveries like protein folding. They developed an AI program to help address the nation's long-term food resilience.2 It was not some robot overlord from Science Fiction but an unparalleled computational tool blending science with systemic design. It worked a bit like prompting ChatGPT in the early 2020s, but infinitesimally more powerful, drawing upon the latest research from diverse fields like agronomy, nutrition, economics, logistics, climatology and generative design to shape the policy response.
The team used the following prompt: “How can we create a resilient domestic food system to feed the entire population a nutritious diet using only food produced in the UK?”
Regenerative agriculture, supported by elements of degrowth, was determined as the best course of action. Short-termism was out; regeneration had a mandate. The AI program was dubbed DeepREGEN.
Their plan was implemented nationwide in the late 2020s. Every aspect of daily life changed. The government nationalised critical infrastructure and wound down ‘less necessary’ businesses and industries. Many industries were reshored to Britain. Citizens were required to alter their consumption of energy, goods and materials radically. All food production was now centrally planned and coordinated by regional boards of farmers, technical experts, and the DeepREGEN team. Labour was reallocated on an unprecedented scale to ensure sufficient food production.
Rationing
“It was a shock at first. Choosing between all the different takeaway options on a Saturday night - Chinese, Indian, fish and chips, pizza - feels like another lifetime ago. Everything we eat in Britain is grown here these days. It took a long time to get used to the rations. Now they are actually pretty decent a lot of the year, though they can be a bit boring in the winter. I can’t remember the last time I had a banana, and I miss proper coffee so much…
Citizen of Leicester, 2040
The days when consumers could go to a supermarket and buy whatever food they wanted, whenever they wanted, regardless of the time of year, are long gone.
The DeepREGEN team calculated weekly rations for every citizen based on regional and national production, optimised for nutrition and using almost entirely only British-produced food. Every citizen was issued a ‘ration book’ - albeit through a smartphone app connected to the blockchain ledger rather than a cardboard pamphlet. Food is now distributed through nationalised supermarkets, whose ‘just-in-time’ business model had utterly failed during the heavily disrupted mid to late 2020s. Most restaurants were closed, though some adapted to become community hubs, serving labourers.
The rations allocated to people in the first few years were very limited compared to the abundant choices available to consumers in the early 2020s. It took a few years for people to adjust.
Eating seasonally became mandatory. People found creative ways to enjoy the sometimes limited variety. People were encouraged to supplement the rations by growing their own vegetables in private or community gardens. Preserving, fermentation, homebrewing, baking sourdough bread, and similar activities underwent a renaissance far beyond what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ultra-processed food isn’t available to such an extent anymore. Large-scale cultivation of sugar was deemed an inefficient use of resources with poor public health consequences. Today a handful of nationalised food manufacturers produce a limited selection of morale-boosting sweet options. The global trade in chocolate has largely collapsed.
In the early years, ensuring that everyone got enough calories and macronutrients was the priority, and even that wasn’t always successful. The rations improved iteratively over time. As regenerative agroecosystems matured, scientific research and innovation progressed, labour became more efficient, and the DeepREGEN team’s longer-term planning began to bear fruit.
A much greater diversity of foods became more widely available - albeit still only that which could be grown in Britain. Indeed, the AI-designed diet resulted in better health outcomes for the broader population after a few years - obesity, heart disease, and other so-called ‘lifestyle diseases’ plummeted.
Landscape transformation
Throughout the 2030s, the British landscape underwent a significant shift. The DeepREGEN team centrally planned all agricultural production to meet the requirements for rations.
Cereals like wheat, rye, and oats, as well as beans, pulses and potatoes, are all important staples in 2040, making up the bulk of rations year-round. The production of diverse varieties, grown in extremely healthy soil, means that these staples can meet the majority of nutritional needs.3
Horticulture has flourished, with field-scale cultivation, market gardens and community gardens all contributing to the nation's fruit and vegetable supply. Agroforestry has also thrived, with nut and fruit crops now a vital component of the nation's diet. In fact, with so many trees, much of the British countryside landscape now resembles a mosaic of savannah-woodland - a greener and more pleasant land.
Meat and dairy products are the most strictly rationed food groups, especially so in the earlier years, and diets had to adjust accordingly. DeepREGEN deemed factory farming a poor use of resources - too reliant on imported feed and a threat to resilience due to its impact on waterways and the risk of pandemics. Many conventional grazing practices were likewise deemed a poor use of land.
Instead, livestock was integrated into mixed farming systems wherever possible through pasture cropping, intensive rotational grazing, silvopasture and other methods.
Even so, British people's average daily meat consumption from the early 2020s exceeded the carrying capacity of healthy agroecosystems in 2040, especially when factoring in that all meat had to be produced domestically rather than imported. Diets adjusted accordingly. The state incentivised households and communities to keep poultry and pigs to take pressure off the ration system.
The state compulsorily purchased any potentially productive land that wasn’t contributing to food production. Golf courses, land for gamebird shooting, fields for grazing horses and similar unproductive uses were all converted to agriculture.
