# Lisi Krall Source: *Planet: Critical* with Rachel Donald — "Lisi Krall on How Economics Overpowers Culture", 1 Oct 2026. [Podcast episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/planet-critical/id1545009586?i=1000792515879&r=4281) Lisi Krall is a professor of economics at SUNY Cortland and author of *Bitter Harvest: An Inquiry into the War Between Economy and Earth*. She also appeared on The Great Simplification (#86, "Agriculture, Surplus, and the Economic Superorganism"), so she is a direct companion to [[7 Rungs of a Runaway System]]: Hagens gives the ladder of why the system resists change today, Krall gives the ten-thousand-year evolutionary origin story of the system doing the resisting. ## The two dualities: an illusion and a real one Krall's organising project: separating the **illusion of duality** — the belief that we humans are separate from nature — from the **real duality** that has actually been created: the emergence of an economic system that functions *as if* it were severed from the Earth, even though it is, materially, nothing else. This matters because much of progressive environmental thought assumes there is no duality, that the economy is simply "connected to the Earth" and needs to be reconnected. Krall agrees the economy is a material system, but insists that missing the *real* duality — a system that has evolved to act on its own logic, regardless of its biophysical roots — is its own form of not being in touch with our historical moment. ## The economic superorganism Her specific meaning: a profound change in economic organisation that began with the **cultivation of annual grains** roughly ten thousand years ago. Humans became configured into a system where the complex relationship with the living Earth is reduced to the annual cycles of grain production. The system "stands unto itself" — it develops insularly, expands until local ecological limits force collapse, and its imperative is perpetual surplus, population growth, expansion and militarism. The ant and termite comparison is not decoration: ants and termites engaged agriculture before us (they cultivate fungi), and the structure and dynamic of their collective economic lives is remarkably similar to what humans entered with grain agriculture. This is the **ultrasociality** thesis she developed with John Gowdy: complex societies need simple individuals, and the transition to grain agriculture restructured human societies into a new whole. The key feedback loop (her "brilliant line" moment in the interview): **hierarchy feeds back on the agricultural system, pushing it to further expand, because elites depend on the expansion of surplus for their survival as elites**. Prescient precisely today, when vastly growing inequality meets an urgent need to consume less: degrowth means reducing hierarchies, and those who sit atop them know it. Their unwillingness to imagine a smaller economy is not only lack of imagination; it is an awareness of what it would do to their position. ## Capitalism as one interpretation of the superorganism Capitalism is not a new thing under this reading; it is the **institutional interpretation of the superorganism**, in which the type of surplus changes. For most of ten thousand years, surplus meant agricultural output. Under capitalism, surplus is institutionally redefined as **surplus value and its translation into profit**. The crucial move: this is **not simply greed**. Workers, capitalists, everyone is interdependent around this surplus, and the imperative to stay in the game — take your profits, reinvest, find new avenues of profitability — is structural, beyond anyone's personal vice. The challenge is not "getting a handle on greedy corporations". It is much more complicated, because when you start pulling at the threads of such a highly interdependent tapestry, it is hard to say what will happen. This is the same point Hagens makes from the other direction: nobody in the system has to be a bad person. Krall supplies the deep history of *why* the imperative exists. ## How fossil energy severed the biophysical roots The evolution of markets predates the Industrial Revolution, and the textile industry is the clearest example. Early industrial production ran on falling water in rural areas — where labour was scarce. Fossil fuel production freed manufacturers from geography entirely: position anywhere, ideally coastal cities with coal access. The Industrial Revolution tapped the dense carbon largesse and set the system into hyperdrive: mass production technologies producing enormous material output at very low cost, an ever-pressing problem of **overproduction**, and an ever-greater imperative to expand markets. Her summary judgement: **fossil fuel energy severs the system from its biophysical foundations** — counterintuitive, since the economic system is a material system, but the expansion from the early nineteenth century onward behaves as if no such roots exist. Agriculture began the severing; capitalism is its institutional and then energetic intensification. Andreas Malm's book she is describing (she forgot the title in the interview) is *Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming* — a companion to his [[How to Blow Up a Pipeline]]. ## Culture: adaptive advantage turned drag Culture gave humans an adaptive advantage: learning, passing on knowledge, developing techniques for different environments. But two twists