CARROT: ON ECOLOGICAL ABSTRACTION AND THE RETURN TO MATERIAL LIFE  

ABSTRACT

This position paper examines the growing gap between ecological language and ecological life, where contemporary environmental policy, advocacy, and leadership systems have become highly skilled at describing ecological crisis through frameworks, metrics, campaigns, and institutional processes, while becoming increasingly less connected to the everyday material practices through which ecological systems are actually maintained, including food production, soil care, and local land-based competence.

It argues that ecological participation has been gradually replaced by ecological representation, where engagement is increasingly performed through visibility, identity, and communication rather than through sustained material involvement in the systems being described, producing a situation where ecological seriousness can be demonstrated publicly without necessarily requiring the ability to grow food, tend soil, or maintain ecological function in place.

Within this context, the paper introduces the carrot as a deliberately simple and grounding object that does not respond to policy language, institutional framing, or strategic narrative, but only to soil, time, care, and material conditions, and therefore functions as a direct test of whether ecological claims remain connected to reality or have drifted into abstraction.

From this perspective, the carrot exposes a widening disjunction between ecological visibility and ecological capability, revealing how easily ecological discourse can become a performance of concern rather than a practice of care, and how systems can become fluent in describing ecological breakdown while remaining structurally dependent on infrastructures that do not reproduce ecological life locally.

The paper proposes a shift away from ecological systems that privilege representation, visibility, and narrative coherence, toward systems that rebuild participation, capability, and material competence, where ecological resilience is understood not as something communicated or managed at distance, but as something practiced through shared work in soil, food, and land. In this framing, the carrot is not a symbol but a test: it either grows or it does not, and everything else must eventually return to that fact.

KEYWORDS

Ecological abstraction; substitute participation; ecological policy and advocacy ecosystem; civic infrastructure; land literacy; governance; soil competence; representation economy; carrot principle; Dr Demeter; Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

THE PROBLEM OF ECOLOGICAL ABSTRACTION

The central irony of contemporary ecological systems is not that they lack knowledge, nor even that they lack data, modelling capacity, governance frameworks, or institutional awareness, but that they have become structurally far more competent at describing ecological breakdown than at reproducing ecological life in place, in soil, in bodies, and in the ordinary daily metabolic processes through which communities actually sustain themselves through food, land, labour, and shared material participation.

We now inhabit a historical condition in which ecological awareness is culturally abundant while ecological participation has become increasingly scarce, and this scarcity is not primarily the result of ignorance, denial, or insufficient information, but rather emerges through the gradual relocation of food systems, land systems, and ecological competence out of everyday civic life and into systems of institutional abstraction, governance language, policy representation, managerial process, and symbolic performance, within which what matters most is no longer what is materially grown, repaired, maintained, or reproduced, but what can be measured, reported, certified, narrated, and circulated as evidence of ecological concern within administrative and political systems increasingly detached from the lived realities they claim to govern.

The result is a peculiar and deeply modern contradiction in which societies become progressively more fluent in the language of ecological crisis while simultaneously becoming less capable of participating meaningfully in the ecological processes upon which their own continuity depends, producing a condition where populations can speak endlessly about resilience, sustainability, regeneration, and systems change while remaining structurally dependent upon highly extractive and operationally fragile systems that they neither understand materially nor possess the collective capacity to reproduce locally.

Within this condition, ecological politics increasingly risks becoming a politics of representation without participation, in which symbolic alignment substitutes for material engagement, institutional discourse substitutes for civic capability, and the appearance of ecological consciousness gradually displaces the far more difficult task of rebuilding the practical, relational, and infrastructural foundations through which ecological life is actually sustained across generations.

THE SUBSTITUTE PARTICIPATION ECONOMY

At some point in this shift, ecological understanding stopped being anchored in land and began circulating as content, and once that happened everything else followed its logic: crises became communicable objects, activism became platformed identity, food became supply chain optimisation, and soil became something that could be referenced endlessly without requiring proximity to it.

This is the substitute participation economy, where engagement is routinely replaced with representations of participation, and where carbon accounting replaces stewardship, certifications replace governance, campaigns replace infrastructure, and systems change becomes a phrase that can circulate indefinitely without requiring contact with a system that actually changes.

THE ECOLOGICAL POLICY AND ADVOCACY ECOSYSTEM

Even within the ecological policy and advocacy ecosystem, including its high-visibility leadership layer, this pattern persists, not necessarily through intention but through structure, because ecological work that is legible at scale is often work that can be represented, narrated, and circulated, while ecological work that is materially reconstructive tends to be slow, local, and resistant to visibility metrics.

This produces a situation in which ecological breakdown becomes narrative capital, moving smoothly across conferences, institutions, and advocacy platforms, often accompanied by food systems that are entirely disconnected from the places being spoken about.

THE KRILL WARS CASE STUDY

This is not hypocrisy in the simple sense, it is abstraction that has stabilised itself as normality, and abstraction, once normalised, begins to reproduce its own authority. It produces what might be called the krill wars, not literal conflict over marine life, but symbolic competition over ecological meaning, where attention, morality, and narrative circulate at the level of discourse while soil, food systems, and local ecological infrastructure remain largely unpractised by those doing the speaking.