A new industry boomed to ensure a varied diet throughout the year: regenerative ocean polyculture farming. Systems designed by the DeepREGEN team were implemented along the coast, producing abundant fish, crustaceans, shellfish and seaweed (for food, fibre and medicine) whilst drawing down blue carbon.4
The closure of many industries resulted in a lot of redundant infrastructure, especially in urban areas. Urban farms, including low-carbon aquaponics, aeroponics and mushroom cultivation, were retrofitted into old industrial buildings, office buildings, car parks, parks, vacant lots, and on rooftops.
Rather than turn over every square centimetre of the country to food production, DeepREGEN recommended ecosystem restoration to increase resilience through biodiversity provisioning and carbon drawdown. Ruminant grazing in the Lake District, Wales and the Scottish Highlands was scaled back, replaced with rewetted peatlands and restoration of native forests.
Job Guarantee
All this was only possible with the Job Guarantee.5 The winding down of so many industries deemed less necessary to the UK’s resilience would have resulted in mass unemployment and a deeply unjust transition without it.
The low-input regenerative agriculture that formed the core of the resilience plan required a lot of labour to be reallocated to the sector. The government guaranteed a job to every citizen who sought one to ensure full employment within food production and other activities that increase the nation’s resilience. Now in 2040, more than half the population work in food production, either directly in agriculture or in a supporting role - perhaps the greatest proportion of the population doing so since the middle ages.
Such drastic change was initially met with resistance, though more from people who stood to lose cushy well-paid jobs in less necessary industries. Many others welcomed the change. A crisis of meaning had arisen within people working jobs that provided little value or purpose to themselves or society - leading to a sense of emptiness, frustration, and a lack of fulfilment. Over time, most people adapted to their new roles and even enjoyed them as they had more meaning and purpose. The Job Guarantee spelt the end of ‘Bullshit Jobs’. 6
“I like working outside. It’s hard work but rewarding. I used to work in an office, basically just responding to emails all day. What I do now has a lot more meaning; I feel like I’m contributing to something bigger.“
Citizen of London, 2040
Resources were also reallocated to non-agricultural roles that increased the nation's resilience.
The government invested heavily in low-carbon public transportation infrastructure, providing many jobs, as private car ownership was severely restricted. The UK could no longer import enough fuel to meet previous demand, nor could enough energy or resources be dedicated to replacing all combustion engines with electric cars.
Clothing was another critical industry that was reshored - now, most new clothes worn in Britain are primarily made domestically with British-grown regenerative natural fibres.
Regenerative AI?
DeepREGEN was vital for ensuring that food production could match ration requirements.
Significant investment was made into agricultural research and field trials to refine DeepREGEN’s recommendations. Investment into regenerative agriculture exceeded that which had been poured into conventional, industrial agriculture previously, resulting in a new age of discovery that accelerated regenerative agriculture's potential.
A rich network of sensors - dubbed the ‘Internet of Soil’ - constantly monitors national agricultural production and field trials to feed into research. DeepREGEN used machine learning and mass experimentation to direct well-funded research teams, which sped up research exponentially and allowed for nuanced context dependency that might have taken decades to achieve otherwise.
Some discoveries based on the hybrid of machine learning, deep computation and physical field trials included:
rapidly improving crop varieties for different contexts by selectively breeding heritage and commercial varieties, using extensive field trials and machine learning;
agroecosystem design, including designing optimal companion plantings for intercropping, syntropic agroforestry and food forests;
hyper context-specific recommendations for interventions based on real-time soil monitoring and testing;
designing hyper-diverse green manure/cover crop mixes to eliminate the need for synthetic inputs;
real-time soil health monitoring, carbon sequestration monitoring and design of protocols to improve based on research;
designing novel biological pest and disease prevention solutions
design of novel agroecosystems, such as ocean polycultures
increasing the yield of perennial cereals7 and other experimental food crops
The DeepREGEN team also found new alternatives to help meet the demand for popular foods that hadn’t previously been grown in Britain but couldn’t easily be imported anymore. Tea and coffee, in particular, were deemed essential rations, but their production had been devastated by climate change. DeepREGEN assisted research teams developed locally-adapted alternatives. A tea cultivar - developed from a cold-tolerant Himalayan variety - now thrives in Wales and the Scottish Highlands. New varieties of yerba mate and chicory were created as imperfect coffee substitutes, though they improved with time, and alternatives were limited.
Not Utopia Britannica
Though people are reasonably well-fed and guaranteed employment, they don't have the same freedom they enjoyed in the early 21st century. People’s choices of leisure, travel, ownership and consumption of material goods, the types of education and jobs they could pursue, and the food choices in supermarkets and restaurants seem wild compared to today in 2040. Perhaps in many ways, the post-WWII period was a blip in human history. The status quo of the early 21st Century could no longer persist, but a sense of real loss haunts much of society.