now: 1. Global culture is being pulled into one uniform capitalist structure — the extermination of language and culture as everything is consolidated into a single economic logic. Eight billion people plugged into one financial system, one value (profit maximisation), one market. Rachel Donald's observation in the interview: that is a strange *simplicity* at the heart of complexity, and it makes the system fragile — an ecosystem gains resilience through diversity; this system has run out of it. 2. Culture may be adaptive, but for climate change it may be a **drag on quick adaptation** — we have institutions, ways of existing and relations built around dense carbon, and culture lags. It holds us back rather than providing a mechanism of change. Her hard warning about **re-education as the route to change**: history says that over ten thousand years, our intelligence, cooperativeness and cultural institutions have not run counter to this system — they have enabled and elaborated it. It is hubris to assume re-education alone can right it. What is needed is **system change**, which requires a deeper understanding of our evolutionary history and how sociality got configured into this structure. She does not claim to know whether we have the capacities to do it. ## Transition as accommodation, not resistance The Green New Deal and the transition to renewable energy, in their present form, are for Krall **accommodation, not resistance** — the status quo masquerading as solutions. They rest on the long-standing ideology that human ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, captured in capitalism, can solve the problems capitalism has caused. There is truth in it, but nothing about expanding renewables re-embeds humans in the more-than-human world, which she takes to be the actual task. The energy literacy gaps she points at: **EROI** — net energy, after Charlie Hall — renewable energy delivers less net energy than dense conventional carbon, so there is less surplus to go around; the difficulty of consolidating dispersed energy; intermittency; storage and batteries; and the further you get from burning carbon, the harder the chain is to audit (nobody can actually tell whether a Tesla is more carbon-neutral than a small efficient petrol car). And the deep scepticism of green capitalism in all this is documented from the economics side in [[Downstream Everything You're Told About Green Capitalism is Wrong w Brett Christophers]]. ## The distribution problem If you want to limit energy use *and* give the impoverished masses enough to escape impoverishment, there is only one arithmetic: **the top energy consumers have to consume a great deal less**. Stan Cox's *The Green New Deal and Beyond* is her recommended book on exactly this. And there is a further structural catch: lifting the poor into fairer participation would mean the West surrendering its dependence on their low-value labour and resources, which is why "we'll fix our renewable economy first" is the system protecting itself again. On inequality: it has **never been solved by growth, but growth is always the promise**. If you cannot grow, what chance do you have? It must be discussed only in the context of limits, and it is solved by redistribution — which we should do — *plus* changing the underlying relations that generate inequality. Redistribution alone is a band-aid on a system that manufactures the wound. ## Rapprochement and conservation as limitation The goal of human decision-making now, she argues, should be **rapprochement with the more-than-human world** — profound economic, existential and spiritual discussion, a whole movement with that focus. One pointed debate: some in the conservation movement argue that setting aside wilderness recreates the human/nature duality we should be overcoming. Krall's reply: the duality is *real* — there is an economic system functioning as if disengaged from Earth, and it is eliminating what she calls **the wild impulse of the planet**. Prioritising the rights of the more-than-human world by conserving places has not been adequate, but it has not been nothing. Rachel Donald's synthesis: **reimagining conservation as limitation** — hard limits to the system, with Indigenous and local communities, rather than managing the same system to be slightly "more sustainable". A system can be made more or less sustainable without ever giving the wild its due. ## Suggested new notes (well aligned with the vault) - **Lisi Krall** (👥 People) — fuller bio, SUNY Cortland, papers with Gowdy. - ***Bitter Harvest*** (📚 Books) — her inquiry into the war between economy and Earth. - **John Gowdy** (👥 People) — ultrasociality, ants and termites, ecological economics. - **Charlie Hall / EROI** (👥 People / 📚 Topics/Science) — net energy; pairs with the energy literacy points. - **Stan Cox — *The Green New Deal and Beyond*** (📚 Books) — the distribution arithmetic. - **Andreas Malm — *Fossil Capital*** (📚 Books) — the textile/coal history she references; links [[How to Blow Up a Pipeline]]. ## Related notes [[7 Rungs of a Runaway System]] · [[Historical progression of economic systems]] · [[Agrarian]] · [[Agrologistics]] · [[Global Capitalist Economy]] · [[Neo-liberalism]] · [[Corporations]] · [[GDP]] · [[Less is More]] · [[Doughnut Economics]] · [[The Shock of the Anthropocene]] · [[Theory of Change]] · [[Moloch]] · [[Rupert Reed]] · [[Murray Bookchin]] · [[I Eat the Stars]]