I’m behind on my readings updates! Here’s one that I read a few weeks ago:
So I meant to check out The Earth Care Manual, a permaculture guidebook for Britain and temperate climates. However, due to a mix up on my part, I ended up with The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture, which is written for Australian climes. Ah well.
It was still a good read. It was designed very much for the person already set on creating a permaculture set up for their land, particularly in a rural or suburban setting. Ms Morrow stresses observation, giving the reader many assignments to get to know their land, using her farm and a friend’s suburban home as example cases. The graphics are simple and cartoonish, and there are many grids and datasheets providing examples of how the reader should go about organizing his observations and what they might mean.
Earth User’s Guide is not a deeply technical work, and indeed, one should probably go elsewhere for instruction of specific technique. However, as a permaculture design book, it is designed to make the reader aware of the space he owns, and of the interactions of the biotic and abiotic components of the ecosystems and how they will affect the growing pattern.
The stress on observation, initial and continuous, is crucial, I find. Permaculture requires a certain mindfulness, a certain intimate knowledge of the land. It is impossible to work in harmony with what you do not understand, and a generalized technical knowledge is not sufficient when each acre has it’s own microclimates. Modern monocultural industrial farming is a sort of brute force agriculture; the land is beaten into submission with long straight rows, pesticides, chemical fertilizer, and GM crops. Permaculture is more of a mental exercise; a continual sorting out of what works and what doesn’t, trying to create an environment that is both wholly natural and wholly edible.
More than sun and soil, Morrow stresses wind and water as prominent concerns regarding the layout of a garden. When possible, designs should incorporate animals as well as plants; not just domesticated animals, but the birds, insects, rabbits, and other wild creatures that are indigenous to your region.
While it is primarily an agricultural work, Morrow spends a significant amount of page space dedicated to home design. For this I am grateful; the concept of energy-efficient housing has long been discounted in the first-world because of the availability of indoor climate-control technologies, but is often a matter of simple design principles: extra insulation in cold climes, long eaves in sunny ones, courtyards in hot ones.
Overall, I found the book highly accessible, a good primer on the considerations necessary for permacultural living. And permaculture, despite being primarily of agricultural application, is indeed applicable to most parts of life -it’s living to stay. It’s quite a basic book, and anyone designing a permacultural space will need to find more in-depth and technical work, but if you don’t even know where to begin, The Earth User’s Guide is a good place for that.
Love,
Herbert.
Bill McKibban opens his wonderfully readable Deep Economy with an elegant metaphor: More and Better are two birds who for most of human history resided in the same bush. A person could throw the stone of his life’s pursuit at the bush with a good chance of hitting both. However, things have changed. In the first world today, better has moved to a different bush. But many people still have yet to realize that we now have to choose.
At it’s heart, Deep Economy is about a fundemental economic principle: The Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns. DMR an almost universaly applicable phenomenon where each subsequent unit of a good or service obtained is worth less than the previous one. So that first ice cream cone might be delicious, the second unethusiastically good,, and by the fifth you might be downright sick of them.
Bill McKibben is telling us that we’re on our seventh cone of economic growth with sprinkles of environmental degredation. While the first couple provided us great gains of prosperity, utility, and happiness, the recent ones are not making us better off, and possibly even less happy.
Microeconomics tells you that the sensible thing to do is to build until marginal benefit equals marginal cost, but McKibban argues, and I agree, that we are already far past that inflection point.
Instead of ecoonomic growth, which we have too much of already, he proposes that we focus our energies on cultivating communities. Americans have sacrificed community in favor of a materialistc hyper-individualism, which worked until we overdosed. If our economy, our society is more community based we will be happier with a simultaneous lessened desire to consume fewer material resources.
(McKibban provides the caveat that there are still some places where More = Better, mostly in poor developing countries, where close-knit families and communties exist (and in some clases, might be all they have) but their lack of material prosperity provides a very low quality of life.)