Initially, intense resistance was against such prominent use of AI in shaping policies. Some AI experts warned that open-ended assignments like those given to DeepREGEN might result in perverse recommendations like strict population control or even genocide to ensure sufficient rations. There were fears that sufficiently superintelligent and powerful AI agents might go rogue unless very strictly aligned and contained.8 Others argued that even if such an AI didn’t go rogue, giving it such influence over the lives of humans was deeply unethical, risking the loss of civil liberties. In truth, by the 2030s, AI-assisted policy-making was already much more commonplace than was publicly acknowledged.
It was also controversial amongst many farmers and regenerative ‘purists’ who argued that a prominent role for AI was unnecessary or even eroded the human connection with nature. Organisations promoting a more decentralised, equitable approach to a regenerative food system welcomed the job guarantee and transformative scale of funding. Still, they questioned the restrictive nature of high-control central planning.
This period was marred by other controversies and scandals, particularly in the earlier years.
The rationing system was supposed to be temporary but is still in place a decade later - albeit much better than at first. The ‘hungry gap’, in April and May, after winter crops have finished but before spring ones are ready, is particularly accentuated. During this period, stored, dried, and preserved foods make up the majority of rations. Morale can be low, and crime and outbreaks of civil unrest aren’t uncommon. The revelation that certain privileged classes had access to better rations during leaner periods led to public outrage and political turmoil.
Further scandals surrounded the hacking of ration books. Some people had been able to cheat the system by claiming more rations, while others were victims of hacking of ration books and blackmail. This had previously been thought impossible and shook faith in the infallibility of blockchain, a bedrock of the trust in the rationing system. Further, a black market of food and other foods thrived on the dark web as people found ways to cheat DeepREGENs monitoring.
Most concerningly, Britain’s politics have become increasingly nationalist under isolationism. Mass displacement of climate refugees across much of the so-called Global South combined with drastic anti-immigration policies mean that attempted channel crossings are at an all-time high. Populist factions argued that “British mouths must be fed first” and refused to take on more climate refugees. After all, as the rest of the world crumbles, BRITAIN SOLDIERS ON!
Today in 2040, there are whispers that DeepREGEN has repeatedly recommended that food production is now abundant enough that the UK should welcome more refugees. Some fear that the government’s refusal to do so could trigger a catastrophic response from DeepREGEN…
A likely future?
If we treated ecological collapse like the actual emergency that it is, it would have profound implications for every aspect of society. Whatever the future is headed, it certainly won’t just look like the status quo but a bit warmer.
This scenario sought to explore what one such possible response could look like. If you think it is unrealistic, consider the following questions:
What could it look like if we treated the response to climate change, ecological collapse and food security like the actual emergencies that they are? What if we radically reallocate resources to solve these problems?
What could regenerative agriculture look like if it received funding comparable to conventional farming today?
How might countries adapt if global supply chains become increasingly disrupted?
What role, if any, does AI have in bringing about a regenerative food system? What new discoveries could result?
Think about how quickly daily life changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In what other ways could daily life change in the future?
What might a centralised degrowth effort look like? How might it be decided - democratically or not - which industries and activities are ‘less necessary’?
To what extent are degrowth and AI compatible? What about decentralised grassroots politics and AI?
Four 'Alternative Future Scenarios' for Regenerative Agriculture
Four possible futures of regenerative agriculture in the UK
There’s a lot of debate about how constructive using this kind of ‘war’ language is or not since the ecological crisis has been largely caused by this type of colonial, destructive mindset in the first place. This article discusses that. I’ve chosen to include it here since there are obvious parallels between this scenario and the ‘Home Front’ in Britain during WWII. This scenario is not intended as jingoistic nostalgia for a misremembered past but rather explores how a similarly centrally planned response to a series of crises could manifest.
I hope that this scenario doesn’t come across as too techno-optimistic. Today there are already rapidly emerging use cases for AI within scientific discovery (e.g., AlphaFold and here) and design (e.g., here). This article is an early example of how AI could be used to design agroecological systems, as imagined in this scenario. This article discusses how AI might be used to aid strategic decision-making in the future. How might the use of AI in merging these fields evolve in the 17 years between the time of writing and the year 2040 in which this scenario is set?
‘Mineral Composition of Organically Grown Wheat Genotypes: Contribution to Daily Minerals Intake’ (Hussain et al 2010) Link. In this paper, the authors state that: “Wheat grain with high mineral nutritional value can be produced by using specific genotypes under organic cultivation. Choosing “the right” wheat genotypes grown together with suitable growing conditions makes it possible to ensure almost daily requirements of minerals in the produced wheat.”
There are obvious parallels with the Civilian Conservation Corps in post-WWII USA and Britain’s response to WWII, among other. See Jason Hickel’s book ‘Less is More’ for ideas how such an approach could work.
‘Bullshit Jobs: A Theory’ (Graeber, 2018)
For the purpose of this article, I have assumed it is possible to create an AI system that is sufficiently advanced to achieve transformative scientific discovery and systemic design, but ALSO sufficiently aligned with human interests to not cause human extinction. That assumption might be wildly wrong. I recommend this long article by Eliezer Yudkowsky detailing how AI misalignment might cause human extinction and why the likelihood of that happening might be higher than expected.
Such a great read Eliot! Feels like there's a novel in there somewhere.