The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into…

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven by forces that transcend both. /1 https://t.co/T9VYg2r8eB

You come away from this show wondering how we all ever get food on our tables every day. Nobody anywhere in the world can make money, farming. That industry is dead. But we’re not even close to implementing an alternative. /2

And what does that impossibility mean? Maybe it means that the team sports of our political views and our economic politics are not reaching the realities that sustain us. Our landscapes and the food we get from them. /3

It’s not just that we don’t understand how to feed ourselves now. That’s a symptom. It’s that we have no idea *at all* how to live in our landscapes. How to shape them for the mutual benefit of ourselves and other living things. /4

We have urban and regional suburbia, farms and national parks. None are models for coexisting with the landscape. We’re not grounded. Hypermobile travel cultures that treat geography as porn. Places to ‘see’, not inhabit. /5

This is our specific toxic cultural disease. We’re still empires, we think imperially. We accumulate, everything. Including sights. We don’t form ongoing relationships with landscapes. /6

Clarkson’s opponents in his county want to maintain a bucolic fantasy of English country life, divorced from any practical means of sustaining it. A landscape itself created from bucolic fantasy, post-WW2. /7 https://t.co/zOTNgMfBDV

And Clarkson has no sustained appetite for the complexities of the same landscape. There is some movement on both sides, towards the other. But they’re playing team libertarian v team bucolic fantasy. Neither can win. /8 https://t.co/qejeGEIGlx

Even the longest traditions of farming that survive in this landscape are basically just soil mining, unworkable without supply of fossil-fuel generated fertilisers. And climate change is a major character in this Shakespearean tragic-comedy, laughing at us. /9

Flooding and scorching the same land. Crippling farming revenues along the way. We don’t understand how to live in actual relationship with a landscape any more. How to be ground-ed. /10

Our survival depends on us re-learning that, very fast. And the odds are hugely against us pulling that off. Here in Australia we have the world champions at doing that. We recently voted loudly that we don’t get that. /11

A brilliant show. It only hints at these wider themes. But you can’t miss them. /end