At first glance, these conflicts appear urgent, necessary, and morally clear, framed as battles to protect species, ecosystems, and planetary boundaries, yet what remains largely unexamined is the structural condition that makes such conflicts inevitable, which is the collapse of functional, localised food systems that would otherwise render many of these debates materially grounded rather than symbolically amplified.

The supplement economy emerges precisely from this collapse. When food systems fail to provide nutrient-dense, locally adapted, ecologically integrated nourishment, supplementation becomes not only normal but necessary, and from this necessity emerges an entire industry of extraction, refinement, and distribution that is then framed as a problem in itself, rather than as a symptom of a deeper infrastructural absence.

And so the wars begin. What distinguishes these conflicts is not only their focus, but their format. They are increasingly organised as campaigns, shaped by communications strategies, social media amplification, brand alignment, and narrative positioning and they are optimised for attention. This is where abstraction becomes performance.

Because success is measured in visibility, reach, and engagement, rather than in the reconstruction of the material systems that generated the issue in the first place. The logic of public relations begins to shape the logic of ecological action. Issues are simplified to travel and go viral, as too are stories...once a dialogue and conversation and then sharpened to communicate on shorts and snippets. And of course, heroes are elevated to sustain momentum. And in this process, complexity is displaced rather than resolved.

The underlying destructive economic and extractive system remains largely intact. Within this ecosystem, activism increasingly produces a form of loud heroism, where individuals and organisations become visible carriers of ecological concern, able to mobilise attention and dominate narrative space, but not necessarily equipped, or structurally oriented, to rebuild the systems that would reduce the need for such campaigns.

Young people are brought into this process and are told they are being empowered. They are taught to speak, advocate, to organise and amplify. They are less frequently taught to grow food, or group work in community contexts that grow governance and economics that enables ecological systems. They are not systematically supported to develop the capabilities required to transform the systems they are mobilised against. There is little emphasis on land literacy, on soil, on food production, on the practical reconstruction of local ecological systems.

Participation increasingly becomes representational, enacted primarily through language, identity, visibility, and symbolic alignment rather than through ongoing material engagement with the ecological systems upon which collective life actually depends, and as this shift deepens, an entire generation is gradually trained to inherit ecological crisis less as capable practitioners embedded within systems of food, land, repair, cultivation, and stewardship, and more as communicators of crisis operating within economies of attention, narrative circulation, institutional performance, and mediated concern.

This is not fundamentally a failure of care, intention, or moral commitment, but rather a structural consequence of systems that increasingly reward visibility over capability, discourse over competence, and symbolic participation over the slower and less visible work of rebuilding the material conditions necessary for ecological continuity and civic resilience. A paradox therefore emerges in which the apparent success of ecological campaigning often reinforces the conditions of its own ongoing necessity, because while awareness expands, the underlying infrastructural, economic, and governance systems responsible for ecological instability remain materially intact and operationally unchanged.

To move beyond this condition would require a profound reorientation in which existing networks, institutional access, platforms, and resources are directed not only toward amplifying crisis, but toward rebuilding ecological competence, local capability, and the material infrastructures of participation itself.

THE CARROT AS INTERRUPTION

At this point the carrot enters, not as metaphor, but as interruption, because the carrot possesses the deeply inconvenient characteristic of belonging entirely to material reality and therefore refusing almost every contemporary system through which ecological concern now prefers to circulate. The carrot does not respond to policy language, strategic visioning processes, regenerative branding frameworks, stakeholder engagement matrices, climate narratives, innovation precincts, or twelve-part podcast series about resilience hosted by people unable to identify compost that has gone anaerobic.

The carrot does not care about visibility.

It responds to soil structure, water retention, microbial activity, seasonal timing, seed viability, labour consistency, temperature fluctuation, and whether somebody remembered to open the irrigation line after the sustainability summit concluded with ethically sourced muffins flown in from elsewhere.

This is what makes the carrot politically dangerous.

Because as a diagnostic object the carrot immediately exposes the widening gap between ecological representation and ecological capability, revealing the extent to which many contemporary systems have become increasingly sophisticated at narrating ecological crisis while remaining operationally dependent upon supply chains, labour conditions, and extractive infrastructures incapable of reproducing ecological life locally or democratically.

The carrot therefore functions as a systems test.

It asks an embarrassingly direct question: can this community materially participate in its own continuity, or has participation itself been outsourced into language, policy, advocacy, visibility, and institutional theatre while the practical knowledge required to sustain life quietly disappears beneath the performance of ecological concern?