Most of the book deals with providing examples of successful local community initatives: Urban market gardens in Cuba, Local radio in Vermont, Bus Rapid Transit in Brazil, “community intersections” in Portland, small-farmer rabbit co-ops in China, CSAs in Massachusettes and the possibility of localizing the food supply. He wants to reinforced that a “deep economy” is not only a theoretically possibility, but a budding reality.
Considerations McKibban does not touch on are how to speed change from a “more”-focused society to a “better”-focused one (besides, of course, everyone buying his book and becoming enlightened…) and what kind of econometric model would be necessary to consider all manners of costs and utilities. Of course, the latter is outside the lay scope of his book, but possibly necessary if Sustainable Economics is to be considered a sersious discipline within in the field.
McKibban does not advocate a radical shift to frugality and communes nor roamnticizes peasent living. Instead, he is a champion of balance, something much of our society sorely lacks.
Bill McKibban is a sustainable economist.
Love,
Herbert.
I am a student of Economics*. I feel the asterick is necessary since I do not feel most peoples’ conception of Economcs is the same as mine.
What do you hear when you hear Economics? The “dismal science”? Capitalism? The stock market bubble? Alan Greenspan? The “Invisible Hand”? Ridiculous hypotheses of hyper-rationality?
That’s not what I think Economics is. My conception of Economics is based on two premises:
(a) can best be summed up in a quote of my Macroeconomics professor: “In Ecconomics, more is not better. The right amount is the right amount”. Economics is, at it’s heart about finding equilibria, the intersections of two lines. Economics does not dictate that growth is primary measure of a successful economy. Those are assumptions that society (and politics) apply to their interpretation of economic data.
(2) All economics processes should be considered in the long term. I know the short term considerations are nice because they have so few exogenous variables to take as given and so many externalities to disregard. But I feel it’s unrealistic. Mostly in that I feel most businesses and economies would like to exist in 10, 20, 50 years from now. Those that don’t probably are planning on being exploitative and should be regarded with suspicion.
Consideration of Economics in the Long Run changes many important factors:
Firstly, business practices, reputation, adaptability, reinvestment become much
more important than annual profit rates. Sustainability becomes the watchword.
Furthermore, in the long run, the exogenous becomes endogenous, and externalities are internalized. While economies may be “open”, the Earth is still a closed system. In the Short Run, the small view, the Outside world is so large and other that it is disregarded. However, in the Long Run, anything you do to affect the closed system eventually affects you. This is especially true for environmental externalities. Yes, you can pollute the atmosphere, empty the aquafiers, overtax the soils. The reserves of clean air, fresh water, fertile earth seem just waiting for exploitation. It seems like a good idea in the Short Run. But in the Long Run, well, if you use it all today, there won’t be any left tomorrow. The air will be unbreathable, water scare, soil dead. What will you do then?
Thinking only in the short term is easy, yes. But it’s also crazy, suicidal, even. We’ve been binge drinking oil all evening, what will we do in the morning when we wake up with a splitting hangover and an empty keg? What were we thinking, we’ll ask. But we know the answer: we weren’t.
Realistically, we should scrutinize models of business, of politics, of society, not just to see if they work well, but to see if they work well in the long term.
Again, to quote my Macro professor, there are two lessons economics teaches you:
#1 (Microeconomics): Markets are wonderful.
#2 (Macroeconomics): Markets are not so wonderful.
Both of these are equally important. In my opinion, solving the problems raised by the second issue are more interesting.
I believe that the principles of economics can be used to analyze endevours for their Long Run potential.
I am a sutainable economist.
Love,
Herbert.
So here’s my prediction of what the buzzword of a peak-oil age will be:
“Smart”.
Smart-growth, smart-grid, smart-farm, smart-card smart-transit.
After decades of being told that increased machine power would make our lives easier and full of leisure, most of these Smart systems will not refer to AI or computer-regulated efficiency. Instead, there will be a rally for human power. Especially in agriculture, the only way to create an efficient sustainable system is to apply the human evolutionary advantage of reason and memory to it. Less money and resources will be spent on machines and chemicals, and more brainpower will be consumed by our work. We will have less leisure, but we will have more life.