CARROT: NOTES ON ECOLOGICAL POLITICS, FOOD, AND THE RETURN TO SOIL

GROWING AS PARTICIPATION

Growing is not representation, nor is it communication, advocacy, awareness, stakeholder engagement, narrative strategy, or any of the increasingly sophisticated forms through which ecological concern is now circulated across governance systems, funding ecosystems, institutional frameworks, and the global economy of well-designed urgency, but rather an ongoing material interaction between soil, weather, seed, time, attention, labour, weather that does not read policy briefs, and continuity of care, in which outcomes are never secured in advance and cannot be substituted by language no matter how well-funded, well-branded, or well-attended the conference discussing them may be.

To grow is to remain in contact with consequence, which is a condition that does not respond to interpretation but to actual physical participation in systems that either function or do not function regardless of how many keynote speeches are delivered about their importance, and this is where ecological seriousness begins and ends, not in discourse but in the capacity to remain implicated in material outcomes.

FOOD AS CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE

The uncomfortable point is not that we lack ecological knowledge, frameworks, modelling capacity, or even policy ambition, but that we have become structurally skilled at reducing proximity to the systems that actually sustain us, such that food is now treated as a sector, a supply chain, a branding opportunity, or a moral consumer choice, rather than as civic infrastructure through which land, labour, ecology, health, and social organisation are continuously reproduced in ways that nobody can fully outsource without eventually noticing consequences in their supermarket receipts and existential anxiety.

Once food becomes infrastructure rather than metaphor, it becomes harder to pretend it is being adequately addressed through reports, frameworks, and well-designed PDFs about resilience, because infrastructure is not an idea, it is a functioning condition, and it either supports life or it does not, regardless of how many working groups have been established to discuss its future.

THE THREE RUPTURES

The first rupture is that ecological discourse has become fluent in describing systems it is no longer materially embedded in, producing a situation where collapse can be narrated with extraordinary sophistication while basic participation in food production quietly declines in the background like an uninvited truth nobody put on the agenda.

The second rupture is that governance systems have become increasingly comfortable managing participation through consultation, strategy documents, and carefully facilitated engagement processes that produce the appearance of involvement without requiring the return of actual capability.

The third rupture is that societies are now able to care deeply about ecological collapse in public, on panels, in policy, and in digital spaces, while simultaneously losing the practical ability to grow, cook, distribute, and sustain food locally without calling three logistics companies and a sustainability consultant.

RE-ENTERING PRACTICE

There are always those attempting to re-enter practice rather than remain in commentary, to rebuild capability rather than refine descriptions of its absence, and to work in the slower and less photogenic spaces of soil, food systems, pedagogy, and community infrastructure where ecological continuity is still occasionally maintained without hashtags or institutional branding packages.

Living Earth College exists within this space not as a solution, a model, or a scalable innovation product, but as a small and stubborn attempt to remember that education is not separate from ecology, and that learning how to grow food is not an extracurricular activity in a collapsing system but a civic necessity that unfortunately does not come with accreditation points that reflect its actual importance.

CONCLUSION: THE CARROT

And so the carrot remains, not as brand, not as lifestyle symbol for ethical consumption, but as interruption and mild refusal of the entire representational economy of ecological seriousness, because it insists on a very simple condition that no amount of discourse can override, which is that it either grows or it does not, and everything else is commentary layered over that fact.

The carrot refuses ecological theatre without ecological production, refuses substitute participation disguised as engagement, and refuses the idea that describing a system is equivalent to inhabiting it, and in doing so it quietly reasserts a kind of political realism that is increasingly rare in ecological discourse, namely that participation and capability is not optional, it is the condition under which awareness becomes meaningful rather than merely expressive. We must align with life.

CLOSING NOTE

This paper may be shared and distributed freely.

About the Author

Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (Dr Demeter) is the founder of Living Earth College, and works as a consultant farmer and educator with Magical Farm Tasmania and Earthwise Community Farm in British Columbia. She works at the intersection of ecological design, community development, and food systems transformation.

She holds a PhD in convivial food systems, and through Living Earth College and her Convivial Design Studio, develops and implements frameworks for convivial farming and festive agriculture, alongside the Grow Small, Feed All campaign. A portfolio of projects can be viewed here: https://convivdesign.org/con-viv-portfolio

Currently working between North America and Australasia, she is open to collaboration and supports organisations, governments, and institutions in developing community farms and local food systems that strengthen ecological and social resilience. There is an increasing urgency to build capability in regenerative and community-embedded food systems, and to support practical transitions that reconnect food, land, and communities at scale.

For collaborations and enquiries: connect@livingearthcollege.org

Thank you to Ness Vandeburgh Photography https://www.nessvphotography.com

Living Earth College

Living Earth College is a practice-led learning platform founded by Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne, focused on regenerating local food systems through ecological design, community-based farming, and civic-scale food infrastructure. The College brings together education, research, and on-the-ground practice to support the development of convivial farming, festive agriculture, and resilient community food systems.

Working across farms, municipalities, and international networks, Living Earth College develops education that enables individuals, organisations, and governments activate local food systems that strengthen health, ecology, and social connection. Its flagship offering, the Activating Local Food Systems Course, provides practical tools for designing and implementing place-based food system change.

At its core, Living Earth College is focused on one question: how do we rebuild the relationship between people, land, and food in ways that align with life?