Nothing will be more important than education, which itself will need to change. It needs to become more diverse, cultivating to the specialized intelligences that different children have. It needs to be more far-sighted, teaching the basics of how our world functions, how we need to treated, and how to problem-solve and how to learn for a lifetime. It needs to encourage a greater variety of post-graduation options; university is not for everyone.
We need to work more, so to work the earth less. Human energy is the most renewable resource we have.
Love,
Herbert.
I have posts to make up about The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Hope’s Edge (I’ll get to them…), but at the moment what’s on my mind is The Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, ed. Vadana Shiva.
Talking with Prof. Everbach a couple of weeks ago, he asked me, “So what?” I’m doing all this reading and learning about what’s wrong with the current food system, and how people think it should be, and their philosophy as to why it should be like that. But, so what? What am I going to do about it? How am I going to change things? What needs to be done?
The Manifestos are about what needs to be done on a global-political level, and I mostly agree with it. Food doesn’t take well to be commoditized like shoes or computers: it doesn’t travel well: food is best cultivated and distributed as locally as possible, and global legislation should favor a localcentric, diversified system rather than globalcentric, industrialized approach.
This makes sense to me; the agro-industrial complex doesn’t need the support of the WTO and FAO to thrive; it has enough power from it’s sheer size. The global trade organizations should work to promote a competitive market, which means protecting the interests of the small players. Furthermore, trade should be encouraged as a benefit, not an expense, to the local economy, which means local industries, agriculture especially, should be supported.
The other major premise of the Manifestos deals with the agricultural biotech industry. Besides a staunch position against GM foods generally, they are adamantly opposed to the patenting of seeds and lifeforms, a cause very dear to my heart. For one, I don’t know how they prove that there is no “prior art”. Two, it discourages crop diversity, and encourages dangerous monocultures. Three, GM crops rarely delivers on the promise to be more productive, and are more expensive than their natural counterparts, and sterile seed prevent farmers from being self-sufficient or financially independent, and make them completely dependent on the whims of industry year after year.
The Manifestos are directed towards change in government and intergovernmental organizations. Which makes sense. Agriculture is not capable of thriving in a free market, as it is full of externalities (such as pollution, soil degradation, diversity loss) as well as serves a market with a fairly inelastic demand. Or course, much of regulation is saving the industry from itself, as unsustainable practices will come back to harm the business in the long run. Also food security, biodiversity, and agricultural independence are public goods that the market has no reason to provide on it’s own.
However, while I have strong opinions at the policy level, and have much support for those striving for governmental change, I feel a pull towards the other end of the movement, to the personal, “grassroots” level.
There is a lot of argument among food advocates, I’ve noticed, as to which is more important: change on the personal level or change on the policy level. I don’t see why the answer can’t be “both”. Policy change is important: we need a political environmental that’s supportive of small farmers, high-quality local food, that provides consumer education starting in grade-school, that regulates using the precautionary principle in favor of consumers instead of industry, prevents the patenting of life, and understands sustainable solutions.
Those are some big tasks that require a huge amount of advocacy time and energy. However, no less important than making the government fertile and receptive to positions of Good Food, is making the consumers, and ourselves, fertile and receptive to the cause. The system is broken from above because we have offered no resistance from below. People need to take their food, their health, their lives back. Education on the personal and community level is crucial to raising awareness. Kitchen gardens, CSAs, guerrilla gardens, community gardens are all necessary to provide empowerment and connection with the cause. It is important that we get in touch not only with where our food comes from in nature, but the people it comes from: not mere consumers but “co-producers”, as Carlo Petrini advocates. There need to be people who interact with local communities, providing information, sparking discussions, fostering connections, organizing initiatives. Controlling your own food supply provides security: it protects your children health, it provides a buffer when money is tight, it creates a satisfaction unachievable in consumption, it keeps money and work within a community. Food is power.
We cannot merely say “this needs to be done”. We must do. We cannot hope to change the world if we are unwilling to first change ourselves.
Top-down, bottom-up…all efforts are needed. And when we meet in the middle, we shall feast and dance.
My poetic side is starting to take over, so I should stop here.
Love,
Herbert.
RSS - Posts